New RIFERS blogs entries from Maarten Stolte in category general

Resetting local passwords on Windows

Maarten Stolte — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:47:06 +0200

At work we had a problem with a pc where somehow the local administrator account was not accessible anymore, we didn't know the right password or something else was up.
Luckily I found this application: Offline NT password and registry editor, which is a very cool linux bootdisk which can edit your registry, either to reset passwords, or to make other changes.
When changing a user, it offers good documentation and nice menus, which in our case found that the admin account had been locked, and it offered to unlock it and to reset all counters for it, and some other nice automated tricks.
Be aware of the catch that encrypted files for that user are not readable after this trick, but other then that it's a very useful tool.

DRM == 'Defective by design'

Maarten Stolte — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 12:14:22 +0200

Today its the 'Day against DRM.
Please take action if you can, to avoid having to go through alot of (illegal) hoops to be able to play your media on your mediadevice or software of choice.
(Yes, this is also googlebombing which the defectivebydesign folks ask to do in one of their action items, please bomb along)

Lets see how he does

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 31 May 2006 11:18:49 +0200

Going to be following this page to see how my former collegue does. If he makes it to millionaire, at least I can say I helped him ;-)
[back to the regular transmission]

Saved by the Pussycat

Maarten Stolte — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 22:18:45 +0100

When we left home today, I left my frontdoor key on the inside of the frontdoor. We have 2 sets of keys, so I expected no trouble opening the door. Wrong..

The doorlock seems to be of the type where if you have a key on the inside, the one on the outside cant be put in far enough, and it won't open. Problem... We have a balcony door as the only other door to enter our appartement, but a quick investigation at the neighbours balcony told us that that door has no lock on the outside.

After trying to open the door with an old creditcard, which was kinda hopeless as it is a very modern solid door, we decided to call the lockmaker but to also try our last hope of getting in without needing the lockmaker....our Pussycat.

Lotje, as we called her, has a hobby of opening doors. She can open almost any door that isn't locked, and she did open the frontdoor on several occasions.

We sat at the other side of the door, whistling, calling her, trying to draw her attention, and yes, after ten minutes or so she finally got interested enough to open the door to see what all the fuss was about. We finally got in...

We called the lockmaker who returned home without any complaint, and he didn't sound surprised at all that a cat opened the door for us.

lotje on an earlier occasion, opening the door at my parents' house

Google Talk, new IM service powered by Jabber

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 09:42:45 +0200

Rejoice all ye people, for thou are not longer bound to MSN messenger, AIM or whatever other proprietary protocol to talk to your friends.
Google has announced yet another of their 'beta' services, http://talk.google.com.
It is a jabber based service, which makes it easy to talk with people on every platform. Google also launched their own client for Win32 only so far, which, as an extra, has real voice support, a'la Skype etc. Hopefully clients supporting the voice part on other platforms will appear soonish too. If you want to talk to me, I'm datadevil on gmail.com.

Amazon oddities

Maarten Stolte — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:52:55 +0200

Amazon has a feature I only just discovered today, where one can upload an image called a 'customer image'. This feature is ofcourse begging to be abused, and thus is.
Click for example on the following url:
http://www.amazon.com/.../103-5429322-2871021?...

then mouse over the tiny image under the cd cover, you need to hover the right one. Then click the name 'Craig + Keith'. (shortcut url is here : http://www.amazon.com/.../103-5429322-2871021 )

It's amazing what time people have to spend on these kinda projects, and how much fun others can have from it, I at least enjoyed it very much..

girl in the cafe

Maarten Stolte — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 00:07:56 +0200

For everyone in the USA, as its been evening already in Europe, and at least the BBC and the dutch broadcast organisation have shown it, please watch 'The girl in the cafe' tonight on HBO.
It is an emotional, romantic and above all deeply moving movie, making you feel like you really ought to wake up tomorrow determined to change the world.

more info on:
HBO.com

Watching Fabchannel in Linux

Maarten Stolte — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:14:31 +0200

Fabchannel (http://www.fabchannel.com/ ) is a great site, where you can watch live concerts, really live, but also afterwards. Because not everyone in the world has Internet Explorer or a Mediaplayer, I made this small 'how-to get videos from fabchannel using Linux':

- first, you browse on fabchannel.com using your flash enabled browser.
- click a concert you want to see
- click 'start windows media player'
- choose your connection speed
- click with the right mousebutton on the left part of the popup window, and choose view frame source
- find a url that is something like this: "http://www.fabchannel.com/fab2005/dontcopy.php?did=124&q=h" ( Ignore the 'dontcopy.php' script name )
- use wget to download the contents of that url, but, because there is this high-tech IE detection script at play, do it like this:

wget -U 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)' "http://www.fabchannel.com/fab2005/dontcopy.php?did=124&q=h"

- Now you have a file called something like 'dontcopy.php?did=124&q=h'. Cat this file or read its contents in a similair manner.
- In the contents you find a URL starting with mms:, like this: 'mms: //ds103.xs4all.nl/20050509_sarahbettens_300.wmv'
- play this with your favorite movieplayer. If you want to save it, use MPlayer like this:

mplayer -dumpstream mms: //ds103.xs4all.nl/20050509_sarahbettens_300.wmv

NOTE: i inserted spaces after the mms URL to prevent the blog parser from making emoticons of it

Note2: the initial php script takes a parameter called 'did', which might be fun to use in a for loop if you like all the movies
Note3: if you do the wget without the -U (useragent) then you get a nice movie saying you can ony watch the video in Internet Explorer ..<g>

Cooler

Maarten Stolte — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 16:08:35 +0200

Now i'm even cooler, and mostly less noisy

European commisioner gets something right!

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:50:58 +0200

This is kinda confusing to me. Is this the same EU commision that proposes patents?
I do agree with him, and it convinces me my vote pro europe might be a correct one...

Datadevils Law

Maarten Stolte — Tue, 31 May 2005 13:38:34 +0200

"If important data is stored in more then one Excel document, or an Excel document has over 100 rows, or it has more then 1 workbook, then put the data in a database, where a database does not mean MS Access"

I think I might need to change the law to forget about Excel at all

New camera

Maarten Stolte — Mon, 30 May 2005 13:43:49 +0200

Lis' dad gave me 'new' camera, a Praktica super TL 3. It's a fun cam so far, nearly as old as me, but just like me, still going strong. If anyone has experience with this kind of camera; nice sites about it, tutorials, etc., please comment :-)

Firefox 1.1

Maarten Stolte — Sat, 28 May 2005 22:53:35 +0200

Firefox is moving towards 1.1, under the s3cr3t project name of Deerpark. For those who would like to see what it looks like, I have 2 images on my server:

New keyboard considerations

Maarten Stolte — Thu, 26 May 2005 18:01:19 +0200

I am going to buy a new keyboard. As I have this MS natural keyboard for several years, and really like it, I was looking at a newer version of it. I found this [review] which seems to say that it is a good keyboard, the only catch is that its OS support is bad...

but that bad OS support is not for Linux, nor for BSD, nor is it for OSX, no, the Windows support is hard to install .... it made me laugh a little..

Spidering

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 25 May 2005 13:42:02 +0200

I've been using a spider for some work related things for a couple of months now. The spider tool is HTtrack, and to put it bluntly, it sucks a bit, at least for what I want to do with it. It cannot as far as I can find out log in to a site using a form, and it has lots of other weird problems.
There seems to be a nice alternative in the form of the spider from the internet archive, http://crawler.archive.org/ , but I don't feel like recoding our complete environment we have build up so far around this new spider unless I am a bit more certain about this one.
Does anyone have any experience with this, or other spiders/crawlers to share with me?