Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

Those of you who are still using Firefox 2 should be getting the update notification in the next week saying that Firefox 3 is available for download. Mozilla would obviously like all of their users to upgrade to the latest version of the browser, but the real question is whether they will.

I thought this would be a good time to look at the visitor stats for our site, and see which versions of each browser everyone is using. Here’s the breakdown from August 1st, 2008 to today:

• Firefox: 54.75%
  • 3.0.1: 68.26%
  • 2.0.0.16: 19.96%
  • 3.0: 5.08%
  • 2.0.0.14: 1.72%
• Internet Explorer: 36.03%
  • 7.0: 70.38%
  • 6.0: 29.14%
  • 8.0: 0.39%
  • 5.5: 0.05%
• Opera: 4.41%
  • 9.51: 63.22%
  • 9.50: 12.20%
  • 9.52: 9.59%
  • 9.27: 4.08%

Not bad, huh? Only about 25% of you haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Firefox… which is almost the same percentage that haven’t upgraded to Internet Explorer 7. IE7, on the other hand, was released almost 2-years ago as opposed to Firefox 3 that was released just 2-months ago.

I’m sure you have your reasons for not upgrading to Firefox 3 (broken extensions, don’t need/want the extra features, etc…), but will you be changing your mind in the next week or so when the automatic upgrade rolls around? If you won’t be making the jump to Firefox 3 I’d definitely be interested to hear your reasoning in the comments.

Mozilla Weekly Meeting Notes [via Download Squad]
[image via DeviantArt]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
Today we’ve got an amazing freeware application for Windows that actually serves two different purposes. Give a hardy welcome to LocatePC. First and foremost it will keep you informed of your computer’s whereabouts by sending you an email either on a daily basis or anytime the IP address of the machine changes. In the email it will give you all kinds of details that can help you track the PC’s location, such as the ISP it’s connected to and IP address of the machine.

What’s the other purpose it serves? Most of you are probably not paying to get a static IP address from your ISP, right? That means your IP address might change periodically, and this program can notify you via an email each time the IP changes. This isn’t a stated purpose of the application, but that was one of the first things that popped into my mind after I looked at some of the configuration options.

It wasn’t too difficult to download and install LocatePC, but one problem I did run into is that it wouldn’t install without running it as an administrator on Vista. After I ran it as an administrator I was able to fly through the rest of the setup, which is pretty much just entering a password to protect the application. The end result is the screenshot you see above.

Remember, LocatePC is supposed to be discrete so that it couldn’t easily be found by someone if your computer was stolen. For that reason you won’t see anything in the System Tray, and the process name is slightly obscure making it hard to pinpoint when doing a quick visual scan. Don’t worry though, you can access the console at any time by pressing Alt+Shift+Home.

Now you’re ready to configure all of the email settings. This is pretty much a no-brainer, but might require you to setup a new email address since it only supports POP accounts that don’t use SSL. I know, that’s not optimal but you can easily go setup an AOL account that you’ll use only for sending the emails. You can have the notifications sent to any address you would like.

Here are the different configurations screens you’ll encounter (click on any screenshot to enlarge it):

1. Email Account
   This is where you’ll enter in the details of the email account to use for sending the notifications. If you have a Yahoo! Plus account you can go ahead and use that, otherwise I would recommend just grabbing an AOL email account. If you use AOL or Yahoo it will automatically fill in a lot of the details for you.
   
2. Email Message
   This is where you want to enter in the address to send the notifications to, and also any other information you want included in the email. Maybe enter in the model and serial number of the PC so that you don’t have to try and dig it out once the PC is stolen.
   
3. Email Schedule
   Choose how often you want to receive the emails. By default it will send one email out everyday in addition to one if the IP address changes. It’s probably easiest to just have it send an email if the IP changes, which is the only other option available.
   
4. Advanced
   Here you can configure some of the advanced settings such as the site used to get the trace route, the hotkey used to show the console, and where it obtains the IP address from.
   

And now you can enjoy the fruits of your labor! Whenever your IP address changes you should receive an email similar to this:

LocatePC Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last week we posted some mirrors for the Windows XP SP3 download, and today was supposed to be the golden day that Microsoft delivered it to the public. That won’t be happening. Microsoft found a last minute show-stopper that they decided needs to be addressed before offering it to the public.

If you already installed it on your machine it’s not that big of a deal. The issue they found pertains to the Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS). Are you affected by it? If you’re just using the PC at home it’s very unlikely that you’ll notice any problems since you probably don’t use that software. The Retail Management System is a point-of-sale system that Microsoft puts out for small and mid-market retailers. It costs about $1,000 and therefore isn’t likely to be on your PC without you knowing about it.

There’s no word as to when Microsoft will actually release XP SP3 on their website. They have said that they want to get filtering in place first to ensure that systems running Microsoft RMS do not download the Service Pack:

In the last few days, we have uncovered a compatibility issue between Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) and both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience, we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to the web.

To help protect customers, we plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to the web.

We are also testing a fix, and will make it available once that process is complete. Once they have installed the fix, Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers should be able to run both service packs.

Until then, we advise Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers to not install either service pack. Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers running Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1 should contact Microsoft Customer Support Services for additional information.

Still want to download XP SP3? There are all kind of solutions available including a direct link to the file from Microsoft. Here are some of the different places that you can get it:

• From Microsoft – very fast, I’m getting 1.1MB/s on my download
• From MajorGeeks
• From Softpedia
• From BetaNews

[via SuperSite & All About Microsoft]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Remember the free AutoPatcher application that Microsoft shutdown back in August? It was a rather nifty program that had all of the Windows Updates offered in a single download. You could burn them to CD, and take them from one computer to another installing the updates. The time it can save administrators is huge, but Microsoft didn’t like the fact that their updates were being redistributed.

The developer of AutoPatcher wasn’t about to throw in the towel, and decided that he needed to make the program download the updates straight from Microsoft. There is now an AutoPatcher Beta (no installation required) available that utilizes the new download technique, but updates are currently only available for Windows XP, 2000, and 2003:

I do find it a bit ironic that Microsoft shutdown the project, and now they are the ones who have to foot the bill for the bandwidth. From a user’s perspective that is good news because the downloads are lightning fast! After the downloads are completed you’ll still be able to burn them to a CD or DVD so that they can easily be installed on dozens of computers.

I tried the new AutoPatcher by downloading the updates for Microsoft Office, but it ran into a problem when trying to download one of the updates. Naturally you would think that it would just skip over any non-responsive downloads, but the program just sat there. I’m sure by the time AutoPatcher is in final form the bugs like this will have been fixed.

Alternatively there is the Heise Security Offline Updater (free and doesn’t require installation) which supports Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Vista. For each of the different Operating Systems it has several different languages to choose from, and just like the new AutoPatcher it will download the updates straight from Microsoft. Heise Security Offline Updater also includes a separate client application for updating the computers which I’ve found rather easy to use.

Get the New AutoPatcher Beta [via Download Squad & gHacks]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I’m not sure about you, but I have a collection of bookmarks that is almost unmanageable. Some of the bookmarks I probably haven’t touched for years, and I thought it was time for a little spring winter cleaning!

So I started browsing around looking for a utility that would assist me in the daunting chore. Sure there are Firefox extensions out there that can check for duplicate bookmarks and look for dead links, but all of my bookmarks aren’t in Firefox alone. I needed something a little more universal.

That’s when I stumbled across a free Windows-only program called AM-DeadLink. It’s a nifty little tool that can check your Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera bookmarks for both dead links and duplicate entries. This would really be a killer application if it didn’t require any installation, but I’ll take what I can get.

–Dead Links–

If you’re a bookmarking fanatic you probably have some pretty ancient sites saved that don’t even exist anymore. Just startup AM-DeadLink, select your browser, and click the green button with the checkmark in it. The app will begin scanning all of your bookmarks 10 at a time (number of concurrent connections is adjustable in the settings), and it will alert you of its findings:

Click to Enlarge

The nice thing is that it will ignore local bookmarks and bookmarklets which would likely return an error. You’ll also notice that it points out when a bookmark is redirected to another site. Unfortunately there is no option to automatically update the address of all the redirected bookmarks, but that might be a nice feature for the developer to add in the future.

If you find a broken bookmark that you want to delete you don’t have to worry about opening the browser to remove it. Just select the bookmark from the list (Ctrl+Click to select multiple bookmarks), and then click on the Recycling Bin button located at the end of the toolbar.

–Duplicate Bookmarks–

There is an option located on the toolbar that will filter out all of the displayed bookmarks except for those that have duplicates. This is great for finding those sites you’ve bookmarked one too many times:

Click to Enlarge

–And More–

AM-DeadLink has a few other features as well, such as the ability to download favicons for all of the websites in your bookmarks. If you find that the browser doesn’t have a lot of favicons for your bookmarks this is a fast and easy way to do it yourself.

And since your bookmarks are so important it only makes sense that the app lets you back them all up. In just a few clicks they will be saved to your computer in a compressed ZIP file.

–Overview–

In the end AM-DeadLink managed to hunt down 23 dead links and 6 duplicates in my hundreds of bookmarks. It might not be a huge amount, but I thought that I did a good enough job managing my bookmarks that it would have a hard time finding anything wrong with them. Guess everyone should clean “house” once in awhile!

Download AM-DeadLink (Windows only, requires installation)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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