Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

There is a cool Firefox extension available called Mr. Uptime. With it you can monitor sites that are currently not available, and it will notify you when the site is back up and running. I’m guessing that this is going to appeal the most to the Digg crowd since they constantly encounter sites that collapse under heavy load.

How does it work? A toolbar will appear anytime that you get "Page Not Found" message, and from that toolbar you can begin monitoring the site to see if it is back up yet. There is also a right-click menu option that will let you highlight text and watch for that text to change on the page. This would be useful for a site that is performing maintenance where there is no error, but you can still have Mr. Uptime monitor for when the text changes.

Here’s a list of it’s features:

• Status change – Watch when the server status code changes from an error to OK (HTTP status code 200).
• Regular Checks – Mr. Uptime checks for updates every 5 minutes for the first 60 minutes. Every 10 minutes for the next 120 minutes. Every 15 minutes for the next 180 minutes. Every 30 minutes for the next 240 minutes. Every 60 minutes after that.
• Efficient – It uses less bandwidth than a regular visit to a website since it either just checks the web server response or if a string exists or not on the page. It doesn’t load any images, etc.
• Keywords – Set a keyword that the website should or should not contain to be considered ok.
• Time to watch – Set how long you want to keep checking a website. After this time it will be removed from the watchlist even if it hasn’t become available.
• Notifications – Choose to open the website in a new tab or a new window when it becomes available. You can also optionally get an alert dialog box to notify you when a website is working again.
• Easy to use and discreet – The interface will not clutter your Firefox window. The toolbar is only shown when an error is encountered or when you choose to open it yourself. You will not get another toolbar taking up valuable space in Firefox.

This isn’t an extension that I’m going to install simply because I don’t come across enough sites that are down on a daily basis. I maybe come across two or three each week, so this would be pretty unnecessary for me. If downtime is a frequent problem for the sites you visit, or they are constantly undergoing maintenance then this would probably be pretty useful.

Get the Mr. Uptime Firefox Extension

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This article was written on April 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

I just came across this nifty little Firefox trick that is sure to drive some of your friends crazy! As seen in the screenshot above you can very easily embed multiple Firefox windows inside of your main Firefox window. All you have to do is enter this into the Firefox address bar and press Enter:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

The usefulness of this trick is probably next to nothing, but it will surely drive your friends crazy when they see their Firefox looking like the screenshot above! If you set their homepage to the address listed above it will automatically create a second Firefox window, but from what I can tell you can’t make it create multiple windows inside of windows like I did above without manually typing in the address into each address field.

Make sure you let us know any good tricks you pull with this one. 🙂

Source: SeeJay

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you ever thought to yourself that it should be possible to do a double right-click the same way that you can do a normal double click? No? Me neither, but it turns out that it can be pretty useful.

A tiny free app called ClickZap (does require installation) will let you choose from a variety of commands to assign to the double right-click. You can set it to:

• Lock the computer
• Logoff the computer
• Shutdown the computer
• Minimize active window
• Minimize all windows
• Close active window
• Close all windows
• Mute the sound

One of the options I was hoping that this would have is the ability to perform a middle-click, but it doesn’t. Guess I still have to use the AutoHotKey script that I made to simulate the middle-click action. I’ve actually decided to set ClickZap to close the active window which seems to be saving me quite a bit of time, and to my surprise I haven’t accidentally closed a window yet. 🙂

ClickZap Homepage
Source: Shell City

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 18, 2011 by CyberNet.

Areca Backup is one of the few backup utilities that I’ve seen that runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Like most backup utilities you can choose what files you want to backup and where you want to send them to, which includes backing up the files to an FTP/SFTP server. You can also have the the backup zipped to help save some space.

Here are some of the features the developer highlights:

• Archives compression (Zip & Zip64 format)
• Archives encryption (AES128 & AES256 encryption algorithms)
• Storage on local hard drive, network drive, USB key, FTP, FTPs (with implicit and explicit SSL / TLS) or SFTP server
• Source file filters (by extension, subdirectory, regular expression, size, date, status, with AND/OR/NOT logical operators)
• Incremental, differential and full backup support
• Support for delta backup (store only modified parts of your files)
• Archives merges : You can merge contiguous archives into one single archive to save storage space.
• As of date recovery : Areca allows you to recover your archives (or single files) as of a specific date.
• Transaction mechanism : All critical processes (such as backups or merges) are transactional. This guarantees your backups’ integrity.
• Backup reports : Areca generates backup reports that can be stored on your disk or sent by email.
• Post backup scripts : Areca can launch shell scripts after backup.
• Files permissions, symbolic links and named pipes can be stored and recovered. (Linux only)

Areca Backup is developed using Java which is likely why it is available for both Windows and Linux. I generally stay away from Java apps, but I haven’t seen a backup utility this powerful for Linux before so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Areca Backup Homepage (Windows/Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 20, 2010 by CyberNet.

I normally don’t post scripts and batch files that I use, but I wanted to share this particular script because I use it all the time. VBScript files are nice because typically they are simply coded, and work across virtually all Windows-powered machines. You just have to throw the code in a .VBS file, and from there it can be executed in your batch files very easily.

The contents of the file are below, and once set up you’ll be able to send emails using any Gmail account straight from the command prompt. In the code there are two things that you need to configure: the email address and password of the account you want to send as. When executing the VBScript file you simply pass it three parameters: recipient email address, subject line, and the body of the email. There is an optional fourth parameter that it accepts which is the file path to a file you want to attach to the email. That’s it.

Why do I use this all the time? I can easily call this file from other scripts or batch files so that it sends me an email notification whenever something completes. Sometimes I use it just to have a nice history of when some of my batch files complete (or to verify that they even ran), but other times I will insert “dynamic” text into the body of the email. For example, if an error occurred I may have it put the error message in the body of the email. An alternative to that would be attaching a log file using the optional fourth parameter.

The nice thing about the way this script works is that you’ll be able to send emails without setting up an SMTP server on your machine. Of course you won’t be able to send out mass quantities of emails since Google limits you to around 500 sent messages per day, but that should be more than adequate for personal purposes.

Let’s take a look at what the code looks like…

Code begins here:

'Usage: cscript sendemail.vbs <email_recipient@example.com> "<subject_line>" "<email_body>" "<optional:email_attachment_path>" 'Ex. No attach: cscript sendemail.vbs example@gmail.com "test subject line" "test email body" 'Ex. W/ attach: cscript sendemail.vbs example@gmail.com "test subject line" "test email body" "c:\scripts\log.txt" '*********** '****CONFIGURE THE FROM EMAIL ADDRESS AND PASSWORD Const fromEmail = "email_sender@gmail.com" Const password = "password" '****END OF CONFIGURATION '*********** Dim emailObj, emailConfig Set emailObj = CreateObject("CDO.Message") emailObj.From = fromEmail emailObj.To = WScript.Arguments.Item(0) emailObj.Subject = WScript.Arguments.Item(1) emailObj.TextBody = WScript.Arguments.Item(2) If WScript.Arguments.Count > 3 Then emailObj.AddAttachment WScript.Arguments.Item(3) End If Set emailConfig = emailObj.Configuration emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = "smtp.gmail.com" emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserverport") = 465 emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2 emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpauthenticate") = 1 emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpusessl") = true emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusername") = fromEmail emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendpassword") = password emailConfig.Fields.Update emailObj.Send Set emailobj = nothing Set emailConfig = nothing

^ That is the end of the code (Download the Script) ^

You can see that the code starts with example usage of how you can call the VBScript file. Given the nature of executing VBScript files you may or may not have to include the “cscript” portion, but in general you are always better off having it there to ensure that it will run on your computer just fine. Here’s an example of what it looks like when being executed from the command prompt:

Note: The “sendemail.vbs” file was located at the root of the C Drive when I ran this.

Armed with this script you should be able to take it and throw it into batch files, or call it from anywhere that can execute things via the command line. One thing you may want to consider is creating an extra email account just for sending these emails. Not only will that keep your “sent mail” clean in your primary Gmail account, but it will also be a bit more secure since the password for the sender account is stored in plain text within the script.

Here is a nicely formatted version of the VBScript from above that you can download, and have all ready to go for you (after you fill in the two email/password inside the script file, of course):

Download a Zipped Copy of the VBScript

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