Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 24, 2010 by CyberNet.

We’ve covered all kinds of backup utilities on the site, but the one covered in this article is hands-down one of my favorites. Synchronicity is free, open source, and available in a portable format. After you fire it up the first time you’ll probably be shocked that something laid out this nicely only uses 215KB on your hard drive… I know I was.

Setting up your first profile consists of filling out the information in the screenshot above, and after that you can go on to schedule the task if it’s something you want to run on a regular basis. Here are all the different things Synchronicity is capable of:

• Fully customizable synchronization and backup, including:
  • Limited synchronization: synchronize some folders only, or synchronize folders contents without synchronizing subfolders.
  • Full regexp support for files inclusion/exclusion
  • 3 synchronization methods:
    • Mirror
    • One-way incremental
    • Two-ways incremental
  • File hashing
• Full scheduling support (daily, weekly, monthly, at a particular time, etc.)
• Support for multiple profiles
• Fully portable: settings are stored in a single config file
• By-volume-label paths: Create Synchronicity can backup directly to “My Usb”\Documents for example, by automagically locating the “My Usb” drive.
• Advanced features:
  • File hashing, various comparison options
  • Time offsets, to compensate for wrong DST settings
  • Loose timing: allow file time to differ by a few seconds
  • Multiple file systems support (all the ones supported by Windows)
  • Native support for UCN (network) and relative paths
  • Proxy support for updates check.
  • For command line addicts: support for command-line arguments, allowing you to queue profiles, run silently, with optional preview display.

If you haven’t tried out Synchronicity then I highly recommend that you do. It’s not as full-featured as something like SyncBack (e.g. this doesn’t include FTP support), but it includes a lot of the features most people will need… plus some.

Synchronicity Homepage (Freeware/Portable; Windows only)

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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

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

With so many options available, picking the right laptop can prove awfully difficult. How do you know you’ll end up with a reliable model? Or one that will last you at least three years without feeling outdated? While you can’t predict the future, you can use information from the past to figure out your best bet before you make your purchase.

Read more…

This article was written on November 23, 2011 by CyberNet.

There are some great tools out there for testing a website’s performance including Web Page Test, Stella, and WatchMouse. Those are the three that I regularly find myself using, but the website monitoring service Pingdom recently updated their Full Page Test tool blowing many others out of the water.

The new interface they have is beautifully designed, which helps in understanding the data they are presenting to you. When you begin navigating through the various sections you’ll find a full waterfall view that lets you know how long each individual request on the site took, and you can even see a page analysis to help serve as an overview of all those requests.

Then you can flip over to the performance grade to get an idea of which areas on your site could use the most improvement. Expanding any of the sections will list out the requests that go against that particular rule, and towards the bottom they provide a link referencing what you can do to resolve the issues.

There are also some settings you can choose from before you initiate a test. One setting lets you decide whether the results of the test should be saved and made public, and the other is the location of the server running the test (Netherlands, New York, or Texas).

Pingdom Full Page Test Homepage

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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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