Lee.org

I lost a bunch of files off of a web server. But I was able to recover some of them by looking in the cache in my browser. Here are some ways to find those files:

type about:cache in the browser. It will show you all the files in your cache. When you click on the links, it gives you info about each file. To see the actual files, strip down the url a little. For example, change
chrome://view-http-cache/http://lee.org/blog/wp-admin/images/fade-butt.png
to
http://lee.org/blog/wp-admin/images/fade-butt.png

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If you have a lot of files to recover, try using chromecacheview, that’s chrome cache view. As their website says,

ChromeCacheView is a small utility that reads the cache folder of Google Chrome Web browser, and displays the list of all files currently stored in the cache. For each cache file, the following information is displayed: URL, Content type, File size, Last accessed time, Expiration time, Server name, Server response, and more.
You can easily select one or more items from the cache list, and then extract the files to another folder, or copy the URLs list to the clipboard.

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You can try looking in the google chrome cache database on your computer but it’s all a bunch of crazy gobbly-gook.

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You can also try recovering files that have already been deleted from your recycle bin. Recurva does a good job.

I can’t believe Windows 7 hid Quicklaunch. Quicklaunch is a toolbar where you can put all the programs you use most often and launch them easily. It is incredibly useful. I use it 100 times a day. Here’s my Windows XP Quicklaunch.

Well, you can turn it back on in Windows 7. Here’s how (via)

1. Right click on a empty space on the taskbar, then select (hover on) Taskbar and click on New Toolbar. (See screenshot below)

2. In the Folder line, type or copy the location below. (See screenshot below)
%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

3. Click on the Select Folder button. (See screenshot above)

Done!

You can edit the list in Quicklaunch or manipulate the files directly in
C:\Users\(user-name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

There’s more tidbits on the site I found this tip on.

Hugin is a terrific free open source panorama stitching tool. It does not come with automatic control point software pre-installed, I suppose leaving the choice to the user. It takes a long time to set control points by hand and virtually no time to have the computer do it for you. Here is how to set up one of the automatic control point creation tools.

After you have set this up, you will be able to open up Hugin, select your images to stitch and about 3 clicks later have an awesome panorama image like this:

Sunset on a rooftop in Riyadh. Right-click download to view it full size!

1. Download and install  Hugin (I’m using version 2010.2.0 released October 2010 on Windows)
2. Download  Pan-o-matic (local copy of version 0.9.4 just in case) and unzip to some permanent location, let’s say it’s c:\stuff\pan-o-matic
3. In Hugin, go to File | Preferences. Select Control Point Detectors
4. Delete all the existing Control Point Detector Programs in the list
5. Make a new one called (it doesn’t matter exactly) Panomatic

• Description: Panomatic
• Program: c:\stuff\pan-o-matic\Panomatic.exe
• Arguments:  -o %o %i
• Type: Autopano-SIFT

Done setting up!

Now, when you want to stitch images, do the following:

1. Start Hugin
2. From the Assistant tab, click “Load Images…”. Select the images you want to stitch.
3. Click “Align” and wait a while for processing
4. Click “Create Panorama”

Done!

I just came across a piece of software called KFC that removes Flash Cookies AKA Local Shared Objects from your computer. These are new to me but a little googling shows a pretty consistent theme, e.g.:

(webdesign10.com)Web sites use them to track you because they know that most people don’t know about them and that they can track you even after you have cleared your privacy settings.

(wikipedia)Several services even use LSOs as surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, a policy called “re-spawning”

I’m going to add KFC to my  occasional  spring-cleaning of cookies and the like. Find KFC here or a local archive of KFC here.

I own a Toshiba T135 laptop. I’m very happy with it except for one detail. Well 2 if you count that it runs Windows 7, but I digress. The speakers are so quiet that you can’t hear anything. But I found a fix. (via)

You can increase sound DRAMATICALLY if you follow this steps:

Go to Control Panel
Select SMART AUDIO
On the lower part, select SMART EQ/3D SETTINGS
Select CUSTOM
Pull the buttons up (i have them still at number 7, quite enough as you will see)

I pay for the Crashplan backup service and I’m quite happy with it. There is an option where you can backup to your friend’s computer for free. I’d like to trade backup space with a friend (you?) “just in case”. My backup is about 250 gig. I would happily trade about 250 gig on my computer with 250 gig on yours. What do you think?

The app runs with very low overhead. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Don’t worry, without the secret password I can’t view your data and you can’t view mine (assuming you trust the Crashplan software, which I do)

Email me. Lee at Lee dat org.

This is old info but I needed to refer to it after my Windows reinstall so I’ll just put it here for easy reference.

Windows Explorer Command-Line Options

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Explorer [/n] [/e] [(,)/root,<object>] [/select,<object>]

/n                Opens a new single-pane window for the default
selection. This is usually the root of the drive Windows
is installed on. If the window is already open, a
duplicate opens.

/e                Opens Windows Explorer in its default view.

/root,<object>    Opens a window view of the specified object.

/select,<object>  Opens a window view with the specified folder, file or
application selected.

Examples:

Example 1:     Explorer /select,C:\TestDir\TestApp.exe

Opens a window view with TestApp selected.

Example 2:  Explorer /e,/root,C:\TestDir\TestApp.exe

This opens Explorer with C: expanded and TestApp selected.

Example 3:  Explorer /root,\\TestSvr\TestShare

Opens a window view of the specified share.

Example 4:  Explorer /root,\\TestSvr\TestShare,select,TestApp.exe

.

.

.

.

Here it is explained in a slightly different way:

This page was lifted from http://cpcug.org/user/clemenzi/technical/WinExplorer/CommandLineOptions.htm.

Parameters are

separated by commas. Many combinations are allowed, but only a few examples are

given.

Explorer.exe c:\                Open directory as a single pain of icons

Explorer.exe /e,c:\             Explore drive as 2 lists – 
                                  directories on left & files on right
Explorer.exe /e,/root,c:\       Explore drive without showing other drives
Explorer.exe /n,/e,/select      Opens showing only drives
Explorer.exe /e,/idlist,%I,%L   From Folder\..\Explore in the registry
                                  %I – ID number
                                  %L – Long filename
Explorer.exe  /e,DriveOrDirectory
Explorer.exe  /e,/root,directory,sub-directory
Explorer.exe  /e,/root,directory,/select,sub-directory

/e	List (explorer) view, Show large icons if missing (Open view)
/root	Sets the top level folder.
/select	Specifies that the directory should be selected without displaying its contents.
/s	????
/n	Do not open the selected directory, no effect on NT
/idlist,%I	Expects an ID/handle. May help with cacheing. By itself, opens the desktop as icons.
/inproc	Stops display of window (I don’t know why this is useful)

Windows Explorer contains 7 icons. In 95 and NT, the 3rd and 4th are

different. Use

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SHELL32.DLL

I have not found a single reference explaining all the options. Some

parameters were found by searching the registry, some are from the sources

below, and a few are from browsing the executable.

• C:\WINDOWS\TIPS.TXT (95 only)

  provides basic command line help. Search for explorer.

• Additional notes are provided here.

URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / WinExplorer

/ CommandLineOptions.htm

I’m part way through recovering from a hard drive crash. Last week my computer made the dreaded clicking noise. So I decided it was time to transfer my computer life over to a new hard drive.
Old: 180gb main drive, 500gb secondary, 250gb external
New: 1500gb main drive, screw-the-rest eh?

Spinrite told me there were like 3 unrecoverable errors on the old main drive.

My big question is: I have backups; how can I easily tell which files went bad and need recovering? I’ve got something like two hundred and fifty thousand files. (crap, I’ve got two hundred and fifty thousand files!). RAID-5 would automagically do it but Windows doesn’t support software RAID-5 and I don’t want to spend another $600 on drives and controllers. Other solutions?

I’ve got Windows and Outlook reinstalled. Next, the myriad support programs I rely on.

Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for the Linksys WRT54G.

The Tomato Router Firmware works beautifully. With the TCP Vegas and QoS settings, I can have several users on my network including torrents and web surfers and still have the best Skype call quality I’ve ever had, all with the same DSL connection I’ve had for years. The interface is fabulously clean and functional. I can see who is on the network and get a good feel for what is happening at a glance. I’ve been running the software for almost a year now and, plain and simple, it works great.

I just donated $20 to the project.

I am currently running Tomato version 1.25 on a Linksys / Cisco WRT54GL. (yes, v 1.27 is currently available)

I’m using wikis more and more for business. I have a lot of content that I need access to on a daily basis. I need to be assured of having access to this data wherever I go. Some examples include the  phone numbers and addresses for my tutoring clients, shopping lists for my classes, todo items for my business.

What I want is an application to crawl each of my several private  mediawiki sites and make them available offline on my iPhone.

Some products that almost fit the bill include:

• Instapaper – can’t grab password protected pages
• Several Wikipedia caching programs – really close! If they could grab my password protected Mediawiki sites, I’d be set
• Evernote – I haven’t tried it yet but I don’t think this is what I want
• I can make html archives of my Mediawiki sites. I can view this on my laptop which is good. I would like to view them on my iPhone.
• Apps that make Data URLs like Filemark Maker are nice but it’s a multi-step process involving my home computer
• Web pages saved on the PC then viewed with Dropbox. Again it’s multi-step process each time I want a new archive. Maybe I/you could crawl my site with wget and throw that into Dropbox. The HTML archive won’t be pretty and I’d have to manually “Favorite” a lot of pages.

Do you know of an application that can do this? Or maybe you’ll like to write it, becoming  rich and famous?