In an attempt to ensure that all of his digits survive the 4th of July, forum member morehpperliter has devised a simple but elegant replacement to the time-honored tradition of “light the fuse and run like hell!” Using an Arduino and a bit of code know-how, you too can keep yourself out of the emergency room this 4th of July. Or you can continue shooting Roman Candles at your friends and hoping for the best…whichever works for you.
Archive for the 'How-To' Category
Forum member Cerberus posted a tutorial on how to rig up an always-on USB charging port for your PC using a spare USB port, a resistor, and a few pieces of wire.
It requires a small bit of soldering know-how, but anyone who has used an iron at least one time can pull this off. It is a great option for someone looking to reduce clutter while saving energy, since it enables and USB device to charge while your PC is turned off without the need for yet another wall wart.
I like having the ability to remotely access my PC at home while I am away in case I want to grab an important file I have left there, or if I need to finish something I didn’t quite get around to. For ages I simply set port forwarding on my router allowing port 3389 to be directed to my desktop PC, which let me connect to my computer using Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). While this was not the most secure method of doing so, it worked, and I did not want to change how I did things.That’s not to say that RDP is not secure – it does use 128 bit RC4 according to Microsoft. However, with man-in-the-middle attacks being relatively easy to carry out, I thought there had to be a better (and more secure) way of connecting to my oh so precious home network.
In the end, I decided that I could route my RDP sessions through an SSH tunnel and sleep a little easier at night. If you follow the directions below, you can too…
Installing CopSSH
1)Â Â Â Download CopSSH, Putty and Puttygen.
2)Â Â Â Execute the CopSSH installer, click Next to proceed, then click I agree to accept the license agreement.
Continue reading ‘Securing Windows Remote Desktop with CopSSH’
I saw a recent article on Lifehacker about cleanly shutting down and restarting explorer.exe in Windows Vista. I gave it a try in XP just for the sake of it, and not surprisingly, it did not work.
I did however find a way to do it in Windows XP that I wanted to share with others.
You can see the full process after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Safely Shutting Down and Restarting explorer.exe in Windows XP’
Forum member DrNathan posted a quick write-up on how to use Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2, Beta 3, and Beta 4 side-by-side without causing any profile conflicts or corruption. It only takes minutes and is a nice way to give the new iteration of Firefox a spin before the final version is released.
