Raymond.CC Blog

Author: raymond

  • Get SMS Notification when Electricity Power Supply is Restored

    I received a notification from our Malaysian electricity company that they will temporarily cut the power supply for 9 hours next week on my day off from work. Staying at home without the electricity for 9 hours is nearly impossible for me because I can’t watch TV or use the computer, no ceiling fan or air conditioner when the weather is so terribly hot nowadays. Moreover, even if I can tolerate it, my baby definitely can’t. The only option is to get out of the house and go to my parents house or the shopping mall.

    Although they mentioned 9 hours of power shut down, I believe that the stated period is the maximum time and the power could probably be restored much earlier. I wanted to have a way to get notified when the power supply comes back so that I can go back home instead of being outside for the whole 9 hours. I believe there are software that I can use do to this but my UPS battery backup cannot last more than 2 hours. So using the computer to detect when the power is restored and notifying me is definitely out of the question. Fortunately I managed to figure out a solution which I can get a SMS text notification when my home electricity supply is restored.
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  • Power Off USB Port when Safely Removed USB Device in Windows 7

    I got to know about spinning down drives after stopping in Vista & Windows 7 while I was reviewing the changelog for USB Safely Remove 4.4. Basically what USB Safely Remove explained in their blog about this is when you eject a device, for instance a USB flash drive in Windows XP, the LED will be switched off. However in Windows Vista and Windows 7, the LED light is still turned on even after ejecting them from Safely Remove Hardware. It won’t be a problem if it is a USB flash drive because it doesn’t have any moving parts but it could be worrying when it comes to an external mechanical hard drive that requires the heads to park to avoid damaging the hard drive which will lead to data losses.

    Starting from USB Safely Remove 4.4, it comes with a feature to power off device after device stopping by just enabling it in the Options. For people that managed to grab a free license of the USB Safely Remove 4.7 which I’ve posted it yesterday, I bet you would have enabled this option during the first run of the software for safety precaution. However for people that missed the giveaway, or would want to use this option WITHOUT installing USB Safely Remove software, here is how you can manually enable this safety feature.
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  • Best Compatible USB Wireless Adapter for BackTrack 5, Kali Linux and Aircrack-ng

    BackTrack is a very popular free Linux distribution that is commonly being used to hack into wireless networks by using Aircrack-ng to crack the WEP/WPA encryption. The reason why BackTrack is being used instead of Windows is because there are no patched drivers available for Windows that supports injection, unless you are willing to fork out $300 or $700 for an AirPcap TX/NX adapter. It is relatively easy to get BackTrack running by installing using UNetbootin and booting up the live version from USB but the most important thing is to make sure that your USB wireless adapter supports monitor mode and packet injection.

    If you’re looking to purchase a fully compatible plug and play USB wireless adapter that works really well with BackTrack 5, it can be tricky because some brands with the exact model can have a different chipset for different version numbers. For example, the TL-WN822N USB wireless adapter by TP-LINK comes with 3 versions. The version 1 uses two different chipsets, which is Atheros AR9170 and AR9102 while version 2 has the Atheros AR7010 and AR9287 chipsets, and the latest version 3 uses Realtek RTL8192CU. The chipset on a USB wireless adapter is the most important information but normally is not shown on the product box or even on the device itself.

    atheros chipset

    To help you in purchasing the correct adapter, here we list the safest USB wireless network adapter that we’ve tested to have the best plug and play compatibility with BackTrack 5, Kali Linux and Aircrack-ng.
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  • Configure YubiKey with Google, LastPass and KeePass

    Protecting your main email account is very important. Some of the effective methods to protect your email password is by using keystroke encryption software, a virtual keyboard, autofill browser extensions etc, but we still have to be prepared for the worst which is what if a hacker manage to get hold of your password? The answer is to use a two-factor authentication, also known as 2-step verification.

    Recently you’ll find a lot of popular major online services such as Google, Facebook, Dropbox, LastPass, and Microsoft that allow you to set up two-step verification for your account. You can either setup your phone to receive SMS or voice call or install an authenticator app on your smartphone that generates a security code. On the surface, the above method seems safe but is actually ineffective against modern threats such as phishing and mobile malware that can intercept SMS messages.

    A device that is safer to be used as a 2nd factor authentication would be YubiKey. Basically YubiKey is a small yet water and crush-resistant device that doesn’t require drivers or batteries to work. All you need to do is insert the YubiKey into a USB port and touching the sensor will automatically perform the 2nd step authentication.
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  • 10 Ways to Keep your LastPass Account Safe

    Sometimes a piece of software being the most popular in its category doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best. However when it comes to LastPass, it is currently the most popular password manager and undeniably the best in the industry. While KeePass is an excellent open source offline password manager that is very flexible and extensible, it does require the user to be experienced in computers to be able to set it up and also to use it correctly.

    LastPass has additional advantages over KeePass which include online cloud storage that allows you to access your password from anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection. It is also easier to setup and use if compared to KeePass. An important thing in using a password manager that a lot of people aren’t aware of is their role in keeping their password management account safe. Most people would only think that it is the company’s responsibility in keeping their encrypted password safe on their servers and very quickly to put the blame on LastPass when their account got compromised.

    The 2 major security breaches in LastPass show that only small parts of the database that can be used to crack the user’s master password have been copied out by the intruder but did not touch the encrypted user vault data. So if you’ve used a strong non-dictionary master password together with a multifactor authentication, there is a very very low chance that your LastPass login account information can be illegally accessed by the hacker.

    In order to further safeguard and secure your LastPass account, here are 10 guidelines you should follow.
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  • How to Optimize or Deoptimize Firefox OMNI.JA File

    Developing a web browser such as Firefox is not as easy as it seems. It requires a team of brilliant programmers to work together putting up an efficient and fast web browser that is free for us to use. For the Firefox web browser, one of the major improvement on performance is having fewer naked files. Since Firefox version 4, a lot of files, especially the javascripts that used to be in the components folder, are being packed into one file called omni.jar and this effectively reduces 30-100x disk I/O. Omni.jar has been renamed to omni.ja since version 10 to prevent Firefox from being corrupted.

    This improvement has caused some problems to some users who prefer to modify the core Javascript files for customization instead of using add-ons or extensions. If they’re using an older version of 7-Zip such as 9.20 to open the omni.ja file, 7-Zip will report an error saying “Can not open file omni.ja as archive” although it has been reported that the omni.ja file is actually a ZIP file.

    can not open file omni.ja as archive

    A simple workaround is to rename the omni.ja file extension to .zip and Windows will be able to open and extract the files. They can then modify the files according to their needs, repack them into a ZIP file, and finally rename back the file extension to .ja. Although this method works, it is not recommended due to additional optimization being done on the original omni.ja file which can yield an additional 2-3x reduction in disk I/O.
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  • 5 Ways to Delete the Hidden Flash Cookies

    Browser cookies are probably the most important pieces of history data stored on the computer that can be used to keep a user logged on to a website, remember your flash video player volume setting, items added to shopping cart, and even to the extent of tracking the user’s web browsing habits. That is how sometimes you find a website showing an advertisement that is related to what you’ve just searched on the Internet.

    Fortunately every web browser is capable of clearing the history browsing data which includes the visited websites, download history, form data, cache and cookies by simultaneously pressing the Ctrl+Shift+Delete keys. However, some websites use the more advanced tracking technique which is flash cookies that cannot be removed by clearing your web browser’s history data. Apart from that, flash cookies have the potential of storing an enormous amount of tracking information due to the default size limit of 100KB per website compared to only 4KB for HTTP cookies.

    flash cookies storage settings

    If you’re concerned about your Internet privacy and don’t want your online behavior to be tracked, we’ll show you a few different methods to clear your flash cookies and also how to permanently block flash cookies from being downloaded and stored into your computer.
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  • Re-enable Saving or Warning when Closing Multiple Tabs in Firefox

    One of the very useful features found in the Mozilla Firefox web browser that isn’t implemented in Google Chrome despite many requests over the years is the ability to warn the user when closing the web browser with multiple tabs opened. This feature is very useful because there are times when we tend to accidentally click the X button located at the top right of the window which will terminate the Firefox program. It would be disastrous if one of the tabs has an important webpage that is based on session and cannot be restored by reloading or refreshing the page.

    By default, attempting to close Firefox with multiple tabs opened will show a warning “Confirm close” window with the message “You are about to close X tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?”

    warn when attempt close multiple tabs

    Clicking the Cancel button will keep Firefox running but if you’ve accidentally unchecked the option “Warn me when I attempt to close multiple tabs“, Firefox will no longer ask for your confirmation and will instantly close the program. In this article we’ll show you how to restore back the warning on exit when multiple tabs exist.
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  • Recommended to Update IE8 to Internet Explorer 9

    After a year since the first release of Internet Explorer 9 preview which is crippled in most functions and don’t even have an address bar, Microsoft has finally decided to release the final stable version of Internet Explorer 9. I guess most of you already know about the release since this news is practically mentioned in a lot of tech websites but if you don’t, you should definitely update Internet Explorer 8 to 9 even if you don’t use it at all. Reason is some third party software uses the Internet Explorer engine to work properly and also Internet Explorer has always been a part of Windows. There are more pros than cons in having an updated latest version of Internet Explorer on a Windows system.

    First of all, the most notable improvement in Internet Explorer 9 compared to Internet Explorer 8 is the speed of opening new windows and tabs. You will be able to notice the difference without even using a benchmark tool to time the opening of new IE9 windows or tabs. The Internet Explorer developers are finally willing to improve the download manager by adding pausing and resuming capability which is already available to most popular web browsers.

    Internet Explorer 9 also scored very well (95/100) in Acid3 which is a test to see how well a web browser follows certain selected elements from web standards. Internet Explorer 8 failed miserably with only 20/100. You can also now search for keywords directly from the address bar which by default uses the Bing search engine. You can easily change that to Google or other search engine by clicking on the small magnifying glass icon at the end of the address bar and then click at the Google icon.
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  • 5 Free Real Time Non-Indexing Search Programs for Windows

    The search function in Windows is an important feature although we don’t normally use it everyday. As our hard drive space gets bigger and cheaper, we tend to store even more files and don’t bother deleting them. If your files aren’t arranged in order, chances are you forget where the important files are and here comes the useful search feature to the rescue by locating the misplaced file using a combination of file names, extensions, date modified, and etc.

    On an older Windows operating system such as XP, you can launch the search window by pressing WIN+F, or when you’re in Windows Explorer, both F3 or Ctrl+F will also work. Newer versions of Windows such as 7, 8 and 10 are much easier by simply pressing the Start key on your keyboard and you can start typing the words that you want to search for.

    windows search

    Although Microsoft has made efforts to improve the search feature in Windows, there are some users that do not like to use the Windows Search because they claim it does not find the file they’re looking for. It is very likely a user’s problem and they’re not searching with the correct keywords or even looking at the correct path. As for some of the computer savvy users, they’d prefer to disable the indexing service that constantly scans the computer’s index locations, a method which is also found on some third party search tools such as Locate32, Everything, TheSearchMan, etc.

    If you’re one of those that does not like to use the Windows Search feature, here are 5 free real time non-indexing search utilities that you can try.
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  • How to Create and Access Shared Folders in Windows 7

    Windows XP by default allows anyone in the same local area network to access its shared folders without the need to provide a user name and password. This is because the XP Simple File Sharing mode is enabled by default and can be disabled from Control Panel > Folder Options. As for Windows 7, the default security settings for folder sharing have been strengthened and you cannot access anyone’s shared folder on the same network without providing the correct login information. An attempt to connect to another computer will first prompt a Windows Security dialog box asking you to enter network password.

    Enter Network Password

    This is an improved security feature because previously anyone can access an unprotected shared folder by simply using SoftPerfect Network Scanner to scan for shared folders on the whole subnet. However, if you’re the only user on the network or your computers only connect to your personal private network, the authentication to access shared folders is quite unnecessary.

    Here is how to share folders and access the shared folders in Windows 7.
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  • The Proper Way to Fully Install Intel Chipset Driver

    When I was in my teens and started to learn about fixing computers, one of the first thing I remembered learning was the proper order to install drivers. Installing Windows now is much more simplified and easy compared to Windows 95/98 because we don’t need to use a DOS bootup floppy disk, and the vast support of devices on Windows 7. Windows 98 didn’t support a lot of drivers and we need to spend quite a lot of time searching and downloading the drivers for chipset, display, sound, modem and printer on the internet using the slow 56Kbps dial up internet connection.

    A very old friend of mine just called me yesterday asking me what and how to install chipset driver. Many people call it a chipset driver but in fact it is not a driver nor does it include drivers. It contains information text files (INFs) that provides the operating system with information about a piece of hardware on the system. This allows the operating system to show the correct name for that piece of hardware in Device Manager.

    how to install Intel Chipset driver

    As far as I can remember, the first driver that I should always install is the chipset drivers once Windows installation has been completed, followed by the rest of the drivers. If you install the Intel Chipset Software much later, you will notice that it will not install all INFs.
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  • Download Trend Micro Antivirus+ 10 with Free 6 Months License

    Any person who has started using a computer since Windows 95 would have at least heard of an antivirus software called PC-cillin. It was one of the very few pieces of antivirus software available for the Windows computer because back then there weren’t many computer viruses and the available ones weren’t that advanced if compared to the current malware that uses rootkit technology to stay undetected.

    PC-cillin is now known as Trend Micro and just like any other antivirus company, they too offer several different paid subscription products such as basic antivirus, Internet security with firewall, and maximum/premium security with additional privacy protection, mobile device protection, and even system optimization modules.

    trend micro antivirus 10

    The current 2016 version of Trend Micro Antivirus is at version 10 and it is known as Trend Micro Antivirus+ 10. If you haven’t noticed, their product title no longer carries the word “Titanium”. As far as we know, Trend Micro started adding the word “Titanium” to their product names when their cloud-based global threat intelligence was integrated into the software and advertised as a fully cloud based antivirus without relying on offline virus patterns.
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  • How to use SysPrep to Generate Unique SID before Cloning

    To increase the efficiency of recovering your system, some of you may think of cloning your current system and store it in a portable drive by using the program such as Ghost. If your system crashed, you can easily plug in the portable drive, and recover your system to the state whereby you do not need to spend so much time on installing necessary software or security updates for each of the application. Apparently, this will save you a lot of time.

    By preparing a clean operating system image, after you install the necessary software and tools, you will need to perform a system preparation by using a tool called Sysprep. (For Windows Embedded operating system, you will need to use a tool called FBreseal to prepare the system, it is hard to search for on the Internet, and you may download the FBreseal tool from here if you are using Windows Embedded operating system). This step is very important, especially if you would like to clone the same operating system image on multiple machines. If you do not perform system preparation, all the machine that using the same image, will have the same Security Identifier (SID) applied on it. Imagine if everyone in the same town is having the same identity card number, this is ridiculous, and no one will be able to proof themselves. Furthermore, those machines that with the same SID will not be able to join to the domain. From Microsoft system point of view, SID should be unique for every computer device that connected to the Active Directory.
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  • 3 Cloud Based Antivirus Software Review

    The traditional method for an antivirus to detect if a program is malicious is by cross checking with their virus definition database file to see if there is a match. The numbers of malware keeps on growing at a very fast rate and that would increase the size of the virus definition database. Try to imagine scanning a single file would have to be checked against a database containing millions of records.

    This creates a challenge for an antivirus company today in keeping their software fast and as light as possible without slowing down the computer. One of the most efficient method that is being implemented on antivirus software to bring down the load is cloud technology. You can find most of the major antivirus brand such as Kaspersky still uses the traditional definition together with modern cloud detection, but very few that solely uses only the cloud protection method.

    The cloud-based antivirus would be very light on the computer because all the heavy scanning work is done on the server side. Sending every file to the cloud for scanning doesn’t make sense as it would be very slow, hence the cloud based antivirus would still need to employ some other kind of technology such as behavioral scanning to tell if the file is suspicious, then only sends the digital fingerprint of the file to the cloud for identification.

    In this article we’ll list the cloud based antivirus software that delivers protection from the cloud without relying on the local signature-based scanning.
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