RoboForm for Chrome Not perfect, but...

OK, it's better than nothing. That's not saying much. But!!! it's ultra portable. That is to say, you only have to install the plugin and get your sync'd logins. And it's cross platform. Works equally on Linux.

Recover your Roboform Online Password

This does NOT recover your Master Password. This is only valuable for recovery of your Roboform Online connection password.

1. Assume your Roboform application has ever synced and still does (right-click on Roboform, tools, Sync Roboform Data ... should be successful).
   
2. www.snapfiles.com/get/asteriskkey.html
   
3. right-click on Roboform, options, User Data Change Sync Settings (open the window but DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING).
   
4. recover password from the asterisk recovery tool

Replace Dansguardian 2.8.0.6 binary for SmoothWall Express 3

To fix the iTunes 9.1/dansguardian bug (at your own risk, though I don't think it should break anything. If it does, you have the dansguardian backup file, right?):

Assuming you have already installed http://smoothwallmods.googlecode.com/files/DGAV-SW3-2.8.0.6-6.4.4.2-i686-b012.tgz in SmoothWall Express 3.0

1. Back up /usr/sbin/dansguardian
   
2. obtain http://www.gwy.org/dansguardian
   
3. replace /usr/sbin/dansguardian
   
4. chmod +x /usr/sbin/dansguardian
   
5. at the minimum, you could dansguardian -q; dansguardian
   

now the malformed URL issue won't show up and iTunes 9.1 will work with dansguardian 2.8.0.6.

If you want 2.10, you'll have to compile it yourself.

Change sound for Google Mail Checker Plus

find notify.mp3 and replace it in:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions\gffjhibehnempbkeheiccaincokdjbfe\1.1.7

AVG Update "General Error"

Recently, AVG caused a bit of a hassle with update. It wouldn't. The update indicated both Application updates and virus definition updates.

There's no real easy solution to this, but here's what worked for me:
Update from directory.

1. Get the application update from http://free.avg.com/us-en/download-update (the first Windows link that indicates "All Necessary Modules") and remember where it is!
   
2. Open AVG Anti-Virus console, Tools, Update from Directory
   
3. Point it to the download folder from the first step. I told you to remember it! :)
   

You should now be able to successfully update AVG without having to reinstall.

Move an inaccessible window

Do you have a window that the title bar has moved off the screen and you can't reach it with your mouse?

Do this:
Right-click the taskbar icon for that app and choose Move, then press the Down Arrow Key just once. Your mouse now has control of the window. Use it to move the window where you want.

(if Move isn't available, choose Restore. If Restore isn't available, you might have your icons "stacked", so choose one from the stack.)

Tunneling with plink (PuTTY)

This establishes a putty/ssh/plink connection from windows so a nonsecure application can be tunneled through it and then can be closed cleanly.

What is plink?
It's a command line version of PuTTY

What does tunneling mean?
In the case being presented here, any activity that will go to a port on the localhost will do what it should do on the remote site, but do it securely.

No, really, what does that mean?
Let's say you hear that telnet or mysql or ftp isn't that secure, because passwords are flying over the Internet in clear text. That is bad because that password or data isn't encrypted. Yes, I know about sftp, psftp, advanced mysql configuration, ssh, etc. Calm down a bit. If an application doesn't support secure communication, this is what ssh tunneling is about -- providing the secure "tunnel" to do those things.

How do I do it?
1) Make the link
open a command prompt
plink -ssh -L 21:localhost:21 remoteusername@remotedomain

2) use the link
open another command prompt
ftp localhost
and do what you want.

This only works if the remote site is running an ftp server on localhost. (huh?) It means, it only works if the site you want to connect to is listening for ftp connections on 127.0.0.1 (localhost). If it's listening for ftp connections on a local IP address, change localhost in the Plink connection to the local IP address of the REMOTE server. You will still on the local side connect to localhost.

plink -ssh -L 3306:localhost:3306 remoteusername@remotedomain (for use with mysql running on the remote domain. Again, if mysql is listening on a specific IP address, change localhost to the IP address that is configured for mysql.)

Don't forget... this is intended for the *client* applications connecting to the port on the local machine. It will be transparent to the application, but connect to the remote server. Oh, btw, this now establishes the connection securely.

Why would you do this in plink? Frankly, I don't know, except plink was designed for scripting. Most of the examples you'll find on the Internet say, "Usually Plink is not invoked directly by a user, but run automatically by another process. Therefore you typically do not want Plink to prompt you for a user name or a password." Plink is designed to run interactively with things like scp. You should check the furnished manual about that, especially how to put plink in the path, and I strongly suggest you create, save and use all the options (putty session) to minimize the interactivity.

Here's a fun script, though: WARNING! This creates and deletes a file called goawaynow on the remote server!

FIRST sample batch (scheduled?) to connect:
plink puttysessionname rm goawaynow
plink puttysessionname until (test -e goawaynow); do true; done; exit

SECOND run a command like this in another batch (scheduled) after you do the first:
mysqldump -h localhost dbname > dump.sql
plink puttysessionname touch goawaynow


(What does it do?)
First, understand that there is a lot of different customization that can be made to establish the plink connection. Don't be afraid to make changes. But you should necessarily run the two batches separately. The first connect batch removes the goawaynow file. The next line establishes the port forwarding and keeps the link open. The configuration is within the putty session, but you still need to append the until stuff. It basically says, "until goawaynow exists, do nothing, and after goawaynow exists, exit."

The second batch does whatever it needs with the connection, then the next line is supposed to create the goawaynow file, which closes the connection (because the infinite loop above is testing for it).

I'd also like to point to http://thinkhole.org/wp/2006/05/10/howto-secure-firefox-and-im-with-putty/ which has really good comments to make what I said above better. (-qTfNnL?)