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Sunday, August 8, 2004

Show #64

I’m giving away six more four-packs of tickets to the incredible DLExpo today.

Today’s news items

It’s finally ready. The most important update to Windows XP ever has been released. “Final” copies of Windows XP Service Pack 2 are showing up on the peer-to-peer networks and according to Microsoft, SP-2 is going to be released to the public in 10 days. We’ll talk about it today on the show, and why you should be very careful about downloading it now.

UPDATE: You’ll be able to download it from Windows update soon. This is the recommended procedure since it will deliver only the files you need. If you’re a network administrator who will be installing the update on a variety of machines, or if you have to have it right now, you can now download it directly from Microsoft. (Warning: it’s 272 megs!)

Noon-1p

Kevin in Thousand Oaks: transferring 8 and 16mm movies to DVD

Kevin wants to digitize his old family movies. There are, of course, services that do this. They’ll probably do a better job than you can, but it’s not cheap. Here’s a good article from a guy who did it himself. There’s a good article at pcmag.com, do a search for “digitize your home movies” on the site.

Katie in Fullerton: stolen laptop - how to backup

Katie had her laptop stolen but was lucky enough to recover it and now she is thinking about backing up her data, and how often she should perform the task. The key to backing up your data is to make a copy of everything you have no other copy of. In other words, not Windows or your applications. Only copy your data, email, saved games, Internet favorites, etc.

I recommend daily backups to CD-R to a USB thumb drive for stuff you’re working on right now. Weekly back ups to CD-R or DVD-R of My Documents. And monthly backups of everything in the Windows Documents and Settings folder. Make sure you get those backups off site, in case of fire, earthquake, or other disasters.

Protecting laptop from theft:
CyberAngel
Kensington lock

Dave in Altadena: Tape transfer to DVD

Dave wanted to know how well those stand-alone VHS to DVD dubbing decks work. Not well in my experience.

To do it on your PC you’ll need an analog video capture device like
I like the Canopus ACVC110 or Pinnacle’s Movie Box DV.

Nancy in Pennsylvania: Mysterious sounds on her computer

She’s using AOL and sometimes she hears a door opening and closing. I think it’s probably the Instant messenger sounds made when a buddy comes online and leaves.

Dan says: do these sound like it?
Door Open sound
Door Slam sound

She said she hasn’t added anyone to her buddy list but AOL now adds anyone you Instant Message to your buddy list. So you can get the sound even if you didn’t put anyone on your buddy list.

1–2p

Betty Jean in Corona: digitizing negative to make a movie

It’s Grandpa’s 86th birthday and Betty Jean wants to digitize his old negatives and make a Ken Burns style video. They’re large format. The best negative scanner for under $5,000 is the Nikon Coolscan. But some scanners with lights in the lid as well as the bed do a good job. I use and recommend the Epson 1670. iMovie has a Ken Burns pan & scan plugin.

For outputting the video to a VCR I recommend Formac’s Studio DVTV for the Macintosh.

Dan in Huntington Beach: Hacking the OS X Administrator password

Dan works for a company that upgraded to OS X and wants to hack the admin password so that he can change his settings. You can clear it by booting to an OS X install disc and resetting passwords (unless Apple’s Open Firmware) but I don’t know how figure out what the password is. Any suggestions?

Peter in Westlake Village says there’s no known way to crack it. And Peter oughta know. He runs The Mac Shoppe there.

However, several other listeners have emailed to say that, although it’s not guaranteed, a brute force crack is possible as long as you have physical access to the machine.:

If he can obtain the password hash from NetInfo for example by running nidump, then he could attempt a brute force attack to discover the password that hashes to that value using a utility such as Crack5 or John the Ripper: if the person who set up the system used a secure password, this might not work (or could take a few thousand years to successfully find a password that hashes to that cipher text).

He might be able to get root access to the system (or full access to the configuration files) by booting the machine into single user mode, as a FireWire device, or with an OS 9 disc, without needing to know the admin password. See these articles: Mac OS X Single User Mode Root Access Malevolence

To merely make some user preferences changes, it would perhaps be easiest to get into single user and dump the password database with nidump, use the passwd command to change the admin password, reboot and make desired changes in normal mode, and then use niload later to restore the original password information from the saved dump…

Larry in Manhattan Beach: replacing OEM installs with vanilla XP

He wants to know if there’s anything critical he’ll be missing. Probably not. Many laptops come with special software for Wi-Fi, trackpad, and power management, but the built-in Windows capabilities are sufficient.

Understand, I don’t recommend it, but I do it all the time because I hate all the junk that comes with the computer manufacturer installs these days.

Terri in Santa Barbara: looking for pro quality photo cataloging software

She’s an underwater photographer who shoots RAW pix. That means they’re big files. She’s finding Extensis Portfolio too complicated and is looking for some other way to catalog her photos on a variety of media, both offline and on.

parrotbeak says: Terri might try Photolightning for media backup. She might also try iMatch, which is more of a catalog program, rather than an archiving program.

Ray likes Kodak EasyShare. It’s free but more consumer oriented.

Neil in Rancho Cucamonga: cracking Windows XP encryption

He encrypted 20,000 files using Windows XP built-in encryption (available on XP Pro with the NTFS file system), moved the files, still encrypted, to another system. He no longer has the original system. How can he unencrypt and recover the files? I don’t think he can. Got any ideas?

Illuminati says: According to this Microsoft article, Windows creates a set of unique security certificates designed in a way so that even if a user makes another install with the same username and password, the same certificates will not be created. Unless the user copies these certificates onto the other system prior to encrypting, the encrypted files will not be able to be unencrypted.

This article: Encrypted File System Recovery also provides some details: it may help if the original “Documents and Settings\Application Data” folder is available on the new system

For those of us who dont have Windows XP Pro, try the free encryption program Cryptainer LE.

2–3p

Larry in Sun City: large format printers

He uses the marvelous Epson 2200 to print his photos. It does prints as large as 19×13 inches but he wants more. He was waiting for the Espon 4000 but it’s front feed and understandably he doesn’t like that. (I’m sure the heavier stock can be printed straight through from the back to the front, though.) He’s looking for a larger format printer. I don’t have any good recommendations, however. Do you?

Nicky in Aliso Viejo: browser hijacking

Nicki is having issues with spyware and hasn’t been able to rid her computer of it using AdAware. Her home page keeps changing - a sure symptom of Browser Hijacking, the most pernicious type of spyware out these days. Follow my instructions on Main/RemovingSpyware to remove broswer hijackers and prevent reinfection.

Also See:

• Researchers warn of infectious Web sites - News - ZDNet
• Info: ActiveX, Java, & Scripting

Justin in Oxnard: media center recommendations

He’s looking for a way to get video and audio from his computer in the den to his TV and stereo in the living room. This is a hot new category of device often called a media center. Try the Prismiq - the price is right and it works very well.

He also wanted to know how to make a system restore disk, like those that come with new computers, but customized with his apps and settings, etc. I recommend Norton Ghost from Symantec.

Rick in Camarillo: how to resize his partitions

He bought a notebook with a 20 GB hard drive but the first partition is only 2 Gigs. How can he expand it to the full size? Partition Magic from Symantec. The Windows partitioner would work, but’s it’s destructive so he’d lose all his data. Partition Magic can resize partitions without losing any data.

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