PawEng

Lorem Ipsum

PawEng — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:42:00 +0000

Lorem Ipsum is a dummy text used in place of real content. It has been used since the 1500s as a way of showing how print or layout will look without drawing attention to the text. The Lorem Ipsum text looks like real text, and it is, in fact, derived from Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils).

You can use the Lorem Ipsum text yourself when you are designing your company’s new web site or the flier for the local sports club.

Lorem2 [via Lifehacker] lets you select between long and short paragraphs, and between long and short items in a list. It makes it very easy to copy and paste the text into your own document.

Lipsum is another Lorem Ipsum website. It asks you for the number of paragraphs, words, bytes, or lists, and then generates the Lorem Ipsum text for you.

LIFE Photo Archive Hosted by Google

PawEng — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:05:32 +0000

Google is now hosting millions of historic LIFE photos from the 1750s all the way till today. It provides an interesting view of historic events. Using Google’s search functionality, you can browse the photos any which way you want. Browsing by year, for example, shows the zeitgeist of the time. It is easy to get carried away looking at photos of the moon landing in 1968, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, or the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1945. Or one can view photos of far away places like Greenland, Calcutta, or Burma.

See for yourself at the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

Permanently Delete All Data on Your Harddisk

PawEng — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:39:52 +0000

When you get rid of your computer, how do you get rid of the data on it? How do you make sure that nobody can recover your personal data from it. Formatting the harddisk is not enough. It is still possible to recover files from a formatted disk. The Read Write Web blog has a story about this. They describe different tools for permanently deleting your data from overwriting the disk 7 or 35 times to more violent ways like smashing the disks to smithereens. While the latter method may be a bit extreme (and it will most certainly decrease the value of your computer should you want to sell it on eBay), the article does point out an often overlooked security problem. It is definitely worth thinking about it before you retire your computer.

Consistent Formatting in Word

PawEng — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:01:31 +0000

The Microsoft Office Word Team has a blog post on How to Make the Formatting in Your Document Consistent [via Lifehacker]. If you have every worked on a Word document with multiple authors, you know how completely messed up the formatting is when you get the document back. It lacks consistency. The Microsoft Office Word Team explains how to rescue you document.

How To Ditch Your Old Email Address

PawEng — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:02:03 +0000

Do you have an old email address that just isn’t cutting it anymore? Tired of having some juvenile email address like snazzydude@example.com or hotrod75@example.com? Or do you just want to ditch your AOL address? If so, then WIRED has an article for you. It is called Ditch Your Old Email Address, and it shows you just how easy can be.

How Strong Is Your Password?

PawEng — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:59:04 +0000

The Brute Force Calculator [via gHacks] analyzes your password and tells you how long a brute force attack on it will take. You don’t need to actually give your password out; you just enter how many upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters it has. While the results can’t necessarily be taken literally, it still makes for some interesting comparisons.

You can brute force your way through a password of five random characters in only 0.03 hours. Six character passwords take 2.5 hours. Seven characters take 9.8 days. Eight characters take 924 days.

If you only use lower case characters, a brute force attack on an eight character password will take less than an hour.

So how do you create a strong password? Based on these numbers, you should have at least eight characters, and they should be random. Some places enforce the randomness by requiring that your password has both upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters in them. While they can be difficult to come up with, to remember, and to type, they certain make your password more secure.

One way of creating such secure passwords is to take a line of a song or a poem you know (for example, “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”) and rewrite it by abbreviating words and using Leet (for example, “Lucy|t5w/D”). In fact, you could argue that “Lucy” should not be part of the final password as it makes the password prone to dictionary attacks. At any rate, this password certainly beats the most common passwords when it comes to security.

Learn a Language One Minute at a Time

PawEng — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:37:14 +0000

One Minute Languages teach you languages one minute at a time. They have courses available for Catalan, Danish, French, German, Irish, Japanese, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian. You can listen to the lessons directly in your browser, you can download them as mp3 files, or you can subscribe to them via iTunes. Each lesson is about a minute or two. They are very clear, and they are produced by native speakers of each language.

The lessons are free, but you can buy a PDF course guide, 10 enhanced podcasts with synchronized flashcards for each lesson for £3.5 GBP.

One Minute Languages [via Lifehacker]

Test Your Webpage In Multiple Browsers

PawEng — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:31:42 +0000

Browsershots is a free online service that tests websites for browser compatibility. It is very simple to use. You enter your website URL, select the browsers you want to test it on, and Browsershots presents you with screenshots of your website on each of the browsers. Browsershots supports lots of browsers in multiple versions on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD — some 84 combinations in total. You can also select screen resolution, color depth, whether Java is enabled or not, and the versions of Javascript and Flash you want.

Try Browsershots on the browser acid tests. There are currently three acid tests, and they test how standard compliant browsers are. For example, acid test number 2 should display a smiley face. It works fine in some browsers, but on others the results are pretty dismal.

Finding People

PawEng — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 03:15:27 +0000

Pipl is a search engine for finding people. Enter a name, and Pipl searches the deep web for it. Pipl is a free service.

There are other options for finding people online:

123people presents its results in a nice organized way.
WhitePages will tell you where someone lives.
Spock allows you to claim your own identify and making edits to it.
Reunion is is free, but requires registration to see the search results.

There are also specialized search engines like Criminal Searches which looks for criminal records.

There are many more websites that will help you locate long lost friends (or just get you the scoop on your friends and colleagues). However, a simple search on Google is often the best way to start before trying more specialized search engines.

Virtual CD / DVD Drives

PawEng — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:55:59 +0000

There are a number of tools available for mounting a CD or DVD image (like an ISO file) as a disk under windows. This is useful for accessing CD / DVD images for example on a laptop without an optical drive, or for accessing multiple disks at once without having to swap CDs or DVDs constantly.

Here are some of the virtual CD / DVD drives:

ISODisk is a free tool. It mounts only ISO files, but it lets you mount 20 of them at a time.
Virtual CloneDrive is free. It supports up to 8 virtual drives at a time, and you can mount images in ISO, BIN, or CCD format.
Daemon Tools has a free version for non-commercial use and a number of pay versions. It supports CD, DVD, HD DVD, and BluRay.
MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD-ROM (MagicDisc) is freeware. It supports just above any image format you can think of.
Alcohol 120% is a commercial program. It supports a large number of formats, and 31 virtual drives.