Archive for the ‘Downloads’ Category

Posted on July 14, 2008 - by snipe

Track Your Stolen Laptop (for Free) with Adeona

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

From the Adeona website:

Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns. This system is the result of recent academic research started at the University of Washington, with participants now also at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Davis. The foundations of the Adeona design — and an analysis of its security and privacy properties — are published in a research paper at the 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.

Best of all, Adeona is free, and has downloads available for Windows, Mac and Linux. As an added bonus, Mac Powerbook users can configure Adeona to work with the built-in iSight camera and freeware software isightcapture to take a photo of your laptop-mooking perp. Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can access them.

Learn more at the Adeona website, or get started with Adeona now!

Posted on July 2, 2008 - by snipe

Dropbox versus FolderShare for Syncing Files Between Computers

In my eternal quest to sync up all of the various aspects of my life (contact lists, bookmarks, addons), and to cover the control-freak side of things using version control systems like Subversion and CVS, Dropbox and Foldershare were the next natural step. (more…)

Posted on July 1, 2008 - by snipe

Identify and Fix SQL Injection Vulnerabilities in Web Applications

Scrawlr is a free software for scanning SQL injection vulnerabilities on your web applications, developed by HP Web Security Research Group in coordination with Microsoft Security Response Center.

Scrawlr crawls a website while simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities.

After the scanning process, if it can find vulnerabilities, it will display your database table names as a proof of the possible SQL injection vulnerabilities.

From the HP Scrawlr website:

Technical details for Scrawlr

• Identify Verbose SQL Injection vulnerabilities in URL parameters
• Can be configured to use a Proxy to access the web site
• Will identify the type of SQL server in use
• Will extract table names (verbose only) to guarantee no false positives

Scrawlr does have some limitations versus our professional solutions and our fully functional SQL Injector tool

• Will only crawls up to 1500 pages
• Does not support sites requiring authentication
• Does not perform Blind SQL injection
• Cannot retrieve database contents
• Does not support JavaScript or flash parsing
• Will not test forms for SQL Injection (POST Parameters)

There are some limitations, as noted in the above bulleted list, however this is certainly a good start to help web developers find and correct vulnerabilities in their applications. Download Scrawlr now - Windows Only.

Posted on June 27, 2008 - by snipe

Cinemaphiles Stay Organized with Coollector

For the movie buffs, this free app let’s you track movies (DVDs, VHS, BLU-RAY, you name it) that you own, don’t own but have seen, have loaned out to others, want to see, want to own, and so on. It can be used to store your movie library information and even find the lowest prices on movies you want to own. The internal database has over 68,000 movie titles, with a built-in encyclopedia of over 89,000 actors and 42,000 titles. And best of all, it’s free and free of spyware or malware - so download it today. Windows only.

Posted on June 22, 2008 - by snipe

Lego Digital Designer Builds Your Lego Masterpiece

Freeware application Lego Digital Designer is a virtual Lego kit for your Windows or Mac desktop. Once installed, you can either use LDD to build your own masterpiece from scratch or—if you’re lacking patience—you can get a head start by using one of their starter models. With over 763 brick types to choose from, your LDD-design will have reached well beyond the limits of your normal lego kit. Once you’ve built the perfect prototype, you can upload the results to the Lego web site to order a custom kit with every brick you’ll need included! Lego Digital Designer is freeware, Windows and Mac only.

Posted on April 20, 2008 - by snipe

Quickly Organize Piles of Files and Folders

Check out Dir Utils, a little freeware shell extension that lets you quickly organize piles of files and folders with just a few clicks. Its  a great utility for anyone who regularly finds themselves organizing downloads and media files. The utility adds five new options to Windows’ right-click menu, including “Unify,” which grabs files from a folder’s sub-directories and moves them all up to the main folder; “Alphabetize,” which puts all files in sub-folders into A-Z folders based on file name; and “Extensionize,” which does the same based on file extensions. In other words, Dir Utils saves you the time you would’ve spent re-organizing MP3s, gathering a seasons’ worth of episode videos, and keeping a hefty downloads folder organized.

Note: The original Dir Utils website is down, but DJNuts.Com has been kind enough to host a copy of the software.

Posted on January 20, 2007 - by snipe

Multiple IEs

This is handy for when you need to test a website out in multiple versions of Internet Explorer. And its free! Windows only, but then again, IE for Mac is out of development, so its less of an issue. Installation is a breeze, and I’ve set it up on several systems without so much as a single glitch. No promises for Vista tho - I refuse to install it, so I can’t vouch for anything running on it.

Get it free at tredoft.com.

Posted on January 15, 2007 - by snipe

Firefox extensions I can’t live without

All of these work with FF 2, and many work with older versions. All but one or two have also been updated to work with FF 3. (List last updated Aug 26, 2008.)

General Browsing:

URL Fixer
Seamlessly fixes the fat-fingered “.con” typos in a domain name. (Other similar extensions only suggest the alternates after the page has failed to load)

Copy Plain Text
Allows you to copy without formatting

AdBlock Plus
Blocks out inline ads, such as banner ads, Google Adwords, etc. (Note, if you’re a regular at the IWG site, please consider disabling this plugin while there. The ad revenue actually does help keep it running. Its not a lot, but its enough.)

Link Alert
Pops up a teenie icon when you mouseover a link, indicating the type of file a hyperlink goes to (.doc, .pdf, etc).  This is particularly handy if you (like me) hate clicking on a link and then waiting 10 for Adobe Acrobat to open.  Obviously, yes, you can look at the status bar and find out where it’s going - but this extension makes it much more intuitive.

URL Link
Reconnects broken links that are only broken because web-based email wrapped them, etc.  Also has some other neat features.

PDF Download
Makes FF ask you what you want to do with a PDF file, rather than automatically opening it in a browser window.  I’m on a lot of law and court websites often, and many of them offer PDFs, so this is a nice one for me.

Resizable textarea
Just what it sounds like - it lets you make a textarea box bigger for more room to type.

Aging Tabs
Changes the color of the tabs in FF based on how long they have been idle.  This isn’t a critical one, but its helpful to me, since I switch back and forth from tabs so often. At a glance, I can see which are the most active, so I know which ones to click on.

Foxmarks Synchronizer
Syncs all of your Firefox bookmarks across multiple computers.  Requires you to sign up for an account at Foxmarks, but the account sign-up is built in to the initial setup, and it literally took less than 30 seconds. As of October 2008, Foxmarks now supports browser password syncing.

Download Helper
Grab images and video from YouTube, MySpace, etc.

FavLoc
Allows you to set specific favorite folders to save your downloads.

Background Image Saver
More and more sites are utilizing a transparent gif overlay to prevent their images from being saved via the right+click “save image as”. Since Firefox doesn’t have a “Save background image as…”. this extension gives it back to you.

Google Adsense Notifier
Shows you how much you’ve earned in the status bar.  I have found a bit of a glitch with this since the last update, where I can no longer view the amount from last payment (it shows the amount for all time instead), but I am hopeful that this will get fixed soon, since I really like this extension.

Gutil!
Just a quick shortcut to Google services (mail, news, etc.)  Simple, but nice.

Read it Later
This is a handy little addon that lets you flag a page to read later. If you’re like me, you constantly find interesting pages that you want to delve into, but don’t always have time, the very moment you find them. While you could certainly just set up a Bookmarks folder for stuff you want to get to later, Read it Later adds a spiffy icon in your address bar. One click and its saved for later.

Google Preview
Provides a thumbnail screenshot next to the site link and summary in Google search results. I wouldn’t have thought I needed this when I first heard about it, but its become one of my favorites.

Web Development:

IE Tab
This is perhaps more important as a web developer, but there are times when a page won’t render correctly in FF, so it’s nice to have an alternate way of viewing it. There is also a trimmed down version of this extension available as IE Lite. Alas, for PC only.

Aardvark
This one is a must-have for all web developers.  It allows you to quickly and easily view and select distinct elements of a webpage, displaying their characteristics, including id. Great for troubleshooting HTML and CSS.

Web Developer Toolbar
This is THE first extension I go for when setting up a new computer.  Tons of web dev tools, including viewing submitted headers, debugging tools, and so on.

Firebug
This is the SECOND extension I go for when setting up a new computer. If I ever get to meet the people who came up with this, I’m going to march right up to them and plant a wet one on their face. This extension has saved me so much time and aggravation - I can’t imagine being a web developer without it. How did I do it before Firebug? Firebug gives you easy access to CSS styles, HTML attributes, even network calls for external files.

User Agent Switcher
Helps debug any weird encoding issues you might run across.

ShowIP
Shows the IP address of the website host.  Useful if you’re working with a site that does load-balancing, dev environments, and so on.

Server Spy
This addon lets you see what type of server the website you’re visiting is running, similar to Netcraft’s “What that site running” lookup.

Character Identifier
This extension adds a context menu item for selected text that provides more information (from the Unicode database) about the characters selected.

Server Switcher
If you work with a dev and live server environment, such as dev.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com, this extension allows you to easily switch between the two servers from any page on either server.  It would have been nice if you could add one more version, such as staging, but overall its really quite handy.

Fireshot
A very slick, lightweight screenshot addon that allows simple annotations and highlight boxes. Very handy for explaining elements to clients, helping non-techy people understand what and where to click, and so on. There is a free version and a paid version, but I’ve found that the free version is more than adequate for most use. Only available for Windows… *sniffle*

Colorzilla
Great little addon that gives you the power of a color eyedropper in your browser. Need to grab a color from a website to make additional graphics? No problem. Two clicks later, you’ve got the RGB or hex color code copied to your clipboard. This addon has saved me a ton of time.

MeasureIt
Handy little addon that lets you whip out a ruler and measure the size of anything in your browser, in pixels.

HttpFox
Lets you see the headers being sent through the browser - can be helpful for debugging scripts.

The Pencil Project
Great addon that lets you plan and tweak GUI interfaces right in your browser. Click here to read more about the Pencil Project in a previous Snipe.Net article.

Social

Twitterfox
Simply THE easiest way to Twitter. There isn’t a time when I’m on the computer without a browser window open, so this slim Twitter client makes it unbelievably easy to post to and read Twitter updates. Don’t use Twitter? Click here to learn why you should!

Not at All Useful, But Still Fun

Bork Bork Bork!
Translates webpage text into Swedish Chef

Posted on November 18, 2006 - by snipe

Free (Silly) Ringtones

I spent (wasted?) too much of today making mp3 ringtones.  Since I went through the trouble of creating them, I figured I’d post them, in case anyone wants them as well (assuming your phone can play mp3s). Most of these are clipped to under 30 seconds, but there are a few that are a bit longer. Most are set at about 48 Constant Bit Rate, however some are a little higher, and the long ones may have been saved at a lower Bit Rate to reduce filesize. I edited most of these myself (all actually, except for the pop music stuff) so blame my editing if it doesn’t capture exactly the bits you wanted. There are actually more, but I can’t seem to find them on my hard drive.  When I find them, I’ll post them.

Family Guy:
* Chumbawumba - 122K (20 seconds)
* Quagmire “Giggitty” - 10k (1 second)
* “I’m a Tumor” song - 59k (8 seconds)
* Stewie: “For the next 5 hours, you’re my bitch” - 22k (3 seconds)
* Quagmire: “Why are you still here?” - 72k (9 seconds)
* Creepy old guy’s answering machine messages to Chris - 194k (49 seconds)
* “Can’t touch me” song - 180k (22 seconds)
* “Why did the dinosaurs die out?” “Because you touch yourself at night” - 30k (4 seconds)
* Chris: “You dropped something - my jaw. Aww right….” - 61k (8 seconds)
* Mayor West: “You are a filthy whore” - 19k (2 seconds)
* Stewie: “Go fuck yourself” - 7k (2 seconds)
* Peter: “Jeez, what a bitch” - 7k (2 seconds)
* Shatner: “Kahn!!” - 146k (18 seconds)
* Brian: “Peanut butter jelly time” - 142k (21 seconds)
* Stewie: “My fat baby loves to eat” song - 206k
* Stewie talking to Brian about his novel - 223k (45 seconds)
* Peter: “Up in my bum” Christmas song - 44k (5 seconds)
* Louis/Stewie: “Worst mother” - 23k (3 seconds)
* “You have AIDS” song - 212k (43 seconds)

Futurama:
* Grunka Lunka “secret ingredient” - 118k (12 seconds)

Space Ghost Coast to Coast:
* Brak: Beef log - 111k
* Brak: “I’m a  cucumber” - 193k
* Space Ghost/Brak: “Minky Boodle” - 156k
* Zorak: “We like girls” - 135k

Robot Chicken:
* Apocalypse Pony - 194k

Muppets:
* Not Easy Being Green - 159k (27 seconds)
* Swedish Chef bork bork bork - 87k (8 seconds)
* Fraggle Rock theme - 134k (22 seconds)
* Kermit: “Who let the frogs out?” song - 158k (26 seconds)
* New Sound song - 235k (30 seconds)

Charlie the Unicorn:
* Charlie - 82k
* Candy Mountain song - 247k
* Joy and joyness - 53k
* Liopleurodon - 57k
* Shun the non-believer - 86k
* Wake up, Charlie - 87k

Winnie the Pooh:
* “Up, Down, Touch the Ground” song - 165k (24 seconds)

Finding Nemo:
* Dory: “Just keep swimming” - 50k (5 seconds)
* Sea Turtle: “Duuuuude” - 90k (13 seconds)
* Dory: “Speaking whale” - 179k (18 seconds)
* Dory: “My squishy” - 64k (9 seconds)

Commercials:
* Coca-Cola: “Lime in the coconut” - 174k (25 seconds)
* Honda Element: “I peench” - 188k (27 seconds)
* Skittles: Yodeling rabbit - 188k (27 seconds)

Weird Al:
* Harvey the wonder hamster - 165k
* White and nerdy - 235k
* Gotta boogie - 235k

Misc. Movies:
* Little Mermaid: “Maybe he’s right, maybe there is something the matter with me” - 24k
* Robots: “Get up offa that thing” - 235k

Music:
* Beck: “Loser” - 151k
* Jane Siberry: “Everything reminds me of my dog” - 244k
* Dixie Chicks: “Goodbye Earl” - 71k
* Fergie - “London Bridge” - 198k
* VIllage People: “YMCA” - 235k

Dr. Demento:
* Carrot juice is murder - 205k
* Junk food junkie - 235k

Misc. (funny):
* “Ding, fries are done” (Burger King) - 228k
* Gay muppet bar - 247k
* Bilbo Baggins (by Nimoy) - 235k
* Ren and Stimpy: “Log” - 180k

Misc. (not funny):
* Mercy - 238k

Monty Python:
* Lovely bunch of coconuts - 167k
* Altzheimers answering machine - 199k