uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ dı1ɟ

.ʇnoqɐ ʞuıɥʇ oʇ noʎ ɹoɟ buıɥʇǝɯos ʇsnظ .ɹǝʇʇıʍʇ puɐ 'ʞooqǝɔɐɟ ǝʞı1 sǝʇıs 1ɐıɔos puɐ 'sɯnɹoɟ uı uʍop ǝpısdn ɟɟnʇs ʇsod oʇ 1ooɔ ɟo puıʞ s,ʇı

(uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ dı1ɟ) :ǝɹǝɥ 1ooʇ ǝɥʇ puıɟ uɐɔ noʎ

.uʍop ǝpısdn ʇı dı1ɟ uǝɥʇ 'ɟɟnʇs ɟo ɥɔunq ɐ ǝdʎʇ noʎ sʇǝ1 ʇɐɥʇ 1ooʇ ǝuı1uo buıʇsǝɹǝʇuı uɐ punoɟ ı .uʍop ǝpısdn ʎ1ǝʇǝ1dɯoɔ sı ʇsod sıɥʇ 'sǝʎ

.ʍo1s ǝ1ʇʇı1 ɐ ǝɹɐ noʎ ssǝ1un 'sı ʇɐɥʇ 'ʎ1ʞɔınb ʎɹǝʌ ʇı ɟo ʇsnb ǝɥʇ ʇǝb 11ıʍ noʎ ʞuıɥʇ ı uɐǝɯ ı .buo1 ʎɹǝʌ ǝq oʇ buıob ʇ,usı ʇsod sıɥʇ

Technorati Tags: flip, text, upside, down

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The Awesomeness of Mixx and the Nacho Mixx Badge

Well due to some Epic Douche Bags over at Digg and other circumstance that we can not control I have decided never to post on Digg again except maybe another Bauer Power Video or so in the future. But to now focus on Mixx.

Both sites have a lot of cool features but a few of the best things I like about Mixx is that they understand the use for scripts and they filter out adult and offensive material including comments, but don't just delete it for those that do want to use it.

They also seem to be pretty free about wanting people to use their api and not giving them crap for it. One example of this is the Nacho Mixx Badge. What they did was pull the most popular images from the Mixx API and put them into a sweet little slideshow and give you the embed code to put on your site. And because it's just the popupalr ones you know you won't get some crappy pic that comes up and it adds a nice little touch to your site or blog.

Here is an example:

Get this Badge for your blog

Want to trade some cool stories with me and Paul? Add us as friends on Mixx!
Paul's Mixx
Sundance's Mixx

By Sundance of MakeMeASammich.com

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Bauer-Power Episode 6

Yes, finally Sundance and I were able to get back together for another awesome video episode of Bauer-Power! In this episode, Sundance and I decided to do the show "Weekend Update" style, and do it in a funny news sort of format. We hope you like it. Comedy is hard to write!


We decided to give you all a run down in the past month's top stories, with a tad of geeky humor. In case you have trouble figuring out where the punch lines are, we inserted a cheesy laugh track to help you along ;-)

Here is Episode 6 of Bauer-Power!





You can check out our previous episodes of Bauer-Power on our Veoh Channel here: (Bauer-Power Veoh Channel)

If you don't get Veoh in your country, you can catch the Youtube version here: (Bauer-Power Episode 6 on Youtube)

If you wanted to read more about the stories we discussed, here are the links to our sources:

• Robot Theme Park
• Satellite Crash
• Hotmail Pop3
• Kindle 2 P.S. If you want to check out more about the Kindle 2 click here: (Kindle 2)
• Seriously
• Google Earth Atlantis
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Digg Auto-Bury
• P2P Traffic
  

I do want to say that we had some troubles with audio, and chroma keying this go around. Our biggest problem was that we didn't realize how absurdly shiny Sundance's table top was, and how much green it would reflect. We hope to fix that in future episodes. We may even ditch the chroma keying as it is a royal pain in the arse.

Cheesyness aside, how did you like this one? Got any suggestions? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: bauer-power, video, episode 6, tech, news, humor, funny, snl, weekend update, spoof

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Renumber SQL Table ID by Row Position

Have you ever or do you need to renumber the id field in one or more of your SQL tables by their row position in the database? Well I came across needing to do that a few months back. Now I can’t actually remember why I needed to do that but I did and me being the lazy ass I am, I tried Googleing a sample script online instead of just writing my own. I couldn’t find anywhere online for a script that did it. So finally I broke down and just wrote my own and it looked a little something like this…

 

First you need to set all the ID fields to 1 In this example our ID field is called ItemID. You may have to remove the unique identifier property on this field to do so.

UPDATE NewsArticle SET ItemID = 1

Now that, that is done we have the script run though each item at a time so as to put them in the right order using a counter variable to keep track of the new ids. So here’s how that would look. MyTable is the name of the table we’re updating and ItemID is the ID field. The 999 is just some random max number you want it to go to before stopping it really can be anything.

DECLARE @counter INT

SET @counter = 1

WHILE @counter<999

BEGIN

UPDATE TOP (1) MyTable SET ItemID = @counter WHERE itemid=1

SET @counter = @counter + 1

END

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Installing ndiswrapper on CentOS 5.2

I decided that I would give CentOS 5.2 a spin on my Toshiba laptop. For you out there not familiar with it, CentOS is probably the closest enterprise distro like Redhat Linux that is free. Sure there is Fedora, but that is mainly for developers, and not really ready for production. At least, that is according to my Linux admin friend Lance works works with both Redhat and CentOS every day.

My only major problem was that CentOS didn't detect my wireless card after install. Drivers are always an issue in the Linux world. After looking around the internet, it seemed to me that my only option was to install a Windows driver using ndiswrapper (This turned out not to be the case for my laptop, but that is for a later post). The only problem was that ndiswrapper is not installed by default, and it isn't available in the default repositories. So how do you install it? This is what I did:

1. I added another repository that DID have it by running this in the terminal as root:
   rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
2. After adding the new repository I updated yum:
   yum update
3. I installed ndiswrapper using yum:
   yum install dkms-ndiswrapper
   

After that was complete, ndiswrapper was installed and ready to be used to make hardware made for Windows work on Linux!

Like I said though, for my laptop, CentOS actually had the driver available on their Wiki. I will write about that later. They are limited in their firmware though, so for those of you with non supported cards, this post is useful.

Anyone else run CentOS on your laptops? Any other helpful tips you can give me? Hit me up in the comments.

Technorati Tags: centos, wireless, ndiswrapper, yum, install

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Solid State HDD Versus a 5400 RPM Drive

My buddy Ceazar sent me an IM a few days ago saying that he was getting ready to install the 64 bit edition of Ubuntu onto a laptop with a solid state disk. He told me that he would let me know how it performs. Then he told me that they were already running Windows XP on solid state and said it was lightning fast!

Being someone who really hasn't played with solid state hard drive myself, I had nothing to compare it to, so he sent me this Youtube video comparing a solid state hard drive with an older 5400 RPM drive on laptops running Windows XP. It blew my mind. Check it out!

Have you guys messed with solid state drives? How do you like it? Are they worth the hype? Hit me up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: solid, state, versus, vs, standard, ide, hard, drive, hdd

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Fooling Vista Users With KDE 4

My former college professor sent out a tweet on Twitter about a video done by ZDNET Australia about how Windows users probably couldn't tell the difference between Windows 7 and KDE 4 because Windows 7's desktop looks really similar. (Can you say rip off?)

Well Chris Duckett, and Alex Serpo decided to take their theory to the streets. Check out this video:


[Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?]

So basically, what I can gather, and what ZDNET also gathered was that people basically just aren't that keen on Vista. I suppose this just goes to show you that in a blind "taste test" you could easily switch a user over to Linux if you wanted to.

Personally after having played with Windows 7, I do think it is a lot better than Vista. Still,  I'm not sure if you threw a Windows user on KDE that they would immediately get the hang of it. I mean moving from Windows to Linux does require a bit of a learning curve. Even more of a curve than moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista, and from Vista to Windows 7.

What do you think? Do you think it would be easy to migrate users over from Windows to Linux?

Technorati Tags: windows 7, kde, linux, kde4, windows7

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Convert Documents To Speech Online For Free

I happened upon a really cool website the other day and thought I would share it with you guys. It is a really handy tool if you work with someone who is visually impaired, or just can't read too well.

It is an online tool that will simply convert text to speech! This tool is available at iSpeech.org. I don't have much of a need for this personally, except it is kind of fun to type up a little note, then stick it in an email so my wife can play it for my four year old daughter. She gets a kick out of the funny robot voice.

From their site:

iSpeech will quickly convert your text into natural sounding spoken audio. After you convert your text to speech, listen to it with our flash widget, embed it on your website, share it with friends, or download it and put it on your iPod. Your text to speech conversion can be used as a tool to catch up on usefull information, get ahead at work or sit back and relax while you listen to your favorite author. iSpeech text to speech conversion is the fastest and highest quality on the Web.

Here is a quick text-to-speech I made online by pasting some text into their form:

Alternatively, you can also convert supported documents like MS Word, Adobe PDF, Excel, Text, RTF etc. Another really cool feature they offer is the ability to embed a text-to-speech plugin into your Blogger, Wordpress, Windows Live, blogengine, terapad etc blog! Now you can cater to an entirely new audience!

Do you know of some other cool text-to-speech tools online? Perhaps a free text-to-speech download? Let me know about it in the comments!

Technorati Tags: text, to, speech, free, online, tool

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All-In-One Hacking Swiss Army Knife!

My co-worker Mike introduced me to a really awesome live-cd. In fact it might be one of the coolest live cd's I have ever seen. Yes, perhaps even cooler than Bauer-Puntu Linux!

How many of you out there have heard of BackTrack Linux? Who hasn't right? What about Samurai Linux? Helix? DVL? DBAN?

All are really kick as live CD's in their own right. All of them with their own specific purpose in cyberspace. What if they were all combined into one CD? Great, now I am sounding like a cheesy infomercial.

All cheesiness aside, there is a really awesome live cd that contains all of those in one compact piece of awesomeness called Sumo Linux!

When you boot up, you get a simple menu where you can pick which tool you want to use. Maybe you have a job where Backtrack is needed most. Perhaps you have some computer forensics work to be done, so Helix is the right tool. Maybe you need to securely wipe a hard drive, DBAN is the one you want for that. Should you carry around multiple CD's? Hells no!

There is only one CD you need, and that is Sumo Linux because it contains everything in one convenient package with a cool splash screen!

If you would rather carry Sumo around on a USB flash drive, I found instructions on installing it to USB here: (Sumo on USB)

Have any of you tried Sumo? Know of an even better Live CD than this? I want to know about it in the comments.

On a side note, Sumo talk gets me thinking of ninjas. Check out my new Cyber Ninja T-shirt at Bauer-Power gear!

Technorati Tags: sumo, linux, live cd, hacking

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Oh no you didn’t. 11 Reasons why Live Writer is better than ScribeFire

Oh Paul, no you didn’t just try to compile some half assed list of 10 reasons why YOU think ScribeFire is better than WLW! I bet it took you hours upon hours to think of your 10 reasons why you think it's better. Well it’s on. I’ll spare you the embarrassment and just list 11 reasons. Microsoft actually did a good job with their Live Suite, including now with the Movie Maker Live Beta. But to stay on topic lets get to that list. I’ll try to not tear up your post too bad as I’m sure you’ve been getting hell from everyone else about it too.

1. It’s not browser dependent – So you’re not tied to just Firefox. I mean sure a lot of people use Firefox, but not everyone. Actually more people use IE.

2. It’s an actual application – That means it doesn’t have to take up your browser space. So even though ScribeFire is part of Firefox it still takes up most of your browser space. Which to me is one of the most annoying parts.

3. Built in IE Support – WLW has built in support in IE and has great features added with IE8 without having to install anything else. But it does also have plugins for Firefox.

4. More than just Technorati Tags – WLW also supports Live Journal, Flicker, IceRocket, BuzzNet, and many more without any extra plugins. It also pulls a list of all your tags from your blog and you can check them off in a drop down list.

5. Speaking of Plugins – WLW supports plugins. So you want any extra features like Sending a message on Twitter whenever you publish an article, well you can do that. Want to automatically add a Digg button on every post without editing your Blogger code. You can do that too.

6. Easy Embed – Easily embed photos, videos and even maps. All with built in support.

7. Add your own Ads – If you blog already you probably have your own ads. You can easily add them into your blog posts with WLW.

8. Easier more normal interface – Because it comes as an installed application it has all the normal WYSIWYG interface. You can do things like creating tables and set different header types and get the word count.

9. Native Photo Editing – That’s right, you want to add a drop shadow to your image or give it rounded corners, a mirror effect, crop rotate, emboss, ect… you can even add a watermark and well you can do all that directly from the WLW interface.

10. More Support – More people use WLW than ScribeFire so naturally you’ll be able to find more support out there for it.

11. Less Bugs – Now I know that sounds weird being from MS and all. But I had to install ScribeFire twice to get it to work properly and still can’t get the preview to work properly in Flock. Now with WLW. I’ve never had any issues with it.

Well there’s a quick 11 reasons WLW is better than ScribeFire. Not that anyone needs to be told it’s better. They already know. Oh and about your little comment about ScribeFire being portable. Well so is WLW It’s on PortableApps.com. One more thing. Is that the Windows Live Writer uses up only about 12 mb of storage and the same memory that ScribeFire does. So that little bit is also a mute point.

By Sundance of MakeMeASammich.com

Technorati Tags: better than scribefire, top 11, windows live writer

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Where Can I Find A Windows 7 Download?

As you may know, Microsoft put the kibosh on the downloading of the beta version for their new operating system Windows 7 earlier this week. You can still get a serial for it, but if you haven't downloaded it yet, it doesn't really do you any good does it?

Maybe it does! You see, your good buddy El Di Pablo found himself a good quality torrent version of Windows 7 (32 bit version)! I have downloaded it myself and have verified that it is definitely a working version of their beta OS!

Download Windows 7 Beta 1 Build 7022
[Password is B@u3rP0w3r]

How many of you out there have tried it already? I am hearing some really good things about it. From what I am hearing Windows 7 is to Vista what Windows XP Home edition was for Windows ME. I am still playing with it myself.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, download it from the link above. Play with it, and let me know what you think in the comments! If you have played with it already, I want to hear from you too!

By the way, if you came here from Google, please give this result an up vote ;-)

Technorati Tags: windows 7, beta, download, torrent

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In Your Face Sundance! 10 Reasons Scribefire is Better Than WLW

I see how it is Sundance! You want to throw a big, "In your face" at me, but to that I say... "NO! In YOUR face!" I said before that I actually liked Live Writer, but because of your little outburst, I will now have to just say flat out that Live Writer sucks! (Actually, that isn't true... I am just acting out)

I decided to compile a list of the ten reasons why Scribefire is far superior to your pathetic Live Writer. It wasn't hard actually. Mainly because Microsoft Sucks, and it is easy to dig up dirt about just about all of their software! LOL! [Evil Dr. Doom laugh]

So here we go, the top ten reasons Scribefire is better than Windows Live Writer:

1. It's not Microsoft - Everyone knows how crappy M$ stuff is. Just look at Vista and Windows ME!
2. Firefox is already open - I usually have Firefox open anyway. So when I get the urge to blog about something, a quick F8 press and I am off blogging. WLW you have to open separatlely.
3. Firefox is already installed - It is much easier, and faster to install a new FF plugin, than to install an entire separate piece of software like you do with Windows Live Writer.
4. Technorati Tags - SF will inster Technorati tags without the need for additional plugins.
5. Post to Delicious- SF will post to Delicious when you publish your blog post without additional plugins.
   
6. Scribefire can be used in Windows, Linux, and Mac - Were are my Linux users at? I suppose you could install WLW using WINE. Enhoy your Windows 98 style graphics!
7. Less Overhead - Additional programs running means an additional load on the computer. Scribefire doesn't put any additional load on your PC when running.
8. Blog Directly From The Web - Did you find a funny lolcatz picture on the web? Press F8, and blog directly from that page in split screen!
9. No additional crap - Windows Live Writer comes with every other friggin' Windows Live Product they offer. You have to manually un-check all of the extra crap you don't want. SF installs as-is, with no additional junk!
   
10. Monetize with QuickAds - Finally, the best reason to use Scribefire over WLW is the integration of Scribefire QuickAds!
    

I suppose what it all comes down to in the end is preference. Do you like to have a whole boat load of additional software installed when it is completely unneccesary? Do you like supporting an evil multimillion dollar conglomorate? If all your friends jumped off a building would you do it too? If you answered yes to any of the above, then Windows Live Writer is definitely right for you!

If you prefer ease of use, less bloatware, better performance, and the ability to use something on multiple platforms, then you should probably give Scribefire another look.

Oh, one more thing... Did I you can install Portable Firefox to a USB stick with the Scribefire plugin and take it with you with all of your settings, and browser bookmarks? I didn't huh? Maybe that is for a different post.


Technorati Tags: scribefire, firefox, windows live writer, top ten, blog, editor

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Cool Digg Feature For Wannabe Power Diggers

On Saturday I noticed a pretty cool little feature when I was getting ready to send a shout burst out to my network of power diggers. This little feature is pretty awesome if you don't want to be "that guy" that over shouts on Digg. You know, the annoying guy.

This new feature (At least, it is the first time I noticed it) allows you to only shout to those of your friends have still not dugg your article. This way if your good Digg friends have already dugg your story, you can keep drilling down on your list until they have all participated. Check out this screen shot I took:

As you can see, from the drop down menu, you can select the option to shout only to those "not dugg". Pretty convenient if you ask me :-)

If after a few passes, you start noticing a trend of deadbeats, you can go ahead and use this tool I mentioned last week to help you clean up your friends! Happy power digging!

[Edit] - I am such an idiot sometimes! Someone pointed out that this is a script. Me being the upstanding Digg user I am, and not wanting to violate TOS, I have figured out what caused this, and disabled it. Just in time too, because the guy who developed the tool I was using recently got banned for creating it. Check it out: (CheckFriends)

Technorati Tags: digg, power, tools, shouts

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Oh Really - Microsoft Live Writer

So Mr. Bauer here thinks that his Firefox add-in blog editor is so great. Well riddle me this El Di Pablo, is your Scribefire extra bloated and can come bundled with a bunch of extra useless Microsoft products? No it can't!


Even with it's faults I still love the MS Live Writer. It's extremely basic to use but has the power to become much more powerful by installing add-ins for it. It also functions a lot like MS Word. Which most everyone knows how to use and can support publishing to multiple preset and even custom blogs. So if you have your own blog format or even just a blog or news section on your site such as with the Umbraco ASP.Net CMS application you can easily set it up to have MS Live Writer connect and publish content to it.

Now I know some of you out there are saying, "Hey, this is just another dumb useless MS App." well you're wrong. The Live Writer is probably one of the only good things about the new MS Live software. I mean seriously, who wants to change any set of numbers on a web page that could look like a phone number all of a sudden become links to make a phone call from. Yeah, that's part of some crappy phone call live add on crap that will come installed if you don't deselect it from the install.

Even though the install (like a lot of installs out there) you have to be careful about what you're selecting to install or you'll get a bunch of crap, but the Live Writer is very well worth it. One of the best features about it now is that at least with blogger you can schedule your post. All the date/time stuff is located down in the bottom right of your window. Oh and did I mention that it comes with spell check? Yeah, that's right you Wizards out there watch out. Anyway, well it does that coupled with add-ins to accomplish just about anything else you need. It's really a lot better than Scribefire. Even if Dr. Doom says Scribefire is better, and guess what I used to write this post?


By Sundance of MakeMeASammich.com

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Digsby Goes Down

Sweet bastard! Why, oh why did Digsby have to go down today? For those of you not familiar with Digsby, read my post I wrote a few weeks ago about my new favorite IM client that not only handles all IM networks, but also handles Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc.

Well, after being rudely awoken by the east coast at 5:30am because they couldn't access Sharepoint (Seriously! You couldn't work on something else for 30 minutes until the morning Help Desk guy came in?), I took a gander at Twitter and saw a tweet from the folks over at Digsby that they were having server issues. I didn't hink much of it because I wasn't going to be signing on until I got to work anyway.

I got in this morning, and they were still down. No big deal right? I'll just wait a little while and try again later. Three hours later, they are still down! I decided to check out their blog to see if there are any updates. Here is the most detailed blog post I have ever seen:

Really? We'll be back shortly is all you can come up with? Come on guys! I know when a server is down, the last thing you are thinking of is updating your site, but still. Your users want to be kept in the loop!

Anyone else having problems with Digsby? Anyone from Digsby want to shed some light on this morning's outage? Lets hear some comments!

[EDIT] - Just checked the blog again, and they now have this update:

We are having server-side issues that brought down the service. We are working on the problem now and will be back up shortly. If you want to be notified when we come back online, send an email to bugs@digsby.com.

After a year of almost perfect uptime, this is the second outage in the last week. This is completely unacceptable and we will make sure this does not become a regular occurance!

[EDIT 12:45 Pacific]- I got this update about Digsby via Twitter:

[Edit 2:52 Pacific] - Still down... WTF?!

[Edit 3:23 Pacific] - I wonder how many users will go back to Pidgin, Trillian, or some other IM client?

[Edit 3:40 Pacific] - And Digsby is back! Just two hours shy of a 12 hour outage! (At least that is when I first saw their post on Twitter!)

Technorati Tags: digsby, down, im, client, service

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My New Favorite Blog Editor

So Sundance walks over to my desk while I am troubleshooting a print server in Atlanta Georgia, and tells me to stop what I am doing so he can show me HIS favorite new blog editor. I played with it, and I really did like it, but that one is not my favorite blog editor.

No, my new favorite editor is a plugin for Firefox called Scribefire! It is awesome because it plugs right into my browser, which I have open all the time anyway. Not to mention that it is really intuitive, easy to use and most importantly, it allows me to schedule future blog posts!

It makes formatting a snap, and allows you to embed videos from Youtube, and pictures from Flickr with just a click of a button.

Another thing I like is that you can set it to pop open (Simply by pressing F8 I might add) in a split screen mode so you can continue to surf, and blog at the same time. That is handy if you are blogging about something from another news site, blog, or whatever. If you don't like that, you can configure it to open in a new tab or new window as well.

This is from the Scribefire website:

ScribeFire Blog Editor enables users to easily drag and drop
formatted text from the web into their blog(s), post entries,
take notes, and optimize their ad inventory directly through the
Firefox browser.

Additionally Blog Editor enables you to:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

Now, Sundance's choice is a good one too. In fact I believe he is working on a post explaining why the one he picked is his favorite blog client. It is certainly a good one to use, so look for his post tomorrow!

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Bauer-Power Gear! Now With More Pimpness!

As you all know I have been selling Bauer-Power schwag through CustomDropshipper.com for quite a while now. My only complaint about them is that their store's are really, really awful looking, and less than professional.

There is some good news and bad news about them. The good news is that their store is completely customizable. The bad news is that their website is less than intuitive when it comes to customizing the template.

That is no trouble when your good friend is a professional web developer. You all know Sundance right? Well, for his day job Sundance works as a web developer for the same company I work for. I asked him to take a look into the shit storm that is Customdropshipper's template control interface.

Within an hour of poking around, he completely pimped out Bauer-Power Gear! Now the site looks professional, as well as matches the blog almost completely! Check it out!



Now I don't feel like a complete tool for referring you guys to the store! Please go check it! On top of the new t-shirts, I have added some cool coffee mugs, and other fun geeky stuff. Not to mention I am adding new stuff all the time! Help support the cause!

Visit http://gear.Bauer-Power.net now!

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Recovering Forgotten Passwords IV - Recovering PST Passwords

This will be my final recovering passwords post for a while I think. I have milked poor NirSoft long enough. Damn they have cool tools though right?

Anyway, in this final post I will tell you about a tool to recover forgotten PST passwords. This tool works on just about all versions of Microsoft Outlook. That is awesome because we have all had that user call and tell us that they forgot the password to the PST file they created three months ago, and now they need a particular email right away or it is career ending!

This NirSoft tool is called PstPassword. Here is a description from the site:

"PstPassword is a small utility that recover lost password of Outlook .PST (Personal Folders) file. This utility can recover the PST passwords of Outlook 97, Outlook 2000, Outlook XP, Outlook 2003, and Outlook 2007. You don't have to install MS-Outlook in order to use this utility. You only need the original PST file that you locked with a password"

Another cool thing about this tool is that it doesn't require installation, so you can carry it around on your USB Stick, and take it with you wherever PST's need their passwords cracked!

If you know of other cool password cracking...errr...recovery programs other than those at Nirsoft, let me know about them in the comments!

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Cleaning Up Your Digg Friends

I have been really, really, really active on Digg lately. I haven't been submitting posts from Bauer-Power, but I have been submitting stuff. Various things that I think are cool from around the web. Trying to get stuff to the front page. You know, that old chestnut.

I have been fairly successful. Sundance and I have created a small Digg army, and are trying to follow the advice of this once powerful powerdigger: (How I became a Digg Power User...)

So far I have a 2% popularity ratio (Kind of pathetic, but better than most) and Sundance has an amazing 25% popularity ratio which is outstanding!

Anyway, one of the things we have both been trying to do is to keep our Digg friends list clean. By clean I mean remove the people who aren't helping you. Trimming the fat if you will. The people that shout your ear off, and don't Digg anything in return.

A friend on Digg actually told me about this site to help you find who in your friends are Digging your stuff so you can remove the deadbeats that aren't. It's is called DiggStatistics.com. Now, I should warn you that it was flagged as being potentially harmful:

When I went to the site, I didn't find any problems with it, and it did not appear to have downloaded anything. I think it is fairly safe, but please proceed with caution.

Anyway, that site is awesome! It showed me that of my 500 friends, only 250 or so of them were actually digging my stuff! Of those friends it broke down who was digging my stuff the most!

Pretty cool site if you are looking to make quality friends on Digg. Friends that can help you get your stuff to the front page, and who you can help get their stuff to the front page!

Know of any other cool Digg tools? I want to hear about them in the comments!

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Recovering Forgotten Passwords III - Password Capturing

Many of you learned in school, or while studying for exams that TCP/IP was not really built around security. When it was conceived, it was intended to share information freely. Why need security when we are giving everything away for free anyway right? Then came along e-commerce, and other proprietary interests all sharing the same internet. That is when the bad guys came in also right?

Most of you already know that there are plenty of unsecured protocols still in use today. The unsecured protocols transfer data in plain text across the wire. Back in the care free days, this wasn't a big deal, but in modern times, just about anyone can snatch that open goodness right off the wire and use that info against you. Yes, even passwords.

In the previous two posts about Forgotten passwords, I mentioned two tools from Nirsoft. Both of those talked about finding passwords for clients. What if you don't have a supported client? How are supposed to recover your password?

Lets say that you have a computer where your email password to your POP3 email account is cached. You can fire up a tool from Nirsoft called SniffPass which will listen on your network for unsecured protocols like POP3. Once SniffPass is listening in, you can fire up your client. When it authenticates with the server, SniffPass will capture your password. Awe, that's right! My password was B@n@n@13!


SniffPass works on the following protocols:

• POP3
• IMAP4
• SMTP
• FTP
• HTTP

If you are worried about hackers using this tool, make sure that you use encryption for your email. Services like Gmail offer POP3 email over TLS encryption for your protection.

Come back for Part IV where I will help you find forgotten passwords for your protected PST files!

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Bauer-Power is NOT Dangerous!

This one kind of gave me a laugh. I may have taken it more seriously if I felt it would cost me some traffic, but I am not too worried about it. Mainly because I just about get zero traffic from this particular search engine anyway.

I am talking about Yahoo! I had an old Navy buddy shoot me an email. He told me that he did a search for Bauer-Power on Yahoo. Of course, Bauer-Power showed up as one of the top on the list. That was expected. What wasn't expected was the fact that Yahoo thinks Bauer-Power contains dangerous downloads!

Check out this screen shot!



I think I would be worried about it if I got a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo, but I don't! No, me, like most tech savvy folks do our searches on Google. True, Google had a similar issue Saturday, but they got that resolved. This one, doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

I don't know, maybe I should look at it like a badge of honor! What do you think? How would you feel if a major search engine told people you were dangerous? Let me know in the comments.

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