Big Joe's Blog » Software

BitLocker Drive Unlocker

admin — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:22:29 +0000

If you use BitLocker Drive Encryption to encrypt and secure multiple local drives in Windows 7, you will be frustrated by the process of unlocking all drives one by one. One has to double-click individual local drives and then enter their respective passwords to unlock them. This is both a cumbersome and tiresome user experience. Shouldn’t there be an easier method where it requires users to enter passwords for the local drives and then unlock them with just one click? What if more than one drive has the same password? Do you really want to enter the same password multiple times to unlock all drives? Almost every Windows user who has multiple drives encrypted with BitLocker is going through this hassle of unlocking them every day.

Meet BitLocker Drive Unlocker, a portable app that makes it easier to unlock your BitLocker encrypted drives in Windows 7.

MediaTab Puts Detailed Multimedia Info in a Windows Explorer Properties Tab

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:44:08 +0000

Windows only: MediaTab is a free program that provides tag and other technical information about audio and video files, like MediaInfo, but is integrated into Windows Explorer, so you don’t need to open another application to get these details.

Source

Wireless Network Watcher Displays the Computers and Devices on Your Network

admin — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:22:09 +0000

Windows: If you want to create a network plan and need an inventory or just want to see all the devices using your Wi-Fi, Wireless Network Watcher from Nirsoft is a free utility that can help. It scans your network for connected devices and lists their network properties.

Source

Windows Firewall Notifier For Both Incoming Or Outgoing Connections

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:18:12 +0000

Windows Firewall is a software firewall and packet filtering component of Windows which helps users create inbound and outbound rules to protect their network from being compromised. Like all firewalls, it protects the networks from unauthorized access while allowing legitimate communication to pass through and by blocking malicious, specified or user profiling agents. Unfortunately, the firewall settings can be a bit difficult for many home users to configure. For this reason many users prefer keeping their Windows Firewall Off for avoiding network disruptions. Windows Firewall Notifier is a portable application which makes it easy to configure firewall rules (both inbound and outbound) by providing prompts similar to UAC (User Account Control) for allowing and blocking network traffic.

Source

Ninite Makes Setting Up Your Friends’ Computers Insanely Easy

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:53:13 +0000

Via Lifehacker.com

I’ve been a huge fan of bulk-installing tool Ninite, and today they added a helpful feature that lets you link straight to your custom packages, for super simple sharing and remote troubleshooting.

Now, when you create your bulk app installer on Ninite’s page and hit “Get Installer”, it will link you to a new page listing the apps you grabbed and automatically download the package for you. What’s really nice is that you can link straight to this page—for example, http://ninite.com/chrome-skype-itunes-vlc-dropbox-essentials for Chrome, Skype, iTunes, VLC, Dropbox, and Microsoft Security Essentials—so you can send it to anyone without uploading your own installer, linking them to those web sites, or anything else. Just link them to the page, and it will automatically download the installer for them. And, Ninite picks the right version of the software before it downloads, so you don’t even need to worry about whether they’re on a 32- or 64-bit system. Head on over to Ninite’s home page to check out the new feature, and don’t forget that it’ll also update your relatives’ computers too.

Ninite

Embed a TrueCrypt Volume In A Playable Video File

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:52:25 +0000

Steganography is the process of hiding an encrypted message in some otherwise innocent looking format. Normally you can do this with image files, but now(via Lifehacker.com) you can take it to a whole new level by hiding an entire TrueCrypt volume in an mp4 video file.

First you need a suitable mp4 file to hide your TrueCrypt container. I used a video from the NASA website, just click “Download video” to get your mp4 file. Really any mp4 file will do, but try to find a file that matches the proportional size of the container you are going to create.

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Create the TrueCrypt Container

Once you have your video file, create a TrueCrypt container. Use the “Hidden Container” option, this generates a container-inside-a-container. Name it ‘innocuous-looking-file.mp4′ or something similar, and fill out the options regarding the volume size and passwords.

Merge The Video File And The Container

Now that you have your two files, the magic happens. Martin Fiedler, a software engineer from Germany, created a Python script named tcsteg.py that will now merge these two files together. Execute “python tcsteg.py Movie.mp4 NameOfTrueCryptVolume.mp4″ from a command line to make the merge.

The resulting file is very secure, and hard to detect:

There are only four ways to detect the presence of the hidden volume, all of which are unlikely to be checked even by a knowledgeable person. The easiest way to tell about the manipulation would be bitrate monitoring: If a player tells you that the stream has a bitrate of 1 Mbps, but by analyzing the file size, you can compute that it must have at least 5 Mbps, you can tell something is amiss. But who looks at bitrates this detailed? The only other ways would be (1) a sophisticated packet-by-packet analysis of the mdat data that would find out that from offset 65,536 on, there’s not only random-looking compressed data, but random-looking garbage; (2) checking for a repetition of the first 64k or mdat somewhere later in the file and (3) seeing that there’s much unused space in the mdat that isn’t referenced by any chunk offset table.

To remount the volume, just enter the mp4 as a TrueCrypt container and make sure to mark that there is a hidden volume along with the password.

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I tested out the process from beginning to end and it was very easy to do. Let us know if it works for you or if you have any questions about the process!

Real Steganography with TrueCrypt via KeyJ

Use Time Machine with Windows Home Server

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:00:32 +0000

Background:

A while ago I added a hackintosh installation to my HP netbook. Unfortunately I had no way to provide a backup solution to my new hackintosh installation by the way of my Windows Home Server.

I’ve been a long time listener of Windows Weekly. In the podcast, Paul Thurrott recommended Windows Home Server (WHS) for all backup need on a network and media sharing. This intrigued me, so i did my research. At the time, WHS 2008 was the current edition available for $99. Being a cheapskate i decided to wait. A few short weeks later, WHS V2 ‘Vail’ RC0 was released. This was my chance at trying the WHS product for free and remaining bleeding-edge.

I installed Vail a short while after and formatted my drives in the machine to support Drive Extender (DE). This is simply a system which allows to “pool” all your hard drives together in order to simulate on giant one. DE supports redundancy, so should a drive fail you’d just pop in another one. Worked great, but sadly Microsoft decided to kill it this fall.

Anyways…

Seeing as i had essentially a big powerful NAS, i decided to fool around with OSX’s Time Machine. This proved to be quite a challenge. Microsoft touted out-of-box functionality with Time Machine. Unfortunately, the method to enable it was nowhere to be found

What’s needed:

Router
Apple Machine with Snow Leopard
WHS ‘Vail’ Machine

Method:

1. Install iTimeMachine and run it in order to enable AirDisks.

2. Install Launchpad by going to your browser to http://servername/connect and installing MacConnector.dmg. Where Server name is the IP for your WHS.
3. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder. (CMD+SPACE, ‘Disk Utility’)
4. Select the Macintosh HD, then go to “File” -> “New” -> “Blank Disk Image”.
5. In the box that comes up enter:

Where,

machinename – is the name of your machine. To get, launch terminal and type hostname -fs.

macaddress – is your mac address which is called the Ethernet ID (System Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet -> Advanced -> Ethernet)

size – something larger than your current used amount. This will autoresize later.
format – MAC OS Extended (Journaled)

partitions – Single Partition – Apple Partition Map

image format – sparse bundle disk image.

6. Click ‘Create’.

7. Transfer that disk image from your desktop to you time machine folder on the WHS.

10. Launch the Launchpad app.

11. Select ‘Backup computer’.

12. Point time machine to your WHS folder and start the backup.

Voila! This should mount every time you’re connected to your network and automatically start backup.

Sources:

[1] http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsvailbeta/thread/dfc063d9-304a-4f33-ab8a-58d4a7eb63d1/#34a221aa-4e1b-4eac-8d23-f96a53655cd6

[2] http://www.multimedia-pcs.com/version-3-use-time-machine-with-windows-home-server/

Add Google Docs to the Windows “New” Document Context Menu

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:45:00 +0000

How-to and technology blog How-To Geek has a detailed writeup on adding Google Document types to your “New” right-click context menu. They’ve prepacked a registry mod (one for installing and uninstalling) and accompanying files like the Google Docs icons. Visit the link below and grab the installation package then follow along with their screenshot-heavy guide to install it.

How to Add Google Documents to the Windows Explorer “New” Menu [How-To Geek]

Create a Virtual Machine of your Existing Computer With a Click

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:36:12 +0000

Many people have heard of the term Virtualization but don’t really understand what it does. Virtualization, to keep it simple, is a technology that helps you run multiple operating systems on the same machine.

Many people use this technology to virtualize an existing machine’s HD to a virtual machine for testing or training purposes. While there are ways to convert an existing hard drive into a virtual machine, the process was difficult and often required expensive programs.

Well, not anymore. There’s a new utility from Microsoft that makes it both simple and free to convert an existing installation of Windows into a virtual machine ready to run on any other computer.

Microsoft’s Sysinternals team has released a simple application called Disk2vhd, that lets you easily migrate an existing computer to a virtualized hard drive (VHD). It’s a tiny utility doesn’t even require instillation.

Click Here to read more about this process.

Create a Windows Home Server Vail boot disk on a USB drive

admin — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:42:25 +0000

This is a great article showing you how to turn a USB pen drive into a bootable Windows Home Server Vail install disk. Basically it takes the Windows Home Server files and puts them on to a USB thumb drive and makes it bootable, instantly allowing you to boot from the thumb drive and install Windows Home Server Vail without the use of a CD/DVD Drive.

You can also do this for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008 by following the same instructions but obviously putting the relevant disk in.

Check it out here.