Tips

Cleaning up URL’s to send to friends, tweet about, or share on various networking sites is a great idea. Below I will show you how to clean up some popular website URL’s. Before that though why should you clean up your URL’s? Well they can contain information you don’t want to share with other people. For instance Amazon keeps search terms saved in the URL when you visit product pages.

PuTTY is a free to use client for SSH, Telnet, RLogin, and also “raw” TCP connections. This allows you to connect to various servers and send and receive data. PuTTY is very light weight, not requiring an installation. A few amazing things you can do with PuTTY for example are, using it as a HTTP Client, using it for Whois, connecting to SSH Servers, and connecting to your printer to manage it.

ZoomIt is a free tool from Microsoft that allows you to zoom in on parts of your screen, and also draw on the screen. This tool is super light weight and will not slow down your computer, or take up much space. It is a single executable file so no installation required.

A few things that are kinda bad about the program that I don’t explain in the video, or not in depth are the limitations of it. I understand it isn’t a large program but not being able to adjust simple items like Pen Color and Pen Size do make other programs a little more appealing. But ZoomIt is so small, light weight, and doesn’t require installation it is hard to say no to it.

Searching through many files to find a specific string, word, or pattern can be time consuming and a pain. But that is in the past. With AstroGrep, a free to use OpenSource program, you can search unlimited files at once to find what you are looking for. It also lets you search by Regular Expressions to find specific patterns, search with case sensitivity on or off, and search by file create date. You even have the ability to change what file names and extensions to look for to even further your search. I personally use this program all the time to find functions in my older code that I need to look at again. It makes it much easier than opening up multiple files and trying to remember specifically what I called it.

Process Monitor (TechNet ProcMon) is a great tool for figuring out what exactly a program is doing. Either it be seeing what files it’s writing, network activity, registry, or what have you. You can quickly look through the activity and know what’s doing.

Now, using this to determine if software is safe to run on a computer is risky. Process Monitor does not run the programs in a “Sand Box”, so if you do execute the possibly unsafe program, it can cause harm to your computer. But if you are doing research on specific malware or virus’s (risky), you can use Process Monitor to learn more about it, but don’t run it on your computer. At least run it in a virtual machine that you can easily wipe clean.