Updated for Watchtower Library 2008

Install latest wine.

sudo apt-get install wine

As of this writing, I’m using Wine version 1.0.1

1. Pop in the CDROM and double click on Setup.exe icon when the Nautilus window pops up.

2. Run the install as normal. When finished, there should be two icons on your desktop. You can delete the ugly Watchtower Library XXXX.lnk icon. Keep the colorful one.

Your done!

Updated for Watchtower Library 2007

Install latest wine.

sudo apt-get install wine

As of this writing, I’m using Wine version 0.9.46

1. start from scratch (remove ~/.wine directory)

2. run winecfg. Chose “Windwows XP” as windows version. Close app.

3. Pop in the CDROM and double click on Setup.exe icon when the Nautilus window pops up.

4. Run the install as normal. When finished, there should be two icons on your desktop. You can delete the ugly Watchtower Library XXXX.lnk icon. Keep the colorful one.

At this point you could just launch Watchtower Library and it will work. However, if you want the tooltips to work (the floating yellow boxes) you will need to tell wine to use a version of comctl32.dll from an existing Windows installation. Keep going if you want the tooltip functionality, otherwise your done!

5. Copy comctl32.dll from a Windows XP (license is needed for this)
(Note: The comctl32.dll from Windows 2000 works even better.)

cp comctl32.dll ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

Newer versions of wine include a file called ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/x86_microsoft.windows.
common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.0.0_none_deadbeef.manifest. This file prevents the comctl32.dll that you just copied from loading. I just rename the file to something else like this:

mv ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/x86_microsoft.windows.common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.0.0_none_deadbeef.manifest ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/x86_microsoft.windows.common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.0.0_none_deadbeef.manifest.bad

6. Run winecfg again.

7. On the “Applications” tab Click “Add Application” and browse to “Program Files\Watchtower\Watchtower Library XXXX\E” and double click on WTLibrary.exe.

8. With WTLibrary.exe highlighted on the “Applications” tab, click on the “Libraries” tab. In the “New Override for Library” box select “comctl32″. In the “Existing Overrides” box select “comctl32″ and click on the edit button. Select “Native then builtin”. Press “OK” until the winecfg box goes away.

9. The “M” and “*” marginal reference special characters do not display in the tooltips. To get this functionality you need to copy these files to the ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts directory. These are fonts released under the GPL (see font information in the ttfs; the fontforge originals are found in the sources subdirectory).

10. Launch Watchtower Library. Everything should be working except that some of the icons will now have a black background. This is an issue with the comctl32.dll. Experiment with other comctl32.dll files from other versions of Windows. If you find one that works better let me know.

I decided to upgrade one of my computers to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I downloaded the iso, popped it into my DVD/Burner and rebooted. Halfway through the boot it bombed out. So I tried it again, this time popping the CD in my DVD/Reader. Success. It booted fine and I installed Intrepid onto by hard drive.

But, now after booting Intrepid my DVD/Burner (Panasonic LF-D521) no longer works. When I pop in a CD I get this error in ‘dmesg’: COMMUNICATION CRC ERROR (ULTRA-DMA/32). If I boot the 8.04 Hardy CD everything works again. So It’s an OS problem. True, but read on …

Searching the net on this error showed many Windows users having the same error too. One person said they had an old CD drive attached as a secondary drive on the same cable as their brand new fancy burner. They removed it and the Burner began working again. Well, I have an old DVD Reader attached as a secondary drive. I shut down the computer, disconnected the old drive, rebooted, and guess what? My DVD/Burner is now working again!

Update: 2008-11-06
I swapped out the old Samsung DVD/Reader (SD-612) with a newer Samsung DVD/Reader (NEC DV-5800A) and now both my DVD/Burner and DVD/Reader work.

Here is a great article from Linux Journal.

If you have multiple computers on your desktop there are a number of scenarios for using them:

* The brute force way: get a big desk and a swivel chair and spin back and forth between keyboards/mice
* Use VNC or rdesktop to control secondary computers from your primary computer. The main problem with this is that you lose all the screen real estate on your secondary computers and end up with their desktops showing in a window on your primary computer.
* Get a KVM to allow you to switch one keyboard/mouse between multiple computers.
The normal usage of a KVM is to switch your monitor as well as your keyboard and mouse, but that’s not required. KVM’s often seem like a great solution for many peripheral sharing problems, but they’re a bit of a hit-or-miss. They often have switching problems, system boot problems, video quality problems, and if you use multiple monitors a KVM to switch multiple monitors between systems gets pretty expensive.
* Use x2x, the solution we’ll examine here, to share the keyboard and mouse between systems.

There are two ways to run x2x on Linux, the easiest is to use ssh with X forwarding enabled and ssh from the primary system to the secondary system and run x2x on the secondary system:

primary $ ssh -X secondary x2x -east -to :0

The -X option tells ssh to enable X forwarding. The “x2x …” tells ssh to run x2x on the remote system (secondary) rather than running the shell. The “-east” option tells x2x where one system is relative to the other: to the east or west (-west).

The primary system is the system whose keyboard and mouse you are actually using. The secondary system is the one that is going to share the primary system’s keyboard and mouse.

Now, if you move the mouse on the primary system over to the edge where the secondary system is the mouse pointer should move from the primary screen to the secondary screen and from now on any mouse movement should be passed to the secondary system and anything you type on the keyboard should be sent to the secondary system. If this doesn’t work try moving the mouse to the other side of the screen, if that works then restart the command using “-west” rather than “-east”.

The other method of running x2x on a Linux system is to run it directly on the primary system and tell it to connect to the X server on the secondary system:

primary $ x2x -to secondary:0.0 -east

The reason this is not the easy method is that you also need to enable remote X access on the secondary system using xhost:

secondary $ xhost primary

and you also need to open TCP port 6000 on both systems. The easiest way of doing this is going to depend on your distro.

The main advantage of the second method is that copy/paste will now work between systems.

Getting x2x to work on a Windoze system takes a bit more work, mostly because first you have to install Cygwin. Although, if you’re a Linux fan you should already have it installed, it’s the only way to make Windoze bearable. When you’re installing Cygwin make sure x2x is selected in the list of available packages.

Using x2x with Cygwin has a couple of restrictions/problems:

* You can’t use the ssh connection method.
* You have to use the Windoze system as the primary system (i.e. you have to use the keyboard and mouse on the Windoze system).
* If you have multiple displays on your Windoze system you’ll probably experience mouse problems when you return the mouse from a secondary display. The only workaround is to move the mouse very very slowly when you’re about to move off a secondary display onto the primary display.

When using x2x on Windoze run the following command from a shell prompt:

windoze $ x2x -fromwin -to secondary:0.0 -east

Generally speaking x2x works very well both on Linux and on Windoze. Every once in a while you may get a bit of mouse flakiness when you move a window on a secondary display. Also once in a while, when using the shift key you may get the unshifted character on the secondary system if you type too fast. But in most instances you won’t notice any difference between typing/mousing on the primary system and on the secondary system.

p.s. If you have a problem where you get a “>” when you type “< " you need to find a newer version of x2x. This is long-standing bug that was recently fixed.

Optimize remote X sessions with NX. NX will also let you run remote X sessions from a Windows machine.

Next Generation Remote Display

NX is an exciting new technology for remote display. It provides near local speed application responsiveness over high latency, low bandwidth links. The core libraries for NX are provided by NoMachine under the GPL. FreeNX is a GPL implementation of the NX Server.

FreeNX - the free NX.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWMdgN51oQ

This is a slick little perl script to move sites from a Windows web server to a Unix web server.

When websites are built on computers running Microsoft Windows, the case of file and directory names is often ignored. Other “widowsizms” are also introduced such as ending files with .htm instead of .html. This causes BIG problems if the site is served under unix.

nodoze is a “quick and dirty” Perl program to repair these websites so that they will work properly on a unix server.

nodoze - prepares websites built using Microsoft Windows for unix servers

I just picked up a PNY NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT PCI Express x16 video card for $60 at buy.com. It has 512 MB of memory, a DVI port, and a VGA port and allows you to run two monitors under Ubuntu 8.04 just fine.

You can either download the restricted nvidia driver from the Ubuntu repositories, or manually download the latest driver from Nvidia’s web site.

You can set it up so that both monitors act as one large desktop, or each monitor as its own X-Server screen by running nvidia-settings.

I was looking for a small, lite weight software based phone for my Windows laptop that would connect back to my Asterisk PBX using the IAX protocol. iaxLite is perfect and works great. I haven’t tried sipLite (same phone but uses theSIP protocol) yet. Well worth a look if you are using Windows.
Soft Phone : iaxTalk.com !, VOIP::Asterisk::Phone::ATA::USB

iaxLite is a IAX2 softphone. sipLite is a SIP softphone

Garmin: POI Loader

Import customized points of interest created by others with the help of Garmin’s new POI Loader software. In today’s fast-paced world, points of interest are ever-changing. With the help of POI Loader, you can now add your favorite new restaurant, or that supermarket having the grand opening, as points of interest (POIs) to your compatible Garmin GPS. The possibilities are endless — upload safety cameras or school zones, and you will receive a warning if you are traveling too fast. In addition, an optional proximity-alert feature notifies you of upcoming custom POIs. Our free, new POI Loader software lets you personalize your GPS, giving you the freedom and flexibility to literally go anywhere.

/*
 TOP SECRET Microsoft(c) Project: Longhorn(TM) SP1
 Estimated release date: 2008
*/

#include "win95.h"
#include "win98.h"
 #include "leopard.h"

char chew_up_some_ram[10000000];

void main() {
 while (!CRASHED) {

  if (first_time_install) {
   make_10_gigabyte_swapfile();
   do_nothing_loop();
   search_and_destroy(FIREFOX | OPENOFFICEORG | ANYTHING_GOOGLE);
   hang_system;
  }
  if (still_not_crashed) {
   basically_run_windows_xp();
   do_nothing_loop();
  }
 }
 if (!DX10GPU()) {
  set_graphics(aero, very_slow);
  set_mouse(reaction, sometimes);
 }

 // printf("Welcome to Windows 2000");
 // printf("Welcome to Windows XP");
 printf("Welcome to Windows Vista");

 while (something) {
  sleep(10);
  get_user_input();
  sleep(10);
  act_on_user_input();
  sleep(10);
  flicker_led_promisingly(hard_disk);
 }

 create_general_protection_fault();
}

A while back I documented how to setup OpenVPN on windows. I recently found another way that is easier to do. Choose your poison.

The OpenVPN web site is here:
http://www.openvpn.org

and the Windows 2000/XP GUI can be found here.
http://openvpn.se/

If you are talking Windows, you can use the GUI, and a lot is done for you:

• Download and install it.
• It will set up a new ‘Network Connection’; go there in the control panel, find it (the description of it will be something like ‘TAP-Win32 Adapter V8′). Rename it to something obvious, like ‘VPN-1′ instead of the default generic name.
• Go to the OpenVPN menu item under programs and choose ‘Generate new OpenVPN static key’. It will do this and put it in the ‘config’ directory (c:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\key.txt).
• Choose ‘OpenVPN configuration file directory’. You’ll get a folder with ‘key.txt’ and (I think) a readme file.
• If you are setting up the SERVER, create a text file called ’server.ovpn’ and put something like the following into it:

#
# server config for web2 server
#
dev tun
dev-node VPN-1
proto udp
ifconfig 192.168.3.1 192.168.3.2
secret key.txt
comp-lzo
keepalive 10 60
ping-timer-rem
persist-tun
persist-key
verb 4

6. If you are setting up a CLIENT, copy the key.txt file to the …OpenVPN/config directory on that machine and create another text file, called ‘client.vpn’ with the following complementary setup:

#
# client config for web2 server
#
dev tun
dev-node VPN-1
proto udp
remote <ip address of server>
ifconfig 192.168.3.2 192.168.3.1
secret key.txt
comp-lzo
keepalive 10 60
ping-timer-rem
persist-tun
persist-key
verb 4

As long as your ’server’ is at a static IP address (or if you use a DynDNS account) and your firewalls (if any) will pass port 1194 to that machine, you are all ready to go; you can open the link from the server end by right-clicking on the OpenVPN GUI icon in the system tray and choosing the ’server’ configuration and ‘Connect’. Then do the same thing with the client machine, with the ‘client’ configuration file. The first time you use this on an XP SP2 machine, Windows Firewall will pop up and ask you if it’s okay to let OpenVPN do its thing. Different but same general idea for other firewall software/hardware.

Test this in a LAN environment where you know the IP address of the two machines in question and have control over the firewall issues. Also, the docs on both sites above are excellent, as well as the stuff that comes with the OpenVPN package.

To route all your internet traffic (from e-mail and from my web browser) through that home machine when connecting to the internet from a wifi hot spot location, just add the ‘push “redirect-gateway def1″‘ option to the OpenVPN server configuration and set it (the server) to use the BRIDGING mode.

Oh boy. This will tell you things about your Internet activity from the first day you started browsing the Internet. Can you handle the truth?

Foundstone, a division of McAfee, Inc.

Many computer crime investigations require the reconstruction of a subject’s internet activity. Since this analysis technique is executed regularly, we researched the structure of the data found in Internet Explorer activity files (index.dat files). Pasco, the latin word meaning “browse”, was developed to examine the contents of Internet Explorer’s cache files. Pasco will parse the information in an index.dat file and output the results in a field delimited manner so that it may be imported into your favorite spreadsheet program. Pasco is built to work on multiple platforms and will execute on Windows (through Cygwin), Mac OS X, Linux, and *BSD platforms.

Ubuntu Linux Vs. Windows Vista: The Battle For Your Desktop

To be honest, there’s a lot about Ubuntu that impresses me. The out-of-the-box software available with the OS is well-chosen, and the Ubuntu community folks have made a good effort to support the vast majority of the things people do with their PCs. The fact that Ubuntu is free is of course another big motivator, especially if you’ve already blown your budget for a PC on hardware alone.

But there’s at least as much about Ubuntu that I find disheartening or frustrating. There are still too many places where you have to drop to a command line and type in a fairly unintuitive set of commands to get something done, or edit a config file, or — worst of all — download and compile source code. For a beginner, this last is the kiss of death, because if compiling code fails, a beginner will almost certainly have no idea what to do next.

This new operating system looks familiar. If anyone has given this OS a try let us know what the experience was like.

ReactOS Homepage - Frontpage

ReactOS® is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.

I just installed this today on my Ubuntu desktop. I have one word for this: Sweet. Gotta love the icon too.
-joel

Here is how you can run Internet Explorer on your Linux machine. This is handy if you access IE Only web sites.

Installation:Ubuntu - IEs4Linux

IEs4Linux is the simpler way to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Linux (or any OS running Wine).

No clicks needed. No boring setup processes. No Wine complications. Just one easy script and you’ll get three IE versions to test your Sites. And it’s free and open source.

If you have a USB thumb drive you may be interested in this site. You can run all of these programs directly from the thumb drive without leaving a foot print on the host computer.

PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives | Your Digital Life, Anywhere™

Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

Run a guest operating system on a virtual computer running on your desktop. This product is similar to vmware but its open source.
VirtualBox

New Jan 15, 2007
VirtualBox goes open source!
InnoTek today has released its leading virtualization product as open source and launched virtualbox.org as the online community to further develop the product.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows and Linux 32-bit hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

Linux.com | How to get a Windows tax refund

If you buy a computer, you often pay for Microsoft Windows even if you didn’t ask for it and aren’t going to use it. This article shows you how to return your unused Windows license and get your money back, freeing yourself from the Windows tax.

I recently purchased a new laptop computer from Dell. As a GNU/Linux user and believer in Free Software, I knew from the start that I wasn’t going to run Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately, Dell didn’t offer this laptop with Ubuntu or a no-OS option, so I tried getting my Windows refund from Dell after the purchase. After working with customer service, I received a refund of $52.50. In the course of getting my refund, I found some techniques worked better than others. By knowing what works, you may be able to get your refund quickly and easily.

I use JPilot as my desktop organizer and sync it with my Palm TX on Ubuntu. An alarm box will pop up on the desktop when appointments are due. But what if you are away from your computer when the reminder pops up? Here is my solution. This should give you some ideas so that you can customize as needed.

Since I’m using Ubuntu I had to install the email package so I could email from the command line. You may already have this ability with your distribution. If so, skip the next step.

• Install command-line email:

sudo apt-get install ssmtp
sudo apt-get install mailutils

• After installing ssmtp I like to run this command to get everything configured properly with the new mail utils:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure ssmtp

• Create a shell file called jpilot-alarm.sh and place it in your .jpilot home directory. I used vi to create my file:

vi ~/.jpilot/jpilot-alarm.sh

• Then insert this line into the file, substituting your cell phone email address:

/bin/echo "$1 $2 - $4" | mail -s "JPilot Alarm - $3" cellphonenumber@cellphonecompany.com;aplay /usr/share/sounds/phone.wav

The first part of this line (the part before the semicolon) sends the email to your cell phone. The $1 will be substituted automatically with the date, $2 with the time, $3 with the description, and $4 with the body of the note. If you don’t know the email address of your cell phone then contact your cell phone provider. The second part of this line plays a wav file through your computer’s speakers to scare the ba-jeebers out of you when your sitting in front of your computer.

• Now we need to make this shell script executable. Type this command:

chmod 755 ~/.jpilot/jpilot-alarm.sh

• Now open up JPilot, select File/Preferences and click on the Alarms tab. Check both “Open alarm windows” and “Execute this command”. Then put this command in the Alarm Command box.

~/.jpilot/jpilot-alarm.sh "%d" "%t" "%D" "%N"

That should do it. If you have the email address to your cell phone set correctly, and your computer is connected to the Internet, you should be getting your JPilot alarms on your cell phone.

[NOTE] The JPilot package provided with Ubuntu does not have the %D and %N flags compiled in. So you may just get %D as the name of all your alarms and %N as the message body. If you compile JPilot from source using the configuration flag --enable-alarm-shell-danger you will be able to get this functionality. If you want the pretty Ubuntu buttons in jpilot then include the configuration flag --enable-stock-buttons too. To compile jpilot on a Ubuntu box you will need several development packages and the pilot-link package installed. Add them in like this:

sudo apt-get install gettext pilot-link build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libgnome-pilot2-dev libssl-dev

Is this the end of the world as we know it? This is why I won’t be buying a Windows Vista computer any time soon. I’ve been able to do away with Windows completely. I’m running Ubuntu Linux as my sole desktop operating system.

Netsh Tricks

During the development of Windows NT 5.0— which later became Windows 2000—Microsoft worked briefly with Cisco Systems to try to incorporate some of that company’s ideas into the new OS and to help Cisco incorporate some NT 5.0 ideology into Cisco’s products. (You can see evidence of the effort today in the Cisco Voice over IP solution, which requires an Active Directory—AD—implementation.) That fleeting flirtation ultimately cooled, but it left behind a framework for Netsh, an extremely useful commandline networking tool.

Read more »

8 Absolutely Cool, Totally Free Utilities

I’m always amazed by the productivity burst that results from having the right tool for the job—in terms of both the amount of time it takes to do that job and the breadth and accuracy of the data I obtain while performing it. Over the past few years, I’ve amassed a collection of great utilities that I rely on every day. These tools make my job easier, give me faster and more accurate results, and make my clients happy. I carry the utilities on a portable USB drive so that I always have them ready at a moment’s notice. And the best part about my toolkit is that all its tools were 100 percent free. For information about how to locate and download each tool, see the Learning Path.

FileZilla
OpenSSH
WinDump
Ngrep
Ethereal
BareTail
NeWT
Winfingerprint

At first glance you may think you need to enable SAMBA or NFS in order to share your CUPS printer with other users. Think again. CUPS allows you to share the printer via http: or ipp:.

Here’s how I shared my existing HP PhotoSmart 7150 USB printer on my Ubuntu box:
Read more »

This is Part 4 in a series of HOWTOs that will cover setting up a client-server VPN to connect several remote endpoints together onto a common private network. They will cover the setup of a FreeBSD Server (with dual NICS acting as a router), a FreeBSD client endpoint (with dual NICS acting as a router) for a remote office, an Ubuntu Linux laptop, and a Windows laptop. The VPN will tunnel a private LAN over a “hostile” network, and will allow remote users on the Internet to connect to the private LAN.
Read more »

Techtree.com India > Guides > Software Guides > Guide to Useless Services (Windows XP SP2)

An operating system is made up of various components that work with each other. The OS isn’t just one object - it’s a collection of smaller objects, each of which performs a different task. Their conjunction is what makes an “operating system”. Windows calls these components “services”, Linux calls it “daemons” and so on. Each service in Windows is essentially, to put it in a simpler way, an application that stays running in the back doing its job when required. Now each service takes up some memory, which isn’t good if your system has a low amount of memory (like 256MB or less). Fortunately, not all of the default services are required by all users, so you can turn some of them off to free up some memory.

Read more »

Hot Recorder for Music
Hor Recorder for Music converts songs you’ve purchased on iTunes into MP3 or WAV files, so you can play them on any MP3 player. Click the options menu, choose Preferences, and pick which format you wish to use (MP3 or WAV). If you choose MP3, you’ll also need to decide on a bit rate. Lastingly, assign a file extension (e.g. MP3) and click the Save button.

Drag the tunes you wish to convert from the left window to the riht and click the Convert button. The conversion occurs in real time, meaning a five-minute song takes five munutes to convert - so you should avoid running any math intensive software at the same time.

Replay Music

Replay Music is a unique streaming music recorder that captures MP3 files from any streaming source. Every song is saved on your PC as a high quality MP3 file, automatically tagged with the artist, song title, album and genre, and perfectly separated into individual tracks. You can even burn songs directly to CDs, or copy them to your iPod or MP3 Player. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to use. What a great way to discover new music!

This is one way to do it with a Windows box. Stay tuned for a “how to” for FreeBSD.

It’s A Tech World » How to configure OpenVPN

OpenVPN is a tried and true VPN solution. You can install and run this software without needing any help or connections from a third party. It is totally secure and infinitely configurable. The fact that it’s open source and free really makes it stand out though.

Read more »

AutoIt v3 - Automate and Script Windows Tasks - For Free!

AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003 out of the box with no annoying “runtimes” required! You can even make compiled executable scripts that can run without AutoIt being installed!

This software runs on Windows, Gentoo Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Fedora Core 2 & 3, BeOS, and OS/2. It allows you to run old DOS based programs and games.

DOSBox

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games. In theory, any DOS application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early developement.

Explore2fs HomePage

Have you ever downloaded a whole lot of files under Linux, but when you boot back into Windows you realise that you forgot to copy them onto your NT Drive? Well I did, so I wrote an explorer like program that will allow you to save files from any ext2 or ext3 partition.

Computer Networking Help - Advice From Experts - Configuring a free VPN solution in your home:

Microsoft has built in the ability to act as a VPN termination point right into Windows XP. Microsoft XP allows one connection to come in over the configured VPN via the PPTP protocol, using MPPE 128-bit encryption and Microsoft CHAP v2 authentication. It’s fairly easy to configure and can run on your existing LAN connection of your home computer. Below I will walk you through the steps of configuring the VPN server, allowing the protocol to pass through your Linksys router and finally how to configure your client to connect to the VPN.

Zfone

Quoting Phil Zimmermann -
14 Mar 2006 - I’ve just released Zfone, a new product that takes a new approach to make a secure telephone for the Internet.

I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another Zfone client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.

My Windows XP SP2 home computer’s clock started gaining about 10 seconds per minute. I have yet to find out why. I synchronize time with an Internet clock when on-line, but when I’m off line the clock free-wheels out of control. This was seriously affecting my TV recording software making me miss the last several minutes of the program. Until I find the root cause, I’m running this nifty little utility which synchronizes your Windows clock with your BIOS’ Real Time Clock. I’m resyncing ever minute. So far my TV recording is staying on schedule. Now to figure out why this all happened in the first place …
ClockMon™ — Windows RTC monitoring and synchronization utility

You see, the Windows operating system clock starts out with the same value as the Real Time Clock whenever you reboot your computer, but from then on, it is updated completely independently of the RTC via periodic clock interrupts. Thus, over time (i.e. as the system runs), it is possible for the Windows operating system clock to get out of sync with the actual hardware RTC clock (i.e. the actual “wall clock” time).

Have you ever wondered why one program will start before another when you log on to Windows? Here is a list registry keys and the order in which they are processed.

HKLM\…\RunServicesOnce
HKLM\…\RunServices
LogOn
HKLM\…\RunOnce
HKLM\…\Run
HKCU\…\Run
StartUp
HKCU\…\RunOnce

Download | VMware Player
“VMware Player can be used by anyone to run virtual machines on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player makes it quick and easy to take advantage of the security, flexibility, and portability of virtual machines.”

VMTN - Browser Appliance Virtual Machine Center
“The Browser Appliance enables you to safely browse the Internet from within a VMware virtual machine — protecting your host PC from spyware and malware.”

Catalyst Products - SocketWrench Freeware Edition

SocketWrench Freeware Edition is a completely free, general purpose package that includes ActiveX components which simplify Windows Sockets programming. For developers new to Internet software development, SocketWrench greatly reduces the learning curve typically associated with socket programming and TCP/IP in general.