Have you ever tried browsing around accidentally discovering beautiful images/backgrounds or the likes, but not thinking to save them.

Well recently I did, and damn if I could remember the site later (and MY history in IE, well lets just say its huge so that was no help).  I came to think, hey someone MUST have written a utility to inspect your “Temporary Internet files” (IE Cache), you probably know you cant just ‘browse’ down there yourself and get anything meaningful, well anyway, sure enough after a bit of poking around I found a very decent tool (decent because a preview function in this util would have been to die for, but hey this is quite ok).

Get it here (its freeware, yes nice I know);
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/ie_cache_viewer.html

He has even developed a few other utilities for this area so poke around a bit on his site.  His site is even mentioned earlier in my blog as he also makes some VERY COOL security utilities, and hey it makes sense some of these “Temporary Internet Files” utilities could be used for crude security inspection.

Do you have your friends from oversea come to visit, do they hate to miss just a single episode of their local “wheel of fortune – tv show”, well try this site on for size;

http://www.wherever.tv

It even offer a gadget that will omit your pc and stream right to your TV, a bit steep though.

We all experience it, find the most interesting web-cast on the new but don’t quite have time to watch it all right now.  When you visit the site a few weeks later, the web-cast is removed and your whole week is ruined :-(

Well maybe not, here is two media stream capture utilities someone recommended, I have not tried them yet but they both are available as trial versions so if you are in need download a trial and see if it solves your streaming nightmare :-)

www.wmrecorder.com
http://www.applian.com/download-videos/

Have you ever had Windows Update or Forefront Antivirus fail to update, and then mock you with one of those very informative errorcodes like 0×80244015?  Well guess what, you are not a totally lost, there is actually a “cheat-sheet” http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/answers/63.html for decoding these 😀

Now why these translated error codes are not not displayed as opposed to those interesting 0×80244015 number codes… well your guess is a good as mine..

Just had a friend on the line, “I think I have a virus..”..  in this day in age even if you have a decent antivirus installed, is no guarantee for an infection-free existence.

Anyhow, my suggestion to him was; try some or all of these online scanners (its free and besides the time it takes to scan it’s fairly painless), actually for the rest of us it’s a decent idea to sometimes get a second opinion (from our installed antivirus) even if we think everything is fine.

So get scanning;
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/center/howsafe.htm?s_cid=mscom_msrt
or http://onecare.live.com/

http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner

http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml

http://www.eset.com/onlinescan/

http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/default.asp?langid=ie&venid=sym

http://home.mcafee.com/Downloads/FreeScanDownload.aspx
(or goto McAfee and search for McAfee Free Scan)

A collection of various utilities (page is in Danish, but links to international sites)
http://www.spywarefri.dk/onlinevark.htm

If you are about to give up, then there is one final hope – McAfee offers an online service where they will assist you in removing your infection for US$ 89,- and if the sh.. really hits the fan, then $89 may not be that bad a deal).

http://us.mcafee.com/root/landingpages/afflandpage.asp?affid=0&lpname=12982&cid=45687

Companies are getting quite creative when marketing their stuff, one of the latest gimics is a Nintendo promo video on YouTube which is quite fun..

Have a look yourself;
http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

Have some spare time? want to learn how not to expose all your confidential information to the  Google crawler, well, take a swing by http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ here is a guy, that has devoted a lot of time into mapping how to utilize Google to search for all sorts of “interesting stuff”, stuff you were never supposed to see. 

This is an eye opener for most, you really need to think before exposing anything to the Internet – be that webcams, alarms or just your dishwasher otherwise you may end up on a page like this.

If you have a MySQL database somewhere you obviously need to back it up, now I am not much into the inner workings of a MySQL database and have limited access to my hosted services, however I managed to find a link to a utility you can use ‘offsite’, its called “MySQL Administrator 1.2” dooh 😉

Anyhow, you can get it from here;
http://www.mysql.com/ (you may need to do some digging as versions change and I thus not can provide a permanent download link).

How to backup your DB (Danish link);
http://www.web10.dk/help/faq/mysql_backup

We all have tried finding something cool on YouTube just to find it removed the next day when we want to show it to the friends.

YouTube do not offer ‘downloads’ and hence you need to get a bit inventive 🙂

A lot of tools exist to do this, but many cost money, but a nice bloke has created a free util that will assist us (including converting the file to avi).

http://www.vdownloader.es

Xnobi 3
www.xobni.com If you as I recieve and send a ton of mails daily you quickly loose ‘the big picture’, when did you send that mail to whomever@whereever.com well, here is a plug-in for Outlook that will assist you in “data-mining” your email contacts.  It is very simple and cool, but also somewhat hard to explain in a simple manner.

Basically, once installed you can click on any mail and the plug-in will immediately give you a lot of information about the sender (what ‘contacts’ you have in common based upon CC’s in e-mails between you, a list of the latest mails to and from this person and finally a list of files exchanged in e-mails to and from you and this person)..  Go to www.xobni.com website for a more detailed presentation.. 

I’m sold to this concept.