Matt Ouellette [Certified IT Professional | Web Designer | Musician ]

Another woops!

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:00:16 +0000

I have this bad habit of never doing anything with my own website. I will get better. I promise. Maybe I’ll even redo this design. Who knows. Keep eyes peeled. Believe!

I told myself I would

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:54:34 +0000

Last night when I was making my ToDo list for today I put on there, “Website Post”. I told myself I would make a post on here. The problem is today. I have nothing to post about. Other then I realized my entire wireless setup here at home goes nuts when a certain computer is on. I have my desktop, my laptop, both wireless, sending music/data to a printer wirelessly in the other room, and the music/video to the TV via an Apple TV. All is fine and dandy until I turn on my fiances old Compaq laptop. When I say old I mean she no longer uses it. It is honestly only less than a year old. For some reason that PC being on just causes all sorts of issues. To start it doesn’t think its on the internet when it is. The most annoying however is the fact that it causes the Airport Express to lose connection, causing the printer and music to stop working in that room, and causes the TV media to cut in and out/ or lose its connection. Its funny because I can have the two macbooks, the mac mini, the old dell 2200, and the XBOX on all at the same time and nothing cuts in and out, until that stupid compaq gets turned on. Just annoying. Just a rant.

A little fun with some hive repairs!

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:07:34 +0000

Well, I went on an adventure tonight. Nothing to fun for most people but I found it quite entertaining. This PC had a “missing or corrupt” system hive file. Luckily the repair folder existed so I could boot to my good ol’ friend recovery console. Never realized the amount of copy and renaming that goes on during the repair of that but none the less after moving the repair keys to the config directory I could boot into safe mode. In which case I found a snapshot point and copied the keys in there to the temp folder. There I renamed them and then once again booted to friendly recovery console. From there once again delete the current hive files, copy the new ones from the snapshot back to the config directory, and now I can boot into regular mode. One more fun step to do a system restore back to the most current date. And Viola. Windows XP is back in business. Just thought I would share.

Antivirus Programs and the Common Scareware

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:27:43 +0000

Over the last few months, and years actually, I have been removing those annoying pesky Scareware programs that pop up when your computer starts telling you that you have all these infections and offering to remove them if you purchase their software. Most of the time these programs look like and attempt to represent an Microsoft branded program. Occasionally they try and represent a legitimate antivirus company such as Norton. Once in awhile I’ve seen one trying to follow trending topics such as the Eco friendly “Green AV”. Then there are the ones that just look like a very crappy designed program with a horrible UI. The point i’m trying to get at is these things sneak by AV programs such as Norton, McAfee, AVG, etc., without being detected the slightest bit. My question is why. Most everyone of these Scareware .exe’s do the same thing. They are almost always an single .exe file hiding in either the programs folder, or the users ApplicationData folder. No big problem there. They are easy to find. My issue is that they all have been disabling the regedit.exe, cmd.exe, msconfig utility, and task manager. This is done by adding a couple of registry keys to the HKLM or HKCU hives. Thats pretty straight forward to fix. Find the Scareware .exe, delete it, remove it from the registry, then edit the registry to turn back on all of the preceding utilities. My question is why the big name AV programs can’t right a signature to find the one file .exe’s that are editing the registry and starting in the users shell or replacing the userinit.exe startup. Just curious. Thats all.

Call it a little gift!

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:55:20 +0000

Well, It has been a good New Years eve. As I sit still wondering about that darn google countdown, I realized I finished up a little project of my own the other day. Its not great but its done. I figured, with the Red Wings winning, the year coming to a close, all in the same night, I might as well share it with the rest of you. I have created a simple yet complete set of NHL team pucks for both the Eastern and Western conference. Go to my samples page to download.

Happy Holidays

admin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 04:35:48 +0000

Merry Christmas everyone. Just simply stating that. Hoping everyone had a great time celebrating. I’m looking forward to playing with my new Wacom tablet. It should be great fun. We’ll hope for a win from the Red Wings tomorrow. Once I get back from Alpena i’ll get a good post up with a little more tech information for you. Enjoy the rest of your celebrations.

Sharing Tethered Internet

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:28:34 +0000

I’ve been asked this many many times before. And truthfully about 4 months ago I figured it out. It is indeed possible to tether your cell phone to your computer and share the internet through a wireless network. Although the tethered cell phone is already a slow connection, and sharing that with multiple users is really going to bog it down, it may be your only option. With that being said. This one goes out to all the poor folks in Michigan that live in the lovely rural areas.

Please check with your cell phone provider as I am not responsible for any charges or damages that may occur through the use of this technology and concept. This is merely informational.

Things you will need. Aside from your computers of course.

Cell Phone
Cell Phone to Computer Cable
Cell Phone Modem Drivers
Wireless Router
Straight Through Ethernet Cable

We’ll start out with the tethering. We are going to tether to your main computer, preferably one on a desk that doesn’t move. Generally speaking you need to connect your phone somehow, most common is via USB. Now some phones use this great thing called a PROPRIETARY cable. Very annoying in my opinion so unfortunately for some of you you will have to contact your phone manufacturer for the cable. I happen to have a Motorola phone so it uses a standard mini USB cable. The next step is to obtain and install the modem drivers for your phone. Find these drivers can be a pretty daunting task but a good Google search generally does fine in the scavenger hunt. Once that is done you need to get your once computer working on the internet using the now tethered cell phone. The following are a few common steps.

Download and install drivers
Set your phone to data (may be called modem, or internet) mode for USB
Configure a dial up connection using your phone providers settings (google search them)
Make sure connection stays (if you need “their” software then this whole thing won’t work)

From there we get to start all of the fun networking configurations. So get your pens and paper out, or just print this post. It’s gonna be fun!

We continue again working with the same, main computer, that we have been working with. We are going to need the tether cell phone dialup connection, as well as the wired ethernet (networking, hi-speed internet) port on the computer. At this point we do not need to have any extra cables plugged in other than the tethered cell phone and the necessary cables to run a computer of course. It may be a good idea however to have the machine pulled up in a reachable spot as you may need to plug and unplug a cable or two and check status lights on the wired ethernet port.

Start right (alternate) clicking on the dialup connection we just created. From there we need to click on the option to allow other to connect through this computer internet connection. Share the connection with your wired ethernet adapter. This is generally called “Local Area Connection”. Once that is done we need to start configuring the adapter.

Set your Local area connection adapter with a static ip as follows.

IP: 192.168.0.1
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
DNS: Leave blank (static)

Now we must configure the router correctly. Log into your routers admin panel and set it as follows. I use an old Linksys 54G router. Using a standard (straight throught) Ethernet cable connect your wired ethernet card to the Internet port on your router.

Set its operation mode to router. This allows you to send DNS requests to another router as apposed to straight to a high speed modem.

Set the destination LAN on the router to 192.168.1.101
Set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0
Set the Gateway to 192.168.1.101

From here it is all up to your other computers. Connect them wirelessly to the router but instead of using DHCP we are going to set the wireless cards with a static IP address (Use range 192.168.1.105 – 192.168.1.150) and set a static DNS server of 192.168.1.1

Now you fire up that dialup connection we made and away you go. Remember, if you go to a hotspot you will have to reconfigure your wireless cards to DHCP until you are back at home.

Once again, check with your cell phone provider as this make cause your bill to jump depending on your contract. I am in now way responsible for any charges or damage this may cause. This is simply a suggestion post.

I’m just not sure

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:07:32 +0000

Well, I’m not really sure what has been going on lately. I just noticed I haven’t posted anything on my very own website in over a month. And now that I have realized that and came on here to post something, I learned that in this last month I have absolutely nothing to post about. No new designs, stories, fixes. Nothing. Hopefully my life really isn’t that boring but it seems to be that it is. I’ll try and get something new up here for the few people that hop on this site every once in a while. Until then. Best Regards.

Matt

Another Quick Linux Update

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:20:14 +0000

On a side note of Ubuntu just releasing a new version. Another great flavor of linux, Fedora, os also releasing a new version. Here is the counter. Hop over to FedoraProject.org to see.

This is the type of thing I love most!

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:09:17 +0000

It never fails while touring around the internet that you’ll like fall into a nice piece of scareware. Yesterday was no different. Fitting being it was Halloween and all. I ran into another version of the good ol’ Windows Explorer look a like website. I really just with the writers of these would add the simple little script to test if the user is on a Mac or not. It’s not that I am worried about what it’ll do to my computer (because I can’t even run a .exe) but it’s just annoying. I have attached the screen shots below and will do a test later in the week to get you all the files and keys that would be installed (if on a pc). None the less, never believe these things. WINDOWS HAS NO AV SOFTWARE! Nor will it put scans underneath each drive in My computer.