• Create a custom, bootable recovery partition:
  • Acronis True Image includes Secure Zone, which creates a hidden partition for storing backup images. Accessible at boot time via F11.
  • Ghost Recovery Kit apparently allows for creating a custom recovery partition, but the process looks rather involved.
  • Paragon's Drive Backup 9.0 has a feature called Backup Capsule that creates a hidden partition to store images and allows the user to assign a Function key (F3, for example) to access during boot. This is the only solution I tested, with unfortunate results: at virtually the end of the restore process from Backup Capsule, the screen went blue and the hard drive activity went crazy for over an hour before I had to kill it. Thankfully, I had made an ealier image with Drive SnapShot, which I restored to the hard drive in just a few minutes.
• Creating a custom, bootable recovery DVD:
  • Storing an image on a Bootable ISO with PING
  • How to Create a Restore / Recovery Disc and Partition with Ghost
  • How to create a CD/DVD based image of your hard drive with Acronis True Image: MSFN | Neowin

/windows | Sep 28, 2009

/windows | Sep 28, 2009

• Right click the taskbar, click Properties and then click Cancel, or
• Open the Windows Task Manager and then close it

/windows | Sep 26, 2009

/misc | Sep 26, 2009

/mac | Sep 23, 2009

• cat /proc/partitions
• sudo fdisk -l
• sudo parted -l

/nix | Sep 22, 2009

"This tool is a collection of tiny applications itself: grep, tree size list, instant ftp server, text line filter, text replace, duplicate file finder, split/join files, create md5 lists, run command on many files, extract strings, and more- all in one executable still matching your size limit (below 1.4 MB). It has no installer, no dependencies, needs no DLL's - nothing, just type 'sfk' to get the overview of all available subcommands."

/misc | Sep 20, 2009

1. /Applications/file/BetterZip.app/Contents/Resources/7z Call the 7-Zip file archiver contained in BetterZip (which I happened to have from a MacUpdate Promo Bundle). There are several other Mac binaries available or you can download and compile from source.
2. a Add file(s) to archive
3. -mx9 Maximum ("Ultra") compression
4. -pSECRET Set password to SECRET
5. -mhe Encrypt archive headers (i.e., filenames will be encrypted also)
6. ~/Desktop/file.7z Name of archive to create or add files to
7. ~/Documents/file.ext File to compress and encrypt

8. && Execute next command only if previous command returns an exit status of zero (i.e., wait for command to complete successfully before proceeding)

9. scp Secure copy command
10. -P 2012 Connect via port 2012
11. ~/Desktop/file.7z Local file to copy
12. user@example.com:/home/ Remote username and domain followed by directory where file will be copied to

13. && Execute next command only if previous command returns an exit status of zero (i.e., wait for command to complete successfully before proceeding)

14. rm ~/Desktop/file.7z Delete 7z archive from local computer

• As the command list is rather long, you may want to make a permanent alias in OS X by adding a line like this one to your ~/.bash_profile:
  alias bkup='/Applications/file/BetterZip.app/Contents/Resources/7z a -mx9 -pSECRET -mhe ~/Desktop/file.7z ~/Documents/file.ext && scp -P 2012 ~/Desktop/file.7z user@example.com:/home/ && rm ~/Desktop/file.7z'
• After adding the above line, you can load your .bash_profile without logging out: $ source ~/.bash_profile
  and list current aliases with: $ alias -p
• Archive all text files in current directory: $ 7z a file.7z *.txt
• Extract all files from file.7z: $ 7z x file.7z

/mac | Sep 19, 2009

$ unzip -L ~/temp/R173412.exe 
Archive:  /Users/user/temp/R165147.EXE
  inflating: iastor.sys              
  inflating: txtsetup.oem            
  inflating: iaahci.cat              
  inflating: iaahci.inf              
  inflating: iastor.cat              
  inflating: iastor.inf              
  inflating: version.txt             

/mac | Sep 13, 2009

1. Launch FastStone Image Viewer
2. Open photo directory
3. Create > Contact Sheet Builder > Caption > click "..." at top right > EXIF DateTime ($Hx) > Date and Time ($H1)
4. Save the output to a file (PDF, TIF, PNG, GIF, BMP, and JPG supported) or send directly to printer.

/windows | Sep 11, 2009

1. Navigate to folder containing photos in Windows Explorer
2. View > Thumbnails
3. Click and drag thumbnails into desired order. It may be advisable to enable View > Arrange Icons by > Align to Grid.
4. Edit > Select All
5. Right click on first photo and rename to desired_name (1). That is, the desired file name, followed by a space, followed by an open parentheses, followed by the number one, followed by a close parentheses.
6. All photos will be renamed to desired_name (#), where # corresponds to the photo's position in the thumbnail layout.

1. Launch ReNamer
2. Settings > General > check "Use natural order sorting algorithm..." > Save (you may need to restart the program for this to take effect)
3. Add Folder
4. Add rule > Serialize > check "Incremental" > check "Pad with zeroes to reach length" > insert 3 for the number of zeroes > click "Add Rule"
5. Add rule > CleanUp > check "(...)" to the right of "Strip out content of brackets:" > click "Add Rule"
6. Review results before committing changes. The new filenames should look something like: 001name, 002name, 003name ...

/windows | Sep 10, 2009

/windows | Sep 08, 2009

/misc | Sep 03, 2009