Sunday, July 01, 2012

Material Roundup: Linkfest

Been a semi-relaxing weekend.

Read with interest this TaoSecurity blog post Bejtlich's Thoughts on "Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving" as well as this one Whither United States Air Force Academy? both by Richard Bejtlich. I also noted that the USAFA was evacuated this week as cadets were heading in due to the area fires. These things still catch my attention as I had started the process to become a USAFA candidate my senior year of high-school before removing myself from the process for family reasons (my choice…no excuses). Still, I will always wonder about the path not taken.

Also, while IANAL, I was left scratching my head and heartbroken just a bit by the recent SCOTUS decision. The USNI blog had a post that resonated with my own feelings: The U.S. Supreme Court just diminished the significances of Military Valor [opinion].

Little bro was in town so he brought some pizza’s over, I grabbed some super-good local micro-brewed root beers and we had a party catching up, comparing life notes, and watching Act of Valor on this pre-July 4th weekend.

I wrapped things up yesterday with a viewing of Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Wikipedia) which covers the Chauvet Cave (Wikipedia). Very interesting and well filmed documentary. The cave-art is really fascinating…I just wish we could have learned more about the people behind it.

I guess if there was a theme it was reflecting on the importance of what remains of us, of our efforts, of the world around us.

Back to the shallows…

Sometimes I feel a bit guilty just dumping a super-post like this that is heavy-laden with linkage.

Some weeks are busier than others, however, and while I have more than a few posts still pending in the hopper that are deeper collections of “how-to”, personal reviews, or troubleshooting sessions, I hope that some find value in these “linkfests”.  Primarily they serve to help me quickly search and find material, tools, and techniques that I believe will either be useful, or are useful, when I am away from my desk and my USB dongle is at home rather than in hand. It’s challenging finding that right software or tip and maybe something here will be useful to others or pique their interest and send them in the right direction.

Security Bits

For Sec News

Network Resources

Tools and Utilities of Note

  • Updates: Autoruns v11.32, Process Explorer v15.21, Process Monitor v3.02 - Sysinternals. Stop, Drop, and Download now; the holy trinity of software tools just got updated again!
  • Monitor Any Folder Or Disk Drive For Changes In Real-Time, Even Across Networks - AddictiveTips blog post review of new NirSoft tool.
  • FolderChangesView - Monitor folder/drive changes - NirSoft
  • ExtremeCopy: Probably The Fastest File/Folder Move & Copy Utility - AddictiveTips blog review.
  • ExtremeCopy - Easersoft. I’m a dedicated TeraCopy fan but this one sounds intriguing. Will need to put it through the paces soon.
  • Remove Items from the Windows Explorer and IE Context Menus - CyberNet News.
  • MenuMaid - SD Software - software utility link
  • 4 Better Windows Console Tools Alternatives to Windows Built In Command Prompt -Windows7hacker - Kent has a really nice roundup. While the good-ole cmd.exe will do the job, I must say these “replacements” are quite nice. I’ve used “Console2” quite a bit and like the tab format and transparency/font/color tweaking options. PowerCMD surprised me with its feature set and I really can see myself using it more regularly. Check out the others as well.
  • GetFoldersize - Michael Thummerer Software Design - Super nice freeware tool to locate and understand just what is taking up space on your hard-drive. Was recently updated to version 2.5.10. I really like this tool.
  • SizeOnDisk Folder Size - new to me freeware tool found on CodePlex.  Another nice tool to find file/folder size hogs.
  • Folder Size - another freeware file/folder size tool.
  • SpaceSniffer - Uderzo Software - freeware tool that is amazingly fast and amazingly fun to use. While the previously mentioned tools excel at a tabular report, this one provides a super easy visual layout presentation of your space usage. You can drill down very easily. It gives you a easy-to-grasp picture on what is using up your hard-drive space..
  • SequoiaView - I keep this one around just because it is so beautiful. It does a great job even though it hasn’t been updated in quite a long time. It may have been one of the first to present space on disk usage in a “squarified” treemap format.
  • FolderSize - tiny little app (174 kb) from developer Jan Horn that is standalone and gives you a basic what-you-need-to-know report on drive/folder space usage.
  • DirectorySlicer - With giant (and cheap) USB sticks and network connections aplenty, splitting files and folders to specific sizes is become a rarified task. That said this CodePlex project is worth snagging in that it splits files of a folder into partitions of a specified size. So that super-folder you are trying to burn to CD doesn’t fit? Directory Slicer takes the work out of guessing by allowing you to set the size (or use a preset) then it divvies it up accordingly! Clever.
  • Unlock & Delete Empty Folders via Wildcard-Based Rules - AddictiveTips post review of…
  • Empty Folder Cleaner - 4dots Software
  • Reminded me of a previously GSD mentioned Empty Folder Nuker by Simon Wai.


For the Admins: Mostly from Microsoft

Cheers and happy pre-July 4th State-side well wishes to all.

Claus V.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you ever hear of the tool "Everything"? It allows you to instantly view and find files and folders. Where Windows search takes ages and often fails to deliver, this tool finds - forgive me the pun - everything.

You can get it from http://www.voidtools.com/

The only drawbacks i see is that it should run constantly so that it does not have to build the index )which usually is still faster then Windows search..) when you actually want to search for something, but it's relatively small, both on the disk aswell as the memory footprint.
The other thing is that it wants admin rights on startup. It does start without, but doesn't work then.

Claus said...

@ Anonymous - Yes I have. It has been mentioned here several times over the past few years. I really like that it comes in both an installable version as well as a portable build. It hasn't been updated for quite a while but still does the trick quite nicely.

You might also be interested in Locate32. It comes in both x32 and x64 builds. The "stable" build hasn't been updated for quite a while, while the "beta" versions (off the download page) are a bit newer.

Check out these posts for it as well as some other file/folder search tools that are similar which I also enjoy.

File and Folder Linkfest - GSD Jan 2012

Search & Acquire by File Type Solutions - GSD Aug 2009

Thanks for the comment!

--Claus V.