securing RDP (remote desktop protocol)

ive been getting a little paranoid about people remoting into my home pc and causing havok just of late and had decided to lock it down.

in order to do this i decided to employ a few well known tricks of the trade:-

1. change the name of the local administrator account - this can easily be done and should ideally be set to something difficult to guess, as well of course as making the password for the account complex.
   
2. set the port used for rdp to something other than the default - whichever port number you choose you must of course make sure that its not already in use by another process, and also remember to alter any port forwarding rules on your router (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306759 for details)
   
3. lock down the source ip address using an ipsec policy - this trick is less well known and is a little bit difficult to get right, but once in place this is a great safeguard against any attackers, as they would need to be able to spoof your ip addres in order to gain access to your system, not something easily done (see http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1559 for details)

thats it for now.

firefox portable and add-ons

ive been arsing around with firefox for a little while now and i must say i do like it, and im liking it more each day!. ive customised it a fair bit now so it does what i want, here is a list of add-ons that i find essential for firefox:-

1. adblock plus http://adblockplus.org/en/ - this is a new find for me and boy oh boy is it good!, im getting rather tired of websites pushing adverts at me all the time, im not going to click on them so why bother wasting my bandwidth right?!. well this little baby does the job, just fire up firefox head over to the link above and install this add-on, it will basically strip out any adverts giving you a completely advert free web experience, its amazing how much quicker a page will load, just brilliant!!.
2. ie tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419 - love firefox but sometimes find a site wont load correctly because its designed for crappy ie?, well this little add-on will get around the issue, just install this add-on and then add in the sites you want to be viewed in ie, it basically stuffs an ie session directly into firefox, it works perfectly, i personally use it for outlook web access, which doesnt work very well in firefox.
3. tab mix plus https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122 - this add-on gives you full control over your tabs, and importantly allows a new tab to start from your homepage, something that the built-in tab feature in firefox doesnt have, it allows you to freeze tabs, close tabs left and right of a tab, and much more, an essential!.
4. tab scope https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4882 - this gives you the ability to preview your tabs, so you can actually see a mini picture of the tab window by hovering over it, its sort of similar to the preview window you get in vista when you hover over something in the taskbar, its handy and looks very uber geeky! :-).

next post i will talk about firefox rss feeds and using css to hide label names for shortucts on the toolbar.

vista media center overwrites folder.jpg images

oh the wonders of vista media center! :-), as you can see from my title this is to do with vista resizing your nice high def album art images to a crappy 200x200 size image, i just thank god that my high def album art is also embeded in my mp3 files so i can export them out safely, phew!, to anybody out there who used folder.jpg's exclusively my sympathy goes out to you!.

ok well this is a known bug/feature in vista media center, and indeed windows media player, which is what drives vmc in any case, at the mo there are several ways around this but none of them are tidy, my own untested way around this is as follows, i am going to try this tonight so i will let you know if it works.

1. do a search for *.jpg in your music folders and delete all existing files (assuming you have the original high def album artwork).
2. export your embeded artwork from your mp3 files using mp3tag with filename folder.jpg, if your unsure of how to do this then please see my later posts "import/exporting album art using mp3tag"
3. drop to a command prompt and navigate to your music folders and run "attrib -r -a -s -h" (handy to remember to clear all attrib always thing RASH) *.jpg /s
4. what this does is clears all existing attribs for your jpg's.
5. next run "attrib +r *.jpg /s" again from the command prompt on your music folders
6. what this does is makes all your jpg images read only to stop vista overwriting.

the thinking behind vmc resizing the artwork is to try and make the music part of vmc as fast as possible by reducing the size of the images displayed, but hey that doesnt help the perfectionist out there who loves high def album art now does it! :-)

quad tv tuner support for vista

well ive been tinkering with my vista machine and looking to enable quad freeview tv tuner support for vmc (vista media center), this is something that vmc does not support by default (only supports 2 tuners), but if your brave enough you can get this working by enabling it through the registry.

firstly i would like to say this info was taken from the awesome greenbutton website (www.thegreenbutton.com) so i cant claim this as my own hack :-).

1. Stop the Media Center Receiver Service (net stop ehrecvr)
2. Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and open this key:
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{GUID} where {GUID} is either {71985F48-1CA1-11D3-9CC8-00C04F7971E0} for Digital (ATSC or DVB-T) or {A799A800-A46D-11D0-A18C-00A02401DCD4} for Analog (NTSC or PAL).
4. Under the {GUID} key, there will be one key per tuner device.
5. Select the first tuner's key.
6. Select the UserSettings key.
7. Set these DWORD values as follows (case sensitive, all values in hexadecimal), creating them if they do not exist: EnabledForMCE = 0xffffffff UseSTB = 0
8. Create a REG_SZ value named UserDefName and set its value to "Tuner X", where X is the tuner number (1 for the first tuner, 2 for the 2nd, etc.)

If this is the FIRST tuner:

RecordOrder = 0

RecordPrefered = 0xffffffff

WatchOrder = number of tuners -1, e.g. for 4 tuners set this to 3

WatchPrefered = 0

If this is the LAST tuner:

RecordOrder = number of tuners -1, e.g. for 4 tuners set this to 3

RecordPrefered = 0

WatchOrder = 0

WatchPrefered = 0xffffffff

If this is a tuner somewhere in the middle:

RecordOrder = whatever you put for the last tuner +1

RecordPrefered = 0

WatchOrder = whatever you put for the last tuner -1

WatchPrefered = 0

The idea here is that you increment the RecordOrder by 1 for each tuner, and decrement the WatchOrder by 1.

RecordOrder starts at 0 on the first tuner and goes up to #Tuners -1;

WatchOrder starts at #Tuners - 1 and ends at 0 on the last tuner.

RecordPrefered is true (0xffffffff) on the first tuner, false (0x00000000) everywhere else;

WatchPrefered is true on the last tuner, false everywhere else.

Repeat steps 7 - 10 for each tuner, adjusting the values of RecordOrder, RecordPrefered, WatchOrder and WatchPrefered as appropriate.

Close Registry Editor.

Start Media Center. Voila!

I hope you guys can follow this, ive done this on my system and yeah its a little fiddly, but it works!!, i can now record 4 different channels at the same time :-).

customising windows explorer in Vista

ok i now there has been a lot of slating about vista, and to be honest i can see where a lot of people are coming from, however i have to say with half decent hardware, vista can be a delight to use and does move along quite nicely on my system.

Tip 1.
well my first tip for vista is to customise windows explorer, there are two tweaks ive done on my system the first one is to change the shortcut for windows explorer as it defaults to opening up on "documents", in my opinion a completely useless starting point!.

to do this open windows explorer then navigate to the "computer" root menu item, drag this item to your taskbar (or desktop if you prefer desktop icons) by right clicking and then when prompted select "create shortcut here", you can then delete your old windows explorer shortcut and rename this one to "windows explorer", and voila it starts up showing all your drives on your pc.

Tip 2.
ok my second tip is to get rid of the useless default "favorite links" you see in windows explorer and create some new ones instead.

to do this open windows explorer then right click the default favorite links and choose delete, do this for all of the favorite links you dont need, next we need to add in our own favorites, to do this navigate to your most commonly used folders and then right click and drag and drop them one by one to the favorites links, by default they will be named the same as the folder, but if you wan you can right click them and give them a more meaningful name by choosing "rename".

if anybody has any other useful tips then please let me know.

Welcome to my blog

This is my first posting for my new blog, i hope you guys out there in cyber world find my tips helpful, ive spent many an hour trawling google news groups and obscure postings on websites to find the answers to my digital headaches, thus i felt it was only fair to give something back, i hope these postings prevent the headaches i have come accustomed to :-).

Firebird.