In my last post about everyone’s preferred music player, I mentioned that I was dying to try out the Linux player Amarok because I’d heard great things about. There’s just one problem: I’m a Windows user.

Luckily, the guys at Amarok have decided to give the Windows users a taste of what this music player is all about. The process of porting Amarok to Windows is well under way and seems to be going quite well.

All their hard work is paying off. They recently released a version of the program for Windows users to take out for a test run. There is one small thing though. You can’t just download the program. You also have to have the KDE installer and all its binaries.

continue reading "Amarok is now Available for Windows"

The Wallstreet Journal [link] is one of those online magazines that has a subscription service that protects some of its stories from being read by users that have no subscription. Only an excerpt of the story is available for free while the rest can only be read by subscribers, or so we though.

Apparently though the Wallstreet Journal website is making referrer checks to see if a user is coming from either Digg or Google News and will present the user the full story if the check is successful. Everyone else coming from different websites or opening the Wallstreet Journal page manually will only see the excerpt.

A referrer check is one of the weakest protections because referrers can easily be spoofed. The Firefox add-on refspoof provides users with an easy way of spoofing the referrer. Read on to find out how you can read all Wallstreet Journal articles in full length for free.

continue reading "Read all Wallstreet Journal articles for free"

After my last post about the powers of PuTTy in conjunction with an SSH-enabled router, I started thinking about tutorials.

I am not a big tutorial-fan, cause I always can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something here I have no particular knowledge of. And depending on what I do, this bothers me. A lot. Take sewing for instance (yes, I do indeed enjoy the fun of sewing, at least as long as it is fun); in the beginning I only did pre-set tutorials. I got to see some achievements, pretty fast as well, and was happy. But the clothings didn’t fit that well, more often than not I had to make corrections to be at least a bit satisfied with my work.

By now, I do most of my sewing patterns myself by taking bits from tutorials and knowledge and putting them together, and it works just fine for me. My point is, tutorials are often brief, giving appealing results in a short time, but often lack some of the necessary theory. Ever happened to you that you did something with a tutorial that just would not work? And after going through the complete text again, looking at all pictures, you realize there’s a small mistake in it, or something you wouldn’t have thought of, which the author took as given?

continue reading "About PuTTy and Tutorials, including a PuTTy Tutorial."

If you set up some kind of SSH Connection on a windows computer over the past few years, be it to connect to the university’s network or to secure a line for an insecure FTP Transfer,you have probably encountered the program PuTTy on the way to salvation. It’s easy to use, free and OSSish powerful. What many people don’t know about PuTTy though, is what other powers aside from or better in addition to SSH slumber inside the little executable.

I was no exception to this when I decided to fool around a bit with my AVM Fritz!Box (Broadband Router quite common in Germany and Austria that runs with Linux) and installed - among other amusing things - the dropbear SSH Server on it. I was then able to connect to my home network from all around the world using just my dyndns-account and PuTTy, or better his cousin PuTTyPortable, which runs from thumb drives without leaving traces behind on the host system. Oh the joy!

After going through the massive troubles of installing and configuring dropbear via FTP and VM, I first started to think about the use I could get out of this.

continue reading "Fun Things to do with PuTTy and Linux-Routers"