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Computers

Ad-Blocking Proxy for Home

I was up the other night and browsing the web and I had a really annoying ad pop up on a page I was trying to read. I have used the various plugins for Chrome and Firefox that block ads …

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I was up the other night and browsing the web and I had a really annoying ad pop up on a page I was trying to read. I have used the various plugins for Chrome and Firefox that block ads yet a lot of sites detect them and force you to whitelist them. I was then struck by the idea of finding if there was some sort of proxy type of app that would work.

I used to have a really cool application called AdSubtract that installed on your system and then set itself up as a local proxy that was capable of stripping ads off of web pages. I was curious to see if there was some sort of newer application that had this same functionality.

This is where I stumbled across pi-hole. ( https://pi-hole.net/ ) This really sparked my interest and I found it will install and run on Linux, I quickly spun up a new Linux VM on my server and began tinkering away. I got pi-hole installed in about 20-30 minutes. Once it was running I set its IP Address as the DNS for one of my test desktop VM’s and the internet just became a whole new wonderful experience.

Now the network engineer in me began wondering how I could deploy this in various configurations both at home and if it would be capable of running on a Small Business network or even in the Enterprise. Now I am having fun tinkering in my test lab with a new toy.

  Posted by Admin on December 16, 2018

AutoCAD License Server Status

So I recently deployed AutoCAD 2017 Mechanical and set it up utilizing network licensing. I was looking for a way to query the license server to get the number of licenses that are currently in use so that I could …

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So I recently deployed AutoCAD 2017 Mechanical and set it up utilizing network licensing. I was looking for a way to query the license server to get the number of licenses that are currently in use so that I could create a status board that showed this information as close to real-time as I could get it.

The first this I did was run the command line against the license server to see how many licenses are checked out.

lmutil lmstat -a -c @localhost

This will give you a bunch of information returned to the command line so I took it a bit further and had it pumped out to a text file for reference.

lmutil lmstat -a -c @localhost > C:\LicenseStatus.csv

This gave me all the information that I wanted in terms of the amount of licenses that had been checked out. This also told me who the users were as well as their computer names.

pushd “c:\Autodesk\Network License Manager”
lmutil lmstat -a -c @localhost > c:\acstatus.csv

  Posted by Jason Snodgrass on June 14, 2016

A 12 Year Old’s Amazing Invention

I just saw the news report of this 12-year-old kid that built a brail printer out of Lego’s and has now started his own company to build a more cost friendly brail printer for the masses. This kid deserves some …

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I just saw the news report of this 12-year-old kid that built a brail printer out of Lego’s and has now started his own company to build a more cost friendly brail printer for the masses.

This kid deserves some recognition. Check out the website for his company.

http://www.braigolabs.com/

  Posted by Jason Snodgrass on March 19, 2015

Facebook Contacts

I reactivated my Facebook for the sole purpose of trying to find a way to export all of my friends contact info so that I can add it to a program such as Microsoft Outlook or import the contacts into …

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I reactivated my Facebook for the sole purpose of trying to find a way to export all of my friends contact info so that I can add it to a program such as Microsoft Outlook or import the contacts into my Gmail contacts, but I have yet to accomplish this feat. I was able to get Names and E-Mail addresses imported into a Yahoo account, but the contacts are not able to be exported from there.

So far it looks like I might have to manually type out my friends info into an excel spreadsheet one by one from the Yahoo account I was able to get the names and e-mail addresses into. Why does this have to be so hard?

  Posted by Jason Snodgrass on February 11, 2015

Cool Email Archiving Tool

So as I was reading  one of the many tech articles I   tend to read I heard about this utility called MailStore and how it can archive your emails so you never loose them. I visited the website http://www.mailstore.com and …

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So as I was reading  one of the many tech articles I   tend to read I heard about this utility called MailStore and how it can archive your emails so you never loose them. I visited the website http://www.mailstore.com and I found that they have a home version that is not only free, but there is a portable version as well. I decided to download it and give it a try. I was impressed that I could essentially back up my Gmail account and then browse the messages in an offline archive. I then tested this against my Hotmail account as well as an Outlook.com account. I now have localized searchable archives that I can look through even while offline. I am impressed with the product so I thought I would share it with the world. The direct link to download the Home version is listed below. I hope you enjoy it and find it as useful as I did.

http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home-email-archiving.aspx

  Posted by Jason Snodgrass on January 14, 2015

QuickOffice Pro HD

Google has done evil… I paid full price for this application and Google comes along and buys them up. I just found out today that my most used app on my iPad is ending support for DropBox and Box.com and …

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Google has done evil…

I paid full price for this application and Google comes along and buys them up. I just found out today that my most used app on my iPad is ending support for DropBox and Box.com and forces you into using Google drive.

Google drive does not offer the same functionality that I get from these other services. I also now see that they have taken this app to a free model which is good for the masses but what about those of us that paid for the full functioning version?

  Posted by Jason Snodgrass on January 25, 2014

DD-WRT Router Flash

My wife and I have a Linksys WRT54G2 v1 as our home router and there has not been a firmware update in quite some time. Since the router is out of warranty I was willing to experiment with it and …

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My wife and I have a Linksys WRT54G2 v1 as our home router and there has not been a firmware update in quite some time. Since the router is out of warranty I was willing to experiment with it and try to flash it with DD-WRT.

  Posted by Jason Snodgrass on August 25, 2012