CURL Reboot Linksys Router

                                                                        
Here is a CURL command to reboot Linksys routers. This save's time by not having to login to the web interface and navigating the right pages. This can also be used to automate router reboot.

curl http://username:password@192.168.1.1/apply.cgi -d "submit_button=Reboot&change_action=&action=Reboot&wait_time=19&rebootmode=1"

Please note: All my curl commands might not work directly if you copy paste because when you copy it will take the line breaks and give you a error, so paste this code into notepad or something and remove wordwrap, make sure the command is all on one line then copy paste it.

Look at my other scripts to know how to use CURL in windows.

Asus RT-N16 Partial Review

RT-N16 by Asus is a beast of a WiFi Router.

This router has some amazing specs. And its performance is pretty good.

Specs:
RAM: 128MB
Flash: 32MB
2 USB 2.0 Ports
Wireless B/G/N
Broadcom Chipset @480Mhz
4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports 10/100/1000
3 External Antennae's(Great, better than Linksys with no antennae's)
Supported by DD-WRT

Supports 300,000 connections. It acts and a File and Print server with the USB ports. It also acts as a media Server. Can download files directly to USB drives so you don't need your computer on all the time anymore.The web interface of this device is one of the best, no The Best I've ever seen, Its good enough for techy people to use, yet, simple and intuitive enough for novice users to use.

At 100$ your getting top of the line hardware for a Wireless Router. And with DD-WRT the possibilities and features that can be used, make it worth just having this router around. You can install OpenVPN if you put DD-WRT on it, and have a free VPN server to connect home when away.


I have not seen such high specs on a consumer router before, so It's worth having even for future use. I say that because If you look at most manufactures (especially Linksys) The Ram, Flash, and CPU specs drop as they progress. It seems that we are moving backwards when it comes to home WiFi router's instead of forwards. I would of expected that by now our home Wireless Routers would be as good as our computers. I wanna see 1GB of ram, 3Ghz CPU, and 16 GB of flash in a router.

Reboot WebSTAR DPC2100R2

Now here is another command to reboot WebSTAR DPC2100R2 Cable modem, Feel free to try it with other versions of cable modems that are similar.

curl http://192.168.100.1/goform/reset -d RestoreFactoryYes=1

The last CURL command to reboot the cable modem is different to this one because this CURL command will be the result of if you actually logged into the modem with username and password and clicked on the reset button in the web interface.

The Last CURL command was to set the down frequency to the starting frequency causing the modem to reinitialise.


Here is the last curl command and how to use curl in windows.

Random Blue Screen BSOD

Installed new hardware ? or Built a new computer but you keep getting random blue screens? Wether its Windows 7 or Windows XP BSOD Blue Screen of Death STOP: 0x000000F4 or something else, its worth a try. Here's one thing you should try which has worked for me numerous times.

Unplug the Computer, open up your case and remove the CMOS battery(round flat silver battery). Wait 3 seconds then put back in the battery and plug in your computer. Just as Windows sometimes has trouble detecting hardware, so does the BIOS. So you may need to set your date/time in your BIOS again, but at least no more blue screens.

Speed up XP

Here's a few ways to speed up Windows XP and save resources and hard drive space without installing any programs. This does work to speed up Windows7 and Vista, but these steps are for the XP platform.

1) Disable Thumbnail Cache
If you don't view a large database of photo's frequently, you can safely disable this. All it does is create a hidden Thumbs.db file that stores a cache of thumbnails for all pictures that was ever in that folder, regardless of if the image was deleted. So this file can grow large depending on how many images you have in that folder. These .db files are created in every folder that has images in them.

To disable go to My Computer, Click Tools->Folder Options, Click on "View" tab, Check the box that says "Do not cache thumbnails". Click Apply and OK.




2)Turn Off Indexing of your hard drive
Windows indexes all the files on your hard drive and stores it's location, so it waste's space by saving this information and resources by indexing when the computer is idle.

If you use that 'Search' function in Windows to find files or folders once or less a month then you can safely turn this off. You will still be able to use this search feature but it will take a little bit longer, which is worth it to me.

To turn it off go to My Computer, Right-Click on the C: Drive, Click Properties, Uncheck Allow Indexing and click OK, its ok to skip files(you will know if you get prompted)

Do this for each Hard Disk Drive(C:,D:,E:, etc.)

You can do even better by also disabling the Indexing service. Go to Start, Run, type services.msc, look for "Indexing Service" Right click on this service, Click Properties. Click Stop and change "Startup type" to Disabled. Click Apply and OK.



3) Disable System Restore
If you're smart enough to do a fresh install, you should disable this service. System restore creates restore points periodically and every-time you install or uninstall a application, that is a lot of wasted space. And uses a lot of resource's when its creating these points.

To disable system restore Right-Click on My Computer and Click Properties, Click on System Restore Tab, and check the box that says Turn Off System Restore on all drives.

Now these 3 steps wont make your computer super fast, but will free up some resources and hard drive space for you.

Windows No to All

Ok, so your copying a bunch of files to another folder and there are multiple duplicates. Now you see a "Yes to All" option but this will take longer since it has to copy every file where as if you click "No to All" it will only copy files that are not present in the destination directory saving the time of copying unneeded files.

Don't see a "No to All" option ? well there isn't a button for it, all you have to do is hold Shift on your keyboard and click No while holding this button, now windows will interpret this as "No to All" and continue copying your files while skipping files that already exists.

Linksys Wireless Routers Review

New Linksys Wireless Routers Suck. Plain and simple.

(Not one of the bad ones.)

I have tried many linksys routers and have noticed all the new products from linksys are the same, UNRELIABLE.

These new routers are slower, have less ram, cpu speed and flash. Not to mention the bad quality of materials  being used to make these products. The worst part of all is the internal antenna and crappy designs. Internal  antenna's greatly reduce throughput and range of your wireless as well as increase the amount of discarded packets.

External antennas are much better. Now I use to love Linksys, but now I will avoid them like you wouldn't believe.  I will continue to use Linksys routers but only the older models such as WRT100,WRT300N,WRT54*, etc. Even my Linksys home  router WRH54G outperforms newer linksys model's in speed and reliability, ive never had a Internet slowdown as  some people are complaining about with new models, all using Linksys firmware.

I hope CISCO/Linksys will realise this mistake and go back to making good products with external antenna's, and  useful products like their PAP2, PAP2T devices which they currently no longer make.

Tech people like us like to see sophisticated looking devices, devices that look like its Techy, we don't want linksys's new aesthetically  pleasing look that looks like a fancy dinner plate.

See Ya Linksys till you change your ways.

Accessing Dell RAC(Remote Access Controller) over WAN/Internet

In order to access your Dell RAC from the Internet/WAN you will need to foward 3 ports on your router. RAC is a card that allows access to the server regardless of the servers state. From the web interface of the RAC you can reboot,start-up,shutdown the server. Check server status, view last crash screen, redirect the console over the connection and much more. RAC is Dell's version of HP's iLo(intergrated Lights-Out) port.

Foward the following ports on your router:
Port: 80
Port: 5900
Port: 443


Once these ports are fowarded you should be able to access you server's RAC by entering the following in a web browser(note the 's' in http, its important):

https://ip-address
or
https://domain-nam

VB Script to Reboot WebSTAR DPC2100R2 Cable Internet Modem

VB Script to Reboot Scientific Atlanta WebSTAR DPC2100R2 Cable Internet Modem

I noticed that a lot of people read my post about rebooting the cable modem using cURL, so I decided to post my VB Script I created to reboot this modem. Since the following scripts works perfectly with Internet Explorer Version 6, you may need to add or remove TAB's from the script to have it work in other IE version's. Or if you guys request it I will make a script for each version of IE, just leave a comment and let me know.

Update:See this post instead, Script removed.Curl Method

Cheap Decent Remote for HTPC (Home Theatre PC)

Well, I was building a HTPC and decided to use XBMC because of there interface and support for creating your own DVD covers to be shown when viewing your video library(there search sometimes gets it wrong).

XBMC

Remote

I decided I needed a remote for my HTPC because keyboard and remote for watching movies ? no thanks. So I found a remote from DealExtreme for $8.77 with FREE Shipping. 2 weeks later it arrived I plugged in the IR receiver to the computer (it auto installed the driver), put batteries in the remote and launched XBMC, to my surprise there was no other configuration, all the keys on the remote worked with XBMC right out of the box!!

The only settings I changed was to configure a shortcut on the remote to launch XBMC, so once I turned on the computer I did not need a keyboard or mouse, just press the XMBC button and start browsing your movies.

Launch XBMC using Remote
To create the quick key short cut on the remote; right click on the XBMC shortcut on the desktop, click properties, now click in the box where it says Shortcut key, now press the button on the remote you want to use to launch XBMC, the contents of the "Shortcut key:" box should have changed from "None" to something else.Click Apply and OK.

DealExtreme Link: IR Remote

XBMC Site: http://xbmc.org/
XBMC Download Link: http://xbmc.org/download/

View/Find/Clean-up Large Files in Windows

SpaceMonger 1.40

Download Link: SpaceMonger 1.40 
Mirror Link: SpaceMonger 1.40

This applications allows you to open a drive in it and gives you a graphical view of the files on this drive in different colors for file types and folders. Gives you an idea of which files are large and taking up space in a graphical way(larger the box=larger file). This can help you find those large files you forgot about somewhere on your hard drive.

Version 1.40 is the last Free version this company offered.

Build Your Own Linux LiveCD

Here is a website that lets you build a Linux LiveCD for your desired requirements, with the applications you want. You can build a live cd for multimedia, or office use, etc. As you add programs the size of the ISO changes on the top of the screen. The best part of this is that you build the ISO first and then download it.

Make your customized CD here:NimbleX2007V2

The ISO starts at 200MB and grows as you add applications, you can even customize the desktop background image and start-up audio of the live cd. You even have the option of setting your default language and your root account password and a user account username and password.

Now this is just perfect way to customize a livecd  to match your requirements since it will never be installed and only booted from the CD/DVD its nice to atleast choose settings and applications you like/require.

Reboot WebSTAR DPC2100R2 Cable Internet Modem

Here is how to reboot a WebSTAR DPC2100R2 Cable Internet Modem using a cURL command in Windows.  This command will reboot this modem regardless of the ISP; be it BT, Comcast, Virgin Media, Rogers, etc.


1) First you will need to download curl for windows, you can get it here: cURL

2) Now extract the curl archive you downloaded to your D drive, you can use any drive but just make sure you continue to use the same drive in the next steps.

3)Open command prompt(or click start->run  type "cmd" without quotes and press enter)

4) Navigate to the drive where you extracted the cURL program if its in D drive type D: and press enter. Now type "cd curl-7.21.2-devel-mingw32", then type "cd bin" Your command prompt should now be showing this path: D:\curl-7.21.2-devel-mingw32\bin>

5) Copy paste the following command into the command prompt window and when you press enter your modem will reset: curl http://192.168.100.1/goform/gscan -d SADownStartingFrequency=687000000

Viewing Exif Data using Opanda IExif

Opanda IExif

[Freeware][Installation Required]
Site:http://www.opanda.com/en/iexif/
Download Link:Opanda IExif 2.3

Well my last post showed you how to remove exif data and what exif data was. Well here is an application that will show you the exif data hidden in the images. Notice that there is a GPS tab as well, if your image has GPS data in it you can click on the link in that tab and it will show you on the map where that photo was taken. Well, have fun checking out photos and see whats been hiding.

Removing Exif Data from your photographs using Easy Exif Delete

Easy Exif Delete

[Freeware][Standalone]
Site:http://www.easyexifdelete.com/
Download Link:Easy Exif Delete

Firstly let me give a short description of what exif data is. Exif data is data contained in an image that can include date/time the photograph was taken, what type of camera was used, details on the distance of the subject and much more. Some cameras even show the exact location in the world of where the photo was taking using built in or external GPS accessory. My next post will show you how to view this exif data and see whats been hiding in your photo's.

Now there are many reasons you might want this exif data removed such as privacy when posting online, protecting the reason your pictures are looking so great(the settings and equipment you use is in the exif data) or any other reason.

To remove the exif data select all the images you want this information removed from in the application and click delete, it will batch delete exif data from all the photographs you chose.

Easy Duplicate Finder, Free up space on your HDD by removing duplicate files

Easy Duplicate Finder  

[Freeware] [Standalone]
Site: http://www.easyduplicatefinder.com/
Download Link: Easy Duplicate Finder

Wow, this app is soo usefull found multiple large files on my external that were duplicates and were named differently. Can help you find duplicates of any file type and help you clear up some space on your drive.

Very useful, you can search and entire drive or just a folder. Matter of fact you may search multiple specified drives and or folders. So it will tell you if the same file exist in external2 and Folder3 and Drive B:, providing your added these locations to your search.

This program checks the MD5 hash of the files and compares them so regardless of the file name or the extension it will find the duplicates for you. You can have Video1.avi and the same video renamed to Dma.rar and if its the same file it will find it.

Update: Well apparently they now require registration, well it still works great, not sure of the limitations without registration. Will update on that when I get some time.

Test Live/Bootable CD/DVD and USB's

Here is a useful application that I found to test Live/Bootable CD/DVD and USB's. After multiple burning and rebooting to test live cd/dvd's and USB drives I decided to look for a better way, but did not want to spend money on a Virtual Machine software.

I finally found an application that you do not need to install and do not need to create a virtual disk/hard drive. You just open the live cd/dvd iso in it or point it to the Live USB and just click run. It will boot the iso/usb inside your O/S, so you can test it before you burn. It uses a emulator called Qemu to accomplish this.


MobaLiveCD

 

[Freeware][Standalone]
Site: http://mobalivecd.mobatek.net/en/
Direct Download Link: MobaLiveCD2.1

First Post

So here is my first post, Ive decided to start a blog to post about tips and tricks for tech and sometimes life(general fix-its). Problems that I have encountered, I have a lot of hobbies so I have encountered many problems in many different things. Hope some of you will find it useful. Will be updating periodically.

Ill leave you with a little piece of software I found useful.

Unlocker

[Freeware] [Installation Required]

Site:http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
Download Link:Unlocker 1.9.0

Having trouble deleting a file or folder or remove a USB drive because the computer says its in use, well with this application installed just right click on the file click "Unlocker" from context menu and click unlock all and you may now delete it.