Tech Chop

Blast From The Past! 'Bauer-Power' Episode 13

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:42:03 PDT

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This week we interrupt the regularly scheduled Tech Chop episode to bring you a blast from the past! This is episode 13 of the old Bauer-Power podcast where we discussed Vuze, Falcon Punching and Konboot!

Two Week Hiatus And A Special Announcement

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:19:38 PDT

We will not have a new episode this week or next week due to projects at Paul's day job. Paul will return June 24th, but that will be the final episode.

Congress Wants 007 Guns, Two Factor Twitter Authentication & More

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 27 May 2013 10:00:06 PDT

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This week's stories are:

This week's freeware pick of the week is RootkitRevealer:

RootkitRevealer is an advanced rootkit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit.

RootkitRevealer successfully detects many persistent rootkits including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender (note: RootkitRevealer is not intended to detect rootkits like Fu that don't attempt to hide their files or registry keys).

Since persistent rootkits work by changing API results so that a system view using APIs differs from the actual view in storage, RootkitRevealer compares the results of a system scan at the highest level with that at the lowest level. The highest level is the Windows API and the lowest level is the raw contents of a file system volume or Registry hive (a hive file is the Registry's on-disk storage format).

Thus, rootkits, whether user mode or kernel mode, that manipulate the Windows API or native API to remove their presence from a directory listing, for example, will be seen by RootkitRevealer as a discrepancy between the information returned by the Windows API and that seen in the raw scan of a FAT or NTFS volume's file system structures.

Roku Review - Ep63

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:17:42 PDT

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This week Paul skips the news format, and reviews his new Roku 2 XD. He also talks about why he didn't go with the newer Roku 3.

Click here to get your Roku 2 XD!

Excuses are like a$$holes... No episode this week

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:41:48 PDT

Sorry to say but there is no episode this week. Things were very hectic last week with the Benghazi story, and the news of the IRS targeting conservative groups so I spent most of my time keeping track of that on my political blog http://mainwashed.com. Check back next week though, as we will have a fresh episode for you!

Is Privacy Off The Table Since Boston? + 3D Printed Bionic Ears

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:06 PDT

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This week's stories are:

This week's freeware pick of the week is Media Monkey:

MediaMonkey is a music manager and jukebox for serious music collectors and iPod users. It catalogs your CDs, OGG, WMA, MPC, FLAC, APE, WAV and MP3 audio files. It offers an intelligent tag editor which looks up missing Album Art and track information via Freedb and the web, and an automated file and directory renamer to organize your music library.

AP Twitter Account Hacked and Amazon is Making A Set-Top Box!

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:08 PDT

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This week's stories are

This week's freeware pick of the week is Easus Partition Master Free:

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk.

Facebook Says Ignore Your Family, and Nobody Has 100% Up Time!

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:24:24 PDT

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This week's stories are:

This week's freeware pick of the week is Windows 8 Start Button that offers the following features:

Restore Windows Start button and Start menu on Windows 8!
Make 'desktop mode' as your default Windows startup screen
Choose appearance: classic windows, aero mode, Win 7 and more!
Restore all your familiar windows menus and options
All that and more, absolutely free!

Time Travel Discovered and the Missing Link Found?

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:00:08 PDT

Support Tech Chop by doing your Amazon shopping at http://amazon.techchop.com!

This weeks stories are:

The freeware pick of the week is Recuva by Piroform:

Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted from your iPod, or by bugs, crashes and viruses!

Simple to use interface - just click 'Scan' and choose the files you want to recover
Easy to use filter for results based on file name/type
Simple Windows like interface with List and Tree view
Can be run from a USB thumb drive
Restores all types of files, office documents, images, video, music, email, anything.
Supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, NTFS5 , NTFS + EFS file systems
Restores files from removable media (SmartMedia, Secure Digital, MemoryStick, Digital cameras, Floppy disks, Jaz Disks, Sony Memory Sticks, Compact Flash cards, Smart Media Cards, Secure Digital Cards, etc.)
Restores files from external ZIP drives , Firewire and USB Hard drives
It's fast, tiny and takes seconds to run!

Facebook Bangs With Friends & Google Fibre in Austin?

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 12:11:07 PDT

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This week's stories are:

This week's freeware pick of the week is Tree Size Free. From their page:

Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough. TreeSize Free tells you where precious disk space has gone.

TreeSize Free can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. Expand folders in an Explorer-like fashion and see the size of every subfolder. All results can also be drilled down to the file level. Scanning operations run in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The Explorer context menu is supported within TreeSize, as well as the usual drag & drop operations.

The disk space tool now also includes the main feature of our discontinued freeware NTFSRatio: TreeSize Free can display the NTFS compression rate and apply the NTFS compression on directory branches.

Start up TreeSize Free as an Administrator to calculate the sizes of directories for which access is ordinarily not granted. Since the content of the files will not be read automatically during this procedure, Windows security remains guaranteed.

Biggest Internet Attack Ever, Bitcoins for Property and More!

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:11:09 PDT

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This week we switch to our news oriented format. This week's stories are:

This week's freeware pick of the week is Daemon Tools Lite:

With DAEMON Tools you can back up your physical CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray discs into "virtual discs" or so called "disc image" files, which run directly on your hard drive. You can also work with images created by other burning programs! DAEMON Tools supports variety of image types. Use CD/DVD image converter to have one format images in your Image Catalog!

How To Mount an Encrypted Operating System With Truecrypt

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:06:27 PDT

This week is kind of a short episode so we're sorry about that, but that's probably okay because you all have short attention spans anyway.

This week we take a look at one of the good things about Truecrypt since we made them look really bad last week with our side-by-side boot up test with Truecrypt and Compusec. The good thing about Truecrypt is that you can mount your encrypted volumes using Bauer-Puntu Linux so you can perform offline file recoveries, or other offline maintenance while still maintaining security.

Truecrypt vs Compusec: Battle of Full Disk Encryption Software

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:05:03 PDT

At my day job we recently started fully encrypting all laptops with Truecrypt per the request of one of our banking clients. They were worried that if somehow one of our employees saved sensitive data on their laptop, and that laptop got stolen that the sensitive data might fall into the wrong hands. makes sense right?

Well we are currently using Truecrypt, but since starting to use it everyone that has a laptop is now complaining of significant slowness in boot time. I decided to try a different encryption program called Compusec to see if it made a difference. As you can see in the video, it made a world of difference!

Two Tools For Securely Transferring Files

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:03:57 PDT

This week I wanted to show you two tools you can use for securely transferring files over the Internet using encryption. This idea came because we recently started using one of the tools for my day job which I explain in the video.

The two tools are:

Filezilla is great because it's free, the problem is that it requires the use of a client for FTPS, and that my not sit well with the computer illiterate.

The second tool, Lockbox is not free. It's a monthly subscription service, but it is very user friendly.

Both tools are great ways to keep your files secure when transferring data over the internet.

How To Solve Facebook Math: 6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2)

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:02:43 PDT

This week we decided to not do anything super technical, and instead we decided to do some simple Facebook math. You've probably seen one of the following problems floating around:

6 ÷ 2 (2 + 1)
6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2)
7 + 7 ÷ 7 + 7 x 7 - 7

The first two are the same problem really, but besides that all three of these problems have one thing in common. They are order of operations problems. Many people get it wrong, and some even think that there can be more than one answer. That is ridiculous though, because math is an exact science so there can be only ONE answer.

So anyway the order of operations is as follows:

Parentheses
Exponents
(Multiplication/Division)
(Addition/Subtraction)

If you come across two problems that have equal rank in the order of operations, you need to solve left to right. So taking the first problem above, we would solve it this way:

6 ÷ 2 (2 + 1) = 6 ÷ 2 (3) = 3 (3) = 9

If we take the last problem, it would solve this way:

7 + 7 ÷ 7 + 7 x 7 - 7 = 7 + 1 + 49 - 7 = 8 + 49 -7 = 57 -7 = 50

I hope that makes sense to you now. If not, perhaps the video will make better sense ;-)

In either case, the next time one of these problems show up on Facebook, just paste this video as your answer and end any arguments!

How To Start A Blog

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:59:41 PDT

This week I wanted to give you a few tips to get you started with blogging. Many people I know have ideas they want to share with the world, and blogging can be a great way to do that.

I recommend using either Blogger or Wordpress. There are pros and cons to both, which I point out in the video. I personally prefer Blogger because it's free, and I can still use custom domain names. I currently use Blogger for my platform for Tech Chop, Bauer-Power and my new political blog Mainwashed.

After you have your blog setup you should check out these other tools and plugins to get the most out of your blog, and also increase readership and reader interaction:

Disqus - Alternative blog comments plugin
Intense Debate - Another Alternative blog comments plugin
Feedburner - A better RSS feed creator
Networked Blogs - Tool to syndicate your content on social networking sites

If you have any questions that were not covered in the video, hit me up below in the comments!

Police Scanner Apps For Android and iPhone

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:58:24 PDT

This week I wanted to give you two apps you can use, either on your Android device, or on your iPhone so you can listen in on local police chatter, or on police radios across the country! These apps are perfect for national news cases like the recent manhunt for ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner in Big Bear California.

If you are not familiar with that story, Chris Dorner allegedly went on a killing spree before he was eventually cornered in a cabin near a ski resort in Big Bear California. There Sheriff's deputies from San Bernardino county set the cabin that Dorner was holed up in on fire. During the event, the Sheriff's department asked the media to stop filming the live feed which is convenient because now there is no evidence of what really happened.

Well, for the exception of police scanner chatter that was recorded that makes it look an awful lot like the police intentionally set the cabin on fire. If you have a smartphone, now you can listen in on the damning chatter yourself! The two apps are:

Scanner Radio for Android
Police Radio for iPhone

If the cabin was set fire by itself, it might be easier to believe it was an accident.However there were numerous incidencts where police during the hunt for Dorner were shooting at innocent civilians. If you couple that with the fire, it certainly seems that the police had no intention of bringing Droner in alive.

Now I'm not saying that Dorner was a hero at all, or even innocent. The problem here is that we have a 5th Amendment right to due process in the United States, and the police should not have the authority to choose who they bring in alive or who they don't.

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know what you think in the comments.

How To Deploy A SSTP VPN Server

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:56:50 PDT

This week I decided to do a quick walk-through on how to setup an SSTP server in Windows 2008 or 2008 R2. Actually, the video only shows Windows 2008 R2, but that is better anyway because it is easier to change SSL certificates in Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) in Windows 2008 R2 than it is in Windows 2008.

Since the instructions are so similar, I will just point to a previous article I wrote a while back on Bauer-Power. That article was written for Windows 2008, but the steps are essentially the same. (How to setup SSTP in Windows 2008)

I really like using Windows RRAS with SSTP as a VPN. It's easy to setup, and unlike appliance VPN's, you don't have to license individual users. Plus, SSTP uses SSL encryption, and port 443 which is opened outbound on most firewalls because it is so common.

Plus if you want to use two-factor authentication with it, you can use Phone Factor, a tool we talked about in episode 34.

What VPN technology do you like to use? Let us know in the comments.

How To Setup A PGP/GPG Key Server in Ubuntu

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:55:33 PDT

This week I decided to take an old project from my Bauer-Power archives, and turn it into a Tech Chop! This week I installed SKS on Ubuntu to create a PGP/GnuPG key server repository. This is great if you use PGP on GnuPG to encrypt emails with your friends and co-workers and want your own public key repository.

I also realize, that the instructions themselves might be hard to follow in the video, so here's how you do it:

Just do the following:

Install the sks package

>sudo apt-get install sks
Build the key database

>sudo sks build
Set database permissions

>sudo chown -Rc debian-sks:debian-sks /var/lib/sks/DB
Set the server to start automatically at boot

set initstart=yes in /etc/default/sks
Start the service

>sudo /etc/init.d/sks start

That is it! Now your server is listening on port 11371 for key requests. You can now send and retrieve keys to and from the server using your favorite key manager!

If that is not good enough for you, then you can also add a web interface to handle your key searches and requests. To do that you will need to install Apache:

>sudo apt-get install apache2

Once installed create a directory called www in /var/lib/sks/. Download the index.html and keys.jpg file you will need here: (OpenSKS Web Interface)

Extract the contents to /var/lib/sks/www/. Edit index.html and change the three references to your.site.name (currently at lines 20, 36 & 62) to the url of your keyserver, for example keys.bauer-power.net. Now set the correct permissions on that directory:

>sudo chown -R debian-sks:debian-sks /var/lib/sks/www

Now if you browse to http://your.server.name:11371 you will see a nice, user-friendly web interface for doing public key exchanges!

If you have any questions, hit us up in the comments!

[Via Bauer-Power]

How To Trim Your Social Networking Fat

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:52:26 PDT

This week I decided to do a little bit of a shorter episode, and also get back on track. The last two episode have been fairly politically driven, so I thought I would give you some cool online tools to help you mass unfriend people of Facebook, or mass unfollow people on Twitter! How do you like them apples?

The first tool mentioned is Twitcleaner, which is an online tool that taps into Twitter's API and allows you to do some deep analysis on who you are following. It then gives you a report on the people you are following. It will tell you if they are not following you back, who are time wasters and spammers, etc. It then allows you to mass unfriend them all in one swift motion.

The next tool I talked about is a Greasemonkey script called Delete Facebook Friends. Greasemonkey is for Firefox, but if you are a Google Chrome user, then you need to use Tampermonkey. This script allows you to check off all of the friends you wish to remove from Facebook and delete them all with just a click of a button. Simple!

If you know of other tools that allow you to clean up your social networking stream, let us know in the comments.

Wiping Hard Drives... With Bullets!

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:49:27 PDT

This week we decided to dedicate the show to something we feel was a gift from the Founding Fathers of the United States. That gift was a tool that was meant to be another check for the Government. They created a system where there was supposed to be three branches of Government or equal power so that one branch wouldn't be the ultimate ruler, and become too powerful. Then they gave us, the people, the right to be armed to make sure it stayed that way. George Washington once said:

Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.

Unless you have been living under a rock lately you have no doubt heard that the Federal Government, as well as many States, are now seeking to infringe on our Second Amendment rights under the pretense of "protecting the children."

The problem with this, even though you may agree with it, is that we in the United States have been slowly losing our rights since the terror attacks on 9/11/2001. Those attacks led the Government to form Home Land Security and the TSA. It allowed for The Patriot Act to pass. Even now laws like NDAA are being passed to "protect us" yet they infringe on, or bypass the rights guaranteed to us under the Bill of Rights. Benjamin Franklin once said:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Anyway, because of current events my former Navy buddy and I decided to take some old hard drives out to some BLM land near Campo California to "wipe" them with some bullets. Enjoy!

Online Tool For Contacting Your Representatives

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:42:39 PDT

Welcome to the first episode of Tech Chop in 2013! Sorry we didn't so the usual type of episode in front of our green screen set with a script. We had to scramble to get this one out on time because of a hectic week.

Anyway, this week we give you a really great tool you can use to contract your representatives in Washington DC on every single bill you care about. The tool is called PopVox. From their page:

Constituent communications are flooding and overwhelming Congressional offices. POPVOX verifies, aggregates, and simplifies communication with Congress on an open and trusted (and nonpartisan) common ground. Advocacy organizations, trade associations, unions and other groups send their members to POPVOX to take action on bills pending before Congress. Congressional staff and lawmakers log into POPVOX to measure the pulse of their district. POPVOX provides a curating interface for anyone — including Congressional staff, the public and the media — to access and understand the voice of the people.

Not only that, but if you are a blogger like me, or have a website pertaining to a particular bill or bills, PopVox gives you really cool embed code. A perfect example of a website using the PopVox embed code is my very own Does Gun Control Work, which I have posted the PopVox embed code for each of the 12 proposed gun related bills introduced to Congress in January.

Since we live in a Constitutional Republic, it is important that we contact our representatives on the issues that affect us so they can represent us effectively.

Tech Chop's Top 10 Favorite Freeware Programs

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 21:45:35 PST

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This is the last episode of Tech Chop for the year. We will be on hiatus until January 14th. In the meantime, you can still come back to TechChop.com to catch The Tech Podcasts Network's live coverage of CES 2013 January 8th-11th!

This week we decided to give you our top 10 favorite freeware programs that we use every day on our Windows systems. These are tools that help us out a lot in our daily Systems Administration duties. They are (Not in any particular order):

What freeware programs do you use all the time? Any that you think should have been on my list? Let me know some of your favorite programs in the comments!

Software and Equipment We Use To Produce Tech Chop

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 21:42:24 PST

This week we decided to answer a question that was emailed in from long time viewer, Nolan. In a nutshell he wanted to know what equipment and software we are using now to produce Tech Chop.

He also noted that we've come a long way since our beginning as Bauer-Power TV. In the video you will see the progression of the show from our super humbe beginnings when we used a crappy point and shoot Kodak Easyshare camera to do the filming! What we are using now is a lot better.

Here is the list:

That's it! These items, with the exception of the camera and the software are relatively cheap, however if you start doing your own podcast and making money, you can write it all off as a business expense. Not bad huh?

If you have any questions, hit us up in the comments below!

Installing Windows 8

info@techchop.com (Paul Bauer) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 21:23:20 PST

This week I decided to go through an install of Windows 8 with you using VirtualBox. I finally got my MSDN subscription renewed through work so I was able to get a copy of Windows 8 Enterprise to try out. So far, despite a lot of what I've heard, I like it.

True, the design of the Start Screen is stupidly designed for tablet users without regard for regular PC users, but that can easily be fixed with a utility called Windows 8 Start Button. With that free utility installed, Windows 8 looks and works a little more like Windows 7 which we've all grown used to.

Have any of you installed Windows 8 yet? If so, how do you like it so far? Any tips or suggestions? Let us know in the comments!

Tech Chop

Blast From The Past! 'Bauer-Power' Episode 13

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