JK's Journal » xTreme G33k

Removing the junk from my new Dell PC

JK — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 01:47:56 +0000

So after 6 years I finally got a new desktop PC. Techbargains had a great deal on a new XPS 300; I can post more on those deets later. Needless to say I was a little excited to pick up my new machine today at FedEx.

I had a convo with @InstKamra at work today about removing the standard crap that comes with all new vendor systems. I usually embark on a painstaking process to meticulously uninstall, reboot, verify leftover files and registry entries, then install my preferred software. It’s a process I’ve done dozens if not 100+ times and it’s always worth it- Windows Add/Remove couldn’t uninstall white from rice. (*rimshot!*)

@InstKamra mentioned that Windows 7 was supposed to be better at managing these things, and I had some time to kill while I was setting everything up, so I used Revo Uninstaller and Google Docs to put together some numbers. In the end, according to Revo in Moderate mode, there were 1,048 files and 182 leftover registry entries from uninstalling 17 pieces of crapware. Follow the Google Docs link for a full table: Dell XPS 300 Leftover Junk.

I’ve also listed my go-to cadre of must have pieces of Windows FREEWARE, and I don’t say that lightly. I just might take these to my grave on a thumbdrive:

Avast Anti-virus
Revo Uninstaller
Chrome w/ Adblock Plus
Defraggler
Codestuff Starter
Sysinternals Desktops
Lastpass

Once I downloaded Defraggler I ran a quick Analyze and found the following horrendous state of hard drive fragmentation:

1,065 Fragmented Files across 9.6 GB
7,035 Total Fragments
27% Fragmentation
35.2GB hard drive space used

And this is a barebones system right now! Aggh! I can’t wait to dualboot with Ubuntu, but first I have to get Steam on here so I can play Skyrim in all its visual glory. Insert image of me as a kid in a candy shop here.

Late night software ramblings

JK — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:28:09 +0000

Lifehacker clued me into creepy tonight. I’m running Ubuntu 10.4 and couldn’t compile, so I booted into Windows and installed the win32 version. I’m simultaneously impressed and ‘creeped’ out, it works amazingly well, and I only trolled my twitter account.

I’m currently trying to creep famous world leaders. Oh, and today my doc nonchalantly checked her smartphone to see if my new antibiotics clashed with my current meds (answer: Nope!). I really really do love Living In The Future.

Update: Good results on Karl Rove and Ashton Kutcher- no, I’m not calling AK a famous world leader .

Karl Rove (full source: kml):

Ashton Kutcher (full source: kml):

An Encrypted PDF… on Crack

JK — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 01:47:20 +0000

So, regarding this encrypted PDF…

I researched multiple articles. I tried strong PDF editing tools… no dice due to the encryption.

So I researched again. More articles. Downloaded one package- no dice. Downloaded another package and ran it from the command line:

jktuxbox@tuxbox:~$ cd _Temp/
jktuxbox@tuxbox:~/_Temp$ cd da4651/
jktuxbox@tuxbox:~/_Temp/da4651$ ls
da4651_r.pdf
jktuxbox@tuxbox:~/_Temp/da4651$ pdfcrack da4651_r.pdf
PDF version 1.2
Security Handler: Standard
V: 1
R: 2
P: 65476
Length: 40
Encrypted Metadata: True
FileID: c1f160e0774c3af7e6ec72fa7e0cd38b
U: 70b73f450d873ad7c04f2074fe7c7bb84c835c1ff2916515a1cb2e8fe1eb98d3
O: 9259aa1e352b3bf5d97b383d362d5b92f977aea287b2411706d0c759276bd4c8
found user-password: ‘ ‘
jktuxbox@tuxbox:~/_Temp/da4651$

That’s right- the password to decrypt the file was one keypress of the spacebar. *Epic facepalm*