From this entry in Jeff Key’s ASP.NET weblog. I fancy myself a bit of a tip-fiend but there were about a dozen which I’d never heard of.

From the 7/30 Lockergnome Windows Daily comes this handy tool:

ShareWatch lets you continuously monitor who’s using your network shares via a small system tray app.

ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) is an LDAP directory service that can run on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 but runs as a user-level service as opposed to a system-level service. The download is here.

SecureIE from Winferno Software can supposedly help lock down IE and help keep you from the nasties out there.

Lesse … I found this link from this article on RootSecure.net which is actually a link to this PC World article.

Found this in kbAlertz: MSKB article 825750 tells you how to disable DCOM. Why would you want to do that? It obviates the recently identified and hyped and over-hyped problem where a bad guy can take over your machine (discussed in MS03-026 and supposedly addressed in MSKB 823980).

And, of course, it happened at the worst time and I didn’t take the time to record the error information. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll happen again. In the 30 days or so that I ran Tiny I never had a problem like that. Hmm … just another data point.

My 30-day eval period for Tiny Personal Firewall V5.0 beta has expired. Now, who ever heard of a company applying the 30 days to a beta? — you’d think they’d want people to continue to test. Anyway, I’m now running a 30-day eval of ZoneAlarm Pro V4.0.123.012. I don’t care much for the UI but I never have — too flashy for me. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. Right now, Tiny is my fave, even with the bugs/problems. Note that I haven’t had any functional problems, just issues with the UI … I can deal with that.

Got this from the Windows XP mailing list maintained by Sunbelt Software (great mailing list, BTW — there are lots more here). If you’ve got a port that’s open or being listened to on your system, chances are you can find it at one of these sites.

http://andrew.triumf.ca/cgi-bin/port
http://www.neohapsis.com/neolabs/neo-ports/
http://lists.gpick.com/portlist/lookup.asp
http://www.snort.org/ports.html

Shure In-Ear Earphones reviewed here.

Seen those things stuck in performers ears at concerts? Those are “monitoring devices” that, apparently, block out a lot of sound except what’s coming through the earphone (they claim 10-20dB attenuation). ExtremeTech explains about ’em and reviews 2 of Shure’s. Go to Shure and look for E1C and the E2C.

Woody Leonhard does it again. In this issue of Woody’s Windows Watch, he discusses the truth behind the story circulating last week about cracking Windows passwords in less than 15 seconds. Well worth reading!

He also discusses Windows Product Activation — seems that someone has gone through every byte sent to Microsoft during the activation process and has been able to account for all but a couple of bytes.