Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

Meet $, your new best friend for WSL

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We’ve raved about Microsoft’s latest take on a Linux subsystem for Windows, this time in the form of the oddly-dubbed “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” Windows Subsystem for Linux — herein and forever after referred to only as WSL for the sake of our collective sanity — but as awesome as being able to type bash in a command prompt to get access to holy posix goodiness, we think we can do better. Meet $.

$, formally known as RunInBash, is a simple command line helper utility that simply runs whatever follows it under WSL rather than in the current (Windows) terminal. Here’s a picture to illustrate (click to expand):

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macOS-like window switching on Windows with alt-`

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Dedicated followers (and anyone making the switch from Mac to PC) – this Pi Day 2017 gift is just for you! A new day means a new free app for our favorite peeps on the internet. Meet Easy Window Switcher, our invisible window cycling utility that makes it ridiculously easy to jump between windows of the same application à la OS X with the alt` (alt-backtick) keyboard shortcut.

Easy Window Switcher (codename wincycle) imbues your Windows PC with the same superpowers that were once exclusively reserved for the ranks of Apple’s OS X users. With Easy Window Switcher, you don’t need to muck around with alt-tab trying to find the window you’re looking for amongst 40 or 50 others1 – just hold down the alt key and backtick away to your heart’s content. And moving backwards is as easy as 1, 2, 3 altshift` and done.

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  1. What? You really don’t have that many windows open at once? What are you doing here reading this post!? ↩

Dell XPS 15 vs Precision 5520

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Dell has two top-of-the-line laptops that are currently competing for king-of-the-hill status — quite the odd choice from a marketing perspective, no doubt — but how do the two compare? We take a look at both the XPS 15 (9560) and the Precision 5520 and see how they stack up against one-another.

The 2017 XPS 15 9560 and the 2017 Precision 5520 are both “flagship” laptops out of Dell’s prosumer and business divisions respectively, and while they share a chassis and similar specs, they aren’t exactly two faces of the same coin. While on the entry level both can be similarly configured, the XPS 15 comes in one of seven different configurations (or eight if outside the USA), while the Precision 5520 can be hand-customized in any of a dozen+ configurations depending on your (small business) needs. The real difference between the two comes into stark visibility when comparing the top-end options between the two lines, however.

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rewrite: a rust-powered, in-place file rewrite utility

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Let’s say you’ve got a terminal open and you want to sort the contents of a file before you email it to a friend. The file can contain anything and it could be of any length, it doesn’t matter. What do you do?

The obvious answer is to use sort. Sorting the file is as easy as sort myfile – except it doesn’t actually sort the file, it sorts the *contents* of the file and dumps them to the command line (via stdout). So how do you sort the file “in-place,” so-to-speak? Again, the obvious answer would be sort myfile > myfile,1 redirecting the output of the sort command back to the file you want to ultimately send sorted.

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  1. Don’t do this! ↩

FeedSnap: The FeedBurner Replacement

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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FeedSnap logo Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve certainly seen all the hullaballoo that took place when Google shut down Google Reader for good. Aside from being a damn good RSS web-based reader, it was very importantly, so popular that and backed by a company so huge that it basically killed off all its competitors without even trying. If you care about your blog, you’re probably looking for a FeedBurner replacement or a FeedBurner alternative just about now.

People have been panicking about the so-called “death of RSS” ever since. RSS has a special place in our hearts, we think the idea behind a simple, standardized, freely-accessible stream of updates for just any website is a confluence of awesomeness that only comes around once in a blue moon. In other words: if RSS dies today, it’s not because something equally awesome has replaced it. Anyone equating RSS with Twitter streams (where stuff is virtually designed to be lost in the madness) and Facebook “feeds” (accessible only to friends, at the mercy of Facebook Inc) has no clue what they are talking about.

The writing has been on the wall for months, and pretty much everyone has come to suspect the next shoe will soon drop and Google will kill FeedBurner (the equivalent of Google Reader for website publishers) in the next round of “spring cleaning.” Google purchased Chicago-based startup (yay Windy City!) FeedBurner from its founders back in 2007, and ever since has been disabling and dismembering it, one feature at a time. Today, FeedBurner is only a sorry reminder of it once was.

To that end, we are happy to introduce today FeedSnap.

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Tools to help manage and recover your new Windows 8 installation

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Today’s the big day: Windows 8 has hit the shelves and customers are flocking to buy the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system. In the back of everyone’s mind is the big question: what do I do to properly set up my Windows 8 installation, and in the (hopefully unlikely) situation of disaster, if I can no longer get into my Windows 8 PC, what can I do about it?

All of NeoSmart Technologies products are 100% Windows 8 ready. They’ve all been vetted and heavily tested against the latest version of the Windows OS and have been updated with all the features you require for peace of mind. They’ll help you get your system working the way you want it, and then God forbid something bad happen, get you back on your feet as soon as possible.

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Announcing EasyBCD 2.2: Windows 8 dual-booting and more!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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New EasyBCD logoQuick: what takes 5 years, two failed attempts, and thirteen contributors? Answer: EasyBCD with multilanguage support!

Who knew it would be this hard to release a version of EasyBCD that supports languages from English to Arabic and from Korean to Russian? We certainly had no idea it would take this long and this much work back in June of 2007 when we first attempted this gargantuan task! It turns out it’s not such an easy thing to organize and manage the translation of a medium-sized software project – and that no good tools existed to make it possible.

We were expecting to find (this late into the game) a plethora of .NET localization tools and resources that would make the job ridiculously easy, but it turns out all the existing solutions were terrible for one reason or another: too hard for non-developers to grasp, no versioning support, no on-the-fly deployment (i.e. requires recompilation), no unicode support, text-only interfaces, and the list goes on and on. We had to develop our own complete end-to-end translation and globalization framework and associated utilities (xml-based, text-editable, translation interface, versioning support, unicode support, on-the-fly deploy, string aliasing, derivable strings, language cleanup, outdated/missing string search, and more!), which we’ve open sourced to save others the trouble in the future.

Now that we have the excuses out of the way, let us introduce EasyBCD 2.2, complete with 13 languages from around the globe. With much thanks to the following people, we have been able to provide these languages out-of-the-box with EasyBCD 2.2:

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Introducing Windows Recovery Essentials

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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There have been whispers and rumors making the rounds all over the internet for the past few months regarding the licensing of WinPE. The rumors are, in fact, true: as of January 2012, Microsoft has no longer been renewing any Windows Pre Installation Environment licensing agreements with any partner companies; all of whom are now required to find alternative means of meeting their bootable environment requirements.

As many of you are aware, NeoSmart Technologies is one of the companies licensing Windows PE from Microsoft Corp. Back in August of last year, we revealed that we’d struck a deal with Microsoft wherein we’d be licensing Windows PE for use in our system recovery CDs, making them legally available for download for our users. Unfortunately, that agreement will not be in place for much longer, and the recovery and repair CDs in their current form will soon no longer be available for purchase.

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Open Letter to CNet (Updated)

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It has recently come to our attention (original story, HN discussion) that the recently updated EasyBCD listing on CNet/Download.com no longer links directly to an official setup package but rather to an “CNet EasyBCD Installer” which bundles certain 3rd party products and viralware (others are referring to it as malware, we will refrain from doing so) and attempts to pass it on to our end users as part of the EasyBCD experience.

Unlike some of the affected open source software that is listed on CNet, EasyBCD does not use a copyleft license that lets companies and individuals do whatever they want with EasyBCD and repackage it in whichever manner they choose. In fact, in the past whenever we were asked why one of the most popular freeware products available online was not open source, we have repeatedly insisted that the ability to maintain control over the distribution and packing of EasyBCD to ensure an ongoing comfortable and friendly user experience has been our number one reason.

CNet is of course not the only download site using these so-called “downloaders” to bundle unwanted software that unsuspecting users would normally not install. They are, however, one of the largest and prior to this, also one of the more respected download entities. As of today, we shall be contacting any and all companies and sites that use custom “installers” to download/install EasyBCD as this is in direct violation of the EasyBCD license.

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Malware Warning

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It’s our unfortunate duty to inform our readers and users that for a period of several hours some resources on the neosmart.net domain were compromised by one or more attackers unknown. By means of a vulnerability that we were not able to track in one of the scripts on our site, attackers were able to inject malicious JavaScript into resources on our site, leading to visitors to our domain being redirected to a webpage elsewhere online that instructed them to download and install a malicious plugin.

The malware has been purged from our site and resources and there is no longer any threat to our visitors. We’re still working on getting more information, but the malware in question is labeled as JS/BlacoleRef.J and JS/Blacole.A by Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s important to note that visitors to our site could not be infected without their knowledge. The malicious JavaScript in question triggered the browser to display a “do you want to install this plugin” dialog (the exact text differs by web browser make and model), and some browsers were not susceptible to the redirect attack. Users with antivirus software should also not have been at risk, as the malware in question has been blacklisted by the various companies for several weeks now.

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