I use a program called “ColdTurkey” to help me block social media during work or study hours. This program typically works well in Internet Explorer however I find that sometimes in Chrome that the page I want to be blocked will sometimes be accessible.

What’s going on with the program?

The Cold Turkey program blocks your access to the websites using your “Hosts” file. It adds a bunch of options to the host file that basically says:

If you want to go to Facebook… Instead of looking up its address through your Internet Service Providers name server, look it up using your locally created host file.

All the sites you block actually get pointed to the Cold Turkey servers instead of the real address of the blocked websites.

Your computer will always look to your host file instead of looking up the name from the name server so it just always seems to work with Internet Explorer but not Chrome.

When troubleshooting the issue I noticed the system was going to the host file (Cold Turkey) location… However, I noticed Chrome was going to the legitimate location. This meant the website could still be accessed.

Because of this troubleshooting, I knew the “issue” was with chrome. It was not with the system or the Cold Turkey software.

After trying several things nothing seemed to work. I did find however a chrome command that seemed to do the trick. If you are using Cold Turkey lots you might want to bookmark the command page for easy access.

In the Chrome Browser you will need to type:

• chrome://net-internals/#dns

The page will look like this:

You will need to click the “Clear host cache” button. Once you do this the pages that you had blocked using Cold Turkey will actually be blocked!

I recently found out that youtube has a tonne of really amazing audio books online.

In my quest to convert these audio books to mp3 files I soon realised almost none of the websites I had use would allow me to convert a VERY LONG youtube video into a mp3.  Most audio books are like 9+ hours!

I started thinking how would I be able to do this. I remembered I had installed an awesome piece of software called “Freemake Video Converter”. It would take videos on youtube and convert them into anything you wanted. I just couldn’t remember if it would do mp3’s.

I opened it up and found it DID!

Here’s the complete “how to convert a Youtube video longer than 20 minutes to MP3”!

1. Make sure “Freemake Video Converter” is installed.
2. Go to youtube and find the video you want to convert to MP3. Copy the URL at the top of the page
   1. I will use this link for my tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghA0I_MJFA
3. In Freemake Video Converter Click “Paste URL”
4. At the bottom click “To MP3”
5. It will ask you a couple of things
   1. What bitrate you want
   2. Where you want to save the MP3
6. For Audiobooks 128Kb/sec is fine. I told it to save to a folder on my computer.
7. Viola. Sit back and let the program do the hard work!

 

 

 

 

This pages will continue to grow as I finish studying for the Windows 2012 Exams. I will break the studying up into 46 sections.

01 – Windows Server Editions

1. 4 editions
2. No 32bit editions
3. Can switch between the Gui and Core
4. No Itanium
5. No standalone HPC Server. You can add it to other servers here as a package.

Foundation Server Edition

• Scaled Down
  • limited to 15 users
• Designed for small business file and print sharing
• Simple dashboard
• Physical server only (not virtual machine)

Essentials

• 25 Users
• 1 physical or Virtual Server
• Defaults to Server Manager

Standard/Datacenter

• Contains all Windows Server 2012 Features
• Standard
  • 2 Virtual Instances
• Datacenter
  • Unlimited number of virtual Instances
  • Not available via Retail Channels.
• Licensed per user (cal)

02 -New Features in 2012

Server Interfaces

There are now 3 interfaces:

1. Core
2. Minimal
3. Full GUI

Windows 2008 made you specify the interface at install. You couldn’t change this option unless you re-installed. 2012 allows you to switch between the interfaces at any time however you do need to restart the server. You can do this by enabling or disabling the item in “features”. It is called “User Interfaces and Infrastructure”.

Server Core

Roles Not available in Server core:

• Active Directory Federation Services
• Fax Server & Application Server
• Network Policy & Access Services
• Remote Desktop Services / Gateway / Session Host / Web Access
• Volume Activation Services
• Windows Deployment Services

The number of roles supported by Server core has increased:

• 12 of the 19 roles are available to be used.
• Only 9 were available in 2008
• Only 10 were available in 2008R2

Server Core 2012

• SQL Server is supported in Server core!
• Server Manager has changed significantly
  • Provides access to most admin functions
• Manage Pools of servers from Server Manager

Storage Spaces

This allows you to:

• Combine several disks together.
• They can be internal or external and SSD or Standard.
• Allows you setup a large pool and then you can set it up into one or more virtual drives.
• Supports Redundancy
• Support Thin provision

Resilient FS (ReFS)

• New Generation File System
• Self Healing (reduces downtime by not needing to restart)