Exciting  news here at PC Cybertek! I’ve expanded the capabilities of the void of sunlight, purple walled, silver celling, neon lit, smoke filled, PC Cybtek Laboratory. And yes, that is an accurate description of the lab. But who cares what the room I spend countless hours staring at monitors looks or smells like? I’ve finally done what I have been threating to do for ages. Get on with it already you say… OK OK After the break, I’ll tell you

On the bench now sits a computer specifically to test security, learn more about virus and malware infections and create tutorials, nay, create videos of how to remove said virus & malware. Up until now, when I came across something I needed to remove from someone’s computer, I would take notes. If I thought what I learned while cleaning the computer might help someone else, I would post about it here and do my best to reconstruct what was done from my notes. There has always been a couple of problems with this method. First  I have to find and identify the infection. I don’t keep step by step notes of this part and even if I did, trying write about it isn’t easy. Then, trying to recall everything I did and translate it into something that the reader can follow, can also be tricky. Then there is all the work involved to bring this info to you. After I spend hours hunting down, identifying and removing the virus, I have to spend on average, a couple hours at least, writing about how I did it. And I have to do it while my memory is still fresh or risk leaving out some critical info. And to be honest, my only motivation, to do all this work is to be a nice guy. I don’t get paid for this blog, on the contrary, it costs me money to keep it going. Money is something that isn’t abundant around here and suggesting that people visit my sponsors, if they want to support this site, is something that violates the Adsense rules and resulted in them pulling their ads from my site (and left me with $50 in my adsense account which I will never get  )  As you can see it costs me time and money to keep this site up.

The solution I’ve come up with is, video tutorials on a fresh OS. No, this won’t pay for the site, but it will make my job easier. I’ve installed Virtual Machine on the lab’s computer so I can deliberately infect a Virtual Machine (VM) and record the process of removing it. This way I don’t have to spend all the time taking notes and trying to reconstruct it in a blog post. It also solves the problem of cross contamination. When I’m removing a virus, manually, from a clients computer, chances are they have more than one problem. With a fresh Windows install running on a VM, the removal instructions I’m making are all related to the focus of the tutorial and not other software issues or malware.

Of course you’ll miss out on the long winded,  and at times almost witty posts. But I’m sure you’ll survive. And if everything goes as planed, you will get video that will show you exactly what to do. I can also go into more detail as to why I do things the way I do them. With my audio engineering and video editing background, they should look and sound pretty good too.  I look forward bringing you my first video tutorial soon.

Before you go, I have a question for you. Can you recommend a screen recording program for making  these videos? I’ve used Cam Studio but I know there are quite a few of these programs available.  I would prefer if it had both audio and video, but video only will work if there is some features unique to the video only program. I’ll probably edit the whole thing in Vegas Pro so I can dub in the audio either way. If you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments below.

Thankz,

PC Cybertek Chris

You can see what happens when someone guesses an easy password and gets into a router, and the lsessons learned, here.

Even though it’s only been up for maybe 2 months, there’s a lot of great content. There’s plenty of How-To videos, for beginners to advanced users. There’s videos about administration, set-up, widgets, publishing, media, plugins, themes, custom design, and more. There is also a section of videos from Word Camp.

I wanted to write about Word Press TV when it first went live, but I haven’t actully spent any amount of time on it, untill recently. Most of them are using vimeo to host their videos, so the quality is execlent. Theses aren’t some junky, pixalated Youtube videos. They are high quality and when I viewed them with HD turned on, the screen captures of in the how-to videos was perfect and crisp and easy to read the all the text in the videos.  Even when not in full screen or HD you can read them easily. If only everyone made instructional videos at this quality. Check out the example below.

Getting set up with the WP e-Commerce plugin: settings and configuration

While Irongeek maybe best known for his video tutorials, he has also written some nice netowrk security articles. His latest, State Hacking/Computer Security Laws, is very informative and was posted at the end of December of 2007, so it’s current. How To Cyberstalk Potential Employers “This article is less diabolical than its title might imply. Essentially, I want to give the reader some tips for finding more information about a potential employer than the job listing may reveal.” And he does. It’s well written and I like his inclusion of screen shots.

If irongeek.com only had the video section, that would be enough alone for me to recomend it. I’m sure he laid the ground work and inspired others to make hacking video tutorials. There’s also a couple scripts/apps that he wrote, some reviews, and don’t forget the clips of him working out. And if my word isn’t good enough, there’s also half a dozen campuses that use his material. And here’s a nice little link that shows you all the info that can be seen from your browser.

This one is a keeper. Definitely worthy of a bookmark and some time for further exploration. I tip my proverbial hat to Iron Geek. Well done sir.

With so many available to watch, wouldn’t it be nice if there was some software that would let you subscribe to them and view them all in one place? Enter miro. Miro lets you subscribe to all your favorite vidcasts and automaticly download them as they are released. It also has a good sized index, so it is a good place to seek out new ones. It has a built in player that allows you to view them and if you pause it, you can continue watching where you left off, automatically. If there is one you like and it’s not in miro’s index, which currently has over 3000 channels, you can add it. If you already subscribe to some with another program, like iTunes, you can set up a watch directory and miro will import them. You can also search the entire index for any video. Another feature will let you email a link, of any of the videos, to your friends. Maybe you don’t have a ton of space on your hard drive, not a problem, you can set miro to automatically delete content after a certain amout of time.

How much would you pay for a cool piece of software like this? Don’t worry, it’s free! So don’t just sit there, head on over to www.getmiro.com and see what you have been missing.