0wn th3 1n73r.net

Biometric Devices Missing from Windows 7 Control Panel

AuthenTec, a company that makes fingerprint scanning devices, worked closely with Microsoft to enable fingerprint authentication without third-party software for Windows 7. Unfortunately, the settings to set up the fingerprint scanner do not always show up in the Windows 7 control panel. To set up the fingerprint scanner you usually can navigate to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Biometric Devices. From there you can enter your password and register your fingerprints. What if biometric devices is missing from control panel?

To get the biometric devices to show up in Windows 7 control panel download the drivers from AuthenTec’s website (mirror here). I am not sure if this next step is necessary, but the directions I found said to extract the driver with uniextractor. I have extracted the driver for you and zipped it up here (x32, x64) so you don’t have to. Open the zip file and extract the files somewhere and run setup.exe. This installer will create a folder under C:\Program Files\ called WIN7TS and will install the drivers for your finger print scanner. It will also load the necessary components so you can use the fingerprint scanner from the control panel. Once the biometric devices option shows up you can set up everything from the control panel.

If you are getting the ‘Set-up Failure’ error, then try running C:\Program Files\WIN7TS\TrueSuiteApplication.exe directly. It is the same program that runs from the control panel but sometimes has less errors on setup.

Let me know in the comments if you have any problems or questions.

Winter 2009 Theme Pack for Windows 7

Greetings 1n73r.net readers! I am excited to be here for my first post where I will be creating and posting Windows 7 themes for you.

In case you don’t know, when Windows 7 was released it came with a great feature for creating customizable themes. These themes include the Desktop Background, Sounds, Window Color, and Screen Saver.

Within my work place it is no secret that I love to find great wallpaper and I end up changing it quite often. Now I get to share them with you!

First off I thought I would share with you my Winter 2009 Theme Pack. All you need to do is download the linked file to your computer (this will only work if you are using Windows 7). Next double click on the icon that downloads and it will open your Personalization window and automatically install the theme. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.

Right Click on the link below and click “Save As” to download the theme pack. Enjoy!
Winter 2009 Themepack

2010 Tech Predictions

It was fun doing this last year. So I thought I would have another go at it and see what I come up with.

Computers:
1. Netbooks/sub-12″ laptops will be even bigger than before because they will finally be useful. Atom/ULV processors, Ion/Tegra graphics, and touch enabled devices will make having a 17″ laptop a bad thing. Oh and used/refurbished laptops might play a big role in killing desktops once and for all.
2. Windows Home server will have a big update (based on server 2008 r2) and will include Windows Media Center backend and Zune software so you can plug your tuners directly into your WHS. This will also allow for great integration in Windows Mobile 7 and begin a new wave of extenders. I don’t think it will be out till Q3/Q4 though so extenders won’t make a push until 2011.
3. Someone will finally offer a true alternative to cable TV. It will probably come from Apple/Netflix/Boxee/Hulu/Microsoft and it will still be an expensive monthly charge but it will be possible to disconnect your cable/satellite. I am thinking Microsoft will begin a Zune Pass for TV which will integrate into Windows Media Center when WHS 2 and WM7 come out.
4. Apple will begin talks of their new OS, Microsoft will stay quiet about what they are working (and ride the good wave of Windows 7) on as long as possible, and Linux will be in a transitional phase while KDE and Gnome both get big updates.

Video Games:
1. Nintendo won’t come out with anything new. They are going to milk the Wii and DS as long as they can and plan for the Wii HD announcement in 2011. Microsoft will do the same with the Xbox 360 but they will probably hint that they are making something new before the end of the year.
2. Sony will hopefully focus on finishing their projects (home, media codecs, 3D, etc.) and open up the PS3 to 3rd party programs in 2010. Things like Netflix and Pandora streaming I don’t think are too far fetched and I really hope to see a decent browser come to the console along with Vudu streaming.
3. A new mobile console will come out. Probably in the form of a phone, but I expect a lot from Microsoft with Xbox Live on Windows Mobile 7.

Cell Phones:
1. Verizon will begin its rollout of LTE and Apple will announce a device for Verizon. I have always thought Apple would not make a CDMA device until Verizon starts rolling out LTE and that will happen in 2010. This also means that the device will work on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in the US and many GSM carriers around the world once GSM networks start updates. With a device on Verizon Apple will have a huge hold on the mobile market. It won’t go unanswered though.
2. Android will become number 3 in the mobile world. That is no small feat however. Android is currently the bottom in market share, by a lot. They will win in 4 ways, 1. Cheap devices 2. Multiple options 3. Any Carrier 4. The decline of RIM and Windows Mobile. Windows mobile has already been stagnant for the past 5 months and RIM is losing it’s customers. I don’t think RIM is smart enough to announce something big so they will die off but will still hold a good portion of the market share through most of 2010. Oh, and an official Google phone and a crap load of more updates to the OS won’t hurt either.
3. webOS will gain market share thanks to Verizon but will still fail to make the impact that the new Apple device will. Palm’s only benefit will be that they will be on Verizon first because they will support CDMA. I really hope they come out with a new phone, but if anything I think they will only announce a new phone in Q3 but not release anything new.
4. Windows Mobile 7 will have features built in that will make any iPhone user gelous. I am not just talking about cool games, I am talking about ZuneHD player integration, amazing hardware, and media streaming galore. I think they will integrate with the new Windows Home Server/Media Center and will really make seamless media playback better than ever. Not only that but WM7 will be heavily integrated into social networks allowing you to be always connected to your facebook, twitter, email, etc. even more seamless than Android or webOS.
5. Apple Tablet will be huge at first, and then go the way of the Apple TV. Yes the device will be really cool, yes fanboys/blogs/tech sites will long for the chance to gaze upon the amazing apple logo on the back, and yes it will do really cool things with media playback and music streaming. But if even 1/2 of the rumors are true the device is destined to fail. A ~$800, 10″ tablet you carry around to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, and play games on really just sounds lame unless I was at home sitting on my couch. And in that case I will just use my laptop or get a netbook preferably with Google Chrome for less than 1/2 the price. I feel weird talking about it when it is really only about a month from being announced. But in all honesty, I don’t see how this would be any better than a device you can actually carry in your pocket like say, a Google Phone. Oh and the tablet will have hardware issues in the first generation.

Other:
1. 3D in TV’s will have a big push. There are finally standards to allow for it and sales will be slow at first because there won’t be much content and prices will be ridiculous. Interest will rise when cable providers announce 3D cable TV offerings for launch in 2011.
2. Retail stores will begin to push online sales and start to lose services because consumers are getting smarter, or at least more resourceful. With Amazon having as big of a year as they did, stores like Best Buy, Barns n Noble, and Sears just can’t rely on people coming into their stores as much.
3. The Automotive industry will finally push for a standard in electric/hybrid cars. With so many companies going out of business, automotive makers can’t stay fragmented for long. They will have to agree upon something or they will lose to a up and coming company like Tesla.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Mostly I feel 2010 will be a year of recovery and not innovation. Although necessity is the mother of invention so maybe I am wrong.

2009 Predictions Follow-up

I thought I would follow up on my predictions for last year and see how I did.

Computers:
1. Multitouch – While this didn’t make as big of a push as I hoped, hardware development is very slow in a recession, there have been announcements of hardware coming out in 2010 that defiantly take advantage of multitouch inputs. Project Natal and the PS3 motion controller did surprise me though.
2. Linux Market Share – I cannot find a good answer on this one. But lets just say market share boomed but not where I thought it would. Android and webOS are both Linux based devices that saw a huge jump in market share from where they were in 2008. And there were also reports of Linux having a 30% market share in netbooks. Those numbers are good enough for me to say this is confirmed!
3. Microsoft Solutions – Windows Mobile was a failure still because WM7 got pushed back, the ZuneHD made huge progress and if weren’t for apps would be preferred over the iPod Touch in the tech world. Just the fact that I had 4-5 people ask me about the Zune this year makes me think it was a success. A year ago if you said Zune nobody knew what you were talking about. Windows 7 was a success but I think more than anything Microsoft no longer is the joke of the tech world, Apple is. Just getting their reputation back was a huge success for them.
Video games:
1. Wii – No it didn’t crash, sales are still relatively strong but with addons upon addons for the console and no new games that are any good. This will remain a console that collects dust in peoples entertainment centers.
2. PS3 – Totally confirmed! With the launch of the PS3 slim and a couple big games that finally came out sales jumped tremendously. From what I could find the PS3 actually surpassed the Xbox 360 in worldwide sales. And that is saying a lot considering how much the US and Europe loves the Xbox 360 and how much of the market share that accounts for.
3. Online play – Was it key? Not anymore than previous years. But the PlayStation Network is growing in popularity, and usefulness, and casual Xbox 360 games even needed to sign up for accounts for Netflix streaming, which I think is lame BTW.
4. PS3 3D – It is later than I thought but it is sill coming.
Other:
1. DTV transition – Wow, that was uneventful. I guess people were more prepared than I thought. It also helped that a good portion of OTA users switched to cable or satellite.
2. Streaming video – While this probably wasn’t because of the DTV switch. Many online video sites flourished, and some failed.
3. OLED – Besides a few mobile devices, OLED was unheard of in 2009. I blame that on the recession, that crap is expensive to develop. All in all though, there was no projector built into a laptop and pocket projectors just started coming onto the market. Stupid recession.
4. New site – Nope, didn’t happen. Twitter really took off but nothing to surpass the growth of facebook. Although MySpace is finally bleeding users.

MythTV how-to video – Part 2

This is a continuation of Part 1 and in this video I just walk you through a Mythbuntu installation and what options you want to use. The next parts will be about configuring the software past the initial installation.

Sorry for the sound quality. I had to use my digital camera for video (which is what I used in part 1) but for some reason there was a ton of static on the recording.

MythTV how-to video – Part 1

I have been working on my MythTV box for some time now and finally got around to editing the first part of the how to I recorded when setting it up. The first part is just about setting up the hardware (not much new), but the second part (and probably third and forth) is going to be on setting up the software and getting things configured just the way you want them to be.

How-to Modify the Default User Settings in Linux

Just like my other two posts here is how you can modify your default user settings in Linux. This is similar to OSX but instead of “/System/Library/User\ Templates/English.lproj” being our template directory. It is “/etc/skel”.
The skel directory stands for skeleton and it is where the default files and settings come from when you create a new user in Linux. The skel directory is a lot more basic than Windows or OSX mainly because A) not much is needed to create a Linux profile and B) all of the configuration files are stored in plan text and not some fancy .plist or .dat file.
Typically, most distros will only include three files in their “/etc/skel” directory. Those files are “.bash_logout”, “.bash_profile”, and “.bashrc”. If you want to include any more files/settings you can simply edit the configuration in your profile (or a temporary user), copy the setting files to the “/etc/skel” directory, and chown the files with root:root.
What if you don’t want to overwrite the files that came with your distro but you still want to make a skeleton directory? Simple, edit the “/etc/adduser.conf” file and set the SKEL value to whatever you want. Just make sure that the folder is available to root when you are trying to create the new user. In other words, don’t put the folder on a removable drive.
If you are using the GUI to create the new user the files and settings will be copied automatically and if you are using the adduser command just make sure you use the -m flag.
That is really all there is too it. Let me know if you have more tips for creating a user profile or if this helped you out in the comments.

How-to Modify the Default User Settings in OSX

After my post on modifying default user settings in Vista I thought I should follow up with how to accomplish a similar thing in OSX. For OSX there is only one way to accomplish this, and that way is the manual way.

Just like with the manual way in Vista set up two user accounts, your local admin and a template user. Change all the settings you want for the template user and then restart and log in as admin. To copy the files to the default user you will need to open the terminal and follow the commands below.

Local admin isn’t enough, you will need to actually be using the terminal as the root user. If you don’t have root enabled you can find out how to enable it here.

sudo su

The English.lproj is the default user directory for any user that uses the English language. All we are doing here is copying the English.lproj folder and its contents to English.lproj.bak. For these important files ditto is better than cp because ditto will preserve the “resource fork” using the –rsrc option. It is also a good idea to keep a copy of this default user somewhere else besides just this computer in case something happens. I would recommend zipping up the English.lproj folder and storing it on a backup drive somewhere.

cd /System/Library/User\ Template/
ditto –rsrc English.lproj/* English.lproj.bak

Now that we copied a backup we can remove all the files/settings in the old English.lporj directory. If you accidentally delete the English.lproj folder (instead of just its contents) you can create it again with mkdir.

rm -rf English.lproj/*

Here we are just copying everything from our user we set up to the user template folder. Replace “rothgar” in the below command with the username you gave your template user.

cp -R /Users/rothgar/* English.lproj/

This final step will change the owner and group of the files and folders inside the user template to what they should be. All of the default user files should be owned by root and the group wheel.

chown -Rv root:wheel English.lproj

Those are all the steps needed to modify the default user. It would also be a good idea to reboot the computer, log in as admin, and check/repair disk permissions on the drive just to make sure everything is correct before you take an image of the computer. If everything is correct you can test out your settings with a new user and if everything checks out delete your template user.

Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or problems with the process in the comments.

How-to Create a default user in Windows Vista/7

In Windows Vista and Windows 7 there are two ways you can create a modified default user profile. One is automatic and the other is manual. The automatic way is the recommended way according to Microsoft. However, you may run into some problems using this way so I will explain it the manual way too.

First up is the automatic way. For the automatic way you have to use the system preparation (sysprep) tool that Microsoft provides built into Windows Vista and 7. This tool is used for a variety of things but is mainly used for when you need to create a single computer image to put onto multiple machines. To see all the crazy things sysprep can do read the technical documentation on creating an unattend.xml file for sysprep to change everything from your sidebar widgets to your computer name.
Once you have your unattend.xml file created you just need to make sure you have the CopyProfile option turned on in the “specialize” pass and you should be all set.

<CopyProfile>True</CopyProfile>

A few things to note if you are going to do it this way.
1. The account you run the sysprep command from is going to be the account that is copied to the Default profile. So make sure the account you are running sysprep from has admin rights and is set up exactly as you want it.
2. The administrator account is removed during sysprep. Even if you have everything set up the way you want it to be admin will get the same settings as Default user unless you do some fancy scripting.
You can do some more reading on using this method with the following KB article.

Now for the manual method. This method is good if you don’t want to sysprep the computer because all you want to do is change some items for all the users that are going to be logging into a computer. I got all this information from this technet thread but I have used this mothod pretty extensively.
First thing you have to do is to create the profile just as you want it (same as the automatic steps). In this situation though you need to create a second user account because you are going to use the local administrator account to copy all of the settings from the second account to the default profile.
Once everything is set up just the way you want it, restart the computer and log into the local administrator.
After you log in follow the steps below.

1. Right click Computer and select Properties
2. Select Advanced System Properties (elevating as required)
3. In the system properties dialog click the Settings button under User Profiles
4. Select the account you want to use as a template
5. Click Copy To
6. Change the “permitted to use” option to “Everyone”
7. Use the Browse button to select the location of the default profile (C:\Users\Default) You will need hidden files shown to see this.
8. Click OK
9. Click Yes to overwrite the existing default profile

The steps above copy all the files and settings to the profile but there are still things in there that probably reference your old account you had created. To get rid of all those references to the other account you will need to edit the registry hive of the Default user. Follow the steps below to remove all traces of your template account from the default user.

1. Enable “Show hidden files and folders” in Folder Options
2. Disable “Hide Protected Operating System files” in Folder Options
3. Launch Regedit
4. Select HKEY_USERS and go to File -> load hive
5. Navigate to the profile directly of the user you want to load (e.g. C:\users\default for the default user)
6. Open the ntuser.dat file
7. Provide a name for the hive, this will be used as the root key name for that hive under HKU
8. Search the hive for any reference to your old user account.
9. When you find any keys that reference your old user account you can delete the keys (they will be re-created when someone new logs in).
10. Unload the hive before attempting to log in as the user

After you have finished you can log in with a new user to test that all the correct settings transferred to the default profile. If you are satisfied with everything go ahead and go back to System Properties -> Advanced System Properties -> User Profiles and delete the account you set up for the Default User template.

If you have any questions, comments, or problems feel free to leave a comment. I hope this helps.