Here’s a sketch from BBC One’s “The One Ronnie” 2010 Christmas Special.  Can the store clerk resolve this customer’s problems? Watch to find out…

Here at GeekyProjects.com we are always evaluating software and whenever we have a recommendation worth mentioning we bring it to you. This is the case with Shrink O’Matic. Shrink O’Matic is an exceptional program designed to batch-resize photos.  It can resize a whole folder full of pictures in a matter of seconds. There are many programs on the web designed to do just this, however, what stands out about Shrink O’Matic is its speed, ease of use and portability. It runs in Adobe Air, giving it the ability to be installed on different operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Mac.

If all of a sudden your computer does not boot and you see messages like “operating system not found”, “missing operating system” or “invalid partition table”, you know there is something really wrong with the Master Boot Record (MBR). In this article I will describe how to fix it with a free and open source utility called TestDisk.

TestDisk is a powerful  data recovery utility, mainly designed to recover lost partition tables. It can run in various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Apple, etc. and recover partitions from their filesystems as well. I have tried many other programs in the past with mixed results, however, none come close, not even the utilities that come with the Microsoft CD, like fixmbr or fixboot. If any program can find your lost partition, it will be TestDisk.

Here at GeekyProjects we have been receiving hard drives for a while from all over the world and recovering their data in exchange for donations to the site. (We even received one from a soldier stationed in Afghanistan once).   However, lately our focus has shifted towards the website itself and we no longer have the time to continue with the service. Nevertheless, we have decided to share our knowledge with the public in a series of articles, and this one is probably one of the most important. How to recover data even when the hard drive is damaged.

Many data recovery services charge big dollars for this, and it is a procedure you can do at home, without having to open the hard drive. This procedure however, does not work for all cases, but it does work for a big percentage of them even when the hard drive has the famous “click noise of death”.

Hasn’t this happened to all of us?. You discover you have a virus, you go to task manager and you are unable to identify it but you see a bunch of strange looking svchost processes.  SVCHOST.EXE is basically a Windows program that executes dll files. DLL files can’t run by themselves; they need a program to run them. This is where svchost comes in.  Some Windows pocesses come in DLL format rather than EXE. Some of these processes include “Windows Firewall”, “Automatic Updates”, “Plug and Play”, Windows Themes”, “Fax Service”, etc. Sometimes however, viruses use svchost to run; this way they cannot be identified on task manager and appear harmless, disguised as a Windows process.

As user friendly as Mythbuntu is, there are some things you should know that will make life a lot easier when after you finish installing it. These are subjects that are not addressed in the Mythbuntu installation manual, they are things I have discovered myself and decided to share them with my readers.

At work I am solely in charge of approximately 200 computers, this has led me to become sort of an expert in cloning. I have tested many commercial packages and none come close to Clonezilla. Clonezilla has two versions: Clonezilla live, which as its name states, runs from a live CD and Clonezilla SE (Server Edition).  In this article I will describe how to install the SE version on the latest Ubuntu release (10.04 Lucid Lynx).  Please note that this is a walkthrough so do not let the length of the article scare you. The set-up is actually very easy with this article. I have also written a tutorial on how to use Clonezilla.

This tutorial will teach you how to password-protect your usb drive data using free open source encryption security software. Why? Well I am sure many of you know the reason… “the fear of having your important data falling into the wrong hands”, specially in this era of identity theft and other digital crimes.  However, using this project for that reason alone can be rather simple and trivial. With data encryption you will discover new ways of using your usb drive, ways you probably never thought of before.  When traveling, for example, I like to take my passport in digital format, that way if I happen to lose it I can always go to an embassy and obtain a new one. Having a digital copy can speed up this process significantly. This is specially important when traveling, as time is critical. Same goes for your credit cards, passwords, and other critical information too extensive for your brain to handle.

Why have Tivo when you can have Freevo? I say… Why have Tivo when you can have MythTV! Yes, for those of you that don’t know it yet, you can build your own DVR and finally escape those monthly fees. And if that wasn’t a good enough reason to build one, here are some more: It will allow you to burn your recordings to DVDs, it will include a jukebox to store and play all your music, it will allow you to rip CDs and DVDs, includes a Photo Gallery utility, includes emulators for your favorite game consoles, includes a web browser, displays the weather and the news, it will stream over-the-air cable or satellite programs just like you would with a Slingbox. basically your own linux home theater PC. All of this in a single installation package. Convinced? All you need is an old computer and a fantastic free software named Mythbuntu, and you will be on your way to having the best DVR system ever imagined!.

Here is the situation: You want to clone (or copy) a hard drive to a new drive, however, you do not have a hard drive of equal or bigger size to restore the image to. This has happened to me many times, and many times I have wondered what to do. Norton Ghost does this seamlessly, but I had to purchase it and I was not going to make the same mistake most of us do, “just throw money at the problem”, specially in this era of open source software.  I knew there had to be a free solution out there to clone my hard disk and after a little bit of research and testing, this is what I came up with. Resize the partition using GParted and clone the partition using Clonezilla, which is in my opinion the best hard drive cloning software available.