Using MakeMKV for ripping DVDs and for other A/V tasks
If you wish to "rip" a DVD, i.e., create a video file on a disk drive
from the DVD, one free program you can use on Microsoft Windows systems
or Mac OS X systems is
MakeMKV.
The software can also be used to extract a video file from an ISO image of a
DVD.
[ More Info ]
[/os/windows/software/audio-video]
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View RDP Firewall Rule using PowerShell
If a Microsoft Windows system is running the
Microsoft Defender
Firewall,
firewall software that comes with Microsoft Windows systems, you can
check on whether connectivity is allowed on a particular
network
port from a
command-line
interface (CLI) using
PowerShell. You can determine whether the Windows Firewall is active on a
system from a command prompt
using the command netsh advfirewall show
currentprofile
. If the value of "State" is "ON", then the Windows
Firewall is active on the system.
C:\>netsh advfirewall show currentprofile
Domain Profile Settings:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
State ON
Firewall Policy BlockInbound,AllowOutbound
LocalFirewallRules N/A (GPO-store only)
LocalConSecRules N/A (GPO-store only)
InboundUserNotification Enable
RemoteManagement Disable
UnicastResponseToMulticast Enable
Logging:
LogAllowedConnections Disable
LogDroppedConnections Disable
FileName %systemroot%\system32\LogFiles\Firewall\pfirewall.log
MaxFileSize 4096
Ok.
C:\>
You can check on whether the firewall is permitting connectivity on a
particular network port, e.g., TCP port 3389 for the
Remote Desktop
Protocol (RDP), from a PowerShell prompt, which you can obtain by
typing powershell
in the Windows "Search" field at the bottom
of the screen and then clicking on Windows PowerShell when you see
it returned by the search function. At the PowerShell prompt, you can issue
the command Get-NetFirewallPortFilter | Where-Object { $_.LocalPort -eq
3389 } | Get-NetFirewallRule
. If you wished to check on whether
firewall connectivity is permitted for some other protocol, substitute
the port used by that protocol, e.g., port 22 for
Secure Shell (SSH)
connections.
[ More
Info ]
[/os/windows/software/security/firewall]
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Stopping automatic updates to Microsoft Paint and other Microsoft Store apps
When I sat down at a system running the Microsoft Windows 11 operating
system on Saturday, I saw a message stating that
Microsoft Paint
had updated itself automatically. I had at least a dozen Paint windows open
where I had posted screenshots over the past week for things I wanted to
check later. I had not saved those Paint windows; I had anticipated going
through them on Saturday, extracting information I wanted to keep from some
images and then closing the windows and saving others. But I found
the update had just closed them all without any prompt asking whether
I wanted to save them and without saving the images. So I lost all the
information from them irretrievably. Certainly, I should have saved
the images in those Paint windows or used some other graphics application that
automatically saves the contents of windows for that application or at least
won't automatically update itself without saving any unsaved work, but I'm still
irritated at the mindset of Microsoft developers regarding not caring
about the impact to users if users have unsaved content in Microsoft
applications, in addition to being irked with myself for not saving
the information. I do use Paint a lot for simple graphics tasks, such as
cropping and resizing screenshots, and I don't want it updating itself
without warning when that may lead to a loss of information I haven't yet
saved. You can determine when a Microsoft Store app was last updated and turn
off automatic updates for apps obtained from the Microsoft Store, though
you have to turn off the auto update feature for all apps, since there is
not a way to do it only for a particular app, such as Paint.
[ More Info ]
[/os/windows/software/graphics/mspaint]
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