Windows

Got access to a wifi network, but forgot the password? No a problem. At least not if you have a windows, Mac or Linux machine with access. All these OSes can basically without restrictions show you the wifi password in clear text.

Windows

Once you have access to the wifi network. Open the commandline and enter the following command replacing “SSID” with the actual name of the wifi network you want to retrive the password to.

netsh wlan show profile name=SSID key=clear

I’m not usually playing too much around on Windows apart from using office and teams - and other software bound to windows which company work require. A small event on an ongoing project however did require some small exploration into Windows and what could be done to solve a simple task.

• We had an all-day event, where multiple photos were taken on mobile phones througout the day.
• I needed to collect the photos, sort them and share them.

I realize that Google Photos, Flickr and multiple other solutions may work for such an occation, but we really didn’t want to share the photos outside the company and nor force anyone to create an account anywhere - neither to see the photos nor to contribute with their own.

Modern computers contains al lot of software. A fully updated fresh windows installation contains well over 50.000 files - and before it being “usable” with the most common applications, plugins, addons and extensions for the software you use on a daily basis, you’ve probably added so much more, that you’ve completely lost count of what’s been installed.

It’s a pretty bad situation in terms of security and software maintenance/updating.

WindowsUpdate has come part of the way. It’s easy and simple for even common users to use and stay fairly current with the core windows system, but it only covers a small piece of the puzzle. While most windows machines I’ve encountered seem to have Office installed, WindowsUpdate doesn’t cover it - OfficeUpdate does, but how many people know of that? - and run it on a regular basis?

So, I was actually using Microsoft Windows for quite a while. My first windows was Windows/286 which was nothing like the current Windows, but it was okay somehow. Today I just realized that I haven’t really been using Windows on any of my own machines and even though Vista was released three months ago, I haven’t seen it yet. It is sort of funny, but since switching to a Mac, I’ve been spending less time keeping the machine running – debugging, tweaking and doing other odd stuff – and more time doing actual fun work at the computer – like expanding my portfolio at istockphoto.

If you are among the 70.000.000 users, who still use windows 98 or Windows Millennium, your operating system has reached end-of-life today and will no longer be patched for security or supported by Microsoft. If you can’t afford the update, you may consider upgrading to Ubuntu or some other free system for your computer.