Good command line or programmatic image manipulation app

Check out ImageMagick to programmatically or from the command prompt manipulate images. It supports a ton of formats. It has support from .NET and Java, etc.

A very good tool to have in your toolbox.

Get Proxy settings when you don't have access to see them

Open a command prompt and enter the following command

Command Line

netsh winhttp import proxy source = ie

You should get output like:

Current WinHTTP proxy settings:

    Proxy Server(s) :  some.corp-proxy:8080

    Bypass List     :  some.corp-servers...

Chrome

If you have Chrome it has an interesting feature for doing so as well.

chrome://net-internals/#proxy

This will give some results similar to the following

Proxy server: some.corp-proxy:8080
Bypass list: 
  some.corp-server...

nslookup like functionality from Powershell

Below is a Powershell script that takes a list of aliases that you want to lookup. For each item in the list it will output a line. Each line is tab separated and composed of the alias, the host name, and the ip address (first one if there are multiples). The output can be copy and pasted into Excel easily. Any errors will be shown in Red.

$aliases = @(
'www.apple.com',
'www.apple.co.uk'
)

foreach ($alias in $aliases)
{
    try
    {
        $entry = [System.Net.DNS]::GetHostEntry($alias)
        $tab = [char]9
        $hostname = $entry.HostName
        $ipAddress = $entry.AddressList[0].IPAddressToString
        Write-Host "$alias$tab$hostname$tab$ipAddress"
    }
    catch 
    {
        Write-Host "$alias could not be processed" -ForegroundColor Red
    }    
}

There are actually Powershell packages that implement nslookup, but they require something be installed, imports, dependencies, etc. The only dependency to run this is that C# be installed and System.Net.DNS be available.

Example output is:

www.apple.com e6858.dsce9.akamaiedge.net 2.20.214.243
www.apple.co.uk apple.co.uk 17.172.224.108