IT Pro Tuesday #132

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

To start off, Hornetsecurity's free 2020 Cyberthreat Report is now available for download here. This report covers the important developments and attack methods from 2020 as well as the expected trends for 2021.

This week, we're asking for your favorite IT-related books we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply or leave a comment with your suggestions, and we'll be featuring them in the coming weeks.

As always, we’re updating the full, searchable list on our website here. Enjoy.

But on with this week's tools...! Here are the most-interesting items that have come across our desks, laptops and phones this week. Hornetsecurity has no known affiliation with any of these unless we explicitly state otherwise.

A Free Tool

Simple Static IP is a few-clicks method for enabling users to set their IP address to static for occasions when that's useful, like when employing port forwarding. Our thanks to DeleriumDive for this one.

A List Library

ITProMentor Best Practices Checklists is a compilation of best practices and implementation guides for Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune), Office 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams) and Windows 10 (Business edition). Credit for this one goes to digitaltransmutation.

Another Free Tool

Advanced Renamer enables you to rename multiple files and folders simultaneously. Provides 14 different methods to change the names, attributes and timestamps of files as well as copying or moving files to new locations based on information in the files. You can construct new file names by adding, removing, replacing, changing case or giving the file a brand new name based on known information about the file. Lets you verify your settings in advance and undo the batch if you're unhappy with the results.

Yet Another Free Tool

RBTray allows almost any window to be minimized to the system tray by right-clicking its minimize button, shift-right-clicking on its title bar or using the Windows-Alt-Down hotkey. Our thanks go to JustAnotherITUser for the suggestion.

One More Free Tool

jiq is jid combined with jq that allows you to drill down interactively using jq filtering queries. thecravenone explains, "If you find jq's syntax to be as difficult to work with as I used to, check out jiq, which is an interactive jq. While it's certainly useful for combing through data, I mostly use it on test data to formulate my eventual jq query."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

IrfanView is a fast, compact image viewer/converter for Windows with a simple interface and powerful features. Includes many powerful built-in features, plus more than 60 plugins to extend functionality. Kindly suggested by Reverent.

Find and Replace (FNR) is an open-source tool that allows you to find and repace text in multiple files. Bose_Motile likes it because, "Sometimes you just need to do some bulk text editing and don't need to waste time trying to compose the perfect batch file to do it."

Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.