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• How can ICS in Windows 7 be managed via command line, scripts, config files, etc.?

  - by Skya

  I've been using ICS successfully for years, but now I'm looking for a way to control it through something else than the GUI in Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections - Connection Properties: I want to do everything that the encircled checkbox does, without touching the GUI. But what does the checkbox do? Microsoft don't provide specific information and the most helpful forum post I've found is from 2003. Assuming that some of the advice is still valid, I've come to the conclusion that ICS is broken down into 6 parts that have to be set up individually: the sharedAccess service interface settings firewall rules a static route dnsproxy autodhcp I've already learned that the service can be started/stopped with the command net start/stop sharedAccess and that netsh is a good tool for changing the interface settings and the firewall rules. But I don't understand how ICS handles routing and DNS. All hosts in my network are configured statically, so I don't care much about autodhcp. Thanks for your help! EDIT: I've spent the whole day scanning through ProcMon and I've seen reads/writes to both the registry and the filesystem and it is difficult to determine what parts of it actually make ICS work. I'm trying to look for an API instead. I'm looking into this right now, but I still want to know more about the inner workings.

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• Officially announced RAM support size doesn't apply to one of twin rigs with just one difference

  - by Deniz

  It'll take a little long to describe my situation but here goes the story : In January 2009 we bought (the OEM parts) two similar systems with just one difference. One of them had a Phenom X4 cpu and the other one (mine) a Phenom X3 cpu. At the beginning we had problems with both systems to power them on whilst having all of their ram slots being full. We decided to install the systems with just 2 slots populated and later try to install the rest of ram sticks. Both systems did succeed to support 3 sticks. We tried many different procedures to make the systems work with their fourth ram slots being populated. We waited for new bios updates and flashed the boards when they were available, we tried different ram sticks with different frequencies etc. One day while we were trying to install the fourth stick, the X4 machine did accept it. The other one did not. The most mind boggling thing was that after one of my trials the X3 system begun to not operate with the third slot populated. Our boards did have AMD 770 chipsets and we even tried to change the board of the X3 machine with another 770 chipset board. Now my questions are : Should we change the cpu ? What is causing the X3 system to not accept the fourth (or now the third) ram stick ? The manufacturers sites do claim that this boards do accept 4 ram sticks (but they only tested them with certain ram brands and models). What are the limitations for maximum ram configurations on motherboards ? Are there some "rules of thumb" except frequency, voltage, chip type considerations for which we did check our parts ? Our boards are : Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 Sapphire PC-AM2RX780 - PURE CrossFireX 770

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• Disk IO slow on ESXi, even slower on a VM (freeNAS + iSCSI)

  - by varesa

  I have a server with ESXi 5 and iSCSI attached network storage(4x1Tb Raid-Z on freenas 8.0.4). Those two machines are connected to each other with Gigabit ethernet. The raid-z volume is divided into three parts: two zvols, shared with iscsi, and one directly on top of zfs, shared with nfs and similar. I ssh'd into the freeNAS box, and did some testing on the disks. I used ddto test the third part of the disks (straight on top of ZFS). I copied a 4GB (2x the amount of RAM) block from /dev/zero to the disk, and the speed was 80MB/s. Other of the iSCSI shared zvols is a datastore for the ESXi. I did similar test with time dd .. there. Since the dd there did not give the speed, I divided the amount of data transfered by the time show by time. The result was around 30-40 MB/s. Thats about half of the speed from the freeNAS host! Then I tested the IO on a VM running on the same ESXi host. The VM was a light CentOS 6.0 machine, which was not really doing anything else at that time. There were no other VMs running on the server at the time, and the other two "parts" of the disk array were not used. A similar dd test gave me result of about 15-20 MB/s. That is again about half of the result on a lower level! Of course the is some overhead in raid-z - zfs - zvolume - iSCSI - VMFS - VM, but I don't expect it to be that big. I belive there must be something wrong in my system. I have heard about bad performance of freeNAS's iSCSI, is that it? I have not managed to get any other "big" SAN OS to run on the box (NexentaSTOR, openfiler). Can you see any obvious problems with my setup?

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• Building a PC for Work and play? [closed]

  - by Derek Organ

  Ok, Its been a long time since I build my own PC so I'm looking to get back into it again and build a new one. First off budget is about €800 excluding the monitor and windows 7 licence and mouse. (just bought a new g500) I plan on using my computer for work, lots of applications open at once but none particularly excessive (photoshop being the most demanding, mostly coding tools) I also use it for some gaming, e.g. COD, Starcraft etc. One thing I do want to do eventually is get a really good monitor with hight resolution and maybe 27" so the graphics card needs to be able to make best use of that. So a few questions 1) Is the bottle neck in performance mostly still the harddrives? 2) Aren't most processors e.g. i5 etc even i3 so far a head of other bottlenecks it makes litte difference the higher you go. Isn't the Graphics card dealing with heavy graphics so what really slows because of a slow CPU? So from this my thinking is to get a SSD drive as my primary drive for OS etc and have loads of memory e.g. 6-8GB and a decent mid level graphics card? It doesn't seem at my level worth spending much on CPU and any other parts really. I basic parts off the top of my head Case, Motherboard CPU SSD Drive SATA Drive Power Supply Memory Cooling (fan?) Graphics Card Network Card Keyboard DVD drive Mouse Windows Monitor Am I missing anything? Any helpful tips or general education much appreciated. Thanks, Derek

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• Probability of Blade Chassis Failure

  - by ChrisZZ

  In my organisation we are thinking about buying blade servers - instead of rack servers. Of course technology vendors also make them sound very nice. A concern, that I read very often in different forums, is, that there is a theoretical possibility of the server chassis going down - which would in consequence take all the blades down. That is due to shared infrastructure. My reaction on this probability would be to have redundancy and by two chassis instead of one (very costly of course). Some people (including e.g. HP Vendors) try to convince us, that the chassis is very very unlikely to fail, due to many redundancies (redundant power supply, etc.). Another concern on my side is, that if something goes down, spare parts might be required - which is difficult in our location (Ethiopia). So I would ask to experienced administrators, that have managed blade server: What is your experience? Do they go down as a whole - and what is the sensible shared infrastructure, that might fail? That question could be extended to shared storage. Again I would say, that we need two storage units instead of only one - and again the vendors say, that this things are so rock solid, that no failure is expected. Well - I can hardly believe, that such a critical infrastructure can be very reliable without redundancy - but maybe you can tell me, whether you have successfull blade-based projects, that work without redundancy in its core parts (chassis, storage...) At the moment, we look at HP - as IBM looks much to expensive... thanks a lot best regards Christian

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• How to set up RAID-0 first time on new PC?

  - by jasondavis

  I have built basic PC's in the past but have never used a RAID array at all. SO now I am buying parts to build my new PC, it will be an intel i7 processor. My motherboard will have RAID support which I will use instead of an aftermarket raid controller for now. Also I plan to use 2 SSD drives in RAID-0 for my windows 7 OS. (Please note that I am aware of the issues with doing this, including lack of TRIM support when using RAID with SSD drives. I am OK with it not working as I can just re[place the drives in a year or so or wheneer they become more sluggish). SO here is my question part. If I assemble the motherboard, PSU, processor, RAM, vidm card, etc and then go to turn the PC on, it will have the 2 SSD drives hooked up. so I assume I will then soon the BIOS screen before I install windows? How to I go about making the 2 drives work in RAID-0 at this point? I do the raid part before installing my OS right? Please help with the steps involved from assembling the parts of the PC and then turning it on, to the part of getting the RAID-0 set up between the 2 drives and then installing my windows 7 OS from a Optical drive? Please help, all advice, instructions, tips appreciated as long as on topic. I do not need to be told that this is a bad idea as far as if 1 drive fails I losse it all, I plan on having a disk IMAGE to be able to restore my OS and software to a new set of drives at anytime needed in the event of drive failure. Same goes for lack of TRIM support. Thanks for reading and help =)

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• Cut (smart edit) .mts (AVCHD Progressive) files un Ubuntu Lucid

  - by pts

  I have a bunch of .mts files containing AVCHD Progressive video recorded by a Panasonic camera, and I need software on Ubuntu Lucid with which I can remove the boring parts, and concatenate the interesting parts, all this without reencoding the video stream. It's OK for me to cut at keyframe boundary. If Avidemux was able to open the files, it would take about 60 hours of work for me to cut the files. (At least that was it last time I tried with similar videos, but of a file format supported by Avidemux.) So I need a fast, powerful and stable video editor, because I don't want that 60 hours of work go up to 240 or even 480 hours just because the tool is too slow or unstable or has a terrible UI. I've tried Avidemux 2.5.5 and 2.5.6, but they crash trying to open such a file, even if I convert the file to .avi first using mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy. mplayer can play the files. I've tried Avidemux 2.6.0, which can open the file, but it cannot jump to the previous or next keyframe etc. (if I make it jump to the next keyframe, and then to the previous keyframe, it doesn't end up at the original keyframe, sometimes displays an error etc.). Also I'm not sure if Avidemux 2.6.x would let me save the result without reencoding. I've tried Kdenlive 0.7.7.1, but playback is very choppy, and it cannot play audio at all (complaining that SDL cannot find the device; but many other programs on the system can play audio). It would be a pain to work with. I've tried converting the .mts file to .mkv using ffmpeg -i input.mts -vcodec copy -sameq -acodec copy -f matroska output.mkv, but that caused too much visible distortions in the video in both mplayer and Avidemux. I've tried converting the .mts file with TsRemux.exe, but Avidemux 2.5.x still can't open that file. Is there another program to cut and concatenate the files? Is there a preprocessor which would create a file (without reencoding the video) on which Avidemux wouldn't crash?

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• Flickering dual screens in Virtual Box Ubuntu 13.10 Guest

  - by alexleonard

  I have Ubuntu 13.10 x64 installed as a guest in VirtualBox (under a Windows 8.1 host) and have the settings for the virtual machine setup to run with a monitor count of 2, 128MB video memory and 3D acceleration enabled. In my guest I have the virtual box additions installed (which allowed me to have two 1920x1080 screens). Here's a screenshot of my VM settings. My laptop is an Asus N550JV which has both Intel's HD Graphics 4600 GPU and Nvidia's GeForce GT 750M. By default though I believe the Intel GFX card is being used to render the VM. When I boot up the VM it loads perfectly on dual screens, however whenever I move the mouse from one screen to the other (I have a Dell S2340L running over a HDMI connection as a second screen) the screen flickers. I've tried a variety of settings changes in both Ubuntu and the VM settings, but cannot seem to stop this screen flicker. I also used the NVidia control panel in Windows to force the dedicated graphics card to always be used but found that the display driver sometimes crashed whilst working in the VM, resulting in my VM session being destroyed, so I figured it's better to stick with the Intel GFX as that appears to be more stable. I also tried without 3D acceleration but that was much worse, and if I ran the VM with a low amount of graphics memory it really struggled. Here's my dmesg output: http://pastebin.com/1LJuYWMj (not sure if this is helpful in this situation). I read some posts suggesting changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf but I don't appear to have an xorg.conf file. There were also a few posts (though related to Synergy) suggesting running xset -dpms but this command doesn't appear to have had any effect for me. As an additional note, I'm finding that window drawing in the guest is a little laggy/glitchy. For example, quickly scrolling through a web page may result in parts of the viewport displaying original content. Certainly I notice drawing issues most in the web browser, but it also impacts other software with parts of the window not being drawn when, say, switching between accounts in thunderbird. Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

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• Power Outage Interrupted Upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate, Reverted to Vista, Now Vista is failing... What Next?

  - by tednewk

  I was in the midst of what seemed to be a successful upgrade from Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate when there was a brief blackout. The upgrade failed and Windows reverted back to Vista. Now Vista is very slow to boot, has problems waking back-up from inactivity and quickly loses it's wireless connection. The wake-up problem manifests itself as the mouse is clearly shown on a black screen but I have no access to the Desktop or Taskbar or Explorer. Even Alt-Ctrl-Delete doesn't seem to work. No task menu, no reboot. Hitting the reset button reboots the machine with the usual Black Screen warnings offering Safe Mode. I tried to do a system restore to a point before the upgrade. That didn't seem to work. My guess is that my system is a mutant with parts of Vista and parts of 7 crashing each other. I would like avoid a clean install if at all possible to avoid reinstalling other software. What should I try now? My thoughts are: My a system back-up to lock the computer in place Trying a second 7 upgrade If that appears to be working make another back-up If not reload back-up and try a repairing Vista from DVD. If that appears to work make another back-up, let system stablize about a week then try 7 install again If that doesn't work are there any other options to try before settling for a clean install? Another complication, I am doing this by "remote control". I'm traveling with my job and I'll be talking my son through it over the phone. (Kind of like the landing the 747 cliche from all the 70's adventure shows!) So is there a way of simplifying the steps? Thanks Ted

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• How to configure default text selection behavior in Windows XP, 7? (eg. mouse click selects entire word vs. mouse click inserts an active cursor)

  - by Mouse of Fury

  I find the mouse click behavior of Windows XP and Windows 7 annoying and intrusive. I don't remember Windows NT being quite this bad, or MacOS 7 - 10 which I used in the nineties. When I'm using a browser and I click on a text field - for example, the address bar, or a search box - the first thing which happens is the entire field is selected.Subsequent clicks seem to select parts of words, often deciding arbitrarily to exclude or include adjacent punctuation. The same in Excel and other apps, and when trying to rename files, so I'm assuming this behavior comes from a system-wide text handling routine. I frequently want to edit text, cut out or replace odd parts of the insides of words or chunks of sentences, and often find that to get a simple cursor to insert I have to click the mouse up to 4 times in succession. I've had to do a lot of this recently and it has been driving me insane. Is there a place at the system level where this can be configured? In a perfect world, I'd like a single click on a new text area to insert a cursor point, and a rapid double click to select the entire area. Words or text within the area could be selected by inserting a cursor, holding down the mouse button and dragging to the exact point where I want the selection to end - even if that's in the middle of a word. No, I don't need or want Windows to "smart select" a word or sentence for me. I've looked in the Mouse and Accessibility Options control panels (Windows XP). Haven't found anything even close. Thanks -

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• saving data from a failing drive

  - by intuited

  An external 3½" HDD seems to be in danger of failing — it's making ticking sounds when idle. I've acquired a replacement drive, and want to know the best strategy to get the data off of the dubious drive with the best chance of saving as much as possible. There are some directories that are more important than others. However, I'm guessing that picking and choosing directories is going to reduce my chances of saving the whole thing. I would also have to mount it, dump a file listing, and then unmount it in order to be able to effectively prioritize directories. Adding in the fact that it's time-consuming to do this, I'm leaning away from this approach. I've considered just using dd, but I'm not sure how it would handle read errors or other problems that might prevent only certain parts of the data from being rescued, or which could be overcome with some retries, but not so many that they endanger other parts of the drive from being saved. I guess ideally it would do a single pass to get as much as possible and then go back to retry anything that was missed due to errors. Is it possible that copying more slowly — e.g. pausing every x MB/GB — would be better than just running the operation full tilt, for example to avoid any overheating issues? For the "where is your backup" crowd: this actually is my backup drive, but it also contains some non-critical and bulky stuff, like music, that aren't backups, i.e. aren't backed up. The drive has not exhibited any clear signs of failure other than this somewhat ominous sound. I did have to fsck a few errors recently — orphaned inodes, incorrect free blocks/inodes counts, inode bitmap differences, zero dtime on deleted inodes; about 20 errors in all. The filesystem of the partition is ext3.

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• Buying an old laser printer -- what will need to be replaced?

  - by marienbad

  Hi all -- as you can see I'm new. I do IT and wiring for a small local shop but I never deal with printers. I do a LOT of printing, and I'd like to stop spending as much money on it. On my local CL, there is an HP 8100DN (duplex network) printer for a very good price (and the toner is a quarter-cent per page). It has printed 200,000 pages and I don't yet know anything else about it. The model was released in 1999. So my questions: What are the parts that tend to need service on laser printers? On ebay, I see fusers, rollers, DC power boards, and motors. What would you expect to replace soon at 200,000 pages? Are there any good "tests" to find out if certain parts are near failure? Do you have anything to say about the HP 8100 specifically? The bottom line for me is that if there's any chance of repairs costing more than $100, it's not worth it for me.

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• Add keyboard languages to XP, Vista, and Windows 7

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you regularly need to type in multiple languages in Windows?  Here we’ll show you the easy way to add and change input languages to your keyboard in XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Windows Vista and 7 come preinstalled with support for viewing a wide variety of languages, so adding an input language is fairly simply.  Adding an input language is slightly more difficult in XP, and requires installing additional files if you need an Asian or Complex script language.  First we show how to add an input language in Windows Vista and 7; it’s basically the same in both versions.  Then, we show how to add a language to XP, and also how to add Complex Script support.  Please note that this is only for adding an input language, which will allow you to type in the language you select.  This does not change your user interface language. Change keyboard language in Windows 7 and Vista It is fairly simple to add or change a keyboard language in Windows 7 or Vista.  In Windows 7, enter “keyboard language” in the Start menu search box, and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”. In Windows Vista, open Control Panel and enter “input language” in the search box and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”.  This also works in Windows 7. Now, click Change Keyboards to add another keyboard language or change your default one. Our default input language is US English, and our default keyboard is the US keyboard layout.  Click Add to insert another input language while still leaving your default input language installed. Here we selected the standard Thai keyboard language (Thai Kedmanee), but you can select any language you want.  Windows offers almost any language you can imagine, so just look for the language you want, select it, and click Ok. Alternately, if you want, you can click Preview to see your layout choice before accepting it.  This is only the default characters, not ones that will be activated with Shift or other keys (many Asian languages use many more characters than English, and require the use of Shift and other keys to access them all).  Once your finished previewing, click close and then press Ok on the previous dialog. Now you will see both of your keyboard languages in the Installed services box.  You can click Add to go back and get more, or move your selected language up or down (to change its priority), or simply click Apply to add the new language. Also, you can now change the default input language from the top menu.  This is the language that your keyboard will start with when you boot your computer.  So, if you mainly use English but also use another language, usually it is best to leave English as your default input language. Once you’ve pressed Apply or Ok, you will see a new icon beside your system tray with the initials of your default input language. If you click it, you can switch between input languages.  Alternately you can switch input languages by pressing Alt+Shift on your keyboard. Some complex languages, such as Chinese, may have extra buttons to change input modes to accommodate their large alphabet. If you would like to change the keyboard shortcut for changing languages, go back to the Input Languages dialog, and select the “Advanced Key Settings” tab.  Here you can change settings for Caps Lock and change or add key sequences to change between languages. Also, the On-Screen keyboard will display the correct keyboard language (here the keyboard is displaying Thai), which can be a helpful reference if your physical keyboard doesn’t have your preferred input language printed on it.  To open this, simply enter “On-Screen keyboard” in the start menu search, or click All Programs>Accessories>On-Screen keyboard. Change keyboard language in Windows XP The process for changing the keyboard language in Windows XP is slightly different.  Open Control Panel, and select “Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options”.   Select “Add other languages”. Now, click Details to add another language.  XP does not include support for Asian and complex languages by default, so if you need to add one of those languages we have details for that below. Click Add to add an input language. Select your desired language from the list, and choose your desired keyboard layout if your language offers multiple layouts.  Here we selected Canadian French with the default layout. Now you will see both of your keyboard languages in the Installed services box.  You can click Add to go back and add more, or move your selected language up or down (to change its priority), or simply click Apply to add the new language. Once you’ve pressed Apply or Ok, you will see a new icon beside your system tray with the initials of your default input language. If you click it, you can switch between input languages.  Alternately you can switch input languages by pressing Alt+Shift on your keyboard. If you would like to change the keyboard shortcut for changing languages, go back to the Input Languages dialog, and click the “Key Settings” button on the bottom of the dialog.  Here you can change settings for Caps Lock and change or add key sequences to change between languages. Add support to XP for Asian and Complex script languages Windows XP does not include support for Asian and Complex script languages by default, but you can easily add them to your computer.  This is useful if you wish to type in one of these languages, or simply want to read text written in these languages, since XP will not display these languages correctly if they are not installed.  If you wish to install Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean, check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box.  Or, if you need to install a complex script language (including Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, the Indic languages, Thai, and Vietnamese), check the “Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages” box.   Choosing either of these options will open a prompt reminding you that this option will take up more disk space.  Support for complex languages will require around 10Mb of hard drive space, but East Asian language support may require 230 Mb or more free disk space.  Click Ok, and click apply to install your language files. You may have to insert your XP CD into your CD drive to install these files.  Insert the disk, and then click Ok. Windows will automatically copy the files, including fonts for these languages… …and then will ask you to reboot your computer to finalize the settings.  Click Yes, and then reopen the “Add other languages” dialog when your computer is rebooted, and add a language as before.     Now you can add Complex and/or Asian languages to XP, just as above.  Here is the XP taskbar language selector with Thai installed. Conclusion Unfortunately we haven’t found a way to add Asian and complex languages in XP without having an XP disc. If you know of a way, let us know in the comments. (No downloading the XP disc from torrent site answers please) Adding an input language is very important for bilingual individuals, and can also be useful if you simply need to occasionally view Asian or Complex languages in XP.  And by following the correct instructions for your version of Windows, it should be very easy to add, change, and remove input languages. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show Keyboard Shortcut Access Keys in Windows VistaKeyboard Ninja: 21 Keyboard Shortcut ArticlesAnother Desktop Cube for Windows XP/VistaThe "Up" Keyboard Shortcut for Windows 7 or Vista ExplorerWhat is ctfmon.exe And Why Is It Running? 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• Week in Geek: FBI Back Door in OpenBSD Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, fix annoying arrows, play old-school DOS games, schedule smart computer shutdowns, use breaks in Microsoft Word to better format documents, check the condition of hard-disks using Linux disk utilities, & what the Linux fstab is and how it works. Photo by Jameson42. Random Geek Links Another week with extra news link goodness to help keep you up to date. Photo by justmakeit. Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax. Fortinet: Job outlook improving for cybercrooks In an ironic twist in the job market, more positions will open up for developers who can write customized malware packers, people who can break CAPTCHA codes, and distributors who can spread malicious code, according to Fortinet. Enisa: Malware for smartphones is a ’serious risk’ Businesses and consumers are at risk of data breaches through smartphone use, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The trick with the f: Google and Microsoft web sites distribute malware Last week, Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform and Microsoft’s rad.msn.com online ad network briefly distributed malware to other web sites in the form of advertising banners. New scam tactic: Fake disk defraggers It would appear that scammers are trying out new programs to see which might best confuse potential victims and evade detection by legitimate antivirus software. Microsoft closes IE and Stuxnet holes As previously announced, Microsoft has released 17 security updates to close 40 security holes. All four Windows holes so far disclosed in connection with Stuxnet have now been closed. Microsoft Offers H.264 Support to Firefox on Windows via Add-On The new HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in add-on from Microsoft offers users that are running Firefox on Windows 7 H.264 support for HTML5 video playback. Google proclaims Chrome business-ready Google has announced that Chrome is ready for corporate use. Microsoft Tells Exchange Customers to Think Twice Before Opting for Google Message Continuity This week, Microsoft is telling companies still running Exchange 2010’s precursors that they should carefully consider the implications of embracing Google Message Continuity. Who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS users Steven Vaughan-Nichols explains why he feels that Chrome OS will be ideal for either office-workers or people who need a computer, but do not know the first thing about how to use one safely. Oracle takes office suite to the cloud Oracle has introduced Cloud Office 1.0, a cloud-based version of its office suite, which is aimed at web and mobile users. Mozilla pays premiums for reports of vulnerabilities The Mozilla Foundation has followed Google’s example by expanding its rewards program for reports of vulnerabilities in its Web applications. Who bought those 882 Novell patents? Not just Microsoft The mysterious CPTN Holdings — the organization that bought the 882 Novell patents as part of the terms of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell – has been unmasked (Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle). Appeals court: Feds need warrants for e-mail Police must obtain search warrants before perusing Internet users’ e-mail records, a federal appeals court ruled today in a landmark decision that struck down part of a 1986 law allowing warrantless access. Geek Video of the Week What happens when someone plays a wicked prank by shoveling crazy snow paths that lead to dead ends or turn back on themselves? Watch to find out! Photo by CollegeHumor. Janitor Snow Shoveling Prank Random TinyHacker Links The Oatmeal on Cat vs Internet What lengths will our poor neglected kitty hero have to go to in order to get some attention? Guide On Using JoliCloud With Windows JoliCloud is a nifty operating system that’s made for people who need a light-weight OS that’s mostly cloud based. Check this guide on using it with Windows. Use Cameyo to Easily Create Portable Programs Here’s a nifty tool to make portable apps out of programs in Windows. Check out the guide to do it. Better Family Tech Support A nice new site by Google to help members of family understand how computers work. Track Your Stolen Mobile Phone With F-Secure A useful anti-theft tool for your mobile phone. Super User Questions Another week with great answers to popular questions from Super User. What Chrome password manager fits my requirements? What’s the best way to be able to reimage windows computers? Could you suggest feature-rich disk-based personal backup program for linux (and I’ve seen a few)? What is IPv6 and why should I care? Is there any way to find out what programs are trying to connect to Internet on windows? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Here are our hottest articles full of geeky goodness from this past week at HTG. 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.? The Twelve Days of Geekmas One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through our latest batch of retro-geek goodness from one year ago. Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd How To Restore Windows 7 from a System Image How To Manage Hard Drive Space Used by Windows 7 Backup and Restore How To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week, so see you back here again after the holidays! Got a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by mitjamavsar. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• Turn A Flash Drive Into a Portable Web Server

  - by Matthew Guay

  Portable applications are very useful for getting work done on the go, but how about portable servers?  Here’s how you can turn your flash drive into a portable web server. Getting Started To put a full web server on our flash drive, we’re going to use XAMPP Lite.  This lightweight, preconfigured server includes recent versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP so you can run most websites and webapps directly from it.  You could use the full XAMPP, which includes more features such as a FileZilla FTP server and OpenSSL, but for most purposes, the light version is plenty for a portable server. Download the latest version of XAMPP Lite (link below).  In this tutorial, we used the self-extracting EXE version; you could choose the ZIP file and extract the files yourself, but we found it easier to use the executable. Run the installer, and click Browse choose where to install your server. Select your flash drive, or a folder in it, and click Ok.  Make sure your flash drive has at least 250MB of available storage space.  XAMPP will create an xampplite folder and store all the files in it during the installation.   Click Install, and all of the files will be extracted to your flash drive.  This may take a few moments depending on your flash drive’s speed. When the extraction process is finished, a Command Prompt window will open to finish the installation.  The first prompt will ask if you want to add shortcuts to the start menu and desktop; enter “n” since we don’t want to create start menu links to our portable server. Now enter “y” to configure XAMPP’s directories automatically. Finally, enter “y” to make XAMPP fully portable.  It will set up the servers to run without specific drive letters so your server will run from any computer. XAMPP will finalize your changes; press Enter when everything is completed. Setup will automatically launch the command line version of XAMPP.  On first run, confirm that your time zone is correct. And that’s it!  You can now run XAMPP’s control panel by entering 1, or you can exit and run XAMPP from any other computer with your flash drive. To complete your portable webserver kit, you may want to install Portable Firefox or Iron Browser on your flash drive so you always have your favorite browser ready to use. Running your portable server Using your portable server is very simple.  Open the xampplite folder on your flash drive and launch xampp-control.exe. Click Start beside Apache and MySql to get your webserver running. Please note: Do not check the Svc box, as this will run the server as a Windows service.  To keep XAMPP portable, you do not want it running as a service! Windows Firewall may prompt you that it blocked the server; click Allow access to let your server run. Once they’re running, you can click Admin to open the default XAMPP admin page running from your local webserver.  Or, you can view it by browsing to http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in your browser. If everything is working correctly, you should see this page in your browser.  Choose your default language… And then you’ll see the default XAMPP admin page.   Click the Status link on the left sidebar to make sure everything is running correctly. If you click the Admin button for MySql in the XAMPP Control Panel, it will open phpMyAdmin in your default browser.  Alternately, you can open the MySql admin page by entering http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/ in your favorite browser. Now you can add your own webpages to your webserver.  Save all of your web files in the \xampplight\htdocs\ folder on your flash drive. Install WordPress in your portable server Since XAMPP Lite includes MySql and PHP, you can even run webapps such as WordPress, the popular CMS and blogging platform.  Download WordPress (link below), and extract the files to the \xampplite\htdocs folder on your flash drive. Now all of the WordPress files are stored in \xampplite\htdocs\wordpress on your flash drive. We still need to setup WordPress on our portable server.  Open your MySql admin page http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to create a new database for WordPress.  Enter a name for your database in the “Create new database” box, and click Create. Click the Privileges tab on the top, and the select “Add a new User”.   Enter a username and password for the database, and then click the Go button on the bottom of the page. Using WordPress Now, in your browser, enter http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.  Click Create a Configuration File to continue. Make sure you have your Database name, username, and password we created previously, and click “Let’s Go!” Enter your WordPress database name, username, and password, leave the other two entries as default, and click Submit. You should now have the database all ready to go.  Click “Run the install” to finish installing WordPress. Enter a title, username, and password for your test blog, as well as your email address, and then click “Install WordPress”. You now have a portable install of WordPress.  Click “Log In” to  access your WordPress admin page. Enter your username and password, and click Log In. Here you can add pages, posts, themes, extensions, and anything else just like you would on a normal WordPress site.  This is a great way to experiment with WordPress without messing up your real website. You can view your portable WordPress site by entering http://localhost/wordpress/ in your address bar. Closing your server When you’re done running your test server, click the Stop button on each of the services and then click the Exit button in the XAMPP control panel.  If you press the exit button on the top of the window, it will just minimize the control panel to the tray.   Alternately, you can shutdown your server by running xampp_stop.exe from your xampplite folder. Conclusion XAMPP Lite gives you a great way to run a full webserver directly from your flash drive.  Now, anywhere you go, you can test and tweak your webpages and webapps from any Windows computer.  Links Download XAMPP Lite Download WordPress Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7How To Use BitLocker on Drives without TPMSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostView and Manage Flash Cookies the Easy WayInstall and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

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• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

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• The 20 Most Important Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows PCs

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Keyboard shortcuts are practically essential for using any type of PC. They’ll speed up almost everything you do. But long lists of keyboard shortcuts can quickly become overwhelming if you’re just getting started. This list will cover the most useful keyboard shortcuts that every Windows user should know. If you haven’t used keyboard shortcuts much, these will show you just how useful keyboard shortcuts can be. Windows Key + Search The Windows key is particularly important on Windows 8 — especially before Windows 8.1 — because it allows you to quickly return to the Start screen. On Windows 7, it opens the Start menu. Either way, you can start typing immediately after you press the Windows key to search for programs, settings, and files. For example, if you want to launch Firefox, you can press the Windows key, start typing the word Firefox, and press Enter when the Firefox shortcut appears. It’s a quick way to launch programs, open files, and locate Control Panel options without even touching your mouse and without digging through a cluttered Start menu. You can also use the arrow keys to select the shortcut you want to launch before pressing Enter. Copy, Cut, Paste Copy, Cut, and Paste are extremely important keyboard shortcuts for text-editing. If you do any typing on your computer, you probably use them. These options can be accessed using the mouse, either by right-clicking on selected text or opening the application’s Edit menu, but this is the slowest way to do it. After selecting some text, press Ctrl+C to copy it or Ctrl+X to cut it. Position the cursor where you want the text and use Ctrl+V to paste it. These shortcuts can save you a huge amount of time over using the mouse. Search the Current Page or File To quickly perform a search in the current application — whether you’re in a web browser, PDF viewer, document editor, or almost any other type of application — press Ctrl+F. The application’s search (or “Find”) feature will pop up, and you can instantly start typing a phrase you want to search for. You can generally press Enter to  go to the next appearance of the word or phrase in the document, quickly searching through it for what you’re interested in. Switch Between Applications and Tabs Rather than clicking buttons on your taskbar, Alt+Tab is a very quick way to switch between running applications. Windows orders the list of open windows by the order you accessed them, so if you’re only using two different applications, you can just press Alt+Tab to quickly switch between them. If switching between more than two windows, you’ll have to hold the Alt key and press Tab repeatedly to toggle through the list of open windows. If you miss the window you want, you can always press Alt+Shift+Tab to move through the list in reverse. To move between tabs in an application — such as the browser tabs in your web browser — press Ctrl+Tab. Ctrl+Shift+Tab will move through tabs in reverse. Quickly Print If you’re the kind of person who still prints things, you can quickly open the print window by pressing Ctrl+P. This can be faster than hunting down the Print option in every program you want to print something from. Basic Browser Shortcuts Web browser shortcuts can save you tons of time, too. Ctrl+T is a very useful one, as it will open a new tab with the address bar focused, so you can quickly press Ctrl +T, type a search phrase or web address, and press Enter to go there. To go back or forward while browsing, hold the Ctrl key and press the left or right arrow keys. If you’d just like to focus your web browser’s address bar so you can type a new web address or search without opening a new tab, press Ctrl + L. You can then start typing something and press Enter. Close Tabs and Windows To quickly close the current application, press Alt+F4. This works on the desktop and even in new Windows 8-style applications. To quickly close the current browser tab or document, press Ctrl+W. This will often close the current window if there are no other tabs open. Lock Your Computer When you’re done using your computer and want to step away, you may want to lock it. People won’t be able to log in and access your desktop unless they know your password. You can do this from the Start menu or Start screen, but the fastest way to lock your screen is by quickly pressing Windows Key + L before you get up. Access the Task Manager Ctrl+Alt+Delete will take you to a screen that allows you to quickly launch the Task Manager or perform other operations, such as signing out. This is particularly useful because if can be used to recover from situations where your computer doesn’t appear responsive or isn’t accepting input. For example, if a full-screen game becomes unresponsive, Ctrl+Alt+Delete will often allow you to escape from it and end it via the Task Manager. Windows 8 Shortcuts On Windows 8 PCs, there are other very important keyboard shortcuts. Windows Key + C will open your Charms bar, while Windows Key + Tab will open the new App Switcher. These keyboard shortcuts will allow you to avoid the hot corners, which can be tedious to use with a mouse. On the desktop side, Windows Key + D will take you back to the desktop from anywhere. Windows Key + X will open a special “power user menu” that gives you quick access to options that are hidden in the new Windows 8 interface, including Shut Down, Restart, and Control Panel. If you’re interested in learning more keyboard shortcuts, be sure to check our longer lists of 47 keyboard shortcuts that work in all web browsers and 42+ keyboard shortcuts to speed up text-editing. Image Credit: Jeroen Bennink on Flickr     

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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• A Simple Collapsible Menu with jQuery

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  In this post I'll demonstrate how to make a simple collapsible menu using jQuery. To get started let's go ahead and fire up Visual Studio and create a new WebForm.  Now let's build our menu by adding some div, p and anchor tags. Since I'm using a masterpage then the ASPX mark-up should look something like this:   1: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 2: <div id="Menu"> 3: <p>CARS</p> 4: <div class="section"> 5: <a href="#">Car 1</a> 6: <a href="#">Car 2</a> 7: <a href="#">Car 3</a> 8: <a href="#">Car 4</a> 9: </div> 10: <p>BIKES</p> 11: <div class="section"> 12: <a href="#">Bike 1</a> 13: <a href="#">Bike 2</a> 14: <a href="#">Bike 3</a> 15: <a href="#">Bike 4</a> 16: <a href="#">Bike 5</a> 17: <a href="#">Bike 6</a> 18: <a href="#">Bike 7</a> 19: <a href="#">Bike 8</a> 20: </div> 21: <p>COMPUTERS</p> 22: <div class="section"> 23: <a href="#">Computer 1</a> 24: <a href="#">Computer 2</a> 25: <a href="#">Computer 3</a> 26: <a href="#">Computer 4</a> 27: </div> 28: <p>OTHERS</p> 29: <div class="section"> 30: <a href="#">Other 1</a> 31: <a href="#">Other 2</a> 32: <a href="#">Other 3</a> 33: <a href="#">Other 4</a> 34: </div> 35: </div> 36: </asp:Content>   As you can see there's nothing fancy about the mark up above.. Now lets go ahead create a simple CSS to set the look and feel our our Menu. Just for for the simplicity of this demo, add the following CSS below under the <head> section of the page or if you are using master page then add it a the content head. Here's the CSS below:   1: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent" runat="server"> 2: <style type="text/css"> 3: #Menu{ 4: width:300px; 5: } 6: #Menu > p{ 7: background-color:#104D9E; 8: color:#F5F7FA; 9: margin:0; 10: padding:0; 11: border-bottom-style: solid; 12: border-bottom-width: medium; 13: border-bottom-color:#000000; 14: cursor:pointer; 15: } 16: #Menu .section{ 17: padding-left:5px; 18: background-color:#C0D9FA; 19: } 20: a{ 21: display:block; 22: color:#0A0A07; 23: } 24: </style> 25: </asp:Content>   Now let's add the collapsible effects on our menu using jQuery. To start using jQuery then register the following script at the very top of the <head> section of the page or if you are using master page then add it the very top of  the content head section.   <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" ></script>   As you can see I'm using Google AJAX API CDN to host the jQuery file. You can also download the jQuery here and host it in your server if you'd like. Okay here's the the jQuery script below for adding the collapsible effects:   1: <script type="text/javascript"> 2: $(function () { 3: $("a").mouseover(function () { $(this).addClass("highlightRow"); }) 4: .mouseout(function () { $(this).removeClass("highlightRow"); }); 5:   6: $(".section").hide(); 7: $("#Menu > p").click(function () { 8: $(this).next().slideToggle("Slow"); 9: }); 10: }); 11: </script>   Okay to give you a little bit of explaination, at line 3.. what it does is it looks for all the "<a>" anchor elements on the page and attach the mouseover and mouseout event. On mouseover, the highlightRow css class is added to <a> element and on mouse out we remove the css class to revert the style to its default look. at line 6 we will hide all the elements that has a class name set as "section" and if you look at the mark up above it is refering to the <div> elements right after each <p> element. At line 7.. what it does is it looks for a <p> element that is a direct child of the element that has an ID of "Menu" and then attach the click event to toggle the visibilty of the section. Here's how it looks in the page: On Initial Load: After Clicking the Section Header:   That's it! I hope someone find this post usefu!   Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,JQuery,Master Page,JavaScript

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• Solving embarassingly parallel problems using Python multiprocessing

  - by gotgenes

  How does one use multiprocessing to tackle embarrassingly parallel problems? Embarassingly parallel problems typically consist of three basic parts: Read input data (from a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). Run calculations on the input data, where each calculation is independent of any other calculation. Write results of calculations (to a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). We can parallelize the program in two dimensions: Part 2 can run on multiple cores, since each calculation is independent; order of processing doesn't matter. Each part can run independently. Part 1 can place data on an input queue, part 2 can pull data off the input queue and put results onto an output queue, and part 3 can pull results off the output queue and write them out. This seems a most basic pattern in concurrent programming, but I am still lost in trying to solve it, so let's write a canonical example to illustrate how this is done using multiprocessing. Here is the example problem: Given a CSV file with rows of integers as input, compute their sums. Separate the problem into three parts, which can all run in parallel: Process the input file into raw data (lists/iterables of integers) Calculate the sums of the data, in parallel Output the sums Below is traditional, single-process bound Python program which solves these three tasks: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # basicsums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file. """ import csv import optparse import sys def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) return cli_parser def parse_input_csv(csvfile): """Parses the input CSV and yields tuples with the index of the row as the first element, and the integers of the row as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.reader` instance """ for i, row in enumerate(csvfile): row = [int(entry) for entry in row] yield i, row def sum_rows(rows): """Yields a tuple with the index of each input list of integers as the first element, and the sum of the list of integers as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `rows`: an iterable of tuples, with the index of the original row as the first element, and a list of integers as the second element """ for i, row in rows: yield i, sum(row) def write_results(csvfile, results): """Writes a series of results to an outfile, where the first column is the index of the original row of data, and the second column is the result of the calculation. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.writer` instance to which to write results - `results`: an iterable of tuples, with the index (zero-based) of the original row as the first element, and the calculated result from that row as the second element """ for result_row in results: csvfile.writerow(result_row) def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # gets an iterable of rows that's not yet evaluated input_rows = parse_input_csv(in_csvfile) # sends the rows iterable to sum_rows() for results iterable, but # still not evaluated result_rows = sum_rows(input_rows) # finally evaluation takes place as a chain in write_results() write_results(out_csvfile, result_rows) infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) Let's take this program and rewrite it to use multiprocessing to parallelize the three parts outlined above. Below is a skeleton of this new, parallelized program, that needs to be fleshed out to address the parts in the comments: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # multiproc_sums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file, using multiple processes if desired. """ import csv import multiprocessing import optparse import sys NUM_PROCS = multiprocessing.cpu_count() def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) cli_parser.add_option('-n', '--numprocs', type='int', default=NUM_PROCS, help="Number of processes to launch [DEFAULT: %default]") return cli_parser def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # Parse the input file and add the parsed data to a queue for # processing, possibly chunking to decrease communication between # processes. # Process the parsed data as soon as any (chunks) appear on the # queue, using as many processes as allotted by the user # (opts.numprocs); place results on a queue for output. # # Terminate processes when the parser stops putting data in the # input queue. # Write the results to disk as soon as they appear on the output # queue. # Ensure all child processes have terminated. # Clean up files. infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) These pieces of code, as well as another piece of code that can generate example CSV files for testing purposes, can be found on github. I would appreciate any insight here as to how you concurrency gurus would approach this problem. Here are some questions I had when thinking about this problem. Bonus points for addressing any/all: Should I have child processes for reading in the data and placing it into the queue, or can the main process do this without blocking until all input is read? Likewise, should I have a child process for writing the results out from the processed queue, or can the main process do this without having to wait for all the results? Should I use a processes pool for the sum operations? If yes, what method do I call on the pool to get it to start processing the results coming into the input queue, without blocking the input and output processes, too? apply_async()? map_async()? imap()? imap_unordered()? Suppose we didn't need to siphon off the input and output queues as data entered them, but could wait until all input was parsed and all results were calculated (e.g., because we know all the input and output will fit in system memory). Should we change the algorithm in any way (e.g., not run any processes concurrently with I/O)?

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• Need Help Customizing a Grammar Checking Replace Rule in Java

  - by user567785

  Hello, I am currently adding the Khmer (Cambodian) language to LanguageTool, an opensource grammar checker for OpenOffice (http://www.languagetool.org). I don't know enough Java to customize one of the scripts and wanted to make a request here asking if anyone would be willing to customize it for me (I can put link to your website at http://www.sbbic.org/lang/en-us/volunteer/ if you help). Here is the script that needs customization KhmerWordCoherencyRule.java: /* LanguageTool, a natural language style checker * Copyright (C) 2005 Daniel Naber (http://www.danielnaber.de) * * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either * version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. * * This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU * Lesser General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public * License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 * USA */ package de.danielnaber.languagetool.rules.km; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import java.util.Locale; import java.util.Map; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.AnalyzedSentence; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.AnalyzedToken; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.AnalyzedTokenReadings; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.JLanguageTool; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.tools.StringTools; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.rules.Category; import de.danielnaber.languagetool.rules.RuleMatch; /** * A Khmer rule that matches words or phrases which should not be used and suggests * correct ones instead. Loads the relevant words from * <code>rules/km/coherency.txt</code>, where km is a code of the language. * * @author Andriy Rysin */ public abstract class KhmerWordCoherencyRule extends KhmerRule { private static final String FILE_ENCODING = "utf-8"; private Map<String, String> wrongWords; // e.g. "????? -> "?????" private static final String FILE_NAME = "/km/coherency.txt"; public abstract String getFileName(); public String getEncoding() { return FILE_ENCODING; } /** * Indicates if the rule is case-sensitive. Default value is <code>true</code>. * @return true if the rule is case-sensitive, false otherwise. */ //in Khmer there is no case public boolean isCaseSensitive() { return false; } /** * @return the locale used for case conversion when {@link #isCaseSensitive()} is set to <code>false</code>. */ public Locale getLocale() { return Locale.getDefault(); } public KhmerWordCoherencyRule(final ResourceBundle messages) throws IOException { if (messages != null) { super.setCategory(new Category(messages.getString("category_misc"))); } wrongWords = loadWords(JLanguageTool.getDataBroker().getFromRulesDirAsStream(getFileName())); } public String getId() { return "KM_WORD_COHERENCY"; } public String getDescription() { return "Checks for wrong words/phrases"; } public String getSuggestion() { return " does not match your previous spelling of the word, use "; } public String getShort() { return "Use a consistant spelling throughout"; } public final RuleMatch[] match(final AnalyzedSentence text) { final List<RuleMatch> ruleMatches = new ArrayList<RuleMatch>(); final AnalyzedTokenReadings[] tokens = text.getTokensWithoutWhitespace(); for (int i = 1; i < tokens.length; i++) { final String token = tokens[i].getToken(); final String origToken = token; final String replacement = isCaseSensitive()?wrongWords.get(token):wrongWords.get(token.toLowerCase(getLocale())); if (replacement != null) { final String msg = token + getSuggestion() + replacement; final int pos = tokens[i].getStartPos(); final RuleMatch potentialRuleMatch = new RuleMatch(this, pos, pos + origToken.length(), msg, getShort()); if (!isCaseSensitive() && StringTools.startsWithUppercase(token)) { potentialRuleMatch.setSuggestedReplacement(StringTools.uppercaseFirstChar(replacement)); } else { potentialRuleMatch.setSuggestedReplacement(replacement); } ruleMatches.add(potentialRuleMatch); } } return toRuleMatchArray(ruleMatches); } private Map<String, String> loadWords(final InputStream file) throws IOException { final Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>(); InputStreamReader isr = null; BufferedReader br = null; try { isr = new InputStreamReader(file, getEncoding()); br = new BufferedReader(isr); String line; while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) { line = line.trim(); if (line.length() < 1) { continue; } if (line.charAt(0) == '#') { // ignore comments continue; } final String[] parts = line.split(";"); if (parts.length != 2) { throw new IOException("Format error in file " + JLanguageTool.getDataBroker().getFromRulesDirAsUrl(getFileName()) + ", line: " + line); } map.put(parts[0], parts[1]); } } finally { if (br != null) { br.close(); } if (isr != null) { isr.close(); } } return map; } public void reset() { } } Here is what I need the SimpleReplaceRule.java to do: 1 - Be able to have more than two spelling variations in the coherency.txt file (right now it can only be Word1;Word2). 2 - Find the first use of ANY of the spelling variations in a document that are found in coherency.txt and then make sure only that spelling is used throughout the document (ex. in the coherency.txt I have Word1;Word2;Word3 then in my document on the first line I write Word2. then on next line I write Word1 and Word 3 - then the grammar checker will flag Word1 and Word3 saying that I should use the spelling "Word2" instead...etc.). If anyone can help I would be grateful! Thanks for your time, Nathan

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• PowerShell Control over Nikon D3000 Camera

  My wife got me a Nikon D3000 camera for Christmas last year, and Im loving it but still trying to wrap my head around some of its features.  For instance, when you plug it into a computer via USB, it doesnt show up as a drive like most cameras Ive used to, but rather it shows up as Computer\D3000.  After a bit of research, Ive learned that this is because it implements the MTP/PTP protocol, and thus doesnt actually let Windows mount the cameras storage as a drive letter.  Nikon describes the use of the MTP and PTP protocols in their cameras here. What Im really trying to do is gain access to the cameras file system via PowerShell.  Ive been using a very handy PowerShell script to pull pictures off of my cameras and organize them into folders by date.  Id love to be able to do the same thing with my Nikon D3000, but so far I havent been able to figure out how to get access to the files in PowerShell.  If you know, Id appreciate any links/tips you can provide.  All I could find is a shareware product called PTPdrive, which Im not prepared to shell out money for (yet).  (and yes you can do much the same thing with Windows 7s Import Pictures and Videos wizard, which is pretty good too) However, in my searching, I did find some really cool stuff you can do with PowerShell and one of these cameras, like actually taking pictures via PowerShell commands.  Credit for this goes to James ONeill and Mark Wilson.  Heres what I was able to do: Taking Pictures via PowerShell with D3000 First, connect your camera, turn it on, and launch PowerShell.  Execute the following commands to see what commands your device supports.  $dialog = New-Object -ComObject "WIA.CommonDialog" $device = $dialog.ShowSelectDevice() $device.Commands You should see something like this: Now, to take a picture, simply point your camera at something and then execute this command: $device.ExecuteCommand("{AF933CAC-ACAD-11D2-A093-00C04F72DC3C}") .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Imagine my surprise when this actually took a picture (with auto-focus): Imagine what you could do with a camera completely under the control of your computer  Time-lapse photography would be pretty simple, for instance, with a very simple loop that takes a picture and then sleeps for a minute (or whatever time period).  Hooked up to a laptop for portability (and an A/C power supply), this would be pretty trivial to implement.  I may have to give it a shot and report back. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• This Week in Geek History: Gmail Goes Public, Deep Blue Wins at Chess, and the Birth of Thomas Edison

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Every week we bring you a snapshot of the week in Geek History. This week we’re taking a peek at the public release of Gmail, the first time a computer won against a chess champion, and the birth of prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Gmail Goes Public It’s hard to believe that Gmail has only been around for seven years and that for the first three years of its life it was invite only. In 2007 Gmail dropped the invite only requirement (although they would hold onto the “beta” tag for another two years) and opened its doors for anyone to grab a username @gmail. For what seemed like an entire epoch in internet history Gmail had the slickest web-based email around with constant innovations and features rolling out from Gmail Labs. Only in the last year or so have major overhauls at competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail brought other services up to speed. Can’t stand reading a Week in Geek History entry without a random fact? Here you go: gmail.com was originally owned by the Garfield franchise and ran a service that delivered Garfield comics to your email inbox. No, we’re not kidding. Deep Blue Proves Itself a Chess Master Deep Blue was a super computer constructed by IBM with the sole purpose of winning chess matches. In 2011 with the all seeing eye of Google and the amazing computational abilities of engines like Wolfram Alpha we simply take powerful computers immersed in our daily lives for granted. The 1996 match against reigning world chest champion Garry Kasparov where in Deep Blue held its own, but ultimately lost, in a  4-2 match shook a lot of people up. What did it mean if something that was considered such an elegant and quintessentially human endeavor such as chess was so easy for a machine? A series of upgrades helped Deep Blue outright win a match against Kasparov in 1997 (seen in the photo above). After the win Deep Blue was retired and disassembled. Parts of Deep Blue are housed in the National Museum of History and the Computer History Museum. Birth of Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history and holds an astounding 1,093 US Patents. He is responsible for outright inventing or greatly refining major innovations in the history of world culture including the phonograph, the movie camera, the carbon microphone used in nearly every telephone well into the 1980s, batteries for electric cars (a notion we’d take over a century to take seriously), voting machines, and of course his enormous contribution to electric distribution systems. Despite the role of scientist and inventor being largely unglamorous, Thomas Edison and his tumultuous relationship with fellow inventor Nikola Tesla have been fodder for everything from books, to comics, to movies, and video games. Other Notable Moments from This Week in Geek History Although we only shine the spotlight on three interesting facts a week in our Geek History column, that doesn’t mean we don’t have space to highlight a few more in passing. This week in Geek History: 1971 – Apollo 14 returns to Earth after third Lunar mission. 1974 – Birth of Robot Chicken creator Seth Green. 1986 – Death of Dune creator Frank Herbert. Goodnight Dune. 1997 – Simpsons becomes longest running animated show on television. Have an interesting bit of geek trivia to share? Shoot us an email to [email protected] with “history” in the subject line and we’ll be sure to add it to our list of trivia. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines RGB? CMYK? Alpha? What Are Image Channels and What Do They Mean? Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO] The Lingering Glow of Sunset over a Winter Landscape Wallpaper

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• Collation errors in business

  - by Rob Farley

  At the PASS Summit last month, I did a set (Lightning Talk) about collation, and in particular, the difference between the “English” spoken by people from the US, Australia and the UK. One of the examples I gave was that in the US drivers might stop for gas, whereas in Australia, they just open the window a little. This is what’s known as a paraprosdokian, where you suddenly realise you misunderstood the first part of the sentence, based on what was said in the second. My current favourite is Emo Phillip’s line “I like to play chess with old men in the park, but it can be hard to find thirty-two of them.” Essentially, this a collation error, one that good comedians can get mileage from. Unfortunately, collation is at its worst when we have a computer comparing two things in different collations. They might look the same, and sound the same, but if one of the things is in SQL English, and the other one is in Windows English, the poor database server (with no sense of humour) will get suspicious of developers (who all have senses of humour, obviously), and declare a collation error, worried that it might not realise some nuance of the language. One example is the common scenario of a case-sensitive collation and a case-insensitive one. One may think that “Rob” and “rob” are the same, but the other might not. Clearly one of them is my name, and the other is a verb which means to steal (people called “Nick” have the same problem, of course), but I have no idea whether “Rob” and “rob” should be considered the same or not – it depends on the collation. I told a lie before – collation isn’t at its worst in the computer world, because the computer has the sense to complain about the collation issue. People don’t. People will say something, with their own understanding of what they mean. Other people will listen, and apply their own collation to it. I remember when someone was asking me about a situation which had annoyed me. They asked if I was ‘pissed’, and I said yes. I meant that I was annoyed, but they were asking if I’d been drinking. It took a moment for us to realise the misunderstanding. In business, the problem is escalated. A business user may explain something in a particular way, using terminology that they understand, but using words that mean something else to a technical person. I remember a situation with a checkbox on a form (back in VB6 days from memory). It was used to indicate that something was approved, and indicated whether a particular database field should store True or False – nothing more. However, the client understood it to mean that an entire workflow system would be implemented, with different users have permission to approve items and more. The project manager I’d just taken over from clearly hadn’t appreciated that, and I faced a situation of explaining the misunderstanding to the client. Lots of fun... Collation errors aren’t just a database setting that you can ignore. You need to remember that Americans speak a different type of English to Aussies and Poms, and techies speak a different language to their clients.

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