Computer trivia

The tip provided here is pretty intuitive, but is not generally known and used.

It is very common to use the Ctrl key to select more than one folder or file. But very few know that Ctrl key can also be used to select more than one window. If you want to close more than one window at a time, press and hold the Ctrl key. With the Ctrl key pressed, click on all the windows on the taskbar (not on windows, but on the taskbar). Now release the Ctrl key and right click on any of the windows selected and you can see the option to close the selected group.

Very similar to the way multiple files are copied or deleted, right?

Isn’t it great if you could edit just any website in the wild. I mean it. You can edit the content of any website. If you want to you can change this post you are reading right now and if you did not like it, you can delete it altogether.

Lets see how this can be done.

Open the site you want to edit and let the site load completely. Now with the page opened, hit the following in the URL bar of your browser.

javascript: document.body.contentEditable = ‘true’; document.designMode = ‘on’; void 0

There you go. Now click anywhere on the page and you can edit the text as if it is your notepad. You can also resize the images or delete everything at a time.

If you want to mak the page uneditable again, go to URL bar and hit escape. You will get the original URL which can b loaded now in the usual manner.

I guess you have realized that this is just fun stuff. Nothing will happen to the original site content, and all the changes you make are restricted to your machine only.

Enjoy the stuff. Change the Google homepage to include your name.

To be out

I agree, you can browse through your folders very fast, but sometimes you find a slight delay wen you try to open some folder or traverse through the explorer tree. The following tweak will fix this and makes explorer slightly faster than normal. Though the difference is not too great, it is noticeable.

The idea is to instruct Windows not to search for network files and printers each time you open windows explorer. By default windows does this every time explorer is opened. So here are the steps.

- Open any explorer window

- Click Tools menu and select “Folder Options”

- Click the “View” tab in the Folder Options window

- Clear “Automatically search for network folders and printers” check box

- Click OK

The computer must be restarted for this change to be applied (probably, restarting explorer will work, but I don’t know)

There has been a very common complaint since the release of Firefox 3 about the browser logging out of already authenticated sessions and not logging into the approved websites automatically. This problem was not existent in the Firefox 2. Not only after restarting the browser, but Firefox 3 also logs you out of the website after a certain period of time.

The most obvious place where you can find a solution for this is to check if the cookies are enabled and allowed by the browser. However, this is not a solution as Firefox will log you out even all the cookies are present and allowed. There are many reasons cited for this abnormal behavior like the way Firefox is quit, plug-ins etc.

Here I present the solution I found and that worked for me. But I’m not sure if this will work for everyone.

I read somewhere on the Internet the files in which Firefox stores cookies are getting corrupted when it is upgraded from version 2 to version 3.  The cookies were stored in cookies.txt in the older version and in cookies.sqlite in the newer version and this transfer seems to be corrupted. I deleted both these files and started all over again and this has solver my problem,  though this means that I have to start from scratch logging into all the sites manually once. But that was only once and now my browser logs me in automatically.

This a Firefox tweak which can help you boost your Internet connectivity speed considerably. Follow the steps below and you can observe see the pages loading much faster.

Note that this tweak will only work with Firefox and not other browsers and also that this tweak will not degrade the system or browser in any way.

- Open Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter

- Look for the following entries and set them to the values indicated.

network.http.pipelining                            : TRUE

network.http.proxy.pipelining                   : TRUE

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests         : Any value between 20 to 30

- Create a new Integer (right-click and select new Integer) and name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay

- Set the value of the Integer created above to 0

You are done. Restart the browser and you should notice the pages loading faster than normal.

If you are curious as to what happened, we have enabled pipe-lining and set it to load some 25 pages at a time, instead of loading one page at a time which is the default behavior.

The new integer we created will instruct Firefox to process the information received with zero delay.

When you use a public computer, one may not like other seeing all the applications and files opened by him. However Windows allows this as it records all the recently opened files and programs under ‘recent documents’. Fortunately there is a way to instruct windows not to record the recent programs and files.

Do the following (for Windows Vista)

- On the taskbar, right click and select ‘properties’

- Select the ’start menu’ tab

- Clear ‘Store and display a list of recently opened files’

- Clear ‘Store and display a list of recently opened programs’

- Click OK

Now windows will stop recording your activity and you can see whatever files you want to see

Windows XP also has this option, but may be at a different place. Go to the ’start menu’ tab and then look for the appropriate option under advanced settings.

Suppose you are in a conference and browse to a site to get some information. How do you feel if the site suddenly starts playing some song or starts explaining about their products. Embarrassed?

With the advent of Flash, it has become pretty common to include flash in the webpages as it loads much faster. Using flash is certainly welcome, but certain websites misbehave by including audio which plays without user consent. This is done with the sole aim of getting he users attention. But this causes frustration and sometimes embarrasses us. I was wondering if there is any solution to disable the sounds from the flash websites (Of course, not the obvious solution of muting the system volume, which may not always be possible).

I searched over the Internet and found many softwarez which does this. However there is a very easy solution to this. The idea is, browsers use a dynamic link library named “msacm32.dll” to get the sound drivers. So if we prevent the browser from doing this, it will not play any sounds. The browser first searches for this file in its home directory and then in the windows root directory.

So the solution is, create an empty text file, rename it as msacm32.dll and place it in the home directory of the browser.  So the browser tries to get the directory information from this dummy and obviously fails. As it has already found the file in its home directory, it will not again search for it in the windows directory and thus will not find the original file. In case you want your browser to play the sounds again, just remove the file we created above or rename it to something else.

As far as I know, this solution will not cause any problems.

Note:

Home Directory for IE: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer

Home Directory for Firefox: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox

These may differ in your machine

This post is about a very common mistake while untarring in Linux. I personally have committed this mistake many times and seen people doing this.

Suppose you have a file filename.tar. The most common way to try to untar this file is

                                                “tar -zxvf filename.tar”

Some times this gives the following error.
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

When a file has .tar extension, it means that the file is either zipped or zipped and compressed. The command we typed above is for files that are zipped and compressed. However some times files are only zipped and not compressed. In that case the above error is thrown.

So, the command to untar tarballs that are only zipped and not compressed is

                                       “tar -xvf filename.tar”

Try this and there will not be any problem.

Do you know that it is possible to edit the registry remotely in Windows XP? The worst part is the service required for remote registry editing runs by default in Windows XP. This can be considered a serious security hole given the importance of registry in Windows Operating System.

Fortunately, there is a way to disable this and make your system more secure. Here are the steps to do this.
1. Open Control Panel.
2. Open administrative tools - services.
3. Scan all the services and locate the service named “remote registry”
4. Right click and open its properties.
5. Select ‘disable’, in the startup type option box.
6. Restart the computer and remote registry editing is disabled.