Useful tips and stuff that matters » tips

Vista Temporary Internet Files Virtualized

angelchen1111 — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:55:18 +0000

Yesterday after scanning virus with Kaspersky online(which is a Java Applet), I saved the log file in my documents; however, I can’t find it anywhere in my document folder. I thought it was lost, so I opened the online scanner and tried to save again and I still saw the old file there. I wondered where did it go, so I searched for it, but Vista’s search function is quite useless and it didn’t find it. I then looked into the AppData folder to try to find it but still nothing. Later on I tried to boot into Linux and searched for the file again, and I found it in the “AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Virtualized” folder, which was kinda weird. It was Vista’s new security feature to Virtualize those programs that are incompatible and make them to write to a different folder than the actual one, but how come other programs can’t see those virtualized files? To prevent things like this, I have to run Internet Explorer as administrator to save the file in order for the file to be written to the correct folder.

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Extract Video and Audio from flv files using flv extract

angelchen1111 — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:54:39 +0000

With FLVExtract you can extract video and audio from flv files without reconverting them again and lose quality.

url to download FLVExtract http://www.moitah.net/#FLVExtract

Installing Language Pack in Vista for My neighbors

angelchen1111 — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 06:48:28 +0000

Today I helped my neighbors to upgrade his Windows Vista that comes from the pc from premium to ultimate so that I can install the chinese language pack for them. I actually helped them to buy the upgrade from premium to ultimate online for about $172. After buying it I got the license file with the product key on it and started the update. The upgrade took about one hour and went fine. After the upgrade I was happy and trying to install the language pack from Windows Update, but the language pack failed to install when it’s half way through with code 2 error! I restarted the computer, tried it again, but it’s still the same! Still can’t fix it even after clicking the get help next to the code 2 error and search online for solutions of the problem! I actually found many people with the same problem and no solution! Some people said that the only way to get through it is make a clean install of Windows rather than using the one that comes with the PC. Later I called microsoft support for help and that guy simply sucks, can’t do anything about it either. Afterward I didn’t have any other way to fix this and I decided to resize the Windows partition and make a new partition to install Windows on it. The first time I installed Windows Vista ultimate with the Upgrade Anytime CD without the cd key I bought because it didn’t work. After installing it didn’t work either because the cd key can’t be used for activation. After that I tried to instal premium first with the computer’s product key and then upgrade to Ultimate, but without activating the premium first and couldn’t use the cd key either. Of course it failed again. Finally I gave it one more chance by clean installing premium first and then activate it. After activating the premium I can finally use the upgrade cd key to upgrade to ultimate and install the language pack! Phew… almost wasted the money that I use to upgrade. I think the language pack doesn’t work with the preinstalled Windows in many computer and I had to make a clean install instead to get it work.

Shopping Cashback on Buying Things Online

angelchen1111 — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:59:31 +0000

Do you want to get additional cashback besides the discount that they offer online? On the website InstantProfitz you “can get automatic rebates for shopping at your favorite merchants – and all sorts of new ones too! This ‘cash back’ is in addition to and separate from any discounts you may get at hundreds of online merchants!” All you need to do is to make qualified purchase at their listed merchants through their links, and you will get the percent cash back listed on their website for that merchant after 30 days.

There are many famous online stores including Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, and even Half.com on their list; through the links on that site you can save some additional $$$ besides their original discounts.

For more information click here, also don’t forget to check out the FAQ, it contains some important information on how it works.

Reset Windows XP’s password using Offline NT Password and Registry Editor

angelchen1111 — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 22:09:05 +0000

A video of resetting Windows XP’s password using Offline NT Password and Registry Editor(from the boot floppy disk). Here’s the original version of the video.
Here’s the link to download Offline NT Password and Registry Editor and instruction on how to use it.
If your computer allows booting from floppy disk or cdrom, your Windows’ password can also be reset using some boot disk or CD like that one. You should disable booting from any disk, like floppy, cdrom, flash drive. etc. except for hard drive in BIOS setting if your computer is public computer or you don’t want others to reset your password.

Another link to download Offline NT Password and Registry Editor

how to fix wordpress 404 error when posting in wordpress

angelchen1111 — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 01:16:22 +0000

If you have mod_security turned on in your server you will sometimes get a 404 not found error when you try to save or publish your post. To fix this add the lines
SecFilterEngine Off SecFilterScanPOST Off
to your .htaccess file in your wordpress’s root directory to turn off mod_security’s keyword filtering feature for posting forms, and you should not get the error anymore when you try to post.

How to get rid of the wide spaces between the post body in WordPress

angelchen1111 — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 05:06:51 +0000

Sometimes we see some annoying wide spaces in between the post body, which makes the post looks wierd, like this one in the picture. That’s because the theme’s stylesheet made the post body’s texts to align justified. To get rid of those wide spaces we have to open the file style.css in the folder “wp-content/themes/your theme”, find the .post { section or .entry-content { section if you’re using K2 and change text-align: justify; to text-align: left; to make the text to align left, so that they won’t make wide spaces by sometimes aligning left and sometimes aligning right. After changing this file the wide spaces will be gone.

How to recover a corrupt registry that prevents Windows from booting

angelchen1111 — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 07:35:00 +0000

Today my friend had a problem with his computer, while Windows is booting it restarted unexpectedly without leaving any error message. I tried to boot under safe mode, but still had the same problem, it restarted again. I then tried the start up option “Disable Automatic Restart on System Failure” on the boot menu, this time it gave me the blue screen with the message “registry error 0×000051” and it told me that registry was corrupt. Because of this I had to use the recovery console to replace the corrupt registry with the last good registry found inside the System Volume Information folder, which is where the System Restore’s files located.
Here’s how I did that:

After logging in to the recovery console cd to C:\System Volume Information, then dir to list the directories inside of it, you’ll see a lot of folder named _restore{*} along with their date, cd to the most recent _restore{*} . If you don’t know what recovery console is or you’re not comfortable with it please check out this page.
List all files inside of it and choose the most recent folder RPxxx that you think the registry at that date was still not corrupted.
Cd to the folder Snapshot.
List all files again and you’ll notice something like

_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SAM
_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SECURITY
_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE
_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEM
_REGISTRY_USER_.DEFAULT
Back up the existing registries in the system folder just in case of the something goes wrong we can restore those registries

copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\software c:\windows\tmp\software.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\sam c:\windows\tmp\sam.bak
copy
c:\windows\system32\config\security c:\windows\tmp\security.bak
copy
c:\windows\system32\config\default c:\windows\tmp\default.bak
Replace the corrupt registry in the system by running
copy _registry_machine_software c:\windows\system32\config\software
copy _registry_machine_system c:\windows\system32\config\system
copy _registry_machine_sam c:\windows\system32\config\sam
copy _registry_machine_security c:\windows\system32\config\security
copy _registry_user_.default c:\windows\system32\config\default
After replace the above files restart the computer and it should boot appropriately again.

How to autosurf effectively

angelchen1111 — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 01:57:00 +0000

Autosurf is a good way to increase your site’s traffic, it works by you visiting other people’s sites automatically in exchange for other people’s visits, sites are shown for a specific amounts of time then rotates afterward. Once you start the autosurf window, you can sit there to watch each websites that it shows up or you can go to do something else. There are many autosurf websites available, you could just google search “autosurf” to find them, the good ones can even get over hundreds hits(unique and non-unique) per hour. But some of them shows sites that load too many stuff that freezes the browser, or cheating sites like frame breaker, which redirect the page on the top frame, thus breaking the rotator’s frame.
Many autosurf websites won’t work well with Internet Explorer as they won’t rotate, you should use FireFox to browse them, if you don’t have FireFox, get
now! To prevent the frame breakers or sites that lag the computer, or to open many autosurf rotators at once without lagging you should install the extension NoScript, then block all the scripts except for the autosurf sites, because they need javascript in order to rotate. After that you should also block the plugins because they will lag, click the NoScript icon in the status bar and then click options, click the advanced tab and check forbid java, flash, and other plugins, click OK to save. If you want to open many autosurf sites at once you should also disable loading images except for the autosurf sites, and open the sites in tabs instead of many windows. Once you’ve done all of those you could surf 24 hours a day to exchange traffic for your website with little or no breaking and lagging.

Note that the traffics generated by autosurfs are artificial traffics, people usually won’t look at your websites, if you want your website to be seen by other people you should try Manual Traffic Exchanges like iLoveHits, FastFreeway, or BlogExplosion, they require the user to verify before switching to other websites instead of done automatically.

How to make links to open in a target frame

angelchen1111 — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:31:00 +0000

To make links in a web page to open in a target frame or new window all you need is to add target=”_blank” in between the section of the html code, where *** is the default target frame.

target=”_blank” Opens a page in new window
target=”_self” Opens a page in the same frame
target=”_top” Opens a page in the top page breaking all frames
target=”_parent” Opens a page in parent frame

We can also use target=”frame or iframe’s name” to make the link to open in that frame or iframe.

To make links to open in a target frame or new window by default add in between the section of the code. This also works for Blogger’s templates, for Blogger Beta’s templates since it had to be XML compliant you have to add the closing tag at the end to to make it work.

How to flip sidebar to left and post body to right in Blogger

angelchen1111 — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 05:56:00 +0000

In Blogger Beta you can move the widgets up and down, but you can’t flip the post body to the right or left of the sidebar. Here’s an easy way to do that without widgets.

To move the sidebar to the left find the section main or main-wrapper and change float:left to float:right, then find the section sidebar or sidebar-wrapper and change float:right to float:left. To move the sidebar to the right just do the opposite, change float:right to float:left and float:left to float:right.

After flipping them you might want to flip the backgrounds as well, and fine tune the layouts to make your blog look well.

Here’s the picture of the template TicTac Blue with the sidebar on the left:

How to kill a hard drive in Linux quietly with an easy way to undo it

angelchen1111 — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:30:00 +0000

We know that we can kill Linux by running the command rm -rf /, but this can’t be undone as your files are gone. Here’s a quick way to make your hard drive look like formatted and how to undo that easily (tested under VMWare with ubuntu), click each picture for more information.

First back up the first 10000 bytes of the hard drive and then replace it with empty data.

Everything seemed to be OK and we could still shut down normally, but……..

After we restart, it won’t boot anymore with an empty MBR and all the partitions are gone! To fix it we need to boot from a boot disk and restore what we backed up.

After all this it everything worked again. Now restart and check it…

Inspiration from my very sad personal experience:

Once upon a time I thought the first 512 bytes of hda1(where my Windows is installed) is the MBR but in fact it’s supposed to be the first 512 bytes of hda, I ran the command “dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1″ and thought this would reset the MBR, but the Windows partition is ruined instead!

List of free phone call services compared

angelchen1111 — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 22:22:00 +0000

Free PC-to-Phone services with free PC-to-PC feature:

Skype – Now you can make free unlimited phone calls from skype to regular phone within U.S. and Canada with no minute limits until the end of this year. This only apply within U.S. and Canada, if you’re using Skype from other countries the calls won’t be free.

Gizmo – I heard about Gizmo for the first time in an email that says “Skype bad, Gizmo good”. Now Gizmo can make calls from PC to mobile and landline phones FREE in 60 countries (click for more information), but it requires both participants, the one making phone call and the one receiving, to use Gizmo to make PC-to-PC calls actively in order to qualify for this.

Free Phone-to-Phone services:

Jajah – Like Gizmo, active users can use it to make long distance phone call with other active users. Unlike Gizmo, it’s phone-to-phone, to use it you have to go to its website to type your phone number and the number you wish to call, after a while your phone will ring – your friend’s phone will ring, and you can start talking. Unregistered users can only try it for 5 minutes, registered users can call 1000 minutes a month, five hours a week, 1 hour a day. (for more information click here)

Phonehog.com – Like Skype, this service is only available in U.S. and canada unless you have a way to call its toll-free numbers for free in other countries. Unlike other services, it’s intended to be used in regular phones, to use it you have to dial the toll-free number and enter the pin number they gave you, just like using phone cards. When you registered you have no free minutes yet, to add free minutes you have to go to its website and sign up offers from other companies, many offers are free, some are paid, most paid offers gives you more free minutes. If you want phone card or you want to make phone call from public phones (20 units per connection) it should be your choice.

Some very cool free stuff and tools online

angelchen1111 — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:25:00 +0000

Did you Know that:

Now in aim you can make a free phone number in AIM phone line.
In Windows Live Local you can see the front of your house.
You can download free LEGAL music in mpfree.com, they’re in WMA format 128kbps or 256kbps, which is very cool.
You can also download copyright free classical music online in the ClassicCat website.
You can make free INTERNATIONAL phone call (including U.S. of course) in phonehog.com or make free phone call inside U.S. with Skype.
In firefox you can play very cool game without any plugin, you can try it here.
You can play video with java online.
You can make a very cool mp3 player with flash (Very cool, works in myspace.com)

Make Ubuntu Dapper to display Chinese well in two minutes

angelchen1111 — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 14:16:00 +0000

With Ubuntu Dapper you can make Linux to display Chinese fonts (or maybe for other languages as well) much much easier than before. After you read this you’ll find out to make Linux to display Chinese well can be as simple as this.

Get the font Simsun.ttc from Windows or some other high quality Chinese fonts and put them in the folder /usr/share/fonts/truetype.
Update the font cache by runing “sudo fc-cache -fv”.
Last and not least run the command “sudo fontconfig-voodoo -f -s zh_CN” and you are done! restart X and check it out.

Here are some screenshots for the effects:

You can even see bold, italic, bold+italic fonts:

Firefox browsing Yahoo China:

Something about Blogger’s template format and tips to show html code in posts

angelchen1111 — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:20:00 +0000

Did you know that Blogger.com’s template is just a special HTML file with some special template tags in between? That means you can customize your blog just like editing a web page.

That gives you the maximum flexibility to customize the blog’s design. You can add and change anything you want from top to bottom. To learn more about the template tags and what they do please visit http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42095.

I found it useful to put ”> into your template’s section, so that search engines will show your website’s description in their result instead of some stupid message like “Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS · Get your own blog · Flag Blog · Next blog” if you have NavBar on.

If you want to put HTML codes in your blog to let others copy you can’t paste them directly in the Edit Posts window, it will give you some error message, here’s a way to get around it:

Copy the codes you want to paste into the post and paste it into a HTML editor (like FrontPage)’s design section.

Check the source code of the contents you just pasted, you will notice that the symbols “<”, “>”, or others became &??; now you can copy those codes with &??; and paste them in the posts, although you still see &??; now, when you published your post the &??; will become the appropriate symbol again when it show in the blog.

Note: You can’t get away with it by putting the unmodified codes inside the text box, Blogger’s editor still won’t let you save it even if you do that.

Wow! pictures of houses taken from the sky!

angelchen1111 — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:25:32 +0000

WTH? did I take this picture of my friend’s house from the sky front and back? No, it came from the amazing new Windows Live Local service (Formerly Virtual Earth) I mentioned before, now whenever you see the map of some big cities you can see them in bird’s eye’s view. with that you can see any place front and back as if the picture is taken from the sky. The technology used is called Pictometry, its images are taken at a 40 degree angle using a patented process, and it’s widely used by local and state Governments, including police and fire departments. Now everybody can give it a try now to see the all the places around us for free.