Goto: http://www.bestipodtips.info/
Info for IPod generations.
Plus!
Feeling for a little adventure; the uber geek iPod hack- IPod Linux!
Not for the new user but if you have an older IPod device laying around, why not give it a shot? http://www.ipodlinux.org/wiki/Main_Page
IPod Linux does not work on 2nd/3rd/4th generation iPod nano, 6th generation iPod classic, all iPod shuffles and the iPod Touch.
Quick tip. Otis and Dover type elevators have this hidden feature that is usually enabled.
While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.
Some elevators systems may have this option turned off. But why not try it if your in a high rise building and your in a hurry.
Everyone’s all excited about High Definition TV channels these days. Cable service providers have changed the way they deliver cable content through their lines by way of newer cable boxes and such. However a few hacks exist that are perfectly legal.
All newer HDTV’s ( primarily 2007 and newer, but some pre-2007 TV have this too) have QAM tuners and ATSC tuners as required by FFC laws.
A QAM tuner is this:
A QAM tuner is a electronic tuning device. The qam tuner is used in digital television sets and other electronic equipment, such as vcrs and dvrs. QAM stands for "quadrature amplitude modulation". Qam is the format by which digital cable channels are encoded and transmitted by the cable companies. A qam tuner can tune non-encrypted, digital cable channels, without using a cable box (set top box). If your set has a built in qam tuner, you can simply plug the cable from the cable company, directly into your TV set. This will allow you to watch non-encrypted programming. (Encryption is used for programs such as HBO and Showtime).
An ATSC tuner is this:
An ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) tuner, often called an ATSC receiver or HDTV tuner, allows reception of ATSC digital television (DTV) signals broadcast over-the-air by TV stations in North America, South Korea, and Taiwan. Such tuners may be integrated into the television, VCR, digital video recorder, and set-top box which provides audio/video output-connectors of various types. An ATSC tuner for most cable TV systems is a QAM tuner, referring to the different type of modulation used.
ATSC tuners allow you to hook an antenna up and watch Digital HDTV broadcast from local TV station towers. Often HD Channels look better if you get a good signal since it is not compressed. Cable service providers compress HDTV data so to not saturate the lines since bandwidth is often limited.
In a nutshell, QAM tuners allow for cable coax lines to be hooked and non encrypted channels ( basic standard TV and basic HDTV- usually local HDTV channels) to be watched. So, if you pay for any type of cable; basic, digital, HDbasic, you actually having all the channel streams flowing through that connection.
You can hook the raw coax connection without a cable box to the newer TV. The QAM tuner will decode and display all the basic channels including the free HDTV channels! Just do a channel scan from your TV menu and your set.
Now, you will not get any interactive guide channels and the channel numbers will not be in order or may not even make sense. Channel 8 through your cable box may come up as channel 845-001. However this is a great hack for any secondary TV’s you may have since you do not have to pay for any additional Cable boxes! Since most houses now are wired with cable coax in all rooms or most common rooms it makes this easy to hook up. Some of the digital music channels will come through also.
Modern TV’s will let you reliable the channels. So if you take your time with it, all the funny numbers can be changed to sensible channel labels.
Microsoft Windows Vista sure had it’s problems at launch. But now; post Service pack 1 and many updates, it runs pretty good on newer PC’s. There are a few lesser known tools hidden inside that many do not know about.
One of which is the “ Snipping tool”. The Snipping tool is actually part of the built in tablet PC tools bundled in all version of Vista except Home basic edition. By default, they are usually turned on. Savvy users or pre-optimized systems sometimes have this turned off.
This tool is also available in windows XP tablet edition 2005.
To use:
Click your start button and in the search line just type “Snipping tool.” It should come up toward the top of the start menu. {if not refer to the end of this article to turn it on}
It allows you to set a starting point and drag open a box and take a picture of any size of whatever is on your desktop and save it in common picture formats. You can name it whatever you want or save it to any folder.
This can be useful from anything to sending a pic of a error message to someone else to diagnose or to grab that wallpaper some website won’t let you download for your cell phone.
If it does not come up in the start menu search, follow these directions. Remember, this is in Vista only.
1. Click on Start button and select control panel
2. Click Programs link
3. Click “ Turn windows features on or off” User account control may ask for confirmation, it’s ok.
4. It may take a minute to load all the Features list. Scroll through list and make sure check box for “ Tablet-PC Optional Components” is selected.
5. Click “ok” when done.
I really need to increase my readers, followers, and commenter's. Email me at evermore707@rocketmail.com with the phrase “ i wanna be a geek” in the subject line. I’ll then add your email address to a list that will send a notification to you when new articles are posted on this blog.
AND/OR
Follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/evermore707 and look for blog update posting there.
AND/OR
Use the RSS feed at the bottom of this blog to get updates. IE7 has RSS functionality built in. Most Smartphones have this ability also. I recommend “Viigo” to Smartphone users as it’s available on all types of phones. ( I’m planning an artical on RSS and will detail it soon).
AND/OR
Use your Gmail account to become a follower and get your awesome Gmail user pic displayed right on the side of my blog. Nothing like a little face time on the internets! (gmail user photos can be inserted via the settings menu on the Gmail page).
ESPICIALLY
Forward this blog address to your friends and family. http://evermore707.blogspot.com if you use a PC and browse the internet, you can only become more knowledgeable and internet “worldly” by absorbing the content I write here.
If someone manages to make 100 useful comments in the next 6 months, I’ll come over and clean you kitchen ( or pimp out your PC)..
In no way will I ever concede that Microsoft operating systems are superior. I have some form of all OS’s installed including OS-x and Linux. However, Windows is the dominate PC operating system. There are some really great applications Microsoft gives away free that many do not know about. The average windows user would really have to dig to find these, though they are super simple and effective to use.
Windows Live Skydrive.
A lot of us carry around a flash drive or portable hard disk to take important files with us. Some people use email attachments to shuttle pictures or documents back and forth. Some people just keep a folder on their work PC filled with stuff and occasionally burn a CD.
{This is an example of “Cloud computing”, in which I believe is the future of all computing needs. It will redefine all of our social, personal, and work synergy between PC’s and internet.}
Skydrive can eliminate all of that provided you workplace does not block Windows live webpages ( I would think most would not).
Skydrive is basically an online hard drive. Accessible through any browser and with any type of internet connection. You can have private folders or public ones in which anybody can view or download files within. Anything from pictures, documents, mp3’s, and even .exe files.
It’s tethered to your Live account. Live accounts are free and start by creating a email address. http://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rpsnv=10&ct=1240461151&rver=5.5.4177.0&wp=MBI&wreply=http:%2F%2Fhome.live.com%2Fdefault.aspx%3Flc%3D1033&lc=1033&id=251248 You can add any of the live services, but in this article we will focus on skydrive.
The skydrive page is here: skydrive.live.com It does have an “active X” that will be installed to your browser. It will prompt you to do this and it’s ok. However, if you do not want to install this active X or are on a browser you cannot modify, you can still take advantage of all the functions.
You get 25gb of online storage and can create as many folders, subfolders, or public folders you want. The use of public folders can be a godsend when you have photos to share. Family members don’t have to sign up for any service, just provide the link to the public folder. They don’t even have to have a Live account.
It’s also a great way to backup important files and pics. While 25GB will not serve everyone’s picture collections, Microsoft seems to expand the amount of storage every 6 months or so. Since all data in non public folders is only accessible to the account holder, this is a very safe way to keep backups “off site”. It’s also a great way to migrate files to new PC’s or take work document home with you for further editing.
A 8gb flash drive will cost around 20 bucks these days. Skydrive is free and allows 25gb. Seems like a great deal to me.
Reading 2600 today, I was reminded of an old flaw in Windows operating systems. Some people used to think it was a conspiracy between Bill Gates and our government. This flaw still exists in Windows versions, 2000 and XP. In Vista you have to force it to work.
Basically it is this, open the notepad editor. Type the words “ bush hid the facts”. Save, and close notepad. Now reopen. In XP or 2000 you will see 10 small squares. If you had a Chinese language pack installed for some reason you will see Chinese characters.
In Vista, open notepad. Then chose “open” from the file category in the header. Click the saved file but at the bottom it will have an encoding choice. Choose Unicode and it will display.
Years ago this freaked out a lot of people. Most likely the type of people who subscribe to these kind of conspiracy theories anyway. However it was quite a “meme” for it’s day.
This can be explained although it’s kind of geeky.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia:
Bush hid the facts (sometimes also this app can break) is the common name for a bug present in the function IsTextUnicode of Windows NT 3.5 and its successors, which causes a file of text encoded in Windows-1252 or similar encoding to be interpreted by applications that uses it (such as Notepad) as if it was UTF-16, resulting in mojibake.
While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence that is most commonly presented on the Internet, it does not exclusively occur with that phrase. The bug can be triggered by many sentences with alphabetic characters and spaces in a particular order (4-space-3-space-3-space-5), as well as other combinations that can be parsed into valid (if nonsensical) Chinese characters in Unicode.
The bug occurs when the ANSI string is passed to the Win32 charset detection function IsTextUnicode with no other characters. Because of this bug, IsTextUnicode will return TRUE, which means that applications that uses it will incorrectly interpret it as UTF-16.
Basically, the word string of 4-space-3space-3-space-5 ( you can use any words or even numbers) triggers the computer into thinking that characters represent something else in programming code.
Just another old school “Easter egg”..
Lot of blogs, security sites, and news media are going nuts over this software worm. Rarely do they explain what it really is or does to infected systems. It is estimated that over 11 million PC are infected with this worm. Here are some facts about it.
Summary:
Win32/Conficker is a worm that infects other computers across a network by exploiting a vulnerability in the Windows Server service (SVCHOST.EXE). If the vulnerability is successfully exploited, it could allow remote code execution when file sharing is enabled. Depending on the specific variant, it may also spread via removable drives and by exploiting weak passwords. It disables several important system services and security products and downloads arbitrary files.
The following system changes may indicate the presence of this malware:
Windows Security Center Service
Windows Update Auto Update Service
Background Intelligence Transfer Service
Windows Defender
Error Reporting Service
Windows Error Reporting Service
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
"TcpNumConnections" = "0x00FFFFFE"
virus
spyware
malware
root kit
defender
Microsoft
Symantec
norton
mcafee
trendmicro
sophos
panda
etrust
networkassociates
computerassociates
f-secure
kaspersky
jotti
f-prot
nod32
eset
grisoft
drweb
centralcommand
ahnlab
esafe
avast
avira
quickheal
comodo
clamav
ewido
fortinet
gdata
hacksoft
hauri
ikarus
k7computing
norman
pctools
prevx
rising
securecomputing
sunbelt
emsisoft
arcabit
cpsecure
spamhaus
castlecops
threatexpert
wilderssecurity
windowsupdate
Here is a visual representation of how it works.
The April 1st payload:
Systems infected with the latest version of Conficker will begin to use a new algorithm to determine what domains to contact. Microsoft has not identified any other actions scheduled to take place on April 1, 2009. It is possible that systems with the latest version of Conficker may be updated with a newer version of Conficker on April 1 by contacting domains on the new domain list. However, these systems could be updated on any date before or after April 1 as well using the "peer-to-peer" updating channel in the latest version of Conficker.
So far a few sites have been attacked by the April 1st update ( university of Utah http://news.cnet.com/report-conficker-worm-bites-university-of-utah/?tag=mncol;txt). However this worm is still relatively quiet and just festering on systems, building the botnet.
Keeping your system patched with windows updates, Security software, and good surfing habits will keep you safe. Using an alternate DNS service for your internet can help. Open DNS is a good alternative http://www.opendns.com/. I’ll someday post more on open dns and how to use it. Open DNS has great support and is easy to use- even for the non geek.
Google is a great search site and email provider. They also provide many great services for free. However, they make money by advertising. When you search something on Google, the first couple of results are highlighted in yellow. Also some ads are displayed on the right side. These are based off your search terms. These ads and your search terms are logged at Google's servers and the data is analyzed to provide you and Google's users with better ad results in future use.
It’s explained deeper here: http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html
You can opt out of Google tracking your search queries and it will serve generic ads.
Download and install the Cookie here:
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/
Just remember, some PC temp file cleaners will remove this cookie. You have to install it again. Most PC file cleaners give you the option to save specified cookies. CCleaner, a free program I recommend, has this type of functionality.
Ads and search engines go together. With out ads, there would be no free search. It can be argued that it goes the other way too. without search , no ads..
Most ads like this aren’t really harmful and no different than what we are exposed to on TV or radio. But I believe the more transparent you are on the internet the better when it deals with basic internet browsing.
DEP is and important feature of windows Vista and soon Windows 7.
DEP is basically this:
Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature that can help prevent damage to your computer from viruses and other security threats. Harmful programs can try to attack Windows by attempting to run (also known as execute) code from system memory (RAM) locations reserved only for Windows and other authorized programs. These types of attacks can harm your programs and files. If DEP notices a program on your computer using memory incorrectly, it closes the program and notifies you with the DEP stop error. DEP is ran in a software mode and in a hardware mode. If your processor supports DEP (NX for AMD, and XD for Intel), then you will have hardware and software DEP. If it doesn't, then Vista will just use software DEP. 64 bit applications will have DEP enabled all the time by default, but 32 bit applications do not and must have DEP manually enabled for them. For more information, see: Windows Help and Support: Data Execution Prevention: FAQs
To verify status of DEP:
1. open a command prompt ( windows key + r , then type cmd )
2. in command prompt type : wmic OS Get DataExecutionPrevention_SupportPolicy and hit enter
3. one of four numbers will appear
0 = Always off-DEP is disabled for all processes
1= Always on-DEP enabled for all processes
2= OptIn-DEP is enable for only windows system components, this is the default setting
3= OptOut DEP is enabled for all processes. This is an administrative type setting where an admin will create lists of what has DEP enabled or not.
Setting 2 is fine for most users however, DEP is not on by default for Internet explorer 7. IE8 it is enabled. It’s a good idea to have this on although it may “break” some websites. It can be changed very easy.
Turn on DEP for IE7 32bit ver..
1. start IE7
2. Click on Tools then Internet options
3. Click on advanced tab on top header
4. Scroll to security and put a check in box by “ Enable memory protection to help mitigate online attacks”.
5. Unchecking this turns it off
Some IE7 addons “ toolbars or widgets” may cause it to crash. It may not even allow you to run. If that happens check out:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/114310-internet-explorer-reset.html
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