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How To Tether HTC Desire With Windows 7

kuanhoong — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:51:40 +0000

HTC Desire is a great phone. One of my favorite features is the Internet access via USB tethering. Starting with Android 2.1, Eclair, USB tethering is a pretty simple process.

In order to to tether or share mobile internet connection with your computer or laptop on Android 2.1 phone on Windows, all you need to do is to install the HTC Sync software which is already available inside your micro SD card. If not, you can easily download the latest version of HTC Sync from here.

Once HTC Sync software is installed, you may connect your HTC Desire via the USB port, and select “Internet Sharing” option from inside your “Wireless & Networks” setting. With that, you are ready to surf your favorite websites and be connected to the net.

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How to block Google Sidewiki Users From Commenting On Your Site

kuanhoong — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 04:17:43 +0000

Google Sidewiki is the latest feature from Google which allows anyone to basically comment on your site, on your site, with the Google Toolbar. However, some webmasters are not into this idea and they want to know if there is a way to opt out of this feature. The answer is no, not an official way to opt out, but the good news is you can block these users completely.

Google Webmaster Help explained that you can use a rewrite rule to block people with this toolbar.

Until Google dumps this or provides an opt out, web site owners who’d like to retain control of what appears on their own site can block all Google Toolbar users by adding the following to their htaccess file. The "notoolbar.php" points to a file explaining Google’s bad behavior and instructing the visitor to uninstall Google Toolbar in order to proceed. You can create your own file and name it whatever you like, just be sure to change the code below to make it match the file name you’ve chosen.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} GTB [NC]
RewriteRule .* notoolbar.php [L]

Just a reminder that this would also block anyone who has the Google Toolbar from getting to your site. So the decision is up to you.

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How to convert WMA file to AAC (MPEG-4) file by using VLC Media Player

kuanhoong — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:44:13 +0000

VLC Media Player is the most versatile media player out there. It is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, and many more) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. The best thing about VLC Media Player – it is completely FREE.

Besides a great media player, VLC Media Player is also a great tool to convert media files from one format to another. Here’s a simple tip on how to convert .WMA file format to .AAC (MPEG-4) file format by using VLC Media Player.

In case you are not aware, Windows Media Audio (WMA) is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. While the Advanced Audio Coding or AAC is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. It is designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates. Thus, AAC is part of the standardization for the MPEG-2 & MPEG-4 specifications.

Steps to convert WMA file to AAC (MPEG-4) file :

Step 1 : Download and Install VLC Media Player

If you don’t have VLC Media Player, you can download it from this link.

Step 2 : Open up VLC Media Player and Choose Media > Convert/Save

Step 3 : From the File, locate the WMA file.

Step 4 : Click on the Convert/Save button at the bottom, enter the intended conversion File name and select MP4 from the Encapsulation tab.

Step 5 : From the Audio tab, select MPEG 4 Audio (AAC)

Step 6 : Final Step, click Save. Sit back and enjoy your converted file.

Good Luck!

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Run Skype program from your USB drive

kuanhoong — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:26:26 +0000

Skype is the the most popular P2P IP telephony client that allows users to make calls over the Internet. Starting from Skype ver. 1.4, it is now possible to run Skype from your portable USB drive and without any installation.

Steps to run Skype program from your USB drive :

Install Skype on your PC and then find the installation folder. It’s probably something like “C:\Program Files\Skype.” Copy the Skype.exe file to a folder on your USB flash drive.
In that same folder on your flash drive, create a subfolder called “data.”
Create a new text file called “Skype.bat” or Skype Portable.bat” or whatever you like.
Open your new file using Notepad or another text editor and write “skype.exe /datapath:”data” /removable” (without the quotes).
Save and close your file

To launch Skype, just click the Skype.bat file. Skype should launch and all of your settings will be saved in the data folder. [via]

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5 FREE online services to backup your data

kuanhoong — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 07:22:40 +0000

In Information Technology, backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. Local backup to external or optical drives is an excellent practice, but it can’t always protect your precious data. Fortunately, there are many online services that provide excellent backup services that are near-real time off-site backup. Below are 5 FREE online services that you can use to backup your data.

1. MozyHome Online Backup

Mozy offers reasonably priced unlimited online backup that’s highly configurable for both PC and MAC users. For personal and non-commercial usage, you can signup with MozyHome and get a 2GB FREE online backup storage for your data. If you would like to have unlimited storage capacity, it is just $4.95 per month.

How it works

1. Sign up for an account.
Create a MozyHome user account which will allow you to download MozyHome software. Its quick, easy and our step-by-step instructions will guide you through the process.

2. Download and install software.
MozyHome downloads in just seconds, and the installation is simple and fast.

3. Select files to be backed up.
Simply check the boxes next to the backup sets, or types of files you want to back up, and MozyHome does the rest. In addition to selecting files by backup sets, you also have the option of selecting specific files and directories.

Download MozyHome for PC or MAC.

2. IDrive

IDrive Online Backup Classic offers an intuitive interface, similar to Microsoft Windows Explorer, which makes it easy to select files/folders for remote backup and restore activities. For basic user, IDrive offers 2GB FREE online storage for both PC and MAC user.

The initial transfer for IDrive will be a full backup of all your data. This may take some time based on the total size of your backup data. Subsequent backups will be incremental in nature with only modified portions of the files being transferred.

One advantage of IDrive is that is does true archiving. Therefore, no data is deleted from your account until you manually delete or run sync to match your desktop data to your account. In another words, you full control of your backup data.

Download IDrive for PC or MAC.

3. XDrive

AOL’s Xdrive is an online backup service that allows you backup your data online. An Xdrive account provides you with 5GB of storage is available for FREE while a 500GB account costs $10 per month. Previously, you could access the storage space only via your Web browser or through the Xdrive Desktop utility, which assigns a drive letter to your virtual Xdrive in Windows Explorer. Besides Xdrive Desktop, you can choose to install XDrive Desktop Lite which runs in its own program window. It uses the Adobe AIR platform, which allows Web-based apps to run outside a browser. With Xdrive Desktop Lite application, it makes accessing the files and folders in your Xdrive online data-storage account even easier.

Download and install XDrive.

4. ADrive

ADrive’s Basic plan offers individual users FREE 50GB of online storage and backup for all file types including access to our basic service features. With the Basic plan you will have the essentials to store, backup, share, and edit your documents online. The Basic plan is intended for individual or personal use. For Business user, you can signup for Signature (50GB storage costs $6.95 per month) and Premium (100GB from $13.95 per month ) plans for more security, storage, and access.

For ADrive, all uploading is done via a Java interface that allows end user to upload maximum 2GB files easily. All uploaded files will be scanned by an anti virus scan engine before store at their online storage services.

ADrive online file storage services consider the best file sharing services which offers the largest file storage to meet the demands of data-intensive world. Meanwhile, a comprehensive security and high availability to end user to backup their files on anywhere and anytime in the world.

5. Boxstr

Boxstr is another online backup service that offers 5GB of free storage plus some significant bandwidth to share files. Files stored with Boxstr can be shared by posting them in social networking sites e.g. post music on your MySpace page or other social networking sites with the integrated MP3 player. Besides that you can use Boxstr as your online photo album where you can create a stunning photo gallery.

You have two ways to upload your file to Boxstr by using the web or desktop application.

So which is your favorite online backup service?. Please share them with me in your comments.

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8 Ways To Access Wikipedia Offline On Your PC and Mobiles

kuanhoong — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:00:44 +0000

No doubt, Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. There are over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and it is still growing at a rapid pace. Wikipedia even though is not the perfect source of information, but if it is good enough to be used every day by millions of people, and it would be good if it can be accessed offline as not everyone has access to the net 24/7. Below are 8 ways where you can access Wikipedia Offline on your PC and Mobiles.

1. WikiTaxi

WikiTaxi is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go. WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays reasonably small. The huge English Wikipedia easily fits on a 8 GB memory stick.

Download WikiTaxi.

2. WikiSlices

WikiSlice as the name suggests is a slice of Wikipedia based on a particular topic. WikiSlices make Wikipedia easy to explore. Wikipedia allows you to only search for information. WikiSlices help you browse through this information. While using Wikipedia, you may have felt the need to view related topics or sub-topics. When you create a WikiSlice, the topics and sub topics are displayed prominently, so that you can quickly view them. You also see popular pages related to what you are searching or browsing. The most important feature of WikiSlices is that you can download it on your desktop or laptop and access the information even when you are offline or on the go. WikiSlices can be used offline with the help of the Webaroo software. If you don’t have the software, the software will be downloaded automatically when you download your first WikiSlice.

3. Pocket Wikipedia

Pocket Wikipedia is an excellent freeware application that brings Wikipedia pages to your PC and Windows Mobiles for offline reading. The Pocket Wikipedia comes as a 175 MB zipped file (not even required to install!) that has hand picked pages of Wikipedia with 14 Million words and 24,000 images. The wide range of topics covered by this freeware are good enough to read when you are on the move. It works on Windows Mobiles, Linux PCs and Windows PCs.

Download Pocket Wikipedia.

4. Zipedia

Zipedia is actually the second (Wikipedia Taxi was the first) application that downloads Wikipedia and provides offline access to it’s contents. The main difference between Wikipedia Taxi and Zipedia is that the latter is a Firefox add-on which adds the Wikipedia offline search right into Firefox. The contents of Wikipedia can then be accessed by typing in wikipedia://wiki/ into the address bar.

5. GearsMonkey Script (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey + Google Gears)

By using Gears with the Firefox Greasemonkey plugin, you can inject Gears code into any website that you want. In order to access Wikipedia pages offline, for each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on “cache page” and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

You need the following tools to take Wikipedia offline:

Greasemonkey – Use Greasemonkey to inject Gears code onto a webpage after it loads
Gears – You’ll be utilizing all three components that make up Gears:
- LocalServer: Capture any URL
- Database (local to computer): Keep track of what URLs you have stored, personal preferences, etc.
- WorkerPool (threading): Keep the UI snappy — run heavy computations, data synchronizations, etc. in the background. Also can help overcome cross-origin dilemmas.
iFrame – Use in conjunction with Greasemonkey to allow for capture of cross-origin resources.

6. MediaWiki

As we all know, Wikipedia runs on the open source software MediaWiki. This in turn runs on top of MySQL and PHP, as well as possibly Linux and Apache. If you would like to access Wikipedia offline, then you can install your own MediaWiki and download pages dump of Wikipedia to your hard disk. So, all you have to do is:

Install WAMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP on Windows).
Install MediaWiki.
Download and install a pages dump of Wikipedia.

7. Unyverse

Unyverse is a new service to access Wikipedia with your Java or Windows Mobile phone, from anywhere. It uses a small smart client application and has the following advantages over the pure WAP/mobile web access:

You can read your previously downloaded articles offline when you have no connection
Reading experience is optimized with nice table of contents, page by page formatting, and change font size which is important when reading on a small screen
Entire content is downloaded compressed, so it is faster
You can synchronize your bookmarked article with your free Unyverse web account.

8. iPhone/iPod Touch Wikipedia Offline Reader

This app is a Wikipedia Offline reader for your iPhone/iPod Touch. It indexes and dumps are almost exactly 2GB together of Wikipedia content into your iPhone/iPod Touch hard disk. To install, put the app in /Applications. Use something like Customize.app to get it onto your springboard. Untar the dump, and put the contents at /var/root/wp. If using Windows, check out the video installation tutorial.

Download this application – Wikipedia.zip (current version: 0.2.3) and Wikipedia Dump (English, 2007).

Do you know other ways to access Wikipedia offline?. Please leave your comments and share them with me.

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6 simple ways to download protected photos from Flickr

kuanhoong — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:52:52 +0000

Protected photos in Flickr are protected by putting the transparent spaceball.gif on the photos to prevent the photos from being downloaded. It’s been done by the users not wanting to publish their private photos. Normally, in browser firefox or Internet Explorer, you can right click on the photo, and then click on “Save Image As…” to save the picture. But with following the method above, you may com across with a 1×1 pixel picture. You may either use the good-old Print Screen or any of the methods below to defeat the Flickr image protection.

1. Firefox Media Tab

For Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 users, Goto Tools -> Page Info -> Media – Scroll down until you see that Flickr image in the Media Preview Window. Click the Save As button.

2. Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera

For Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera users, just right click the Flickr web page and choose to view the HTML source code for the web page. Then within the HTML code, try to search for “spaceball.gif”. You’ll find the full location of the protected image enclosed in the tag just before the tag that encloses the spaceball image. Paste the URL onto your browser, and you will be able to see the image where you can save it by right-click it.

3. GetFlickr

GetFlickr is a tool developed by TechRoam that helps you retrieve the original size of a protected Flickr photos easily. The page provides a text box where you have to copy and paste the photo ID of a particular Flickr photo. By entering the ID, GetFlickr will show the URL of the image’s largest version. You can then save and download the photo to your local computer.

4. Firefox AdBlock Add-on

With AdBlock Add-on installed in your Firefox browser, you can Hit CTRL + SHIFT + A to open the list of blockable items. Navigate to the entry with spaceball.gif at the end and choose to block this item by right-clicking it. This prevents that spaceball.gif is loaded so that you can save any items at Flickr by right-clicking it.

6. Opera Blocked Content Tool

Go to Tools -> Advanced -> Blocked Content, and press the Add button. Add this as the URL to block:
*flickr.com/images/spaceball.gif and http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif

5. Bookmarklets

Add the following bookmarklet to your browser and it should also allow you access to the Flickr protected photos.

javascript: location.href=document.evaluate('//div[@class="photoImgDiv"]/img',document, null, null, null).iterateNext().src;

6. DeFlickr

DeFlickr is a simple web page that allows you to enter the Flickr URL and it will display the protected photo that you can save to your local computer.

Disclaimer : The author does not authorize any sort of downloading photos from Flickr without the consent from the owner. If users want to protect their Flickr photos, it is advisable that they should either make them private, stop uploading them at all to any photo sharing sites where they can be downloaded.

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Simple way to hide files and folders in Windows XP

kuanhoong — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:06:49 +0000

If you share your computer with friends, coworkers, children, spouse or your computer is always connected to the Internet, then most probably all your private files or folders are under threat of being revealed. Now it is possible to hide all your private files or folders with extra security.

Free Hide Folder 1.8, it is a very easy to use folder security software that offers you the ability to prevent unauthorized access to your files. This is achieved by making your files and folders totally invisible for others. Others will not know where your personal files exist and they will not be able to accidentally view them. You can hide folders simply with a few mouse clicks. Free Hide Folder is protected by a password that you can change or remove at any time.

Key Features of Free Hide Folder:

• Hide your folder completely. Unless you unhide it yourself, nobody can find it.
• Password protection when running program.
• No file system structure modifications needed.
• Any number of folders may be hidden at the same time.
• Easy-to-use user interface.

You may download your free personal copy of Free Hide Folder here.

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Backup all your IE & Firefox passwords, Windows System Info and Hardware Info

kuanhoong — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:38:16 +0000

Here’s a good and simple to use software that I think is the coolest utility software out there that allows you to backup all your Internet Explorer and Firefox passwords, Windows Systems Information, Hardware Information and many more. You can do all that with System Information for Windows or SIW. SIW is an advanced System Information for Windows tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.

SIW keeps track of all your information for your Windows which includes Asset Inventory Tracking, Computer (Software and Hardware) Inventory, PC Audit, Software Audit, Software License Compliance Management). You can run SIW in batch mode and export your report in four file formats -CSV, HTML, TXT or XML.

Finally, SIW is portable standalone FREEWARE that does not require any installation. You can run the program directly from an USB flash drive, from a floppy, from a network drive or from a domain login script.

You can download a copy of SIW from here.

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Add Fancy Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages

kuanhoong — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:08:08 +0000

Ever wish that you can add a simple image zooming application for all the images on your webpages. Here is a simple and great looking application that allows you to do all that. FancyZoom 1.0 is designed to view full-size photos and images inline without requiring a separate web page load. It provides a smooth, clean, truly Mac-like effect, almost like it’s a function of Safari itself.

With FancyZoom 1.0, you can get the following features:

Focused on the smoothest, most polished zooming animation possible
Automatically scales images from any image link, with no HTML changes
Preloads full-size images in the background on link mouseover
No resource-heavy Javascript libraries — 100% coded from scratch to zoom
Draws a nice drop shadow under the full-size image to offset it from the page
Uses Safari 3′s “box-shadow” feature to draw the drop shadow natively, no images required
Requires only two new lines of code in your HTML
Tested and works with Safari, Firefox, IE7, and IE6. (Looks better in modern browsers.)

The best feature of FancyZoom 1.0 is that is completely FREE for non-commercial sites.

For more information on how to install FancyZoom 1.0, check out this webpage.

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