Category Archives: My Hacks

Increase Productivity with multi monitor setup

I have always been fascinated with multiple displays and I always wanted to have a multi monitor setup for myself. I firstly became aware of such a concept when I bought Ati Radeon 9200 long time back. Then I realized that I could hook up two monitors to my box… one on the 9200 and the other on the onboard intel one… The 92o0 also had the option to hook up a TV.

Currently on my wish list is the ATI EYE FINITY.

Here I would try to show how I utilize two monitors to increase productivity ans have fun…

I have an XPS 1210, I love to chat, watch movies and documentaries and google around. XPS 1210 being a very small machine has a screen of just 12 inches and thus at times it becomes difficult to watch movies and do other things at the same time. One more thing that i like to do is Google for any thing that I find interesting in a movies or a documnentary and to do that I have to stop the video. So I decided to buy a LCD monitor and extend my work space. I zeroed in on AOC 20′ 2036Sa. It not at all expensive and has great response.

Now what I do is that I have extended my destop on to the larger LCD and watch movies on it and do the rest of the work on my XPS… woking and having fun at the same time…

Following is a guide to setup multi monitor setup.

Windows 7 has some neat little enhancements, one of them being how it lets you handle dual monitors. If you’re adding a second monitor to your Windows 7 home or office PC, which is a very good idea, it’s a breeze to configure.

There are actually two ways you can currently setup multiple monitors in Windows 7, either by using a keyboard shortcut or via the traditional system properties.

I really like the first method since it’s new and is way easier than having to go into the Control Panel or anything else.

Simply press the Windows key and P (Windows + P) to bring up a quick menu of options.

dual monitors windows 7

Pretty neat! You can pick to show only the computer, make the second monitor a duplicate of the first, extend the desktop to the  second monitor or turn off the first monitor and activate the second.

The second way is to right-click on the desktop and choose Screen resolution.

multiple monitors windows 7

Now you’ll see the familiar 1 and 2 to distinguish which monitor is which. There are several options and under Multiple Displays, you can choose from the same options as when you pressed Win + P.

setup multiple monitors windows 7

That’s it! You can also change the orientation of the displays and change the resolution of each display. It’s pretty straight-forward in Windows 7 and a lot easier!

Apart from this if you are extending your desktop then you can chose the location of your second display. That would decide the movement of the mouse. Suppose you keep the second display on right then moving the mouse beyond the right edge takes the cursor to the secreen 2. Similarly u can keep the second screen either in left or right or top or even bottom.

How to Enable Tools – Folder Options and Registry Editor in Windows

Many times Windows users face a common problem. The “Folder Options” in “Tools” menu is not visible. Even It can’t be accessed from Control Panel. Also “Registry Editor” is disabled.

If you are also facing this problem, then you have come to right place. Follow the simple steps mentioned in this tutorial and your problem will be solved:

1. If Folder Options is disabled but Registry Editor is still working in your system, then you can enable Folder Options by editing Windows Registry. Type regedit in RUN dialog box and press Enter. it’ll open Registry Editor, now go to following keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

In right-side pane, check whether a DWORD value named NoFolderOptions exists or not? If it exists, delete it.

2. If you are not familiar with editing the registry, then you can simply download following file, extract it and then run the .REG file:

folder_options.zip

3. But sometimes Registry Editor is also disabled. Whenever you try to open regedit, Windows will show following error message:

Registry Editor has been disabled by administrator.

Its a symptom of “RONTOKBRO” Trojan. To remove this trojan, follow the instructions given in following topic:

Is Your System Infected with a Virus / Spyware / Adware / Trojan?

4. If its not a trojan problem and someone intentionally has disabled it in your system, then you can enable it again by following any of these methods:

a. Type gpedit.msc in RUN dialog box and goto:

User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System

in right-side pane, set “Prevent access to Registry editing tools” to either Not Configured or Disabled.

b. Just type following in RUN dialog box and press <ENTER>:

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Now after enabling Registry Editor, you can re-enable Folder Options by following methods mentioned in 1st or 2nd steps.

All Restrictions for Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and 7

Following is a list of some important restrictions, which can be made in Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008 and 7. For example, you can restrict Display properties, Taskbar properties, folder options, etc.

All tricks are based on Registry editing, you just need to open Registry Editor by providing regedit command in RUN and then create the mentioned key and set its value as given below:

NOTE: If you want to remove the restriction, simply delete the DWORD value or set its value to 0

1.) Restrict Display Properties:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System

create DWORD value NoDispCPL and set its value to 1

2.) Restrict Taskbar Properties:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoSetTaskbar and set its value to 1

3.) Restrict Folder Options:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoFolderOptions and set its value to 1

4.) Restrict Locking/Unlocking the taskbar:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value LockTaskbar and set its value to 1

5.) Restrict Active Desktop:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoActiveDesktop and set its value to 1

6.) Restrict adding/deleting items from Toolbars:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoToolbarCustomize and set its value to 1

7.) Restrict adding/deleting toolbars:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoBandCustomize and set its value to 1

8.) Restrict right-click in Start Menu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoChangeStartMenu and set its value to 1

9.) Restrict Desktop Cleanup Wizard:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoDesktopCleanupWizard and set its value to 1

10.) Restrict notification at low disk space:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and set its value to 1

11.) Restrict Taskbar Context Menu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoTrayContextMenu and set its value to 1

12.) Restrict Programs to run:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun

create String value with any name, like 1 and set its value to the program’s EXE file.

e.g., If you want to restrict msconfig, then create a String value 1 and set its value to msconfig.exe. If you want to restrict more programs, then simply create more String values with names 2, 3 and so on and set their values to the program’s exe.

13.) Restrict Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System

create DWORD value DisableRegistryTools and set its value to 1

14.) Restrict Task Manager:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System

create DWORD value DisableTaskMgr and set its value to 1

15.) Restrict Writing to USB Drives:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current Control Set\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Create DWORD value WriteProtect and set its value to 1

16.) Restrict New option in context menu:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenu Handlers\New

And delete the value of Default, e.g., empty it.

17.) Restrict Send To in context menu:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenu Handlers\Send To

And delete the value of Default, e.g., empty it.

18.) Restrict Balloon Tips:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\Advanced

Create DWORD value EnableBalloonTips and set its value to 0

19.) Restrict Users to enable New XP StartMenu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create DWORD value NoSimpleStartMenu and set its value to 1

20.) Restrict Command Prompt:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System

Create DWORD value DisableCMD and set its value to 2

21.) Restrict Drives in My Computer:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

In right-side pane, create a new DWORD value NoViewOnDrive and change its value as following:

3 : To Restrict A and B drives only.
4 : To Restrict C drive only.
7 : To Restrict A, B, and C drives only.
8 : To Restrict D drive only.
F : To Restrict A, B, C, and D drives only.
03FFFFFF : To Restrict all drives.

And if you want more specific restrictions, like you want to restrict a combination of other drives, then you can use decimal no. instead of hexadecimal no. Following is a list for all drives decimal no.:

A: 1
B: 2
C: 4
D: 8
E: 16
F: 32
G: 64
H: 128
I: 256
J: 512
K: 1024
L: 2048
M: 4096
N: 8192
O: 16384
P: 32768
Q: 65536
R: 131072
S: 262144
T: 524288
U: 1048576
V: 2097152
W: 4194304
X: 8388608
Y: 16777216
Z: 33554432
ALL: 67108863

So if you want to disable a combination of drives, just sum their numbers and give the same value to NoViewOnDrive. e.g., for restricting C, D, E and F drives, give the value: 4+8+16+32 = 60

NOTE: You can also hide the drives using NoDrives DWORD value. The location and its value remain same as the above trick.

22.) Restrict RUN in New XP StartMenu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create DWORD value NoRun and set its value to 1

23.) Restrict Control Panel:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create DWORD value NoControlPanel and set its value to 1

How to dry wet mobile

untitled

Yesterday my cell phone .. got drenched in water … almost got itself killed… I tried soo many tricks to save its life.. D moisture almost took my baby’s life… I saved it .. with rice … U can too …

It could be anything .. sink, toilet or rainstorm, anything …
Posting it so that it might help you… Don’t try to turn your ph on!.
1. Remove the battery immediately , patt it dry with a towel
2. If sun is high .. put them out ..
3. Try using a hair dryer
4. Put into a container of dry raw rice for a day ( maybe for 2 -3)
5. put phone in a plastic bag with a few silica packets.
6. Hearing aid dryer for several hours.
7. Place it in an oven with just the oven light on for a few days(the light on is enough to dry out the air and increase the temperature just a little).
8. Rub alcohol to avoid corrosion due to the water but don’t use it on the screen

Auto retweet with yahoo pipes

Recently I was provoked by a thought of retweeting a tweet by some particular tweeter automatically, and thus begun my search for such a tool or web app. To my surprice I could not find any instead I stumbled upon how to use yahoo pipes to do that.
The way i did it was as follows
Instead of creating my own pipe from scratch I used clean twitter feed pipe and edited it to my convinience.

Firstly You need to have key word.
I took it as Guykawasaki
so for me the feed url would be
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=guykawasaki as I wanted to retweet all posts by Guykawasaki

1. Add a fetch feed box and enter the url in it.

2. Next add a Regex boc to filter our the unwanted content based on regular expressions

3. Then add a filter funtion to perform filtering on basis of the above expressions

4. Connect the pipes and you are done.

steps to pipe

Now we goto the properties of the pipe and click run it. Once we are on the results page which looks like this.
link to run

Here what is of important to us is the RSS of this pipe. Clicking it gives us the RSS link of the pipe and we are almost done.

pipe run
Now what we need to do is just use twitterfeed to automatically post the updates to the required twitter account.
If unknown to twitterfeed see how to do it here.

Mac OS X 10.5.6 on my XPS 1210

I have been fascinated by the Apple’s Mac OS ever since I got to know about it. And when I came to know that I could install it on my laptop, I was delighted. I have been successfull in installing various versions from days of OS X 10.4 [Tiger]. Lately I thought of installing 10.5.6 and upgrading it to 10.5.7 on the same old XPS m1210 which I bought in November 2006.

My XPS Mac

Mac OsX 10.5.6 on my XPS m1210 with triple boot.

My previous posts.

Leopard 10.5.1 [Kalyway] on my XPS1210

My Dell o MAC

Mac OSX + XP dual boot

Bluetooth Headset Antenna Hack

I had an old Orchid mono bluetooth headset lying around in my drawer since so many months. The reson for not using was, I didnt own a bluetooth enabled phone 😉 . Now that i got one. I tried to test it.

3-in-1

And to my disappointment the range was not too good and there was interference when i kept my phone in my trouser pocket. I guess my bidy was acting as a dampner.

So I decided to increase the lenght of its antenna by adding a lenght of copper wire. I know this sounds crazy but sheer craziness works many a times.

It did work and following is how I did it.

I ripped apart my headset.

Took  a small lenght of insulated copper wire. Thin and the kind that is used in small 3V motor winding.antena

all-apart

There in the picture above you can notice a small white bix kinda thing. It has one end connected to the circuit and the other was free.

So making a calculated blind guess, I soldered the wire to the open end and exended the antenna.

open

And wow. It did work.

I then packed it up and took out the wire near the microphone at bottom and then bent it along the crevice to secure it. The extra length was cut off. Now I get enough signal to hear clearly in my ear waht is being transmitted from my Nokia 6500

Leopard, Ubuntu and Windows XP multiboot

I have been a fan of the Mac OS ever since i cam to know about it. When i got my first computer I tried my best to make the windows look like mac but it was not upto my expectations and buys a mac was not an option for me. Then came the OSX86 project and it made my dream come true. I started experimenting with OSX 10.4.8 and kept trying to get it working on my Minimachine [xps 1210]. It took me around 6 months and several GBs of downloads to get tit to work.

I joined college for MBA and the Mac os in its latest flavour named the leopard was with me till i had to let go of it to install Linux because I had never thought that I would be installing 3 OSs simultameously and it went on like that for 6 more months and i was without mac os. Today I reinstalled macosx 10.5.2 and it jsut didnt boot as I had Ubuntu too installed previously and i got the Grub error…

Then I did the following to fix grub and added an entry into grub for booting macosx…

How to fix grub….

1. Boot the Desktop/Live CD. (Use Ubuntu 8.04 or later)

2. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal)

3. Start grub as root with the following command :

     sudo grub

4. You will get a grub prompt (see below) which we will use to find the root partition and install grub to the MBR (hd0)

         [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.   For
         the   first   word,  TAB  lists  possible  command
         completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
         completions of a device/filename. ]

grub>

Type the following and press enter:

find /boot/grub/stage1

If you get "Error 15: File not found", try the following:

find /grub/stage1

Using this information, set the root device (fill in X,Y with whatever the find command returned):

grub> root (hd0,3) // for me it was (hd0,3)

Install Grub:

grub> setup (hd0)

Exit Grub:

grub> quit

Boot into Ubuntu

Open Terminal and run this command.

" sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst "
it will allow to configure your boot order.

3) Edit your OSX in Editor Window.

title OSX86

root (hd0,0) " Replace with your Partition of OSX "

chainloader +1

Now Grub lets me choose which os to boot….

Ubuntu

Leopard

Windows XP

Grub on minimachine
Grub on minimachine

when i chose leopard I am presented with the Darwinx86 booot loader which presents to me all partitions to boot from an if i choose Linux from Darwin then i again get back to Grub…. 🙂

Darwin boot loader on minimachine
Darwin boot loader on minimachine

I just can keep switching between boot loaders and boot any os that I want….

The existing issues of single core only and no camera and card reader and no shut down still bug me… The shutdown and sleep had worked for me at times but not always.

How to export directory listing to text file

I did this a coupl of times and every time i had to look or the information on the web so this time i sortof thought to document it for reference and many others might find it usefull too.

It comes in handy when large list of files with their paths has to be created. As one can not type in the paths for say a directory containing 1000 or so images but to really need to do that for some data base or a gallary.

To do this we just need to type in a single lin in command promt and all s done…

1) Open the command line (cmd.exe in NT/2000/XP)
2) Navigate to the required directory using the cd command.
3) type dir /b>filelist.txt

A file called filelist.txt will be created with the directory contents. If you want to create the file list elsewhere, use a fully qualified file name or use the ..\ convention. Don’t forget that Windows uses \ not / as directory delimiters.

HACK ATTACK [Convert a straight lan cable to patch in 2 minutes]

This about making a patch or cross over cable if u have many straight spare ones lying around as was the case with me. I needed a patch cable to network my pc and notebook but had left my patch cable at one of my friends. This is a simple 2 minute hack which would allow you to convert a straight cable to patch.

Requirements:-

Straight LAN cable [the ones that connect routers and modems to your computer]

A pair of scissors or a Wire stipper [ I would recommend good ones becuse we wud be cutting wires]

Tape [ you might want to cover up the lose ends and exposed wires ]

Cut the cable from the middle. We only need 4 wires the orange pair and green pair.

strip the wire pairs about 1 cm

connect the solid green to solid orange and connect the stipped green to stripped orange and u are done.

This wont take u more than 5 minutes even if you are a noob.

Now use tape if u want. I left mine as such.

Connect the two computers using this wire.

Goto network connections and select appropriate network adapter then goto its properties and then select tcp/ip and assign an ip address in range 192.168.1.x

where x is any number between 1 and 255

do the same with other computer too but this time choose some other value for x.

Now we need to set up out computer for p2p networking.

We need to follow this on both computers.

In network connections left side pane click set up small home or office network then next just select the third option in the lists and keep going nexting. [sorry for very crude instructions no time…. wiring from college lab ;)] will edit it to add more detail once i have time…

Restart both the computers and Ping if u get a reply u are doneand congratz to u.

If not trouble shoot just google it or mail me. I wud be glad to help.