Digital Insights: Computer Tips & Tricks

Finding good freeware software can be tricky sometimes, because many shareware programs position themselves in search engines as “Free to download” and you can download only trial version of the program which has limited features.

Recently I had to download a couple entire websites for offline browsing (because they were shutting down) and was searching for a decent program that can download all website html and other type of files making original file structure. I searched in Google for a bit and found “SurfOffline Professional 2” which could download entire site in a simple wizard style process. However there is a price tag from $39.95 to $120. And it’s no use spending money on software that you will use once. Read the rest of this entry »

Today various sources reports of a massive hotmail login information leakage on the web. The number of exposed hotmail accounts rise from 20.000 to even 30.000.

How to know if your hotmail account is hacked? Well there’s no universal technique to know that, but keep in mind that the infamous list contains primarily if not all accounts beginning with letters a and b. So it seems only a part of this list leaked into public.

Accounts ararat973@hotmail.com and blando2713@hotmail.com where the first and last usernames in a list.

Having in mind that it was not a hack in Hotmail system but more likely some gathered login  information via phishing or other web 2.0 applications which ask to enter your email address and password in order to do something (e.g. check who has blocked you in msn messenger and so on).

Another good thing would be to change the password to be on the safe side and not loose your privacy. Also don’t forget to check in Google your full email with quotes: “your@email.com” as it may show the locations where your email name is exposed and one of them might be that list with hacked Hotmail accounts.

Just a quick note to myself and others who experience a problem of WordPress showing only one entry (post) in category view.

At first I thought it was related to my theme, because I often edit in for various performance tweaks, but even changing through default WordPress themes the problem persisted and only one entry was showing in category although it obvously had more than one post in it.

So I started looking in my WordPress configuration and found that in Settings-> Reading sub panel it was an option called ” with value equal to 1. So I changed it to 5 and refreshed the category page. Sure enough it was it, now there was 5 entries displaying in my category.

So if someone else is experiencing this issue, at first check that parameter in your wordpress backend to save some time searching for problem in theme files.

By the way, the problem was on my other blog, but you can check some categories on this blog too :)

Today after coming back from summer holidays to my dorm room I encountered strange WordPress login problem where I couldn’t login to all my WordPress instalations on Hostgator hosting (404 error after providing valid login credentials). My first thought was that someone hacked the admin directory because there where no styling in login screeen,t just plain “cssless” login forms.

After searching for help on the internet I found nothing helpfull to my problem  so I decided to reinstall WordPress by uploading fresh files from clean WordPress setup folder and suddenly I saw .htaccess file in my wp-admin folder. Took a look and to my surprise I saw these lines:

deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xxx.xxx

A flashback came to my mind and the whole wp login problem dissapeared. These lines mean a WordPress admin folder protection. Nobody can access admin interface except user with the allowed ip. I have forgotten that I installed this security system on my blogs and paid an hour to solve that. Read the rest of this entry »

FRAPS is a state of the art program to view how many FPS (frames per second) your graphics card displays a game. Aditionally you can record gameplay and save it on your hard disk as a video file for later viewing or uploading to Youtube.

Hovewer, FRAPS makes huge files while recording gameplay because there is no time for processor to compress video. So even not long 1 minute video can take up to 700 Mb space on your HDD not to mention lagging while recording.

Today my example will be a short “Alone in the dark” gameplay clip, which takes 48 seconds and originally used a bit more than 451Mb of space. Keeping such huge files on your computer will certainly clog the entire hard drive so you need to shrink videos to a more manageable size.

Basically you will need 1  program and 1 codec: VirtualDub as video editor and XviD Codec for encoding Fraps AVIs.

• At first install Koepi’s Xvid Codec;
  
• Then start Virtual Dub and open your video file (File->Open video file…);
• Set compression ( Video->Compression) to Xvid MPEG-4 Codec:
  
  
• Now to start video conversion you need to go to File->Save as Avi (shortcut F7) and select the file save location.

This codec converts videos REALLY fast and the quality is simply superb. To make you believe below I added actual screenshots from 2 converted videos using some ffdshow codec that was installed probably by some codec pack earlier and the Koepi’s codec:

ORIGINAL VERSION: 451Mb

FFDSHOW CODEC: 15Mb

Koepi’s codec: 22Mb

Koepi’s codec did just the right quality and video size without any further adjustments. I think it’ll be my codec of choice for a long time.

As you may already experienced, one of the most powerfull password managers Roboform doesn’t offer simple export/import feature to transfer all paswords (Passcards) to another computer or just backup temporarily when you maybe want to reinstall windows.

You can make an html file (Logins->Print List->Save as html) with all your passcards gathered in a list but this is very time consuming to transfer passwords manually one by one.

Hovewer the solution to transfer Roboform passwords is quite simple. Just go to ../My Documents/My RoboForm Data/Default Profile and save this folder to a safe location for later use. You may notice that every passcard has its own file created in that folder so the backup proccess is to simply copy “Default Profile” folder over the new installation and you’re done.

Recently I got email from them telling that Geocities closing date is October 26, 2009. Although I’m not using their servic anymore for a long time they still sent me an email informing about these changes. However, you may download your files this way [excerpt from Yahoo email]:

“To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As… from the menu that appears. Choose a location on your computer to save your files, then click OK or Save.”

Anyone familiar with hosting would laugh reading this suggestion. Seriously, I can’t imagine who was so smart enough to come up with this idea of back up a website. If you’re looking for really outstanding hosting provider, check this one.

When you try to open .pps file it instantly goes to presentation mode without allowing you to make any editing. Even if you try to load that document into PowerPoint program, it still runs in presentation mode.

This can be easily bypassed by renaming the extension from .pps to .ppt. Now PowerPoint thinks that it is simple PPT presentation which you coul edit like you want.

I don’t know if .pps is different from .ppt file format only in the extension but it works.

This tip came me while listening to new Moby song called “Shot in the back of the head”, which is available to download for free here.

The song starts with swinging sounds from left to right speaker but I listened with my old headphones that has no marks of R (right) and L (side) left,  so I couldn’t determine if the song starts on the right side or on the left.

So to quickly solve this problem use simple trick. Open your computer’s volume control panel and move “Volume Control” or “Wave” slider to the left or right direction while listening to some music. If you hear the sound on your right when the slider is  moved to the right, then it means you have put headphones correctly. If not, just switch the sides and you’ll be fine.

Here is a nice trick to bypass Youtube comment filter and insert links into comments. As you know, commenters are not allowed to post links on the comments because of possible spamming. Hovewer not every link is a spam and sometimes your link on Youtube comments could be appropriate. Read the rest of this entry »