Anas Ismail Khan

You are familiar with the term plug-and-play; if not, well, just google it 😉 Anyways, we use countless plug and play devices, but ever heard of a plug and play Operating System(OS)?
Slax is just another one of the countless linux distros, but the best thing about it is that it’s plug and play. Just boot using a Slax live CD or USB, and it’d start up. The initial setting-up processes hardly take a minute, and no install required.

It’s quite stable and pretty useful, plus the total size of the disk image is just 210MB, now isnt that efficiently coded!

Here, grab your own copy of slax and give it a try, and i assure you that it won’t at all mess up your existing OS as no installation is required.

It’s a project, led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. No need to tell you what its about as the name says it all.

Well, Thrun’s team did succeed in making this award winning vehicle called Stanley, and this happened back in 2005 and this car won some DARPA challenge.

This is a simple but useful trick for hiding folders in your phone without any special software/tool. This works in almost all phones, at least it did in every single one i tried.

Well, thats all you have to do.

1. Name the folder “anything.jad“, at first this would be visible, But that’s normal.
2. To hide it, all you have to do is, create another folder with the same name but  replace the last bit, i.e. the extension, (which in this case is jad,)with .Jar. That’s it.
3. Now the Jar folder would be visible but the jad one wont.

Its not exactly the best choice, as the “.jar” is visible in the folders name, but still, its the quickest and easiest way, plus, not everyone knows about these extensions.

Note: To un-hide that jad folder, just delete the jar one.

Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer that you can plug into a tv and a keyboard. It uses an ARM processor and can run various llinux distros like Debian, Ubuntu and even some version of android, and is capable of almost anything that a normal pc, belonging to a normal user does.

Yo, today was our robotics competition, The First Lego League(FLL). Dont ask what FLL is, just google it. The bots were built using the Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit. In the competition  we were judged on four things: The Robot Design, Robot Game, Core Values, and Project. Core values was all about how well you cooperate with your team members, while in the project, we were supposed to think of a problem faced by out elders, give an innovative solution for it, and present it in front of the judges. Our Team, “The After-Shocks” was the best in Robot design, and the game. Core Values too went well, however not the best. Project was a complete catastrophe as our solution to blindness (for that was the problem we chose) was nowhere near innovative. But it was the game and the design that we really rocked at. All the bots, but ours looked almost exactly the same, ours was the only one somewhere near innovative.

Now, to the game. Well, just before the competition, we were going awesome, the bots, not just ours for this was the case with everyone, went wacky. In the first round, we score 140. Second place, highest was 165. But in the next round we score 210 and then it seemed as if the other teams had no chance of catching  up, but then Team Lightning Strike score 202, and this clouded our chance of winning. The last round dint exactly go as well as it was supposed to, cause on the practice mat, the score was somewhere over 300, but on the competition, we only scored about 150. Even then, we were the best.

The trophies were made entirely out of lego, and we got two of them, for the design and game. The overall champion was Team Lightning Strike, as they were the only ones with a  successful presentation.

Often you might have come across websites that have been blocked by your ISP, an example is youtube, which is blocked in Pakistan. To access such websites, you can use a proxy server. There are dozens of sites offering free web proxy; ONLINE. The most popular one is 12345proxy.net, though in my opinion, the best one is Umer Rock’s Proxy Server.

But using such services can be tiring, the other option is to use some Software,  this one is slightly more preferrable and preferred.

Now, the thing is that not all of the proxy sites and tools work on Youtube. About an year ago I was fine with ultrasurf, but now if i use ultrasurf, i am able to surf Youtube, but it displays an error whenever i try to play a video. Same goes for many others.

If you wanna go for some software, then the best option is to download and install Hotspot Shield. It integrates with your browser automatically, just make sure it is connected.

So, the conclusion is that if you wanna use some online tool, go for Umer Rock’s Proxy Server, but if you wanna use some software, go for Hostpot.

You might have noticed people making strange characters like “☺☻♥” on facebook e.t.c. Some of these, take the heart for example, can be _Triggered _using special codes, in this case, “<3”. But not every single one of them has codes known to public.

Anyways, these characters can be added by pressing Alt + (any key from the num-pad).

Examples:

1. alt + 1 = ☺
2. alt + 2 = ☻
3. alt + 3 = ♥

With this handy Web Dev Extension extension, you can totally strip down websites, and modify them. Such modifications include:

• Disabling, Deleting and addin cookies,
• Disabling, and editing css,
• Adding, creating or hiding forms, images, input fields, e.t.c.

Can’t say much here. If interested, try it!

Chromium OS is an open-source, linux-based operating system, designed by google to work with web based applications. Its quite a simple one really, and not the sort everyone would like, in fact, the only application it comes with is a browser (though of course you can install more apps.)

Anyways if you feel like trying it, there are two ways to do so. The first is to download the disk image, burn a usb or dvd with it and boot with it. But if you dont wanna take any risks, you can try it on virtual box. All you need is virtual box, and the Chrome OS Virtual Disk.

The Process is simple. Start Virtual Box and create a new Machine. Select Linux Ubuntu as the OS Type, and when you come to the “Hard Drive” part, check “Use an Existing virtual hard drive file, and browse to the one you just downloaded. That’s it.

Now start the machine, the configuration process would hardly take a minute. Then just login with your google account.

Akismet is a wordpress plugin for reducing spam comments. It works by sending the info left by the commentor, to the Akismet servers, which checks whether the comment is spam or not. And it’s completely free for personal blogs.

Well, as far as i have noticed, every wordpress installation is pre-installed with akismet, You just need to configure it, which would hardly take a minute.

The process is simple, just sign up at Akismet.com, and you’ll get an API key, once you have got it, go to your dashboard, activate Akismet, and enter your key, which was mailed to you.