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Anas Ismail Khan
My name is Khan and I am a Developer
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I'm glad my Wikipedia article got rejected
My second last post was a review of The Painted (2024), a low-budget film lacking a Wikipedia article due to limited marketing and visibility. As one of the first people to write about it, I also ended up creating its Wikipedia page—my first-ever contribution—which, despite being doomed to perpetual draft status, led to some interesting experiences that I’ll share in this post.
The draft had gotten rejected for having too few references and having low notability. It was hard to find even basic information about the movie outside of IMDB and Letterboxd, both of which, being community maintained, aren’t considered strong sources for references.
- I tried different combinations of keywords and went as far as the last page of google’s search results to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
- I visited Wikipedia articles for other movies to find any non-indexed but standard credible sources that might also have information for this movie. e.g. BBFC
- I updated and resubmitted my draft many times and the moderators even acknowledged that there simply didn’t exist any more sources of information for the movie but that didn’t change anything. My article will retain its draft status until more blogs write about the movie.
However, in the process, I ended up learning a lot about the people behind the film. I learned that Sasha Sibley – the producer, director and writer – was scarcely older than myself, and that the executive producer was also named Sibley and therefore was clearly a family member
(his sister, perhaps?). I learned that Sasha was LA based and that this was his second feature-film and that “The Painted” had originally been a short film that was released around covid. I visited the websites of the other crew members, e.g. Peter Bui, their cinematographer with a mechanical degree. I also learned from a not too reliable source that this movie had been in the works for a very long time.Suddenly had a newfound appreciation and love for the movie I had so brutally posted a review about a few days before. I felt like I knew the crew and was rooting for them. I was curious too. So I did what anyone else would have done in the same position: I emailed Sasha, telling him I had the pleasure of watching and reviewing his movie and that I would love to learn more about it. He replied:
[…]I am very flattered – and that was a nice, accurate if not glowing review […] I’m happy to hop on a call if you want any more info or an interview[…]
That’s right. I reviewed a movie and the director of the movie read my review.
I took him up on that interview offer and excitedly waited for the call which turned out to be an absolute pleasure, of course. Sasha Sibley was a delight and one of the nicest and most humble people I have ever met. We talked a lot, about his background, inspiration, work, and even budgets. That information, however, deserves a post of its own that I will post shortly. For now, all I can say is: I’m glad I spent all that time writing that Wikipedia article.
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Oops, I did it again
A month ago, I wrote about my first contribution to an open-source, Microsoft-maintained, project, from June 2024, that got merged by November 2024. What I didn’t mention at that time was that that wasn’t my only contribution to that project. Shortly after that pull request got merged, I opened a second one. Once again, I created an issue, to report a bug, and a pull request, to solve the bug, back to back. However, this time I made them in the correct order.
The same project from the last article required me to enable ETags on the OData API that I was working on. An ETag is an HTTP header that’s used for cache-invalidation and concurrency control. It’s basically like a hash representing the state of the resource/data at said endpoint. The client may use it as a cache key and the server can use it for concurrency control when multiple requests attempt to update the resource at the same time. ETag values are based on a special field/column on the resource record that changes every time the record is updated.
Lets talk for a moment about how ETags help with concurrency control.
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The Painted (2024) - Movie Review
I am not a fan of cinemas. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. I particularly detest going to cinemas. I prefer watching movies in the comfort of my own home, with my own popcorn and unlimited condiments from my fridge for my hotdog. The only times I go to a cinema are when I’m forced into it.
Today was one of those occasions. While movies that I would naturally find more interesting like Mufasa, Sonic 3 and Brave New World were playing, I couldn’t buy a ticket to any of them because they belong to a class of movies that me and my sister always watch together. It’s sacred. Since she wasn’t with me today, it came down to this bunch:
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How to work for Microsoft without getting hired
I’ve been a fan of open-source longer than I have been an adult. The moment I first switched to Linux in 2012, I knew it would remain my daily driver until I could afford to buy a Mac. As I, both voluntarily and involuntarily, continued to ditch my usual programs in favor of free and open-source alternatives, the deeper I dove into the world of open-source and the stronger became my desire to contribute to it.
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I made a MIPS simulator
AKA MIPS – A Java Based MIPS simulator. Browse the code on GitHub.
Long story short, my Data Structures teacher gave us this project where we hasd to use our knowledge of data structures to make something useful. She said we could do it in groups so naturally I found myself in a team of 3.
She told us about the project near the start of the semester and a week before it was due we were still trying to decide what we were gonna make. She said that we would have to present our project and pitch it and convince the audience that it’s a useful piece of shit. The problem with us was that any idea we came up with was either far too advanced and therefore not worth the time and effort or far too simple for our ego to allow us to go about presenting it as our grand project.
I thought maybe we could make like a virtual machine of the Altair or any other primitive computer and that led us to the idea of making a MIPS simulator. We opened the instruction set in a browser tab immediately and were relieved to find that it was sufficiently small and therefore we decided that this was what we wanted to do.
Within 24 hours I had written a buggy but functional parser that could read assembly files coupled with a machine object using a couple of integer arrays for simulating the RAM and registers. Downloading and running some assembly code for MIPS on my parser helped me fix some bugs and typos that had crept in.
Because the teacher had insisted that the project be a graphical program, one of our team members was tasked with creating a GUI for this and so he made a JavaFX project that ended up looking very similar to the MARS simulator for MIPS. No it wasn’t at all a coincidence because he had used MARS before.
After coupling my code with the GUI, I would say we ended up with a pretty decent program. It has a few limitations, e.g. lack of floating-point support. I learned from Steve Wozniak that it’s okay to leave that out when you’re writing your own language processor. On a serious note though, I didn’t initially plan on leaving it out but I learned after it was a bit too late that MIPS had a whole set of 64 bit registers for handling floating-points and I didn’t feel like making any changes to the otherwise working parser. Other than that, there’s no support for unsigned arithmetic. The whole program is Java based and Java doesn’t have unsigned types so neither does the simulator.
The code for the program is available on github. Feel free to check it out, give your feedback and even suggest improvements. It’s not on my teammates account because he created an pushed the code for the GUI on a separate repo and then merged the parser code directly into it.
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On “Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887” by Edward Bellamy
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about “The Sleeper Awakes.” At some point in that book, Graham (the protagonist) compares his situation to that described by Bellamy; and earlier in the book, when he is sound asleep and has only been asleep for a few decades at most, we see his friends talking about the same thing. Curious as I was upon reading that name I chose to google it.
(I don’t quite remember exactly what I googled but it was probably something like “Bellamy Socialist Utopia Sleeper.”)I found out that there was a book by an Edward Bellamy called “Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887” in which a man sleeps for somewhere slightly above a century and, you guessed it, wakes up in a world vastly different from the one he slept in. I downloaded that book right away and made a mental note to read it after finishing “The Sleeper Awakes.”A few hours ago, I finished reading “Looking Backward” and I thought I might as well write about it and throw in a few words about the similarities and differences between the two books. There are SPOILERS AHEAD so proceed at your own risk.
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Entropy of life
I know it’s kind of a weird title. I will promptly explain it. Have you ever been in one of those situations where you went ahead and did something without thinking twice only to later regret doing it and spend the next few days brooding over different ways to deal with all possible undesirable consequences of that course of action?
We often see situations like these in movies. I considered adding examples here from Harry Potter or The Flash or Infinity War but then I decided against it because I didn’t want to post any potential spoilers and because not everyone would be familiar with those scenes. Instead let me use a very general example: Something goes wrong and the protagonist(s) considers possible courses of action to take. In short, they form a plan that sounds completely nuts but they decide to do it anyway because it’s “the only way.” And all that while you’re just sitting there hoping that they’d see things your way because ot you there’s clearly another and better way but they can’t seem to think of it. Anyways, they go ahead and execute their plan only to screw up further and get themselves into a situation much worse than before and then the cycle starts again (or maybe not.)
Now that I am done typing that stupid example, I realize that it’s too general to be of any use. So let me use the example of time travel. Let’s say you have a regret. Years pass and you cannot get over it. Say you gain access to a time machine. You go back in time to fix it only to realize that you created a new world that’s equally undesirable. You try to figure out the point in time where this new world of yours went haywire and try to fix that. Again you screw shit up. Eventually you realized that you’ve messed it up to the point where it cannot be fixed. (There are actually movies about exactly this.)
Have you ever met someone and gotten to know them really well only to end up wishing you’d never met them in the first place and thinking about how your life would have been so much better if you hadn’t? Or maybe you’ve at some point said something that you immediately wanted to take back and so you keep on thinking about different ways to explain yourself should someone bring it up again and you can’t help fearing that someone would hold it against you. But anything you say to cover it up could only make matters worse.
In short, what I mean to say is that things always get worse with time. The more the time passes the greater the number of things in your life that went wrong, the more secrets you have and the more people there are that know your secrets, the greater the number of people in your life that you watch out for e.t.c. and every lame attempt to fix any of it only creates more problems. Life only gets messier and messier and there’s no way to clean up that mess.
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On “The Sleeper Awakes” – H.G. Wells
I don’t exactly remember how I discovered this book. But at least a couple of months ago, I came across the name, looked up the synopsis and downloaded it with the intention of reading it on the first chance. Less than a month ago, on a particular midnight, I was unable to sleep and having little to no desire to take up something educational, I decided to go through my collection of fiction. The H.G. Wells folder caught my eye and I opened it to reveal this book along with a couple of others. Remembering suddenly what it was about, I decided to start reading it.
Fun Fact: The first chapter was called “INSOMNIA.” Also adding that although I mean to not talk in detail about any events in the book, depending on your perspective, there may or may not be spoilers ahead so proceed with caution.
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Explaining Savitar to a noob be like
Me: Hey, Tom Felton made an appearance in the Flash.
They: Who’s that again?
Me: Malfoy.
They: What does he play?
Me: Julian Albert. A CSI working with Barry. But sometimes he gets mind-controlled and takes on the mantle of “Alchemy.”
They: Who controls him?
Me: Savitar.
They: Who’s Savitar?
Me: Barry.
They: Who’s Barry again?
Me: Flash.
They: Why does he control him?
Me: To create evil metahumans.
They: Why?
Me: Because he’s evil.
They: The Flash is evil?
Me: No. Savitar is.
They: You just said Savitar is Flash.
Me: I said he is Barry.
They: And Barry is Flash, right? So..
Me: Savitar is another Barry.
They: Like a clone?
Me: Yes, quite like a clone.
They: Where’d he come from?
Me: The future.
They: So basically, Barry turns evil in the future and goes back in time to fight himself?
Me: No. Barry clones himself in the future and that clone travels in time.
They: Why does he do that?
Me: Because he needs help.
They: With what?
Me: Fighting someone. He creates many clones of himself in the fight. They all die except for one.
They: Who was he fighting?
Me: Barry.
They: What?
Me: He was fighting Savitar.
They: No. You said he created Savitar to fight someone else.
Me: He created a clone to fight Savitar. Then after the fight, he told the clone to go to hell. The clone had no purpose or place. Just endless pain. It drove him crazy and turned him into Savitar.
They: This time travel shit is confusing.
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Toggl’s “Building a Horse with Programming” comic explained
If you don’t know what this is about, you should first go and check it out.
So, C++ is, for me at least, an intolerable programming language. Everything from the code to the resultant program tends to be as ugly as it gets. More than half the time it feels like it was hacked-together to include everything. However, it has been around for a very long time and you can use it to do just about anything that you could want to do with a programming language. Only, the experience and the result may not exactly be great.
Then we have Java. The main problem with Java is that for a language that aims to be useful for all sorts of applications on all platforms, it’s missing a lot of features that are commonly used by full-stack developers. Very often, when writing programs in Java, programmers end up spending more time than they need to creating new types and methods so that they can use them in the program that they actually set out to write.
Ever since npm and nodejs gained popularity, JavaScript has become one of the world’s most widely used languages and npm is probably _the _most used package manager of them all. And the thing about Javascript programmers is that they use a lot of external libraries and packages
and every once in a while, they add their own package to the global repository just to get a kick out of it.By now there are probably more packages in npm than there are libraries for any other language out there and when you are a JavaScript developer, you really have use them if you want to get any work done. The pinked “Backbone” and “Angular” are references to Backbone.js and Angular.js, two popular JS frameworks.NoSQL refers to database systems that don’t use SQL and are non-relational. An example is MongoDB, which stores JSON objects grouped into collections. The joke is that the non-relational model doesn’t always expose enough information for you to be able to access your objects without using the abstract api.
COBOL? Well, I guess no one entirely gets it except for its creator.
Lisp has a lot of parentheses. Just google sample codes for lisp and you’d know.
C# is a fairly complete and tolerable language. The problem? Microsoft. Windows. The thing about the costume is that C# is basically Java in a costume (it closely resembles Java in terms of syntax and semantics.) The camel is basically the windows environment. Basically, it means that C# programs don’t always work as intended if not running on Windows.
Assembly doesn’t really offer a lot of language features. There’s a basic set of operations that have to be used for everything. But coding something in such a low level language means you get control over aspects that most languages abstract over. So you can make a really efficient program, hence, the thing about running.
Everyone hates PHP. They say it’s a terrible and unsafe language and has unpredictable behavior. I personally have reasons to really like PHP but I will still go ahead and tell you that most good posts on the subject target aspects of the language that really do suck so yeah some of the hate is justified.
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SQL Server screwups and how to fix them.
So recently I installed Visual Studio 2017 on a laptop and I installed it with only the ASP.NET and WinForms features. I was working on a webapp and initializing the database when I realized that VS was completely unable to connect to the database. I opened the “SQL Server Object Explorer” and tried to manually connect to the MSSQLLocalDB instance and I got this error.
A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 50 – Local Database Runtime error occurred. Error occurred during LocalDB instance startup: SQL Server process failed to start.) (Microsoft SQL Server)
I tried to start the service from the CMD and I kept on getting similar errors. Eventually, I concluded that the installation was corrupted and therefore tried reinstalling LocalDB. Guess what? It got me past this error but introduced me to another. It was something like this.
CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5(Access is denied.) while attempting to open or create the physical file ‘c:\Users\AnasDatabaseName-asdf5sdfasd5fs5dfs5f.mdf’.
This time, the CREATE Database command was failing because it was trying to create and MDF file in my “Users” folder. I checked the default location for the databases and it was in a sub-sub-sub-sub-folder inside AppData. A bit of Googling told me that this was actually a bug in the program itself and had been fixed in a recent update. So I just downloaded the latest Cumulative Update from the Microsoft site and it did the trick.
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Who are you?
You’re not your face
Yet it defines you
You’re not your body
Yet it forms you
You’re not your soul
Yet it gives you life
You’re not your thoughts
Yet they drive youYou are none of them
Yet all of them
But none of them
Are all of you. -
What would it be like to travel at the speed of light?
Imagine an infinitely long flat runway. You are running through it. At the speed of light. Let’s ignore the effects of relativity and resistance. The visible spectrum is painted on the runway, all the way from the start to the finish, meaning there’s infinitely many shades of all the 7 colors of the rainbow painted on the runway, each one easily distinguishable from the next. Yes, we are also assuming this is possible. An infinite number of trees are planted along the edges of the runway.
The speed of light is 300 000 000 m/s. Which means that any objects at a distance of 300 000 000 m from you will only be visible for a second after which you’d already have passed them. Any objects along your path relatively closer to you than the refresh-rate of your brain or your eyes or both, will not be perceptible.
You are standing at the starting point. On both sides of the runway, you can see a row of trees extending as far as the end of the runway, all of them look same age and length and appear to have the same amount of shrubbery. In short, they look identical. Your family and friends came to wish you good luck and are standing right behind you. Along with a whole crowd of people who paid to witness this miraculous feat. You got on your left another in runner, wearing red, who will start exactly one second after you and on your right is a runner, wearing violet, who will start exactly one second before you. All three of you have the same acceleration. All 3 of you are wearing heat and radiation resistant clothing.
The runner on your right has started. You see him become a red streak and disappear. The moment he disappears, you get hit by a wave of heat. Not that you should be looking at him cause after exactly one second you follow. Start running. Immediately after you start running, look at the runner behind you, you’d see him wearing violet instead of red as you get faster and depending on the shade of the red in his clothes, he may or may not completely disappear. This is due to the Doppler Effect. You will know you’ve reached the speed of light when all you see behind you is an abyss of blackness. You might observe a flash of violet before that happens. The light from anything behind you never reaches you. Your field of vision is limited to 180deg from your immediate left to your immediate right. On your right you can see a purple streak extending all the way from slightly less than 260 000 000 m ahead of you to exactly 300 000 000 m ahead of you. That’s the runner who started before you. That streak is simply multiple images of him running.
If you look down at the painted ground, instead of seeing the colors change smoothly, you’d see them flickering into each other. Kinda like jumping straight from bright red to yellowish orange, because you are moving faster than the time it takes for the brain to “refresh” the image you see. The smaller the angle between your line of sight and the ground, the smoother the transition from one color to the next. Meaning, if you look directly at the ground and then slowly move your eyes upwards, you’d see the change between colors getting smoother, however the rate of that change would keep on getting smaller, and eventually, you’ll be able to see each shade for almost a whole second. But you will be looking at the color of the ground 300 000 000 m away from you.
Now look at the trees. They no longer look uniform and similar. The ones farthest from you still look like they did when you started running but the ones closest to you look very different. They look older and yellower and less leafier. The farther you go, the less leaves you see on the trees and more on the ground and the farther you go, the older they get. If you look at the tree farthest from you and keep on looking at it until you reach it, you’d see it smoothly lose leaves and colors and life.
I forgot to warn you to not look straight ahead. The Doppler’s effect needs to be taken into account also for objects that you’re running towards. Remember that radiation proof suit you put on? It was for a reason. The light from the objects that you are running towards has been blueshifted out of the visible spectrum. Any part of the electromagnetic spectrum travelling towards you now carries an infinite amount of energy. Not only would it be impossible for you to _see _it, your eyes would probably burn, if not along with the rest of your body. In truth, as soon as you approach a significant fraction of the speed of light, everything in front of you would turn blue and then eventually violet. But the other parts of the spectrum that you shouldn’t really be able to see, will now be somewhat visible. First the infrared waves would make an appearance followed by the radio waves. Yes, they’d look red at first but eventually they might get blueshifted out completely and then there really won’t be anything left for you to see.
In truth, there really won’t be much time between when you start running and when you blackout and also get obliterated as a result of the radiation but I wanted to make a post about what you could see, if you could keep on running at the speed of light for a while. That’s why I didn’t mention the blueshift until the end. There are better posts than I could ever come up with about the same concept but with relativity taken into effect. My favorite one being Relativistic Baseball. Yes I know they set the speed at 0.9c but then again, it’s because they present actual math and wanted to avoid infinities resulting from using c as the speed. An example of such an infinity would be trying to calculate the blueshift of an object approaching you at the speed of light.
The blueshift equation is as follows:
F = f * c / (c-v)
The variable v is the relative velocity of the object moving towards you. When moving at the speed of light towards a stationary object, this v is equal to c. Which means the denominator becomes zero which means we cannot determine the new frequency or as some of you would like to conclude, the frequency is infinite, meaning the wavelength becomes zero. Any photon with zero wavelength would have infinite energy which is not possible.
Sorry for wasting your time.
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Men In Black 2 – The locker and the marble
In Men In Black, we see J and K chasing down Edgar The Bug to recover the “Arquillian Galaxy” which is a minuscle galaxy inside a glass sphere resembling a marble. As the movie ends, the camera zooms out from J’s car and keeps zooming out and eventually we zoom out of the earth, the solar system and finally the galaxy which is revealed to be inside another glass sphere which is then picked up by some giant being and used as a playing marble alongside countless others.
In Men In Black 2, we are introduced the the C18 locker aliens, who are tiny creatures, about a few centimeters in height that live inside a locker in NYC. This was slightly different from the Arquillian Galaxy in that the beings were far bigger and their “colony” resembled a fair-sized city. Their origin is unexplained but it is safe to assume that they weren’t always there and were relocated and perhaps recolonized at some point in time prior to the events of the movie. At the end of the movie, J insists on showing telling them that there’s more to the universe than just the inside of a locker at which K proceeds to open a mysterious black door that says “Do Not Open.” As we zoom out of J, K and Frank standing in the doorway, we see a whole array of giant lockers inside a giant station and giant humanoid aliens walking around in it, which basically was meant to show that the humans themselves are living inside a giant locker.
Now what does it all mean together? Do we live inside the locker or the marble or both? Considering both concepts were boldly put forward by the movies themselves and assuming that they haven’t made any continuity errors, it is relatively safe to say that we are inside both. When we zoom out of the locker, we can still clearly see Jay and K and Frank standing in the doorway of the locker and they are scarcely smaller than the locker itself. This suggests that the locker doors are not containers but mere portals to worlds whereas the giant station is kind of an intermediary “world between worlds” just like the forest with pools from Narnia. This portal could be located in virtually any of the planets or worlds or galaxies shown or mentioned anywhere in the trilogy or it could be an extra dimensional thing that manifests itself as a station with lockers to 3D beings.
Building upon the fact that the lockers are portals, we can assume that each portal leads to a separate galaxy considering how all galaxies are supposed to be packed inside marbles and therefore don’t really allow the inhabitants to just fly out of them.
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Yes, Fred and George were definitely bullies.
This post does a great job at explaining how so I am not gonna bother.
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Angular vs React vs Vue.JS
This is the shortest and most effective comparison that aims to make the decision making process easier.
Angular:
Pros:
- The oldest and therefore very mature.
- A complete framework in itself and ideal for large projects.
- The MEAN stack remains, to date, one of the most popular stacks for web-development so finding jobs is never tough for Angular developers.
- With NativeScript, you can use it to develop smartphone apps.
Cons:
- If you don’t know, don’t like or don’t want to learn TypeScript, I would suggest staying away from it because the current releases are TypeScript based.
- Packed with features, it’s a huge framework and therefore takes a fair amount of time to learn and master.
React:
Pros:
- Been around for a fair amount of time and therefore can be said to be just as mature as Angular.
- Smaller than Angular and therefore easier to learn.
- Just as popular, if not more, and therefore has a well-developed community.
- Just as many jobs out there for it as for Angular.
- React Native allows for it to be used to make Android apps.
Cons:
- You will have to learn JSX. Basically the idea is that in ReactJS, you try to maximize your use of JS and minimize your use of HTML. JSX kinda merges both. Obviously this adds to the learning curve.
- Not a complete framework. React Developers almost always use Redux or some other flux implementation for state management. Code often becomes a real mess with large projects.
Vue.JS:
Pros:
- Has just as many features as React, if not more.
- Small enough for you to be able to learn it in a single day.
- Great for small projects.
- Gaining popularity real quick.
- Resembles the original Angular.JS so if you are familiar with it, you’d love Vue.
- Unlike React, with Vue, the goal is to maximize the use of HTML and minimize the use of JS.
- Although not a complete framework, it comes with it’s own router and flux implementation, that, although independent projects, offer seamless integration with Vue itself.
Cons:
- Relatively new and therefore has a small community and fewer jobs are available.
- NativeScript has a plugin for Vue support but it not supposed to be ready for development yet. Although, it seemed pretty functional when I tried it.
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Complimenting Complements
This post assumes familiarity with “Two’s Complement”, “One’s Complement” and an understanding of “Positional Numeral Systems”.
Why is the Two’s Complement called the Two’s Complement?
Ever wondered why the two’s complement and the one’s complement are named as such? We were told that to calculate the two’s complement of a number, you add 1 to its one’s complement. But why? When calculating the one’s complement, we simply subtract every digit from 1, so why don’t we subtract every digit from 2 in two’s complement? And maybe, you tried to reason with yourself about how there’s no “2” in the binary system and so that mehtod would not work anyway. There is however a much better way to understand and explain it. To understand this, you need to understand the difference between the radix complement _and the _diminished radix complement.
According to wiktionary:
- The radix complement is the number which, when added to an n-digit number in radix-r, results in r^n. An alternative way of looking at it is that it is the smallest possible (n-1)-digit number in radix-r. The radix complement for radix-r is called r’s complement. We get it by adding 1 to the diminished radix complement.
- The diminished radix complement is the number which, when added to an n-digit number in radix-r results in r^n -1. An alternative way of looking at is is that it is the largest possible n-digit number in radix-r. The diminished radix complement for radix-r is called (r-1)’s complement. We get it by subtracting every digit from (r-1)
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Sybill Trelawney
Sybill Trelawney, the Divination teacher at Hogwarts, was poorly received by her fellow staff, her students and the fans of her universe for reasons that all translate to “She was a fraud. She wasn’t a true seer and therefore not an eligible candidate for the job.” I however have always had a very different opinion about her. I believe that not only was she not a fraud but also a perfect candidate for the job, not to mention the fact that she did actually possess a gift.
We know that she was the great-granddaughter of some celebrated seer named “Cassandra Trelawney” and that Dumbledore went to meet her at the “Hog’s Head” and that no sooner than he met her, he realized that she didn’t possess her great-grandmother’s gift. Then she went into a trance and made the prophecy about Harry defeating The Dark Lord, and Dumbledore decided to hire her because he could tell that she was gonna make more of these prophecies and wanted her to be close to himself when that happened.
Now I want you to think. You are the headmaster of a school, and you want to hire a teacher for a karate class. You have to choose between a guy who is incredibly strong and can pick up and throw around the room just about anyone who picks a quarrel with him regardless of how good their karate is and a guy who spent years learning and mastering the sport and is a great fighter. Who will you choose? True that the first guy has the gift of strength and therefore has a good chance of winning most fights but he may not know anything about the sport, whereas the second guy has nothing except for a thorough knowledge of exactly what you want him to teach to your students. I don’t know about you, but if I was you I would probably hire the second guy, unless of course the first one demonstrated better karate skills than the second one.
Let’s try a different situation. You are the headmaster of Hogwarts and you want to hire a divination teacher. You have to choose between a woman who is well-versed in all the practices and techniques of divination (e.g. reading tea-leaves and making predictions from a pack of cards or dreams) or a centaur who, like all centaurs, was born with inexplicable knowledge of the cosmos and unfathomable divination skills that only require for him to look up at the sky. The woman doesn’t possess any magical powers that allow her to tap into the spirit world but she knows all that is known to man about the art of divination whereas the centaur who doesn’t have any need for those human methods probably doesn’t even know them. In fact, in the potterverse, the centaurs mainly, if not only, use the skies to predict the future and that too with seemingly minimal calculation or effort. It may be safe to assume that they aren’t even aware of the other methods used by humans. So, if it was for me to decide, I’d hire the woman, because she knows her stuff and so should be able to teach it whereas the centaur may not even know shit about the subject and is just naturally gifted at predicting the future by looking at skies.
We saw enough proof in the book of the fact that Sybill actually did know a lot about divination. She was accustomed to using all the techniques that she taught in class, and a whole lot of her predictions came true. She predicted the death of Dumbledore a few hours before it happened, predicted the order of death of certain groups of people. There are better posts about her predictions coming true so I’m not gonna list all of them here. So we know that Sybill certainly did have the knowledge, and that makes her a good candidate for the job. And we are also aware of the fact that she actually did possess a gift. That makes her a perfect candidate for the job.
One thing to note is that she herself was totally unaware of her gift. Clearly she had no control over it but given time and practice, it could be possible for her to get a handle on it. If Dumbledore wasn’t such a jerk, he’d have told her and tried to help her but he chose to not only keep her in the dark but to also make sure that she was one of the least respected members of the staff. Dumbledore and the Teachers routinely spoke ill of her and didn’t shy away from telling their students that she was a fraud and that her predictions weren’t to be taken seriously.
Let’s address the “fraud” question now. She did, at times, make predictions that sound way too ridiculous and didn’t even come true. Why? The answer is very simple. Entertainment. When you have a job like hers and everyone expects you to make cool predictions every once in a while, you have to have a mysterious air around you and you have to make predictions and you have to say stuff to make sure you have the required amount of attention. Come to think of it, she once predicted that Harry will have 12 children. Everyone knows that sounds made up including herself and so the whole point of saying it was to entertain students with some mildly humorous predictions which was a good change from the darker predictions she used to make, two of which she made in her first class and went on to become popular gossip topics.
Sybill Trelawney is underrated an underappreciated and she deserves better than to be called a fraud and better than to be insulted by her staff members.
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The Final Sentence
I’ve been reading books, more than I’ve been reading lately, lately. Very often, I read them onscreen. A while back, I was starting with H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and the PDF I found had about somewhere slightly above a hundred pages in it and it made me wonder if that was actually the whole book and not a truncated version and so I googled for the last sentence of the book to see if it matched the one in the PDF.
I ended up finding this tumblr blog called “The Final Sentence” that exists solely to serve as an archive of the final sentences of all books. I think it’s pretty cool actually and every once in a while, it makes me feel better about a crappy PDF.
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Rewriting Legacy Code
I once wrote an answer on Quora about the improbability of a programming language to completely die out once it has gained popularity. The idea, not so original, was that there are two factors preventing a language from dying:
- A significant amount of code is written in it and a significant amount of people or _other __code _depend strongly on it. An example is Linux. Now Linux has always been C and always will be. As long as Linux exists, it would be impossible for C to die out.
- Everyone knows about it. The problem with a programming language being popular enough for it’s existence to be common knowledge is that there will always be people who’ll be fond of it and would want it to never die out. The best example would be Richard Eng, the smalltalk evangelist who has grown more popular than the language itself and likes to call himself Mr. Smalltalk.
This post is about the first reason. C, PHP and JavaScript are three of the most popular and most hated languages that are getting closer and closer to being about as old as time itself. For my own reasons, I both like and dislike the 3 and also rely a lot on them. Let’s assume everyone agrees to killing all 3 of them. Now the problem is that C is:
- The language Linux is written in.
- The language most programmers start with. (Often this is because universities prefer to teach it in the earlier semesters.)
- More or less the only mature language that has the least amount of abstraction that one could ask for except for C++, which is a mess and an offspring of C itself and therefore not worth talking about in this post.
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Comparing strings with “==” operator vs “.equals” method [Java]
During lunch, I was reflecting on that day when my programming teacher asked me to come forward and teach “bitwise” operations to the whole class, and I remembered how, in my attempt to explain to them the basic difference between a regular “OR” and a bitwise “OR”, I had talked about value comparison being different from a bitwise comparison. Then I began to wonder. A bitwise operation on machine level is fairly simple to understand, but what about value comparison? What is it that happens at machine level when you check if two integer values are equal?
As I began my search for the answer, I pinged Vladislav Zorov, my mentor and friend, and asked him. He said that compilers mostly just subtract the memory addresses of the two objects being compared and returns true if the difference is zero i.e. if they are literally the same object. I couldn’t agree with this so I argued against it. I said that it is possible for two variables to point to identical objects without pointing to the same object and so I set out to prove it.
I wrote a very simple program:
import java.util.Scanner; public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String []args){ // Created two strings using the same literal and an array with the second index set using that literal. String x = “abcd”; String y = “abcd”; String[] z = {“asafaf”,”abcd”}; // Printing addresses of all 3. System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(x.hashCode())); System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(y.hashCode())); System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(z[1].hashCode())); // Checking to see if the equality symbol works on these if(x == z[1] && x==y && y==z[1]) System.out.println(“== works on the 3”); // Comparing the 3 using the equals method which will, obviously, work. if(x.equals(z[1]) && x.equals(y) && y.equals(z[1])) System.out.println(“equals method works on the 3”); // Creating Scanner object to read from stdin. Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in); // Taking two strings as input. Will test with // 1. Two different strings // 2. Identical strings // 3. “abcd” for both String j = input.next(); String k = input.next(); //printing their addresses System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(k.hashCode())); System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(j.hashCode())); // Testing both comparisons if(j==k) System.out.println(“== working on input strings”); if(k.equals(j)) System.out.println(“equals working on input strings”); // Initializing a string identical to x,y,z[1] but with the new keyword String a = new String(“abcd”); // Printing its address System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(a.hashCode())); if(a==x || a==y || a== z[1]) System.out.println(“== working with new keyword”); if(a.equals(x)) System.out.println(“equals method working with new keyword”); } }If you run it, you’ll see that its output shows that all strings that have the same value point to the same address regardless of how they’re initialized. But the equality symbol only works when two strings have been created with the same literal. The fact that we’ve now proven that identical strings in Java do have the same memory address does perhaps imply that comparison is done simply by comparing addresses but then what about the equality symbol? Well, I’ll update this post when I find out.
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Messing around in the Pottermore group
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David Carson on JS
The dirty little secret is that most “modern JavaScript development” is nothing to do with actually building websites – it’s building packages that can be used by people who build libraries that can be used by people who build frameworks that people who write tutorials and teach courses can teach.
I’m not sure anyone is actually building anything for actual users to interact with. – David Carson
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Die Verwandlung
I just finished reading Franz Kafka’s “Die Verwandlung,” translated into “The Metamorphosis” by Stanley Corngold. Before I even started reading it, I’d told my classmate about how it seemed like a weird one — something I’d deduced from its synopsis — and he’d responded with “Franz Kafka’s works tend to be.”
Now that I’m done with it, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. For one, it was incredibly short. Like I knew it was a short story but I’d still been expecting it to be longer. Then there comes the fact that (SPOILER ALERT)
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What if logic isn’t actually all that logical?
Logic, science, reason, all of it is what? Rules that always hold true for everything that they are defined for. But who really defines them? We do. Who comes up with them? We do. And what are they based on? Observation.
I remember, as a kid, reading an article in my native language, titled “What if there was no Sun?” and it, as you can guess, was full of stupid stuff like “pitch black, ice cold, nobody would survive for any more than … e.t.c.” While I was reading it, I couldn’t help but wonder why a world without our Sun would ever have any life-forms that need the sun to survive? Or why the humans _on such a world would not _be used to not having a sun and thus be optimized for survival in such harsh conditions.
My point? We believe logic is absolute. Maybe it is, but only for our world. We know that if we pull at a free movable object, it would move towards us. But for all we know, there could be a world out there in which doing so would result in that very object moving away from us. That sounds illogical, stupid, and inconceivable but if it happened all the time in our world, it wouldn’t be.
We believe that we can make deductions using reasoning, but how reasonable would that be when that very art of reasoning itself is a set of deductions based on observation. What about observation? Do we even really see our world as it is? We don’t even know if we all see the world the same way. A really narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum is sensed by our eyes and is used by the brain to form an image. This is literally akin to reading a detailed book and imagining the events and the characters. Using this analogy, we can tell that while the image can be extremely detailed, it will still be limited by the amount of information it is based on. Imagine if our ears were so trained that we could, in the absence of light, form images and see using sound. Is _that _inconceivable? But what really is the difference between the ear and the eyes? Both sense and interpret waves with the help of the brain. If we could see the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would have a much smaller list of opaque materials than we currently do.
This does of course suggest that it doesn’t matter if the science and logic we so rely on is limited by our observation as long as it holds true for our observable world, but the idea was the very fact that it would be just limited to our observable world. This is kind of like how we wouldn’t be able to tell if there were any more-than-3-dimensional-beings out there observing us right now because we can’t perceive or observe more than 3 dimensions.
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Linus on C++
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it... In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. In general, I'd say that anybody who designs his kernel modules for C++ is either (a) looking for problems (b) a C++ bigot that can't see what he is writing is really just C anyway (c) was given an assignment in CS class to do so. Feel free to make up (d). -
How GoDaddy robbed me.
Humble request to all readers: Share this post.
I really want to keep this as short as I can and address only the primary issue. For those who don’t know, GoDaddy is one of the most popular domain registrar’s in the market and I started using it a couple of years back as a means for getting rid of my local registrar who had been screwing up routinely in a most inefficient way.
Abstract: Lately, they have not only made a few irrational and immoral decisions, but they also robbed me of a rather large sum of money and then messed up my order completely. In short, I paid thrice for the same order and I didn’t even get what I ordered. Furthermore, somehow the same domain was purchased twice using my account and I have absolutely no idea how it’s even possible.
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What the hell?
So I was minding my own business in my humble abode when I receive an email. A quick look at my phone’s notification bar tells me that it was from the admissions counselor (, let’s call her Daisy,) of a college that had accepted me. I wasn’t at all surprised because the decision day for that college had just passed and I hadn’t shared mine at all.
The email said “Daisy has shared a document with you.” And had a button that said:Open in Docs.
Like a dumbass, I clicked on it. I did wonder why she’d share a document with me and I did, kinda, wonder why it didn’t look like the average Google Doc invitation, but I was on my phone and I chose to overlook it.
Then I land on a page that asks me if I want Google Drive to have access to my email account. It asked for permissions like “Edit, delete and create emails.” I was certain, by this point, that something was not right. And I just allowed it. You know why? Cause the goddamned address bar clearly showed that I was still on Google and still on https. I was redirected and then it appeared to be completing a request and loading something and after waiting for a few minutes, I realized what I had done.
Now I noticed another weird email, and it said “Anas Khan has shared a document with you.” That was it. Now I realized what those permissions were for. I checked the sent mail and realized that this shit had forwarded itself to “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh@mailinator.com” and that email was BCC’d to virtually every email address that I had ever communicated with.
Well, kinda screwed up. But I have to say this: It was a clever scam.
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Let there be light
The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light. If annihilation of matter occurs, the process is merely that of unbottling imprisoned wave-energy and setting it free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of light, potential or existent, so that the whole story of its creation can be told with perfect accuracy and completeness in the six words: ‘God said, Let there be light’. – James Jeans
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Did Nokia really not do anything wrong? They did.
“We didn’t do anything wrong but somehow we still lost.”
Those were the words of the CEO. Do I agree with them? No.
Let’s go back to, say, 2006. Every average person had a Nokia. The Motorollas? Those were what people bought between two successive Nokias. Sony Errison? Well, that one had its own cult. There was a wide variety of different lines of phones in the market, each aimed at a different class of users. The basic featured for those looking for a cheap calling device, the multimedia enabled for those that wanted more, the communicators for those that afforded them.
That wasn’t all. That was the time when Nokia did some strange experiments resulting in the production of some really weird and unique phones. And guess what? A large percentage of those took off as well. Examples of such models could be the NGage and the Ngage QD – Gamepad shaped devices aimed at gaming. I happen to have owned both models. Nokia was also infamous for coming up with some really weird designs, which, surprisingly, sold just as well.
Why? Cause Nokia owned the market. They were among the pioneers and they had almost monopolized the mobile market. What they produced was good and was pretty regardless of how shitty it might actually be.
All the awesome devices that Nokia ever made were
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What Coulumb said to Newton.
Charles Augustin de Coulomb: Can I copy your work?
Isaac Newton: Sure. but change it up a bit so that it doesn’t look obvious.
Charles Augustin de Coulomb: Sure. -
Spoiler song lyrics in “Amazing Spiderman 2”
I was watching this video, and below it I found this comment:
irishdancingchicken: (Possible spoilers) Listen to the lyrics: “I’ll shut down the city lights,” like Electro did. “When enemies are at your door, I’ll carry you away from war” – he tried to. “Your hope dangling by a string” = her life literally dangling by a string/web. “I’ll love you long after your gone” – he does. Doesn’t matter if you don’t like the song or artist, the filmmakers knew what they were doing when they put it in there.
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Richard Parker owned an Ericsson Chatboard CHA-01
I was doing some math when I, for reasons I can’t recall, remembered that scene from “The Amazing Spider-man 2” _in which, among a number of other things, there was a scientific calculator on the floor of Peter’s room. Interested to know what model it was, I googled it and landed on this post . The author identifies it as the _“HP-48GX or a closely related model.”
When I looked at the pictures again, however, I realized that the calculator wasn’t the only interesting artifact among Parker’s possessions. My eyes fell on this thing here and with a jolt I realized that I happen to own one of them.
This thing, which Lucas Allen — the author of that post — took to be a Palm PDA, is actually an Ericsson Chatboard CHA-01, a small portable QWERTY keyboard that allowed for some decent and fast typing in the old days. Back then, everyone wanted to have one of these. Richard Parker, being a scientist and doing some really sick work probably had to type long emails and messages and this would have been one of his essentials while travelling.
It also makes sense because it’s a Sony movie and they would of course focus more on showing the characters using a bunch of their products instead of focusing on producing a good movie that fans can appreciate.
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What are Sum, Product, and Pi types
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Monolingual Autism
You can google that if you like and realize that it may not really be a real _thing. _It’s something that I have been observing for a long time and I’m sure you’ve seen or felt it at different points in your life.
A while back, LifeHack posted about people having different personalities when speaking in different languages. So I thought: Is it possible for a person to be autistic in a particular language and enthusiastic and energetic in another? Sounds stupid, eh? Well, here’s an example that might make it sound slightly less stupid and slightly more relatable:
Think of a kid from India or Sri Lanka or even Russia — or any other place where English isn’t really the first language. If that kid goes to a decent school, he’s probably learning English and his teacher probably encourage him to converse in it when possible. Let’s name that kid Connor.
Connor is 14 years old, he goes to a decent school and converses in English with his teachers simply because it’s a school rule. Connor speaks his native language at home and when among friends and he’s pretty talkative. Connor has no trouble reading or writing in English. But sometimes, e.g. in a group of several people, that he doesn’t know very well, who are confidently speaking to each other in English (although they also know Connor’s language), Connor gets tongue-tied. Connor has to put too much effort into forming every sentence that he then speaks. Connor, therefore, chooses to speak in his own language. The greater the number of such occurrences, the stronger Connor’s belief that he can’t converse effectively in English and the harder it will be for him to do so the next time he is faced with the prospect. At times like this, Connor get’s mildly autistic.I have a theory. If Connor were to speak to someone that doesn’t know any other language besides English, he probably won’t have this much trouble. I personally believe that all this happens because it feels stupid and illogical to converse with people in a secondary language when you don’t need to. If someone knows Connor’s language then he would prefer for them to speak it instead of English.
This makes it sound like just as much a matter of choice as a question of confidence. So what is the issue? And that, is exactly why I chose to compare it with autism. The thing with disorders is that you can’t just choose to not have them. Sometimes you know you have them and that they are stupid but you can’t just think your way out of it. I believe that this is something like a disorder where the brain just doesn’t accept the idea of doing something as illogical as conversing in a secondary language when you can choose not to. Secondly, every time it kicks in, it is accompanied by nervousness and hesitation and makes you look like this quiet, timid, shy personality and occasionally raising questions like “You don’t say much, do you?” or perhaps even “Is he autistic?”
Can it be overcome? No idea. Does it need to be overcome? Logically? No.
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Albus Dumbledore’s sacrifices
Let’s get to it. We all know about Dumbledore’s past, and his friendship with Grindelwald and the whole “For the greater good” thing. Not all of us, however, realized the fact that he never stopped living his life by that motto. Albus Dumbledore _always _did everything for the greater good.
“You’ve been raising him like a pig for slaughter.” – Severus Snape.
Yes, remember that big reveal to Snape? Dumbledore making clear his belief that in order for the Dark Lord to perish Harry had to die? Remember how he didn’t even try to deny the fact that he was, in fact, just keeping Harry alive so that he could die at the right moment?
But that wasn’t it.
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If programmers aren’t engineers,
Then neither are bio-engineers.
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Never do [insert temporal adverb] what can be done [insert another temporal adverb]
You may be familiar with the 2014 film titled “Predestination,” that involves the most mind-blowing time-loop. While watching it, I didn’t fail to notice this:
“Never do yesterday what should be done tomorrow.”
At first I laughed. Then I decided to give it some thought. My first and last interpretation of it was the same. In short, it’s about not messing with the past. If something happened at a particular point in time, then you have no reason to try and make it happen earlier.
However, there is a far simpler explanation for it. And that’s simply the fact that it’s just a tiny bit of humor from the creators and logically, in essence, it isn’t a lot different from what Aaron Burr spoke of:
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If you pretend to love my shitty startup,
I’ll pretend to love your shitty startup.
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Batmen Analysis
So, I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time. You see, there’s a whole lot of Batman movies out there along with a good number of _Batmen. _With different actors, playing the same character, in different movie adaptations, there come arguments between fans over the superiority of certain adaptations and portrayals.
In this post, I am going to analyze all the live-action movie Batmen, from Michael Keaton to Ben Affleck, and judge them based on how well they portrayed both Bruce Wayne, and Batman. Before we continue, let’s briefly discuss the two personalities. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire orphan, disciplined and mature for his age. While he may be well known to the world, he can be called reclusive. His _dark past _is what gives him his wisdom and what gives him the look of a man who has dealt with the truth, up close. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have feelings or a sense of humor. He can be touched, and he ain’t witless.
Batman, Bruce’s vigilante personality, is an all righteous, assertive tough-guy who values human-life above all emotion and justice. His instincts and choices are rarely to be doubted. He is also a quick-witted strategist and a really skilled fighter. Also, he is worthy enough to lift the Mjolnir. He knows the difference between what’s right and what’s (seemingly) needed, and he knows better than to let his emotions drive him. Well, let’s start analysing, shall we? -
Physics jokes
I’ve been casually going through the answers to this question for the past hour. I came across a lot of hilarious ones and an almost equal number of those that are probably hilarious to those that get them. Yes, that does imply that there are quite a lot of them that I don’t get. There used to be more, but I figured them out, all thanks to the internet.
It’s amazing how educational this shit can be. Consider the following scenario:
Joe is a Physics student. Joe loves Physics. Joe wants to be a Physicist. Joe idolizes Hawking, and shares – on his social media – jokes about Schrodinger’s cat. Joe is browsing Quora and he comes across this question. Among the answers, he reads this: Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg are driving down the road with the top down, having the time of their lives. They blow past a hidden state patrol officer who jumps in his car and pulls them over a few miles down the road. The officer gets out of his car, hitches up his britches, and saunters up to Heisenberg who is driving.
He motions to roll the window down and Werner complies, then the officer asks: “Sir, do you have any idea how fast you were going?” To which Heisenberg replies: “No Sir. But I know exactly where I am.”Joe doesn’t get it. He opens Google in a new tab and types “Heisenberg’s.” Googles suggest’s his uncertainty principle and the slightest bit of reading gets Joe smiling. Now he reads through the rest of the joke, which he gets, and reposts it.
Why does Joe behave this way, and how is this shit educational?
It’s understandable for people to not get jokes, and even more understandable for people to not get Physics related jokes. But is it acceptable for a Physics geek to not get a particular joke? Of course it is. Joe, however, was afraid that if people found out that he didn’t know Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle they’ll never respect his intelligence again. He is particularly afraid of his fellow _“physicists” _finding out. Joe felt ashamed of himself. He couldn’t stand how he’d failed to get a popular Physics joke – one that starred Hawking. He felt compelled to figure that joke out and chose to research and expand his knowledge enough to, if not more, get that joke. When he was done, there was one less Physics joke that he didn’t get, and one more principle that he knew.
It seems that Joe’s preferred road to being a Physicist involves reducing the number of Physics jokes that he doesn’t get to a minimum. It sounds funny, and stupid, but it’s smart, and it works. Let’s do a little math, shall we? There are 100+ answers on that Question. Most of the ones I came across had at least two jokes. It’s unlikely for two successive jokes in an answer to be about the same principle, so that means that there are at least 200 jokes below that answer. Obviously, there would be repetition, so let’s just go noob and halve the number. Now we got 100 unique jokes. If Joe reads them all fails to get half of them, he will research and read up on at least 50 different principles/theories.
Jokes motivate Joe to study. But what if Joe actually spent all that time, which he spends reading jokes, studying? That way he could still learn 50(or more) different principles/theories in the same time as he could before and he could do more.
Conclusion: Joe is lazy, not stupid.
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Kaspersky OS
First, it’s based on microkernel architecture, which allows to assemble ‘from blocks’ different modifications of the operating system depending on a customer’s specific requirements.
Second, there’s its built-in security system, which controls the behavior of applications and the OS’s modules. In order to hack this platform a cyber-baddie would need to break the digital signature, which – any time before the introduction of quantum computers – would be exorbitantly expensive.
Third, everything has been built from scratch. Anticipating your questions: not even the slightest smell of Linux. All the popular operating systems aren’t designed with security in mind, so it’s simpler and safer to start from the ground up and do everything correctly. Which is just what we did.
Let’s talk about this. Micro-kernel design? Interesting, but MINIX has had that for ages now. Linux vs MINIX = Monolithic vs Microkernel = Performance vs Security. Yes, going for one kernel design instead of the other does equal compromising one aspect for the other. In short, this decision to use the micro-kernel isn’t honestly innovative.
Built-in security system? Oh wow.. Sure, whatever. Give us more details and then we will consider it’s existence and efficiency.
Everything has been built from scratch? I admire your effort, but at the end of the day, it is going to have to be POSIX compatible. It’s hard to say whether or not it really was worth the effort. And I hate to break this to you, but it would have saved time, and made more sense, to proofread the code instead of rewriting it.
In short: As of now, it offers nothing too interesting. Sure, I’d like to download an image and give it a go but that’d probably be it.
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If Tony Stark existed,
Elon Musk wouldn’t.
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The Tenth Man
When nine people agree on something, it’s the tenth man’s responsibility to disagree no matter how improbable the idea.
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“Omelette du fromage”
So, around the time Assasin’s Creed Unity came out, I came across this video. It was quite popular among my friends back then. At 1:18, we see two guys seated on a table facing one another and as something lands on it, one of them says: “Oh no! My omelette du fromage” _at which, Arno pops up and replies: “It’s actually omelette au fromage.” _That’s the first and last time I heard that phrase.
A few days ago, I came across the term again somewhere on the internet and so I googled it. Its literal meaning being “omelette of cheese,” it actually originates from an episode of the popular tv show “Dexter’s Laboratory.” _The episode itself is called “The Big Cheese,” in which, Dexter can’t say anything except _“oomelette du fromage”.
Funnily enough, throughout the episode, his day at school is better than the average because, as it happens, saying that same damned phrase everytime he opens his mouth, seems to work out just fine for him. He nails a french test, and a mathematics question and gets a bunch of girls fawning, and even manages to deal with some bullies.
So why does Arno say “It’s actually omelette au fromage.”? _Because “omelette au fromage” means _“omelette with cheese,” _and that’s the correct term to use for a cheese omelete. As you can guess, _fromage means cheese, while omelette means pretty much what you think it does. Therefore, “du”=”of” and “au”=”with.”
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The Dilemma of Programming Languages
So, I’ve been up and laptop-ing for the last two hours or so, and all I’ve been doing is reading one article after another centered on programming languages. A good fraction of those articles lashed on how Javascript sucks. It’s been a lot of continuous reading, all thanks to catchy links located throughout the articles, and at any given time there have been at least 7 tabs (with articles) open at all times. Even as of now, there are exactly seven other tabs, besides Facebook, open in my browser.
It all started when I, scrolling through my news feed, out of sheer boredom, landed on a post by Richard Eng, an evangelist for SmallTalk whom I first came across on Quora, and while reading, I clicked on some other links and opened them in new tabs, and then the process repeated itself. The more I read, the clearer became Eng’s views on the different languages. It was clear that he hates JavaScript, and just the first part of this post by him shows that he definitely has a point.
While going through his list of his JavaScript alternatives, which are all basically Transpilers, I also discovered Brython, which is basically Python running in JavaScript’s place as the client-side scripting language. It’s pretty cool actually, although apparently the code is transpiled from Python to JS during runtime and that’s gotta take a toll on the performance.
Also, like countless other people, Mr. Smalltalk was kind enough to tell us that PHP is one of the three languages he can’t stand. While I agree that JS deserves to be on that list, my love for and comfort with PHP is too strong. It hurts when people constantly tell me that PHP sucks, and that it shouldn’t be used on any serious projects. Maybe they are right, maybe they aren’t, but I do believe that PHP is going to be around for a long time.
While reading about the desire for improvements to JavaScript, I wondered about what would be the best way to work towards them. They can’t just change everything like Angular did with the 2.0, that could break the web. But if they offer backwards compatibility, it would just keep growing and ultimately become a huge confusing mess.
I guess that it’s fairly safe to say, that with programming languages, it’s important to make the correct decisions during the initial stages of development.You might be wondering what the point of this article is, or what exactly is the actual “dilemma.” To be honest, there isn’t a point. I’m just thinking out loud. Incoming opinions lead to indecisiveness, which in turn results in time going wasted.
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“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” – A cursed sequel
The title might be a little too harsh, but I assure you, I’m not the only person who feels that way. I read the script and sometimes I wish I hadn’t. While there are some revelations in it that I like, there are other parts that I just can’t accept are canon.
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Stupid to kill someone
if you have a motive. -Jason Statham (The Mechanic)
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“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
— Wayne Gretzky
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Good judgement comes from experience,
which comes from bad judgement.
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Danvers
PHP based real-time dynamic-site-generator. Browse the code on GitHub Demo
So, on Jul 22, 2016 I started off with a small project that I had been meaning to develop for quite some time.
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6 Ways the Harry Potter movies are different from the books
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The Virtual Reality I want.
There’s something of a silent war going on around us at this time, and it has been going on for quite a while. I know that I wrote “Virtual Reality” in the title, but that’s merely due to the fact that it’s the generally preferred term for all of those projects out there making headsets and goggles, but otherwise this post does cover my ideas about its brothers _that go by the names _“Mixed Reality” and “Augmented Reality.”
So, before we go on, let’s talk about how the brothers differ. Virtual Reality is where Oculus is the major player in the market, and has met fine success. The HTC Vive is another which may not have stirred as much excitement but so far, all things positive have been said about it. The idea of virtual reality, in terms your grandma could understand, is that you put on a headset and you find yourself in a different world altogether. You look around, and all you get to see is what the headset shows you, while you are completely distracted from what’s actually around you. Rather like the Nygmatech in Batman: Forever. _You put it on, and the next thing you know, you are in a forest; or perhaps in the middle of the _French Revolution?
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Interstellar vs 2001: A Space Odyssey
Ever since it’s release in 2014, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”, _has often been compared to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”_
I was fairly late at watching both. Since I missed the release of 2001 by more than 30 years because I wasn’t at all close to existing around the time it was released and for the the first few years after I had started to exist, it wasn’t entirely possible for me to watch and comprehend it.
As for Interstellar, all I have to say is that I wasn’t really watching many movies when it came out. I guess it was because my internet sucked and because I was dealing with exams so I put it off for a while, since I didn’t want to ruin it by watching it in a hurry. It wouldn’t have made much difference, but since I had heard good things about it, I wanted to be relaxed and with ample time before I set about to watch it.My reaction to both was: What the hell?
2001: A Space Odyssey, is considered the ultimate classic and some would go as far as calling it the best one of Kubrick’s works_.
(Having never watched any of his others, I can’t say much on the matter.)_ So it started off with a music that sounded pretty familiar and that’s all thanks to Toy Story, _and after a few minutes into it I was like what the hell? That scene didn’t have to be as stretched. And my reaction was pretty similar to the one in which a woman walks along a velcro’ed path carrying a lunch tray to a sleeping guy. The scene with the apes too was unnecessarily long so I fast forwarded through it and missed the actual punchline (_i.e. how they suddenly discover that a bone can be used as a melee weapon). Oh and the part at the end that is known as the “Stargate sequence” All you see for 10 minutes is landscapes with colors messed up and for what?
Other than that, the lack of a decent conclusion might make it a cool suspense for some, but for me, it makes it suck. Nothing was explained. Although the novels that were released, and the sequel that followed, and countless fan theories suggested that it was aliens leaving all those monoliths and stuff. Let’s face it though, who watched the sequel or read the novels? Not a lot of people. -
Minimalism and security.
Minimalism helps. It always does. It’s clean, cool, beautiful and relaxing. Oh and it allows for security in software. Every single element in an application, every single feature, every program in an operating system could open doors for attackers to get in through.
The recently discovered Mac malware Eleanor, which opens a backdoor, works by exploiting a vulnerability in the MacUpdate application.
iPhone jail-breaking applications, not that I have anything against them, make use of similar vulnerabilities. The original JailbreakMe exploited a vulnerability in Safari in iOS 1.1.1, while the second version used a vulnerability in the PDF reader.
I do realize that it looks like I am suggesting that Safari or PDF readers or updating apps should not exist, but what I am actually suggesting is that the more an app grows, the greater the chances for an attacker to get in. We can always, at the very least, keep stuff simple. For example, smartphones could have less pre-installed bloatware? Samsung could stop shipping their devices with apps like “Papergarden” or “Flipboard” or “Samsung Apps” installed by default?
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Does your personality change when you switch languages?
Lifehack thinks so, and I can’t help but agree. It’s something I have always noticed. Sometimes you switch languages while talking simply because you feel that some things are better said in a particular language.Different languages allow us to express ourselves differently.
From what I believe, it’s not a matter of having as many personalities as the languages you know, but a matter of how much at home you are with them. Some languages don’t allow you to be yourself as much as others and vice versa.
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Const vs Let vs Var [JavaScript]
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Constant pointers vs pointer to constant vs constant pointer to constant.
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If telling the truth is deception,
then we are gladly guilty. – Megatron
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On being the right size – J.B.S. Haldane
Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.
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Contextmenus.js
Purely Javascript based solution allowing for easy creation of right-click context menus. Browse the code on GitHub. Demo
So, Haider posted on his Facebook timeline, a link to his then newly setup github repo which he had named “rightclick.js.” It was pretty clear what it was about so I gave his code a look. He is using JQuery, and
(for some reason unclear to me,)NodeJS.This morning, I decided to make my own in pure Javascript. I started around afternoon and got done with it a couple of hours ago.
I wanted to call it contextmenu.js but there already exists a script by that name, and thus, out of respect, I renamed mine to contextmenus.js.The code happens to be a couple of files that together take up a total of 1812 Bytes of disk space. Everything that you need to know, in order to get it to work for you, is explained in the README.md on the GitHub page. -
Progresive Web Apps
You are using a computing device, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a desktop computer. It’s new, shiny, with little or no applications installed, _apart from the bloatware that the manufacturer could have generously shipped with it. _You fire up Facebook in a web browser, like a couple of pictures, post a status, have a small chat with a friend, and then after a while, you close the tab and lock your phone. After a while you do it again, and this time, you spend a whole hour scrolling through the news feed, and then once again you close the tab, and lock your device.
Now while it’s locked, and still connected, your device makes a decision. Assuming that you like Facebook, it adds a Facebook icon to your homescreen, or your app-drawer, for easy access to facebook.com. So the next time you unlock your iPhone, you simply tap on that icon, and it opens facebook.com in your default web browser. You love it.. It’s just a simple link, but it already feels great, and it could be better. Soon enough, after another day’s usage of the site, you notice that tapping the app icon no longer opens a browser window with facebook.com. Instead, you get a window solely running Facebook like it’s a standalone native application for your operating-system.
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Physics 9702 Winter 2015 qp13 Q37
37 A network of resistors, each of resistance 1 Ω, is connected as shown.
The current passing through the end resistor is 1 A. What is the potential difference (p.d.) V across the input terminals?
A: 2V
B: 5V
C: 8V
D: 13 V -
From Windows 8 to 10 – The excitements and the disappointments.
tl;dr
I have been a Linux user for the past few years, but I grew up using Windows, and I have always been closely interested in it’s progress and moves.
When Windows 8 came out, I was like the only person I knew who didn’t hate the Metro. All my friends thought it was ridiculous, and truth be told, it was. It seemed as if they had forgotten that people neither have a bunch of huge touchscreens lying around in their place nor do they love the desktop experience in full touch, and Windows 8 was a weird cross between an OS optimized for touchscreen, and an OS that didn’t look like it would ever work well with touchscreens.
Accessing the desktop by clicking on a tile at the bottom left corner of the screen was oddly disturbing.. it felt like the desktop had lost it’s old integrity.. Like it was only a tile among many, like it was just another app like the ones accessed by clicking the other tiles. Furthermore, at times, it was hard to decide which world to live in: the metro, that had a really long way to go, and was far from mature, or the desktop that we’d both loved and hated for ages. For Developers, it both sucked and was an opportunity at the same time. They had a new platform to master; some would go on to proudly declare themselves to be of the first 100 developers for Windows apps. Some developers saw it as mere clutter. Another language and platform to come across and not-read articles of.
The question was: “Why?”
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Can machines think?
Back in 1950, Turing’s paper, titled “Computer machinery and Intelligence,” was published in journal called “Mind,” and it was one of the things that can be credited for changing the way people thought about machines. Some readers were awestruck, while others only saw gibberish.
The paper, in a fair-amount of detail, spoke of computers, and the possibility of them being indistinguishable from a human in the future. The present day, may or may not be the future in question, but we have most definitely made a fine dent. Turing spoke of storage, and memory and processing and instructions, and of word, _in the second part of his article titled “_Digital Computers.” The model of computing defined in his article is what we know today as the Turing Machine.
The part on digital computers was preceded by “The Imitation Game.”
You might be familiar with the 2014 movie of the same name, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a young Alan Turing who builds an intelligent-machine so as to be able to decrypt the messages encrypted by the german Enigma machine. The Imitation Game, which is defined finely in his article, is what could be used as a Turing Test, so as to determine how close a machine is to imitating the behavior and thinking capability of a human being, and whether or not it could possibly hoodwink a human into mistaking itself for a human. The Turing Test is a popular topic for discussion among enthusiasts, and developers perform different forms of it on their AI creations to this day.I could go on for a while, but there’s honestly no point to it, and your time could be better spent reading the original article.
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Fixing the brightness issue on Ubuntu 16.04
- The issue: Random flickering when changing the brightness using the function key, while the change wasn’t steady. The slider in system settings allowed me to change the brightness normally.
- The machine: Dell Inspiron N5110
The first solution I tried was creating the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf file with the following lines:
Section "Device"<br /> Identifier "card0"<br /> Driver "intel"<br /> Option "Backlight" intel_backlight"<br /> BusID "PCI:0:2:0"<br /> EndSectionThis didn’t change anything. So I tried following “dushnabe’s” suggestion on this thread. Which too didn’t make any difference really. The problem, as I saw it was that I appeared to be using both intel_backlight and acpi_video0. Both use different ranges of values to change the brightness. Hence the flickering. It became clear that I had to force the usage of just one, and that’s exactly what the fix in that answer was supposed to do. Except that for some reason it wasn’t working.
After googling further on this, I landed on this page and I saw the list of kernel parameters that had to do with the backlight. I rebooted a couple of times, each time trying a different parameter, and finally,
acpi_backlight=nativeis what did the trick. I noticed that it doesn’t allow me to change brightness on login screen, but after login, there was no flickering, and when I ranls /sys/class/backlight/, I saw that it no longer returned acpi_video0. The only issue I have right now is that there is no fixed minimum. Sometimes, it decreases to a reasonable minimum, while at other times, it results in a blackout, and I have to manually adjust it using the slider in system settings or using xbrightness..To replicate this process, all you need to do:
- Fire up a terminal
- sudo nano /etc/default/grub
- At the very end of the string
GRUB\_CMDLINE\_LINUX_DEFAULT, (which in my case was “quiet splash,”) addacpi_backlight=native.
The final string, in my case, looks like “quiet splash acpi_backlight=native“ - Close and save the file, and run
sudo update-gruband then reboot.
In the event that this doesn’t work, it’d be worth your time to try out the rest of the kernel parameters. You don’t have to modify the grub file every time. Instead you can choose to modify kernel parameters before boot. This you can do by pressing “c” on the grub screen and typing the desired parameter, in the correct place, right after “splash.”
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Under-steer vs Over-steer & Torque vs Horsepower
Under-steer is when you hit the wall with the front of the car.
Over-steer is when you hit the wall with the rear of the car.Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall.
Torque is how far you take the wall with you. -
Hands on with Ubuntu 16.04 “Xenial Xerus”
Being one of those idiots who started downloading the ISO way before the link was even officially added to the download page, I do have a couple of reasons to regret doing so. I was on a slightly messed up 14.04 that appeared to have deteriorated over time, and I had been considering a reinstall, but had been putting it off because I had decided to wait until after the release of Xenial.
So, fast forwarding to when I was done installing it. As per habit, the moment it was installed I fired up a terminal and at the same time opened Firefox.. The first thing I noticed was that the terminal had a green font on the “user@conputer:~$,” and then I ran an apt-get update, which obviously was stupid as it had just been released, and a while before or after it I also noticed that the terminal seemed to insist that I use “apt” _in commands in place of “apt-get.” _I don’t honestly know what inspired this change, but just another minor.
Two changes that we had been hearing about since way before the release were:
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Nostalgia
is a bitch.
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Alexarank.io
On January 3rd, I launched a tool, that’s hosted at; yep, that’s right. You guessed it: alexarank.io. What the tool does, is pretty simple. It tracks the global Alexa ranks for domains, and shows the change over time in a chart. It’s not exactly tracking every damn domain on the web, but nothing prevents it from doing so. Except that someone, and I mean anyone who cares enough, has to submit the domain once, and that very instant, the tool would start tracking the domain.
On December 27th, Amin messaged me and shared his desire for tool that would track changes in Alexa ranks for particular domains. On the slightest effort at googling, we both discovered a shitty tool that offered to do so at some price I didn’t even bother to remember. Alexa itself offers to do that for you, but they too, yep you guessed it, do it for a fee. So I say to Amin, _we need to make a free alternative, _and we immediately start concepting, and after a while we started playing with code. Within the next few days we had a working buggy prototype up, but it was uglier than you could possibly imagine, so we fixed the bugs, and made it look presentable and on the 3rd day of 2016 we registered the domain and it was up.
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After all this time? Always
Alan Rickman, the English actor, well known for playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movie series, passed away at the age of 69 today. They say he had cancer. (
No I don’t know which cancer it was,nor have I got any idea about how long he had had it and how much people knew about it. )
Being one of those that hate Snape during the first 6.7 books, and at the end can’t help but forgive him, and also one of those who have seen Rickman as Snape for so long that they can’t see him as anyone else, _(he did, after all, make a great Snape,) _I feel strangely sad about the news. Still, I don’t plan to write an essay. I’ve said what I had to say.When I’m 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I’ll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, “After all this time?” And I will say, “Always.” – Rickman.
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Remix OS – What Google need’s to ditch Chrome OS for
I could explain here, but I’d rather you simply read The Verge’s post about it.
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Highlight menu link of the current page.
On some websites, regardless of whether or not they are wordpress or even PHP, the menu link for the page you are viewing gets highlighted or it becomes active. _An example could be the 2014 theme for WordPress (
see how, in the nav bar at the top, the link for home is green?) _or css-tricks.com (link for the current page is orange.)In static web pages, there could be more than one ways of doing this, and I’m not even gonna go there. But in dynamic websites, where there could be tons of pages with the same elements loaded, like the nav, the header, e.t.c. you can’t really change the attributes of a certain list item to suit a particular page.
Now the thing is, this isnt exactly rocket science.. Most good WordPress themes have this by default, but thanks to those few that don’t, I know that there’ll always be those who’d ditch a theme they spent ages styling on, simply because they’ll be tempted to use one that has it.The day before I was modifying a theme, and I was almost completely done making it look like I wanted to, when I noticed that the css for :active state on the links didn’t apply. Of course that was stupid, no one really bothers with the active state anyway, they usually just define their own class.. After comparing the theme with another, and failing to find out how a general theme does it, I decided to code it in myself.
CSS-Tricks has this age old tutorial video that shows a way to code it in yourself. Basically the idea is to parse the URL, and get the page request from the permalink. If you played the video, you can see how he got the page’s name and he applied it to the body as an id, and in his css he defined a style for body with ids matching the names of all his pages.
I however would do it slightly differently.. Just like he did, we get the request URL, get rid of slashes and question marsk (if any,) and apply it to a var ready to be echoed. But instead of applying and id to the body, and adding a comma separated “body#pagename” a number of times, we can define css for a particular class, like, for example “.current,” and add a script to the page, which gets the page’s name from the url, and finds the menu item with that name in it’s “title” attribute, and applies the “.current” class to it.
So all you gotta do is add the style for the .current _class to the css file and then add the php from that css-tricks tutorial (_the $page variable,) to the header.php. And then you need to add a small Javascript script, that takes that $page var (don’t underestimate the power of
<?php echo $page; ?>,) and applies the class to the corresponding menu link.As a bonus, I will add below all the code you need to make this work.
<?php $page = $\_SERVER[‘REQUEST\_URI’]; $page = str_replace(“?”,””,$page); $page = str_replace(“/”,””,$page); $page = str_replace(“.php”,””,$page); $page = $page ? $page : “home”; ?>Add this PHP at the very top of the header file.. before _everything, _and then, anywhere below below the nav markup, add this JS script:
<script> nav = document.getElementsByClassName(“nav”)[0]; nav = nav.getElementsByTagName(“a”); for(i=0;i<nav.length;i++){ if(nav[i].getAttribute(“title”).toLowerCase() == “<?php echo strtolower($page);?>”){ nav[i].setAttribute(“class”,”current”); } } </script>You might have noticed that this only works if the container of the nav has a “.nav“ _class to it. Even if it doesn’t that can simply be added, and if there’s a different class name you are inclined to use, then simply use it, or if there’s an id, replace the “_getElementsByClassName” with_ “getElementById.” _But that wasn’t just it. Another prerequisite for it to work is for the _a _tags in the nav to have _title _attributes. So yeah maybe I’m just wasting my time posting this. But _hey! _Whatever works, works.
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The Swagway (and clones) “hoverboards” suck
Am I honestly the only one who thinks that?
Reasons:- They don’t hover.
- They aren’t anything like a hoverboard is supposed to be.
- People call them hoverboards.
- They are slow and impractical. And therefore useless for the average Marty.
- They cost a ridiculous amount.
I understand that the fact, that we don’t have hoverboards even after the BTTF day and its almost 2016, hurts.. Hoverboards are like the thing everyone expected to just somehow arrive with 2015, and then the year started and we were no closer to getting hoverboards then we were to getting an Android-based Apple device. Even then there was a small ray of hope.. that it wasn’t October ’15 yet, and so the world waited, until we were a day from the BTTF day and that was when we knew that we weren’t getting them, but did that mean we had to go for such a bullshit substitute? The “substitute” that doesn’t even remotely come half as close to the hoverboards in the movie as the first maglev based hoverboard.. or the Lexus one, or the Hendo?
Buy them if you want people, but please don’t call them hoverboards.
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Rust is to iron
what mold is to bread
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Currencies
are languages
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Shared Cricket Stadium for Pakistan and India.
A few days back, I was talking to a friend I picked up online, who happens to be an Indian, and as we were discussing some things loosely related to cricket, it hit me.
There’s this whole thing about Pakistan vs India matches. People, adults and teens and kids alike, all gather together some place where the live game is projected on a large screen. There’s something too exciting about this even for those who aren’t into cricket much. There’s this feeling of unity all thanks to this rivalry between the two countries. Note that this rivalry here, that I speak of, is much more of a friendly rivalry, and there’s technically nothing wrong with it, with all those cheeky advertisements and all, it’s all about showing the other country who plays better.
The big idea is that a stadium, funded by both countries, be built, with the consent of the governments of both, where all matches involving Pakistan and India take place
(tough but allow me to add “when possible”), preferably those that the two countries play against each other, and people from both the countries could come and watch them together. -
Using two routers to extend a network – Part 2
The goal: Create two separate networks, each with its own router. Both routers will have different security and SSID, while the WAN settings of A are configured to connect to the internet while B, being a subnetwork of the first, will connect to the internet through it.
Now the thing is that the LAN and WAN IP addresses can not be in the same subnet, so here’s what I did. I changed the subnet of A from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.0.0 .. Also, I changed to IP Adress to 192.168.1.1. That’s all the config you need to do in Router A, assuming it is already configured to connect to the internet.
Now get an Ethernet cable and plug one end of it into any of the LAN ports (some reccomend the first) in A, and the other end into the WAN port of B. Login to it’s portal.. yeah it’s at 192.168.0.1. Though I don’t see why dynamic shouldn’t work, but since it didn’t for me, let’s assume it won’t work for anyone else. Select Static IP in the startup wizard and you’d be greeted by a number of blank input-boxes. Fill them in as follows:
IP Address: 192.168.1.2
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.1
Primary DNS Server: 192.168.1.1
That ought to do the trick. You might want to do a reboot, but that’s not always necessary.
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Using two routers to extend a network – Part 1
Umm, yeah, so let’s get to it. What was the first interpretation? oh that’s right, Router B to act as a wireless access point for A.
So, A has an internet connection and B has to be connected to it via a cable and configured in such a manner that the connected devices automatically connect to either of the two devices with the best signal as you move about, and as B is acting as an access points, all data B receives and sends would of course need to be sent to and received from A. (Pardon me if something I’ve written doesn’t seem correct, I’m merely a noob and explaining in terms your grandma could understand.)
This was actually pretty simple, so I’d just list the steps leaving out the screenshots.
- Get an ethernet cable and insert one end of it into any LAN port on A, and the other end into the first LAN port of B. (actually I’m not sure if it has to be the first port or not.)
- Login to the web interface of B and set the SSID, i.e the name of the network, and the security settings of B to be the same as those of A. e.g. if A is called “narlges” and it’s using WPA, with passphrase “flutterwacken”, then you need to apply the same settings on B.
- Making sure that both A and B are in the same subnet, change the LAN IP adress of B to something other than that of A. So if the IP of A is 192.168.0.1, then you can set B to 192.168.0.X. Basically X can be any number between 0 and 255 except 1 as it is being used by A.
- Disable DHCP on B as it won’t be assigning IP addresses and all.
- Other wireless and radio settings like channel and all need to be the same too
- Reboot both routers?
And basically that’s it.
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Using two routers to extend a network
I have recently been faced with this challenge, partly for learning, as it’s kind of an enthusiast thing and partly because I might actually need to to that in the near future. Since the title might seem a bit vague or ambigous to some, let me first make a bit clear exactly what it is I’m after. How about we start by listing interpretations? (My goal and the whole point of all this can be seen to later.)
Router A= TL-WR841N, and this one’s configured to connect to the internet using PPTP
Router B = Tenda W268R,
- I have two routers, and I want B to act as a wireless access point to extend it’s range.
- I have two routers, and I want B to have a LAN of it’s own, with A as a gateway providing access to the internet.
- I want to do either of the things listed above over a wireless bridge.
Let me say this much. I am a newbie. I’m not much of a networking guy, nor do I really know how this is going to work. I’m simply Google-ing and experimenting.
In the next few posts, I will explain what I have tried and what was the outcome.
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When doing what’s right is wrong
We’re all pirates
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Strength
Is survival
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Obsession
Is dedication
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The miracle is this
The more we share, the more we have. – Leonard Nimoy
Rest In Peace Mr. Spock.
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The perfect distro
Doesn’t exist
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October 21, 2015
We have till then to develop the hover-board, while rumor has it that Nike has already started working on the self-lacing shoes. In which case, I guess, it’s also safe to put off the hover-conversion, I’ve been dreaming of for my car, till then.
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Code-names of Debian’s Releases
Buzz? as in Lightyear?
As if there’s any other Buzz!
Umm, yes. I think there is, but it’s of course too much of a coincidence that every single one of Debian’s releases is code-named after Toy Story characters.
Rex, Bo, Hamm, Slink, they’re all there, not to mention Woody. And guess what? Even Wheezy made it, (though i hope that was after he got his squeaker fixed.) Now to follow is Jessie, but _Damn! _That’s one long wait for Buzz, but on the plus side, she’s almost there.
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Spend a day without X
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Offend
Only to defend.
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LXDE fans be like
“My life sucked, but then I installed LXDE, and now my computer runs faster than me…”
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Discover Microsoft 1994
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The “Linux” of the web-browser ‘industry’
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Bob Wall on Bruce Lee
Speed like a lightweight, hit like a heavyweight.
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Let it Go – Male
This GUY creates a perfect male cover of the song “Let it Go” from the Disney movie Frozen.
Let It Go – Male Vocal Cover by Caleb Hyles – Frozen from Caleb Hyles on Vimeo.
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Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin”
is to Ubuntu, what XP is to Windows.
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Explaining the Debian-family distros like a boss
Debian = Lol
Ubuntu = Lool
SuperOS = Lawl
Ubuntu Ultimate Edition = LulZ
Linux Mint = Lel -
Google Map’s Street View’s “Time-Travel” feature
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Visit Hill Valley 1955 Maybe?
Yes, the town from the Back to The Future movies, it’s being recreated, London, for an upcoming ‘screening’. Available from 24th July – 10th August, being done by some _‘Secret Cinema’ _which is known for constructing such environments.. This is all being done probably as a tribute to the super-hit trilogy, as it’s almost 2015.
Though, our cars are still on the roads, and so are the traffic lights and stuff… There still arent holographic billboards, or fully-functional, publicly-available hover-boards / self-lacing shoes; not yet.
Also the people neither dress like this, nor do they look all that dumb.
They are gonna recreate the whole scene, where the visitors would perhaps be taken through the whole time-travel experience Marty was shown to have undergone, with travels to perhaps both 1985 and ’55. And, at the very end, would be like a recreation of the _“Enchantment Under the Sea.” _The Ball at the end of the first part and part of which is also shown in the 3rd.
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The most amazing idea has hit me,
but first, I need to be the CEO of Microsoft.
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Just Another Screenshot
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Animating Vegeta – The Power of CSS3 and Sprites
Check this out before you read any further.
Some time back, I googled the term _“sprite”, [I tend to forget what it is (not anymore though)], _and in return was presented with a fine number of them, however, my eyes were quick to notice that the very first one of the results featured a few actions of Vegeta, one of the main characters from DragonBall Z. I thought it’d be cool if I tried creating a program, a web-page to be precise where one could animate Vegeta, by merely clicking on buttons.
So well, on May 21, around sunset, i got to work. I googled and checked out a number of sprites until I finally decided on this one.
Though I had initially decided to do it purely using JS, but then it hit me, that CSS3 supports animations so why not use that?
Anyways, as soon as I began, I realized that this sprite is not very well suited to the job and thus I had no choice but to slice it up into several smaller ones, each representing a different move. _I started with the ‘_stance’. _Made a four step sprite which initially was 176×83. And tried animating it. Still the problem that remained was that I couldn’t get it to work like I wanted it to. What was happening was that the Image would just Slide from left to right. After like an hour or two I finally managed to get it right. Turned out that the number of “Steps” I was wasnt well suited to the initial and final positions I had defined in the keyframes. In the end, I managed to get it right. I used 4 steps and set the final keyframes to _‘-widthOfImage.’ _That was it. Now all I had to do was to create sprites for the other _moves.
Next I tried the _“duck-and-punch,” _which too worked like a charm with the existing code. But as I progressed, I realized that the size wasnt well suited to all actions. Some required a broader frame, while some _(initially) _required more than 4 steps, and that was when I somehow messed up the keyframes and wasted another hour fixing them. In the end, I decided to 4 steps where possible, (_I actually ommited some of the images), _and to use a 300×87 canvas, where each frame was 75×87.Tried them all one by one by replacing the url in the code. All worked like a charm. Now I moved on to the ‘_kamehamehaa’(s). _The problem with these was that both the sprites were of 6 steps, so I had put them off for later. However the number of steps didnt make much difference except for the fact that I had to update the number of steps in the CSS , and resize the box everytime.
Now to the UI. What actually happens is that when you click on any of the buttons, it calls out a JS function which replaces the URL of the image with a different one, and thus a new sprite replaces the existing and thus is seen to perform a different action. _Also, the function restores the original _‘stance’ sprite after the animation has completed one cycle.
As for the 6-step Kamehamehaa(s), I wrote a different function and keyframes. Now this function though worked in a similar manner, it would update the animation attribute (keyframes and steps) along with the image, and once completed one cycle, it’d restore the original keyframes and image. That was all.As for the Energy bar, I declared a variable, initially equal to 50. Every Kamehameha decreases it by 10, while the rest increase it by 5. The Bar is updated every time the variable is updated, it’s width being directly proportional to the value of the var.
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Real-life Transformer
A Street Performer, dressed up rather like BumbleBee.. He actually Transforms into a car too…
![[Animation] Street Performer dressed up like Bumble bee Transforms](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--plovF50Y--/ivsr2l6aluyam3b8gbvl.gif)
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Knock Knock
*
Rings a bell*
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In life, you either adapt or perish.
That is Evolution.
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Down for just me or everyone else?
Use isup.me to find out.
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Villains aren’t born
They are made.
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7 minutes well spent
This is how I passed the time when I unexpectedly got disconnected from the internet.
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W: Duplicate sources.list entry [FIXED] [Ubuntu]
Okay, so ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 through the liveCD, i hadn’t once been prompted to update stuff. This seemed unusual to me as I used to get updates every now and then, and then the fact that I hadnt upgraded from 13.04 until right after the LTS was launched and the support for Raring had already been cut off. Also, the fact that I had aborted the installation before the upgrading process had completed.
Still, after a fair amount of days had past, last night i booted it up and ran the sudo apt-get update command. It started fine but then it would get to a part where it would get stuck for several minutes and then would display several occurrences of the same error:
W: Duplicate sources.list entry http://xxxxx.xxx.xxxx xxx/xxx xx(x/x/x/x.x)Pardon the X’s. The former part of the error is what matters. So, the first thing everyone does is a google search, and the best thread I could find on the subject was this one. I tried creating a new sources.list file after backing up the original just like it says there, and tried again. Still got the same error, so I searched again and this time I used slightly different keywords. Landed on a site that suggested checking the “other software” tab in the ‘software and updates‘ settings for duplicates. I checked and found that the “Canonical Partners” entry was recursive. I removed one and tried the old command again. And still, it didn’t make any difference.
Then I tried the “Y PPA Manager.” It actually has a tool that is supposed to search for and remove duplicates. Even that didnt work, so I decided to manually look for duplicates in the file.
The file wasn’t a pretty sight, so the first thing I did was to eradicate all those “comments.” which left me with a fine list of sources. (sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list) Next thing, I looked for duplicates. e.g. if there was a line that said:
deb http://xxx.xxx.xxx xxx xxx main restricted
then there shouldnt be one that says:
deb http://xxx.xxx.xxx xxx xxx restricted
since the former includes both “main” _and “_restricted.”
Since I wasn’t too sure of anything, I merely “commented” the lines that looked suspicious. (All you gotta do is add a “#” at the start of the line.) Once done disabling all possible duplicates, I saved the file and re-ran the update command. This time it worked!
However, later on i noticed that the “Canonical Partners” repo had disappeared from the list present in the “other software” tab. This I then manually added to the sources.list. Just paste the following lines:
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu trusty partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu trusty partner -
Flappy48 – Combining “Flappy Bird” and “2048”
Flappy bird and 2048, two of the best games if the year, in terms of their rate of going viral, though totally different in themselves, have been combined into Flappy48.
The objective is to keep joining the numbers, just like in the game 2048 and eventually reach the 2048 tile, while at the same time, avoiding the obstacles. The obstacles being vertical columns, rather like those green pipes in flappy Bird.
You start off with a two, and as you flap, you collect more numbers, usually 2s… This would go on until you reach the 2048 tile.
The game is based on the unity engine. You can play it online, or download it on your android, though the web version would require you to install the Unity Web Player.
The game seems finely developed. The theme and scheme is similar to that of 2048, with all solid-ly applied shades from yellow-red.
The idea itself is great. At least better than the other pointless clones of flappy bird like flappy doge and shit. At least it brings something new. -
Canonical shutting down UbuntuOne
While installing the essentials and all, my eyes fell on the gnome bar which looked bare, without the UbuntuONE icon, and that’s what reminded me of the cloud. I pressed the super key and typed the name in the dash, intending to configure it, but surprisingly, it didnt return any such App. I therefore, blaming myself for not upgrading properly, decided to install it manually when a thought hit me. That’s when I checked the Ubuntu One twitter account and there it was, in one of the most recent posts, my unasked question answered.
Turns out, that it had been announced sometime around the start of April that by June the services would be shutdown, and the client app would not be included in the upcoming release by default. Reason, there isnt one. All it says on the blog is that their aim for Ubuntu is to provide the world with a bla-bla-bla OS, and that they should be focussing more on that, while the free-storage field is not for them to step in. It was also mentioned that there are services that now provide upto 25GB of free storage, and UbuntuOne would require a bit more investment if it has to compete with such services. Users have until 31 July 31 to backup there data after which it would be permanently shut down.
If you ask me, the cloud was one of the reasons why I preferred Ubuntu. I tried a number of cloud services, no really, quite a number, and I always wanted one that would like always be backing my data up, smoothly, without being much of a bother. U1, though has a crappy web UI is the only one I got comfortable with. SkyDrive, quite frankly sucked back then (though there have been improvements following the release of Windows 8.1 that set it at par with U1), and there’s this peculiar problem with Google’s installers that prevented me from trying the best of Drive. Thus U1, I preferred over all, though it didnt offer the best web-based UI, or a huge amount of storage, or an online office suite, but in what it did offer and what it was supposed to be, it was flawless.. like a charm it worked for me. No, it’s not always the storage amounts that attract consumers, no, it’s user-friendliness that matters more.
I’d rather they don’t shut the service down. It’s one of the things that together with Ubuntu make a great combination.
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Trying my hands on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr”
After upgrading using the LiveCD image since you can’t perform a proper upgrade from 13.04 to 14.04 LTS, and using it for like an hour, and installing all the necessities, I decide to do a blog post on what new the LTS has to offer.
First off, It’s a little disappointing, taking into account all the reviews I read about it’s beta releases being way more stable than all the previous releases, and the stuff they said about it’s performance and then just like they did with the release of 12.10 that coincided with the release of Windows 8, there was stuff about it being a great alternative to XP, the support for which has just been cut. Come to think of it, I even got fooled by the screenshots I saw, that had a completely different UI, and i was like, “Damn! this might perhaps be the best thing to happen to ubuntu since ubuntu.”
So far, the only improvements i’ve noticed is the lock screen, which was previously nothing but a floating ‘dialog box’ but now it’s been made to look just like the login screen. _Okay! _And the language toolbar in the gnome-bar which is more or less similar to the one you get in Windows, and though small, it is an improvement i appreciate. Then of course, there’s some improvement in the lens though they might have been there since the last release, e.g. option to search for messages on social networks right from the dash. Also, now in every guest session, right when you login, it issues a warning stating that all data and files while be lost when you log out, and as far as i remember the previous releases did use to save the files. Oh and I almost forgot to mention the change in the set of default wallpapers. And as for applications, Cheese webcam booth comes preinstalled, and so does an “_ubuntu browser”, _a web browser app, rather similar to IE10’s metro version, with bits in design that suggest that the app was intended for mobile devices, and is perhaps naught but an experimental example of an app designed for touch, still, it works fairly well. As for Ubuntu One, no it’s not included by default as the service is about to be shut down.
Now to performance, until now, far from satisfactory, lags way more than 13.04 ever did, and seriously if one ever asks me which release i was most comfy with, I’d say 13.04. It’s lagging even as I type this post, though this could be due to the fact that this is just the second session since the upgrade.. but well, I dont see much improvement in performance. If there’s some change, it’s probably de-provement (though i might be wrong.) And there’s also this slight change in the File manager. I dont remember the Background as being this much “white” _in 13.04, also, the black gradient of the title bar now stretches down further, covering the navigation buttons and the breadcrumbs bar, i mean, _wow!
On the whole, it doesn’t have much new _“features” _to offer. It may have a boatload of improvements on the back end. I wrote disappointed because, after all the reviews i had read about it (not canonical’s fault though that the people exaggerate) i was expecting a bit too much. Some even posted screenshots with modified UIs that fooled me into believing that it had been given a new look too. There have, yes, been certain improvements obscure from a consumer’s point of view, but the initial lag pissed me off.
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Upgrading from Ubuntu 13.04 to 14.04 LTS
Those of you who didn’t bother to upgrade to 13.10 might be having trouble upgrading to the latest LTS… Yes you can not perform an “upgrade” but the word merely refers to the process where you upgrade using the updater tool just like you would update chrome or any other app while continuing to use the computer generally.
It doesn’t at all mean that if you are willing to save your files and settings, you have to upgrade first to 13.10 and then to 14.04. No.. despite how ridiculous it may sound, some did consider doing so.
All you need to do is download the ISO from the site, burn it onto a drive and boot, just like you would for a clean install. Start the installation process until you reach the part where it’d actually prompt you, and state that a previous version was found on this computer. You’d be presented with a number of options, one of which would be to upgrade from 13.04 to 14.04 LTS while preserving settings and files where possible. -
Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty tahr” finally available for download
Those of you who were taken aback at the sight of the same old website broadcasting 13.10, there’s news for you!
Oh and they worked on the site too.. its more “Mobile-friendly” now. 😉
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The clock is ticking
Only a matter of time, hours more like, before Ubuntu’s next LTS release, 14.04 Trusty Tahr is out..
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Scientists claim that the Quantum theory proves that conciousness is moved to another universe on death?
“.. there’s a multiverse. In one you are married to your wife, in another you are married o another woman, in another you are married to a a man.. ” – Jason Statham, The One
Robert Lanza, who’s been stated as the 3rd most important scientist of the world by the Times magazine is the guy behind, and most directly responsible for this claim..
Though, not everything is to be believed just cause you read it over the internet or just cause some scientists claim that its true… It’s a highly controversial topic and might attract criticism from people of various religions for being in conflict with beliefs.
Plus, the thing itself does sound rather ridiculous too.. -
Facebook acquires skype
For 1.8billion USD.. what are they gonna buy next? The transaction is to be made sometime during the month of May.. exact date hasn’t yet been decided upon …
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Trying out DSLinux
Downloaded the VDI hosted at virtualboxes.org.
Simple to the extent where you find yourself drowning in a variety of options on a confusing UI.
Though the image is packed with a whole lot of tools, (that account for Its size, 200+MBA), installing stuff and customizing it to suit your needs isn’t really as simple as it might seem. Definitely not an option for a General consumer looking for a feather-light distro, and requires a bit of tuning before it can be of much use.. -
A ring-system around an asteroid
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Nocturnal
http://nocturnal-commissions.tumblr.com/
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Eletelephony
Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant—
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone—
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I’ve got it right.)
Howe’er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee—
(I fear I’d better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)
– Laura Elizabeth Richards -
Connect to the Internet via a Network Bridge [Windows]
You’ve got 2 computers at your place. A nice laptop, and a desktop that’s deprived of a wireless adapter. The laptop connects to the internet through the router, to which it wirelessly connects, however the PC has to do without internet since the router’s a bit too far away from the computer for a wired connection.
In such a case, you might wanna consider (or might already have unknowingly) going for a network bridge. The idea is that you connect your computer to the laptop via an ethernet cable, and the laptop to the router (WiFi). So in simple terms, you are connecting to the internet through the laptop which is connected to the internet.
But it’s not as simple as simply plugging in a cable. Some _configurations _have to be made, so here’s what you can do:
Open the “Network and Sharing Center” on your Laptop, and click on the “Change Adapter Settings” link. Select/Highlight both the Wireless and the Ethernet adapter, right-click, and click on “Bridge Connections.”
Now sit back and relax while Windows sets up the bridge and once done, check if another icon appeared among the adapters, representing the “Bridge.” Also, you might wanna check if both the two adapters are part of the Bridge. It’s pretty simple and all you gotta do is see whether or not it says ‘bridged’ next to enabled _on the adapters’ icons. If either of them doesnt, right-click and select “_Add to Bridge.”Before you proceed, on your laptop, fire up CMD, and type in “ipconfig /all”, Note down the values it returns for “IPv4 address”, “Default Gateway”, “Subnet Mask” and “DNS Server.”
Now the Client-side configuration. On the other computer, go to the Ethernet Adapter’s IPv4 properties; check “Use the Following IP address.” Fill in the ‘Subnet Mask’, ‘Default Gateway’, and ‘DNS Server’ _fields with the values you previously copied after running the ipconfig command on your laptop. However, in the IP Address field, add 1 to the last three digits, so that e.g. 168 becomes 169. As for the ‘_Alternate DNS Server’ _field, add 1 to the last digit just like you did for the IP Address. That’s it; check “_Validate Settings upon exit”, _click “_ok”,”_ok”,”_close.” After a few seconds, the other computer would be connected to the internet.
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How to Assign a Static IP to on Windows Computer
A Static IP differs from a Dynamic one in the sense that the latter changes with every router reset, while the former always stays the same.
To change your IP to a dynamic one, follow these steps:
- Fire up CMD, and type in “ipconfig /all”
- Note down the values it returns for “IPv4 address”, “Default Gateway”, “Subnet Mask” and “DNS Server.”
- Open Network and Sharing Center (quickest and simplest way is to right-click the network icon in the system-tray and clicking on the link therein.)
- In the sidebar on the left, click on the ‘change adapter settings’ link.
- Double-click on the icon of whatever adapter you are connecting to the internet through.
- A window would pop-up. Right in the centre of the box, would be a list of items that the connection makes use of. Look for “Internet Protocol Version 4(IPv4)” in the list; select it; click properties.
- Another box would pop-up, but this one’s the last in the row. Now this step is where you make the real changes, but before you change anything, check if the “Use the following IP address” radio button is already checked, and if it is, quit straight away since it’s already static. However if not, then do check it.
- At least three of the previously disabled input fields would now be enabled. Fill the fields with the details you copied from the results to the ipconfig command. The last bit of the IP Address is variable and you can give it any value you wish, however, copying the existing would do the trick too.
That’s it you are done.
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Creating a Counter-Strike Server using Port Forwarding and the dedicated-server application
First off, to create a server, you need additional files. The main executable of them being the “hlds.exe”, and if this one’s present, we must assume that the other prerequisites are present too, (including swds.dll, which is like a patch that allows non-steam clients.) If not present, just search for them, and download them.
Creating a server on a machine is no big deal. All you have to do is run the HLDS, and fill in the slots with whatever you wish, (who am I to limit the max no. of players on your server?) _and I assure you that the slot for _Server Name _can carry anything. However, in the _“UDP Port” _slot, type “27015” since it’s the preferred (actually most-widely-used) port for CS. The Server’s up the moment you click But the thing is that the server’s local. It’s accessible only on your PC and on other computers on the same network, but not globally accessible over the internet. _So how do we make it global?
That’s what we forward the ports for. To do so, login to your router, by typing the router’s IP address into the browser. TP-LINK users may consider this a complete step-by-step guide, though of course this applies to all, however different ones have slightly different UIs.
Anyways, once logged in, go to Forwarding and then to Virtual Servers,_ _and click on . A form should greet you. Now in the Service port slot, type “27015”, (if there’s an “_internal port” _slot, leave it blank.) The rest can be left to the defaults, however in the IP Address Slot, type in your computer’s ipv4 address, and it should be static (unless you are looking forward to having to go through the whole damn procedure again and again.)
After inputting the IP, save the changes and now you are good to go.Now others can connect to your server by typing into their CS consoles:
connect xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:27015
(Replace ‘xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’ with your router’s global IP address. To find out the global IP, the quickest and easiest way is to visit whatsmyip.org.)
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Ubuntu 12.04 Live Mode Login Credentials [Ubuntu]
The username’s “ubuntu“, and password’s blank.
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Sony’s Micro-USB Flash Drive
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The one thing I do when I don’t have anything to do
Nothing..
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Mohammad Ramadan
The guy who noticed a bug In the FB android app and the messenger.
What he noticed was that the pictures were being sent over the http protocol, and not https.
He actually emailed Facebook and they paid him a total of $2000.
Here, his original post -
The chemistry StackExchange
Has a breaking bad section..
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I hate it
When you don’t forward a text message to 10 people, and die the next day..
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Koding
A cloud-development platform for developers, where with every free sign-up, you get a virtual-machine, complete with root access, 2GB RAM and 1.2GB storage. You can view, manage and create files right in the browser. It even has a terminal emulator which too runs in the browser.
The VM is sort of pre-configured with NodeJS, PHP, Apache, MySQL e.t.c. and you can always install whatever packages you need. You can import personal projects from your disk, into the cloud, and you can also create new ones, using a few presets for a start. The _presets _here refers to _Bootstrap, AngularJS, WordPress _e.t.c. So the idea is that it would just create all the necessary files, and prevent you with like a template that you are free to edit to suit your needs.
The development-UI is fine too. You can edit code right in the browser, and view it in a browser app running inside the browser, rather like on W3schools.
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Lenovo’s All-in-one android PC
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The compass can point true north
But tells naught about the swamps and bushes and other obstacles that lie in the path. So what’s the point of knowing true North?
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SkyDrive to become OneDrive
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ChromeOS ported to Windows 8
Got the update?
Yes this is the latest version of Google Chrome running in Metro on Windows 8.1 preview. It’s like the whole of ChromeOS is being simulated in an app, (and that is the whole idea behind it.)
Strange yet smart move; let’s see if either this or the launchers can get people to use and actually get comfortable with the Chrome Apps environment..
#SkyNet… -
LXQt: Qt port of LXDE
LXQt, the “next-gen”, upcoming desktop environment, is the product of the combined efforts of the LXDE and the Razor-Qt teams. The output is, in terms of visuals rather similar to KDE, so those who enjoy KDE but find it _highly-resource-consuming, _LXQt might be just the thing for them. Since I never liked KDE much, I might not like this one at all.
LXQt is to become the default environment in the upcoming releases of Lubuntu which is probably for the best since as much as I like LXDE, it’s too simple for a general consumer to find normal. A simple example could be the trouble they’d have to simply getting the Battery Indicator to work for them (It refreshes slow and all. ) I know it was a lame example but its one of the things that piss me off whenever I use LXDE.
Plus the JetBrains’ tools dont work on any environment other than GNOME or KDE, but they might on this one… -
The shortest distance between two points
Will always be a straight line
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Android being ported to cars?
It does say so here..
Way to go SkyNet! -
The Yahoo Notepad gets the new look
Yahoo Notepad, one of my personal favorites of such apps on the web, has recently been altered in terms of UI, and the new look, no doubt, and improvement, at least in terms of readability, greatly resembles or happens to be identical to yMail’s new theme. Also, there’s a change in the terminology (_slight) _and perhaps a feature or two has been introduced.What used to be folders, are now called “notebooks”, _and also, they’ve added a search bar, rather similar to the one they have on ymail. Only this one offers to actually search through all the notes. Other than that, the new UI is way more user-friendly than the older one. Creating, Modifying/saving, deleting notes and notebooks, every single one of these tasks were like slow and taxing in terms of UI back in the old interface. e.g. to rename or move or delete a folder or note you actually had to navigate to that one and then select stuff from menus e.t.c. but now, it has evolved to a slightly ‘_straight-forward’ _sort of UI, and yet _sleeker. _To create a new notebook, you simply have to type a name in the input box that says “_create new notebook” , and press enter. To rename or delete notebooks, they’ve added a right-click context menu. Just move your cursor over to the notebook and right-click.
Another minor improvement is that whenever you are switching from one note to another and have made unsaved changes, it’s gonna prompt you and ask whether or not you are willing to save your work. Good, cause in the previous one, you can keep on switching from one note to another without realizing that all his work was being lost. A warning like this would do.
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We are who we are
Not what we were…
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VWX
The W was developed for the V and is the precursor to X
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Stephen Hawking on Time-Travel
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Printing 2014 using a JS code free from numerals [Explanation]
Came across this thread on stack exchange. The challenge was to write a code, using whatever language you want, that would print the number 2014 to the console, without using a single numeral in the code. The person to post the code with the least number of characters wins.
After scrolling a whole lot over a number of Befunge codes and all, I came across a JS code, where the guy had said “Using pure-Math only..”, _and he’d posted two codes, one used some type-conversion while the _older version was like in plain JS. This:
m=Math;p=m.pow;t=true;++t+m.floor(p(m.exp(m.PI),t))*t*t++-p(++t,t--)/--tSince the guy had written that the code was pure-math, I decided to give it a closer look.
As I was going to try it out, I opened another tab, and in the console, I pasted his code. It did really print out 2014, but how? It’s been ages since I even printed my own name in JS, so figuring out the code took me quite a while.
In the address bar i typed “data:text/html, <html contenteditable>” to make it editable, as i wanted to make notes while trying shit in the console.So, the first thing I did was add a little whitespace to the code and make it slightly more presentable.The code is basically 4 lines, should i say? Notice the three semicolons? yes, they ensure that the code wont screw up if you give a line break right after the semicolon.
The first bit is “m=Math”. This the guy did simply to save space and perhaps for his own ease. Math.function() is the syntax for performing and implementing in your code various mathematical functions, rather like the Math module in Python. Followed by “p=m.pow”, and “t=true.” m.pow is his code’s version of Math.pow(x,y), which sets the index of parameter x to y, so Math.pow(2,3) would be equal to 2³. This too was merely to save space. The t = true could be confusing for some. That’s when JSs automatic type-conversion comes in handy, (True = 1; 0 = False). So “t-true” sets “t=1.”Now the main expression:
++t+m.floor(p(m.exp(m.PI),t))*t*t++-p(++t,t--)/--tThe ++t sets the variable t= t+1. I’ts the same as t += 1 in Python. You might have noticed that the code also contains “t++“, so what’s the difference between the two?
t++ _increases ‘t’ by 1, but does not implement therein. Means if the code is _t=3; t++*3; _The first bit set’s ‘t’ equal to 3, and in the second, t is multiplied by 3 while at the same time increased by one. ++t is slightly different. It increases and implements right then. So _++t*3 would result in 9 not 6.
Then the m.floor function is used to round off a number to the last integer. So 5.9 would become 5. Math.exp(a) results in 10ª, while Math.PI is a constant, which of course is equal to 3.141592653589793.That’s pretty much all the functions explained. After starting with the very _deepest _bracket, and working my way out to the end, I ended up with the following expression that’s equal to ‘2014’, and is like a simplified version of the original code. this:
2+(1070*2-Math.pow(4,4)/2).To see how I got there, here’s a copy of the page on which I was making all the notes.
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FreeBSD install fails on VirtualBox [FIXED]
A known issue, faced by many, who at first usually blame themselves or the installation image, is that the installation process sort of ends of its own accord when extracting the archives, and after a reboot, it displays an error, the nature of which suggests that it failed to find files to boot.
Anyways, try enabling IO APIC from the system settings page. Might do the trick. -
Your age on other planets
How old would you be if you were living on another planet?
Click here to find out. -
Gates to Jobs when accused of theft
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
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GIT CheatSheet
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Clink
I was browsing through dribbble (I dont really do that very often), when I came across this. Since the animation wasn’t really running well, I moved on to reading the description (response by the designer himself to be precise), at the bottom of which was a link to the _“full-video.” _I followed, but after watching only part of it, I again moved on to the description, and followed the link therin, and that’s when i fully understood what it all was about.
Clink is actually an app, that allows you to have _drinks _together, while not being together at all. Here’s an example, it’s your birthday, and you want to treat your friends to a drink. You’d open the app and send a _clink _to some bar (bars have to create clink accounts), that acts as a token, carrying details of whatever drink you are offering your friend, and of course you have to pay right-then too, using PayPal.
Though I myself might never use it, I do really appreciate the developers for their effort. The idea or concept behind the project isn’t bad either, and especially, nowadays when the birthday-guy has to treat the wishers (or they’d force him into doing so; no escape), this might come in handy..
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Well said..
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” — George Bernard Shaw
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GNU
GNU’s not Unix!
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10 “Must-have” Android apps for general consumers
Title says it all, and here they are:
- Lightning Launcher: First things first. Not many android users, especially those dealing with the older versions of HTC sense are content with the default UI. Common replacements are the GO Launcher, and Apex. But the thing with these two is that they can take up a nice amount of memory, especially GO launcher. On phones with high-specs, this may go un-noticed, but even on Dual-cores, the GO Launcher can cause a visible lag. To avoid this, for users that want naught but productivity, Lightning Launcher is a great option. It’s damn light, (at times it may take not more than just 2MB!) It’s extremely simple yet very customizeable, and once you get the hang of it, you can adjust it exactly to suit your requirements, but on the minus side, setting up, and getting used to it can be taxing and time consuming. In my opinion, lightning l_auncher is to android what lxde is to ubuntu. _For those who prefer a more user-friendly, and _slightly-less-bland, yet damn-light _UI, they can go for Smart Launcher.
- Smart Launcher: In terms of weight, this ones my second favorite, and currently my primary launcher application. Smart Launcher is, in terms of design, a bit different. The home screen is more like a lock-screen sort of design, the top half of which can be dedicated to a widget (it features a clock by default), and the lower part can hold a virtually unlimited amount of icons dedicated to applications and shortcuts. Swiping from the edge, or pressing the menu button, or touching the menu icon, all would take you to the App Drawer, where the apps are all sorted into categories (and you are free to move them from one categ. to another.) That’s pretty much it. It’s pretty much customizeable too. You can alter the home-screen icons to a number of presets, and you can also apply themes and icon-packs.
- Aptoide: Aptoide is a store-of-stores. Especially on Devices that don’t support the Play-Store, Aptiode comes real handy. It’s like a portal where people can create their own stores and upload applications, but that was the developer side. For general consumers, aptoide works great for searching for and installing applications not available on the playstore, or those that aren’t really free. Just try once, and you’d know. It has to be manually downloaded and installed. Available for Download at aptoide.com
- Astro and ES File Explorer: Rivals, and since i never explored the former much, I cannot say which one’s better but in terms of personal preference, ES is. ES is user-friendly and simply packed with features. And has a clean user-friendly interface. You can use it to access files over FTP, Bluetooth, LAN, and of course you can add your SKydrive, U1, and other cloud accounts. Has an inbuilt App Manager, Download Manager and other usuals. However, the one thing it doesnt have and Astro does is a cool, proper Task Manager. It is however available as an independent app called the ES Task Manager, but I never liked it much. Astro also offers integration for your Facebook account, but it’s the interface of Astro which I just couldn’t get myself to like. Nevertheless I keep both.
- Kingsoft Office: Documents to Go, and Office Suite Pro aren’t exactly free, and buying such stuff for mobile devices might not exactly be a very cost effective solution for users who don’t really need to use these apps much, and to be honest, i never ever used the full version of either. Kingsoft office offers a Writer, a presentation tool, and a spreadsheet, and that is pretty much all one might need on a mobile device. Not really low on formatting features either, so for a general user, Kingsoft Office won’t be a bad choice. It’s pretty user friendly too.
- Inkpad Notepad: A simpler alternative to Evernote. Inkpad notepad is a plain notepad, which kinda resembles the iOS notes app in terms of design. All your notes are synced to inkpadnotepad.com. Free version only allows upto four syncs per day, and this could be irritating for some users, and especially when it keeps on notifying you with every sync. Still for a general user, not a bad choice, since Evernote can take some time getting used to.
- Myscript Calculator: Is a fun, and useful application which allows you to write mathematical expressions as you would on paper, and solves them. Does support all the functions your default calculator app does, and only provides an easier way to interact and avoid confusion.
- Clean Master and All-In-One-Toolbox: Both are great Optimizers. Clean Master offers an easy to use interface, while the latter might offer an extra tool or two. Both have a one-touch-memory-boost button, and both offer widgets for the home-screen. A bonus feature of Clean-master’s is that it adds a button to your default launchers homescreen after the first boost. Both offer junk, history and AppData cleaners, and App Managers. All-in-one-toolbox however offers a number of features that clean-master doesnt, like an inbuilt file-manager, Cache Cleaner, Apk managers, startup apps e.t.c.
- PicsArt: The best photo-editor available for Android. Has everything one might need, but the feature that I really like is the Draw mode, which sort of is a mini version of PS running in your mobile complete with support for Layers.
- Offline English Dictionary by Livio: The best Dictionary app available for Android. The definitions are from Wiktionary, but this one works offline.
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MB vs Mb vs Mibit vs MiB
First of, the ‘b’ stands for bit, _while the B stands for _byte. _So MB stands for _megabyte, _and Mb stands for _megabit. _The _Mi, Ki, Gi prefixes are binary prefixes. The difference between Mb and Mibit is that MB represents 1000² bits, while Mibit represents 1024² bits. Same goes for Kb and Kibit.
So if it says 2MB, then its 2 * 1000² * 8 bits, and when it says 2Mb, then its 2 * 1000² bits.
When it’s 2Mibit, then it’s 2 * 1024² bits, and when it’s 2MiB it’s 2 * 1024² * 8 bits. -
Proof that Linux IS UNIX
Try creating a new account via terminal on Ubuntu and see what it prompts you with…
“Enter new UNIX Password”
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Creating User Accounts via terminal [Ubuntu]
First off, simply fire up a terminal, and then for root access, type:
sudo su
It’d prompt you for the password, type it in.
Once you gain root access, type:
adduser username
It’d ask you to _enter new UNIX password. _type one, and retype when it asks you to
That’s it. Now it would prompt you for a few more details regarding the new user, but they arent important, just press enter, and soon, it’d prompt you to confirm if the information is correct. Type y and enter. That’s it. Your new user account is up and running. To delete it via terminal, type the following command when root:
deluser username
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Google to be the “real-life version” of SkyNet?
Google, that started as a search engine that gained global popularity, and parallel to searching, the only thing it offered was a home page light-enough for you to test your internet connection, but that doesn’t at all mean that it wasn’t awesome enough them. A whole lot of people owe their success to it, as it helped numerous youngsters with their homework and school projects, and thus if they are successful now, Google might have contributed a whole lot into their success. According to it’s wiki article, Google started in 1998, but it has now come a long way from being just a search engine.
Then came other products. Gmail, in 2007 or 8, (and something by the name of Google Wave followed too , but it wasnt very successful,) which soon became a _rival _to Hotmail and YMail. Well, OK, Hotmail isn’t the _primary thing _of Microsoft’s. MS was the first software company, it brought computers to the world to be consumed by normal people and we respect that. Who cares if Bing never got as popular as Google, MS isnt all about search engines either. As for Yahoo, Okay, Google beat their search engine, but loyal ymail lovers still like it, and well their _messenger _is still respected more than Google’s talk.
Ah yes, Google Talk eh? Well, this one, a messenger would fall in the same category as Windows Live messenger and Yahoo’s messenger, however, once again, Not very successful. Earlier this year, It was renamed to Hangouts, and perhaps a few newer features were introduced, like using phone numbers to find friends e.t.c. The kind of thing Viber and WhatsApp are famous for, but still, consumers like me prefer sticking to the older, and _original _ones, i.e. the two mentioned above.
Then there’s the Google Drive. Cloud storage, and rival to Microsoft’s Skydrive. I like and respect both, and both have their pros and cons and in my opinion, both are _equal _on the whole, plus again, MS isn’t famous for being a provider of cloud storage. Google Docs, an online office productivity suite, the MS counterpart for which is the Office online. Both are great.
Then there’s Google+, a Social network by google, that perhaps isnt very popular as Facebook and twitter, yet the 3rd in terms of preferrence. This can be proved by the fact that most websites, for contact, or _upvotes/reccommendation _provide three buttons. One from Twitter, one from Facebook, and another from Google+. But still, not exactly on the top eh? Another is Picasa, which is a photosharing cloud-storage, and perhaps might be considered a rival to Yahoo’s Flickr. However, from what I know,Flickr is more popular.
Youtube, the primary place on the web to look for Videos too is owned by Google, though perhaps not started by them, but it’s improving a whole lot, and one cant say that Google didnt contribute to it.
AngularJS, a Javascript Library and framework, Google’s, and rivals a number of others that fall in the similar category and is certainly gaining popularity and quite some fan base in the world of developers. The Google App engine provides free hosting for web apps, rather like Heroku. And that’s not all, The Google Apps are a set of productivity tools, for businesses and individuals, that help with setting up and managing websites. Then the Google Developer tools are good and the Google Analytics Tools help a lot with SEO, and keeping track of site traffic. Oh and Blogger is a great place for _normal(s) _to start a blog.
Google Maps, rival to iPhone’s maps, and the primary GPS service of most users nowadays, and it’s streetview is known to have captured some seriously interesting stuff. Google Earth is a similar product but it provides an interactive, fun interface where you can explore the earth. Similar products are Google Mars, Google Moon, and Google Sky.
But that’s not all, these products dont even contribute to perhaps half of Google’s fame. There’s more. In 2008, Google launched Android. A Linux based, free and open-source Operating system for Mobile devices, and the first ever android device to apppear in the market was the HTC Dream. Android gained popularity real quick, and especially with the release of the Galaxy Y and other Galaxy devices, it soon got _‘fan-ned’ _by a large percentage of the world, and became a rival to iOS. Android devices are manufactured by the leading company of the present, Samsung, Sony, and HTC, and of course, Google’s own Nexus devices, one of which is launched every year. Could Android kick iOS out of the market? maybe if they play well, as they are in a position to.
The same year, they’d lauched Google Chrome. The top web-browser of the present, that soon became another alternative to internet explorer alongside Mozilla’s Firefox. Well, Internet Explorer’s had it’s day, still respected.
As Chrome got popular and computing moved closer to the cloud, Google seized the chance and launched Chrome OS. Another Linux Based OS, damn lightweight, and this time for slightly more desktop devices. The idea behind Chrome OS was something like this. Every day, millions of users boot into their computers, and once it’s fully loaded, the double-click the icon of their web-browser and start off with whatever they want to do, but dont really do much outside the browser, so they are more or less logging into their OS just to be able to use the browser, so what if your browser was your OS?
Chrome OS’s source code is publicly available, however, it isnt available for download and comes preinstalled in Chromebooks, that are laptops officially built for the OS.A few days back, Google announced the release of a Chrome Apps launcher for MacOSX. The Chrome Apps were originally a feature offered by the browser. More like extensions perhaps, but slightly more ‘applications’. They are also well integrated into the Chrome OS of course and are the main _software _for Chrome-OS. The thing about them is that they are totally on the web, they dont have to be installed. All you need is a _launcher, _which could be either the launcher itself, or the ChromeOS (which has a similar launcher of course) or the chrome web browser.
But they released the launchers for MacOSX and Windows? And I also read that apps are being made for Android and iOS too, however i couldnt find an Android app on the playStore… not yet.So, as these launchers are out, a number of people might try these, and some, with high speed connections and normal use, might get too comfortable with their apps, that they are gonna try out when they try the launcher, and when they do, the apps would get popular and some users’ use might not extend beyond using these apps, and this is how some might consider switching to Chrome OS itself.. + chromebooks are real cheap and thus attract buyers.
Android is becoming like the primary OS for smartphones, and soon their might come a time, when, like I posted before, they might merge the two projects.
Merging would result in a whole lot of improvements in ChromeOS, and then people might actually start using it, if it has the integration _that i look forward to seeing, _and using.Just look how Google is expanding. Started as a search engine and now its the leading company of the web, and with the passage of time, It’s trying on every field or bit there is to IT. Then that Google glass. They can actually monitor, and see exactly what you are doing using that thing. People use gmail as their primary email, Drive to store data, buy domains and hosting from google, walk with a pair of spec on their noses that too was developed by google and records what they see.
It’s like WE the CONSUMERS are being CONSUMED by technology, when it should be the other way round. If anything close to Skynet exists or ever will.. It’s Google.
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Entrepreunership is hard, but you cant die
A LinkedIn Article that I read. It’s a bit long but do read it…
Not really sure if the ‘phrase’ but you cant die is supposed to mean that you “shouldnt give up”, or that “despite how hard it might seem, entrepreneurship doesn’t ever kill you.”
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Chrome Apps launched for Mac
This Wednesday Google launched a Mac version of the Chrome Apps launcher.
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Ah.. just merge the two…
Rather than just making the chrome apps run on iOS and android..
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11.12.13
The date today…. But only a matter of time before its 12^2.13 😀
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My first website
Not much of one. More like the very first attempt where I simply Googled something like “create a free website”, and ended up on Jigsy, which was then called ‘Viviti.’
Here, it carries naught but my name. Blame the power outage, for I was intending to add a whole lot of flash content.
I did build on it a lot afterwards but offline.. -
Volatile and Non-Volatile
RAM is volatile, while ROM is not..
Is that too hard to remember? -
I do kinda “miss” the old-classic form of storage
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JQuery Mobile
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Don’t worry about what the people think of you
They don’t think very often.
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Selena Gomez, irritated, curses and gets off the stage
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The Cyborg R.A.T 9 Gaming mouse.
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Why are pointers used in C++?
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Lunar Laser Ranging experiment
They actually shot lasers at the moon, to measure the distance between the earth and the moon, which were reflected elsewhere by the retroreflecters planted earlier, during the Apollo 11 Program?
Well, maybe it wasn’t a hoax as they say, but where exactly did they reflect the lasers to? Hopefully, not on some other part of the earth but somewhere in mere space.
Here, take a look at the Wikipedia article. -
Quora’s down
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Google Nose
Ages ago, many of us noticed the addition of a strangely catching tab on Googles pages. Some ignored, with the presumption that it’s another new product by Google, while some investigated.
The idea, as it said on the Google Nose’s home page was that users could actually sniff __stuff they search for. An example they themselves gave in a screenshot was “wet dog.” As you click on the Nose button, it’d instruct you to bring your nose close to the screen and sniff, and when you do, the screen would go all frosty at places, but you won’t even get a whiff of what a wet dog is supposed to smell like, cause the whole Google Nose thing was nothing but an April fool joke! -
There’s always time
And you can always waste it.
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The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time? Bertrand Russel or John Lennon?
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What I’d love to see happen
Chromium OS, and Android, both are light-weight, open-source OSs developed by Google, improving and getting popular, _gradually, _over time.
I think it’s only a matter of time before Google adds features for fully integrating one into other and soon, eradicating either of the two names and merging the two projects, into a single one, an OS available for both desktop and mobile devices.
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Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions – Slashdot
Bitcoin, the online currency, P2P money, which was first introduced in the year 2009, and the idea behind it was to introduce a currency, unniversal, for e-commerce, perhaps the first of it’s kind. Users create account and get _wallets, _where they store their money, and some form of these wallets can also be downloaded to your computer and mobile devices.
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Chromecast
Came across the term for the first time when I was checking out stuff on the play Store. It’s another project by Google, which in itself is naught but like a USB flash drive, but there’s more to it.
The Chromecast enables you to enjoy media content on your HDTV. Means if for example you come across a YouTube Video, while checking out your Facebook feeds, all you have to do is look for and press the chromecast button. It would prompt you with a list of available devices, selecting any of which would play the content on whatever device you chose. To do so, what you are gonna need is true chromecast USB device of course which has to be plugged into the TV.Here, a link to the official video:
The Chromecast -
Student turns old turntables into drawing machine
Here Take a Look, Guy’s a genius.
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The page RIP Paul Walker gains 1.5m likes in like a day
99% of the posts in our news-feed seem so say naught but stuff like “RIP Paul Walker.” Walker, an actor best known for his role as Connor O’Brien, in the Fast and the Furious movie series, died yesterday in a car crash.
Someone, no idea who, created this page on Facebook, with the name RIP Paul Walker, that has about 1.5m likes right now, and from the look of it.. it does look a day old.. Guy did seriously have quite some fan base..
EDIT( On request of Amin Eftegarie): Here's a Link to the page in Question
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Tofu
Tofu, @tofu_product, is a Twitter account, that seems to have a thing for confusing tweets, and following General public.
Actually, it is supposed to be a bot. The moment you follow him, he’d follow you back, and he’d go through your tweets, make something out of them, and tweet it to you.. sounds stupid eh? But that’s more or less like what happens. A Tofu tweet normally doesnt make much sense.
Do give it a try, find him on Twitter and follow him. He’d follow you back instantly. Wait for another few minutes and he is bound to tweet something to you.. -
The not-too-light lightweight distro
I used to think the Lubuntu was capable of running on any machine available, until I read on some blog a post where a guy was hoping to find a nice damn-light distro for his Toshiba Satellite 300CDT, that had only 4GB storage and 48mb of RAM..
Well, guy could do with slax, as the minimum memory requirements for the 32bit version inn text mode happen to be exactly 48mb… -
Camera-free iPhones
The Singapore ministry of defense actually asked the M1 operator for camera-free iPhone devices.
Reason: This allowed the “military” to use the smartphone in areas where cameras are strictly forbidden in those areas for security reasons..
http://asia.cnet.com/hands-on-apple-iphone-4s-without-camera-62213320.htm
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Running StartX in Ubuntu screws up “login” [FIXED]
Two days back, I out of curiosity, fired up a terminal and typed in startx, with the hope that the UI would be reduced to naught but the _original form _of the X. At first it displayed an error, saying that i’m not permitted to. But then I tried again, and this time with a ‘sudo.’ The moment I _entered _my password, the screen went all dark, but only for a second, after which I was left with naught but a blank desktop, free from menus. Sensing failure, I opened another terminal and wrote ‘unity.’ Something similar happened, but this time, the title bar of the terminal kinda got stuck to the top of the screen. I tried the same command again, and this time, I was brought back to where i started. The terminal in which i had typed the startx command was still there, however i failed to notice that the user logged into it wasn’t my primary user account but root. I didn’t really notice anything unusual, except that the _settings _dropdown, present in the top-right, in the gnome bar, wasn’t showing up the options it ought to, so I restarted the computer by simply pressing the power button.
After the reboot, whenever I’d attempt a login, I’d be greeted by a dark screen, and after like a fraction of second, I’d be back on the Login Page. But the guest account seemed to work fine, so I logged into it and created another Administrator account, and on that one, I tried recreating the problem and was successful. _Okay, _now we might get somewhere…
Now what I did, that fixed the problem, was this:
I logged into the account, i.e the first one where i screwed everything up, via the tty1 terminal (Ctrl + Alt + F1), and ran the following commands:sudo rm /home/anas/.Xauthority* sudo apt-get install --reinstall xorg --fix-missing
The first one deletes the file, while the second re-installs Xorg. After this, I was able to login to the account again.
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Neat!
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HTML5 DrumBox
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The Facebook messenger [mobile] gets a new look
Yesterday, when going through a list of updates that had to be installed, I noticed that the icon of the messenger had changed into a round-er, and light colored one, rather like the new icons in iOS7, this:
The icon’s what forced me into upgrading; _had to _try as it was bound to come with a number of new features and not just a change of icon. Well, I installed it, and ran it.
I was welcom-ed by a screen, all white (they dropped the light-blue background), which asked me if I was indeed ‘Anas Ismail Khan.’ As I proceeded, I was asked to confirm my number, which would ensure that people find me using my number, regardless _of whether or not I’m part of the friendlist, but, this is optional. The reason behind it, I guess, is that they are moving towards making it into an independent messenger, which combines the best of both Kik and whatsapp. It’s similar to whatsapp in the sense that just having your number might do the trick, however the _friendlist of course is still there, and thus the contacts list would consist of both your phone’s contacts and your Facebook Friends. However, due to privacy settings perhaps, usernames dont always work either, and just like the number _thing _this might be optional as well.
They also eradicated the ‘__sms integration’ feature. You can no longer use this app as your primary messaging app, though the changelog might say something similar.
A strange _con _of the app happens to be the fact that there is no _‘log out’ _option. On androids, clearing the app data does the trick though..
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500$ Aventador
Now this guy, Taras Lesko, who’s known to have previously built a 7-foot high Gundam, is now making an Aventador worth no more than $500, out of.. what shall i say? paper?
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Wordo – The Only Truly Free Dictionary on the Web
I am a student, and every now and then I come across a term too complex for me to understand, (or perhaps not too complex but alien,) and thus I have to Google things a lot, and half the time its such terms. The results would of course direct me to some other site, and some of them would have stupid lag-gy popups, while others with flashy ads or too Bland an interface.
Wordo is free from all this. The interface is really clean and only that which is required is on the page. No ads, no popups, no surveys nothing to distract you, instead a huge mature font to provide maximum readability. Apart from that, the simplicity of the interface also ensures minimum lag.
To sum it all up in a single sentence, Wordo is a _true _dictionary, on which, the user’s activity does not extend beyond anything that he isn’t willing to do. Give it a try and you’d know…
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Window Managers vs Windowing Systems(Display Server) vs Desktop Environments
If you happen to be a Linux user, you might, at the very least be familiar with the Desktop environments: GNOME, KDE, LXDE or XFCE. _Also, _you might have come across the names _OpenBox, X Window System _and _Window Maker, _and perhaps an implementation of more than one of these _together, _e.g. ‘Gnome/OpenBOX.’
Now the Question is, If they are all UIs, what exactly is the difference? And how can they all be working together at the same time? Because despite how similar they seem, each serves a totally different purpose.
To explain this, I’d take the example of layers. Imagine a stack of, let’s say, papers. The _Stack _represents a GUI Linux OS, and every individual sheet of paper represents a different component. Now assuming that the bottom section is dedicated to the GUI Components, the layer at the very bottom of this section would represent the X-Window System. It like forms the _base _of the GUI, and displays the information in a graphical way. Above the X, is a Window Manager, i.e. _assuming, _OpenBox. This Window Manager, as it’s name states, helps you _manage _them open windows. Menus, Taskbars, managing the look and feel, e.t.c. could be examples of what it might offer. Now a Window System, the X, may offer some of the functionality of a Window Manager, but still, they are two different things. In Simple words, a Window manager only enhances the Windows System.
Now the Desktop Environments are a bundle of Applications and tools, with their own UI, and built on some Window Manager, that provide the user with the essentials like a File Manager, Text editor, Browser, e.t.c.
Now to sum it all up, take the example of UbuntuGnome. The Ubuntu Gnome uses the X Windows System as the display server, but on top of it is the Openbox, and the Desktop environment is Gnome, which comes with its own set of Applications like the Nautilus File Manager, Gedit(text-editor), Rhythmbox Music Player, e.t.c.
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Microsoft Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2
Couple of days back, Microsoft announced the ‘coming’ of the new Microsoft Surface 2 and the Surface Pro 2; the former being the successor to Surface RT, while the latter of course succeeds the Surface Pro.
So, what else did Microsoft say about the two? and what new features do they pack?
First off, to the new and similar ‘features’. Both of them now come with a, what they call, “dual-angle Kickstand” , that can be adjusted to meet your requirements, so called improvements in battery life, ‘faster’ ‘than ever before,’ HD Screens, and support for USB 3.0. With both, you get about 200GB on SkyDrive free for 2 years, along with an year of ‘unlimited free voice calling to landlines in over 60 countries’, and ‘free Skype Wi-Fi at over 2 million hotspots worldwide.’Now to the DIfferences.
The Surface 2 comes pre-installed with Windows RT, and touch optimized Office RT, to which, the addition of Outlook has been made. Battery life of about 10 hours, and the NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor ensure that you work ‘faster’ and ‘longer’ 😛The Pro 2 would come with Windows 8.1, packs an Intel Core i5 Processor, and about 512GB of Storage. They also say _that they’ve _‘taken advantage of the latest processor technology to provide longer battery life on a single charge.’ _Apart from that, it has its own stylus i.e. the _Pro Pen, and a ‘ brilliant 1080p widescreen display.’
Accessories include a Docking Station, Wireless adapter for type-covers, the touch/type-covers of course, and the Surface Music Kit (similar to the covers), an Arc Touch Mouse, and a car charger.
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Cloud Services – Quick Reviews
With the passage of time, as ‘everything is moving to the cloud’ (pardon my _excessive _use of this quote, but it does really sum things up), the use of cloud storage is becoming common, and there are dozens of such services on the cloud each with its own uniquity, now the questions that arise are, “which one of them is the best?” “which one should i go for?” “can we really trust them with our data?” e.t.c. So, in this post, I’m going to talk a bit about the most popular (or at least the ones i prefer) cloud services on the web.
Microsoft’s Skydrive(formerly Windows Live Folders): Microsoft’s own cloud, that offers about 7GB of free storage. Apps are available for Windows, MacOSX and Mobile Devices i.e. Android and iOS. These apps are well integrated once you fully install them and do offer a Sync feature, but the best thing about SkyDrive is that it serves well as both: “_access-through-browser__” _service and when installed, it can sync files between your PC and SkyDrive very well too. The Web Interface is what most people love about Skydrive, and you can also create and to some extent, edit documents e.t.c. It has this own great photo viewer, e.t.c. So on the whole, Skydrive isn’t too bad.
Google Drive: Taking into account the factors stated in the description of skydrive, Google Drive is perhaps the only other such service that’s in any way close to Skydrive. Google however offers 15GB, and, the photos and documents don’t take up storage space on the google drive, so it doesn’t really matter, and in fact, the later feature is good. About the Document thing, they can be created through Google Docs. Interface is good and clean and it too offers applications so that you can sync between PC and Drive.
Ubuntu One: Ubuntu One, my favorite, unlike the above two, has apps for all three platforms, offers 5GB of Storage and has an awesome Sync. Despite how lame the phrase ‘awesome Sync’ sounds, i really mean it. I never really could ever make efficient use of cloud services until i tried Ubuntu One. Google Drive can be troublesome when installing and Skydrive’s Sync features were kinda limited to special folders back then, and neither offered the speed and everything that Ubuntu One did. It merely flows, but the major drawback about it is that the Web interface doesn’t really go beyond listing the files and offering a few basic features like ‘delete’ and ‘download.’ And you might find that it doesn’t run as smooth on Windows as it does on Ubuntu itself, but then that’s what it was made for.
Bitcasa: Bitcasa offers about 10GB of free storage, and has a nice and clean interface. It too offers applications for Windows, Mac, and phones, but my usage of Bitcasa never went beyond creating and account and installing its chrome extension. I never really tried its apps so i cant say much about it. However I created the account in order to use it like a DropBox, where i can throw files when i have to. However what I liked about BitCasa was it’s Chrome Extension that allowed you to directly download stuff to your bitcasa drive, and thus beside ever download button is a ‘download to bitcasa’ button.
Flickr: Flickr is a photosharing website, backed by Yahoo, which, according to what it says on its home, offers about 1TB of free storage space, which you might not ever run out of. So if you have to store huge masses of pictures. Go for Flickr.
CloudApp: CloudApp is the best cloud service that exists. It’s quick and amazingly user-friendly, but it’s only available for MacOSX.
****These were the cloud services I normally use and prefer. As for the Question about _‘trust’, _well, all i can say is that Microsoft are what _brought _computers to us, and thus have been in the game for ages. So i doubt that they care about what a single user from millions in his 196th country is storing on their servers, and as for Google, well, you trust google with quite a lot already + you use their email services. Clouds like bitcasa _can _be a problem, as even I didn’t really hear anything about it. I just came across it somewhere and liked it; tried it. Flickr’s Yahoo’s.
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OtherOS [PlayStation3]
OtherOS was a feature in the Playstation 3, which was later discontinued and made unavailable throught a firmware update, that allowed one to install a custom operating system i.e. Unix or Linux like OSs. The reason for its discontinuation was perhaps the flexibility of running OtherOSs and perhaps it challenged the reputation of their own OS.
Anyways, the Flavours that are known to have run on the PS3 are YellowDog Linux, Fedora, OpenSUSE and a versions of Ubuntu were actually ported to it too!
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What’s a Tab Delimitted file?
If you’ve ever tried building on the Cleverscript, or if you’ve ever played around with Spreadsheets, you might have come across the terms “Tab-delimited-file” or “comma separated values,” and few often wonder what the terms really mean.
In simple terms, these are simply formats that save spreadsheets in plain text, i.e. in a manner that can be viewed and easily understood through a simple text editor like Notepad, Gedit, leafpad e.t.c
In a tab delimited file, every line is a row, and the columns are separated by tabs. This sheet for example:
Would look like this:
when viewed through leafpad.
Similarly, when you go for ‘comma seperated values’ it uses commas instead of tabs, for example, the same file would look like this:
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RIP Tom Clancy – The “story-writer” of Splinter Cell… DEAD.
Tom Clancy, American, and well known to gamers as the guy behind the storylines of Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six, died on the 1st of October 2013, i.e. a few days back _yes. _If one would step out of the gaming world, they’d realise that there was more to him than just producing games. He wrote a number of books, but almost all of his works, at least the ones i know of, were all really about warfare, military e.t.c.At the age of 66, he died of some sort of illness, the nature of which wasn’t really made public.
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The UbuntuStart / StartUbuntu Project to shun XP
Windows XP, successor to 98, was a huge leap for MS, and well perhaps the most stable version of Windows ever in its time, the first release of which was launched in 2000, is still widely used. Whether it _should _still be used or not, is highly debatable. Some loyal supporters would argue with the fact that it’s about 3 versions old and yet extremely stable and supports everything, while others who have (or at least claim to) have looked into the issue state that, it’s no longer secure, and that it has compatibility issues and all.
Canonical seized the chance and began working on it immediately. The Ubuntu Start Project, the first releases of which are already up and available, aims to provide Windows XP users, (or users with PCs that support nothing much higher than XP,) with a “modern, unique, stable, fast, powerful, highly customizable, active and amazing community based system, open-source, free Linux-based system which should replace their very old no longer supported system.”
From what I can make out after reading this, in itself, the project is more of a campaign to gain more users than a new redefined OS. Means that despite its purpose, and how big _the whole thing sounds, 50% of the project is just about persuading people to switch to Ubuntu, while the rest i.e. the software bit of the project is a script that has to be run _after installing ubuntu, _that would kinda enhance it for windows users so that they don’t have trouble getting used to the new environment, e.g. _moving window buttons from left to right 😀 . Auto-mounting NTFS drives, (cause we are too lazy to make a single click), and it also installs GIMP, WINE, DropBox, some torrent client, and other such tools that one _might _need.
Can’t really say much about this myself as i haven’t tried the script myself yet.. however this was a smart move by Canonical, but on the other hand, XP users, if you are by any chance planning to make the switch, be prepared, for Linux is Linux. (no offence meant)
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Where’s the ‘Innovation’?
Two days back, Sony unveiled its Xperia Z1 smartphone, that packs a 2.2Ghz Quad-core processor and a 20.7MP camera, and the same magnificent display, perhaps _that’s _a little larger too, and that’s the point. Every now and then, a new phone comes out, and it’s pretty hard to choose the best among them, as the competition is tough, but what exactly is it that a day-newer smartphone carries? A slightly better processor? perhaps an _extremely high-res _camera? or a water proof display? Or…Just a larger screen.
If this is what makes one phone superior over the other, then it’s no competition, considering that one carries better hardware, and thus is bound to perform better. Comparing a dual-core HTC with a Quad-core Samsung, or comparing the Water-proof Xperia with a normal _Huawei, or a 41MP Lumia with any camera-ed device is similar to comparing a tank with a Vespa (no offence meant)_.
When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone, in 2007, it didn’t pack a Quad-core either, but it really hit the market, and people fell in love with the idea, _cause it was one. _The idea behind the iPhone wasn’t to sell Dual-cores or water-proof phones, or integrated cameras, or even _fancy touch screens, _but it was the Revolutionary UI that set it apart from others. If you dont get it, simply watch the video,( it’s available on Youtube, so i wont bother sharing a link.)
And soon, support for something similar was ported into Android, which arrived a bit earlier than the iOS, and yet, the latter is considered to be superior, (though personally, i love both.) That Android is what powers up most of todays’ smartphones, and the best of which is itself based on Steve Jobs Revolutionary UI.
True that Samsung introduced the ‘smart pause’ and the ‘eye focus’ is another rumored release, but even these two, though a huge leap, aren’t exactly needed, nor are they going to make life better for us.. They are simply building up on the same thing and adding to it, whatever they see, but this won’t do. They are supposed to be building mobile devices _but going on the wrong track by enlarging the screen with every release. Similarly, it’s good for the phones to carry a camera, but the phone is not _supposed to be _a camera. The eye tracking thing of Samsung’s, is in itself, good, but do we really need it? though it sounds pretty simpler, it might put strain to the eyes, and it might be a bit error-prone, and _what’s the point of it being in a phone?
The floating touch / motion control, rumored to be in some model of Xperia, and the latter in SmartTVs, is pretty advanced too, but we dont need all this in our phones.. People prefer simplicity. Microsoft could have introduced it in their windows phones ages ago if they wanted too, seeing as we’ve seen something similar yet better in the XBox, but they dont have to or need to. The Simple UI of the Windows Phone 7+ is an example, of how they are keeping it simple, and how people are loving it.
The MotoX introduced the _talk to your phone _thing, and that was kinda something new, and so was the _shake to open _camera, though they are minor improvements, but do fall in the category next to the the Huawei’s Screen Temperature, HTC Zoe, and the Samsung’s counterpart to Zoe.
Nowadays, all improvements _that are made to the _smartphones _are enlarging the screen or making it _persistent, _better RAMs or CPUs e.t.c., or perhaps in terms of better software, but it’s still the same _smartphone. Where’s all the creativity, the innovation? Are they really running out of ideas?
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Microsoft Acquires Nokia
Nokia, the Finnish manufacturer of Mobile devices, which has been a bit _‘out of the game’ _in the recent years, especially since they gave up on the Symbian Mobile platform, and started with the Asha series, and could have had to face worse if it hadnt been for Microsoft, and they hadn’t produced the Lumia series of Windows Smartphones.
Yesterday, it was announced that the two have come to an agreement, where Microsoft is to purchase Nokia, and ensure the delivery of better and yet exciting devices. The transaction, according to the Technet blog, is to be made during the first quarter of 2014.
This might really put Nokia back in the game as a rival to HTC, Samsung and Apple, (which it already was, but not totally,) except that it will not be the same _nokia _anymore, but merely Microsoft, cloaked under the name, a change of which hasn’t yet been announced, and is likely to stay that way.
So,
Samsung, Apple, Huawei and of course HTC…
GAME ON! -
Linus Torwalds’ initial email.
The one that started it all, where Torwalds asked the people for suggestions and stuff that they’d like to see in the minix OS.
From: mailto: <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.Fi" target="_blank">torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.Fi</a> (Linus Benedict Torvalds) <p style="text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;"> To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix<br /> Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?<br /> Summary: small poll for my new operating system<br /> Message-ID: <mailto: <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.Fi" target="_blank">1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.Fi</a> </p> <p style="text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;"> Hello everybody out there using minix — I’m doing a (free) operating<br /> system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386<br /> (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to<br /> get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in<br /> minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the<br /> file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). </p> <p style="text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;"> I’ve currently ported bash (1.08) and gcc (1.40), and things seem to<br /> work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few<br /> months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any<br /> suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-). </p> <p style="text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;"> Linus (mailto: <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi" target="_blank">torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi</a>) </p> <p style="text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;"> PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.<br /> It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably<br /> never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I<br /> have :-(. </p>**Credits: www.linux.com/news/software/linux-kernel/734956-linuss-famous-email
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XBMC – The Xbox Media Center
The XBMC is an application designed to serve as a free alternative to Windows media center, and is available for several platforms, and even has its own standalone version known as the XMBCbuntu which, yes, is based on ubuntu.
It was originally created for the original Xbox console, but as it got popular, they made it available for several platforms.
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GTA VC Back To the Future Hill Valley Mod
The mod is one of the best I’ve ever played and it’s as convincing as it could be and the best thing about it is that it’s based on VC, and yet it makes the impossibles of modding-on-vc, _possible. _The Mod, in case you havent figured it out yet is based on the 1985 Super-hit comedy science-fiction Back To the Future Films, that are all about travelling through time and changing the past so as to ensure a better future, or should is say, the _present? _Well, watch the movies (if you havent already); definitely worth watching.
Anyways, to the Mod now, (assuming that you know all about the movie.) The game includes several Deloreans; the original DMC12, the modified DMC12(the first time machine) and as you travel into the Future, you unlock the BTTF2 and BTTF3 Time Machines, and a bonus model, _that’s based on the DMC13 and has the ability to teleport as well…( _No, _the last one _didnt exist in the movies).
Now to the gameplay; The last stable release 0.2e R2, and there used to be a number of differences between every 2 releases. So, in 0.2e, as you start the game, the player gets spawned at the Vercetti State(mansion) and the player’s textures have been slightly altered to resemble Marty McFly from BTTF. The first mission is some sort of tutorial that can be _skipped. _The first step is to get a Delorean and make it into a time machine, and to do so, you have to take it to Sunshine Autos, which would be marked in the radar with a D. Well, then you have to Drive the car straight into the _Import Garage _and once done, you’d be kinda prompted with a choice of unlocked Deloreans. In this case, just the BTTF1 Delorean.
Now once done tuning up the Vehicle, you’d have to acquire plutonium, that has to be stolen from The Libyan hideout, and the moment you do so, the Libyans would be on your tail, and you’d have no choice but to take a leap into the future, _while _on the run.
Once in the Future, you’d have to try out the BTTF2 Time Machine that has the ability to Fly too, and then you’d send it sometime else using the remote control, and fly back to the showroom in a flying Delorean, which would later be modded into a slightly advanced time machine that can teleport you wherever you wish, and once done with that, you’d have passed the mission.. that’s it, however, I forgot to add that the once unlocked the BTTF2+ time machines, you wont need Plutonium, seeing as they run on Garbage, which is _everywhere. _AAs you go into the Future, you’d come across more Futuristic flying cars, including the convertible police car from the movie, and as you go back into the past, they’d be reduced to the classics, and eventually, nothing. As for the area, well, there wont be much change apart from a few buildings perhaps.
Apart from the tutorial, there’s another mission where Biff steals the unfinished prototype of the DMC13 time machine, and you have to chase him in a BTTF2 time machine and send him back to his time.
Well, that’s it, apart from that there’s this Time Train, that doesnt exactly need much fuel, and works well in almost all times, and this is it. Doesnt sound much, and yes it might get boring after sometime, but the mod is definitely worth trying out, and you can play around and do all sorts of tricks with it.
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The Moto X’s Specifications
I dint bother to mention it in the other post cause it was way to heavy already but those like me who wont rest until they see a table of specs, well here it is:
Width 65.3 Height 129.3mm
Curve 5.6 -10.4mm
Display 4.7″ AMOLED (RGB) / HD 720p
Weight 130G
Battery 2200 mAh. Mixed usage up to 24 hoursRear Camera 10MP CLEAR PIXEL (RGBC) / LED Flash / 1080p video (30fps)
Front Camera 2MP 1080p HD videoOperating system Android 4.2.2
Architecture Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System
RAM 2 GBStorage 16 GB standard, 32 GB version available online. 2 years 50GB storage free on Google Drive
Bluetooth 4.0 LE + EDR
WiFi 802.11a/g/b/n/ac (dual band capable), mobile hotspot
Bands GSM/GPRS/EDGE UMTS/HSPA + up to 42 Mbps CDMA/EVDO Rev. A (CDMA model only) 4G – LTE -
Enable/Disable Guest/Remote Login accounts in Ubuntu 13.04 [Ubuntu]
The guest and the _remote login _accounts are enabled by default, but there are those who want them disabled, and this could be due to privacy concern (though i noticed that you cant do much in the guest account), and as for the remote one, well, maybe they just dont want to see it there.
Well, to disable them, all you gotta do it fire up a terminal (Ctrl + Alt +T), and paste in the folllowing command:
To Disable both:
sudo /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -l false -R false
to disable only the guest one:
sudo /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -l false
to disable the remote login:
sudo /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -R false
That was it; ought to do the trick.
To Enable, use the same commands, however, make a li’l alteration; i.e. replace all the ‘false’s with true.
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The Moto X – Another release that redefines smartphones
The Moto X, another upcoming state-of-the-art _smartphone, of whose release date, i myself am unaware kinda redefines the term smartphones, and gives its company quite a _rise _in the _world-of-smartphones. Before the launch, the leaks, the rumors, Motorolla wasnt exactly the best choice, nor did much people ever even bother to consider it (but well, no offence meant. And well the same story goes for Samsung)_
_So anyways, the Always Ready _smartphone _Designed By You, that has a _Quick Capture _feature to ensure that you _Never Miss a Shot, _really does has it all, and it could be quite some boost for the company which has by the way been acquired by Google.__
Starting with the _Motomaker. _Notice the phrase ‘_Designed by You’ _that i used above?
_Yes it means what it means. _The Motomaker is, or is gonna be, a website where you are gonna customize your order before buying it. Customization includes choosing colors for the back and front, and even _accents _which refers to stuff like the Volume buttons and well the border round the rear camera. You can even add a signature at the back, which is similar to the _iPod Engravings. _And well you can choose a case too.But that was the _Styling _bit. Then comes _Features, _where you can choose between 16 and 32GB storage, add a custom _greeting _on startup, Oh and you also have the option of connecting your google account right there.
After Features, _We have _Accessories, _A wall charger is included, and you can also add-on _Earphones (color of your choice 😉 ). That’s it! The phone will be shipped to you within 4 days.
The Motomaker; kinda a demo video
So that was the Motomaker; no it doesnt end here; now to the _Quick Capture _which involves starting the camera app with a flick of the wrist. _Useful! _especially when you are in the middle of those moments when you hardly have a second to waste.
Here’s an example:
But what’s this Always Ready_ _thing?
This merely refers to the fact that the phone is always responding to you when you want it to. You can simply talk to it. Give it orders, tell it what to do. This is pretty close to _Siri _found in iPhones.See how he said ‘Ok, Google now’ _and the phone went into _Listening Mode.
Well, that was it. I know the features arent exactly totally _unheard-of _or _unimaginable _but well its definitely worth a shot.
By the way, do check out the Videos if you havent already.
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What’s new in Android 4.3 Jelly Bean
The newly launched, version of Android comes with its own range of exciting features, ranging from apparent _visual effects _to _not-to-apparent _security fixes.One of the apparent features being a user account system, Restricted Profiles as Google calls it. The purpose of the new user account feature, (i guess not much explanation required) is merely to ensure that _multiple-users-on-a-single-device _dont have much trouble managing their docs e.t.c. and yes it also kinda improves privacy, i.e. files you dont want other users to access.
Then there’s the support for Bluetooth Smart Devices, and yes some sort of built–in anti-virus tool, which i think wasnt there in the earlier versions, Actionable Notifications e.g. instant-reply to a just-received email, right from the notification bar, oh and it also includes dynamic widgets(that resize by themselves 😀 ), a smart-share feature, called the Android Beam similar to the Galaxy s3’s S-beam.**
**Another of its amazing features is the Photo Sphere, which is similar to a panorama _but that’s like a cyllinder while this is more like a whole sphere. Panoramas capture 360° horizontaly, while a Photo sphere captures 360° in _any direction.
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GIMP – The free alternative to Photoshop
Not everyone bothers to research on the subject, but almost every one of us comes to think of it. Photoshop truly is one of a kind; _at least what most fans say, and satisfied with it, no one bothers to look for an alternative. However, it so happens that PS aint free, and that can be a bit of a problem, seeing as most people just need it as a _side software, _and arent exactly graphic designers, and thus to them, PS is not at all worth the money.
So they dont have much of an option but to use the trial, or pirate it.But there are those who dont feel too good about Piracy, or maybe they just dont wanna go for pirated software, OR maybe they think that pirating, the PROCESS, is not worth the time and effort or is a bit too taxing, and thus they prefer going for an alternative.The best Photoshop Alternative i ever came across, is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, mainly known as GIMP. GIMP has almost all the features of PS, at least most of them, or more like _all that I know _of. _But well im no expert, nor much of a Graphic designer, so I wont make a good judge but still, the tool is definitely worth a try for those who _are _looking for an alternative to photoshop. Oh and I’d like to add that its UI can be a bit confusing for PS users, as its totally different from what i expected, but it works too, just different 🙂 . -
Ubuntu Edge
The Ubuntu Edge is an upcoming _state-of-the-art _smartphone, more-like, just a project for now, that would feature the fastest multi-core processor they can get their hands on, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of internal storage, and LTE antennae on either side.
But the thing that makes it unique is.. that’s right, you’ve guessed it; yeah, no rear camera 🙁 . Just kidding. Actually, it _dual-boots _Android and Ubuntu touch.
The idea behind the project being, porting a complete desktop OS into a phone, when docked, the Ubuntu OS will start on your computer, running right from the phone.
Well, do check out the video, i.e. if you havent already.
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Pokemon Fuse-er
pokemon.alexonsager.net hosts a tool that allows you two fuse any two Pokemons together. 😀
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Security breach on the Ubuntu Forums.
The site has been ‘shutdown for maintainence.’ This{#mfa11} is all that’s visible of it right now..
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Access Linux partitons through Windows
Linux and Windows, two of the most widely used OS’, and ‘which one is better’ is highly debatable. Now both have their own pros and cons, and well, experience _can be a bit _different _and _frustrating, when switching from one to the other.
Well, a common problem usually faced, especially by those who go for a dual-boot, is that Windows cant read/write/access Linux partions, while on the other hand, Linux can Windows’. But there are a variety of tools available that _do enable _you to access Linux partitions through Windows. Some only offer the _read _feature, while some even let you _write _changes to the disk.
After trying a whole bunch of them, the best i could find was the ParagonExtFS. This one works on all 3, i.e. XP, 7 and 8, and it has no confusing UI to deal with. Just a simple _mount _feature, just as in Linux, and thats it. Now you can Explore, view and edit Linux files through the Windows Explorer.
You can download ParagonExtFs from here. _Yes _you have to register, but well doesn’t exactly matter. Just fill in the form with whatever’s required and click submit.
Now, check your email, i.e. the address you provided while filling in the form, for an email from eservice@paragon-software, that contains the download link.
_Installing _and _operating _is relatively easy, once installed, just run it, and a box will popup carrying a list of partitions; Linux ones marked yellow. Select a partition and mount it; specify a drive letter and thats it. Now you can explore the partition normally through the windows explorer.
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Strobe illusion
Stare at this for about 30 seconds, and then look around you.
😉
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Celestia
Celestia is a 3D simulator of the Solar System. It’s pretty amazing actually. You can move about, lock onto planets, land on their surface. _It’s not exactly limited to the solar system, more like _the Universe, _i.e. as much of it is known to mankind. You can even move out and visit other _galaxies, systems, e.t.c.
It also has a _“TLC Feature 😀 ” _that enables you to speed up or slow down time, or even _stop it, or reverse it. _That;s not all, it has a lot of features and is definitely worth trying.
Installing it in Ubuntu is relatively easy, simply fire up a terminal(CTRL + Alt + T), and paste the following code:
sudo apt-get install celestia-gnome -
S4 League Snow Drop Dual Magmum
Well As You Know S4 League is Getting Better And You get Pleasure BY having Fun and we all Dramed of using dual pistols in a game with cool skils (or maybe not) S4 Gave us dual magmum and a Capsule that is both For Ben and buyable credits Today my luck was maxed and i got the dual magmum spec edition Called Dual Magmum Snow Drop Well Every Special Edition Weapon needs some specs Like Hp + 5 sp +5 movement +3% and attack + 11 and this is also on the pen shop so you can get it now and get experienced to the Dual Pistolizing of S4
s4league.com (gamesite)
-SuperSonic_S4
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Blind people – Can they dream like we do?
The answer to this totally depends on _how long, since when, _and _to what extent _has the person been blind.
If a person has been blind since birth, they’d just have auditory dreams, i.e. all dark, with just voices. but if a person used to be able to see, but lost his sight later, they’d dream just like normal people do i.e. in color, _or perhaps, as they get used to being blind, their dreams might reduce to auditory ones, and if they arent completely blind, but cannot exactly dream very well either, and _have been this way for a long time, their dreams too would be all blurry and obscure, just like their vision.
I never exactly met a blind person to ask, but well, after researching a bit, and well, applying a bit of common-sense, stated above is what i believe.
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FC college
Despite its name, FC college has nothing to do with “football clubs.” _It simply stands for _Forman Christian.
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Pakfacebook
PakFacebook is a social network, that was launched as an alternative _right after Facebook was banned for the first time in Pakistan, that did kinda resemble the real facebook, in both i.e. the _visuals, _and the _functionality.
After coming across a link on Facebook, that led me to phpfox, which is a complete social networking solution, I realize that Pakfacebook is _highly _or should I say _totally _based on phpFox, or the latter on the former, cause there’s no saying who owns which. But I’ve seen enough to tell that it’s the same thing.
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Collection
I’ve got this _‘hobby’ _of collecting Operating Systems’ images; _mind _only stable or lost ones.
A screenshot, of the folder where I store them distros.
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Introducing “Stories’ Notifications” on Facebook WEB.
The news-feed, a constantly updating, “feed” _of _stories _from pages or people you’ve subscribed to, or those who are part of your friend list.
The Mobile App had this _notifier _feature that would inform you of any recent activity, new stories, that have to be displayed on the _news-feed.
The “New Stories” notifier from ‘Facebook for Android’
Now Facebook brings the same feature to its Web version, _though things work a _li’l _differently here, yet I assure you, it _does work, infact, better. _So, this new feature is nicely integrated into the new “bar” introduced along with the graph search, and whenever there’s some _recent activity (that’s too noble to be displayed in the ticker _and thus is included in the news feed), It’ll display a small _counter _next to the _Home _button/link on the top-left part of the _bar.
The notifier from the ‘web version’ of Facebook. See the 2? yeah thats the ‘counter.’
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Nokia Lumia 1020, the first such smartphone to go 41MP
The Nokia Lumia 1020, that’s said to be available on AT&T by the 26th of July, makes even the best of DSLR’s look inferior, it’s own rear-camera being 41MP with a max resolution of 7712 x 5360. Lenses: Zeiss, Flash is Xenon for still-captures, while there’s an LED one for Videos, their quality being 1080p, 30fps.So well, let’s move to the rest of the specifications; Starting with Display. Screen-size is 4.5″, 15:9 aspect ratio, AMOLED Gorrilla Glass. _Processor’s a 1.5GHz Dual-core snapdragon; _slight disappointment _for those expecting a quad-core. RAM 2GB, and Storage capacity 32GB, and front-camera is 1.2MP; another _dissappointment. __
Well, quite a charm, _and i’d love to get my hands on one. Who cares if it aint quad-core eh? It’s 41MP, and well, 2GB of RAM aint bad either. + its _not-being-a-quad-core _makes it comparatively _more-affordable, seeing as the same model with a quad-core wont exactly go cheap.
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Cygwin
Cygwin is to Windows, what Wine is to Linux..
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Unable to mount Windows partition on Ubuntu&Windows Dual-boot [Ubuntu]
Another known issue, no biggie. What happens is that when the person tries to mount a windows partition on Ubuntu, they get this huge error saying that “the metadata kept in Windows cache refused to mount…” “the partition is in an unsafe state” “not permitted” e.t.c.
Well, dont panic, the solution is present in the last few lines of the ‘error message,’ _only, not everyone realizes that, and often, it just doesnt work, _(that goes for Windows 8 users.)
The reason behind it being the fact that your ‘Windows’ might be in an hibernating state, a proper shut-down ought to do the trick, but windows 8 users might continue to get this error even after a shut-down. This is due to the fact that Windows 8 comes with a fast startup feature that really does speed up, by _not shutting down _completely. So you might be clicking on the shutdown button, but what really happens is that the _Windows _goes into a hibernating state.
So, here’s what you gotta do. Login to Windows , and either disable the fast startup and shut-down properly, or you can do a normal restart, seeing as the _Fast Startup _doesnt apply to restarts.
To disable the fast startup feature, press start, to go to the start screen, and search(settings) for “Power Options.” _Click on _“Change settings that are currently unavailable” (administrator access required) _and under _Shutdown settings, ‘un-check’ _the ‘Turn on fast startup’ _button.
Thats it. Save changes and Shut-down.. or restart.
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MACBuntu messed up the Global Menu [Ubuntu]
Ubuntu’s Unity interface greatly resembles that of MacOSX, and that includes T__he Global menu, AKA The Mac Menu, _which shows the _Application menu(File, View, Edit, e.t.c.) in the top bar.
__Macbuntu, an Ubuntu to MacOSX Transformation pack, _which i was so tempted to try, didnt work too well for me, and thus I uninstalled it. Yet, it left the scars; in this case, by permanently messing up the _global menu.
This is how i fixed it. (terminal):
sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt indicator-appmenu
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WINE installation Messed up fonts [Ubuntu]
A known problem that I myself experienced, when I logged into Facebook, after rebooting to complete the installation of WINE. A tool that aims at enabling windows programs to run on other platforms.
So, what actually happens is that WINE installs a number of Microsoft Fonts, and well, I guess, one of them happens to be on Facebook’s alternative fonts, (the default one being Lucida Grande, which is NOT included in the package installed by WINE).
The problem can be fixed by simply uninstalling the package ‘msttcorefonts.’ You can do this either via the ‘Ubuntu Software Center’, or the terminal.
To do this via the terminal, use:
sudo apt-get remove msttcorefonts
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Working with ‘models’ in GTA
If you visit a site sporting GTA Mods, you’d see hundreds of Car mods, Player models, e.t.c. most of them containing naught but new models and textures. The question is “How to install them?” Do we have to erase the existing models, in order to replace them with the new ones? Yes!
So, to do this, the simplest and most user friendly way is to use the IMG tool. So, once you’ve downloaded it(no install required), simply open the file gta3.img using the executable you just downloaded. The file can be found in the ‘Models’ folder.
Now, for example, if you are replacing the car “Banshee” with a mod you just downloaded, search for “Banshee.dff”, and “Banshee.txd”. Delete both, and if you dont feel good about it, you may backup; simply extract the files and store them somewhere.
Once deleted, just import the newer “Banshee.dff, and Banshee.txd.” That’s it. You’re done!
Note: Not every mod requires changes to be made in the ‘gta3.img’ file. Until VC, this was a.. well, STANDARD. But in SA, some player mods, e.g. Clothes e.t.c. might require opening “Player.img” But the procedure remains the same.
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Enabling Workspaces in Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’
System Settings > Appearance > ‘Behaviour’ tab > Check ‘Enable Workspaces’
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Whats New in Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’?
Raring Ringtail is a short term release, which would be supported for 9 months, successor to Ubuntu 12.10 Quantam Quetzal.
Excitedly, most of the users have made the switch, almost of them expecting to see a real change in the OS. This could be partly due to the fact that they’ve got tired of using the same old interface, and can do with slight changes, and partly due to the fact that they aren’t satisfied with its performance.
The question arises, is there anything new in new-est version of the OS?Well, there have certainly been a few slight changes, i.e. visual ones, that include an “ubuntu one” icon in the top bar, similar to that of the “CloudApp” in MacOSX. Apart from that, there is now a BT menu in the top bar, with a few essential options.
The “Dash” icon, has been changed to.. well, this:
13.04’s launcher vs 12.10s (sorry for the poor quality of the latter.)
Similarly, the “Software Center” icon has been redefined along with the “Workspaces” Icon, (which by the way are not enabled in 13.04 by default; see this post), and what used to be the “Home Folder” in the older versions, is now known as “File Manager,” (complete with a new icon.) All the icons are now slightly more pointed, means the corners are less round.
So, these were all the visual changes. Now to performance.
I’m sorry to say that it’s still the same old ubuntu, still a bit slow, even on “hi-fi” spec-ed computers. YET, i can see a reduce in the lags, e.g. it actually used to hang whenever i’d start a VM in 12.10, but in 13.04, i actually managed to run a VM alongside Chrome and the software center! -
The Java Based Windows 8 Explorer for Mobile Devices?
The “Windows 8 Mobile – Java Explorer” is a really advanced file explorer for classic mobile devices, _that don’t exactly support _advanced computing (dear me, im not sure whether or not this was the right term.) Such devices include all Nokia OS(s40), Symbian phones (at least nokia’s) and every other device that supports Java Apps.
I’ve tested it on a Nokia 2700 Classic, Nokia C3-01, Nokia X2-01, Touchtel SOLO, Nokia C101, oh yeah and a BlackBerry Curve 9300.
Now what exactly is so good about it. Well, glossing over the few _basic and essential _file-management utilites, i.e. cut, copy, paste, move e.t.c. , It comes with a fully featured archiver, capable of opening, extracting and even creating ZIP, RAR, BZIP e.t.c. and even JAR and NTH archives.
Apart from that, it has an in built FTP utility, using which, you can remotely _file-manage _another device connected to yours via Bluetooth.
Well, that’s all I can remember right now, but i assure you, that’s not all, it has several other features, and well, believe it or not, it’s the best File-Manager that exists for such devices. An alternative is the Moby Explorer which is kinda based on the former, but is slightly short on a few features that it has replaced with his own. So both are worth trying.
Do give em a try if your device supports them. 😉
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The New Facebook Graph Search Feature
The Graph Search really enhances the Facebook search, and with it, you are _slightly more likely to find who, or what you are looking for. _All you need to do is type your query in plain English (Just dont take this line _too _literally,) mind, dont go totally casual.
↑The new Graph Search
In simple words, with the new graph search, “__Filtering Search Results” _is easier. All right, _lets go back to the past, (mind! only a few days back), with the Classic-old-Facebook-Search, _which some of you might still be using, let’s say that you want to search for a Guy named “_Jack Robinson” _who went to _“Oxford.”
↑The old classic search
You’d type “Jack Robinson” in the search bar and click on the search-button, (if _the person’s profile does not appear in the 1st few results,) _and once it dislays “_All Results”, _You’d go for a few search filters, adding which isn’t much _user-friendly _either.
Now, with the new graph-search, all you need to do is type: “_People named Jack Robinson who went to Oxford.” _That’s it. Of course I cant guarantee that the graph search will always get you to the right thing, but the point is that it _does make searching for people or stuff easy, _and so far, to me, it’s returned naught but relevant results. It’s not exactly limited to 2 filters; you can add as many as you want e.g. “_People named Jack Robinson who went to Oxford and are friends of Sam Slater.” e.t.c. _It’s pretty flexible actually and really worth giving a try. 😉
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PoolHD Launched
Was wondering what to post about, and the first thing that came into my head was PoolHD, along with the fact that it’s “Coming 18th of June 2013,”
So I checked the date and it turns out that today is 18th!
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Xbox one vs PS4
The Xbox One design was revealed a way before the PS4. Both had unveilings before the E3 press conference – a traditional launch pad for games consoles – but at the PS4’s early showing, we didn’t get to see the box. It was only shown off fully at E3, on 10 June.
What do they look like? The Xbox One is significantly larger than the PS4. It’s a chunky black mammoth that’s 10 per cent larger than the Xbox 360.
The Sony PS4 is relatively petite, with a slanted design that’s quite unlike the curved bods of the various PS3s, past and present. It can stand either flat or on its side, and it is significantly more lounge-friendly than the Xbox One – even though the Xbox has more lounge-centric features as a more ‘entertainment’ led console
Xbox One vs Sony PS4 – Price and Release DateXbox One – £429, November release
PS4 – £349, “holiday” 2013We now know almost everything about the Xbox One and PS4. Including that the PS4 will be significantly cheaper than the Microsoft console – £80 less.
The Xbox One will go on sale for £429 in November, and the PS4 is scheduled to hit shelves in during “holiday” season of 2013. To translate that from American-ese, it’ll go on sale before Christmas, most likely around the same time as the Xbox One.
There are several reasons why the Xbox is more expensive than the PS4. Perhaps the most significant is that it comes with the Kinect sensor as standard, as it is required to operate the console. It’s not down to the core system components, though, as the PS4 is actually a little more powerful than the microsoft console.
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S4 league
S4 League is a great free MMO game that perfectly blends nonstop shooter action with inspired anime visuals. It’s a stylish third person shooter with a fantastic and colorful anime attitude that is both terrific to look at and play. The neo Tokyo anime style features great poses and elegance in actions such as running, jumping, shooting and even flying in the detailed and resourceful maps. Best of all, the graphics aren’t very hardware consuming, so most computers will be able to run this awesome shooter.
You’re free to customize your character with hundreds of pieces of equipment, weapons and clothing, showing your futuristic style in this virtual show game. Then it’s time to choose the game mode between Deathmatch, Touchdown or the Chaser. An additional arcade mode let’s you just walk and show your skills while you eliminate tons of enemies.
S4 League is an acclaimed game with a huge playerbase of every level for you to battle. Besides being a fast paced action shooter, it’s also extremely fun to play, featuring a ranking system that will put you to the test.
Whats So great about it:
1.Great Visuals
2.Fast and Fun Gameplay
3.Customization Options -
Atari Breakout – Google’s version
go to Google Images and type Atari Breakout. 😉 Enjoy
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GTA-United
Old, but well, GOLD. ‘GTA United’ was a ‘total-conversion-mod’ for GTA San Andreas, which lacked in missions, but for free-roamers, It’s fun.
All features are the same as SA, but the thing, that makes it special is it’s map, comprising only of, the whole of Liberty City(from GTA 3), and Vice City. The two cities are only _inter-accessible _by sea, or air; no land route.
The fun-part is that it kinda enhances GTA3 and Vice City, so the lack of missions doesnt account for much. All the Clubs, in both the cities are slightly real-er _as they are in SA. Same goes for the Clothing and ammunition stores. You no longer get _one outfit per store, but can shop for whatever ones you like, but when it comes to the Ammunition stores(Ammu-Nation), I sometimes miss the vice-city ones; much faster, though i agree that they were not at all real, seeing as the dealer hardly ever moved.
Apart from that, you can _swim, _which would come in handy while performing crazy stunts, while on the run from the law.
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Los-Santos, San-Andreas in GTA-V
See that “VineWood” Sign? Ring any bells?YUP! It’s the same old sign from Los Santos, San Andreas.
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Apple Lifestreaming the Keynote LIVE
But, unfortunately, it only works in Safari -
Activate Windows 8
I’ve got this activator that i’ve tested on Windows 8 PRO, and it did work for me.
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osdisc.com
is where you can buy DVDs of various Linux, Solaris, and BSD based Operating Systems.
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UNetbootin
UNetbootin is a tool, available on all 3 platforms i.e. Linux, MacOSX and Windows, that allows you to create Bootable Live USB drives, or you if you are short of USB flash-drives, you can go for the frugal-install on the hard-disk.
UNetbootin either makes use of ISO images of distributions present in your computer, and if in case you are short of them too, it downloads the respective image from the internet, and then uses it to burn to your DVD, or perform the _frugal-install, (i.e. _if by any chance you have to resort to that level.)
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Rikomagic’s Quad-core, Android v4.2, Mini-PC
This dongle’s got a quad-core processor, comes with Android 4.1 JellyBean pre-installed, that’s upgradable to 4.2, and_ _has been designed to be simply plug-ged into the HDMI port of your TV.
_Slightly-more-specific _Specifications are:
- OS: Android v4.1(JellyBean)
- Processor: 1.8Ghz Cortex-A9 Quad-Core.
- Memory: 8GB
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Pronouncing “Linux”
A topic quite debatable, as to whether it is pronounced as “lie-nucks”, or as “lee-nucks.”
Though, ive always pronounced it as the latter, I realized that Linux has been named after Linus Torwalds, and the forename in question, I heard being pronounced as “lie-nuss,” and therefore decided to correct this.. error.
I actually researched on the subject, and on the internet, i came across this recording of Linus Torwalds himself, pronouncing the word as Linus.
Here, give it a “hear.”__ 😀 😉
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Ubuntu Derivatives
Ubuntu is the most popular, and most-widely-used Distribution of Linux present. Based on Debian, it too is open-source, but unlike Debian, which is like all about networking, Ubuntu is, well, the_ preferred one for normal, home users. _
Now, with ubuntu’s being open-source, come several derivatives.
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Bootdisk.com
“Your computer isn’t doomed. Fight back with BootDisk.com” A Collection of Floppy Disk Images, ranging from MS-DOS 5.0 to WIndows XP Professional 2006.
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RAID Drives and Storage Pools
Windows 8 comes with a built-in storage-pool feature, and Drive-Bender is a ‘state of the art, single point storage pool technology’, and the upcoming PoolHD would be the “fastest and easiest way to create and maintain a storage pool of virtually infinite size.”
Now the question arises, what are these, so called, “Pools”? Well, before I answer that, let me explain what RAID Drives are, (though I’m no expert and to be honest, I myself didnt know anything about the two until a while ago.)
RAID, short for Redundant-Array-of-Independent-Disks, which bundles a group of hard-drives, in such a way that they function as a single _super-drive. _There are a few different kinds of RAID, each with its unique features and advantages.
A Storage-Pool, is similar to a RAID drive, or more like, a user-friendly-home-applicable _form of a RAID drive, that too brings multiple hard-drives or partitions together, so that they function as one _pooled-drive.
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“Windows 8 Setup Failing After Reboot” – Solved
A common problem these days, which I myself have experienced, while installing Windows 8 CP, and PRO on my Dell INSPIRON N5110.
What actually happens is that, the initial part of the Windows Setup goes very well, and then the system goes down for reboot, at which, most people remove their installation media from the device. This is perfectly normal, and has nothing to do with what follows, i.e. It starts booting into Windows 8, and you can see the Win8 Logo, and the loading animation, which stays for a few seconds, and then fades away, leaving the screen all black,
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Matt Mullenwug, the founder and creator of WordPress, ‘writes a letter to wordpress’
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Windows Phone Demo
Now you can actually “Test-Drive” the_ _Windows Phone.
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Torrents vs Magnet Links
When we download stuff using torrents, we first download a *.torrent file and run it with our bittorrent client. The torrent file contains information that leads to the download.
Magnet Links are such that, when clicked on, start your default torrent client and start off with the download immediately, without the *.torrent file.
It saves time(hardly a minute though), and well, wont clutter your disk with stupid files worth no more than a few KBs.
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VirtualBox-VM fit to screen
When i first installed Ubuntu inside a VirtualBoxVM on my laptop, i noticed that it didnt make proper use of the widescreen. The display was a small square box in the middle of the scree which kinda bothered me. To overcome this, just install the guest additions. To do so, press HOST + D. There you go. The auto-installer will take care of the rest.
Sit back and relax while the process completes, and then restart the VM.
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WINE
Wine enables you to run Windows applications on Linux, Solaris, BSD, and MacOSX
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Linux XP
Linux XP Desktop is a discontinued distribution of Linux which is based on Fedora, and bits of Red Hat.
The interface is based on the GNOME desktop, and, as the name suggests, has been designed to imitate the Windows XP environment (they haven’t exactly done a very clean job though, and is capable of running several windows applications using WINE.
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ReactOS – The free alternative to Microsoft Windows
The React OS project is an operating system written from scratch that follows the design and architecture of Windows NT. The idea behind it was to launch a free and open-source operating system that would enable windows programs and drivers to run on your PC.
Now, what you must be thinking is: “Why the hell would one want to go for such an OS when we already have got Windows?” Well, that’s cause ReactOS is free and open-source, means that you are free to customize it to suit your needs. It’s not just an alternative, but a free alternative to Microsoft Windows.
It’s pretty light actually. You can download it from the reactOS site, though i’d advise you to try it on a VM first, cause you might not find it as interesting as it sounds.
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No hard drives been found – Linux XP/Red Hat
An error i faced while trying to install Linux XP 2006 on a VirtualBox VM. The error is known to have been faced while installing Red Hat too, and the reason behind it is that neither of the two OS support SATA hard-drives, i.e. at least the older versions didn’t, so I just unmounted the HDD from the SATA controller, and mounted the same HDD on the IDE controller. To do so in VBox,
- Power off the machine
- Go to the machine’s settings>Storage
- Right-Click on the HDD(under SATA in the storage tree), and click Remove attachment
- Add a hard-disk to the IDE controller and in the box that pops up, click “choose existing disk”
- Now all you gotta do is browse to the HDD you just unmounted and select it.
That’s it. Start the VM, it ought to work fine now.
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Recover Partitions after Uninstalling Linux – “Not enough space on the disk to complete this operation” Disk management
Often users face this problem, after uninstalling Linux, and re-partitioning the _un-allocated space. _What actually happens is that they keep on getting stupid errors saying “Not enough space on the disk to complete this operation,” whenever they try to create new partitions using the Disk Management tool in Windows.
The reason behind being that the Windows Disk Manager is not… Ah _capable _of creating partitions in the middle of the disk, and thus, it displays the error. Users who created the Linux partitions at the end of the HDD, wont face any such difficulties.
Anyways, the solution is to go for some advanced partitioning tool _e.g. GParted which is for Linux. There might be a _Windows _compatible _version, but I never was successful with my searches, so you might wanna go for the Ease Us Partition Master, which comes with a lot of advanced features, and would certainly get you across this error.
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Uninstalling Ubuntu From a win7&ubuntu Dual-boot Using Windows 7
Ubuntu, based on Linux though is free and open-source, not everyone would be satisfied with it, as an average user would get pissed off in a week, because there arent many of the desired apps available for Ubuntu and those that are, people get a hard time installing them. I haven’t got anything against Ubuntu, and I’m not asking anyone to stop using it, but those that regret installing it in the first place, here’s how you can uninstall it.
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Get rid of the “This Copy of Windows is not genuine” error in Windows 7 Ultimate
Often when you’ve got updates on, there comes a time when your desktop background disappears, and you keep on getting errors and popups saying that your copy of windows is not genuine, and stuff like “you might be a victim of software counterfeiting.” The reason behind is that you are using a pirated version of Windows which you didn’t obtain the legal way._ _Now the point is that these errors and popups can be annoying, and people would always welcome a cure, and well here’s one. I’m not encouraging anyone to go for pirated software, but i’m still posting the solution cause not everyone can afford to buy their own licensed copy of windows.;-)
So getting rid of the error is quick, simple and clean though a bit annoying as you need to restart twice in a row.
- Go to Windows update and click on the link on the bottom left corner, saying “installed updates.”
- Look for the update KB971033, and uninstall it (right-click>uninstall,) and reboot.
- Run Command Prompt as Administrator. To do so, just press start, type cmd, and on the first link, right-click>Run As Administrator.
- In the CMD window, type the following command: slmgr.vbs -rearm, and press enter. At first, nothing would happpen, but this is normal, but after a few _seconds, _a box would pop up, saying that you need to reboot for the changes to take effect. Well, do as it says.
Note: This would only rid you of the WGA notifications and popups, but remember, this wont fool it into believing that you are using genuine windows, means that you’d still be unable to use the Security Essentials.
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Cardboard Wi-Fi Router
An eco-friendly, affordable, easily-recycle-able, Cardboard Wi-Fi Router.
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Fault in some undersea cable slows down internet by 60% in several countries including Pakistan
A cut in some fiber cable has slowed down internet by 60% in Pakistan, and several other Europian countries. The cable in questions is said to be the _primary internet backbone between Europe, Middle East, Sub-continent and Europe. _Cut somewhere near Egypt; Internet is being supplied through a substitute cable.
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Confessions trend on Facebook
Nowadays, you cant surf around fb, without coming across some confessions page. It’s just another trend, like those viral videos of Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake, that spread like worms. The idea behind these confessions page is that everyone feels uncomfortable about certain things and has trouble sharing stuff, holds secrets, and to make them public, one can simply message the page admin, and he’d post whatever the person has to say.
The first such page i came across was the “TWS Sixth Form Confessions” which was limited to a certain organization, and such pages have been appearing ever since, with a rate that is increasing by the day.
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Take Screenshot In Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich(ICS) or above
Dunno about the older versions, guess you have no choice but to download some app that provides this feature, but since 4.0, android comes with a built-in screenshot taking utility, and all you need to do is press and hold the power + volume down button.
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Install Komodo Edit 8 on ubuntu 12.10 64 bit
Komodo edit is a code editor and an alternative to notepad++, in fact, its even better, and runs in all 3 i.e. Linux, Mac and Windows. Installing it in linux can be a bit tricky for newbies, so here’s what you need to do.
Download the archive, and extract it wherever you wish, but if you dont wanna complicate things for yourself, just extract them into the home folder.
Open a terminal windows by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T, and navigate to the directory where you extracted the archive. To do so, type:
cd your_directory.
If you extracted it into the home folder, just copy and paste this code:
cd Komodo-Edit-8.0.0-12188-linux-x86_64
Once in the directory, type:
./install.sh, and press enter. Now it’ll prompt you for the install directory, which doesnt honestly make much difference, so just leave it blank and press enter. That’s it!
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SWAP space/partition – Linux
A swap partition is simply the place from which your computer borrows some memory if it runs out of RAM. The RAM is way faster than the hard disk, but in case you do run out of memory, and are in real need of it, the computer resorts to paging, and borrows some “virtual-memory” from the hard-disk, and in computers running linux, it borrows from the swap partition.
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“no root specified” error during ubuntu installation
While installing ubuntu 12.10, when i got to the partition-ing part, i kept on receiving an error saying something like “no root file system is defined.” After countless attempts, i figured out a solution to this.
Firstly, make sure that the partition where you are installing ubuntu is an ext4 partition, and dont leave _mount point _empty. To do so, just double click the partition, and in the box that pops up, select the ext4 journalling file system, and in mount point, just add a single “/”
That’s it! you should be able to proceed now.
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Create a free web with 1500mb hosting space and a proper domain name
There are several such services on the cloud that enable you to build a website for free. Some, like my3gb, offer you some hosting space and a subdomain (like domain.my3gb.com), and some also offer a site builder. Webs.com is an example, that offers a free subdomain, and an awesome site builder.
But most of these services have several limitations, e.g. you cant add more than 10 static pages to a free web made using Webs, and this wont work. To make a proper website, you need some hosting space, and a domain name.
What if i told you that you can get 1500mb, and a custom.tk domain name, for FREE?
It is possible. 000webhost.com is one of those sites that offer you 1500mb hosting space + a subdomain + a site-buillder, and the best thing about it is that they also allow you to associate your exisitng domain name with your 000webhost account, with a fully featured cpanel, webmail, subdomains e.t.c. it is the closest you can get to real webhosting.
So, hosting, we’l take from 000webhost, and that leaves the domain. Dot.tk offers you a proper free *.tk domain name, for e.g. domain.tk, and yes, this is where we are gonna get a domain name.
Now all you need to do is:
- First check whether your desired domain name is available or not, and if it is, register it immediately. Dont worry about the DNS, redirect thing, you can change that later, just complete the signup process.
- Sign up for an account on 000webhost, and in the box titled “i want to use my own domain,” write the .tk domain name you just registered.
- Once your account is set up, go to the cpanel of your site, and there you’l get a message, asking you to update the nameservers of your domain to something.000webhost.com. To do so, just login to your my dot tk account and go to the domain panel. There you’ll see a list of all the domains you registered on the site, or rather, the only domain youve registered there. 😀
- Just click modify, and in the box that pops up, check “Custom DNS.”
- Leave the IP addresses empty, and in the host name boxes, write down the nameservers of your 000webhost account. Save the changes, and thats it! you are done.
The process may take a day or so, but once it has completed, this is what you will see when you go to your .tk domain.
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Boot SLax through a USB drive
On Feb 18, I posted about Slax – A Plug and Play OS, which is absolutely free, but often, some people who are not much into computers, have trouble installing it. The simple + quick method is:
- Download Slax. ZIP or ISO doesnt make much difference but personally, i prefer ISO. (and if you are not sure whether ur computer supports 64 bit or not, just download the 32 bit version, which is recommended.)
- Download and run the Linux Live USB Creator.
- Choose the USB key, and select the ISO file.
- Persistent data; leave it to the reccommended settings.
- Check the options you want, and click on the lightning button to start the process.
That’s it! you are done. Once it has completed, just restart the computer and boot from the usb. When it asks you for the user name and the password, input the following credentials
- username= root
- password= toor
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CleverBot
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Let me google that for you
Let me google that for you
LMGTFY is a tool, or more like a sarcastic search spider, that tells google to search for whatever keywords you input. The actual idea behind it is that some annoying jerks keep on asking you stuff every now and then, without bothering to research (at all) themselves, and finally, there comes a time when you give up and tell them to google whatever it is that they want to know.
LMGTFY generates a link, that you can send to any such jerk, and it actually googles _the query for them. _Confused? eh?
Here’s an example (click on the following link):
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Romo – The SmartPhone Robot
Built by Romotive, a team of nerds, Romo is a small, and affordable personal robot which uses an iDevice as its brain. In itself, it is nothing but a set of wheels, but place your iPhone or iPod on it, and it’ll come to life. Romo wanders about, talks to u, plays with you, and it learns from its surroundings. He even tilts his head back and forth.
Romo can also be remotely controlled by a mac or just another iDevice, and you can also invite your friends or family from all over the world to control Romo through a private url.
Once they download the SDK, users can create and distribute their own apps for Romo, using a simple graphical-programming interface.
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Fll National Championship
The First Lego League National Championship was held on Saturday 2nd March 2013, at the Lahore University of Management Sciences(LUMS), and everyone was expecting a lot from us, The Aftershocks, and who wouldn’t, after seeing our performance at the Regional. 😀
But we didnt live up to the expectations 🙁 , cause due to some reason, our bot went mad, and we didnt have the time nor the resources required to fix it, so the first two rounds at the robot game went terrible, but before the start of the very last match, of the very last round, we tuned up our bot a bit, and scored over two hundred. This brought us to the seventh position, which was a great deal for us, seeing as we were an underdog team, the last, in the first two rounds. The Robot Game Trophy was awarded to Musa’b School, with a high score of 280.
Now, coming to the Project. Well, the judges did really like our idea, which was a device, the “Comfort-Sole” that can be fit-ted inside any shoe, and would spray aerosol on the person’s heel whenever the pain-intensity-sensor gets a value over 60, but maybe it wasn’t good enough for the trophy, so the Project-Research Trophy went to the Team Lego-Core from Generations School Karachi.
And now (skipping over core-values) to the RObot Design. Ever since the other teams arrived at LUMS, and we saw their bots, we knew that the Robot Design Trophy was ours for sure 😎 , seeing as none of the other bots were anything close to ours, and guess what? We were right!
That leaves the overall championship, which was awarded to the Team Roots Pakistan from the Roots School Islamabad.
Well, overall, the experience wasnt that bad, and I should say that the LUMS Rausing Executive Development Centre (REDC) is quite some place to stay. 😉
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Slax – A Plug-And-Play Operating System
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.
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Google driverless car
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.
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Hide Folders in your phone, without using any tool or software
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.
- Name the folder “anything.jad“, at first this would be visible, But that’s normal.
- 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.
- 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.
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Raspberry Pi
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.
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Internet Error Codes
501: Not Implemented
502: Bad Gateway
504: Gateway TimeOut
505: HTTP Version Not Supported -
Blogger Hired Woman to Slap him whenever he logged into any social networking site
When San Francisco-based blogger Maneesh Sethi realized he was wasting too much time on Facebook, YouTube and Reddit, he resolved to change his work habits.
His solution: Pay someone $8 an hour to slap him when it appears he’s wasting time on a social network.
The full Craigslist ad reads:
Hey!
I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a mission cafe) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen. When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.
You can do your own work at the same time. Looking for help asap, in mission, near 16th mission BART.
Compensation: $8 / hour, and you can do your own work from your computer at the same time.
The ad, unsurprisingly, received about 20 responses within the first 60 minutes.
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My software never has bugs….
It just develops exciting new random features.
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Victory at the FLL – Robotics competition
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.
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Scroll Clock
A digital Clock comprising of a number of scroll bars. Just click the link below and u’d know.
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Hidden Game in Google
Go to Google, and type “zerg rush”. Enjoy!
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Magnificent Computer Graphics – Impossible Objects
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Access Blocked Websites
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.
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Do a Barrel Roll
Go to Google and type “do a barrel roll” and press enter. 😉
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Reason behind IE’s existence
Why does Internet Explorer exist?
So that we can download chrome! 😀
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FB Privacy Update
Now you can edit your FB Privacy Settings from the top bar. This is not yet available to everyone.
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Special characters in windows
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:
- alt + 1 = ☺
- alt + 2 = ☻
- alt + 3 = ♥
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Chrome Web Developer Extension
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!
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YMail updated
The yahoo mail theme has been updated. This one is based on the METRO lines.
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Ranahost server under DDOS
Ranahost is a Web hosting provider; in fact, the best in Pakistan, but one of their servers is under DDOS attack since the past two or three days.
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SkyDrive
Get upto 7gb of free cloud storage. Just go to skydrive.live.com, and login with your microsoft account.
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Run Google Chromium OS on VirtualBox
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.
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iPhone → iPad → Macbook
Not gonna say much here. Just check this out.
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Akismet
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.
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Revert Back to the default Cpanel theme
Once while going through the cpanel of my site i came across a tool cause RVSkin. It’s basically a tool that allows you to fully customize the cpanel theme. The only problem with it is that once you activate it, there is no option of reverting back to the original one.
Well, just copy and paste this link into your address bar:
[http://**_domain.com_**:2082/cpsess6507594894/frontend/x3/style/switchstyle.html?brandingpkg](http://anasismail.com:2082/cpsess6507594894/frontend/x3/style/switchstyle.html?brandingpkg)=Note: Replace domain.com with your own domain, PLUS, this will only work when you are logged into your cpanel.
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DOS (Denial of Service) attack.
A DOS — stands for denial of service — attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. One common method of doing so is saturating/overloading the machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond does slowly. Such attacks usually lead to a server overload.
A few years ago, when Pakistan blocked FB, People seized the opportunity and launched their own social networking sites, and started promoting and advertising them. One of them was pakfacebook, the most popular one.
Well, what happened was that these FB addicts started signing up like anything, as a result of which, most of the sites hung, and wont respond properly.
In general terms, DOS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service, or obstructing the comm. media so that it cant communicate properly.
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Windows RT and Windows 8 PRO
The first release of Microsoft’s Suface Tablet, cost about $499, comes with Pre-installed Windows RT. It is (i assure you) REAL windows, but only just; its more like a Mobile OS. Windows RT has the same interface as the one you get in windows 8 pro, and it fully supports all the windows 8 apps.
But what it does lack, is the support for Desktop apps, Means, you wont get the desktop interface in it, nor will the OS support programs that were designed for previous versions of windows(the desktop ones.) While Windows 8 Pro supports both. Another difference between the two tablets is that the RT one runs on an ARM Processor while the other one uses Intel.
So, the main difference between the two is that Windows RT supports only METRO apps, while Windows 8 PRO supports METRO+DESKTOP apps, and runs on a comparatively better processor.
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The CASIO pb100.
The CASIO pb100 is an old computer or rather a PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR based on BASIC. Supports upto 1kb RAM and requires 2 CR-2032 lithium batteries which are used both as a power source and MEMORY.
It also suppports a tiny Dot Matrix Printer, and a cassette tape interface which when connected to a tape recorder, saves programs on a tape in the form of Audio tones.
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Gmail SMS
Login to your Gmail account.
Once the page has fully loaded, look on teh left side of the page.
You’d see a sidebar.
In the lower part of the sidebar, is an input box that says: “Search Chat and sms.”In that type the number, and ENTER. A box will pop up. Name your contact and select its country.
THATS IT.
Now you can chat with him normally
NOTE THAT SMS REQUIRES CREDIT. you ONLY HAVE 50. AFTER THAT U’L HAVE TO BUY SOME MORE! -
Download stuff using torrents
Ever wondered How people download large Movies and games?
The answer is quite simple,
They use torrents.If you know what they are, and how they are used,
then this post is useless for you,But if you dont,
then carry on!
Torrents are the data of the target file you need to download. These files contain nothing but the data about the locations of different pieces of the file, available on the web. THis also gives them resume capability, because they download the file bit by bit. I know this sounds strange and confusing, but the method is quite simple.
First of all, to download using torrents, you need a Bit torrent Client. I’d personally recommend Vuze(http://www.vuze.com/download/), or uTorrent ( http://www.utorrent.com/).
A bit torrent client is a TORRENT DOWNLOAD MANAGER. So, once you got one, the method is quite simple.
Just go to a torrent website,(there are dozens of them, However, the best one is Isohunt.) and search for the desired content. Choose a torrent and download it. (downloading torrents takes less than a second.) Run the torrent with ur torrent software. Select target folder for the download and proceed.
Your download has started. -
Transform Windows XP to 7 in a few small steps.
Tired of running Windows XP? PC not supporting Windows 7? Feel like transforming Windows XP into Windows 7 in just a few small steps?
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Download True Transparency here: http://
truetransparency.en.softonic.co m/</wbr></wbr> -
Download ViGlance here: http://lee-soft.com/viglance/
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Download Styler Toolbar here: http://www.crystalxp.net/
galerie/ en.id.551-styler-1-401.html</wbr></wbr> -
Download Unniversal theme Patcher here: http://
universal-theme-patcher.en.soft onic.com/</wbr></wbr> -
And
the SevenVG RC Theme link: http://www.demogeek.com/2009/08/11/ top-5-of-the-best-windows-7-the mes-for-windows-xp/</wbr></wbr></wbr> -
Extract The Theme files to Windows/resources/themes Extract ViGlance and True Transparency anywhere you want.(no installation required.)
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Install Styler Toolbar, and before restarting, run the Theme Patcher.
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Now you can restart the computer. go to properties, and apply the SEVEN VG theme.
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Then go to my computer and hide the navigation buttons, address bar and activate STYLER TOOLBAR.
- For window pane transparency, aero shake, snap e.t.c. run True Transparency. For the Win 7 Super Bar, Run ViGlance.
- ENJOY!
Note: I know this is not a complete transformation, but this is the best you can do without editing the Registry, dll’s e.t.c. The icons for example are the smae boring ones you get in XP. If you want to change them too, you can download some icon pack. There are dozens of them free online.
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Open Multiple accounts using a single PC
It is not exactly anything new or secret but most people have trouble logging into multiple fb, or gmail e.t.c. acconts at once using the same pc. Well theres a way. The best option is to open some other browser, and login using that one. But if you want to use the same browser, just open a private window or tab, and….. ENJOY!
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Use a single SQL Database for multiple WordPress installations
Most people experience problems when trying to use a single SQL database for multiple WP installations. Its not as difficult as it seems to be. Start with uploading files, and carry on normally until you reach the install.php part.
At the bottom would be an input box labelled Table Prefix. By default, the value would be WP (which is most likely used for your previous installation.) So just replace it with something else, and continue. That’s it.
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TeamViewer
Teamviewer is a Remote desktop Utility, which allows you remotely access another PC on the network. When you run teamviewer, you are assigned with an ID and a password(which difffers in every session\run.)
So, here’s the whole procedure. One person starts teamviewer and tells his ID and password to the other who inputs his ID into this input box that says “Partner ID,” and clicks “Connect to Partner,” On which he is prompted for a password and in return, he gains access to the First person’s PC.
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Breadcrumb address bar in XP
Like the breadcrumb address bar in Windows Vista/7? want the same thing in XP?
Download and install QTAdressbar.You might have to restart your PC after the installation.
anyways, once the installation process has completed, open windows explorer,
go to Menu>View and enable the QTaddressbar.
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Hidden FTP client in Windows/Mac and Linux
We all use FTP clients like FileZilla, CoreFTP, SmartFTP. Most people use Graphical Interfaces, but some even prefer Command line, but only 10% know about the hidden CLI FTP client that comes with the OS.
Just type FTP in cmd(Terminal in Linux or Mac) and press enter.
For a list of available commands, type help and press enter.
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Moving The sidebar from right to left in the 2011 wordpress theme
Most people experience this problem when editing the default Twenty Eleven theme and usually, they try placing the sidebar before the main content in the php file, or adding some code to the functions.php file. But they dont need to.
Now there are 2 ways to do this. The simplest is: go to Dashboard>Themes>customize>layout and select “Content on Right”
But if you wanna do it through CSS then open style.css, and replace this code:
#secondary { float: right; margin-right: 7.6%; width: 18.8%; }with this one:
#secondary { float: left; margin-left: 7.6%; width: 18.8%; } -
Get tabbed Browsing in Windows Explorer
Just download and install Clover.
Shortcuts Description Ctrl + N Open a new Clover window. Ctrl + T Open a new tab. Ctrl + W Close current tab. Ctrl + Shift + T Re-open last closed tab. Ctrl + D Bookmark current folder. Ctrl + Shift + D Place all opened tabs into a bookmarked folder. Ctrl + Tab Switch to next tab. Ctrl + Shift + Tab Switch to previous tab. Ctrl + Shift + B Enable or disable bookmark bar. Thats it. Enjoy. 😉
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Dribbble
The show and tell for Designers.
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CodePen
Nice Stuff they got on CodePen. It’s a collection of pure HTML5+CSS3+JS objects. Do check it out!
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Popular followers
My Friend is working on a fun project which is called Popular Followers. It allows you to sort your twitter followers on the amount of followers that they have. He wanted to find out if His trashness twitter account had any celebs/high-profile people following it, and didnt want to manually scan 1500 followers. Google showed him there was an awesome programmer (Raymond Camdon, he works for Adobe, is extremely productive, has adopted children) who had already tried to create such a tool, He emailed him to ask if hed be interested to collaborate with him on creating this simple tool for the masses. But designing such a small tool is easy, since they didnt need much more than a background, and a big-ass form box. The complete project, from the initial email, to deciding on a name, registering a domain, was finished in 24 hours. It took a bit longer before they actually launched, though. So hereby, dear readers of This blog Here it is: Popular Followers.
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Unsubscriber
Sick of receiving spam mail, email notifications, newsletters e.t.c. from multiple sites that you have signed up on? Well here’s a Solution.
Unsubscriber is a free addon, that you can install in your email account. It creates a folder named “UNSUBSCRIBE.” All you need to do is to once move the mails you dont want to the unsubscribe folder. Once done, unsubscriber will take care of the rest.
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Android or Windows Phone 7?
Have to buy a new cell phone. Wondering what OS to buy. HTC 7 mozart is some Windows phone 7 smartphone with its 8mp camera, 1ghz processor, 512MB ROM and 576MB ram. Only it has no proper file management nor a card slot. It comes with 8GB internal storage. And all the windows phone apps available on the appstore are for windows phone 7.5 or higher, while HTC 7 mozart has got Windows phone 7.0, so what if none of the good apps are compatible for it? Another limitation of the windows phone 7 is that it is totally dependent on ZUNE.
And when you take a look at Android, HTC ONE V seems the best so far for me. It comes with android 4.0.3, internal 4GB storage, microSD card slot (upto 32GB support,) 512MB RAM, 1GHZ processor and 5MP camera. Not to mention that android does fully support file managers.
Of course Android is the better option but i’m quite keen to try a windows phone 7!
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Windows Phone 8
Nokia launches the first Windows 8 phone. Nokia Lumia 920.
With a 768 x 1280 pixels(4.5 inches) Screen, Corning Gorilla Glass, and an 8MP autofocus camera, Not to forget the 1gb ram, and 1.5ghz dualcore processor! (Comes in four colors: Black, Gray, Red, Yellow, White.)
However, like all other Windows phone 7 and 8 phones, it doesnt have a card slot. (comes with 32GB internal storage.)
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Mystery behind the “BUG”
In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer).
On the 9th of September, 1947, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F.
The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log.
The word went out that they had “debugged” the machine and the term “debugging a computer program” was born.
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