Every plugin or extension I’ve used for Chrome and Firefox to manage sessions means I have to make a few clicks to save each session and another bunch of clicks to open that session later into a separate browser window. Plus the latest window I close will get opened next time when I start that particular browser. So if I close last the windows with my daily tabs I loose the browsing session with the occasional tabs I need for a short period of time.

It’s a mess I reckon and even if I daily use Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera I can’t manage to browse the web the way I like and automatically keep separate browsing windows for the websites I visit.

The sollution

After thinking about this particular problem I’ve found a partial sollution to help me open special windows with the tabs I use the most. It’s partial because it doesn’t work exactly like I want and it works for Firefox and Chrome only, or at least I haven’t found how to use it on other browsers. The steps needed areas follows:

1 – In Windows Vista/7 open Start Menu and type the name of the browser. Drag the launch icon on desktop and rename it so that it will describe the session you will open once double clicked. In Windows XP you’ll have to browse to Start Menu – Programs and manually find the shortcut

Start menu search

2 – Right click on it and open Properties. Here browse to the Shortcut tab and edit the Target field by adding after the last “ the websites you wish to open (without http://) and separated by spaces. Remember that you can’t open 10-20 tabs as the target field has a limited char allowance.

Editing the shortcut parameters

3 – Repeat this step as many times as you like. It also applies to Chrome. In IE it doesn’t seem to work as the browser will try and open a single windows with the address consisting of the string (including spaces) that you enter in the target field after the last “. Or if you prefer, in IE this trick only works with one URL.

How to use it on a daily basis?

Always remember to open a new browser window for Firefox or Chrome and then double click the shortcut. If you don’t do this you’ll end up with the tabs being opened in the first browser window. If you know another trick to help me manage multiple sessions for the same browser please let me know in the comments below and I’ll try and update this article.

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But waiting is not always the best solution, at least when it comes to incompatible software and I’m going to show you a little trick that might save you from upgrading to a new version (which sometimes can only be done by paying a certain amount of money). No, I’m not talking about XP Mode for Windows 7, which means installing Windows XP in a virtual machine and running program from there.

Using Windows 7 compatibility mode

For those of you who don’t know Windows 7, as previous Windows versions did that allow a program to be executed in an environment similar to a previous version of Windows, which can be  selected by you. Accessing it is pretty simple: right click on a file or shortcut that you wish to execute and select Properties. From here go to Compatibility tab and check “Run this program in compatibility mode for” and select a previous Windows version for the drop down list below. Hit Apply and double click that file/shortcut again. If it still doesn’t work then select another compatibility mode. If none of them work then you might try XP Mode or wait for a compatible version to be released.

You can also choose to run the program with Administrator privileges or enforce the settings to all user running that particular program. Note: this trick also applies to installer programs, not just already installed software. Remember that running a program in compatibility mode doesn’t mean it will not affect your computer, for example best registry cleaners have released update versions that support Windows 7 but older models might just ruin your installation.

Windows 7 compatibility mode selector

If you encounter problems let me know and I’ll try and help you. Also if there’s other software problem you’ve encountered drop a comment below and I’ll try and help you.

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What WP-Optimize does

There are a few action you can perform with WP-Optimize and those actions are:

• remove post revisions: in the latest WordPress versions almost all changes you make to posts are saved so you can later revert to any of those revisions if something happens
• clean marked Spam comments: it’s pretty self explanatory and cleans a serious portion of the database if selected
• clean unapproved comments: what’s the point of keeping them, right?
• optimize database tables: this is one of the most important functions as greatly reduces your database tables size using MySQL commands, so it’s pretty safe

WP-Optimize options page

How do you install and use WP-Optimize

Installation is easy. Download the plugin from here. Copy it to your Plugins directory on server, activate from admin and that’s it.

To use it go to the Dashboard tab in admin on the left sidebar and select WP-Optimize. Here you select one or more of the four options and hit go. Wait a few seconds and you’ll see a report showing how much space you’ve freed.

WP-Optimize provisionary report

Important: always backup your database before optimizing in. If things go wrong you have to be covered.

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First, to be clear, for the next trick to work you need a valid Gmail address. Why is that? Because Gmail is the only webmail service which allows you to spell your email address by using a point between any of the letters and numbers (any other characters are not allowed in a gmail username) that make up your account name. What that means? johndoe@gmail.com equals john.doe@gmail.com, or jo.hn.doe@gmail.com or whatever combination you like. Any email sent to any of those aliases (I can’t find another better name for them) will arrive in your initial johndoe@gmail.com Inbox.

Simple, isn’t it?

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In this post I’m going to show you how you can use Firefox to search directly on its address bar using any of the search engines you’ve configured for this browser.

How to configure search providers for Firefox

Selecting a search provider to use

This is good to know before we start into the advanced stuff. Just press the down arrow right of the icon of the current search provider used in Firefox search box. It displays the list of current search engines plus a link to “Manage Search Engines”. In the windows that opens next you see the detailed list of current search engines with options like move up, move down, remove and “get more search engines”. Pressing the latter link opens a new Firefox Tab with a list of search engines to choose from. From here things are pretty self explanatory.

How to search a specific search engine using the Firefox address bar

Advanced options for search engines in Firefox

Here’s the smart part: go back to “Manage Search Engines” and select each of the search engines you want to be able to use from the address bar and select Edit Keyword. I’ve set up a different letter for Google (g), Yahoo (y), Wikipedia (w) and IMDB (i), but you can select anything you want.

After you’re done just enter the following combination in the address bar and you’re done: “shortcut keyword”. For example in my case:

• typing “g make a website” searches on google using the “make a website” keywords
• typing “i inglorious bastards” opens up an IMDB page with the search results from “inglorious bastards”

It’s easier now to search whichever search engine you’re using with no additional clicks. If you want to use only the keyboard the shortcut for positioning the cursor in the address bar field is ALT+D. Hope you liked this short post!

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Google custom search is still in beta

In this post I’ll treat the case of integrating the Google Custom search engine in WordPress, the most used free software platform for blogging.

What do you need?

• A blog running a self hosted version of WordPress. Sorry guy, but no wordpress.com domains.
• An HTML editor (I use Notepad ++)
• FTP client (I use FileZilla)
• An AdSense account
• Some time and a few HTML/CSS knowledge

Steps required to integrate custom search in WordPress

First, you have to sign in to your Google AdSense account and create a new ad slot for the custom search results ads: Adsense Setup – AdSense for Search. Once you get here select “Single page” to have all options on one page. I’ll explain to you what every field means:

• Search type: specifies where to search, the Internet or only your site
• Selected sites: put here every site URL you wish to search, one per each line
• Optional Keywords: if there’ any word combination you wish to add to the string of chars the used inputs in the Custom Search field here’s the place to mention them
• Site language: self explanatory, is the language your blog uses
• Your site encoding: go to your blog, right click on a free space, select “View Source” and look for “charset”. Select in the Adsense drop down list the encoding your website uses
• Country or territory for Google domain: to better list localized search results Google needs to know the region of your website’s visitors, where most of them come from
• Custom channel: give a name to the ad channel to better track its results in your Adsense reports
• Safe Search: specify if you want adult content to be omitted from displayed results
• Look and Feel: choose from a few themes available for the search box
• Text Box Length: specify the size of the search box as it will appear on your site
• Opening of search results page: here you’ll specify how the search results page will look like. Options are in the same page, in new windows (easiest to implement), or in a dedicated page on your site. For the last option you have to create a page on your blog (page, not post) and give it a name that you’ll specify in this Adsense wizard. Mine is called “search”, so the URL is http://www.johnpopes.com/search. Also enter the width of the search results area so that it will fit your theme layout.
• Ad location: where should google display ads on your search results page. Depending on what you choose the aforementioned Width of the results area has a bigger minimum value.
• The Palettes: here you’ll change the colors of the search results. Every change is reflected in a sample box on the left.
• Agree with the special terms
• Enter a name for this particular search unit and hit “Submit and Get Code”

The long Adsense setup wizard (click for large image)

Now you’re presented with two codes (if you chose to display results in the same page or in another page on your blog, not in a new window. Now the input box code goes in your theme. Mine was searchform.php. The second one goes into the page template (here is more info on how to create a WordPress page template) I’ve created starting with page.php and replaced the part with the_content(). Use this template when creating the page that will you’re your results (see the “Opening of search results page” step). Remember that those file names in your WordPress theme may be different, but also look for the code that displays your normal search box and create a new template for pages, where you replace the content with the provided code by Adsense.

Custom search results on my blog

If you want to change the look of the Custom Search you have to log back in Google Adsense and hit Adsense Setup – Manage Ads and Edit on your Custom Search module. That’s it. If you get stuck at one step or need more clarification don’t hesitate to post a comment below and I’ll help you.

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Naturally I’ve accepted the invitation and went to with the jury part of my duties, on the last days of course, as a lazy ass person that I am. It stroke me then that it’s not easy to be a part of a jury and do your job right, without being biased or unfair to some of the participants. That’s when I’ve figured out that there’s a methodology to follow that ensures your vote is cast as objectively as possible. I thought to present you my ‘algorithm’ that I follow in order to evaluate web stuff. Of course this kind of methodology can be applied to numerous other evaluation processes, not necessarily related to a jury.

How to evaluate ‘stuff’

First, there are a few things that need to be defined first, before the members of the jury start doing their work. In my case there was the categories for which Internetics gives prizes, each category was defined separately so we understood well what we were looking for in each subscription of a given category. This is by far the most important step, as it tries to put up a formula for evaluation. Also the notes range must be refined (in this case was 1 to 5, 5 being ‘very good’).

The second most important part of the jury duty is to go back to candidates from 1 to X-1 when you evaluate number X so that you make sure you’ve remembered how the current candidate fares compared to the other. It’s not enough to put every candidate in a schema or formula and give a note by measuring where on the scale the candidates falls. It’s critical to compare candidates with each other so that the verdict you’re giving is fair for all candidates subscribed to the contest.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can take a candidate out of context, so that the verdict won’t be influenced. You want to evaluate a list of candidates at a given moment, following a given list of characteristics. The next year the same candidate would get a different verdict 99% of the times, as methodology changes, mentality changes and the same thing can be seen differently over a given period of time. And this brings me to the third most important thing: compare the candidates in the shortest period of time. If you do some today, some tomorrow, you could be influenced by your mood, by the weather or by a headache.

Follow those simple rules and your verdinct can be impartial, as much as it’s possible, of course.

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In this article I will try and explain how you can secure your wireless network. You’ll need a minimum of computer knowledge, but I’ll try and post links to resources that explain best various terms that I’ll use in this post. I won’t be posting a screenshot step by step guide as router user interfaces are very different from one to another, but the names you’ll see for various options are the same everywhere. So, let’s get started:

Terms and things you need to know about your wireless router

1. IP address – it’s the Internet address of a connected device, it’s made or four groups of numbers, each with values between 0 and 225.
2. Encryption protocol – the method used to scramble the data being send/received so that someone without proper access right won’t be able to understand.
3. MAC address – it’s the address of the networking interface in a computer. Your router, computer network card, wireless card in your laptop have different MAC addresses (Example: 00-81-7D-31-3B-C4)
4. Network SSID (Service Set identifier) – is the name of the wireless network you’re creating with the router. When you search for networks in range or connect to a network that’s the identifier.

How to secure your wireless network?

There are a few options to secure a wireless network starting from the router. I’m referring here to security as in “no computer in range of my wireless router can access my network if I don’t grant it access”, I’m not covering Internet security, as it is a much broader subject and includes subjects like Firewalls, Antispyware, Antimalware and Antivirus software.

So, here are the methods you can use to deny unauthorized access to your wireless home network:

1. Hide your network SSID from being broadcasted by the router. In this way a person who want to connect to your wireless network won’t be able to do it unless he know the network exists and its name. Don’t be fooled tough as there are programs that can find wireless networks in range, with or without SSID.
2. Don’t leave the network traffic unsecured. Choose an encryption protocol that offers high security and use a long password with special chars like numbers, -, _, ?, * etc. I recommend using WPA and WPA2 variants, not WEP.
3. Filter MAC addresses that have access to the network. All wireless routers have the option of specifying which MAC addresses of network cards are allowed to connect. This is a very powerful protection method. Find your MAC address in Windows by hitting Start button – Run – cmd.exe and type “ipconfig /all”, then look for your network card name and copy the “Physical address” number.
4. Change your router IP address and password. By default many routers come with passwords like “admin” and IP addresses like 192.168.0.1. Changem both of them to not so easy to guess values.

Those are the most basic and at the same time efficient methods of securing your wireless network at home, so if you do all of them there’s little chance an unexperienced hacker can pass through them, but that doesn’t mean you’re bullet proof. If you have any questions leave a comment bellow and I’ll try and help you.

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Ninite doesn’t even install itself: it runs in the background and installs all the applications you’ve checked on the first step, saying No to features like toolbars, ads or MP3 player  of the day, if you know what I mean. There’s only one downside: not all applications are included in the list, but for a typical user there’s more than enough programs to install.

I’ve tried it on Windows 7 and it works perfectly. Check Ninite out and tell me what you think. Below there’s a screenshot of the list of programs that you can choose from:

Ninite first step: selecting programs to be installed

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We all loose hours and hours watching clips on Youtube, following people on Twitter, posting on someone’s Facebook Wall and so on. All this time would have been better used to do constructive things, earn more money and free up more time for our offline life, you know, the one we had before the Internet was all over the place.

Now we are all spending at least 8 hours at work in front of the computer and then a few hours more in front of it at home. Besides the health factors involved here there is the problem of alienation, which I’ve talked about here. Thing are not getting any better, as the Internet becomes more and more addictive, especially to young people.

So, in this post I’ll try and present a short list of things I do when I want to get a lot of work done in a relatively short amount of time. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it makes me realize how much time I’m loosing on a usual day at the office, time that I’ll never get back.

How to be more efficient while working on Internet

No, without too much ramblings, the list of things I do to be more efficient while I work on Internet (a dream job, by the way).

1. Take a paper notebook and make a list of the things you need to do each day, putting the most important tasks on top. Put an estimated amount of time needed to finish each task. Check the ones you’ve completed and put the remaining ones on the list for next day
2. Make a habit to check your email at most two times a day’ preferably at lunch time and afternoon. Both sessions should include reading and answering to emails
3. Do the tasks that involve writing and thinking at the beginning of the day, when your mind is still fresh. This way you get things done faster and better
4. If you must check social networks, post pictures, status updates and so on do that in your lunch time, or at night, when you get home
5. Same goes for Instant Messaging, a total waste of time if you get bothered a few times an hour while you concentrate on a really important task
6. Get a QWERTY phone, as you might use any precious minute to write a post/article for your blog while you’re waiting for your next train/metro or whatever

Well, that’s my list of things I do when I want to get some work done and don’t really want to be distracted by all that ‘junk’ on the Internet. It doesn’t always work for me but when it does I can really see the difference. So how about you, what are your tricks?

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Battery life is important for me

If you hate that there are a lot of methods to increase the battery life of your phone, almost all of them being free. This guide might not seem all that new as it consists of pretty obvious methods but some I’m sure will find it interesting. So here it is.

Tips for increasing cellphone’s battery life

• keep the phone at room temperature as extreme temperatures tend to reduce battery life – so don’t keep it in your hand during winter for example
• turn screen brightness to minimum or activate the automatic brightness sensor, if your phone has one
• turn off Bluetooth
• turn off WiFi
• turn the screen power saver on or set it up to activate as soon as possible
• don’t use the external speaker and set the earpiece to lower volume
• don’t make pictures
• don’t access the internet
• set to phone to use a 2G network
• don’t use the screen too much
• turn off vibration notifications
• if you own a smartphone make sure you close all background running applications
• buy an extended battery for your phone, if there are available items for your model

Those small changes in usage patterns helped me increase the battery life of my Nokia E71 from 2-3 day to a full week. Of course I can’t use (or not use) my phone like this and I manage in average 3 to 4 days of use with moderate to light usage. Do you have any other tip about how to increase modern phones battery life? If so feel free to share them here with me.

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Don't be afraid to get dirty

For me it’s a pleasure so I’m gonna try and ease up thinks for newbies by describing the main steps involved in building your own computer. This is not a step by step illustrated guide, but more of a reference for when you have all the components on the table and don’t know where to start. So there it is:

How do I build a computer?

First make sure your hands are clean, not electrically charged (touch a large metal object to solve this problem with static electricity that can damage chips), you have all the necessary components and tools (a Phillips “crosshead” PH screwdriver and a cutter are usually enough) around the working table.

The main steps in building your own computer are:

1. Get the side panels off the computer CASE
2. Mount case fans if available or not included with the case
3. Mount the power supply and put all the cables to hang outside the case
4. Mount the CPU on the motherboard
5. Mount the memory modules on the motherboard (check the manual for correct dual-channel or triple channel performance)
6. Mount the Cooler on the CPU (if you have a big one it might get hard to put the memory modules in their place that’s why I recommend mounting the memory in step 4) and connect its cable to the motherboard
7. Mount the Optical Drive
8. Mount the Hard drive
9. Screw in the motherboard inside the case
10. Put the graphic card in its place
11. Connect the power cables to the motherboard
12. Connect other power cables to HDD, Optical Drive and Power supply
13. Connect Case fans to the motherboard or power supply
14. Connect case cables to motherboard (power, reset, usb, firewire, audio connectors and other cables if available). Check the manual for this step as it’s not so intuitive where everything goes
15. Plug the power cable to the power supply and start the computer
16. Connect the monitor to power and VGA card
17. Enter BIOS to set up things
18. Install OS and other programs
19. Enjoy your DIY build computer

I know, it sounds too easy, but everyone can do it with a little help from someone. You just have to have a little faith in you and read other resources on the Internet.

Here’s a list of sources that might help you build your own computer:

• How Stuff Works
• DaileyInt – An Illustrated Step by Step Guide
• TechPowerUp
• Youtube 20 videos course

A relaxed guy explains in the video below how a DIY computer should be built:

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The Photoshop tool bar

It’s enough to know and understand a few image editing concepts and you can edit your own images for your blog. Today I’m gonna try and explain to you three concepts that will help you get a right sized image for your posts.

Resize

On yout computer screen image dimensions are expressed in pixels or px (small individual sqares, each of a special color). Let’s suppose your blog has a text column 400 pixels wide and you want to put a picture in a post that’s 1200 px wide. Your WordPress blog can resize it for you and link to the bigger image, but that ain’t gonna look good plus it will take more space on your precious hosting server.

What happens when you use a resize tool? In the example above each three pixels of the original image are squized into a single pixel and the color il calculated as a mean of the three initial pixels. If you get the options of resizing the image using a resample algoritm (look for this option in the Resize tool you use) you better check it as the resized image will look better. Also remember to keep the aspect ratio if you don’t want the resulting image to look distorted.

A smaller image will also have the advantage of occupying less space, if the resize length and width are smaller than the original size of the image.

Crop

This is a slightly different concept that will also make your resulting image smaller. A crop tool will allow you to select a portion of the image and crop to that selection (resulting image will contain only the pixels inside the selection). This is an useful tool when the initial image contains things you’re not interested in. If your tool has the option of specifying a size (width and height) for the crop area and you set those value the program you’re using will crop the pixels in the selection you provide and then apply a resize algorithm to the dimensions you specify (you got it, this is a two step operation).

Crop doesn’t have to be proportional and the resulting image won’t be distorted.

Canvas size

I’ve left this concept at the end as it’s a little bit more complicated to explain. Imagine you have a picture, 100 x 100 pixels, and you need more space in the left side to put some text there. By using the Canvas size tool you’ll be able to extend the working area of the picture in any direction by any size you want. The additional space will be filled with a color you choose in the tool’s options. In the resulting space, if you’ve increased it you’ll find all the graphic contents of the original picture.

Canvas tools also can be used to decrease the working area of the picture, but be careful, all information outside the resulting working area is lost. Decreasing canvas size is usually used when you want to eliminate unused space in an image and keep the rest of the pixels untouched.

That’s it for now. If you want to read about other image edition functions please state their names in the comment form below and I’ll try and explain them in future posts.

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The Key to Success

What I want to share with you are my view on things to do if you want to be a successful blogger:

1. start blogging, don’t spend all your time researching
2. blog constantly, if you know you won’t have Internet access it’s a good idea cu have some articles already written and set to be published once you’re out
3. practice a lot, that will improve your writing skills a lot, you won’t be an authority if your grammar sucks
4. write down article ideas when they come to you so you’ll have a list with things to write about when new topics are hard to find
5. content is king, write useful articles, don’t chase SEO subjects (very true if you are not a SEO guru). If people like your articles they will come back for more
6. don’t copy others ideas, get you own vision on a topic, even when you have  a completely different point of view about a topic (or especially when you do, as controversy makes people comment more)
7. don’t forget about social media, read what other blogs on your same niche write, comment, get people to talk to you, interact like you do in real life
8. write about something you like, not just think about the money as without passion you won’t get far
9. be patient, as they say “overnight success takes a few hard working years”
10. work, work, work, there’s no other 100 % certain way to reach success

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Composite illustration of a CPU building process

A short general “How is made” presentation of the micro processor building process:

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Backup on the Fly

I won’t make a big list of the services available online, but I’m gonna present you the stuff I use daily to backup and sync my files between multiple computers.

My solution

I use a combination of two software programs to first backup my files and then to sync them between computers.

1 – Sync Toy, a software I’ve talked about earlier, that I use to rapidly backup and syncronize files between my laptop, desktop and mobile hard drive. It’s easy to set up and it is reliable from what I’ve experienced in past two years. I miss the function of backing up settings and detailed reports after synchronization but that’s the price of free.

2 – Syncplicity, it’s a software that can synchronize folders between computers but it also keeps a copy of the files online (even files you’ve deleted). It saved by ass a few times after deleting sensible info. In order to use it you must create a free or paid account (see the difference here) and download a little piece of software that will synchronized the folders you’ve selected between multiple computers running the same software and configured to be logged into your account.

Why I use two different pieces of software? Mainly because one backup is not always enough plus the online versions it’s not very fast for large directories with multiple files.

What I’ve tried and not liked

I’ve also tried Microsoft’s Live Mesh Service but I’ve had one of the biggest disappointments in modern Microsoft software ever. The way you define folders to be synchronized is not very easy to understand, that’s why when I’ve defined the second computer it created the Mesh folders from my first computer on my desktop. I’ve deleted them (stupid me) and to my surprise it started deleting the files on the first computer.

I’ve stopped the process when I’ve realized what was going on but it was a little bit too late for a few hundred files. Syncplicity, which was running in the background managed to delete files and all I’ve got was two computers with the same two folders empty.

Thankfully, Syncplicity has a backup of all files in an online Recycle Bin, from where I’ve managed to recover them. Suffice to say Mesh was uninstalled the second I’ve recovered my files.

Conclusion

My solution doesn’t necessarily meets your needs that’s why you should check out other services, free or not. You should check google for “online backup services” to find an extensive list. Don’t forget to share with us what you did find an what you use on a daily basis to backup and synchronize your files.

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I, for myself, an early Vista adopter (since Release Candidate 2, if I remember well), as I’m always liked new things and as Windows XP was on the market for a long time I’ve wanted something else. But even now, after two years of using Vista I’m still confused sometimes when faced with simple tasks, like File Sharing without a password, which I needed a few days ago and just yesterday I’ve managed to do it right.

So, let’s see what I wanted to do and what stopped me: I have a desktop and a laptop and I was trying to share some files in order to copy them from one PC to another. I’ve browsed to the folder I was going to share, right clicked on it, selected Share and added Everyone as a Reader to the permissions list. Nice and easy, but when I tried to access that computer I was prompted for an user and password, which I didn’t set up anywhere else so end of the road for me.

Yesterday I’ve had a breaktrough, and let’s see what I did in a few easy to follow steps.

Step 1. Left click on the network icon in System Tray (highlighted with red) and you get the picture below.

Step 2. Select Network and Sharing Center, that opens the picture below.

Step 3. Select Passwork protected sharing (underlinded with red in the picture above) and turn it off. That’s all. 

What it does it allows users to connect to your folders without requesting for an username and password. If it’s turned on, in order to view/modify files in shared folders you have to know an username and password that has rights on the computer that shares the files. Usernames with blank passwords don’t work, as the system requires a password.

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You just keep hearing that Video is the next big thing on the Internet. Just looking at Youtube, video comments and vBlogs you can see why people are saying this. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I’m sure it’s not totally true either, and I’m gonna elaborate on this with my own example.

So, I’ve got last month a Toshiba HD Camcorder (actually I’ve won it at a contest. Thank you Toshiba!) and I’ve just started my spielberguesque career. From what I see daylight videos are pretty amazing, while medium and low light shots turn pretty pixelated/grainy, which means you’ll never shot indoor without proper lighting, but I’ve got it for free, so don’t forget that.

Now, to get to the point, the camera saves files in MP4 format using AVC1 codec, which you guessed right, it’s not very common, so I was able to play it only with VLC Media Player (a nice player indeed, as it has all codecs embedded, so no need for search/install/try on Internet).

Now it doesn’t seem such a big problem, but what do you do when you want to edit the video, split it or reconvert it (1 hour of video takes about 10 gigs, so you’ll run out of space on the camera or your PC pretty fast). Sure there’s SUPER video converter that can convert pretty much anything to everything but the end result it’s not great and I’ll tell you why:

The steps that must be done to edit, convert and store an 88 MB, 48 seconds video:

• Copy video from camcorder (takes a few dozen seconds)
• Convert it using SUPER (I only managed to convert it to MPG, not AVI) in a 2000kbps 14 MB file
• Edit it in Ulead VideoStudio (a pretty simple and straight forward video editor) in a few minutes
• Export it from Ulead, which did take ~30 minutes (I’ve managed to watch the last episode of Californication during this time) in a 55 MB file
• Upload to Youtube which isn’t ready after one hour (I have a pretty good Internet connection, but I’m not living in US…)

Now that’s a lot of time (over 2 hours) for just under one minute video file. What’s worse than that: the end result, a file that doesn’t seem HD at all and it’s just slightly smaller than the original one.

What I’m saying is that Internet is not the answer (maybe yet) for storing your digital media library, which is supposed to be done without loss of quality as you might want to show your youth adventures to your grandkids later in your life when Super Mega HD or whatever is mainstream then.

But let’s not freak out for just a few cases when Internet can’t provide you with a sollution and do something about it, even if it doesn’t prove intuitive or great (just like my case). By the way, any suggestions for editing AVC1 MP4 files out of the box are welcome.

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Easy you say: use the retrieve password by email function provided by WordPress! This should always work, but there are some situations when it doesn’t: your email account cannot be accessed for some reason, you changed the username and don’t remember which is it, you gaved admin rights to a guest blogger and it changed your password (that’s a really silly thing to do).

So, let’s see the “magic” method I’ve thought of. First you have to have access to your SQL database, with admin rights. Now let’s see the steps:

1. Create another WordPress blog (on a subdomain of the original blog, on shared hosting account or even on your local PC)
2. Create an account and set a password
3. Login to that blog’s SQL database (you can use PHP MyAdmin)
4. Browse the wp_users table and look for the user_pass field corresponding to the admin user. You won’t recognize the password you typed as it’s encrypted.
5. Copy the string
6. Login to the SQL database (usually your host provides access to PHP MyAdmin) of the blog you’ve lost the password
7. Browse the wp_users table and change the user_pass original field to the copied value at Step 5 (at this step you’ll also see the username/usernames accounts of the blog)
   
8. Go back to your blog and login with the username to which you’ve changed the password (use the clead password, not the encrypted string).

The wizard above can also be applied to any website that uses MySQL to store users and passwords, provided that you duplicate the platform (so that the passwords are encrypted the same way).

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me.

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If you find yourself in one of the situations described above you start searching the Internet, like I did. And below are the websites I’ve found that seem reasonably good for what I needed.

• http://www.mandolux.com/ – very abstract website, but very good wallpapers
• http://www.dualscreenwallpaper.com – easy to navigate but not the best dual screen wallpapers out there
• http://www.dual-display.com – very good wallpapers, but they are not sorted

And because I know you don’t have time to search I’ve put below a few wallpapers I currently use for my dual monitor setup.

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