A neat desktop customization for XP & Vista. Sits on the desktop nicely, kind of sticks to the wallpaper, you can right click normally through it & almost none resource usage. Very cool! (100 times better & sleeker than vista native stuff)

http://lifehacker.com/5087956/customize-your-own-killer-enigma-desktop

Firefox: Google Search in the Address Bar

How to do enable Google search with Firefox’s address bar









1. On the address bar type: about:config
2. Press Enter
3. Access the about:config page.
4. Find the keyword.URL preference name, by writing in "Filter:” field
5. Double-click on it to change the string value to http://www.google.com/search?&q=
6. Click OK and close the about:config page/tab
7. Voila, it works perfectly, very convenient

How to delete cygwin folder

The other day I spent sold 2 hours trying to delete the annoying cygwin folder for installing a cleaner version. :p

every time I deleted it gave me access denied error until I used calcs in command prompt to reset the permissions. (Equivalent to chmod *.* 777)

CACLS c:\cygwin /E /T /C /G "wahmed":F

where wahmed is my user account in windows. After that just right clicked the folder and poof, deleted. Phew!

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I suppose before you get to the above point, you already have done this small bit

Complete Method
First kill the cygwin services, by either going to Start>RUN>services.msc or type these lines in cmd prompt/Run
1 - cygrunsrv -E sshd
2 - cygrunsrv -R sshd

3 - Delete the folder c:\cygwin and all its sub-folders (if it doesn’t get deleted follow the above guide)

4 - Remove the Environment Variable CYGWIN (by right clicking My Computer->Properties->Advance-Environmental Variables) edit the Environment path accordingly

5 - Start>Run>regedit and delete these two registry trees
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER_Software_Cygnus Solutions"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_Software_Cygnus Solutions"

6 - Go to Control Panel>Category View>Performance and Maintenance>Administrative Tools, Computer Management.
or click Start>Run>compmgmt.msc
delete the sshd user if it exists in the "System Tools" - "Local Users and Groups" - "Users" section.
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Three UK and Ireland broadband Latest Drivers for USB E169G Modem

Latest Drivers for Three USB modem (Huawei 169G Drivers). Got them directly from Three Ireland. Data speed does seem to be increased after this one, and the interface also seems to be better. The drivers are for Microsoft windows XP, Vista and MAC OS-9 onwards.

http://rapidshare.com/files/158006757/Huawei_169G_USB_3G_Modem_Drivers.zip

For Linux (ubuntu): to make E169G working on linux Ubuntu and Debain, please follow this guide, its quiet comprehensive

http://blog.tech-pro.net/entry/38/Linux_and_the_Huawei_E169G

Free Land line numbers for UK & US

Just wanted to share some links. I am sure many of you already know about this, but I was trying to setup a free SIP based land line no's. (Skype and many other services give it for money)

http://sipgate.co.uk - for UK or Germany's land line no's

and

a combo of http://www.freeworlddialup.com/ - for SIP forwarding
& http://www.ipkall.com/ - for US land line no

for sipgate there is already a pre-configured X-lite(software for voip calls) available, for IPkall you need to download "X-Lite" and do the setting as mentioned on their website.

both of these work nicely, and people can call from Ufone-Pakistan for Rs.1 or something. Its quiet useful.

"The Black Swan" an interesting book by Naseem Taib

Usually I am not too fond of reading mathematics & probability books for fun, but someone strongly recommended this book, so I borrowed it from library and started reading with a condition that If I get bored during the first 5 pages its going out of the window.

But my O my how wrong was I. This book is simply amazing. It shattered some of my everyday concepts on many levels. Its written with a reason to predict unpredictable events in stock markets around the world, and about highly improbable events e.g not having very un-common events like 9/11 or war in Lebanon is actually more uncommon than having ones (means that unprobable events are bound to happen, world can not be happy place for too long, the probability of things going right for too long is very low); and the influences these highly improbable and unpredictable events create are massive. But since we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.

kool… :) rite?

LinuxBIOS (Faster boot time for linux)

If someone wants to get freaky with their Linux boxes try this open Bios thing (LinuxBIOS, http://linuxbios.org/ ). It replaces the native Mobo bios with a trimmed down Linux version (with no support for DOS). Grub gets loaded into BIOSäs rom, reduces boot time and support parallel hardware initializations i.e. faster boot time for Linux.

When booted you just see two panes for Linux hardware initializations, (no Intel inside screen or press F2 or F12 etc..) I have tried it on dell optiplex gx620 (Intel 915 mobo) without any problems.

Though, there is no apparent reason to do this, and probably it has potential to fry the motherboard, but its cool :)