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4GB of RAM on a 32bit Windows OS

Benny Chew — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:36:49 +0000

Most machines now configured with 4GB of RAM but continue to be bundled with the 32-bit version of Windows. You might’ve noticed that in this situation it does not fully utilise all of it, but here’s a simple fix to work around this issue instead of putting a 64-bit OS instead:

To enable PAE mode, you have to add PAE to the boot entry in the BCD file. Open an elevated command prompt. Type BCDEDIT /SET PAE ForceEnable.

via: Microsoft’s help article

ipfilter (blocklist) update

Benny Chew — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:18:21 +0000

There has been update to the ipfilter.dat source which I posted up before (have just updated that post). The previous source was from BISS but the people who maintain the blocklists now publish it at this site.

Whether or not the blocklists are of any use is up for debate, and definitely not something I’m going to go into in this post..

via here

Let me google that for you

Benny Chew — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:30:16 +0000

If you participate in online forums or groups, you would realise that a majority of queries could be answered simply by googling. Colleague sent this site around today which potentially could help those whom are in need of guidance: Let me google that for you

Type in the phrase in the search box.
Hit Google Search.
Copy and paste the link to the person who requires guidance.

For e.g., click here.

iTunes 100% CPU on closing

Benny Chew — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:32:12 +0000

After I got my iPhone 3G a couple about 2 months ago, I had no other choice but to use iTunes for all the syncing, backups, music etc as Apple wants total control of what you can or can’t do with its devices (was using YamiPod previously, writeup here). :|

My loathing for it got worse as it didn’t seem to be closing gracefully on quitting besides causing software restores which all ended up with iTunes.exe taking up 100% CPU. I decided to stop swearing at it and search around for the root cause as this behaviour wasn’t replicated on my work machine and on colleague’s variety of machines.

Turns out it wasn’t iTunes, but the antivirus (NOD32 2.7) which wasn’t playing nice. After adding various iTunes paths to AMON/IMON exclusion lists, there has not been crashes or 100% CPU since (instructions on how to do this here). Guess I was cursing the wrong software but anyhow..

Just a note, this is a fairly belated post as I was having this issue with iTunes 7.x and have since upgraded to 8.0.1 which may no longer require this workaround. ;)

Firefox 3 is out

Benny Chew — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:51:25 +0000

After trying it out for the past 24 hours, I must say I’m very impressed by the improvements over version 2. For starters, it has not hogged up to 500+MB of memory after a couple of hours, no crashes thus far too. Besides that, the new location bar (a.k.a. AwesomeBar) is simply fantastic. Most extensions have been updated to work with the latest version but you may have to switch to different ones if they aren’t updated anymore (or do some workarounds). Go get your copy of Firefox 3 here.

While on the subject of Firefox 3, BBspot has an article on it here. And before you go about saying ‘about time!’, BBspot is a satire news site. :P

My Google Reader shared items

Benny Chew — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:35:37 +0000

I subscribe to a considerable amount of feeds (which occasionally can get tiresome to clear, removed Digg as the volume was way too great) and I have a filtered list/feed available here which are items from feeds which I think is noteworthy.

It can be added to any RSS reader if you wish to be kept updated of the items which I share. ;)

Cross street in Google Maps

Benny Chew — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:29:06 +0000

I decided to find out if cross streets (intersections) can be easily searched via Google Maps rather than searching for one street and just scrolling around to find the intersection with the other recently, and realised there was a keyword to do that.

For e.g., typing a very frequently used rendezvous point into Google Maps:

Swanston St at Bourke St VIC 3000

Would give you the intersection of Swanston St and Bourke St (ex-Nike Melbourne). Link to the page here.

Pretty nifty since it’s common place for shop lot locations to be listed as ‘corner X road and Y road’.

via MalekTips

Music from Windows system sounds

Benny Chew — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:43:37 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gmail 2.0

Benny Chew — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:10:56 +0000

An updated version of Gmail was recently rolled out to most users just after IMAP access was released, and I got it pretty early on. However, I somehow got reverted back to the old version a few hours later and never actually figured out why, till now..

Apparently, after I got moved over to the new version, I actually switched my language preference in the settings from English (US) to English (UK). :| I sort of left it as it is since then and finally decided to find out the root cause today (after much cursing at how evil it was for me to be given access to the updated version for just a few hours..).

So if you still seem to be stuck in the old version, try the following (was suggested here):

Click ‘Settings’ in your Gmail window (top right, close to ‘Sign Out’).
In the drop down for ‘Gmail display language’, change it to ‘English (US)’.

Oh well, Gmail is still in beta..

More screenshots of the new version here.

More BitTorrent stuff

Benny Chew — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:11:58 +0000

I think the links are kinda old, but anyway..

Both links from TorrentFreak.