Archive for category Tips & Tweaks
Driver installation problems with Sony WALKMAN
Posted by Benny Chew in Gadgets, General Tech, Tips & Tweaks, Windows on July 7th, 2007
My sister got a Sony WALKMAN NW-E013F as a free gift recently and the installation of drivers continually terminated abruptly at about 70%. Initially she thought it was her fault but after some googling, it was Sony’s. >:| They somehow shipped CD-ROMs with defective drivers in them, which caused that installation troubles.
Taken from here:
Important information regarding the CD-ROM software supplied with the following WALKMAN: NW-E013/E015/E016/E013F/E015F/E016F
Some CD-ROM provided with the above mentioned models may not be used. Therefore, the Hardware Operation Guide (PDF) may not be opened and the Driver for Microsoft Windows 2000 users may not be installed.
If you’re having the same issues, just get the drivers from here and it should install fine. ;)
And here‘s the link to SonicStage 4.3 which is the software used to transfer your music to the device (similar to how iTunes works with the iPod).
Sony Asia Pacific’s announcement regarding this issue can be found here.
myIPneighbors
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Web on June 25th, 2007
myIPneighbors provides a very quick and easy way to find out which other domains are hosted on the same server (IP would be more accurate I guess). If you have nothing better to do or just curious who else is on the same server as you, check it out.
Testing LCDs for dead pixels
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks on June 25th, 2007
Just posted a short write up on testing LCDs at spherebox.
Sharebee.com
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Web on June 16th, 2007
Just a site I came across earlier today which (re)uploads the file you uploaded to multiple file upload sites (Megaupload, zSHARE, Sendspace, RapidShare were the ones used when I tried). Sendspace links weren’t working for me then (apparently being fixed) and Megaupload link only worked after some delay. Link to the site: Sharebee.com
I don’t have much use for it, but if you’re into uploading files for multiple users to download from, this site would definitely cut the amount of time spent uploading to each different service. ;)
A very neat WordPress plugin
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Web, WordPress on May 17th, 2007
As stated in the WordPress’s Codex, one of the steps in doing a proper upgrade of WordPress is deactivating all plugins beforehand (and reactivating upon successful upgrade). Since I’m managing a number of WordPress sites, and each WordPress install has a fair bit amount of active plugins, doing this is a considerably arduous task and annoying (especially so since updates/upgrades get released often).
I was googling around for a quick fix for this and found this plugin which works a treat. :)
Now if only that can be added to my shell script which currently automatically grabs the latest.tar.gz and rsyncs all the separate installs to promote further efficiency and laziness..
Remove truncation of feed feature after more tag in WordPress 2.1
Posted by Benny Chew in Open Source, RSS, Tips & Tweaks, Web, WordPress on May 13th, 2007
If you have already upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and have the syndication feeds options set to ‘full text’, you might’ve noticed that the RSS feed for your blog post gets truncated after the use of the <!––more––> tag. This is a change in behaviour as compared to previous version of WordPress (2.0 and below) which would show the whole post in an RSS feed if the feed option was set to full text.
Without going into the debate of full vs. partial feeds (I’m on the full feeds side though ;)), there’s a WordPress plugin which does not require any additional configuration apart from just dropping it into your WordPress’s plugins directory and activating it. Get it from here.
Windows XP/2003 Automatic Update restart annoyance
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Windows on May 12th, 2007
I got tired of my Windows 2003 automatic installation of security updates (and restart) when they are released, so I decided to go digging around to find a way to stop that. A quick Google search got me this site, whose step 2 did the trick. Here are the steps for my configuration:
- Go to Start->Run, and type ‘gpedit.msc ‘ without the quotes and hit OK.
- Browse down to Local Computer Policy->Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Update.
- The settings which I changed are:
- Enabled ‘Configure Automatic Updates‘ and set it to ’3 – Auto download and notify for install’
- Enabled ‘No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations‘
- Disabled ‘Allow Automatic Updates immediate installation‘
- Enabled ‘Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations‘ and set it to 1440 minutes
Screenshot of my Group Policy Object Editor:
As far as I know, Windows XP does not install updates automatically by default, so that might only be a default for Windows Server 2003 which I’m using. However, I believe the restart prompt is defaulted to 10mins for XP and 2003.
Combating comment spam
Posted by Benny Chew in Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Web, WordPress on February 4th, 2007
After the major upgrade by my webhost, there was a sudden surge in spam on the blogs on spherebox, with a lot bypassing Akismet‘s filtering. Apparently he did not configure the ModSecurity Apache module (which did an excellent job previously) and was too lazy to do so as the new version he had installed had supposedly different configuration settings. :(
Since I got sick of getting the incessant email notifications of spam held in moderation queue, I decided to go looking around for fixes and came across this at WordPress’s Codex which helped cut down the crazy amount of spam that kept going through by heaps. Basically it adds rules to the .htaccess file which will check that any comments being submitted to wp-comments-post.php come from the comments page of the WordPress installation and not directly injected by spam bots.
Note that this did not stop the spam completely, but managed to reduce the volume enough so that Akismet could block it off appropriately.
If you’re encountering the same issue as I did, try it out. The instructions are fairly simple and requires few modifications. :)
sizeasy
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Web on February 4th, 2007
Just got some height/width/depth specifications of a new mobile phone and are unable to compare it visually yourself? sizeasy does an excellent job at this and only requires you to enter the dimensions.
3D view comparison between an iPod nano and a pack of playing cards:
Didn’t grab the screenshots for the other views, so if you want to check out the other views, just try it out yourself. ;)
Tab Mix Plus new window/current tab problem?
Posted by Benny Chew in Firefox, Tips & Tweaks on December 9th, 2006
Encountered a problem where certain links which were happily opening up in new windows/tabs suddenly started opening up in your current tab? Check out the fix for it here.
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