Archive for category Tips & Tweaks
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.
WAP site for Malaysian news
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Web on December 8th, 2006
If you’re on the move a lot but still want to be updated of Malaysian news, check out this site. Sent to be by Alan, it contains the latest news from sites such as The Star, Bernama, NST, The Edge and some other well known sites with everything stripped out to leave just the article header title and body text which makes it easily accessible (and readable) by WAP enabled mobile devices.
Firefox 2 built-in dictionary
Posted by Benny Chew in Firefox, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Web on November 26th, 2006
You probably would’ve noticed the dotted underlined red lines under misspelt words which are typed into text boxes/forms/fields. To me, it’s a rather welcomed feature since I use web applications and services quite a fair bit (I don’t misspell a lot, but automated checking is a bonus I guess ;)), but by default, the bundled dictionary is for the US locale which would complain when you spell ‘favour‘ instead of ‘favor‘.
Fortunately, it’s a rather easy to get around this, which is just to select and install the appropriate dictionary from here. Once that’s done, just right-click on any text box/field/form and you should be able to select the dictionary you want to use (screenshot below):
Once that’s done, you’re all set! :)
workFRIENDLY
Posted by Benny Chew in Humour, Tips & Tweaks, Web on November 19th, 2006
If you’re in work environment which utilises Microsoft Word a lot for work, you could try workFRIENDLY. It basically allows you to surf most sites in a Word-like interface.
I’m not going to go into the ethical issues of such an application, neither am I supportive of that behaviour and I do wish to be held responsible if your superior finds out. :P
Eliminating document viewing troubles
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Windows on November 4th, 2006
If you have used word processing software such as Microsoft Word long enough, you would probably know by now that all the fancy formatting and styling you have for your document on your computer may look totally horrendous on another machine, especially when viewed with other ‘compatible’ word processing software such as Open Office‘s Writer or other freely available viewers.
To avoid this problem, one easy way is to generate PDFs of your document which you can then distribute which you can be sure they would be able to view it without any issues.
Adobe‘s PDF format is probably the de facto standard when it comes to document viewing. The Adobe Reader software which is used to view PDF files is free and is installed in most computers nowadays. Another free PDF viewer which you can use instead is Foxit Reader.
So now to generating PDFs! Just follow the steps below and you should be able to start generating them real soon:
- Download PDFCreator from here (get the .msi version, i.e. zPDFCreator-0_9_3-AD_DeploymentPackage-WithoutToolbar.msi).
- Install PDFCreator by running the .msi file which you downloaded earlier. If you go to ‘Printers and Faxes’, you should see a new ‘PDFCreator’ printer installed.
- Open your document as usual, get to the print dialog, choose printing preferences and then select the PDFCreator printer.
- Hit ‘Print’ as usual and you would then be prompted on the filename of the PDF file and where you want to save it to.
With PDFCreator, you can practically generate PDFs from any application which supports printing. There are other settings you can choose from in PDFCreator such as having the PDF encrypted to prevent unauthorised copying.
Another PDF generating software which you can try out instead is CutePDF Writer which does the same thing, but requires you to download and install the Ghostscript converter separately and does not have that many features as compared to PDFCreator.
More Firefox 2 tweaks
Posted by Benny Chew in Firefox, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Web on October 30th, 2006
Apparently it’s now officially called Firefox 2 and not two-point-o (2.0), so I’ve dropped the .0 from the title. :P
I usually use the shortcut keys ALT+I, ALT+B rather frequently at a forum I visit to get highlighted text in the post box to be italicised or bolded, but in Firefox 2, this shortcut keys no longer work by default. You now have to add the SHIFT key into the mix, so it goes ALT+SHIFT+I instead. If you don’t want to use the SHIFT key, you can edit two values in about:config (like for the close tab button previously):
Change:
ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
ui.key.contentAccess to 4
Taken from MozillaZine forum.
As for other about:config tweaks, head over to this page and for other Firefox tweaks, check this guide out. ;)
Upgrading Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) to 6.10 (Edgy Eft) using apt-get
Posted by Benny Chew in Linux, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks on October 29th, 2006
This upgrade was released a day or 2 ago, and I thought I’ll give it a shot at upgrading using apt-get‘s distupgrade. The steps I used:
- sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
- sudo apt-get -f install
- sudo dpkg –configure -a
- Reboot.
Steps taken from Debian Admin.
The first step replaces all occurrences of ‘dapper’ with ‘edgy’ in the sources.list which has the list of repositories apt-get will use (e.g. I have mine pointed to my ISP’s FTP mirror instead), the next step updates the sources.list which is then followed by the upgrade. 5th and 6th step is to check that the process completes properly and the last step is pretty self explanatory.
Only issue I had with the upgrade was VMware Server stopped working, which I’ll probably have to reconfigure/reinstall it as I think some configuration stuff probably got overwritten.
Ubuntu’s documentation wiki has probably more comprehensive explanations on the upgrade steps as well as alternative upgrade choices.
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