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Make Your WordPress Blog iPhone Compatible Using WPtouch

Sharninder — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:21:42 +0000

I’m sure most of you would agree with me that the iPhone is the world’s most popular smartphone. Even if you don’t agree with that statement per se, you’d definitely agree that it is the world’s most popular smartphone for accessing the Internet.

There was a time when web pages had to be written specially for mobile devices and most devices available in the market just couldn’t display regular web sites designed using HTML.

The Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod touch devices is responsible for more than half of the world’s mobile Internet usage and it doesn’t look like that uptrend is going to change soon. The reason behind this popularity is that, unlike other smart phone browsers, mobile Safari can display regular webpages as well as desktop based web browsers.

But, while the iPhone and iPod touch browsers display almost all websites perfectly, using a mobile specific theme you can offer a lot of advantages to your visitors.

For one, the mobile optimized pages will load a lot faster. The fonts will be optimized for reading on a device with a small screen and last but not the least, the user won’t have to scroll and zoom just to read the content.

But, if you’re worried that you’ll have to do a complete rewrite of your blog’s theme to make a mobile optimized version, don’t worry, WPtouch is here to your rescue.

WPtouch is a wordpress plugin that completely changes the way your blog looks on a mobile device like the iPhone, iPod touch or the Android. In that sense, it acts more like a theme for your blog rather than a plugin.

If you’re using wordpress version 2.8 or above, the easiest method to install WPtouch is to login to the admin panel and click on the “Add New” link under Plugins.

Search for the term WPtouch and when the WPtouch plugin shows up in the search results, click on the Install link to install it automatically.

Once the installation is completed, you can activate the plugin by clicking on the Activate link on the same page.

The plugin will now be installed and activated, ready to start serving a mobile version of your blog to your iPhone totting visitors.

If you want, you can just leave it at that and WPtouch will happily keep serving your visitors as long as you want, but if you’re like me and like to customize each and every part of your blog, I’d suggest that you give the Settings pane a look and customize certain aspects of WPtouch to better match your blog.

Click on the WPtouch link under Settings.

This is where you can change the theme’s style, colors and the icons used. When you’re happy with your custom changes, click the Save Options button.

If you use the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog, like I do, then you need to make some more changes to the your setup.

Click on the WP Super Cache link under Settings and check the tick box that says “Mobile Device Support” and click the Update Status button.

Scroll a little further down the page and you’ll find the Rejected User Agents text box. You need to add the following user agents to the list that is already there.

phone
ipod
android
dream
cupcake
webos
incognito
webmate
opera mini
blackberry9530
blackberry9500

Save the list.

That’s it. You can now happily declare your blog as the most mobile friendly blog in the neighborhood.

Make Your WordPress Blog iPhone Compatible Using WPtouch originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Mac: Load Flash only when you want to with Clicktoflash

Sharninder — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:23:00 +0000

Adobe’s Flash technology is pretty much THE standard when it comes to delivering video over the Internet. A number of high profile sites like YouTube, hulu and metacafe use flash to display content to their users and the flash plugin is quickly becoming a must have for every computer user.

Flash is not being used just for videos, it is also used around the Internet for creating casual games, advertisements and pretty much anything that you can think of.

In spite of all the advantages of the Flash platform, the problem with flash is that other than Windows, it really doesn’t run well on any other platform. Flash is also a notoriously heavy user of your system’s resources.

If you’re a Linux or OS X user like I am, you can forget about timely updates and can also expect your browser’s memory and CPU usage to go through the roof if you like visiting flash heavy websites. In my opinion, that is reason enough to get rid of Flash.

So, what do you do if you’ve had enough of the flash advertisements and videos making an appearance on every website that you visit ?

You give ClickToFlash a try !

ClickToFlash is an extension for Safari on OS X that blocks Flash from appearing on any site that you visit. With ClickToFlash loaded, this is how a site using flash will look like.

So, what’s the great deal about ClickToFlash, you ask ? You could have gotten rid of flash by just removing the flash plugin, right ? And to block advertisements, there are already some excellent freeware out there.

Well, I agree, but with ClickToFlash you don’t have to remove the flash plugin and that is the flexibility that it provides. The flash plugin will not be loaded up with every page you view of YouTube, for example, but you can still see the flash elements on the web page, if you want to, by just clicking on the element. So, to start playing the YouTube video above you can just click anywhere inside the gray area and the video will start playing.

Infact, in the case of YouTube, ClickToFlash also gives you an option to view the higher quality the H.264 video stream using QuickTime instead of Flash. Just right click the inside the gray area and select the H.264 option.

Isn’t that awesome ?

But, if you’re a heavy flash user, the constant clicking required to view the content on all your favorite sites might annoy you a bit. In that case, ClickToFlash provides an option to add certain websites to a Whitelist.

A Whitelist is a list of all websites which ClickToFlash excludes from blocking. Adding a site to the Whitelist is easy too, just right click the flash element on the particular site and select the Add to Whitelist option, as you can see in the image above.

ClickToFlash will then add the site’s URL to it’s Whitelist and the next time you visit that site, you’ll be able to enjoy all flash content as if ClickToFlash never happened to you ! I can already see myself making use of this feature for atleast a couple of sites.

So, do you guys find flash videos and ads annoying ? Have you ever though of ways to get rid of them ?

Note: A similar plugin for Firefox is Stop Autoplay

Mac: Load Flash only when you want to with Clicktoflash originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Install and Test Wordpress on Your Mac

Sharninder — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:18:58 +0000

Wordpress is without a doubt the most popular blogging platform around. Not only is it a good piece of software but what makes it the best tool for the job is the awesome community that is associated with development of not only the Wordpress core software, but also the various themes and plugins.

For all it’s simplicity, a lot of people still shy away from using Wordpress because installing and maintaining it requires a certain level of technical knowhow. Specifically, the knowledge of installing and managing a PHP/MySQL stack and dealing with all the problems that can happen with a botched Wordpress installation.

So, without further ado, we’ve written this post that’ll not only teach you how to install a complete PHP/MySQL stack on your Mac but also teach you to install and configure a fully functional Wordpress install, all without leaving the comforts of your own computer.

MAMP, which stands for Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP and is an all-in-one solution for people who do not want the hasle of installing and configuring the individual components on their system.

Follow the download link on the MAMP site to get hold of the latest DMG image and double click the image to mount it in the Finder. The download is a bit heavy at about 170 MB but it will be totally worth it … trust me.

One of the best things about OS X is the ease with which software can be installed. To install MAMP in your system just drag the MAMP icon to the Applications folder.

Double click the MAMP icon to launch control panel.

MAMP will automatically start the Apache web server and the MySQL database server and also launch an instance of your default browser to tell you that everything is working fine.

Keep this window open – We’ll need it in a while.

MAMP also bundles a version of phpMyAdmin along with the complete PHP/MySQL stack.

phpMyAdmin is a web based software to manage MySQL databases and we’ll use that to create a database for our Wordpress install.

Click on the phpMyAdmin link in the browser, and when it loads up in your browser, give a name for the new database and press the Create button.

That was probably the easiest MySQL install I’ve ever done.

Now that we have all the infrastructure in place for Wordpress, head over to the Wordpress website and download the latest version of the software.

Unzip the file that you just downloaded into the htdocs folder inside the MAMP folder – /Applications/MAMP/htdocs.

You should now see a wordpress folder inside htdocs. Browse to this folder and open the file named wp-config-sample.php using a text editor.

In this file, find the lines which say:

‘DB_NAME’ – replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with ‘the name of the database that you created’
‘DB_USER’ – replace ‘usernamehere’ with ‘root’
‘DB_PASSWORD’ – replace ‘yourpasswordhere’ with ‘root’

Save the file and rename it to ‘wp-config.php’ from ‘wp-config-sample.php’.

Now, open this address in your browser – http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.

Follow the wizard and at the end of it, use the temporary password that the wizard created for you to login to your shiny new Wordpress Install. That’s it ! You now have a fully functional Wordpress install on your computer to play with all the themes and plugins that you want.

How to Install and Test Wordpress on Your Mac originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Unlock Hidden Mac OS X Settings With Secrets

Sharninder — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:00:41 +0000

Mac OS X is a wonderful operating system with one of the best and easiest to use graphical interface among mainstream operating systems. It is amazing to see how much thought the designers of the OS have put into each element of the interface striving all the while to make it easier for the user to use the computer without bringing in any complexity, and retaining the ability to configure the computer as the user wishes.

But, there is still so much more that OS X is capable of and it is not always possible to harness all that power from the Graphical interface, and that is where our application of the day, Secrets, comes in handy.

Secrets installs in the System Preferences Pane and provides you access to hundreds of hidden OS X settings. Almost all of these settings can be accessed from the command line also and if you’re a regular follower of the Mac OS tips website, Mac OSX Hints, you might have come across some of them earlier. But, with the hundreds of hidden settings that Secrets unlocks, you’re bound to find some that you’ve never come across and will find useful.

To install Secrets, just download the zip file, extract it and double click the Secrets.prefPane file that is a part of the zip archive.

Now, you can just click on the icon in System Preferences and OS X will launch Secrets.

Secrets divides all the settings into various categories that are displayed in a vertical sidebar on the left side of the window. This classification makes it easy to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you want to change the dock style from the default 3D type to the older 2D style dock, just click on Dock in the left sidebar and select the 2D style from the drop down menu under Dock Appearance.

If you follow the popular OS X blogs, you’d recall that this particular setting was widely published for users who wanted to go back to the older Dock style when Apple decided to change the default Dock appearance to the 3D style in OS X 10.5. I, on the other hand, actually like the 3D look more so that’s what I keep.

How about something more useful?

One of the features of OS X that I use most often is Quick Look. This feature lets you quickly preview a document right from the Finder without even opening the document. The feature works even if you don’t have the required application installed, and Apple has been nice enough to bundle plugins for the most common type of documents along with OS X.

I use Quick Look all the time to read Word and Power point documents even though I don’t even have Microsoft Office installed on my system.

By default, if I use Quick Look on a folder all it tells me is the size of the folder and the number of files in it.

The two Finder settings that I like to enable using Secrets is to let Finder display hidden files and enable the Quick Look X-ray folders which enables Quick Look to display thumbnails of all the items inside the folder.

Changing the above settings require you to restart Finder. You can do so by clicking the Quit This button at the bottom of the window.

Now, whenever you use Quick Look to view a folder, you’ll see thumbnail images of all the documents inside the folder. Isn’t that cool ?

Go ahead and use Secrets to customize OS X as you see fit. Let us know which are your favorite Secrets.

Unlock Hidden Mac OS X Settings With Secrets originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to create a WiFi Hotspot using Mac OS X

Sharninder — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:58 +0000

WiFi is pretty ubiquitous these days, with devices that support WiFi and places that offer Internet over WiFi as a service, mushrooming everywhere.

At least that’s what I used to think till about last month when I found myself in a hotel with no WiFi and just one Ethernet port that I was expected to share with two of my friends. Now, we could all do what others at the venue were doing. Sharing the Ethernet port, finish up our work in a given time and hand over the port to the next in line.

Or we could just make one of the computers act as a WiFi hotspot and let the other PCs access the Internet through the first one.

It isn’t too difficult to guess the option that we chose, and for our little setup we decided to use my Mac as the router, since the setup was the easiest on the Mac.

In this post today, I’m going to detail the steps that are needed to share the Internet connection on a Mac effectively turning your Mac into a WiFi router.

Setting up custom network

First of all, you need to create a network of all the computers that are going to share the connection. In networking terms, this is called an adhoc network.

The good thing is that you don’t need to do anything special to create an adhoc network in OS X. OS X will prompt you when it needs to create one, if you’re using the Airport Card (WiFi) for sharing.

To enable Internet Sharing, open System Preferences (Apple -> System Preferences) and click Sharing.

Select Internet Sharing from the list of Services.

From the Drop down menu, select the Interface which is connected to the Internet source and from the list below it, select the interface which you want to share with the other computers. In my case, that was the Ethernet and the Airport (WiFi), respectively.

The third and final step is to create an adhoc network which the other computers can connect to.

Click on Airport Options.

OS X will then prompt you to type in a name for the new network.

Unless you want all the freeloaders in the neighborhood to piggyback on your network, I’d suggest that you select the Enable Encryption option and provide a password for the network.

That’ all there is to it. Click Ok and OS X will enable Internet Sharing on your Mac, from the Ethernet to the Airport Interface.

The only thing left now is to search for a new networks in all the other computers that you want to connect, and our adhoc network should show up in the list. Select and join this network.

All the client machines should now be able to browse the Internet as if they’re directly connected to the Internet over WiFi.

How to create a WiFi Hotspot using Mac OS X originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Pause a Process on OS X

Sharninder — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:07:55 +0000

So, you’ve just bought a shiny new Apple machine ? It is the fastest machine in the lineup with the max RAM you could afford.

And even that doesn’t stop OS X from throwing that annoying beach ball icon at you right when you’re at your most productive phase of the day?

If the answer to that is yes, read on!

Mac OS X normally is a pretty good multi tasking operating system but like all operating systems, OS X also has it’s limits and while it tries to make maximum use of the RAM and CPU power available to it (and multiple cores, if you’re using a grand central enabled application), there will always be times when you have to face the beach ball.

All current generation of Macs come with a fairly generous amount of RAM so running out of RAM is not that real a problem and if an application still needs to use more RAM than a certain threshold, the operating system’s swap and memory management routines kick in to handle that.

CPU cycles, on the other hand, are always in short supply. If you’re into any kind of multimedia creation or editing, you’d know what I mean.

So, what exactly are your options when an application you’re running starts consuming the CPU like there’s no tomorrow ?

Well, the first option is pretty straightforward. Find the errant application and close it. You can find the CPU usage of all applications by looking at the Activity Monitor.

To kill an application just select it and click the Red Quit Process button. Can’t be easier than that !

The only problem with this approach is that you lose whatever tasks you were doing in that application and there really is no way to get them back unless the application itself has a feature to save your tasks and resume.

But, it turns out that there is another way to deal with this problem.

Mac OS X provides a method by which you can “pause” an application instead of quitting it and then later when you want to get back to it, continue running the application from exactly the point where you left it.

The first thing that you’d need is the process identifier (PID) of the particular process that you want to pause. This is the number given in the first column of the Activity Monitor window. Note down this number. We’ll be using it pretty soon.

Now fire up the Terminal application (From the Applications->Utilities folder) and use the kill command as shown in the screenshot below

Most people think that the Kill command is only used to kill a process on Unix based systems. But, the fact is that this command can be used to send any OS defined signal to an application and STOP is one such signal that Mac OS X defines. What it does is that it stops (or pauses) whatever tasks the applications is performing and takes away control of the CPU from it. Your tasks are still kept in memory and are safe.

kill -STOP <PID>

You can check the status of the process in the Activity Monitor and it should be consuming 0% of the CPU now.

When you’re done with your work and want to get back to the paused process, just use the same kill command to pass another signal, CONT this time, to the process using the same PID that you used earlier.

kill -CONT <PID>

That’s it. You have successfully paused and restarted a process on Mac OS X. You can now happily continue with your work as if nothing ever happened.

How to Pause a Process on OS X originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7

Sharninder — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:00:47 +0000

If statistics are anything to go by, Internet Explorer is the biggest and the most popular browser on the Internet. Of course, all of us geeks here know that statistics are not always correct … or fun.

But, well, the truth is that IE owns anywhere between 60-70 percent of the browser market and despite it’s flaws, it’s still going strong. While most of the geeks have long moved to Firefox, there are millions of Windows users who still swear by IE, not because they like it but because of the simple fact that it is bundled along with their OS – Windows.

When Microsoft released the latest Incarnation of Internet Explorer, version 8, a couple of months back, it started pushing it as the answer to everyone’s miseries. Advertisements promoting IE 8 and urging users to upgrade were (and still are) on the Internet, in magazines and on TV. MS also did all it could to force users into installing the latest version of Internet Explorer on their computers by pushing it through windows update as a recommended update.

I agree that IE8 has some pretty nice features and is miles ahead of IE 7 or 6, but for people like me, who have almost completely moved over to firefox, IE just takes up precious space on the computer and is of absolutely no practical use.

And it looks like Microsoft has been thinking the same way as I do.

Windows 7, like all previous versions of Windows is also going to ship with Internet Explorer but Microsoft, faced with a number of legal threats for bundling IE along with Windows, has finally provided an option in Windows 7 to uninstall IE. The only problem is that the option to do so is hidden quite deep and with this post today, I’ll teach you how to get to it and remove Internet Explorer once and for all from your Windows 7 running PC.

First, of all, open the Control Panel and from there go to the Add-Remove programs utility. In Windows 7, this utility is present under the Programs heading and named simply, Uninstall a Program.

On the right hand side of the pane, you’ll see a list of all the programs that you’ve ever installed on your computer but Internet Explorer 8 will not be present in this list. To get to that, look at the left hand pane and you will see a link which says “Turn windows features on or off”. Clicking on this link will open a window with a list of all the windows features that you can turn off (or on).

Internet Explorer is listed in this window as a feature of Windows and it is turned on by default (denoted by the tick mark against it’s name).

To remove Internet Explorer all you have to do is uncheck the Internet Explorer 8 option.

To be fair, this feature only turns Internet Explorer off, which means that it’s still there, but you won’t see it in the programs menu and you won’t be able to run it using the windows Run command also. All links supposed to open in Internet Explorer will fail with a message saying that the application required was not found.

Missing IE ? Turning it back on is simple too, just follow the same procedure and check the tickbox saying Internet Explorer 8.

How to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7 originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7 Without Losing All Your Settings

Sharninder — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:36:46 +0000

Windows 7 is the latest incarnation of the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It is also the latest darling of the blogosphere and is being widely regarded as the only true successor to Windows XP. While Microsoft did release Vista after Windows XP, it was a disaster and most people, including yours truly, resisted migrating to Vista completely because of various reasons.

It is nice to know that Microsoft has been listening all this while and promises that Windows 7 will be much better than Vista both in terms of resource utilization and general useability. That and the fact that Microsoft has decided to withdraw support for Windows XP, will see a lot of people migrating to Windows XP from Windows 7.

The only problem is that Microsoft has not provided a direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7, so there are only two options for people who want to migrate up from Windows XP.

The first one is to upgrade to Vista and then upgrade to Windows 7 but that’s not really recommended for obvious reasons. The other solution is to do a clean installation of Windows 7 (which would wipe out your Windows XP). This option is the one that Microsoft recommends.

If you have a lot of data in Windows XP, now is the time to make a backup of it while we hand-hold you through the recommended upgrade procedure from Windows XP.

Make sure that you have the Windows 7 installation disk, either the retail version (when it comes out) or a disk burned from the ISOs that Microsoft made available for download.

Backing up your data

Insert the disk in the CD/DVD drive and when windows autorun prompts you to run the Windows 7 installer, don’t run it and instead select the option to browse/open the DVD.

In the DVD, under the support folder, there will be a folder named migwiz.

Run the program named, migsetup.exe. This is the Windows Easy Transfer tool. Microsoft wrote Windows Easy Transfer to help you transfer all your data and settings to a new machine when upgrading to a newer operating system.

As you can see, with this tool, you will be able to migrate all user accounts, email, user data and pretty much everything else from Windows XP to Windows 7.

The only thing that the Easy Transfer tool cannot take care of are the third party programs that you have installed, so you’ll need to reinstall them again. This is a limitation imposed by Microsoft and it is, currently, not possible to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 and while keeping all the third party programs as it is.

Click Next at the welcome screen and you’ll be asked to chose one of three choices for the location where you want to store all the data that the tool will save.

I chose the “External Hard disk or USB flash drive” option and I recommend that you do the same since it sounds the easiest one. If your XP machine is connected to a network and you have a network share that you can use, feel free to select that option, and click on the Next button.

The next option is pretty self explanatory and is actually the only option on the screen so select “This is my old computer” and move on.

The easy transfer tool will then scan the various user accounts for all the data that it can migrate.

Click Next and select a password for the archive. This password will be later used on Windows 7 to complete the migrartion of your settings and data. And the last step of the process is to chose the location where the Easy transfer file will be saved. Connect an external hard disc to the machine, if you haven’t done so already, and select it.

That’s it.

Now, run the Windows 7 installation program and install Windows 7 normally.

Since Windows XP cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 directly, you’ll have to choose the “Custom Option” to install Windows 7.

Proceed with the installation as you normally would.

Once Windows 7 is installed and running on your machine, attach the external hard disc that you used to take the backup, to the machine, browse over to it and double click on the backup file that you’d created earlier.

The Windows Easy Transfer utility will then start, ask for the password that you’d set earlier and migrate all your XP settings and data to Windows 7.

How to Upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7 Without Losing All Your Settings originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Remote Control Your Windows PC Using Twitter

Sharninder — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:12:11 +0000

Twitter is a cultural phenomenon these days. In the few short years of it’s existence, it has gone from becoming just the latest social kid on the block, to the service which most of us see/read even before our daily newspaper.

Different people use twitter for different purposes. Some use it to share interesting links with their friends, some use it to share funny jokes and some use it as their own public instant messenger, broadcasting intimate details of their life. All this was before some enterprising open source enthusiasts decided to come together and use Twitter for something even bigger – remotely controlling their PC.

TweetMyPC is an open source application that lets you send commands to your PC via Twitter and instruct it to shutdown, logoff, restart, download files off the internet and a lot more.

To setup TweetMyPC, download the latest version on your windows PC and run the installer.

TweetMyPC works by listening to a Twitter account for updates. I’d suggest that you create a new Twitter account for this purpose and also keep the updates on this account as private so that no one else is able to read the commands being issued.

Head over to Twitter.com and create a new account. Login to your newly created account and click on the Settings link. On the main Account page, you will find a checkbox to protect your tweets. Check it.

Now, launch TweetMyPC and setup the application for the first time by giving it the twitter account details that you just created.

That’s all. TweetMyPC is now setup and will continue to run in the background listening for commands on the twitter account that you set, every one minute.

To send a command to your PC, login to the Twitter account that TweetMyPC is listening to and write the command as a status update.

TweetMyPC will respond back with the physical memory of your PC in a tweet. The responses from TweetMyPC look something like this.

The responses come as updates to the same Twitter account and so everyone will be able to see them. This is the reason why I suggested that you protect your tweets while creating this account – You wouldn’t want anyone to look screenshots of your desktop. Yes, TweetMyPC can also take a screenshot of your desktop and upload the picture to Twitpic if you want to know what exactly is happening on your computer while you’re away.

Some other important and very useful commands that TweetMyPC supports are reboot, hibernate, getfilelist, getfile , hibernate and standby. You can see the complete list of commands and their syntax in this blog post by the author of TweetMyPC.

How to Remote Control Your Windows PC Using Twitter originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Uninstall Internet Explorer 8 in Windows Vista

Sharninder — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:35:31 +0000

I like to call myself a reluctant Windows user, at best. Microsoft Windows is something I use only when I have to and even then I make sure I don’t touch Internet Explorer even with a 10 ft pole.

Needless to say, whenever I login to my Windows desktop, every couple of weeks, I usually have a slew of updates waiting for me to install them, which I always dutifully install. That’s what updates are for, right ?

Well, this is where the sad part of the story begins. I haven’t really had a problem with any MS updates till now but when Microsoft, in a recent update, pushed Internet Explorer 8 on my computer, all hell broke loose. A lot of web based applications I rely on daily started acting weird. Active-X Add-ons that I need for my work stopped working. IE 8 crashed a lot more and was much more buggy than IE 7 and that is saying something, considering that I hardly used IE 7 also .

Which is why I decided to get rid of IE 8 once and for all and write this post so that it may benefit others who are in a similar situation. I use Windows Vista so some of the instructions might be Vista specific.

The first step to getting rid of IE 8 is to open the control panel and click on the Program and Features applications.

This application will show you a list of all the programs installed on your machine and allow you to uninstall them. Except for one small problem !

As you can see, Internet Explorer 8 does not show up in the list of programs installed on your machine. Since, IE was installed by Microsoft as part of a system update, The Programs and Features application doesn’t consider it a normal user application.

IE 8 shows up as an update installed on your computer. To get to that list, click on the “View Installed Updates” link in the left sidebar.

You will now see a list of all the updates that you’ve ever installed on your computer. If, like me, you’ve had your windows install for a long time, this will be one long list. Browse through the list and find the update which says Internet Explorer 8.

Select it, and click on “uninstall”. Follow the instructions, if any, and let the uninstaller take charge. Once the uninstall is complete, restart your computer and carry on with your IE 8 free life.

How to Uninstall Internet Explorer 8 in Windows Vista originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Remove DRM from iTunes Music

Sharninder — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:06:51 +0000

iTunes is the world’s biggest online music store. It is probably also the world’s biggest distributor of DRM infested music. Even though, in the past few months, Apple has taken steps to rectify the problem, the chances of you purchasing DRM laced music from iTunes are still high.

So, what is the problem, you say? “I can still listen to all this music on my iPod/iPhone”. “I can still use iTunes to manage all my DRM music”.

DRM ( Digital Rights Management) is a term used to describe procedures which are taken to prevent unauthorized use of the media in question. So, for example, if you have music with DRM purchased from the iTunes store, you will not be able to play them on any media player, other than Apple’s. You will also not be able to convert these files to the MP3 format because Apple, under DRM, doesn’t give you the rights to do so.

But, do not despair. There are ways to get around this and we’ll be teaching you exactly how to do that in this post.

There are generally two ways to remove DRM from iTunes music. The first method, which we’ll discuss here, involves the fact that Apple doesn’t let you convert protected (DRM) music to MP3, but it lets you burn them on a CD/DVD, so that’s one way of getting the music out of the system.

The second method involves using software utilities to strip out the DRM from the music. We’ll be covering this method in a later post.

Exporting DRM laced music to a CD/DVD

Insert a blank CD/DVD in the drive and open iTunes on your computer. Select the File->New Playlist option (or press Ctrl+N). Give a name to the new playlist.

Now, the next step is to select all the files that you want to remove DRM from and drag them to the playlist that you just created.

Now that you have all the tracks you want on the CD/DVD media, right-click the playlist and select the option to “Burn playlist to Disc”.

iTunes will now present you a dialogue box where you can select the kind of CD/DVD that you want to burn. Make sure you select the Audio CD option.

iTunes should now start burning the music to the CD and it’ll let you knows once it’s finished.

Importing music from a CD/DVD

Now, select the Edit->Preferences option and under the General tab, click on Import Settings.

Select the MP3 Encoder from the drop down list and you’re all set to import the track on the Audio CD that you just wrote as MP3 files.

Remove the CD from the drive, and insert it back again. iTunes will prompt you to import the tracks from the CD to it’s own database. Let it do so and at the end of the import process, you’ll have new MP3 tracks void of any DRM.

Enjoy your DRM free music.

How to Remove DRM from iTunes Music originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Upgrade Ubuntu Without Rebooting with Ksplice

Sharninder — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:32:16 +0000

Don’t you hate it when you’re in the middle of something important and the operating system keeps bugging you to reboot your computer, just because an important security update was installed ?

I hate it and I’m sure the guys behind Ksplice hated it too. They hated it so much that they decided to do something about it and developed Uptrack.

Uptrack is a software updater which works in much the same way as Ubuntu’s default update manager, with the exception of one important step. Uptrack doesn’t require the computer to be rebooted after an update has been installed. Ksplice, the company behind Uptrack, has developed a technology which lets a running program, even the kernel, be upgraded without the need for a reboot.

Isn’t that awesome ?

Installing Uptrack on your Ubuntu 9.04 system is quite easy as you’ll see.

First of all, Request for an access key from Ksplice’s website. Enter your email address and you’ll recieve the key by email within a couple of minutes.

Now, you should add the Ksplice repository to APT, so that you can use apt in the future to update Ksplice also.

In your terminal, type the following command to open up the Apt sources list.

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ksplice.list

Add the following lines to the file.

deb http://www.ksplice.com/apt jaunty ksplice
deb-src http://www.ksplice.com/apt jaunty ksplice

Save and close the file. Now, run the following commands on the terminal:

sudo wget https://www.ksplice.com/apt/ksplice-archive.asc
sudo apt-key add ksplice-archive.asc
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install uptrack

The first command downloads the PGP key for the repository and the second command adds it to the list of keys trusted by APT. This will make sure that apt doesn’t complain everytime you download something from the ksplice repository.

The second commands refreshes the local APT repository and the third command installs uptrack. The key that Ksplice emailed you earlier, will be required now, so make sure you have that handy. Uptrack has a default CLI which can be used to manage updates, but if you’re the GUI kind, run the following command to install the uptrack-manager GUI for uptrack.

sudo aptitude install uptrack-manager

Once uptrack-manager is installed, you’ll see an icon in the taskbar which is Uptrack’s way of letting the user know if and when new kernel updates are available.

The ‘K‘ icon with the red warning means that there are updates available for your system. To view the updates that are available, just click on the icon.

To install the updates shown on the screen, just click “Install all updates“. Uptrack runs via cron to periodically check for new updates but if you want to manually check for updates, you can click on the “Check” button to do that.

That’s all. You can now say Goodbye to all the schedules reboots that you had to do earlier everytime a software update came through.

How to Upgrade Ubuntu Without Rebooting with Ksplice originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Compress A Video File with Virtualdub

Sharninder — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:21:59 +0000

Anyone who has played around with any kind of video knows how huge uncompressed video files can be. The huge size of video files is what has led to the proliferation of video compression algorithms like DivX, Xvid, MP4 etc, but how exactly do you compress an uncompressed video to one of these formats, to save space and maintain your sanity ?

In this post, we’ll teach you exactly that. We’ll be using an open source application called Virtualdub to compress a video file while still retaining the quality of the original.

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for Windows. It is free and open source and is released under the GNU GPL license.

To get started with using Virtualdub, download and install it from virtualdub.org. By default, Virtualdub does not come with any video compression codecs built in, because of licensing restrictions. You can however get started by downloading the Xvid codec from www.xvid.org. This is the format that we will compress our video to.

Once you have the codec installed, launch Virtualdub and click ctrl+O to load the uncompressed video. Virtualdub should load the video and you should see a screen similar to the one below.

This is called the timeline view.

A video format like the .avi that I have loaded here has two parts, the video part and the audio part and we can treat both parts seperately for compression. To give an idea about the level of compression we achieve, the uncompressed file is about 716MB in size. We’ll look at the size of the compressed file once we’re done with the process.

Click on Video and chose the Compression option (Or click ctrl+P). From the list of Codecs displayed on the left side of the window, choose the “Xvid MPEG-4 Codec” and click on

Configure

The only option that you need to worry about in the Configure window is the Target bitrate. When you open this window for the first time, you will see a default value in it which is the bitrate of the original file. Mine was 700 kbps. I changed it to 300 kbps. 300 is a decent enough bitrate if you’re producing video for the web and are concerned about the size of the file, which is what this tutorial is about, right ?

Click on Ok and come back to the time-line view.

Now, we need to select a compression codec for the Audio part of the file. From the Audio menu, select the option titles “Full processing mode“. Now, select Audio again and click on Compression.

From the list of Audi codecs, choose MPEG Layer-3 and click on Ok to get back to the time-line view.

Now, to create the compressed file, choose the File->Save as AVI option and give a new name for the compressed file. Virtualdub should now start saving the compressed file to your chosen location.

After the compression process is done, you can check out the size of the new file.

Isn’t that amazing ?

The compressed file will, obviously, be of slightly lower quality but I’m sure you can live with that, considering the huge savings in space.

How To Compress A Video File with Virtualdub originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Enable 3D Acceleration In VirtualBox

Sharninder — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:47:34 +0000

Virtualbox is an excellent application to have if you’re looking to try out new operating systems and/or are generally interested in virtualisation for the many benefits it offers.

Make Tech Easier has extensively covered VirtualBox a couple of times earlier and we are great fans of this cross platform, open source application.

One thing which VirtualBox was missing till some time back was support for 3D acceleration for guest operating systems. What this means is that the graphics driver used inside the guest virtual machines was only capable of simple 2D graphics and thus interfaces like Compiz on Linux and Aero on Vista were not useable.

There was basic 3D support for Windows guests in Virtualbox 2.1 but users using Virtualbox to run Linux guests were mostly confined to the 2D graphics driver. That has changed with the release of VirtualBox 2.2 recently and VirtualBox now supports 3D acceleration. The 3D acceleration support built in VirtualBox uses your native machine’s graphics hardware to provide this capability, so if your native graphics driver doesn’t have 3D capability, VirtualBox cannot make use of it.

The support for 3D acceleration is not enabled by default and with this tuturial we aim to help you guys set up a new virtual machine with 3D accelerated graphics support.

First create a new Machine the usual way, and install a guest operating system in it. We used Ubuntu for our testing.

Now, you need to edit the settings of your newly created virtual machine. To edit the settings for any virtual machine, the virtual machine has to be shut down. So, first shutdown whatever operating system you have running inside the virtual machine.

Now, while the virtual machine is highlighted, click on the Settings button to open up the settings window.

In the general settings pane, check the check box titled, “Enable 3D acceleration”.

That’s it. The virtual machine has been enabled for 3D accelerated graphics now. But, to actually start using 3D effects inside your guest operating system, you need to be using the special VirtualBox graphics driver, which is distributed with the “Guest Additions”.

To Install the VirtualBox “Guest Additions” drivers in your guest operating system, while the guest is running, click on the Devices menu and select the “Install Guest Additions” option.

Now, follow the instructions to install the drivers in the guest operating system.

Now, you can enable Aero or Compiz effects in the guest operating system and make full use of the graphical capabilities of your machine’s graphics card.

How To Enable 3D Acceleration In VirtualBox originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Create An iPhone Ringtone Using iTunes For Free

Sharninder — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:50:21 +0000

The iPhone is an awesome smartphone and I’ve been in love with it ever since I got it.

The iTunes app store is just one of the many benefits of using the iPhone and it is amazing to see and use all the innovative applications being developed by third party developers.

However, if you talk about Apple as a company, they’ve had a pretty tight control over the iPhone platform and that is my only gripe with it. Apple’s control over the iPhone ecosystem is so much that they charge you to even create ring tones for the iPhone even if you have purchased the song legally through iTunes, and for a lot of people paying for ringtones is the only way to get ringtones for the otherwise excellent phone.

In today’s tutorial we’ll show you how you can create a ringtone for your iPhone for free using nothing but iTunes and a little perseverance.

To start with creating your own iPhone ringtone, open iTunes and select the song that you want to make a ringtone out of.

Right click and select “Get Info“. Go to the “Options” tab select a “Start Time” and “Stop Time” . This will ensure that iTunes will play the song starting from the “Start Time” to the “Stop Time”. Make sure that the stop time doesn’t exceed the start time by more than about 40 seconds. To be on the safer side, I usually keep the length at 30 seconds.

You can uncheck the start and stop time settings after you’ve created your ring tone.

Now, go to Edit->Preferences and in the General tab click on Import settings

And make sure that the AAC encoder settings are set to the following.

Now, right click on the song that you’d selected in the beginning and create an AAC version out of it.

You should now see two songs with the same name in iTunes but one of them would be of 30 seconds duration (or the duration that you chose for the ringtone), while the other one would be the full original song. We’re almost done now.

Select the newly created 30 second AAC version of the song in iTunes and press CTRL+C. Paste the song on your desktop (or any other folder) using the CTRL+V shortcut. This AAC version of the song will have the .M4A extension. Change it to .M4R.

Now, with the iPhone connected to your computer. Simply drag this file to the iPhone icon in iTunes.

That’s it. Your newly created ringtone should now be visible in the iPhone and you can start using it rightaway.

How to Create An iPhone Ringtone Using iTunes For Free originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Gmail Notifier For Ubuntu 9.04

Sharninder — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:07:56 +0000

Ubuntu 9.04 is the latest major release of Ubuntu. Among it’s many improvements, it brings with it a very cool new notification system to notify the user of events happening on the system using a nice transparent popup window in one corner of the screen.

The notification system has been designed to be non intrusive and as such, does not require user intervention at all. All notifications are on the screen for a pre-defined period of time and after that just disappear without the user having to do anything.

The Ubuntu team has done a very good job of modifying the various system applications to use the new framework but until now I haven’t seen any email notification application using this framework.

The non-intrusive nature of the notifications makes it a natural choice to be used as an email notification method and the first utility to be made for the task is the awesome Gmail Notifier called gm-notify.

gm-notify has still not been included in the main Jaunty repository, so to install it you will have to add its launchpad PPA repository to the package manager.

Start editing the software sources by starting the application from System->Administration->Software Sources, and add the following repository to the list of third party repositories.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/t.vetterlein/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Click on close and reload to let the package manager update it’s repository with the new list of packages. This should be done in a couple of minutes.

Now, you can install the gm-notify utility using the Synaptic Package Manager at System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager.

You might be prompted about a missing apt key and such but you can ignore that for now, since we haven’t installed the PPA key for this particular repository yet. In any case, the repository is safe and I have tested it myself.

Now, to configure gm-notify to work with your account, you will have to press ALT+F2 and type in the “Run” dialogue box which comes up, type “gm-notify-config.py” to run the gm-notify configuration GUI.

Enter your username, password and the mail checking interval and click on Apply.

Now, from the same “Run” dialogue box (Alt+F2), start the gm-notify daemon by type “gm-notify.py”. Press the Enter key and you should see a small mail icon in the Ubuntu Panel.

Now, everytime you recieve a new email, you will see a nice cool looking notification. No need to check your email like every minute.

Since, this is a new facility being provided by Ubuntu 9.04, gm-notify will not work on any version of Ubuntu prior to 9.04 or for that matter any other Linux distribution. To install Ubuntu 9.04 and set it up the way you want to, read our guide on the topic.

What other applications do you guys use for email notifications ? Let us know in the comments.

Gmail Notifier For Ubuntu 9.04 originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Convert A DMG File To ISO

Sharninder — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:35:43 +0000

The ISO file format is pretty much entranched in the PC world as THE format to use for CD/DVD disk images. The advantages of this format are plenty – It is a standard open format and tools to work with it are readily available for all operating systems, Windows, Unix/Linux and OS X.

While Mac users can use the ISO format on their machines, Most software on OS X is distributed as a DMG file. The DMG file format has a couple of arguable advantages over the ISO format like encryption, compression etc., but the truth is that the rest of the world uses ISO and there is no way easy way to use DMG files in the PC world.

I faced this dilemma at work a couple of days back when I had a DMG file in my hand and had to burn it to a DVD but I was using a Linux machine.

I tried searching online for solution to burn a DMG on Windows but couldn’t find any free utility. So, I searched for the next logical solution. Convert the DMG to ISO and I found a way to do it – and the good thing is that the tool to be used for the conversion comes with Mac OS X and is a simple command line utility.

This method only works on a Mac, so you have to convert the DMG file to an ISO on the Mac itself and then transfer and use the resulting ISO on your PC. The utility to be used for the purpose is hdiutil and the complete command is:

hdiutil convert dmgfilename.dmg -format UDTO -o converted_iso

Below is the screenshot of the command that I used to convert my DMG file to ISO.

The above command will create a file with a .cdr extension, which stands for a CD/DVD master. If you want, you can rename it with a .ISO extension and it should still work fine. Copy it over to your Windows or Linux/Unix machine and you’re all set.

You can now use Nero, cdrecord/wodim or the OS’s built in ISO burning tools to burn this ISO file to any media.

How To Convert A DMG File To ISO originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Configure A Firewall In Linux Using Firestarter

Sharninder — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:38:51 +0000

Long back, when I was running a Windows only PC, a firewall utility was always among the first software that I used to install on a newly formatted machine. Along with an Antivirus, a firewall used to be considered a must for any Windows installation that was in any way connected to the outside world.

Of course, times have changed now. I use Linux almost exclusively and rarely see the Windows login prompt. Most Linux distributions are far more secure than Windows, out of the box, but the threat is still there and having a good firewall protecting your computer is still a good idea.

Almost all Linux distributions comes bundled with a firewall software known as iptables, which is a command line based software for configuring Firewall rules for all network traffic to and from the Linux kernel.

Being a command line tool, the syntax tends to be a bit cryptic and even, intimidating for the first time user. This is where Firestarter comes into the picture.

Firestarter is a graphical interface for the iptables firewall. To install Firestarter on Debian, which is the Linux distribution that I use, give the following command.

sudo apt-get install firestarter

And then launch firestarter using the Applications -> Internet menu entry.

Instead of an intimidating interface, Firestarter uses a simple wizard to take new users through the steps necessary for configuring the firewall.

The first step is to identify which network interface will the firewall listen to. This is usually the primary network interface of the machine which is connected to the Internet.

Next comes the part where the user is asked to chose wether the particular machine is used for sharing the Internet connection. Select the secondary network interface of the machine which is connected to the rest of the internel network, if this machine is also being used for sharing the internet connection.

That’s it. The firewall is ready to be deployed.

Click on the Save button and you will see the Firewall status window. This is where you can see current statistics about your newly created firewall and also tweak the rules even more if you so desire.

By default, this firewall is fairly restrictive but if, for example, you want to create a rule that only your friend should be able to remotely access this machine, then you can add a policy to whitelist your friend’s IP address.

Firestarter is, in my opinion, a very simple and easy to use utility to configure and manage the iptables firewall, both for the novice and the experienced user.

Do you use any other firewall software on Linux ? Let us know in the comments?

How To Configure A Firewall In Linux Using Firestarter originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Convert PDF Files To Word For Free Online

Sharninder — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:35:19 +0000

The PDF file format is quickly becoming the de-facto format for sharing information on the web.

The good thing about PDF files is that the format allows the creator of the document, the ability to retain the original formatting even when the document is being viewed on different operating systems or different viewers.

The only problem with PDF files, though, is that it’s not easy to edit them. Not unless you buy the Adobe Acrobat suite which costs a bit of money, well … a lot of money !

We have covered ways to convert PDFs to editable word documents and today we will cover another tool to do the same job, pdftoword.com, except that this is Web-based.

PDFtoWORD.com (their capitalization, not ours) is a free web based application that does exactly what the name says – it converts PDF files to Word. PDF to Word will also convert to the RTF format, if you’re interested in that.

PDF to WORD is so easy to use, you don’t even need to register anywhere. Just point it to the PDF that you want to covert, chose the format that you want (DOC or RTF) and give them your email address.

The web application will then upload the file that you supplied to their servers, perform the conversion and send you the converted document via at the email address that you supplied. That’s all about it!

This is definitely the easiest and best PDF conversion application that I’ve used till now, and I’ve tried quite a few ! I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the conversion.

The conversion process can take a couple of minutes, so be patient. Rest assured, in a couple of minutes you will have a shiny word document in your email inbox, that you can start editing to your heart’s content.

The only hitch to using PDF to WORD for converting PDFs is that the maximum size of the input file that it can take is 10MB. So, all you aspiring authors might have to wait some time before you can actually use this tool to swap your name instead of the original author’s name from the latest bestsellers, and brag to your friends.

Other than the above caveat, the application is pretty stable and ready to use.

Convert PDF Files To Word For Free Online originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Extract Files From Rar, Zip Archives online

Sharninder — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:49:50 +0000

A couple of days back, while I was searching for some nice wallpapers for my desktop, I came across this neat collection bundled in a rar archive. The collection had all sorts of nice wallpapers for different sized desktops and was exactly what I wanted.

The only problem was that the file was about 100 MB and I didn’t really have the inclination or time to download it. And moreover, I wasn’t even interested in all the wallpapers from that collection. All I wanted was a way to open the archive and be able to download only the 1400×900 sized images.

With that goal in mind I went searching for tools online to help me view and download files from within rar archives and came across Wobzip.

Wobzip is an online archive viewer. It is based on the excellent open source archiving tool 7-zip, and so supports all formats supported by 7-zip, including the more esoteric ones like CAB, ARJ, CPIO etc. Of course, it also supports the common formats like ZIP, RAR, ISO, TAR etc so whatever your need be, Wobzip probably has you covered.

To start using Wobzip, All I had to do was point it to the location of the wallpaper archive and within a couple of minutes I could view all the files contained within the archive and download the ones that I was interested in.

The archive is password protected ? No problem, Wobzip supports those too. Just give the password of the archive to Wobzip and it’ll handle everything for you.

Wait for Wobzip to download the archive file to it’s servers and once it’s done, you’ll be able to view it and download any or all the files contained within it.

A friend has sent you an archive that you don’t have the viewer for ? Fret not!

Wobzip also lets you upload an archive to their servers and then view and download its contents.

Wobzip promises that each file is encoded using a hash and so no Wobzip employee can read your precious data, but if you’re still paranoid you can click on the delete all files button once you’re done downloading the one file that you were interested in.

I found Wobzip to be lifesaver and hope that it is useful to you guys also. And trust me, that one time when you really have to use it, you’ll thank MakeTechEasier and of course, the awesome guys behind Wobzip.

Extract Files From Rar, Zip Archives online originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)