Sharninder

Sharninder is a programmer, blogger and a geek making a living writing software to change the world. His tech blog, Geeky Ninja, is where he shares his wisdom. For free !

Recent Posts

How to create a WiFi Hotspot using Mac OS X

free-wifiWiFi 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.
[Read more...]

How to Pause a Process on OS X

Activity MonitorSo, 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!
[Read more...]

How to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7

IE8-logo 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.

[Read more...]

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

Windows 7 Logo 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.

[Read more...]

How to Remote Control Your Windows PC Using Twitter

Twitter 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.

[Read more...]

How to Uninstall Internet Explorer 8 in Windows Vista

Internet Explorer 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.

[Read more...]

How to Remove DRM from iTunes Music

iTunesiTunes 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.
[Read more...]

How to Upgrade Ubuntu Without Rebooting with Ksplice

Uptrack LogoDon’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.
[Read more...]

How To Compress A Video File with Virtualdub

VirtualdubAnyone 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.

[Read more...]

How To Enable 3D Acceleration In VirtualBox

VirtualBox LogoVirtualbox 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.

[Read more...]