PC Knight

Change command prompt to monochrome

knight17 — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:27:04 +0000

Windows on Windows was bitten by memories of the monochrome days. So it introduced a handy tip to emulate a monochrome feel for your command prompt windows. Not good for anything practical, but hey, it’s still fun! Greg Shultz at TechRepublic tells us how:

Open a Command Prompt window.
Right the title bar and select the Properties command.
Select the Colors tab.
Select the Screen Background button and select the black box in the color palette.
Select the Screen Text button.
To emulate an old green monochrome monitor, select the green box in the color palette, and then in the Selected Color Values panel use the spin button for the Green setting to move the number up to 255. Make sure that the settings for the Red and Blue remain at 0.
To emulate an old amber monochrome monitor, select the green box in the color palette, and then in the Selected Color Values panel use the spin button for the Red setting to move the number up to 185. Make sure that the settings for the Green remains at 128 and Blue remains at 0.

Hat Tip

How To Remove Advertisements From Eye TV Programs And Convert Them Into iPhone, iPod Format

knight17 — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:08:01 +0000

If you are a lucky iPhone owner, by now you might have discoverd what a pain it is to use EyeTV for deleting commercials. You had to actually select each and every commercial break manually, then compact your recording, then export it n an appropriate format for the iPhone.

Today, I came across a solution (from a frustrated user), read on for detailed guide:

First you want to install X11 for Mac OS X if you don’t already have it. You’re going to need it to compile Mplayer. If you don’t know where it is, it’s on your OS X install discs under additional software.
Go get Macports if you don’t already have it. You can get it from here.
Follow the installation instructions for Macports including running the selfupdate. After doing so, run the following commands in a terminal:
sudo port -v install ffmpeg +a52 +faac +faad +gpl +lame +x264 +xvid

sudo port -v install mplayer +darwin_8 +darwin_i386 +faac +macosx +x264 +xvid

sudo port -v install wine
Now that you’ve installed all that software, go get comskip. I use version 79_99. It’s an open source mpeg commercial detector that works great. You don’t have to install it into wine or anything. Just unzip it and put the folder inside a folder called “wine” in your documents directory.
Now, download this comskip.ini file and place it in your comskip directory.
Make two new folders on your desktop called newvids and oldvids.
Download this bash shell script and put it on your desktop. In a terminal, cd to your desktop and type
chmod u+x avitoh264.sh
Edit the shell script and replace all instances of “tannhaus” with your username.
Now everything is installed and we’re ready to do our normal process of removing commercials from our EyeTV programs.
1. Go into your recordings in EyeTV. If you wish, cut any excess from the beginning and ending of the programs – before the actual program you were intending to record starts. Then compact the edited files.
2. Export the files in mpeg2 format into the directory “oldvids” on your desktop.
3. Open up a terminal and type “cd Desktop”
4. Now type “./avitoh264.sh”. A lot of gunk is going to fly by on your screen…including a lot of errors if X11 isn’t running. If it’s not, don’t worry about it. It will work anyway. It just throws a lot of errors.
5. When it’s finished, you will find all your newly formatted and commercial free videos in “newvids” on your desktop. You may now import them into iTunes and sync them to your iPod or iPhone.

Enjoy!

Links for Reference

Hattip

[tags]iPhone, iPod, Video, mpeg2, downloads, ads. mac osx[/tags]

Folding@Home Achieves Petaflop Mark With The Help of PlayStations

knight17 — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:14:47 +0000

Folding@Home, the Stanford University’s ambitious distributed computing project aimed at unlocking the mysteries of protein folding has hit another great milestone. It is the first to achieve a petaflop mark by a distributed computing initiative. The lion’s share of the processing power is contributed by Sony’s PlayStation 3 game consoles.

Known amongst the scientific community, a petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). In other words, if every person on the planet were to perform a simple mathematical calculation, such as calculating a percentage, each person would have to perform 75,000 calculations every second for the world’s population to achieve a petaflop. [...]

Current statistics on the project’s home page show processing capacity at 1P Flops (floating point operations per second) with 804T Flops from the PlayStation 3. A further 163T Flops are from Windows-based computers and 43T Flops from graphics processors.

The project is attempting to unlock the mysteries of protein folding. It’s suspected that misfolds in proteins are the cause of several diseases, including Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, BSE, and some forms of cancer so better understanding the process could lead to medical breakthroughs.

The computer power needed to perform the modeling and calculations is immense but the problem is such that it can be broken down into pieces each of which are handled by different machines. PlayStation 3 owners who enable the Folding@home application contribute unused power of their console processors to the task.

Links and Reference

[tags]petaflop, playstation, sony, folding@home[/tags]

Facts About Wikipedia

knight17 — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:17:53 +0000

It is estimated that 7% of Web surfers read Wikipedia articles in every browsing session. But do you know the following facts about Wikipedia?

About 8.2 million articles have been contributed to Wikipedia since 2001, a total of more than 1.4 billion words
The English-language version of Wikipedia has about two million entries — about 15 times as many as the largest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the standard to which it aspires
Specialist sites based on the “wiki” model include Wikible (the Bible) and Wookiepeedia (on Star Wars)
Last month it emerged that many embarrassing Wikipedia entries had been edited by organisations mentioned in them. The Chinese Government erased information about China blocking Wikipedia inside its borders. The CIA tweaked entries on Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon
I am sure you know this already. The term “wiki” is derived from the wiki wiki or “quick” buses found in Hawaii

[tags]wikipedia, wiki, facts[/tags]

Learn Linux Step By Step From IBM

knight17 — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:52:48 +0000

Here’s a series of well written IBM Linux tutorials to help you learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for system administrator certification. These are considered amongst the most popular online preparation methods cited by LPI exam candidates, as mentioned by the LPI.org website. Even if you don’t care to be certified, these tutorials are a great way to learn everything.

From : /. Firehose

[tags]Linux, Tutorials, LPI, Free[/tags]

Free Games

knight17 — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 21:13:49 +0000

Over time I have found many fully functioning games that are free to download in various places across the Web. Here are 100 of these great full games that are free to download online. They range from independent games, to games that were once commercial but are now free, free to play MMO games (some of the MMOs do have the option of purchasing in game items, etc.), free action games, 3rd person games, games designed by hobbyists, and many more!

Download Full Version PC Games blog made an attempt to create a list of freely downloadable PC Games, the list includes some nice titles. Check it out.

[tags]games, free, downloads[/tags]

How To Easily Create New Folders With Keyboard Shortcut

knight17 — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 17:00:44 +0000

Sometimes I try to organize my folders. I like my HDD to be well organized so it will be easy to find the files I need, at the right time, instead of looking here and there.

Today, I was organizing my eBooks collection; it was full of chaos after I added many books from my friend’s PC. So, I started to organize them: Programming, Operating Systems, History, Religion, Language, Science, Philosophy, Reference, Dummies Guides, Physics, Money, Novels, Encyclopedias, Magazines, Photography. I was soon fed up with creating new folders.

Creating new folders is simple. Just right click | New Folder. But I got annoyed when I had to create multiple folders. Fortunately, someone else had already found a simple solution for this pestiferous problem: a shortcut to create new folders.

mdAxelerator is a 16K .exe that enables you to define shortcut keys for creating new folders and makes it possible to change some other stuff. You can define the key combinations you wish to create new folders. The default is: [Alt]+[Shift]+[N].

You can also set it to start automatically when Windows boots; I don’t mind this damned small freeware application “hogging” my RAM.

[tags]Windows, Shortcut, Downloads, Freeware[/tags]

How A Search Engine Works

knight17 — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:55:32 +0000

nbsp;Portfolio.com has a nice slideshow on how Google works.No, it is not discussing how the page rank stuff works or anything like that. It is for the average joe.

[How Google works?]

[tags]Google, Search[/tags]

System Restore Points With A Click

knight17 — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:51:24 +0000

If you play with Windows a lot, like me, you probably know that it is always a good idea to create a restore point. So, if something goes wrong you can just get back to the previous state as quickly as possible. Instead of going the traditional method (Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | System Restore |Create a restore point and the completing the rest of the wizard.) I found a small vbs file that will do the trick.

First, open notepad (Start | Run | notepad) then paste the following:-

rp = “Scripted Restore Point by ” & WScript.ScriptName

GetObject(”winmgmts:\\.\root\default:Systemrestore”).CreateRestorePoint rp, 0, 100

Save the file with an extension .vbs instead of the default one by entering “instant_restorepoint.vbs” including the quotes, now the script is ready.

In Windows XP, you can launch the script directly to create a restore point, wheras if you are using Windows Vista; you will have to create a shortcut (Right click | New | Shortcut) input “wscript.exe”

eg: wscript.exe C:\Documents and Settings\knight17\Desktop\instant_restorepoint.vbs

Now run the script as an administrator (Rightclick|Run as admin..) and when prompted by the UAC click continue.

[tags]windows xp, tip, system restore[/tags]

Easily Resize Images

knight17 — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:36:30 +0000

Taking photographs on a digital camera is fun, but these days I am worried about disk space, it is fast running out! If you have alteast 5 megapixel camera you know that the average file size will be in the range og 1.1 to 1.5 Mega Bytes. So started my hunting to reduce image size rapidly. I downloaded Fast Image Resizer, a small freeware application that will get the job done.

Fast Image Resizer is a simple image resizer that makes it easy to resize one or multiple images for web or email distribution. You can choose from several preset image sizes or specify a custom size, customize JPG compression and output quality and output the resized images to a new folder or create renamed copies in the same folder. Simply drop the images onto the interface and the resizing process will start automatically. Fast Image Resizer preserves EXIF data and can take advantage of dual or quad processors [...]

Download Fast Image Resizer.

[tags]resize, images[/tags]