How To Set Up Your Printer In Ubuntu

Or, how to print effectively without any hassles in Ubuntu.

Step 1] Boot Ubuntu

Step 2] Make sure your printer is connected (via USB) and switched on

Step 3] Have two glasses of water

Step 4] Watch TV for five minutes

Step 5] Return to your terminal and start printing.

That’s it. No spoolsv problems, nothing. Ubuntu will notify about low-ink and out of paper problems. It also reads .pdfs and .docs, so there is no question of incompatibility anyway.

Switching From Gmail to Yahoo! Mail

Yes. That’s true. From Gmail to Yahoo! Mail. NOT the other way round. Many (including me) love Google and its relatively new mail client. But the truth is, Yahoo! is the better one. It has some really nice features, which many Yahoo! skeptics would have ignored. People switched to Gmail as it was new and funky. But all of us know about that (un)popular Gmail server crash. Gmal lost its credibility as a good e-mail client back then. Yahoo! is still better. It has filters, drag-and-drop features, and also loads much faster than Gmail. Even faster, when cached.

I did a test to prove it

1] Google Mail

Typed mail.google.com in the address bar of Firefox, made sure that no bandwidth-consuming processes were running, and hit enter.

Enabled: Chat, Calendar

Disabled: Labs, Themes

Time taken to load: 8.99 seconds

2] Yahoo! Mail

Typed mail.yahoo.com in the address bar of Firefox, made sure no bandwidth-consuming process was running, and hit enter.

Enabled: Every friggin’ thing available by default: news, temperature, chat and calendar.

Disabled: Nothing

Time taken to load: 7.56 seconds

Which proves it that Yahoo! Mail loads faster than Gmail by 1.43 seconds. That’s a large number, considering Gmail had no labs enabled.

So if I have convinced you to move to Yahoo! Mail from Gmail, here’s how to do it:

TrueSwitch

Step 1: We’ll be using this service called TrueSwitch. It does cost $19.95, but free to do, when you switch to Yahoo! (Wow. I was a poet and I didn’t even know it!). Click here to begin switching.

"Copy, Notify, Forward, Cancel" seems to be the motto of TrueSwitch, and it lives up to it.

Step 2: After you’ve done that, you’ll need to sign in to Yahoo! Type your password, and click Sign-in.

Sign-in to your Yahoo! Account

Step 3: After you’ve signed in, you need to grant TrueSwitch permission to access your account. Click I Agree.

Confirmation

Step 4: Enter your old e-mail address (Gmail in this case). Enter your username, and select gmail.com in the first drop-down box. For example, if your e-mail ID is shadowline@gmail.com, you type in only shadowline and select gmail.com in the drop-down box.

Type your old e-mail address password, select all data to be transferred (I recommend you check both Email and Address Book.)

You can also send a notification to all contacts in your old Gmail account informing about the change in your e-mail ID. Clicking on Personalize this notification will help you draft a custom message manually, which will be sent to your contacts.

You will need to give TrueSwitch all details to switch to your Yahoo! account

An example of the notification the recipient receives when your notification reaches him/her.

Step 5: When you’re sure you’ve done everything, including agreeing to the Terms of Service, click Start Transfer. You should see this dialog box.

Although it claims to take a few seconds, it takes suprisingly longer than the expected time to process the data, depending on your current Gmail account.

Step 6: After a really long and agonizing wait, TrueSwitch completes “confirming your account info”. Open your Yahoo! Mail account. If all the mails aren’t there, don’t worry. Wait for about sixteen hours. You’ll see all mails with each sorted out into folders available to you. Nothing changes in the first twelve hours. The final result comes only after sixteen hours, when all your folders and current mails have been transferred.

Step 7: Now that the transfer is complete, you need to direct all your mails to your Yahoo! account. Open Gmail. Click Settings. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Enable forwarding by clicking on the Forward incoming mail to radio button. Type in your complete new email ID. Select archive Gmail’s copy in the drop-down box, so that all mail remains in the Gmail inbox as well.

Forwarding all incoming mail

Step 8: Click Save Changes and open your Yahoo! Mail account. You must have received a mail from accounts-noreply@google.com. Click on the confirmation link, and you’re through.

Congratulations! You have successfully travelled from Gee Mail to Yahoo! Mail. Lemme reassure you. Its a move you’ll never regret.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License

Charismatic Conversations #5

Another chain mail this time, but pictures. Shikhar sent me this awesome e-mail. Its about women.

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Boost Your Internet Speed

Did you know that Windows XP reserves 20% of your bandwidth by default  for other applications, meaning that you will not be able to access your browser at maximum speed, because of some other application? It sucks, right? Well now you can change it. As usual, not by any 3rd party application, but by some clever tweaking. Lets edit group policies!

Steps

1] Hit WinKey+R to open the Run… dialog box.

2] Type gpedit.msc in the Run… dialog box and hit Enter or click OK. The Group Policy window opens up.

3] Navigate to Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates…

…QoS Packet Scheduler.

4] Now, in the right pane, double-click on Limit reservable bandwidth.

This window should open. This is how it looks like, originally.

6] Click the Enabled radio button. You will see 20% entered in the Bandwidth limit (%) text box. Type 0 instead. Zero. Not O. It should now look like this.

7] Click OK and close all the other windows. Restart Windows. You will surely notice a change in the speed.

It worked for me. Comment if it worked, or didn’t!

Blocking An Application

The registry can be modified easily to make way for a lot of tweaking. Blocking access to an application is one of those great things. No, as usual, I’m not going to use any third-part app (as they can be dangerous). Lets do some registry hacking by ourselves!!

1] Click Start –> Run… or hit WinKey+R on your keyboard to open the Run… dialog box.

2] Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software …

…/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies …

… /Explorer.

3] Right-click on any empty space in the right pane, and go to New –> DWORD Value.

4] Name the newly created DWORD Value as disallowrun. Press Enter to confirm the renaming.

5] Double-click disallowrun (which you just created) and make sure the Value data is 1 and the Base is Hexadecimal. Click OK when you’re done.

6] Again, right-click on any empty space in the right-pane, and select New –> String Value

7] Name the new String Value anything. I named it notepad, as I want to block the Notepad application. Hit Enter after renaming the file.

8] Double-click the String Value which you just created, and enter the exe name of the file you want to block. It is notepad.exe in this case. To find out the exe name, open Task Manager (by typing taskmgr in Run), and identify the exe name of the application you’re running. Type it into the Value data and click OK.

9] Close the Registry Editor, and restart your computer. You will find that the application is blocked.

Comment if it worked, or didn’t!

Publish Your Blog Using Word 2007

When Microsoft released Office 2007, I was overwhelmed at all the things it could do, and it never ceases to impress me. Especially PowerPoint – it’s got those great reflection controls. It’s one of the best office suites for Windows I’ve ever used – except iWork, which is only for Mac OS X. Yes. Better than Symphony and OO.org.

A great feature, this time from Word 2007, is blog publishing. Publishing a blog is just as easy as typing a document along with the ease of putting all those great headlines and super-efficient spell checking. So here are the steps. Follow closely!

1] Open Word 2007. Vista or Windows 7 users can type “word” in the search bar in the Start menu.

2] Click on the Office button on the top left corner.

3] In the menu, click Publish and click Blog.

4] A new document must now open. A dialog box will appear, telling you to register an account. Click Register Now.

5] Choose your blog provider now. A list of the common blog providers is already available; however, you may add another one if your blog provider isn’t listed. I chose WordPress, as your favourite blog Shadow Line is hosted on it.

6] Click Next. A windows will appear asking you to enter your blog information. Do so.

7] This is an example of the information which I’ve entered for my blog. Notice that the URL is http://crystalunicorn.wordpress.com/xmlprc.php, and not http://www.crystalunicorn.wordpress.com/xmlprc.php. Do not forget to exclude the “www” part. It doesn’t work otherwise. Enter the User Name and Password. You do know that, don’t you. Don’t you? Don’t you?!

8] Click Picture Options if you want to change the way pictures are posted on your blog – whether you host them on the blog server, or on another server. Click OK when you’re done.

9] Your Blog Provider will now be contacted to register Word with your blog account.

10] Success! Click OK to start blogging.

Install Windows Media Player 11 In A Non-Genuine Windows XP

Pretty long title for a good post. Well, at least I think it is a good post.

So after a couple o’ years of Windows Genuine DisAdvantage, Microsoft suddenly verified my Windows XP key as non-genuine, and declared me to be “a victim of software counterfeiting”.

And I wanted WMP11, which is a part of the so-called Windows Genuine Advantage, i.e Microsoft’s policy of providing good downloads only to Windows XP licensed copy buyers, not pirated versions.

So here’s how you can easily install WMP11 on your non-genuine Windows XP. Here’s what you need

1] The Windows Media Player executable. DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT FROM MICROSOFT’S HOME PAGE. Get it from here, or here. If none of these work, Google for it, useless.

2] WinRAR. Get it from here.

3] Fifteen minutes [Actually, this depends on the speed of you internet connection, and the resources of your PC]

Here are the steps. Follow them in the exact order, after turning off your Internet Connection.

1] After you’ve downloaded Windows Media Player 11 from the given links, and also installed WinRAR, right-click on the executable i.e wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu, and click Extract to wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu/. This will only work if you have WinRAR installed. (I guess other archivers such as PeaZip might work as well, but you see, this is tried and tested]

2] After the extraction is done, open the wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu folder. You’ll see this big list of files. Ignore all, but the last two rows, which is full of icon-less executables.

3] Now, run the wmp11 file. Follow the procedure, and finish the install. Go to Start, All Programs, and click on Windows Media Player. You should now be greeted by these windows, which’ll make you feel WMP11 is already installed. Choose Custom Settings in this, click Next and…

… uncheck all the boxes in this, and click Next.

4] Now, you must see an error, telling you that the wrong version of WMP is here when something else was expected, or some crap like that. Click No, and go back to the wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu folder (which you saw in Step 2).

5] Install all the remaining executables, in the exact order I tell you (They’re all in the same order anyway):

1] umdf

2] WindowsXP-MSCompPackV1-x86

3] wmdbexport

4] wmfdist11

5] wmpappcompat

Installing all these should be easy, as all you have to do is click Next. One thing though, do check those boxes, which prompt you to restart Windows. Notice that I’ve left out wmp11, as you’ve already installed that.

6] Now, re-install wmp11, and re-do Step 3. Now…

… Ka-chow!

Hope this worked for you (it sure did for me and a couple others). Comment if it worked, or didn’t!

Revo Uninstaller

There are times, when you want to re-install a trial version, but when you do so, the trial period does not reset itself How to do this, you ask? You can delete the registry entries, you may answer.  But here comes in Revo Uninstaller. It uninstalls programs and also deletes their registry entries, and also the files associated with it. It cleans up the registry, and also frees up some space.

Get it from here. They also have a portable version (in Zip format), and also a self-extracting archive.

Here’s a tutorial on how to use Revo Uninstaller.

1] Install/extract. Now fire it up. Allow it to scan all the installed applications.

2] Search for the app to be uninstalled. I wanted to get rid of avast! Antivirus. So, I type “av” in the search box, and here it is. Click on the app, and click Uninstall.

3] Now, the uninstall window opens. Notice the various modes. I chose Advanced, and clicked Next. It does the most thorough scanning, and is “the slowest mode”. Okay, its not that slow. It does get slow while uninstalling space-consuming apps, such as Adobe Master Collection CS3. Took me nearly three hours to get rid off that one.

4] This is the window that opens next. Revo first creates a System Restore Point, then “Analyzes the applications data before uninstalling it”, and now it starts “the application’s built-in launcher”.

5] Here it is. I continue with the uninstallation (hoping you already know how to uninstall an app).

6]After its over, you return to the window in step 4, and click Next. It was disabled earlier, but it’s enabled now. That leads you to the next window here. This is the scanning process for the registry and leftover files in the hard drive. After its over, click Next.

7] Delete the registry keys…

8] …and also the leftover files!

It’s all over! Yay!

Change The Currency To Match Your Country’s

Excel

This was the most irritating moment while preparing for my computer practical examination. Microsoft Excel simply refused to accept the Rs (Rupees, the currency in India) text before the numbers, so it refused to calculate further. Not only for me, but for many other people in different countries will definitely face this problem. How to correct this? Chuck Office 07 out of the Windows (pun intended) hard-drive? Nah, that’s impossible. Although you all hate Microsoft for various reasons, you’ll have to agree that Office 07 is one of the finest office suites around. Even if it costs a fortune you are ready to download via a torrent buy a copy. But then, Microsoft is biased towards its US customers

So here’s how to correct it.

1] Hit Start. Now, click on Control Panel.

2] Now,  by default, you should see the Category View. If not, switch to Category View from the Control Panel sidebar.

3] Once you’re in the category view, click Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options.

3] Click Change the format of numbers, dates, and times.

4] See the format set for the United States? Change it to your own country. Since India uses the United Kingdom system of numbers, units, et cetera, I’ll choose that.

5] After you choose, click Apply. Now, click Customize…

6] In the Numbers tab, I changed the digit grouping from 123,456,789 to 12,34,56,789. You do so if you wish. Click Apply and go to the Currency tab.

7] Here’s why we came here for. I changed the currency symbol to Rs. Remember to put a space after typing Rs, otherwise, you’ll see the numbers stuck to the symbol. Click Apply. Change the Time and Date if you want, and if you do, remember to click Apply. Click OK, and exit.

And now, whopee!

Format a USB Disk Into NTFS – Part II

First of all, I apologize for not posting for a long time. MTNL Broadband problems, you know very well

Here is another method of formatting a USB Disk into NTFS, this time, using Windows XP’s native formatting. No external software required!

1] Plug in your pen drive, and open My Computer. I’m using a Kingston DataTraveller 100 16 GB (birthday gift for the 24th of December! Yee hah!)

The Start Menu

2] Now, locate the USB Drive. It’s KINGSTON (I:) for me. Right-Click, and choose Properties.

Right-Click Menu

3] In the Properties dialog box, click on the Hardware tab, and double-click your USB Drive. For me, it’s Kingston DataTraveller 2.0 USB Device.

Hardware Tab In The Properties Dialog Box

4] In the Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 USB Device Properties dialog box, I clicked on the Policies tab (that is what you should do too). You will notice, that the Optimize for Quick Removal Radio Button has been chosen by default. Choose the Optimize for Performance Radio Button and click OK. Click OK in the previously opened window too.

Policies Tab

5] Now, right-click on your USB Drive icon in My Computer and click Format.

The Format Option

6] In the Format menu, choose NTFS in the File System drop down menu. Check Quick Format and Enable Compression if you want. If you think you’re done, you are. There isn’t anything that can go wrong anyway. Hit the Start button and relax. You have an NTFS USB Disk now.

The Format Window

Note: I have noticed that enabling compression greatly affects the performance of Transcend USB Drives. The difference is not noticed much in Kingston drives. However, I cannot guarantee any data loss.

Merry Christmas, everyone! And a Happy Birthday to me!