Friday, November 30, 2007

Hiding Your Navigation Bar

Really annoyed by the navigation bar on top of your blog? Want to get rid of it? Read on... After sometime surfing in the internet, I finally managed to find this good article of how to show or hide your navigation bar. Thanks to Derya my blog now looks great. You can see how to do it here. For your note, I didn't use the second part of the code because I want to get rid of the bar permanently.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Reinstalling Windows (Genuine)

Tired, that's what I'm feeling these last few days. People who use our computer at the internet cafe sometime are irresponsible. They don't care about the lifetime of the computer they use. They came to the cafe, rented a computer. Once they logged on, they installed many softwares such as Internet Download Manager (you know what this program is used to), MegaUpload toolbar (for downloading from MegaUpload), YouTube Grabber (to download files from YouTube). While these programs are useful for the customer, we (the administrator) have a lot of troubles to keep the internet connection stable once they installed the software. Using a bandwith manager also doesn't guarantee a stable connection. Anyone who installed and used this software could get all the bandwith while others will be left with a very slow internet connection.

To correct this problem, we usually uninstall these programs right after the customer left. Here is the tricky part, because we installed DeepFreeze and Billing Explorer we got another problem. Through Billing Explorer we can hide the Control Panel and DeepFreeze ensure that the Windows setting would never be changed. The two programs accidentally canceling each other leaving us with no choice than reinstalling the windows.

Another problem arise. We are using genuine Windows XP Home Edition at the internet cafe. As you know if you have a genuine copy of Windows you have to activate it 30 days after you install it. Now, it has been more than 30 days so I have activated all Windows. If you reinstall it you can't activate it anymore. You have to manually activate it by calling the Microsoft and ask for another activation key. Really why should we go with all these troubles because we are using a genuine product?

Fortunately, after searching on Google, I have came up with these two links, here and here. Both of these two links tell you the same thing, how to preserve your windows activation files before reinstalling. Note these tips would only be successful if you are reinstalling the Windows on the same machine with the same configuration as the time you first activate it. So if you're thinking on buying a genuine copy, install it, activate it and then install it on another computer you can forget that. If you have any major hardware changes such as adding another Graphic Card, you should take it off first, reinstall, reactivate the WPA and then put the Graphic Card back in.

Basically what you need to do is copy the WPA.dbl and WPA.bak files from Windows system folder (usually for Windows XP is C:\Windows\System32). Put it in a safe directory for use later. Reinstall your computer. After finished reinstalling, if you are asked to activate, just say no. Boot from safe mode (press F8 while booting). Go to system folder. You should see that there is a new WPA.dbl file there. Rename this file to whatever name you like, e.g: WPANew.dbl. Then copy your original WPA files and put it in the same folder. Restart your computer. You might be asked again to activate your Windows. Now click Yes, then choose only activate but don't register. After waiting for a few seconds your copy of Windows is activated and you should be able to use your Windows.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Label Clouds

Want to have a different look for your labels? When I was surfing the internet, I saw a lot of blogs who have a different look for their labels. The labels were randomly made bigger or smaller. So I started wandering if there is a code for this. After sometime I found the answer here. I have tried the code written there, and it worked fine. Hence, I have added a special thanks for Phydeaux3 who made this code at the bottom page of my blog. This is a really nice hacks!

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

How To Download Youtube

Have you ever heard about Youtube? If you haven't got any clues about Youtube, then probably you are in a town where you don't have internet access. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Youtube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips". As stated before, you can watch almost anything in Youtube from movie, tv clips, music videos and even a video of your own production.
Youtube was founded by three former employees of Paypal, namely Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. See below Youtube's earlier office in San Mateo.


It currently has 67 staffs and it is now acquired by Google Inc, in a deal worth US$1,65 billion. The deal was closed on 13 November 2006. TIME magazine awarded Youtube as "Invention of the Year" for 2006. Here is the look of the new office for Youtube in San Bruno.


Enough about history lesson, now to the important part. As you probably know that you can watch any videos in Youtube's website but the site itself doesn't provide you the tool or link to download the video you want. I don't know if this legal or not but you can download the video if you want. After doing some Googling (using the keyword "downloading youtube video", here are some sites that will provide you the download link of Youtube's video that you want.
Using those sites to download the file is easy, but it requires you to open the site first, enter the Youtube's video path until it finally gives you the actual download link. For me it is easier to use Mozilla add-ons that you can find here. Just download the add-ons, install and restart Firefox. After restarting Firefox, right-click on the toolbar (area to the left of your navigation bar), choose Customize. It will then open a window where you can choose a lot of items. Locate the VideoDownloader, and click to drag and drop it after the Home button. There you go, you can now download the video from Youtube just by clicking the VideoDownloader button. Easy right?