Latest Entries
On Pause for Exams
04 May '10 by InF, under Geekscribes.
Icon courtesy of Jojo Mendoza: Available here.
Hello readers, this post is here to tell you that the Geekscribes authors are on pause for the duration and reason stated below.
Reason: University End of Year (End of Course) Exams
From: 5th May 2010 — To: 15th June 2010
Notes: On Pause means that we will not blog very often/if any. We’ll probably be able to answer your comments though, so leave them. 
Updates: Exams going full swing.In a few weeks and at the end, I will have to present my end of year project etc. So you can imagine that I am a bit busy. I will probably return mid of June and by then, I hope I get some new ideas for Geekscribes. There are some things that need to change and tweak here. I hope to be able to blog on a larger variety of topics too. I dunno yet. Let’s wait for mid June.
Oh, and sorry for that Account Suspended error message. Something weird must have happened.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.
Thank you for reading GeekScribes. You can still read our Archives if you want to.
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Thank you for reading GeekScribes. See ya and come back soon!
5 Comments
Unplanned Downtime of 22nd March
23 March '10 by InF, under Geekscribes.
Greetings readers!
I am very sorry about what happened over the last two days. There has been unplanned downtime on Geekscribes, due to some laziness on my part.
My webhost, Infolad, informed me that my account needed renewing. However, I have been negligent about checking my emails lately, and I missed the notice. Consequently my hosting account was suspended. It took a bit of time to get the account re-activated.
For that I am sorry. I hope this does not occur again in the future.
P.s. Don’t worry. Geekscribes will not simply vanish without notice. If ever you come and see Geekscribes is not there, it’ll probably mean we are having some issues with the site and trying to figure it out.
Welcome, and enjoy your stay with us at Geekscribes.
Thank you for your visit!
5 Comments
PHP Lessons 9: Session and Cookies
19 March '10 by Guest-GS, under PHP Lessons, Programming.
Hello there, back with some PHP lessons. It’s been quite a while. Got loads of projects to deal with at work and wasn’t feeling like typing codes at home.
This lesson will deal about session ($_SESSION) and cookies ($_COOKIES)…(This kind of cookie has nothing to do with cookies our grand-mother used to cook for us 
)
(Click here to read the rest…)
4 Comments
Windows 7: Solutions to can’t sleep problems.
02 March '10 by InF, under How To, Software, Tech Posts, Tips and Tricks.
Hello folks. Sorry for lack of recent posts. Been taken up with uni lately. Anyway, I have recently migrated to Windows 7. I have to say Microsoft has done a magnificent job this time, especially when I compare Win7 and Vista. Performance on Win7 is awesome. And there are lots of usability improvements, which makes 7 a very nice software.
However, I was having a problem: I couldn’t manually sleep my computer. If I did it from the Orb/Start menu, the screen would turn off, the PC would shut for like a millisecond, before starting back up, and prompting me for login.
Turns out there are a few things that can cause this error, and they are easy to troubleshoot. Try these steps if you are having the same problem as me.
1) Update your drivers.
This should be pretty obvious. An old driver might be causing an issue. So just update your drivers, specially for your video card and it should correct any problem. If it still doesn’t work, move on.
2) Try to see which requests are keeping the PC on.
Open a Command Prompt. You can do it by typing “cmd” from the Run menu, or simply open the Start Menu, and type “Command Prompt” in the “Search Programs and Files” bar.
Type this command: “powercfg -requests” without quotes. Then press Enter. You will see a list of programs that could be making requests. Windows Media Player is a usual culprit. Just close them, and it should work. If you have “None.” marked, move on.
3) A specific device is keeping the PC from sleeping
Still in the command prompt, type “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed”. You will see a list of devices that can wake up your PC. For me, I got my Network card, Keyboard and Mouse in that list. Turns out it was my mouse that was responsible for waking up the machine.
What to do? Simple: Go to device manager ( Start Menu – Control Panel (View by: Large Icons, top right) – System – Device Manager (left sidebar) ). Find your device that you think is causing the problem. For me it was the mouse, but I had to try disabling each individually. So, find your mouse in that list, e.g. Mice and other pointing devices, right-click it, choose Properties and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck the box “Allow this device to wake the computer“.
Validate the windows with Ok, close Control Panel, and you should be all ok. Try sleeping your computer now.
That’s it for this small guide. I hope it helps you. Step 3 solved my problem. My computer now sleeps when I want it to sleep.
No Comments
PHP Lessons 8: Server Constants and HTML Forms
10 December '09 by Guest-GS, under PHP Lessons, Programming.
Hello there, it’s been a while, I’ve been very busy with work and some personal project, so i had to delay the PHP courses, but anyway, I’m back and today we’ll have a look at Server Constants.
Take a look at www.geekscribes.net, on the right side, we have a search form, when you type in a search keyword and press Enter, the page loads and it fetch every results according to what you typed. Ever wonder how it works? Don’t go any further, today I will show you bring a boring html form to life.
Before I start, if you missed the array tutorials, then please, go to the link below, and read the post, give it a try.. because you’ll need to understand how arrays work in order to understand this lesson fully.
(Click here to read the rest…)
5 Comments
3 Features Mobile Phones Should Have But Most Don’t
02 November '09 by InF, under Mobile Phones, Tech Posts.
I don’t consider myself to be a very heavy mobile user. Apart from the usual SMS and receiving calls, I sometimes use the camera, or the included Wifi-capability of my phone to browse a bit around while on the go. However, there is a set of features which I sorely miss in my device, and other devices I’ve used. I’ve compiled a list here, and I can only hope some developer stumbles on this page, and decides to implement those. Despite not being critical, they would go a long way in making a device much more usable. They are not too difficult to implement I think, so here goes nothing…
Timed Profiles
I think it must be Nokia that came up with this bright idea years ago. Indeed, it’s a very good feature (at least it is for me). I don’t have to remember to set my device to Silent before going to lectures and such. But since it was implemented, the feature has hardly evolved.
Also, accessing this feature is a pain in itself. In Nokia devices, you have to dig through the menus down to Profiles, and there you get the option to activate it.
The only thing you can do is set a profile, then time another to expire at a time. After that, the other profile will activate, and when the time is up, the previous profile will be activated automatically. Easy to understand but not very useful.
What would have been useful is able to repeat the expiry time or even plan the expiry of profiles over the week. Say, General profile will be active from 18h to 23h, Sleep profile will activate from 23h to 07h. And Silent active from 07h to 18h. And that schedule will be applicable only during weekdays, while during weekends, you have another set of times.
But no, for now, you can’t have it in-built. Yet.
Delay SMS Sending
Another feature I sorely miss. It’s not even available on the networks as a service most of the time! Oh, I do agree there are ways to do without, like setting a reminder and have it sent at a particular date and time. This was possible in my old handset, but not now. It’s as if handsets are de-evolving! Now, on my N85, I don’t even have a stopwatch, while the good old 3310 had one!
Anyway, back to the point. What I want is a way to compose a message and save it. Then set it to be sent at a date and time. Sometimes, you need to remind a friend to bring you something, but only on the eve of the day you meet. You have to remember to send that message yourself, even if your device could have done the remembering with more ease.
Again no, it doesn’t exist yet as an in-built facility. Not in any device I know of. It may exist as an addon-application, but it needs to be in-built!
LED to indicate new stuff E.g. Missed Calls or SMS pending
My good old Sony Ericsson had a LED outside that flashed. But the problem is that it flashed just to indicate that the phone was on. Kind of a waste if you ask me. It could have been put to much better use as BlackBerry did.
BlackBerry devices have a small LED light that flashes when you have pending sms, calls or emails. Why don’t all devices have that? Even the high-end ones don’t!
Better yet would have the LED flash different colors for different things missing, maybe in order of priority. SMS pending flashes blue. Missed calls flashes red. But if you had both, the light would still flash red. At least you’d know from afar if you had something waiting, without having to touch the phone, or press a key to know.
If this is not possible, just make the LED flash at different speeds for different things.
But no, for now, I have to content myself with a dumb LED that tells me my phone is on. Very useful indeed!
All those small, but useful applications that were in older devices
Stopwatch? Timer? Alarm? Flashlight? Please, I bought a device that was multiples of the price of those lower-end phones, but still, it didn’t have all the features of those phones in them. I don’t have a stopwatch! I really need a stopwatch sometimes, and I don’t have one. Not in a device that costs nearly $300! What the hell! A device that costs $100 has it!
That is not fair developers! Give us those features back. We deserve them. And most of them are mostly software, so you can’t complain that it’ll take space inside the device as hardware.
There you go. I have completed my list of 3 features I really miss on any handset I’ve used, and really wished they were there. Do you have a feature that you wished was there, but is not? Let us know.
3 Comments
Clean Up Font Clutter with Font Frenzy
27 September '09 by InF, under Software, Tech Posts.
I’m the kind of dude that install fonts by the buckets. I like fonts, and I like variety in my creations. Also, some programs that I install tend to place their own fonts on my machine on their own. After a while, this creates a huge mess and your fonts list in your applications grows excessively long. If ever the applications you use have font preview, this makes the matters worse! I’ve had Wordpad and some other programs crashing on me due to some corrupt font, or some font they didn’t like while I was browsing the font list.
Also, apparently, having a ton of fonts installed can bring down the performance of your machine, so before installing that font pack with a zillion fancy fonts in it, you might re-consider. Though I have to say, I never noticed the performance hit myself, despite the 1067 fonts I had installed.
Thus, there comes a time in the life of every font freak, where they must clean up their fonts folder. The problem is that Windows has a set of fonts that it likes and cannot work without. I’ll call these system-critical fonts. If you delete those, you will have a brick of a machine on your hands, and a re-install of the OS could save it, but lot of pains involved. Thus you would want a way to clean up that font folder of yours while keeping the essential fonts, correct?
Here comes Font Frenzy! Font Frenzy is a free software that will allow you to preview what fonts you have installed, but also manage them. By manage, I mean, install new fonts, back up existing fonts and uninstall those you don’t want. All this in a very simple interface.
But the most interesting feature of Font Frenzy, something that I have not seen in other font managers, is the ability to “DeFrenzy” your font folder. What this does is uninstall all those non system-critical fonts that you have installed. Before doing that, it’ll prompt you to create a snapshot of your current fonts. I’ll explain what this does later. After that, it’ll “uninstall” all those unnecessary fonts by removing them from the OS’ font folder, and place them somewhere of your own liking. Thus, you have a backup of the fonts, but at the same time, they do not clutter. You can then pick and choose which ones to re-install at a later time.
Now about those snapshots. They are in fact saved states of your font folders. Using snapshots, you can easily add or remove sets of fonts. For example, I have a snapshot where I have “DeFrenzied” my whole font folder, returning my system to its default state. Then, when I need all my fonts back, I just “ReFrenzy” using that snapshot, and get all my fonts back. Likewise, you can have different snapshots for different installed font-sets. E.g. A set with only default+graffiti fonts for example.
Oh, if you still want to clean up the your font mess manually, this list should be helpful to know what NOT to delete.
Summarizing, the good points of Font Frenzy are:
- Simple interface
- Ability to remove non-essential or non-default fonts from a system automatically
- Can restore all removed fonts via snapshots
- Can manage fonts (install, delete)
- Can backup fonts to a folder you like (Unload and Store) in FrenzyMan
The cons are:
- ReFrenzy, DeFrenzy, FrenzyMan… these terms can be confusing to the new user, but you get used to them after a while.
- DeFrenzy (remove all non-essential fonts) does not remove all non-essentials apparently. It does leave some fonts behind. I don’t know if they can be considered essential, but nevertheless, Font Frenzy does a decent job at cleaning up things.
- If you check the Fonts folder in Windows, you will see that not all the removed fonts are gone from that folder. I think Font Frenzy just removes some entries from the registry for some fonts, so they look as if they are un-installed.
So I’d say, if you need a simple, but good font manager, give Font Frenzy a try.
