Tag: Tips and Tricks

[Solved] Firefox’s Right-Click Menu Overlaps Flash/Javascript Menu

by
Inf

Just a quick post here. If you get this problem when right-clicking on Flash videos and sometimes in application-like web interfaces, the solution follows. It’s easy too.

So solution to prevent this overlapping of menus:

 

Go to Tools → Options → Content → Click on Advanced button (opposite Javascript) → Check “Disable or Replace Context Menus” checkbox.

That’s it. Problem solved. This was tested on the new Youtube and a few other sites. The solution worked fine. Let me know if it works for you.

(source)

Using Microsoft Word To Write Your Dissertation? 10 Essential Tips!

by
Inf

I dedicate this a forticle to all those people who will be writing their dissertation soon who need to accomplish an error-free writing project, especially those currently at the University of Mauritius. I know most of you folks of UoM will be using Microsoft Word, possibly Word 2007 to write your document, so I’m covering a set of tools which I made use myself while writing my own undergraduate dissertation. I’ve included a section for beginners too, in case you don’t have extensive knowledge of Microsoft Word.

Technically, I should recommend that you use Latex and Lyx to produce a professional-grade publication, but I know learning Latex and Lyx will take time and time is something you people won’t be having. So let’s just see what Word 2007 can do for you. I hope you find the points below useful in some way.

Note: This article may take time to load because I’ve included a video at the end to show you a live example of all the various points at work, so if you are not understanding something, just see the video at the end.

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4 Innovative Tricks To Save Printer Ink

by
Inf

First post of 2011! Yay! So I thought I’d start with something that can help protect the environment and at the same time, save you some cash. Quite a good idea, no?

So as the title says, we’re going to try to have your printer drink less ink, and hence reduce the amount of money you invest feeding it. You should know that I tried and am still using those measures for a laser printer, but I believe that what works for toner should work pretty much the same for liquid ink. I have no idea about how dot-matrix printers will react, so don’t ask.

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3 Utilities to Schedule System Shutdown

by
Inf

So, a friend of mine wanted to know if she could shutdown her PC automatically at a certain time. Or after a certain period of time. Well it’s possible. And I’m going to show you 3 utilities to do it, and how to do it from within your OS too, in case you don’t want to download. There are a LOT of shutdown utilities out there, but those below, I have used personally.

1. Shutter

Shutter

Shutter is my favourite shutdown utility due to its simplicity, but also because it comes from the author of the great ReNamer that I have already covered on Geekscribes previously.

Basically, you just choose the event that triggers the action. Events can be: countdown, at a specific time,  a period of low CPU usage, a process stops, battery low, among others. After that, you just set the action to do: sleep or shutdown the computer, mute volume, lock the computer, among others. Then just click Start. I don’t like that “Start” button. In my opinion, it should have been “Schedule”. If you want the action to take place immediately, just click “Now”. Shutter also offers an extensive set of options, like showing a message before an action takes place.

Shutter also includes a Web Interface if you want to do “Now” actions, or run commands remotely. This is a really great feature for those of you with a download/torrent box. Note, this can be a security problem, so be sure to set a good username and password when configuring the web server in Options.

Shutter comes in Installer and Portable formats.

2. PowerOff

PowerOff

PowerOff takes another approach at events and actions. It puts everything on the main window. So you just select your action on the left. On the right, set options, like whether you want a warning before the action executes, or whether to force-close applications. Then set the time. Either immediate, or schedule it to execute at a specific time.

There are extensive scheduling options, like at a time, on a fixed day, or a daily schedule, on a weekly schedule, on a day of month, or after a time period elapses. One thing I’d like is the “After” option to allow me to set minutes, hours etc, instead of just seconds.

PowerOff also includes remote-control features, like Shutter. Interestingly, you can have the command execute on a remote computer, if the latter supports it. I haven’t tested that feature though.

PowerOff is portable, and comes with the source code, if ever you want to mess around with it. It’s coded in C/C++ language.

3. Amp WinOff

Amp WinOFf

Amp WinOff, as you can see from the screenshot above, offers extensive options. You can set the actions to execute at a specific time (1st frame, top-right), or use a countdown (bottom-left frame), or when according to CPU load (top-right frame). You then set which action to take. It’s called “Shutdown mode” in Amp WinOff. You can even schedule days in advance.

While the program offers a many options and is very customizable, I don’t like the terminology used. Why is there a “Use the current time + 1 minute” and then a countdown feature? Also, I doubt “Lock Computer” is a “Shutdown Mode”. Anyway, those don’t really matter once you get familiar with the program. Now, the second thing that is annoying with Amp WinOff is that the website has been down for a while now, and I can’t find a mirror that’s still alive. The shot you’re seeing above is not from the latest version.

If you can find the utility somewhere, good.

4. Directly from your OS

Linux:

Yes, you can execute a sheduled shutdown right from your OS. Let’s start with Linux first. It should work on most major distros, but I only tested on Ubuntu.

Fire up your Terminal/Konsole or whatever it’s called in your distro.

Then the command structure is as this:

shutdown [- shutdown parameters] [ time parameter] [ optional message ]

shutdown parameters: r = reboot, h = halt, c = cancel shutdown (time parameter is then not required)

Some examples:

shutdown -r now    <-- Reboot immediately
shutdown -h 19:00  <-- Shutdown (Halt) the system at 19h
shutdown -h +5 "System will shutdown"   <-- Shutdown the system in 5 mins from now, and tell users why.

Quite easy huh? Just note that while a shutdown is scheduled, new users won’t be allowed to login 5 minutes before the shutdown sequence is initiated, i.e. only 5 mins left before shutdown. This is to be considered for multi-user environments.

Windows:

The command is similar to that of Linux, but different syntax and parameter names. Just open a command prompt (type cmd in the search box in Vista/Win7, or Winkey+R, then type cmd, or directly type the commands below in the search box in Win7)

shutdown [- shutdown parameters] [-t xx in seconds] [-c reason]
shutdown parameters: r = reboot, s = shutdown, a = abort shutdown

Some examples:

shutdown -r       <-- Reboots computer immediately
shutdown -s       <-- Shutdown computer immediately
shutdown -r -t 60 <-- Restart computer in 60 seconds
shutdown -s -t 3600 -c "Computer shutting down" <-- Shutdown in one hour (3600 seconds), and tell user why

You should get a confirmation that the command has been accepted. (E.g. Keys icon in the notification area with a message).

That’s it for this post. If you know other methods for scheduling a system shutdown, or maybe to get your favorite utility listed here, drop us a comment. Thanks!

Firefox displays weird characters as headings (solution)

by
Inf

I am currently using Firefox, latest version that is 3.0.11 at the time of writing, and I encountered a strange problem on some sites, one of which is the famous Smashing Magazine. The headings were displayed using weird characters, or what it would seem, special characters. You can see a screenshot below.

Smashing Magazine with weird characters

At first, I thought it was a problem with character encoding. Changing to UTF-8 did not solve the problem, nor did switching off Auto-Detect from View menu – Character Encoding solve anything. Well, basically, after a lot of trying out solutions, it was not a problem with charset or encoding.

I tried other solutions but none seemed to work. One of them gave me a clue as to what the problem is. It was going to Tools – Options – Content – (Fonts & Colors) Advanced – (uncheck) “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”. This rendered all pages without custom fonts, except my default of Times New Roman. The problem was solved.

The workaround indicated that the problem resided with my fonts. I thus went and checked out the website source and the stylesheet and found out that Smashing Magazine uses Helvetica font as primary font for h2 tags. This line was found in the source and stylesheet respectively (I shortened the code with …’s):

<ul class="topic-list">
<li>
<h2><a...> ... </a></h2>
ul.topic-list h2{font:44px Helvetica,Arial, ...}

If you don’t know, Helvetica is a proprietary font and doesn’t come with installs of Windows by default. It didn’t come with mine, on both my XP and Vista installs, so I’m assuming it doesn’t come by default.

The Solution:

So what can you do? Apparently, nothing. You cannot acquire the Helvetica font for free and install it. Unless you are willing to pay for it, you are stuck.

Now, if you are crafty enough, you can use some Google powers and try to find the font by… let’s just say, alternative means. I am not posting links here, because I do not encourage piracy. I managed to find a copy of Helvetica somewhere, installed it and problem was solved. You can see the results below.

Smashing Magazine Problem Solved

If you do want to do what I did, you just need to find a copy of Helvetica from somewhere, install it, restart Firefox and the problem should be solved.

Another plausible solution would be for sites with such problems to substitute their fonts for those people do have on their machines. But we cannot require this from site designers. Another way would be to be able to find an addon or similar for Firefox that would allow for font substitution. If you know of such a solution, you are free to share it with us.

A bit of strangeness here is that, since Firefox did not find Helvetica on my machine, it should have used Arial. I cannot understand why it did not.

If you do install the Helvetica font and still get the problem, maybe it’s another font being used and that you don’t have.In this case: check the website source, find which element it is, search the stylesheet for that element, find which font it is and install the font. Restart Firefox, and the problem should be solved.

Hope my solution helps. That’s it! Kinda easy, wasn’t it?

Note: I uninstalled Helvetica after I tested the solution, for those of you who were interested! 😛

PostgreSQL Database Cluster Initialisation Failed Solution

by
Inf

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. For those of you that have tried to install PostgreSQL (mine was 8.3.7-1) on Windows Vista and got the error Database Cluster Initialisation Failed error at the end of the install, read this.

The problem is that Vista has some safety features associated with setting permissions on the Program Files folder. Basically, even if you are an admin, you can’t change permissions on some folders like Program Files and Windows folder itself. This causes initdb to be unable to create some folders and the database cluster. What this means for you is that you need to install PostgreSQL in another folder that is not inside Program Files.

By the way, if you have forgotten your Postgres account password while installing the first time, just open a Command Prompt in Vista (If you don’t know how, Google for it). Then type the command “net user”. You will see a list of users on your computer. Find Postgre’s account. It’s usually “postgres“. Then you need to change its password by typing “net user postgres new_password” where new_password is… well, a new password for the account. You will be needing that postgres account during install. You will need admin privileges to do this change however.

Firstly, uninstall any failed installations. Use the Control Panel or the PostgreSQL installer in the install folder.

During the install, you will be prompted to choose where you want to install the program. Just select a location in another place. Like “C:\PostgreSQL” or something similar. It may even be on your desktop. But not inside Program Files. Not inside Windows folder. However, it’s not as easy. Bear with me.

After the install, you will still see that darned error message (or something like non-fatal error occured). Do not despair!  (For Windows Power Users, we are just assigning Full Control permission to Postgres account on the new PostgreSQL install folder). For other users, read on if you don’t know how to do it.

Go to where you just installed PostgreSQL.  In this case, the C: drive. There, right-click on the folder (usually called PostgreSQL), and go to Properties – Security tab. Click on the Edit button. You will now see some usernames and other stuff. Click on the Add button. In the “Enter the object names to select” box, enter “postgres” and press Check.  Postgres’ user account should appear there. Click on Ok.

Now from the “Group or Usernames” box, select the Postgres account. In the window below, with lots of checkboxes, assign permission “Full Control” in the Allow Column to it. Note, if you don’t want to allow full control, just give it read/write. But I just went ahead and gave it Full Control. (I was tired and annoyed. The “World’s most advanced open source database” had failed to install!). Click on Ok and wait a bit for permissions to be applied.

Then, just do a re-install. Do not uninstall anything. Just run the setup again. It’ll say that a PostgreSQL install folder already exists and other stuff. Just click on Next until the install finishes. If you see “file cannot be copied” errors, click on the “ignore” button when needed.

That’s it. PostgreSQL should be up and running on Vista now. Hope it works for you too as it did for me, and that my guide is helpful to anybody. If it works, or if you have other solutions, let us know. Thanks for reading! 🙂

Keep the command prompt open after using Run

by
Inf

If you are a Windows user, you know that sometimes you really need to make use of the Command Prompt, for things like “ping” or “tracert”. Unless you are a GUI fanatic.

But have you noticed that sometimes when you type a command in the Run box, the prompt closes immediately after execution? There must be a way to keep it open, right?

Today, I will share that trick with you, and it’s really simple to do.

First, you need to see what I mean. Type “ping google.com” in the Run box and type enter or press Ok. The prompt should close after execution of the ping, not giving you time to see the results.

If this has ever happened to you (it does for me, on Windows Vista), then try this:

Before you type your command, put in “cmd /k” before.

For example, if “ping” closes for the prompt after execution, try “cmd /k ping google.com” or any other address.

I have tested on WinXP and Vista. Both work. Hope this is useful to you someday. 🙂