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I like minimalistic designs that are pure and simple. The layout of Facebook is just like that, but there are however still some annoyances that I wanted to get rid off. First there are those Farmville and Texas HoldEm posts that are just spamming up your News Feed. You can easily get rid of those by the provided remove option. But then there are the Events, Featured, Requests and Get Connected (and others) sections in the right column that you cannot control from the given options. Since I never use them, they are just a waste of space. I tried to remove/hide it with AdBlock Plus and RIP plug-ins (in Firefox ofcourse), but with no success. These plug-ins are usually just enough to hide/block certain parts of websites that you are not interested in. But it seems that Facebook did a little more trouble into protecting these fields from being hidden.

For this problem and many other Facebook fixes I used the Greasemonkey script FFixer in Firefox, which does a pretty good job in adjusting Facebook just as I wanted.

Now the world looks even more beautiful than before.

FFixer is easily accessible via the Account menu, and provides various options to tweak your Facebook.

Windows Live Messenger possesses  some very unique “features” which can also bring a lot of frustration to its users. One of those features that I’ll cover here is the ability of WLM to block the so called “unsafe file types”.

This is actually a good step towards a more secure platform, since those blocked file types can indeed be misused to spread viruses. The point I want to make here however, and also provide a solution to the proposed problem, is that there is no clear option for the user to just disable this file blocking behavior.

Now you can imagine the situation where you want to send a file to your friend that has a file extension that is blocked by default. The frustrating thing is that not only executable files with for example an EXE file extension are blocked but also the frequently used ZIP and RAR files. In that situation you will probably get the following warning notification:

The options that Windows Live Messenger provides is to install Windows Live OneCare safety scanner, which might raise some security doubts. Or, to provide a self-defined virus scanner.

Now it is possible that you just do not have a virus scanner for some reason and then you might think that the story is over, but fortunately WLM does actually allow the transfer of files even if no valid virus scanner is provided. So you can for example provide Notepad as your wonderful and very secure antivirus software.

Actually, providing any string should get the job done. So the steps that you would need to perform are as follows:

1. Go to Tools >> Options >> File Transfer
2. Check the box Scan files for viruses using:
3. Now put any string into this field, click OK and you should be able to send any file from now on.

When sending a file from now on you will still get a warning dialog, but at least you can now send your “unsafe” files over.

Note that when you receive a file from someone you will get a message that the Virus scan has failed and

The virus scan could not be completed. Please check your settings in Tools > Options > File Transfer

Nevertheless, the file is received and you can open it by manually navigating to the folder where you receive your files.

Vandaag was ik mijn router aan het configureren en bij de firewall settings heb ik “per ongeluk” een drop packets regel opgezet voor LAN naar WAN. Toen ik uitlogde en opnieuw probeerde in te loggen, kreeg ik pas door dat ik de router niet meer binnenkwam omdat alle packets gedropt werden.

Dit was dus zeker niet handig, en ik werd gedwongen de router te resetten. Het internet deed het zoals altijd direct, maar de thuis telefoon niet. De SIP instellingen voor de VoIP moesten ingesteld worden in de modem. Het grote probleem was dat ik het SIP wachtwoord niet meer wist en nergens meer kon terugvinden.

Na heel wat gezoek op het internet en de Telfort website heb ik het uiteindelijk opgelost, maar het heeft heel wat tijd gekost om uit te vinden hoe ik het SIP wachtwoord kon wijzigen. Telfort’s FAQ was in ieder geval niet behulpzaam omdat er hierover niets te vinden is (ik heb er niets over kunnen vinden in ieder geval).

Het probleem is op te lossen door simpelweg

1. naar de pagina Instellingen voor vast bellen te gaan en daar in te loggen met je telfort inloggegevens
2. vervolgens kiezen voor Ik wil mijn instellingen wijzigen
3. en tot slot het wachtwoord wijzigen onder Toegangscode wijzigen

Nu is datzelfde wachtwoord direct te gebruiken in de SIP instellingen van je router. Zie hier ook een handleiding van Telfort voor meer informatie.

Mijn internet lijkt nu ook sneller te werken, dus ik heb met dit avontuur toch iets positiefs bereikt naast het fixen van mijn telefoon.

Today I was surprised by the Google background image when I launched my browser. After I figured out that this was a permanent change, I immediately wanted to get rid of it and get to the minimalist style that I liked so much. Anyway, here are a few quick solutions to get the style back:

• Change your home page to: http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all (if the image still apears then click in the left bottom corner on Remove Background image) or you can also try just http://www.google.com/.

• Or, change your home page to the SSL page: https://www.google.com

Update (14:30):

• You can also disable javascript on the Google page.
• Firefox users can use a Greasemonkey script that is nicely removing the background image. If you don’t heave Greasemonkey get it here.
• In last case, you can just wait a few more hours since Google announced this is only a 24-hour promotion of their wallpaper future.

Update (19:09):

• You can also block images on Google. In Firefox open the Google page: Right click on the background >> View page info >> Permissions >> Uncheck Use default and select Block. Et vóila.
• Firefox users (yes, again), can try to block the image with AdBlock Plus.

Update (19:24):

• You can also use the Google IP address: http://74.125.77.147/

Update (19:30):

• The Google background image is removed and everything is back to normal.

Description
SPOOLing stands for Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On Line. The principle is rather simple: The process sends the data to a buffer that a device like a printer can later on access instead of sending it directly. This is useful when for example the application sends the data more quickly than the device can receive and process. This way, the application can send the data at its own rate without having to wait for the device to send more data.

Adjusting Adobe PDF printer properties
Returning to the problem where this spooling does not work in case of printing with Adobe PDF, you might get a message like

"Invalid Adobe PDF printer properties: Do not change spooler settings."

The next part in the error message really explains how to get this problem fixed. You can adjust the settings of the Adobe PDF printer by choosing to print directly as showed below.

Adjusting the registry
Another option is to manually or programmatically make changes to the registry. In key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Printers\Adobe PDF\DsSpooler

you can change the string with value

printSpooling = "PrintAfterSpooled"

into

printSpooling = "PrintDirect".

which should have the same effect.

Introduction
A minor update to Windows Live Essentials was recently released with some bug fixes and “minor changes”, while introducing new bugs and having people not very liking at least some of these “minor changes” like the one option that is left out where you could choose to only show your webcam instead of making a full video call.

Grey box when making a video call
In the recent version 14.0.8117.416 of Windows Live Messenger there exists some type of bug through which one might get a grey box when making a video call. I’m not sure which webcam’s this problems concerns, but I came across one laptop model where this was the case. I also found that there are also other people having this same problem.

“Show my webcam” not available
In this new version, the option to only show the webcam without having to start a video call is left out. Again, there are some people complaining about leaving out this used future.

Solution
The solution for any of the two problems is rather simple. You have to remove your current version (currently newest 14.0.8117.416) and install the older version 14.0.8089.726.

It seems as Microsoft does its best to not provide any downloads for the older (working) versions. Trying to keep your installers of your older versions for later use gets complicated as you can only download the online installer that always downloads the necessary files from the internet of the latest version. It is probably possible to get and save these installer files somehow, but for “normal” people I suppose this would be a hell of a struggle.

Anyway, I felt that I should provide the offline installer files for this older version. There is a full Windows Live installer that contains

• Windows Live Family Safety
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Movie Maker (Windows Vista and Windows 7 only)
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Sync (integrated with Toolbar and Photo Gallery)
• Windows Live Toolbar
• Windows Live Writer
• Microsoft Office Outlook Connector
• Microsoft Office Live Add-in
• Microsoft Silverlight

but also a seperate Windows Live Messanger setup. You can download them both below.

Official Windows Live Essentials 14.0.8089.726 offline setup

Download Windows Live Essentials 14.0.8089.726 (135MB)

• Size: 141.402.440 bytes (135 MB)
• MD5 hash: 0ff7f12bb44f91cad117632e3edd13ae

Download Windows Live Messenger 14.0.8089.726 (24.0 MB)

• Size: 25.240.576 bytes (24.0 MB)
• MD5 hash: 500e43ce39cede387e263ed886d24a74 (MSI file inside the downloaded cab)

Update
* As FuGu pointed out in the comments, the other party you’re communicating with should probably also have the same or older version to  get this to work. If the other party has the newer version 14.0.8117.416 it will simply block the request if you just want to show the webcam instead of making a video call.

Some things just don’t work out like you expect them to do. During my quest with a new web application that I’m about to develop, the very first and basic thing went wrong. The setup of the rdflib python library (version 2.4.2) gave me the following error (on Windows):

“error: Setup script exited with error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

After a lot of useless spent hours on trying to come up with some solution, the answer was found. There is a good solution on the project page of the library too, but I found a slightly quicker solution:

1. First of all download MinGW. You need g++ compiler and MingW make in setup.
2. If you installed MinGW for example to “C:\MinGW” then add “C:\MinGW\bin” to your PATH in Windows.
3. Now start your Command Prompt and go the directory where you have your setup.py residing.
4. Last and most important step: 

   setup.py install build --compiler=mingw32

Note: This is all about rdflib version 2.4.2! Version 3.x for example has some major differences with 2.4.2 and so I’m not aware whether the problem there exists and even if it does, i’m not sure if it can be solved by the above solution.

In one of my previous posts I have given a solution for solving the problem of Realtek High Definition Audio not being recognized on Windows 7.

Today I was dealing with nearly the same problem but on a different PC. It was a Medion PC (not relevant), of which the motherboard had an onboard Azalia/AC97 Audio controller. Windows 7 just displayed that there was no audio device recognized, so I went to the BIOS settings as described in my previous post, but the problem was that it had only two choices: Auto and Disabled. So there was no way of getting it to work with the solution I described before.

Luckily, I found another solution that worked very well and solved the problem. You can do the following:

1. Download the following file: UDAX009-AZA10-Logo09.59.73-flexbass

2. Unpack it.

3. Right click on the file setup.exe and click on properties. Now in the tab Compatibility change the Compatibility mode to Windows XP Service Pack 2.

4. Now run the setup as administrator. This is important since it needs administrator privileges to its thing.

5. When the setup is finished, restart your system and you should have your audio working.

I think this can help a lot of people that are currently dealing with the same problem. Much thanks goes to Luis Rato who described the original post and provided the above file. In case you have additional problems, visit his post here.

I had installed Windows 7 on a machine today and when I was continuing with the part of installing the drivers of the keyboard-mouse of Logitech I couldn’t find any drivers on the official website. Even worse, the keyboard was not even present on the website while it is maybe just 2 years old.

I also search the internet, but with no result. Since I saw that google returns a lot of search results when trying “Internet 1500 Laser Cordless Desktop drivers” I thought a lot of people had the same problem figuring this out and decided to share this.

So the problem was that the basic functionalities of the keyboard did work but not the extra buttons available both on them. More specific, it is about the Internet 1500 Laser Cordless Desktop keyboard and mouse combo with model number Y-RAS79 (can be found on the bottom of the keyboard).

I successfully got it working by using a setup from another keyboard (Cordless Desktop MX 3000 Laser). You can use directly the following link to download it:

• http://logitech-louk.navisite.net/web/ftp/pub/techsupport/mouse/setpoint480.exe

The Conficker worm is one of the more popular these days. It is also very difficult to remove. I have found a quite ‘simple’ solution to it, but it requires some sideway paths to solve it.

It is possible to remove the virus manually, like I described in one of my previous posts, but the catch here is that you need to know exactly where the virus is ‘hiding’ (and it requires also more technical experenice).

Before I present the solution, note the symptoms of the Conficker worm [1][2]:

• Access to security related web sites is blocked.
• Disables AutoUpdate

It blocks all (or almost all) antivirus companies, disables the autoupdate, for it is very hard to remove. The real problem with using an antivirus is that you need some recent definitions to be able to remove the virus.

So one of the possible solutions here is to use simply an antivirus to do the work. Luckily for the ones that don’t like to pay for an antivirus there is the free Microsoft Security Essentials, which in my case did the job (you need to pass the genuine windows check to be able to install it).

However, we still get back to the problem that all the Microsoft domains are blocked by Conficker, so we have to download it elsewhere.

I’ve found it on Softpedia and you can download it here:

• http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Microsoft-Security-Essentials.shtml

Next, we need the definitions. But because Conficker blocks the Microsoft domain, it will not be possible to download it via the usual update function. Even for this problem, there is a solution. You can download it manually (also from the Microsoft site):

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971606 (about 40MB)

You can download this on a machine that is not infected, upload it on Rapidshare, send the link via mail and open it on the infected machine. Another possibility is USB, FTP or whatever.

When downloaded, just install it and you should have your definitions up to date. Next do a “Full scan” and after a while the antivirus will probably ask you to reboot the system so that it can remove the virus.

Finally, if it succeeds, you can test it by accessing the Microsoft site (previously blocked).

Future preventions

• You can disable the Server service (RUN: services.msc) because it is probably outdated
• Don’t disable the Server service and just get all the latest updates (including SP3 on XP)
• Keep the antivirus up to date

References
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
[2] http://www.pc1news.com/news/0486/how-to-remove-and-avoid-the-win32-conficker-worm.html