Throx

Running out of space in your C drive ? Using SSD with limited space and want to create more room ?

You can use Windows command Junction, a very simple and smart way to link your Folder to another Folder. Its basically creating a shortcut from your original path to your desire target folder.

You can download Junction here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768

Use junction to list junctions:

Usage: [-s]

-s Recurse subdirectories

Examples:

To determine if a file is a junction, specify the file name:

junction c:\test

To list junctions beneath a directory, include the –s switch:

junction -s c:\

To create a junction c:\Program-Files for “c:\Program Files”:

C:\>md Program-Files

C:\>junction c:\Program-Files “c:\Program Files”

To delete a junction, use the –d switch:

junction -d c:\Program-Files

For example in windows 7 64bit environment. You want to move all Google data from your C: drive to D: drive. This is how you do this.

Steps:

1. Copy the folder C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Google  to anywhere you want, in this example we put in D:\Google

2. After the copy process complete, double check if everything ok. Now delete the Google folder from C:

3. Download the Junction and unzip it to anywhere you want, in this case I put it in my C:\Windows

4. Now start your command prompt and go to C:\Windows

5. Type:  junction C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Google D:\Google

6. Press enter and you are done, a shortcut icon will be created and now the data will be stored in D:\Google

Some Vista’s Wireless connection lag every 60 secs or 30 secs, it is because the Vista’s build-in wireless software try to look for a better connection every minutes. You can fix this by installing a tool called Vista Anti-Lag. This tool is free so you might want to give it a try.

This bug is not really significant to feel it in normal web browsing but can be very annoying in online game such as World of Warcraft. The tool may or may not work for you. A wired connection should solve this problem.

Interface of Vista Anti-lag

You may come across that windows force you to create an extra account during the initial setup. Then you try to delete it but cannot find any delete option. To force windows to remove the extra account you can go to Start -> Run and type in “control userpasswords2” without the quote and hit Enter. It will bring up a User Accounts window and you should be able to delete it from there.

Advanced User Account Control Panel

Sometimes you want to resize a dozen of pictures and found that it is so troublesome to do it 1 by 1. Forget about big software such as Photoshop or GIMP, here is a simple way to get it done quickly and free. 

1. First download IrfanView from http://www.irfanview.net/ and install it.

2. Launch the program and choose File -> Batch Conversion/Rename…

3. Select your original image and click “Add” into your Input files list. Set your output directory and select the “Options” and “Advanced” button to adjust your batch settings.

4. “Options”: Select your image output quality, generally “80″ quality plus 1024 width resolution images will get you image sizes around 80 to 200kb. 

5. “Advances”: Select RESIZE and Set long side to 1024, asuming you want to resize to 1024 pixel. Remember to check the “Preserve aspect ratio” so that it will resize the heigh for you automatically based on the given width. Play around with different figures to find out what best suite your needs.

6. Click ok and then run “Start Batch”. Your resized images will be done in a few seconds.

Google Talk default installation does not allow users to set their online status. Your friends will always know when you are idle or active. There is a tool called  galwaysidle to solve this problem. After you have installed it, you will be able to set your online status such as Always Active, Always Idle or the normal way.

After the installation, right click your google talk icon at the taskbar and you will see something like this:

Recently I have tried 2 pinyin program for windows. Its really help to type faster compared to the default Microsoft pinyin. They are pretty smart with the words combination.

They are easy easy to use and install, just download it and install it and you are done. Press alt + Shift (may be different, check your language settings) to switch between English or Pinyin input.

Google Pinyin, plain and simple.

Sougou Pinyin, with many themes to play with.

Squid proxy itself will not hide your external IP address but I will show you how to do that when squid combined with OpenVPN. First you need to have a working OpenVPN connection from your PV to the Linux machine. Guide on how to install OpenVPN can be found here.

If you have a success OpenVPN connection, then you can proceed to next step to install Squid.

1. You can use yum to install squid

#yum install squid

2. Open the squid configuration file

#vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

3. Edit squid configuration to allow you to access to the web via the squid proxy.

Locate “http_port”, default port number is 3128, you can change it to any port you like. In this example I change it to 8080.

http_port 8080

Because you want to hide your IP address, you must connect to squid via OpenVPN tunnels. Now we need to create acl list to allow your VPN ip address to get through your squid proxy server. Search for “acl our_networks” then uncomment and modify it as follows:

acl our_networks src 10.8.0.2  #assume your client VPN address is 10.8.0.2
http_access allow our_networks

4. Save your squid.conf and restart your squid.

#/etc/init.d/squid restart

5. Config you web browser connection settings to access the web via your squid proxy

Firefox user:

Tools -> Options -> Network -> Settings , Select manual proxy configuration
HTTP Proxy: 10.8.0.1 and Port: 8080

IE User:

Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings , Tick the check box “Use a proxy server for your LAN…”
Address: 10.8.0.1 and Port: 8080

6. Go to http://www.whatismyip.com and check your IP address. You should be browsing with your squid server IP address now. Good luck.

If you got a fresh installed LAMP with phpMyAdmin and notice an error below saying

“The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results”

and

“Cannot load mycrypt extension. Please check you PHP configuration”

You are not alone, you can solve the problems with the followings steps.

mbstring

New linux repo has the mbstring removed by default, just install it back.

#yum install php-mbstring

mycrypt

Install libmcrypt and php-mcrypt

#yum install libmcrypt
#yum –enablerepo=centosplus install php-mcrypt

Restart your apache / httpd, the warnings should have gone now.

I was getting so frustrated when I try to copy and overwrite files in my CentOS linux, it keeps asking for confirmation even I added the -f (force) command.

# cp -Rf * backup/
cp: overwrite ‘index.php?’ y

Then I search around and finally found a solution ! It was an alias preset for the c, which alias -i to ask for confirmation.

#alias
alias cp= ‘cp -i’
alias l.=’ls -d .* –color=tty’
alias ll=’ls -l –color=tty’
alias ls=’ls –color=tty’
alias mv=’mv -i’
alias rm=’rm -i’
…….

Remove the cp alias

#unalias cp

Done, you should be able to cp -f without the confirmation now.

This tip is useful either for ppl with lots of RAM or less RAM. There is a way to set how your linux control the utilization of RAM and SWAP space called “swappiness”.

There is a range from 0 to 100 in swappiness setting, higher value means the system will move idle memory usage to SWAP file more often. Please note that by setting to “0″ does not men it disabled the SWAP space, this will just make the system write to the SWAP space as little as possible.

To check your current swappiness setting type:

#cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

You will see 60 by default, you can change it to other value to try out the effect before permanently change it in the configuration file:

#sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10
vm.swappiness = 10

Put a value between 0 to 100 above and then run a some high resources program to try out the different. After you hve found the best setting then you can set it to your server configuration.

#vi /etc/sysctl.conf
add the line: “vm.swappiness=10″ without the quote to the end of the file.

This way your swappiness will be set to 10 after the next reboot.