This is another one of my essential Firefox extensions. I can’t stand the ugly Firefox download window. I prefer to see the status of my downloads in the Firefox Status Bar at the bottom of the window. Enter Download Statusbar. [click to continue...]

If you’re like me, being able to have everything connected to a single email address makes life easier. Unfortunately, most Instant Messengers require you to set up email addresses with their service to use with their Instant Messenger program. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about this with MSN Messenger. You can go to passport.net to use any email address (for example, a gmail one) to sign into MSN Messenger with! This will also let you use your email address for all things live. Like Mail, Calendar, Skydrive, etc.

The process is dead simple. Go to passport.net, scroll down to Use an e-mail address you already have and click Get started now under it. After that it’s just a matter of filling in the necessary information. When you sign in to MSN Messenger, use your ‘regular’ email address and the password you created to associate with it. It’s really simple and something I wish I could do with other instant messengers.

I love music, and I love video games. This makes rhythm games perfect for me. And the best part? I don’t have to pay for some of the great ones! This is a list of my three favorite rhythm games, in no particular order. [click to continue...]

Vim is one of the most powerful and popular command line text editors around. It was initially only available for the Linux and UNIX platforms, but was then ported to Windows also. The interface is clean and simple, and you use a combination of keys to perform tasks such as copy-paste, search and replace, delete a bunch of lines, and much more. [click to continue...]

Although hard drive space is cheap today and we happily throw in a few hundred gigabytes into a server or a desktop, it’s amazing how often the disk gets full. Here are a few Linux tools to help you see how much of your disk has been eaten up, and what’s eating it up, so that you can do something about it before it gets out of hand. [click to continue...]

Ubuntu Linux users may be familiar with using the “sudo” command in Linux. It’s a very useful feature in Linux that allows the administrator of a Linux machine to grant “root” privileges to a particular user or group of users. It can also be configured so that this privilege is limited to one or more commands. The Ubuntu team, for example, have decided to block the root user from logging in by default and instead allow users to use sudo to perform administrative tasks. So if you are using Ubuntu Linux, sudo privileges have been setup so that you have full “root” privileges. Let’s take a closer look at setting up and configuring sudo privileges on your machine. Before proceeding please note that you should not try the following on a production server. Please try out the examples in this tutorial on a test machine and get familiar with sudo before you try it out on a production server. sudo is a very powerful tool and must be used with extreme caution. [click to continue...]

The following list will guide you through how to play NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube/Wii, Nintendo Gameboy/Color/Advanced, Nintendo DS AND Nintendo Virtual Boy games on your Windows PC. [click to continue...]

When you are working on the Linux command line and you come across a large file or a large number of files in which you need to replace a certain text with another, finding and pasting over each instance of the text can be a bit time consuming. Well, worry no more. Linux has just the solution for you. Here’s a way to find and replace a string of text in one or more files automatically. [click to continue...]

We recently ran an article on the Linux “date” command. It’s a pretty cool command line tool that allows you to get your system’s date and time in various formats. What it also does is it allows you to set the machine’s date and time. Let’s look at a couple of ways to set the time and date on a Linux machine. First, we’ll look at how to do it using the “date” command, then I’ll briefly introduce you to the NTP server in Linux and show you how you can sync your machine’s clock to a clock running on the Internet. [click to continue...]

I work on remote servers a lot. I use SSH to connect to my servers. Quite often I run a process that I need to let run even after I close my SSH connection. This could be a shell script that parses through my log files or very large mysql database restoration. That’s when I turn to a Linux command line utility called “nohup”. “Nohup” is short for “no hangup”, which translates to “ignore the hang up signal”. The “hang up” signal is what happens when you log out. What “nohup” does is that it allows you to log into your server, launch a process and log out. The process keeps running even after you have logged out. When you log in again you can access that process again, provided its still running. [click to continue...]

Defragging is essential in keeping your Windows machine fast. Don’t you wish it was a more automatic process? Well, it can be! JkDefrag, a great defragging program, comes with a way to use it as a screen saver, and it’s a very easy thing to do. [click to continue...]

A command line tool that I find use for very frequently on Linux is the “date” command. It’s a pretty simple command that returns you the date and time when you call it without any options. But when you begin to use some of the options it provides you with this tool can make your life much easier and fun. Let’s take a closer look at the command itself and some of its options and the cool tricks that we can make it do. [click to continue...]

I love tweaking. The only problem is, I haven’t really been able to find a one stop program for all my tweaking needs on Vista. That’s where Ultimate Windows Tweaker comes in. It claims to be the Tweak UI for Windows Vista, and I feel that it lives up to that. It works on both 32 and 64 bit Vista systems and is portable, which means there’s no need to install anything. You can download it here.

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After you have it downloaded, extract the file from the .zip file and run it. You should see a Window like the one above. If you want to play it safe, click Create System Restore Point to make it easy to go back if anything messes up. The program has over 130 tweaks, most of which are self explanatory. The only problem I had with this was on my 64 bit system. The shortcut icons would not disappear. Luckily, there are other ways to do this. Overall I find it to be a very handy (and small) application.

With hard drives becoming real cheap over the past few years we’ve grown accustomed to having many gigabytes or sometimes even terabytes of data on our computers. This is when being able to find information on our computers becomes important. Linux has a very handy command line tool very aptly called “find”. I’ll share with you some basic features of the “find” command to get you started. I’m quite certain that you will find it pretty useful. [click to continue...]