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It’s funny becuase it’s true…

People that claim to be insomniacs

Source:  http://ninjahumor.com/

There’s nothing I can say to make this funnier so here’s the funniest new meme I’ve seen for a while, enjoy…

I’m going to nuke everyone. Kim, eat a snickers. Why? Because you turn into a war mongler when you’re hungry. Better? Better.

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I just got an odd email from facebook. It is surprisingly brief providing no explanation of any kind, which makes it appear remarkably like a run of the mill SPAM email IMHO…

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Now I get the usual stack of spam every day and I would normally just hit the report spam button gmail kindly supplies, but this message appears to be genuine (unlike this facebook spam). What I’m wondering is if this applies to my personal account only, or has there been a stuff up affecting other users too. If you have a facebook account I’d be very interested to know if you received this also.

If you look at the email header you will find that the email comes directly from facebook.com as Facebook Insider explains, so it is genuine. On the surface the fact that it’s genuine would seem to be a good thing, and it is, but the fact that people are confusing it with spam isn’t good. Over the years I must have received thousands of very genuine looking emails from scammers and I’ve come close to being fooled myself but now Facebook is sending genuine emails that appear to be spam!

Update: Alex reports that he received the same email in the comments below but I have spoken to others who still have not received the message.  This just makes it more suspicious for the casual observer, and it seems I’m not the only one that thinks so.

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Image source Petr Novák, Wikipedia.

Is the time running too fast or too slow on your Windows XP computer? If so there’s a good chance the Windows Time Service (which keeps your computer time accurate) is broken. Fixing it is just a matter of restarting the service but you need to get your hands dirty and enter some terminal commands.  (click images for full size).

1. Open a command prompt by clicking Start -> Run and typing “cmd” and click the OK button.

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This tutorial explains how to stop Windows Update from automatically restarting your computer. By default Windows XP’s Automatic Update feature is set to “Automatic” so that windows automatically downloads and installs updates. This is good as it keeps your operating system fully patched and secure, however windows will constantly nag you to restart your computer. Read on to find out how to get rid of the nag box forever (Windows XP only).

1. Open the Group Policy editor by going Start –> Run and typing gpedit.msc

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The DRM monster is on the loose again, with the release of Will Wrights long awaited SPORE. Users are so unhappy with SPOREs included Digital Rights Management (DRM), they are downloading pirated torrents of the game in record numbers making it the most pirated game ever. Add to this an appalling one star user rating at amazon.com and it really is a looming public relations disaster if Electronic Arts (EA) does not act quickly.

To give you an idea of just how draconian SPOREs DRM is, the manual included with the game clearly states “You may have multiple Spore accounts for each installation of the game” but EA has admitted that this is a printing error. So for two people to play the game on one computer you will need to purchase a second copy of the game. Great. You can’t even back up the game without paying for EA’s Extended Download Service.

Including such draconian anti-piracy measures with possibly the most awaited game since Duke Nukem Forever is just baffling. Understanding how EA has failed to learn from disasters like Sony’s root kit debacle or Creatives Message to Daniel_K (just to name a couple) can only be achieved by Vulcan Mind Melding with every EA staff member responsible for the decision to include the DRM. Dare I say the meld would have to include Will Wright himself? I hope not. I can understand EA treating its customers like this in search of profit, but surely not Will himself. I’m going to cling to the hope that he knew nothing about it until I learn otherwise.

I just received this on my Facebook Superwall titled “Facebook is going to clear facebook accounts if ..”

We all know that Facebook is an extraordinary social network where you can talk to friends, find old friends, and so much more.
The Facebook team is well aware that Facebook is getting over populated due to the fact that registrations have increased 50% since February 15 2008. At their signing in database, it shows that more than a quarter of the members of Facebook havn’t logged into their accounts in over a month.
So where is this leading to you may ask. Facebook is clearing their entire data base and deleting users who have not sent this message to their friends. If you are one of the these people, you will get your user account wiped and would have to re add all your friends. So send this message to as many of your friends as you can, I know you don’t want to start all over from scratch so send away, show your pride for members Facebook!

- Irin rayiz

Update: It seems this is making the rounds again as Tom has pointed out below. It originally appeared after Facebook announced they were rolling out “new facebook” which some users were not happy about. I think the author was trying to add fuel to the fire of discontent in the hope of forcing Facebook to abandon their rollout plans, but that’s just my opinion. Rest assured though, it is definitely a hoax.

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Many sites are reporting user discontent over the forced introduction of New Facebook, with gearfuse describing it as horrible, atrocious and completely cluttered. Based the response to the discontinuation of network pages I’m not surprised. There’s even a “Petition Against the New Facebook” which currently has 478,670 1,610,451 members and can be signed here. 

The new facebook profile design will be rolling out next week whether users like it or not, according to Facebook’s Program Manger Josh Elman who writes on the Facebook Developer Blog:

We’re nearing the time where we’ll switch over remaining users by default. We expect most of this to take place over the next week.

Some users are already getting a message that the change over is imminent when they log into their account, stating “New Facebook will soon be the only Facebook”.

The mere fact that a special Design Integration Guide exists suggests that at least some things will break when the changeover is complete (assuming it goes ahead). Only time will tell how smoothly  the change over goes.

This rec.puzzles newsgroup post made me laugh. I don’t read rec.puzzles or newsgroups in general, but this is completely out of place in rec.puzzles. He has stuffed so many technical terms into two paragraphs it’s just laughable. I really don’t know how much truth to what he is saying because I have never heard of a 555 timer, pulse width, write strobe, NAND timer etc. etc. etc…

The early Apple ][ was notorious for that. I evenutally unsoldered
all the sockets and replaced them with high reliability versions.

The one time I had a guine memory failure wasn’t a RAM chip, though.
It was a NAND gate that passed the write strobe to the RAM chips,
so it could read memory but not write it. Obviously, the boot ROM
didn’t get very far. I tracked it down by attaching a 555 timer to
the reset line and slowly increased the pulse width until the address
lines went from stable to unstable. When I checked what opcode was
executing at that momement, it was the first return from subroutine
in the boot code. The gate must have failed due to vibration (output
was floating) because I had just transported the machine in my car
prior to the failure.

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As of 5 minutes ago nine out of fifteen stories on the front page or digg.com have been reported as inaccurate by diggers. That is sixty percent of all the stories on the front page at the moment. When I logged on I was confronted with so many potentially inaccurate stories I just had to reach for the print screen key and share it with you.

It’s election season, and all but one of the stories is political so that is almost certainly the source of the inaccuracy. What is surprising though, to me at least, is that most of the “inaccurate” stories are about the Republican Sarah Palin. In my experience it is right wing conservatives that spew the most inaccurate information but here we have a conservative that appears to be the victim of exaggerated and inaccurate attacks. This is such a turnaround it makes my head spin.

It might be that my view of conservatives has been poisoned by people like Bill O’Reilly to such an extent that is hard for me to comprehend these sort of attacks happening the other way around. But I also think it a reflection of how desperate the American people (and the world) are for change, and out of desperation some progressive thinkers are lowering their standards to that of Bill O. This sort lowering of standards is a slippery slope. Just imagine if everyone argued like Bill O’Reilly. It would be impossible to express a logical balanced opinion without getting shouted down by some simple minded political bigot.

Whatever the reasons, this is easily the greatest number of inaccurate stories I have seen on digg at one time. I just hope this isn’t a continuing trend :p
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This tutorial explains how to enable or disable Keyboard Number Lock each time your computer starts.

Have you ever entered a phone number via the numeric keypad only to discover nothing has appeared? The most likely cause is Number Lock (or Num Lock as it us usually labeled)  is disabled, and it’s a simple matter of hitting the Num Lock key to get numbers from your keypad. If you have done this enough times however, you will know how much of a pain it is to retype things repeatedly. Luckily a simple registry setting can set the Number Lock Status to your preferred setting.

To enable or disable keyboard numberlock at startup:

1. Stat regedit but going start -> run -> regedit -> OK

2. Browse to HKEY_Current_User\ControlPanel\Keyboard

3. In the right hand pane double click “InitialKeyboardIndicators” and set “Value data:” to 0 to have NumLock disabled, or 2 to have NumLock enabled at startup.

Oddly Microsoft recommends making a  visual basic script to set Number Lock. This seems a litte cumbersome compared to changing a single registry entry, but that is probably a matter of opinion.

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Windows XP comes with an instant messaging program called Windows Messenger but there are much better freeware chat clients available. If you decide to uninstall it however, you’ll discover it isn’t listed in Add/Remove programs.  So how can you uninstall it?

To permanently remove Windows Explorer from your computer you need to execute rundll32.exe with some options by going start->run and type

“RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove” (without the quotes)

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How to Change the Registered Owner and Organisation in Windows XP

1. Run regedit and drill down to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

2. On the right double click “RegisteredOwner” and “RegisteredOrganization” to change the values. A restart needed for the changes to take effect.

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This tutorial explains how to slipstream service pack 3 into a windows installation CD, including screen shots of each step. You can use programs like nLite and Autostreamer to do it for you, but if you’re like me you find it much more satisfying to get your hands dirty and do it yourself. Some might even say it’s how real men slipstream :) [click images to enlarge]

What you need:
A windows XP CD of any flavour.
XP service pack 3 which can be downloaded HERE. Rename the file xpsp3.exe.
IsoBuster which can be downloaded for free HERE.
Nero which isn’t free, but has a trial version HERE.

1. Create a folder called “sp3″ in the root of your hard drive (i.e. C:\sp3) and copy xpsp3.exe to this folder.

2. Create a folder called “xpcd” inside “sp3″ (i.e. C:\sp3\xpcd) and copy your entire XP CD to this folder.

3. Open a command prompt by going start -> run and typing “cmd” in the open window and click OK. Extract the service pack 3 files with this command:
C:\sp3\xpsp3.exe -u -x:c:\sp3\files

4. Integrate sp3 files into your windows cd files by typing this command:
C:\sp3\files\i386\update\update.exe -s:c:\sp3\xpcd

5. With your XP cd in the cd drive, fire up IsoBUster (download here) and select Bootable Disc from the left pane, then right-click the Microsoft Corporation.img file in the right pane and select Extract Microsoft Corporation.img and save the file in C:\sp3.

If you can’t be bothered with this step you can download Microsoft Corporation.img here.

6. Now all you need to do is burn the disc. Fire up Nero 5.5 or higher and choose CD-ROM(boot) from the New Compilation menu. Select the boot tab and then browse to the ‘Microsoft Corporation.img’ you saved at C:\sp3. Select “No Emulation” and change “Number of loaded sectors” to 4. These are the only changes you need to make, leave all the other defaults alone.

7. Select the ISO tab and make sure the file name length is set to “Max. of 31 chars (Level 2)”. Also make sure the check box next to “Do not add the ‘;1′ ISO file version extension” is checked then click the “New” button.

8. Now drag all the files in c:\sp3\xpcd from the file browser to the left pane, burn the disc and you’re done!

If you found this article helpful (or found an error) please leave a comment.
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This tutorial explains how to view hidden files like .htaccess with the free open source FTP client FileZilla. These instructions are for version 2 and version 3 of the software.

Filezilla Version 2
To view hidden files in FileZilla 2 you need to digg into the settings. Select “Edit -> Settings -> Interface settings -> Remote file list” then near the bottom of the window select the check box “Always show hidden files” as shown below…

FileZilla Version 3
To view hidden files with FileZilla 3 it is simply a matter of selecting “Server” in the main menu then selecting “Force showing hidden files”…

When you do this you will receive a warning but it is nothing to worry about. Read the warning, click OK and hidden files like .htaccess will now be visible when you connect to your server.

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Want to be able to click a button on your desktop to shutdown your computer instead of having to click “Start -> Turn Off Computer -> Turn Off” every single time? All you have to do is create a shortcut on your desktop that points to shutdown.exe with the right switches. When you have finished it could look something like this…

or

Creating a Shutdown button:

Right click the desktop and select new -> shortcut and the Create Shortcut wizard will appear. Click the browse button and browse to C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe and click OK…

Now add the switches by typing “-s -t 0″ (without quotes, zero not the letter o, and  spaces between -s & -t & 0) to the end of the text in the location box as shown below…

Now click next and finish. You will now have a functioning but ugly shutdown button on your desktop…

To make it look nicer rename the shortcut then right click, select properties, and select Change Icon to select a better icon.

Create a Restart button:

It might seem a little strange but Windows XP restarts using the same shutdown.exe file. To create a restart button follow the same steps above but use a -r switch instead of a -s switch…

After creating both shortcuts, renaming them and changing the icons, you should have something like this…

or

Shutdown.exe switches: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317371

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