Windows Live Messenger lost after windows hibernation.

I've been using the windows hibernation system for quite a time and recently came up to this problem;
The MSN will probably be lost from the running proccesses during the restore of a saved session. If the user runs it again, it simply won't sign in the account.

What did I do to get it run and sign in?

Follow these simple steps and your problem will (hopefully) be solved.

• Go to a website that offers MSN services. (a good example is http://meebo.com/)
• Login to your msn account directly. (without making a meebo account)
• Then run MSN. (Start->"msnmsgr" or for WinXP Start->Run->"msnmsgr" )
• Sign in, if you have selected to do it manualy, and you are done.
• You can close meebo anytime you want.

You need to login to meebo every time this happens. Doing it only once won't fix the problem permamently.

Secured PDF files. How to unlock them.

PDF files have some kind of protection if the creator makes them secured.
I thought I found a way to unlock them and thought I should post it here.
Doing a google search I came to this site in less than a few seconds.
http://www.pdfunlock.com/
It works great, supports greek (so I suppose it will support any other language) and kinda spoiled my plans for an interesting post but anyways, its exam period and I am not having that much of time this month, so I wasn't up to something new.

If I find a program that can run localy, I will update this post, so you won't have to upload every single file you want to unlock.

Download Videos From Youtube

At last a more begginer post is available in the blog.
Downloading videos from youtube and other websites like vimeo is something that can be useful, fun or whatever you want to call it.
Many people wonder how to do it. There are indeed hundreds of ways to do it although some are slow, others inconvinient and others need money.

Although now exists a program that has a ton of features on it.
It is called aTube Catcher and it is totally free. This is its homepage.
http://atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com/video/

Its installation is easy. You may want to deselect some of the addional and optional options like the toolbar and the default homepage during it though.

It can convert the downloaded videos to a lot of diffrent file formats including 3GP's, MP4's, AVI, GIF and more. Even DVD format is available while converting directly for IPOD is included.

PSP, XBOX and Nitendo Wii video support is also available.

There are also a lot of diffrent file formats supported for sound such as MP3, OGG and WAV.

Anybody should not have any problems using it. Just copy the youtube link and paste it into the URL box.
The Save To box is where does it save the files and output profile is the file format of the output.

One more feature I would like to mention is that it can download the entire of a youtube playlist.
Find the playlist and paste the link (should be something like this http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX).

Be cautious. It may be illegal to reproduce / sell or anything else with the videos you download.
Use them only for personal use please.

Thank you for the 1.000 views.

Reading from windows a linux ext disk partition

Quite a few linux users have a disk partition with windows on it.
When using their linux OS whatever it may be, they simply enjoy accessing their data stored on their windows partition. But what about reading data stored on a linux ext2 / ext3 / ext4 partition from their windows OS?

There comes a big problem, when needing to read a file from the ext partition without wanting to restart their computer boot into the other OS and then reboot into windows to continiue their work?

It is a mess. I had this problem for a month or so but after googling for some hours I found out about the soloution.

There is a windows program that helps with this one.
Here is the link, to the free (till now) program http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ called Linux Reader.
It comes with some documentation but in any way you should not have any problem using it.

If you have any kind of problem, the comments are right below, and I am willing to help as soon as I can.

Toshiba Satellite Linux and Wireless

After running the Ubuntu successfully on my laptop, I realised that the wireless wasn't working.
I could connect to the internet through cable but it seemed that Ubuntu didn't found the wireless device.

It is simply a driver missing.
Luckily Realtek has drivers for its devices on its website.

These are the steps you need to follow:

1. In terminal enter the command: lspci
2. Search in the results for WiFi Adapter
3. In the same line there will be the device id. (Mine was RTL8188CE)
4. Go to the following site and in the search box search the device id you found in the previous step: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/
5. From the results you can download the driver for linux easily.

Further instructions are included in the file you download.

Toshiba Satellite Ubuntu

Well, I recently bought a Toshiba satellite laptop and I wanted of course to install Ubuntu to it.

If you are a linux user you will probably know that most linux distros use 2 partitions on the hard disk drive and they both need to be primary.

Coming to the windows 7 (Home Premium Edition which is preinstalled to the system) disk manager I was really unhappy to see that there were already 3 primary partitions on the disk.
Since these partitions are needed I thought it would be a good idea to try and install 5 primary partitions on the disk, as I had done some months earlier on my desktop computer and it had worked as expected.
Completing the installation of Ubuntu 10.04, after 2 or 3 restarts I only came to the login screen (of Ubuntu) with a not working keyboard.

Because the 3rd partition is used by windows for backup, I wasn't able to delete it as my system would not work properly.

What to do if you need Ubuntu on a Toshiba Satellite?

These are the steps you need to do to finally get Ubuntu 10.04 working on your laptop:

Here is how to backup the recovery partition and have it saved as a virtual drive:
http://www.fanhow.com/knowhow:Copy_System_Partition_to_VHD_or_VMDK_with_Image_for_Windows_80073645

Now go the disk management in windows (Right Click Computer->Manage->Disk Management) and delete the Data partition (the one you made the backup).

Here you may want to extend the windows partition to gain space usable on windows.
Then install Ubuntu using the largest continuous free space when asked where to install.

Now they should run properly.
For the wireless see the next post here.

Linux Time in Windows Console ( PTIME )

Hey there, it has been a while since my last post.

Anyway, if you are a programmer, you know that the faster your program is the better.


Thats why there is a command on linux that is called "time".
Here is the documentation of it by the way.
http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_time.htm


But what if you are programming on windows and you want to know much time does the program do to run?

Here it is:

PTIME

Ptime is a program that runs on Windows Console and it can time the execution time of a program.

http://www.pc-tools.net/win32/ptime/

This is where you can download the program.

If the link is broken then try google.

Now as I understand, you will not want  to copy ptime on a diffrent directory whenever the program you want to time is on a diffrent directory.

What to do?

Simply drop the ptime executable into the "Windows/System32" directory and you are done.

In no way do I claim to be the author of this program.

The original author of the program is Jem Berkes <jberkes@pc-tools.net>.

Recording Computer Videos...

Recording your computer's screen may be useful sometimes, as you may want to upload a video on youtube, about an error probably or whatever.
The problem is that you don't know how to do it.

Well, there are quite a few programs that do this, you can google it, but I will give a review about the ones I use.

The first one is "Camtasia Studio 7", and the other one I use is "FRAPS".

Camtasia Studio 7

I recently installed this to my computer, it has been a week or so, but I have been using the older version (v.6) for quite a long time.

These are the pros and cons that I believe it has.

PROS

• Lightweight. I can't remember having much lag while using it. (Comparing to other recording programs)
• Bugless. It doesn't crash even on old computers.
• Comes with other handy programs for editing, making a dvd menu, a player...
• Zoom-n-Pan (Google it cause there is no space for explaining here).
• It exports to many formats.
• Fast to use, just 3 clicks and it can start recording.

CONS

• It won't record games. (Luckly we have fraps for that.)
• There is no version for linux. (That is sensible. There are diffrent codecs for linux and much more.)
• It is quite expensive to buy and it would be waste of money if you are going to use it once a month.

Fraps

Fraps is a well known program for recording games.
These are the pros and cons that I believe it has.

PROS

• Easy to record. A simple button and the record starts. The same button and you are done.
  
• Screenshots.
• It records games.
• Records sound.

CONS

• FPS cost in games.
• Really huge files if the settings aren't correct. (I had this problem as I run 1680x1050 and the file is an avi)
• It "exports" only AVI files.

In addition, these programs have other abilities not mentioned here.

P.S. Now that I have camtasia installed on my computer, I will make some video tutorials...