Selectively deleting your history entries seems like something you do in adolescence and while I hope I may help my young friends in this area, my reason for wanting to do this is to un-clutter my history.

If you visit a video on Youtube often for example, you will have a hard time just typing “you” in the address bar and finding it in the list, since people generally visit a lot of videos. There is a way that you can clean these from the history (and stuff you don’t want Mom and Dad to see).

Martin has done a post previously on finding visited URL’s through the index.dat file for Internet Explorer, now I would venture to add to that a bit by expanding it to Firefox, and suggesting a way of editing the document to your needs. Here we go:

continue reading "Selectively deleting entries from you Firefox history"

I have to admit, I’m not the cheapskate, I don’t try dodging costs and I don’t employ the technique described here, but it is a fairly easy way to get rid of SMS expenses once and for all. There are numerous ways to minimize mobile costs nowadays, I have a “family pack”, which means that if I buy more than one SIM card, I can call that card any time for free, it only costs about a flat $4 a month. Sadly, this doesn’t include SMS.

As we all know, Google Calendar has the option to send free SMS reminders of tasks. Now all you need is to set up a calendar for your significant other using your own phone as a reminder, and one for yourself, with his/her phone number. Set the default reminder to SMS, for 5 minutes before the event takes place

Now if you want to send her an SMS, just create an event, and write the text as the “What” text. Set the event about 10 minutes ahead to be safe, and save. Sadly only 60 characters will be shown in the SMS, but this is still enough for a quick message. You can create events 1 minute apart and have 3 events span a single SMS if you want. You will have a “reminder” sent to your partner, quickly and for free!

continue reading "Send SMS to your Girlfriend/Spouse for free with Google Calendar"

Microsoft will be releasing the Windows XP Service Pack 3 in the first half of 2008 which means that users have to wait several months before they can install the new Windows XP Service Pack on their computer. As with most other Microsoft releases that are not yet ready for the prime time the Service Pack 3 can also be downloaded early.

Not by all users but by beta testers.. and you. The process is similar to the one that was used to get the Windows Vista Service Pack early. Create a new entry in the Windows XP Registry and use Windows Update to download the latest service pack for Windows XP.

Thankfully though there is no need to download and reboot the computer three times, a reboot is actually not needed at all.

continue reading "Download the Windows XP Service Pack 3"

The Windows Calculator does not increase its font size or appearance if your screen resolution is relatively large. It will always display the characters in an eight pixel font size which displays them ridiculously small if your use a large screen resolution.

Microsoft does not offer a way to change the display of the Windows Calculator or adjust the font size automatically depending on the screen resolution of the computer which means that we, once again, have to rely on third party tools to change a default Windows application so that we can work with it.

You do need a software called Resource Hacker for this, the link is at the end of this article. Unpack Resource Hacker and start ResHacker.exe. Now click on File > Open and browse to C:\Windows\System32 and open calc.exe.

continue reading "Increase the size of Windows Calculator"

I’m really curious why companies try to enforce DRM like protections into their products even though they should know that this is on a large scale only affecting the customers who actually purchase their products. This is in my opinion counter productive, but lets analyze this a little bit further.

Users who purchase Microsoft Windows have to activate and update it. Users who download it from P2P get it activated and with the latest updates installed. What’s wrong with this picture ? Oh yes, the first batch of users who actually paid for the product are having a less comfortable version.

They have to activate the system and will have to do it again if they change important hardware in the system. They have to use Windows Updates to update their system after the purchase as well.

continue reading "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation cracked.. Again"