Experienced users love choice. I’m talking about the choice to turn on or off certain features that come with a product. It does not really matter if we are talking about software or hardware, choice can become important almost everywhere.

Most companies do not seem to think that giving the user choice is a wise thing to do. If you have ever installed a Windows operating system you probably know what I mean. But this article is less about Windows but about the general lack of choice in consumer products and one of the best examples that is affecting me day in day out is the blue blinking light of my Nokia N73 mobile phone.

The phone is starting to blink blue every five seconds or so if it is in sleep mode. Sleep mode has the advantage that the phone is using less battery. It is only possible to turn off the blue light if sleep mode is turned off which would mean that the battery of the phone would drain faster.

continue reading "Bad Choice: Giving The User No Choice"

System Partitioning is a little scary, especially if your as stupid as me and don’t back your files up before you start.

I have been using Ubuntu installed through Wubi, a very convenient and efficient way for anyone to try out Linux beyond a Live CD or Virtual machine.

While Wubi is great It does have a couple limitations, firstly with hibernation and suspend modes, neither of which work. Not an issue for a desktop PC, but for me using my laptop quite a big drawback. Secondly, apparently installing through Wubi gives a small performance hit to Ubuntu, although I wouldn’t know how true this is.

continue reading "System Partitioning with Vista"

In 2001 reports about Zip Bombs or Zip of Death attacks made the round on the Internet and I thought it would be nice to write about one shiny harmless example of that technique. On first glance the file 42.zip is a normal compressed file with the size of 42 Kilobytes. Many users who run a virus scanner will probably run into troubles downloading that file to their computer.

It still looks like a normal 42 Kilobyte archive after the download but the surprise begins when the user tries to unpack that file. What they did was basically pack a 4.3 Gigabyte file consisting only of zeros. That packed file was replicated 16 times and packed again, and again, and again, and again. Or, to use their own words:

The file contains 16 zipped files, which again contains 16 zipped files, which again contains 16 zipped files, which again contains 16 zipped, which again contains 16 zipped files, which contain 1 file, with the size of 4.3GB.

continue reading "42 Kilobytes Unzipped Make 4.5 Petabytes"

Windows Vista users may be surprised to know that they actually have two different versions of the places bar in Windows Explorer. The places bar provides access to several links on the system, for example to the desktop and the My Documents folder.

Windows Vista users can either see the old five locations on the left side of Windows Explorer if an application makes a call to the function of the old Api which was left in for backwards compatibility or something that is called Favorite Links which provides access to way more folders and resources.

A location on the hard drive is being used to store shortcuts to all folders and special folders that are shown in the Favorite Links panel. That location is by default C:/Users/username/Links. It can vary depending on your setup.

continue reading "Manage Favorite Links In Windows Vista"

“This is a guest post by Ben Carigtan, a technology enthusiast and staff writer at Online-Tech-Tips.”

Is your outlook mailbox a mess? Do you miss reading important emails because of the tons of emails you receive on your inbox? Do you want to organize it in such a way that you move a group of emails automatically upon receiving? If you are someone like me who receives more than a couple of hundred emails per day then this tutorial is for you!

Keeping an organized Outlook mailbox is easy by applying rules. In Outlook you can do many things like “move to a specific folder”, “auto delete” and “auto reply”.

continue reading "Creating Rules in Microsoft Outlook"