xMod - Change hidden Mac OSX settings for Leopard!

I've always wondered if there was some application like the ones for windows where you could tweak additional system settings to make the mac perform better or customize it. Turns out, there's a great little application that can do a lot more than that.
It's called xMod, and it's a small, free utility that can do a lot of things. You can find a whole list of stuff it does on their website, but here's a list of things I find interesting:

• It can repair permissions to make sure everything is fine on the OS X file system. (Yes, I know, disk utility can do this too.. but xMod can do so much more!)
• It can check the SMART status of your Disks, and tell you if your hard drive is about to fail (hah. and you thought computers couldn't have fortune tellers)
• It can verify preference files (these are the settings and so on for the applications on your Mac) and find out if there are any errors in them
• It can tweak finder and it's appearance. It can also tweak screen capture settings and menubar styles. Plus, it can also make your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper! (Sort of like Windows DreamScene, but it takes up too many resources on your computer and will slow you down, so I'd recommend that you only have your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper when you aren't doing any actual "work" on your mac)
• It can change the appearance of your OS X dock to make it a 3d dock or a 2d dock
• It can disable dashboard
• It can Enable 'Sticky' mode for Dashboard widgets (so you can drag them on to your desktop if you wish)
• It can:
  
• Enable/Disable Spaces
• Add dock spacers
• Remove Dead tracks from iTunes
• Change a whole load of Disk utility/Address Book/Expose/ Terminal/Safari Options!

Plus, you can change all the things listed above with just clicking on the 'Apply button!'. Undeniably, xMod is a great little application that's powerful and easy to use at the same time!

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Hack to Make FireFox Much Faster!

I've written about how you can make Firefox start up much faster, but in this post, I'll write about how you can get Firefox to load web pages much faster (or at least it'll feel like its loading much faster) using a couple of techniques. One of them is a plugin and the other is a hack.

First, the plugin.

Get FasterFox add-on to make Firefox much faster

FasterFox (registration required to install experimental plugin) is a little plugin that has the ability to do a lot. In essence, what it does is allows Firefox to download data much faster from websites and loads web pages before you click on the link. So naturally, when you click on the link, the web page will load instantly because Firefox would have already downloaded it onto the computer. Of course, this uses up more internet bandwidth, and the speed you'll gain form a website will differ depending on a lot of factors.

But nevertheless, if you have a fairly fast internet connection, then you might want to give it a try. If FasterFox causes a page to load slower then you can simply uninstall the add-on and continue.

If you don't feel like installing an add-on, then you can peruse the hacks I've listed below:

Firefox Hacks to make Firefox faster

The following are some age-old, time tested hacks that will improve the page loading speed for websites by a couple of milliseconds (or nanoseconds) and thereby improve the overall browsing experience in Firefox.

1. First, type in "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter. If you get a message saying it'll void your warranty (heh.. funny Firefox Developers!), click on 'I'll be careful, I promise" button!

In the place where it says 'Filter': type in the entries listed below, and double click on them to change them.

So if it says set "network.http.pipelining" to "true", simply type in "network.http.pipelining" in the "Filter" box and double click on the value to make to to change to true.

For values containing a number, a pop-up will come up asking you to enter a number when you double click on the entry.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Right-click anywhere and select New > Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and click ok, then set its value to "0".

4. "network.http.max-connections" should be changed to 50

5. "network.http.max-connections-per-server" should be changed to 15

6. "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server" should be changed to 15

7. Finally, change "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy" to 15

Then once you are done implementing the tweaks above, simply visit any website of your choice, and you'll instantly notice that the webpage loads a couple of milliseconds faster. If you are unsatisfied with the changes, simply go back to the "about:config" window, and right click on the entries you just edited and choose "reset".

Here are my results:

Firefox with FasterFox Only:
Load Time For Beyond Teck (without any previously cached information): 10.979s

Firefox with FasterFox + Hacks:
Load Time for Beyond Teck (without any previously cached information): 8.762s

Now I realize that this blog's homepage isn't the fastest page in the world to load, but 2.215s is a lot of gain when you think about it... if you browse to 1000 web pages a day.. you'll be saving a lot of milliseconds!
Post your results in the comments below!

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Great free PowerPoint/OpenOffice/Symphony Templates

If you tend to give a lot of presentations, or even if you only give presentations occasionally, then you know how hard it can be to find a good background for your slideshow. Most people I see often use vague combinations of colours and text that makes it harder to read the slides… if you’re one of them (ask your friends, they’ll know) then the following site will help you too.

The resource I’m talking about here is the IBM Symphony Gallery Page, where you can download all sorts of presentation templates and background for your OpenOffice and IBM Symphony (Symphony is also something like PowerPoint… but free like OpenOffice’s Impress software). As a result, you can probably use them in PowerPoint too (although you’ll have to open it in Open Office first and save it as a .ppt file to open it up in PowerPoint).

I find that these templates are fairly professional and can be used for a variety of presentations, whether it’s a presentation at school or at the workplace. Here are some examples:

  

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the IBM Lotus Symphony Gallery and find that perfect template!

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Stop MSN messenger from starting up with your computer

Is it just me or does anyone else also find MSN (or now called Windows Live Messenger or WLM) messenger popping up all the time right after you start up your computer annoying? I mean, I didn't even tell that thing to start up right after I start my computer... it's like it has a mind of its own.

Any way, I realize that there might be a few out there who might need some help to stop MSN from starting up automatically every time you log into your PC. Here's how you can do that...

First, sign into MSN messenger. And then Press the "Alt" key on your keyboard to open up the menubar. Alternatively you can also click on the show menu button, as shown below.

Then, simply click on Tools > Options > "Sign-in" (on the left hand side of the window that pops up.).

Once you do that, uncheck the boxes beside:

• "Automatically run Windows Live Messenger when I log on to Windows"
• "Open Windows Live Messenger main window when Windows Live Messenger starts"

Optionally, you can also uncheck:

• "Allow automatic sign in when connected to the Internet"

Once you are done, just click ok!

Now, no more annoying Windows Live Messenger when you're trying to do some work!

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"This site may harm your computer" Google Bug

Today morning, as usual, the first thing I did after I sat on my computer was to search for things (in this case a wallpaper or picture from which I could draw inspiration for a website that I was working on...). However, something interesting happened. Instead of going directly to the images or search results, I'd get the "This site may harm your computer" message from Google.

No matter what site I tried to search for, or what the website was (even some of google's own websites come up as 'Malware' for some reason) I am constantly getting the problem. Of course, even this blog was listed as 'potential malware' for some reason. [Update: The problem seems to have fixed itself now, in about 5 minutes after I encountered it. Therefore, it is safely possible to assume that if you experience the same problem, just wait for a while till some Google engineer does some script-fu with the servers and makes things alright]

Clearly, there is some kind of problem with either the google server or my Internet connection. I'm thinking that it's most likely the former. Or, could it be that Google just hates me because I use it so much and rarely click on any ads?

Don't believe me? See for yourself. And no, these screenshots have not been retuched in any way, shape or form.






Something tells me that some one might be getting yelled at as I type this.

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Disable Annoying System Beep on Linux (Ubuntu/Kubuntu)

I've been using Ubuntu (well... technically Nubuntu, as I am most certainly a Linux/Unix Newbie) quite a bit lately (more on that later...!) and if there's one thing that has annoyed me so far, it's probably the little old antiquated system beep that my computer makes when I accidentally press a key I'm not supposed.

The beep is loud (I've fallen off the chair quite a few times because of it), useless (well... sort of), annoying and just plain unnecessary. So, I finally decided to get rid of it. Of course, like any other linux newbie I decided to do a quick search on the interweb to find out how to fix the problem.

The first article I came across, from the how to geek, was a bit useless because it was for Ubuntu Edgy! Since I'm using the 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) version of the operating system, there is no 'System Beep' tab when I go to System > Preferences > Sound! But then I found another article from arsgeek that helped me handle the problem. Except, the instructions on arsgeek could have been a little better... so I'm publishing what I did on my blog.

First, I pressed Alt + F2, which brought up the run application command, and typed in the command as stated on arsgeek with a sudo in the front. Like so:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

And checked the box beside 'Run in terminal' and clicked Run.

Then, I typed in my password when Terminal asked me to type it... and Gedit open with the blacklist file.

I copied and pasted the entry:

#silly speaker beep
blacklist pcspkr

at the bottom of the file, and saved the file > Closed Gedit. Finally, on the terminal window that was still open I typed in (I could have of course restarted my system... but I didn't want to waste the 20 seconds):

sudo rmmod pcspkr

And that was the end of the annoying speaker beep problem, in Linux!

More on my experiences with Linux later!

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Adding annotations to Pictures in Leopard

Unfortunately, for some weird reason, Preview does not allow one to add annotations to a picture file by default. You can, however, add annotations to a PDF file quite easily without changing things around (so you can just go to Tools > Annotate and start annotating). But if you want to do the same for a screenshot or any other picture file, you'll have to add the annotation tool in the toolbar!

To do this, first open Preview (simply click on a picture file). Then right click on the Toolbar > Customize Toolbar > Drag and Drop the Annotate Button to the toolbar and click Done.

Then, when you open a picture file, you'll be able to use the Annotate button to draw arrows, squares, circles, and much more! You can even add notes to a picture, in case it's a picture of your cat that you'll be e-mailing to icanhascheezeburger!

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