Shutter Island - Plot revealed - Spoilers!

Shutter Island pulls a Memento-style trick. Or Fight Club. Or any other 'twist' movie where the protagonist is slightly crazy and happens to be the very person he's hunting for. Former US Marshal Teddy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) killed his wife after finding out she'd gone crazy and killed their three young children. So he's sent to Shutter Island and happens to be patient 76. What a tweest!

Resize Firefox to a Particular Window Size

Say you want to resize a Firefox window to a particular size, like 1024x768 or any other particular size. All you do is right click on the bookmark toolbar, select 'New bookmark...', then name it whatever you wish and for the location, paste the following:

javascript:window.resizeTo(1024,768);


Javascript has to be enabled, of course. Now whenever you click on that bookmark, it will resize your Firefox window to 1024x768 (or whatever size you typed in). Particularly useful for seeing how things look on different resolution monitors - ahem, web designers?

Turning off Windows Vista "UAC is off" Notification

For experienced users, User Account Control or UAC in Windows Vista is quite possibly the most annoying 'feature' in existence. You can turn off UAC, but you still get nag reminders telling you that UAC has been turned off every time you start Windows.

How do you turn off those annoying reminders? It takes a registry hack, but you can do it by hand easily and it doesn't take more than a few minutes. It's also a good idea to create a system restore point (google it if you don't know how), because when screwing around with the registry, you have the ability to make mistakes that can permanently hose your operating system. It's also a good idea to export a current copy of your registry to a disk or backup folder so you can re-import it if you make a mistake.

Onto how to actually accomplish said registry hack. First off, your account needs to have administrator rights (computer > manage > local users and groups > groups > administrators > r. click > add to group > add your account).

Next, open regedit (start > run > regedit.exe) and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Policies\System

The value of "ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin" must be 0 ( zero ).
Value 0 = No prompt at all.
Value 1 = Prompt that requires to enter an administrator password(even if you
are an administrator ).
Value 2 = ( Default ). Prompt that requires an acceptance only.
Note: Normal users will be asked to enter an administrative password...

Voila!

Processes That Just Won't Die

Can't kill a process? Under Windows Vista, simply click 'Run' from the start menu, type in 'cmd' to bring up the command line.

Then type "taskkill /PID 5940 /F". This kills process ID# 5940 (iw3mp.exe in this case) forcefully, because otherwise you'd get an 'Access Denied' error when you try to kill the process. The /F option slaps it around a bit and tells it who's boss.

But as it turns out, PID# 5940, aka 'Call of Duty 4 multiplayer' isn't actually running, but the process name still shows up.

Still, handy to know.





Here's a helpful manual for the Windows native taskkill utility:

TASKKILL [/S system [/U username [/P [password]]]]
{ [/FI filter] [/PID processid | /IM imagename] } [/T] [/F]

Description:
This tool is used to terminate tasks by process id (PID) or image name.

Parameter List:
/S system Specifies the remote system to connect to.
/U [domain\]user Specifies the user context under which the
command should execute.
/P [password] Specifies the password for the given user
context. Prompts for input if omitted.
/FI filter Applies a filter to select a set of tasks.
Allows "*" to be used. ex. imagename eq acme*
/PID processid Specifies the PID of the process to be terminated.
Use TaskList to get the PID.
/IM imagename Specifies the image name of the process
to be terminated. Wildcard '*' can be used
to specify all tasks or image names.
/T Terminates the specified process and any
child processes which were started by it.
/F Specifies to forcefully terminate the process(es).
/? Displays this help message.

Filters:
Filter Name Valid Operators Valid Value(s)
----------- --------------- -------------------------
STATUS eq, ne RUNNING |
NOT RESPONDING | UNKNOWN
IMAGENAME eq, ne Image name
PID eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le PID value
SESSION eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le Session number.
CPUTIME eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le CPU time in the format
of hh:mm:ss.
hh - hours,
mm - minutes, ss - seconds
MEMUSAGE eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le Memory usage in KB
USERNAME eq, ne User name in [domain\]user
format
MODULES eq, ne DLL name
SERVICES eq, ne Service name
WINDOWTITLE eq, ne Window title

NOTE
----
1) Wildcard '*' for /IM switch is accepted only when a filter is applied.
2) Termination of remote processes will always be done forcefully (/F).
3) "WINDOWTITLE" and "STATUS" filters are not considered when a remote
machine is specified.

Examples:
TASKKILL /IM notepad.exe
TASKKILL /PID 1230 /PID 1241 /PID 1253 /T
TASKKILL /F /IM cmd.exe /T
TASKKILL /F /FI "PID ge 1000" /FI "WINDOWTITLE ne untitle*"
TASKKILL /F /FI "USERNAME eq NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" /IM notepad.exe
TASKKILL /S system /U domain\username /FI "USERNAME ne NT*" /IM *
TASKKILL /S system /U username /P password /FI "IMAGENAME eq note*"

Lightroom: Exporting to Flickr

Say you use Lightroom, and you love it. Say you also use Flickr, and you love it. But what you don't love is processing a batch of photos, then getting them uploaded to Flickr by hand. A laborious and time consuming process if there ever was one.

What if I told you there was a way to export photos from Lightroom to Flickr?

What you need:
Lightroom
Flickr Uploadr

How to do this with Windows Vista:
1. Go to the folder that Flickr Uploadr has been installed to. In most cases, this will be "C:\Program Files\Flickr Uploadr". Right-click on "Flickr Uploadr.exe". Select 'Create Shortcut" from the context menu. Select the newly created shortcut and hit ctrl+C to copy it.

2. Go to the folder Lightroom stores its application data under for Windows Vista. (this was a bit of a pain to find, and it's the entire reason I'm writing this post). The folder will be "C:\Users\YourUserNameHere\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions". Paste the shortcut into this folder.

3. Start up Lightroom. Click on a photo. Then select File > Export... Scroll down to the bottom of the Export settings box. Under 'Post-processing', there's a setting 'After export'. You'll see options like 'do nothing', 'Show in Explorer', etc, etc. If you pasted the shortcut in the right folder, you'll see an option that says 'uploadr' (or whatever you named your shortcut). Select this.

Now when you export a batch of photos, they're automatically loaded into the Flickr Uploadr. Yay!

(for how to do this in Windows XP, refer to this post in the Flickr Adobe_Lightroom users group)

Firefox With Multiple Profiles Running At the Same Time

Some times you like to be logged into the same website twice, under different credentials. For instance, I have two gmail addresses, one I use for personal correspondence and another I use for professional. Logging out, logging in under a different account, logging back out, and logging back in again under the first account is just annoying as all get out.

Now, Firefox supports profiles, which is awesome. But out of the box, it won't let different profiles run at the same time, which sucks.

But through the power of the command line and a few switches, we can fix this!

Right click on your Firefox shortcut. Under the 'Target' box, it will probably say something like this:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

Change it to:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P NameOfYourCustomProfileHere

The '-no-remote' switch, aka noremote or no remote, allows multiple profiles to run at the same time. The -P switch tells it what profile to use.

If you haven't created multiple profiles, just change it to:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P

When you click on the shortcut, this will bring up the profile manager. Check the box that says 'don't run on startup'. Make a new profile, call it 'Alt'. Keep in mind that for the command line, capitalization does matter. '-P alt' is a different profile than '-P Alt'.

Now to get back to your first profile, make another shortcut that looks like this:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P default


So now you should have several different shortcuts, renamed to keep them from getting confused.

'Firefox' -> "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P default
'Firefox Alt' -> "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P Alt
'Firefox Personal' -> "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P Personal

etc, etc.

Using AIM on Gtalk for your Blackberry

So I recently bought a Crackberry, er, Blackberry, and instantly fell in love with it. Unfortunately, the software availability for it is somewhat hit and miss. One area that really sucks is instant messenger clients. Want AIM / MSN / Yahoo / IRC / etc on your Blackberry? You'll have to pay!

Well, not quite. There are a few free AIM clients and the like out there for the Blackberry - Ramble IM is one of them, for instance. But they kinda suck.

An IM client that *doesn't* suck for the Blackberry and is free is Gtalk. There's a version of Gtalk for the Blackberry - you can download it over said Blackberry at http://www.blackberry.com/googletalk.


So now we have Gtalk on our Blackberry. But it only shows people who use Gtalk - almost useless! But Gtalk has Jabber / AIM integration, and with a bit of finesse, we can get it to the point where you can talk to your AIM contacts on your Blackberry using Gtalk.

The key is populating your Gtalk account with your AIM contacts. One way that works is to download a Jabber client (psi IM), use it to browse to an open Jabber server that has an AIM transport, register on that Jabber server with the AIM transport, and voila! Three hundred "authorize new contact" messages later and you've done it!

I'm going to have to finish up this post and fill in the details a bit later, as I can't keep my eyes open any more, but this post should cover it till I get back: http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/google-talk/36025-aim-transport-psi-google-talk.html#post203196

The open Jabber server I used was: aim.jabber.me.uk or aim.jabber.no