Archive for category HowTo
Windows 8 Edge swipe/pull behavior with synaptic driver
I have a lenovo x220 on which I have been running windows 8 for several weeks now overall its been a pretty good experience for me. Just recently I installed to synaptic driver to help with some weird mouse sensitivity issues I have been having. while it appears that it has helped resolve that issue it added a new one for me
Windows 8 edge swipe behavior, where for example if you swipe from the left edge in it will rotate through open applications or for me the more annoying the right edge swipe bringing up the action menu.
With the x220 this was annoying while I like the form factor the mouse pad is much too small for me to only used the very center of the pad.
Thankfully this is very easy to disable simply open up the windows registry editor and navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2
From in there simply navigate to the “Left Edge Pull” “Right Edge Pull or “Top Edge Pull” sub directories (whichever is annoying you) and modify the Action Type dword to 0 which will disable this compleatly
It is in these same places you can modify the swipe zone size as well if desired (I did not do this I simply disabled)
Tropico (Steam) Crashes on launch
This is a simple one having nothing to do with my other IT interests but it was frustrating for me to figure out a few weeks ago I purchased Tropico 3 absolute power and every time I tried to launch the application it would immediatly crash.
The fix was simple for me I am running multiple monitors, for some reason the game can not handle this configuration you have to disable all extra monitors then it does not have a problem.
The shortcut in windows 7 is win+p otherwise it is in your display settings menu
Chromium and Flash
Posted by Jered in HowTo, Linux, Uncategorized on April 27, 2011
Within the last month on my mint laptop chromium has been complaining about needing to be updated, and it disabled the plugin.
The manual update process is kind of a pain and to be honest and I had just not gotten around to doing the update. On a whim I decided to try and see if there was a way to do the update via apt-get instead of the manual install procedure and I found it
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
It updated the plugin in chromium as well … yay flash works again
Xfire on Debian (Ubuntu and Mint as well)
This is a really easy one but it took me a bit to figure out actually and the answer turned out to be really easy.
I wanted to be able to sign onto xfire from my laptop which is MINT at this time (by the way my favorite distro ever)
Anyways it is simple as adding the gfire package which is the pidgin plugin for xfire
sudo apt-get install gfire
This adds the option in the dropdown list for the xfire protocol
Its as easy as that
Smoothwall as an ESX(i) Virtual
After watching a recent episode of HAK5 I got renewed initiative to resume using a non pre purchased appliance based device as an external router/firewall. As many of you know if you followed my old blog I have done this before with a variaty of softwares both as a hardware and as a virtual device.
In this case I wanted to use smoothwall
For those not familiar smoothwall is a very nice pre-packaged linux based operating system designed to be your edge firewall. The twist I am adding is that I want to run this as a virtual device but keep it simple enough that you would not need specialized hardware to accomplish it (things like VLAN capable switch or such which would be very doable to reduce the NIC count)
A word of warning this post really requires a working knowledge of the basics of vmware (Setting up, configuring ESX itself and a basic level of knowing how to modify virtual hardware and deal with ISO’s) if you are not up this level of knowledge there are plenty of blogs out there that will help you get started, I will also try to write some “basics” but if I miss anything please comment and let me know what I need to add to make it easy for you.
That being said I am using my standard home used tower (Dell SC440) as my virtual device … I have 3 different NIC’s in the device but I am only going to use 2 for this particular project.
As you can see from my networking diagram I have 2 virtual switches with virtual machine port groups on them the inside or green interface will be in the “VM Network” Port group the outside or red interface will be the one in the “Outside” port group
The next step is to create the virtual machine, I created a standard virtual machine marked as “Other Linux 32 bit” as the configuration with the name smoothwall, When creating it leave the default HDD size. I will show you why in a little bit.
As you can see here I created the virtual machine as “Other Linux” With 512 MB of RAM this can be scaled up later if you wish.
Now comes the tricky part, smooth wall does not detect SCSI hard drives which are the standard for ESX.
Step1 is to edit the settings of the smooth wall virtual machine
Step2 is to remove the existing hard disk
Step 3 is to add a new IDE virtual hard disk
This is the only major modification that you have to make to the virtual hardware. You will also need to add a network interface to the “inside” and “outside” port group.
After that is complete you are ready to start installing the hardware
At this point boot to the ISO/CD and follow the menu’s
We are going to want to do a RED+Green configuration for this.
The last trick that makes a virtual environment different than the physical is that we have virtual network cards that are using the same driver set. There are several ways around this but the easiest I found is that wen you do the card assignment it states what MAC address is being used after you assign it.
This MAC address is visiable in the settings of the NIC in vmware
This should point you in the right direction to find which is which. IF you assigned it to the wrong one the nice thing is you can just flip the port assignment at any time.
At this point it is like any other smoothwall deployments out there I would recommend watching HAC5′s Building a High speed Router episode
Outlook Scripting Sending an Email
I ran into this today, I am definitely not a scripting guru by any means but I ran across a situation where I wanted to send a new email in response to a receipt of an email (I did not want to forward the content of the existing but a brand new email)
This turned out to be trickier than I thought there was no built in function so I had to make a script (something I have done with other office products)
Step 1
Create the script itself
I used the following source as my template, it is well documented no need for me to post it again there is one change you have to make to get outlook to be able to use it as a script in a rule though
http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?lngWId=4&txtCodeId=6480
The change is as follows (Taken from this KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306108)
You have to create the sub as an outlook mail item
Example:
Sub CustomMailMessageRule(Item As Outlook.MailItem)This little trick was actually not the easiest to determine for a newb like me
At that point you should be able to have a working mail script to include in a rule
Step 2
You just have to attach it to a mail rule you do that by selecting ”run a script” and picking your script from the list provided (as long as you have declared the Sub right it should show in the list)
Use this rule only for good