Awesome Techs

Multi-touch or multitouch functionality has been attracting consumer attraction, thanks to iPhone and iPod Touch, two-finger-scroll in Apple MacBook with TrackPad, and Windows 7, which has built-in multi-touch mapping application, photo viewing program, and gesture support in Internet Explorer 8. Multi-touch is essentially a set of interaction techniques which allow computerusers to interact and control graphical applications with fingers.

However, for marketing reason, Synaptics official standard drivers for most Synaptics TouchPads does not support multi-touch Synaptics Gestures. Synaptics’ drivers lock gesture features on all non-supported OEM notebooks and laptop PCs, except for certain gadgets such as ASUS EEE PC. So multi-touch is disabled even though touchpad hardware does support them.

But now if you want to experiance this awesome multi touch features, well there is good news. One guy has developed a modded driver for synaptic which will enable the multi touch functionality in a normal PC with windows.

The Synaptics TouchPad driver should support all Windows operating system such as Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. However, do note that the digital signatures of the modded drivers have been broken, and the drivers are no longer signed. Thus, there may be issue when use in 64bit operating system which enforces strict driver signing requirements.

Installation:

1. Uninstall all current Synaptics drivers from Control Panel’s Add and Remove Programs or Programs and Features.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Install the modded driver by running the setup.exe inside the ZIP archive.
4. Windows should prompt a warning about unsigned driver. Continue to install the driver anyway.
5. Restart the computer after installation is completed and Synaptics TouchPad driver is updated.
6. In Device Manager’s Mouse and Other Pointing Devices” section, Synaptics PS/2 Port Touchpad should have driver version of 10.2.4.

Now just play around a little bit and you will know how awesome this features are.

Also there is a two finger scrolling application which is a project hosted in google code. So this application is all you need if you just need the 2 finger scrolling functionality in windows.

This application can be found here:

Download: http://code.google.com/p/two-finger-scroll/downloads/list

The moded drivers from synaptic can be found here:

Download synaptics_v10.2.4.0_allOS_modded_b2.zip or touchpad_synaptics_v10.2.4_vistax32x64_xpx32x64_modded_build2.zip

Or you can just download all the required files from here:

Mirrors:

1. Synaptics Multi touch mode (all) – Selfhosted
2. Synaptics Multi touch mode (all) – Rapidshare – Recommended

Credits: MyDigitalLife

IMPORTANT: Do not upgrade the Synaptics TouchPad driver if you love these touch features, as Sypnatics locks and disable the advanced touch features from driver v11.0.0.0 onwards.

First  you will have to generate key on local machine.

For that type in the following command in a terminal. Here we are using RSA encryption.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

It will ask you for a password but you can leave it blank.

Note you could also pick -t dsa if you prefer DSA encryption.

Ensure that the remote server has a .ssh directory

Make sure the server your connecting to has a .ssh directory in your home directory. If it doesn’t exist you can run the ssh-keygen command above, and it will create one with the correct permissions.

Copy your local public key to the remote server

If your remote server doesn’t have a file called ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 then we can create it. If that file already exists, you need to append to it instead of overwriting it, which the command below would do:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remote.server.com:.ssh/authorized_keys2

Now ssh to the remote server

Now you can ssh to the remote server without entering your password.

Security

Now keep in mind that if someone need to login to the remote server, all s/he need is the file on your local machine ~/.ssh/id_rsa, so make sure it is secure.

Having more than one person using your computer? If you do, you can create user accounts for everyone so that they can customize their favorites, colors, wallpaper, and private files. Default ‘Windows XP User Accounts’.

Sometimes you might need to fine tune the user accounts. You can do this with a hidden ‘User Account 2’ interface by running control userpasswords2.

This ‘Windows 2000’ style ‘User Accounts’ might be useful for those users that are very familiar with Windows 2000.

So, now you might want to add this shortcut permanently to the ‘Control Panel’. The only way is to add some lines into the ‘Windows Registry’.

It is recommended to use *.reg script below to add ‘User Accounts 2’ shortcut to your control panel rather than entering it manually. Copy lines below to a new file and called add_ua2.reg. Note that the extension must be reg. Just right click the file and Merge it. Your computer must be restarted for these to take effect.

Just incase you don’t like it, you can also remove it using *.reg file below. Copy lines below to a new file and called delete_ua2.reg. Note that the extension must be reg. Just right click the file and Merge it. Your computer must be restarted for these to take effect.

Step 1. Install the VNC server.

Windows users: TightVNC is free Windows VNC server and client software. TightVNC is a nice choice because it also allows for file transfers and high compression levels for slow connections. Download TightVNC from here and run the installation on your home computer. Start the server, and set a password for incoming connections.

TightVNC can be set to run as a Windows service, which means your Windows usernames and passwords can be used to authenticate on the VNC server connection. Be sure all your Windows passwords are set and strong, and that any passwordless guest accounts are disabled.

Mac users: OSXvnc is a free Mac VNC server. Download, install, set up a password and start the server.

If your VNC server is connected directly to the Internet, it is now listening for Internet requests on port 5900, VNC’s default port (which is also configurable). Visit WhatIsMyIP from your home computer to determine its IP address and write it down.

Step 2. Install the VNC client.

On the remote Windows computer, also download and install TightVNC, but this time, start the viewer, NOT the server. If you’re on a Mac, download the free Chicken of the VNC Mac viewer to connect to your home PC. Enter your home computer’s IP address and password to connect.

Here’s a screengrab of a VNC connection to my Windows PC from my Mac. Click on the image to see a larger version.

And that’s that! You’re virtually sitting at your home desktop from anywhere in the world.

A few extra VNC tips to chew on:

• For slower network connections, set the compression to “best.” The window image quality will be lower, but the connection response will be snappier.
• Bring a VNC viewer with you on a USB memory stick so you don’t have to download and install on every computer you want to use to connect to your server.
• Avoid having to install a server on Mom’s computer; email her the 166K self-extracting SingleClick UltraVNC server for your next tech support phone session. More on SingleClick in an upcoming Lifehacker feature.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] LogMeIn is a web-based application that also provides this remote desktop control and may be a better option for some folks. I prefer VNC because it’s more of a challenge and doesn’t require third party intervention.

[2] If your home computer is behind a home network router with a firewall, remote computers will not be able to connect. You must open up a port on your router’s firewall and forward requests to it to your computer.

[3] Alternately, you can enter your home computer’s domain name. For setting Up a Hostname For your computer You can use the free service of DynDNS.

Credits:[LifeHacker]

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Supported Sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted–protection methods including CSS are not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), and some .VOB and .TS files
• Most any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.

Outputs:

• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora
• Audio: AAC, CoreAudio AAC (OS X Only), MP3, or Vorbis. AC-3 pass-through, DTS pass-thorugh (MKV only)

Misc features:

• Chapter selection
• Subtitles
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Live Video Preivew

Mac OS
	Mac OS X 10.5 / 10.6 – GUI Download (32bit Intel) Download (64bit Intel) Download (Power PC)	Mac OS X 10.5 / 10.6 – CLI Download (32bit Intel) Download (64bit Intel) Download (Power PC)
	Intel based Macs: If you have an Intel Core 2 Duo / Core i5 or i7, you can download the “64bit Intel” release. If you have the older “Core Duo” or “Core Solo” processors, you should download the “32bit Intel” release.
Windows
	Windows XP/Vista/7 – GUI Download	Windows XP/Vista/7 – CLI Download
Linux
	Ubuntu 9.10 deb – GUI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)	Ubuntu 9.10 deb – CLI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)
	Fedora 12 rpm – GUI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)	Fedora 12 rpm – CLI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)
Other
	Useful Links Checksums Source Code

As the size of hard drives increase, more people are using partitions to separate and store groups of files.

XP uses the C:\Program Files directory as the default base directory into which new programs are installed. However, you can change the default installation drive and/ or directory by using a Registry change.

Go to :-

- Start > Run

- Type regedit and Press Enter

- Go to this directory…
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

- Look for the value named ProgramFilesDir. by default,this value will be C:\Program Files. Edit the value to any valid drive or folder and XP will use that new location as the default installation directory for new programs.