January 20, 2010 18:52 pm by Jal
As a security measure, there are times when you need to stop access to certain programs to other users. In Windows, using the Local Group Policy Editor, you can specify which all programs you want to prevent from running. This is very useful if you are administering an Internet lab in school and colleges or running an Internet café. Here’s the work around:
1) Press 
+ R to open the ‘Run’ dialog box. Type ‘gpedit.msc’ and click ‘OK’.
2) The Local Group Policy Editor window will open. In the left pane, navigate to ‘User Configuration’ > ‘Administrative Templates’ > ‘System’. Now in the right pane, double-click ‘Don’t run specified Windows applications’.
3) In the window that appears, click the ‘Enabled’ radio-button and then click ‘Show…’ button under ‘Options’.
4) In the ‘Show contents’ window, specify the executable file (.exe) of the programs you wish to prevent from being executed. Finally, click ‘OK’.
You’re done! The programs specified here won’t run until you ‘Disable’ the setting in step 3) or you remove the program’s .exe from the ‘Show Contents’ window.
January 15, 2010 3:23 am by Jal
While watching movies with subtitles it is very important to have same framerates for both – the movie file and the subtitle file. Although it does not apply to hardcoded subtitles, unsynced framerates is one of the most common annoyances when we use an explicit subtitle file to overlay on the video. Here, the change of delay to a positive/negative value simply doesn’t work. You need to
sync up their framerates and
not the timing of the subtitles.
Problems due to unsynchronized framerates:
Suppose if you have a video with framerate 25.000 and subtitles with framerate 23.976, then the subtitles will slowly lag in time as the video continues. The only solution is to change the subtitle framerate so as to sync it with the framerate of the video.
Here is a nice utility that comes to the rescue – Subtitle Framerate Changer. Now I don’t need to say what it does right? Just enter the path to your SRT file (subtitle file) with ‘bad’ framerate, specify the new framerate and click ‘Convert’.
The results are really good. I have tested this utility with different videos and subtitles with different framerates and I’ve found it very good. The only glitch is that it only accepts SRT files. But that won’t be much of a problem I guess! 
Download Subtitle Framerate Changer / 212 KB
December 21, 2009 13:53 pm by Jal
Windows 7 has a very nice feature called ‘Jumplists’ which is otherwise very helpful but can get a little annoying at times. The main concern is that it not only displays the core functions of a program in the Windows 7 taskbar, it also displays a list of recent items stacked together, which is not so good on the privacy front. If you wish to remove the recent items from the Windows 7 jumplists, here’s a simple trick.
Removing recent items from Windows 7 jumplists
» Assuming C: as your Windows partition, navigate to:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
» Here you’ll find many AUTOMATICDESTINATIONS-MS files. Things are little tacky here. If you wish to delete only specific recent item entry, you need to open each file in a text editor to check which file corresponds to which recent item. Else you can delete all the files and get rid of recent items for all the programs at once.
No more recent items in jumplists!
December 17, 2009 9:21 am by Jal
Quick-tip
Although it seems a noob thing, it’s actually not. Sometimes even the so-called professionals can’t figure out a simple thing. It so happened that I was goofing around on Facebook and unknowingly clicked the ‘Hide’ button on my friend’s news-feed only to find myself fumbling for settings to revert it back. Facebook’s settings control is extensive but ergonomically average. Finally I figured out a way to get it right. It was just a matter of a mere click on a link that easily manages to escape your sight.
» Select the ‘News Feed’ tab on the left pane, navigate to the bottom of your Facebook page and click on the ‘Edit Options’ link.
» A new window will appear where you can unhide people/pages by clicking the small cross mark against their name.
December 16, 2009 17:09 pm by Jal
Recently I did a post on merging/deleting duplicate contacts in Windows Live Hotmail and now I am happy that even Gmail has incorporated this feature. So without much ado, here’s how you merge duplicate contacts in Gmail.
Merging duplicate contacts in Gmail:
1) In your Gmail account, click ‘Contacts’ in the left pane.
2) Now in the right pane, click the button that reads ‘Find duplicates’
3) It will take 15 seconds max (depends on your contact list) to detect dupes. When it finishes, it’ll display the duplicate contacts with the number of times they are duplicated. You can choose not to merge some contacts by unchecking them. Finally click ‘Merge’ button on top.
Merging duplicate contacts in Gmail was something that I really wished for. It’ll be like a dream come true for those who sync Gmail contacts with their smart phones frequently.
November 21, 2009 18:31 pm by Jal
I must make it clear that this little tip is for beginner’s only. You must have experienced that many of your contacts have multiple email accounts and its quite irritating to see your address book filled with multiple entries of the same person. The reason is, Windows Live Hotmail treats every email address as a unique contact and this makes your address book unorganized and cumbersome to use. However, Windows Live Hotmail offers a feature to counteract this issue.
Here’s how you can either merge multiple email IDs of the same contact or delete all but one of their email IDs:
1) In your Windows Live Hotmail account, click ‘Options’ > ‘More options’.
2) Now, under the ‘Customize your contacts’ category, click ‘Clean up duplicate contacts’.
3) Then click the ‘Clean up duplicate contacts’ button and select a contact from the list.
4) Now you can either select all but one contact details and delete the rest or you can select all and merge them.
There you are. You just made your address book much more clean and well-organized.
November 16, 2009 7:32 am by Jal
Sometime ago I showed a simple trick how you can
minimize Windows Live Messenger to system tray in Windows 7. Based on the similar trick, I am going show you how you can set Windows Live Mail to always minimize to tray.
1) Right-click on the Windows Live Mail icon and then click ‘Properties’.
2) In the ‘Windows Live Mail Properties’ window, click the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Here, set the ‘Compatibility mode’ to Windows Vista. Click OK.
3) Run Windows Live Mail and you will see its icon in the notification area (system tray). Right-click its icon and choose ‘Hide window when minimized’.
Now whenever you minimize the Windows Live Mail window, it won’t appear in the super bar and you can make it appear again by double-clicking its icon in the system tray.
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