Tag: software

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Top S60 Applications: My Own List

Aside from the enhanced calculator, I’ve installed a few really cool apps on my Nokia E51 that some might find useful:

  1. Joikuspot Light – Turns your phone into a wireless router and share your HSDPA signal (if you get one).  It’s free but supports only browsing (HTTP and HTTPS). The full version version offers more features.
  2. Opera Mini – A pretty nifty mobile browser. It uses a gateway that retrieves web pages for you, transforms it into a smaller mobile version, and sends the transformed pages to you. I prefer the built-in browser but Opera Mini has its place (like when your connection is slow).
  3. Fring – reach out and talk to your friend via you can interact with friends on all your favourite social networks Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!, AIM, and more!
  4. YouTube – Watch YouTube videos on your mobile phone. You need a fast network connection though.
  5. Google Maps – Turns your phone into a navigation device complete with map. It even shows your location with GPS or without (via cell site)! How cool is that?
  6. Google Mail – You can configure your email to check Google Mail via POP or IMAP but you can also download this app for checking your Gmail account on your phone.
  7. Google Sync – strictly speaking, not an app but this service allows you to synchronize your phone (just contacts for now) via SyncML
  8. GooSync – since Google Sync doesn’t handle calendar synchronization just yet, GooSync steps in between your phone and Google Calendar to provide you synchronization via SyncML.
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RegEdit and Task Manager

RegEdit and Task Manager are two useful Windows tools for managing your computer. RegEdit allows you to edit the Windows registry, a global configuration setting repository. Task Manager, on the other hand, allows you to start and stop applications and processes among others.

What’s one use for these tools? Malware cleanup. Typically viruses, worms, and other malware would be hooked up into your registry to run upon Windows startup. You need to stop the malware process using Task manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Select the Processes tab, choose the malware process, and click End Process. Of course you’ll need to know the name of the process. If I don’t, I would normally just stop everything I can and then run regedit :P

Once the malware process is (hopefully) stopped, you would want to be able to  edit out  their entries in the registry using RegEdit. Click Start->Run…, type “regedit”, and press Enter. Typically malware startup values would be under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run”). Just carefully delete them.

Now here’s a  problem: Some malware disables both these tools. The solution? Use alternate tools that provide the same or even bettter functionality such as RegAlyzer and Task Killer.

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Disabling Autorun

One big cause for your computer getting infected by viruses, worms, and other malware would be Window’s autorun “feature”. Plug in a hard disk, optical disk, memory card, etc and autorun launches and runs a program. Guess what that program usually is? Yup, malware.

So one of the easiest ways to protect your computer is to simply disable autorun. There are many ways to do it but by far, this procedure from annoyances.org works best for me:

  1. Click Start->Run…
  2. Type “regedit” and press Enter.
  3. Navigate the tree on the left pane to “My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies”
  4. Expand “policies”
  5. If there’s no “Explorer” folder, right-click “policy” and select New->Key. Type “Explorer” and press Enter.
  6. Open the “Explorer” folder.
  7. If there’s no “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” entry on the right pane, right-click on it and select New->DWORD Value. Type “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” and press Enter.
  8. Right click on “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” and select Modify
  9. Enter “ff” on the Value Data Field and select Hexadecimal for Base. Click OK
  10. Close Regedit
  11. As with anything you do in Windows, restart your computer.

Voila! No more autorun.

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Hamachi

My brothers are out of town but that won’t stop us from playing DOTA :P This morning, we played against each other as if we were on the same network. Well, not really since there was a slight latency delay due to the generally poor quality (and expensive at that!) of Internet connection in this country. But it definitely was playable.

So how did we do it? We used Hamachi, an almost zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) utility. It was such a breeze to use: We set it up, I created a VPN (along with an access password), and we all joined the VPN. It’s not your heavy metal, ultra-robust, super secure VPN solution but it’s enough for most needs and, as I said, almost zero-configuration*.

*We did encounter a snag when we couldn’t find games in DOTA but we found the solution here. Basically it means going to Control Panel->Network Connections->Advanced->Advanced Settings and putting Hamachi to the top of the list of connections.