pitumbo.com

- Open Nero Burning Rom

- Select 'Extras' from Menu Bar

- Under 'Extras', select 'Save tracks..."

- Select Disk Drive from Pop Up Menu

- Wait for Nero to access disk

- Change output file format from .nrg to .iso

- Select output path

- Press 'GO'

If you're looking to have some fun online and make a few bucks, look no further than Centsports. I'm not getting paid to promote them or anything like that, I just wanted to give them credit for running an honest business. It is tough to gamble on sports online these days; the government has cracked down and a lot of places are stiffing U.S. customers. In my opinion it's really not safe to gamble anymore online as an American citizen (Europe and the rest of the civilized world has no such problem).

Anyway, the way Centsports works is that they start you with ten cents which you can bet with. That money, and your eventual payout, is all funded by advertising. So in effect, you're never gambling with your own dough. You can not deposit your own money. That's why it's legal, and also why it's safe. Once you check them out you will be happy. Oh, and for a while they were letting you cash out to Haiti to help with the relief effort there. Great job Vince.

Here's proof of my winnings -- one of two checks I've received thus far from Centsports.

IF you do want to give me some love, sign up with this link and I'll get a small percentage of your bets. http://www.centsports.com/?opcode=538425

Good luck with your bets!

I've noticed as I've run Vista I'm getting less and less free disk space, even though I'm not installing new programs. Tracing the source of the growing problem, I found my Windows Folder was 30 Gb! Huge, giant, and ridiculous. It turns out that about half of that, 15 Gb, was the winsxs folder. While it's true that this folder shouldn't be messed with by people who don't know what they're doing, Windows does include a clean up tool with Vista SP2. They hide it, why I don't know. Do a search for compcln.exe or run it from the System32 folder. It will clean up your Windows folder (I recoved about four gigs at least) by deleting duplicate files and making your SP2 install permanent (e.g. you can't revert to SP1, but why would you want to?). Small price to pay to avoid having to reimage, in my opinion.

Lately, my Photoshop application has been crashing every time I open it. I tried reinstalling and repairing it, but to no avail. As it turns out, the problem is with the TWAIN menu. If you watch the popup box as Photoshop open, it will say something like "Building TWAIN menu..." shortly before crashing. To fix the problem, simply add a tilde (~) to the TWAIN plugin. For CS3 on Vista, this is located at C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-Ins/Import-Export/Twain_32. If you're having trouble finding it, just do a search within the Adobe Photoshop folder for Twain.

For Windows XP:

Emails:

Install the Outlook Express on the new computer. Find the Outlook Express folder on the old computer by selecting 'show hidden files' (under tools, folder options), then navigating to:

C:\documents and settings\username\local settings\application data\identities\(series of numbers and letters)\microsoft\outlook express

Copy the entire Outlook Express folder from the old computer to the new, putting it in the same location.

Address book:

Keep hidden files visible as before. Open Outlook Express, select import and then address book. In the dialogue box navigate to:

C:\documents and settings\username\application data\microsoft\address book

Inside this folder will be a WAB file that, once selected, will populate your new address book with your old contacts.

Got a batch of VOB files you want to play in PowerPoint? Convert them to a format Power Point can use by doing the following.

1. Open up Windows Movie Maker (included software on XP / Vista machines)

2. Select "Videos" under Import (on left column in Vista)

3. Navigate to folder with your VOB files and change file type to "all" in selection window.

4. Select your VOB file.

5. Drag to storyboard

6. Select "Publish Movie" under File menu

7. Follow the prompts and select "publish movie to this computer", choose name and location for file output, and select "best quality for playback on my computer".

8. After selecting Publish, your computer will process the video

9. You will now have an AVI file

10. Go to PowerPoint, select insert movie and select your AVI movie

If this does not work, an alternative is to download VirtualDub-MPEG2 from:

http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/~fcchandler/stable/index.html

and use this program to convert VOB to AVI

To do this, you will need a Mac with a working drive.

1. Use Carbon Copy Cloner (free, donation supported software) and clone Install Disk 1 to FireWire drive. Make sure to format the FireWire drive as an Apple Partition Map using Disk Utility first, and select the 'delete all not on original disk' option in CCC to make sure the drive is an exact, bootable copy.

2. Insert Install Disk 2 into drive and open the Packages folder. There will be ~30 packages. Copy these from their location to the System/Installation/Packages folder on your FireWire drive (created from Install Disk 1). Select the overwrite option. Ignore the InstallCD2.mpkg file at the top level of Install Disk 2 as it is unnecessary.

3. Repeat Step 2 with Install Disk 3.

4. Open OSInstallCache.plist , found in System/Installation/Packages folder, using a text editor.

5. Find and delete every instance of the following:

Where X is disk 2 or 3 and ABC is the name of the package. Delete everything between < key> and < /string> including those two tags (ignore spaces after <). There will be thirty-one instances.

6. Save OSInstallCache.plist

7. The FireWire drive now has all the needed modifications. Go to the machine you wish to install 10.3 on, connect the FireWire drive, power it on and boot the computer holding down the option key. After a time you will be given the option to select the FireWire drive as the boot disk. Choose it and proceed with the installation.

it's easy:

1. boot from DVD (10.5 system disk / Leopard)

2. open Disk Utility

3. Select the hard drive from left hand column (NOT partition but drive, eg something like WDBEVE and not s03 etc).

4. Click on Partition tab in main window

5. Select "Current"

6. Select partition you wish to delete

7. Click on minus (-) sign on bottom left

8. Confirm Delete

9. Drag original partition to include full disk

10. Confirm resize

That's it! Reboot and you're done.

Can add the language by downloading from SMF site -- no longer includes multiple languages by default.

Ignore User mod can be used with either English or English UTF8 but doesn't work smoothly. Often requires switching back and forth between the two to enable the options, and blank lines remain in control panel.

It actually really is very easy to set up Wordpress Mu on HostGator Shared Hosting (I have Baby Croc).

I believe all HostGator accounts come with CPanel X3 by default.

So, the steps are:

1. Download Wordpress Mu
2. Upload to public html domain you wish to use
3. Create Mysql database and user w/ full rights
4. Run the installer script by going to the homepage with your browser
5. Setup wildcard domains -- this is the one that had me stumped.

To set up the wildcard domains, select "Subdomains" from Cpanel -- not "Add on domains". For your site, put an an * in the form field and then select the shared website from the drop down box. In the other text field, point it to public_html/domain (or whatever folder you have your wordpress files in). It does take a minute or two to take effect in my experience, so I thought I'd messed it up at first, but it really does work!

That's all there is to it.

Comment with questions and I'll help you out.

When there's only the admin account, and you don't have the password, how do you get back into Windows? You might have forgotten it, you might have had the password put on your computer by a third party, it could appear as the result of a virus, etc. Rather than reformatting, here are a few links to try:

[links removed per request]

Using the traditional GUI of Disk Management doesn't give you the option to delete or reformat, so fire up the command line.

type DISKPART to enter the diskpart utility

at the prompt, enter list disk as below

DISKPART> list disk

take a look at the disk you want to reformat, and select it with the appropriate number, for example:

DISKPART> select disk 1

once selected, you can delete the GPT / EPI by the clean command:

DISKPART> clean

once done, you can then proceed to format the disk the traditional way through disk management and selecting FAT32 or NTFS.

[19/11/09 edited per comments below "clean disk" to "clean"]

Wow, I just lost an entire blog post (curses Drupal)...

Basically, the jist is that it's easy to get free web hosting for your blog through Google. Just go to your DNS settings and set your cname alias to www and point to ghs . google . com. Then make sure to enable a 301 (permanent) forward and put in www . domain . com. That way, when people type in domain . com, they'll still automatically be forwarded to www . domain . com. If you miss this step, the domain will not resolve!

(this post really was a lot better before Droop destroyed it :( -- I should really write posts in Notepad first)

It's nice to see something like this that gives you a bit of hope in the world...all too often, especially in this insulated world of internet, we forget how similar we all really are. This video kind of reminds me of the "dance" video phenomenon (before learning the back story, which took something away from it for me).

My uncle called the other day in a panic because his computer had pooped the poop. As it turns out, he was getting the dreaded Hal.dll error message. Not referring to the evil computer from 2001 (kick arse movie), but rather Microsoft's hardware abstraction layer, which is well...abstract. Part of the problem is that when this file goes bad, or more commonly, can't be found, you end up with all kinds of problems, since it's vital for accessing the hard drive. The repair doesn't have to be all kinds of difficult, however. The quintessential fix, from Infoweek:

* Boot from your XP Setup CD and enter the Recovery Console
* Run "Attrib -H -R -S" on the C:\Boot.ini file
* Delete the C:\Boot.ini file
* Run "Bootcfg /Rebuild"
* Run Fixboot

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=...

Unfortunately, this didn't work in my uncle's case, since his computer could not find the hard drive. He was unsure if it was a SATA drive -- which can be a pain with XP installs as the drivers aren't present -- or if the problem was because of Hal. In fact, he had no idea even what brand the computer was, or when it was made. In any event, it took a second Windows install to fix his hard drive, since the OS repair was not an option. Hopefully this helps someone, and I'll remember to try the 'quick fix' next time this comes up, since it happens so often and XP boxes are getting up there in years.