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Backup over NAS

Although we’ve been mostly happy with Leopard, one of the features we were most looking forward to was the ability to set Time Machine to use a NAS volume like Airport Disk, thus making laptop backups wireless and sexy (well, sort of sexy) instead of wired and cumbersome. Sadly, Apple cut the feature at the last minute, but as with all things OS X, nirvana is usually just a defaults write command away, so just pop open a terminal window and enter:



defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and you should be able to select NAS volumes in the Time Machine prefs. Of course, you should only re-enable this for giggles — we don’t know why Apple turned it off to begin with, and it could very well be full of bugs and hose your data. Considering some of the other glitches that have cropped up in Time Machine, we’d actually recommend staying well away from this one.

Features that make Vista a better experience that aren’t marketed much.

Windows Vista has a lot going for it that most people don’t really hear about. It’s understandable because marketing some of these new features would essentially be tantamount to saying “Oops, XP had some problems”.

Moreover, it is often easy to forget just how big of a release Windows Vista really was. While Leopard claims “300 new features” most of those features are minor in nature (Let’s face it, MacOS X is so good that it’s in the enviable position of only needing to evolve, Windows Vista, by contrast, had to play a lot of catch-up). Windows Vista has closer to 10,000 new features when one adds both major and minor updates to the mix.

WinCustomize has an article outlining 10 examples of minor features that rarely get discussed and yet make a small but noticeable improvement to the Windows experience over Windows XP.

Click for more on Ten Cool Things about Vista you may not have heard of »

The stealth Update that Microsoft released back in August isn’t quite as harmless as the company claims.

Ever since the Redmond company’s recent download of new support files for Windows Update, users of XP’s repair function have been unable to install the latest 80 patches from Microsoft.

Click for more on Microsoft ‘Stealth Update’ Proving Problematic »

By default, WinRAR will only associate files with extenions RAR, R00, R01 till R29, how about the rest?

WinRAR switches to new name scheme for quite some time, which use part1.rar, part2.rar etc. as extensions. However, you can find lots of files, still compressed using the old name, extensions from R00 to R99(then S00 to S99 and so on).

By default, WinRAR will only associate till R29 and left the rest as “unknown file type”. Here is the simple tip to solve this issue and let RAR handle them all.

To do this, just open a command prompt and type

for /L %d in (30,1,99) do assoc .r%d=WinRAR

This will associate R30, R31 till R99 with WinRAR.

If you are using Vista, you need to do this from an elevated command prompt, refer to my earlier post for more info.

Installing SP1 requires lots of space,  and might hinder many from adopting the latest update. 

Per Microsoft’s claim, installing the service pack will require a large amount of free disk space (7 GB for x86 and 12 GB for x64). From my own experience, at least 6GB is required to install SP1 on x86. However, its possible to experience SP1 with less effort–only 3G is required now.

Click for more on Install Vista SP1 when system partition size is limited »

Make the gadget work in non-English Vista systems and “remember” user settings.

One of the new features in Windows Vista is the Sidebar and Gadgets, which provide a handy and speedy way to retrieve various information without additional efforts. The integrated weather gadget, does look great when it works, however, might become less appealing, even unusable by some [serious] bugs.

Click for more on HowTo: Fix The Built-in Weather Gadget in Vista »

Windows Vista by default employs User Account Control (UAC) for better security, but it also brings some obstacle when you try to modify(replace or delete) a system file. This can be achieved by taking ownership of the file and then grant yourself full control over the file.

Without turning off UAC, we need to get an elevated command prompt first:

Click for more on HowTo: Modify Protected System Files in Vista »

Avoid the annoying prompt permanently.

Internet Explorer 7(IE7) is intended to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software, and it also features full user control of ActiveX and better security framework. It put more restrict control over SSL certificate, and completely blocks any site with a self-signed certificate.

Click for more on Install Website Certificate Under IE7 »

Though much argued, I still prefer to adopt UAC in Windows Vista, so to launch an app in administrator mode, I have to right click and select “Run as administrator”.  Being a command line fan, it would be convenient to have it done through some keystrokes.

I searched and found some tool, works fine, but its a bit bulky and comes with lots of (unnecessary) features. To keep things simple, I decide to write one myself. And its done with a size of 6K.

Click for more on Sudo for Windows Vista »

The user universe is divided into mousers and keyboarders, with the latter group stoutly insisting that it’s faster to keep your fingers on the keyboard than to stop and pick up the mouse to execute a command, and looks much cooler as well. If some of your users are in the keyboard camp, these basic shortcuts will be right up their alley.

Source: TechPublic