Connect to a VPN server in Windows and Android

A VPN connection is still mostly regarded as “business solution”, only useful to connecting employees to the company network. But this is no longer true nowadays.

VPNs can be very useful in protecting the integrity and security of data transfers, no matter who the two communicating parties are. To learn how to set up a connection and connect to a VPN server…

Gaining ownership of protected files in Windows 7

Since Vista, Microsoft implemented a more serious protection system concerning core operating system files.

Because of this, replacing, editing, deleting or making any changes to protected files is a tedious task, requiring the additional step of obtaining the appropriate rights and permissions on the files first.

Low framerate with Aero/Flash on ATI/AMD Radeon in Windows 7

At random times, especially after a long computer uptime (over 2 weeks), all windows animations and especially any Flash-based video player would become sluggish and render at about 10-15FPS.

This happens independent of where using the computer or letting it idle while it is running. The solution…

Encrypting Thunderbird email with OpenPGP

Email messages are at the moment the least secure method of transferring information. They are almost always written in plain-text, jumping around from server to server with anyone interested in eavesdropping on them able to do so.

To use an end-to-end PGP encryption with Thunderbird, you’ll need to install Enigmail (Thunderbird extension) and GnuPG…

Skip Avira’s Free Antivirus reboot request on updates

If you’re using Avira’s Free antivirus and are a mad computer user like me that never reboots his computer (unless something blows up), you might have noticed that Avira periodically updates its program (beside the virus definitions) and asks for a system restart to complete this.

Dismount mounted drives that do not have letters in Computer Manager

Upon entering Computer Manager to remove the drive letters, the partitions do not have any letters assigned. In fact, no actions beside “Delete partitions” are present on the context menu. But the partitions show up in Windows Explorer as drives H: and K.

Luckily MOUNTVOL, a Windows utility (present in all Windowses since Xp) “creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point”.

Making Enter type newline and Ctrl+Enter send in Pidgin

By default, Pidgin uses Shift+Enter to jump to the new line (unlike the Ctrl+Enter in Yahoo Messenger), and this may be cumbersome when you’re used to YM or when you’re a fast typer.

Now, to change the actual behaviour of the Enter and Ctrl+Enter keystrokes, we’ll need to paste the following piece of text in the ensuing (pdigin specific) gtkrc-2.0 file …

Automatically moving and sorting recovered files based on file extension

Let’s consider a very complex folder/files structure with a lot of (read infinity) subfolders and a large amount (read infinity again) of files in each subfolder.

This folder structure is generated by PhotoRec, used to recover lost files from damaged/formatted/erased drives.

I needed to move all the files found in those (very numerous) subfolders into different folders based on the file extensions (so in each folder I would only have one filetype, making it a lot easer to browse through and extract important files out of the piles and piles of bulk information).