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).

Desktop Heap limitation

When running lots of applications, one may notice a moment where no more windows can be opened. This is the Desktop Heap limit; you will see this logged in the Event log as “A desktop heap allocation failed”

Back when I was running Windows Xp I hit this limit quite often (because of my working habits). The solution was to increase the limit; for this one needs to edit a specific registry key (always backup first!):

“Now playing” Windows 7 gadget mod

One of the gadgets I started using recently is the “Now Playing” gadget.

One issue I noticed though is its inability to display the trackname for tracks which lack the ID3 tag. The widget would just switch to its “Play a file in Winamp” message. So after a bit of tinkering, I managed to get it to use the track filename and display that instead…

Disable extended media information on videos and images

Windows Xp reads information from media to let you find out properties (width, height, bitrate and/or others) of avi, mpg, asf, etc. files. This “behavior” can lock your avi files from being deleted, moved or renamed, and sometimes it’s just plain annoying. To disable this action, use Regedit to delete …

How to repair Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

This error might occur if Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) components are missing or not registered correctly. This error manifest itself, among others, by not displaying any more processor information in System Properties, and by returning a “Class no registered” error message after running the “systeminfo” command. Registering the WMI components …