Techno-muffin » guide

Handy Windows 7 tweaks

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:16:44 +0000

I just stumbled upon some cool W7 tweaks on SevenForums and figured I'd post them here.

The first one is a tweak to change the hover delay on Aero Peak/thumbnail previews in the taskbar. The original link is here, but I've written a resume here.

Open regedit.

Navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced"

Right-click and create a new DWORD called "ExtendedUIHoverTime".

Choose decimal and enter a time in milliseconds. I've chosen 200 and that works out fine.

Close regedit and restart explorer either by terminating and restarting the proces or logging out/in/restarting the computer

The next one also concerns the taskbar. It's a tweak to enable easy cycling through previews by clicking on the taskbar icon. Copy+pasta:

Launch regedit.exe (Win+R, then paste regedit.exe)

Navigate in the left tree control to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Go to Edit->New->DWORD (32-bit) Value

Name the value LastActiveClick

Hit enter to assign the value and change it to 1

Restart Explorer and you're good to go.

My last tweak for you is really awesome. By creating transparent shortcuts in the taskbar you can group items in an easy way. Go to LifeHacker and find out how.

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How to: Setup DDNS with the LG NAS

admin — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:36:30 +0000

And finally it came! My LG N2B1 with 2x1TB drives. Wonderful piece of gadget in great design. I unpacked it quickly and turned it on. Everything went smooth, though the drives weren't formatted and partitioned when it arrived, but that was easily done through the Web Menu. Also, this is not what this post is about!

One of the cool things LG gives their customers is a DDNS service. They offer you a domain - your_name.lgnas.com - so you can access your NAS not just locally but globally. Just as cool as this sounds as much a pain in the ass it can be to set it up. It took me hours of googling and twice as many hours taking care of my head-aches. My problems were mostly related to port-forwarding, and therefore the guide will cover that primarily. So, here is a small guide that can hopefully help some. I can recommend canyouseeme.org while testing.

Connect to the NAS and enable DDNS. A pretty obvious step. Log into the web menu of your NAS, go to "Remote access" and enable DDNS. Here you must also choose a domain name (make it cool!) and password. Clicking enable should initiate a process, this takes a little while. After it has been enabled your (external) IP-address should be revealed. Copy this to clipboard.

Basically, you can just try to see if it works now. Open a browser and paste the IP into the address-line or type your_name.lgnas.com. Both probably gives you errors, right? If yes, read on. If no, damn, you're a lucky bastard!

So, what's the hold-up? Your connection is being blocked! We need to open up some ports by port-forwarding. This process requires changing some settings in the router, so let's go there now. In a browser type 192.168.1.1 or whatever your router's IP is. Go to port-forwarding - it's located different on different routers. On my Linksys router (WRT160N) it's a tab called "Applications and gaming".

Let's port-forward! We're gonna do 4 different ports: 21 (FTP), 80 (WEB), 9090 (FileView) and 9091 (Torrent). For each, choose a name, enter the port in both external/internal, choose both (UDP+TCP). The IP-address is the address of the NAS. Now, enable them.

Does it work now? Check the browser by entering either your external IP from before or the domain-name. If it works, hurray! If not, read on. We'll get there soon!

Basically, it should work by doing the above, given you've done everything right. So what NOW is the problem? It can be one of three. Either 1) your ISP is blocking the ports for security reasons. If you think this is the case, you must contact them and have them open the ports and can stop reading on OR 2) there is another router in your network! OR 3) Both.

Option 2 was of course my issue. I had not realized that my modem also worked as a router! My setup is a ZyXeL modem/router (wired) to a Linksys WRT160N (wireless) router. My problem was therefore, that the requests never got through to the Linksys and obviously could not forward the ports to the NAS! So basic, but yet so easy to miss. What to do is this.

Open a browser and access your OTHER router. In my case the IP was 10.0.0.1. You will be prompted for a password. Default on ZyXeL is 1234, but a much longer password had been set by my ISP (Cybercity), so I had to retrieve it from a piece of paper hidden away in a very dusty box. Anyways, when you've gotten access to the router, we must do another port-forward, so go there. Now, forward ALL ports (1-64000) to your other router. This is done by doing a port-forward range, 1 as start and 64000 as end. Now, the important thing this is getting the IP correct for the router. It is NOT 192.168... Instead, it will most likely be 10.0.0.2 or similar. Enable the port-forwarding.

Let's check the domain once again. Does it work? I really hope so, since there are no more steps in this guide. Have fun with your remote accessible NAS :)

Guide: How to setup DOSBox

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:25:39 +0000

D-Fend

Yesterday I suggested to spend some time playing good ol' games. Obviously, these games won't run in a modern OS-environment, but with a little help from a friend or three we can emulate an old-school environment. Spending a lot of time getting this to work I figured I'd make this step-by-step guide for Windows-users. I personally run Windows 7 64-bit, but there shouldn't be any critical differences if you run XP or Vista.

So, you want to play Keen? Let's do it then.

What you will need:

http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/

486 Games

Okay, start off and download D-Fend Reloaded. You want the file named "D-Fend-Reloaded-x.x.x-Setup.exe", x's indicating version number. When the download has finished, install it as you would any other program - automatic installation worked fine for me.

First time you run the program it will bring up a wizard to configure the program. There is one thing, that you may want to change and that is the Game Folder. The default is located somewhere like User\Admininistrator\D-Fend Reloaded\VirtualHD\. I prefer to make a directory either immediately in the C: drive or in a subfolder. Note: I was not able to change the Game directory after I had chosen the name in the wizard. Therefore, choose carefully and watch your spelling :)

For these old DOS-games I chose to make a folder called DOSBox in C. I therefore clicked the Edit Settings button in the wizard, skipped to Game Folder and wrote C:\DOSBox. The games I download will need to be put in that folder.

And now.. we're basically done! What we simply need is to find the games we wish to play, put them in our Game Folder and launch them with D-Fend.

Using the example with Keen, go to 486 Games (or Dos Games Archive) and search for it in the search box in the left-hand side. Choose your favourite Keen (mine is Keen 4) and download it where is says 'here' in red.

You will now have downloaded a zip-file containing the game. Open the zip-file and put it the folder named keen4 in your Game Folder.

Open up D-Fend Reloaded and click the green Add-button (or press Insert). This will bring up a profile-window. If you wish, you can select an icon for your game. The essential options for us are the name of the profile and Program file. Go ahead and name the profile Keen 4. Next, click the folder icon to the right under Program file. This will bring up an explorer-window. Dive into your keen4 folder and chose KEEN4.EXE and click Open. We don't need to specify any setup-file, but other games require that. In that case, simply browse to the game folder and chose SETUP.EXE. Now, Click OK and you should be back in the main menu and see Keen 4 added to the list of programs.

Lastly, double-click Keen 4 and the game should start. Notice the prompt: Alt+Enter toggles between Fullscreen and Windowed mode and Ctrl+F9 terminates the game.

If any error occurs feel free to comment on this blog. Good luck and have fun.

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