Cool Technical Tips

Renaming Multiple Files At Once in Windows

2008-09-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

When you download photos from your digital camera, they often have unrecognizable names. You can rename several similar files at once with the following procedure. This also works for renaming other types of files.

Open the My Pictures folder. (Click Start, and then click My Pictures.) Or open another folder containing files that you want to rename.
Select the files you want to rename. If the files you want are not adjacent in the file list, press and hold CTRL, and then click each item to select it.
On the File menu, click Rename.
Type the new name, and then press ENTER.

All of the files in the series will be named in sequence using the new name you type. For example, if you type Birthday, the first will be named Birthday and subsequent files in the series will be named Birthday (1), Birthday (2), and so on. To specify the starting number for the series, type the starting number in parentheses after the new file name. The files in the series will be numbered in sequence starting with the number you type. For example, if you type Birthday (10), the other files will be named Birthday (11), Birthday (12), and so on.

Recover Deleted Mails In Outlook 2003

2008-09-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

Ever noticed if you need to recover some mails which have been deleted by you by mistake. A simple trick could solve the problem but this will work only if you are using a Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail account and will able to recover mails in the period as specified in the policy settings on Microsoft Exchange Server.

There can be two ways in which a file has been deleted.

Case 1: A mail is deleted and then also deleted from Deleted Items folder
Solution: Go to Microsoft Outlook, and click the Deleted Items Folder, then you need to go to Tools –> Recover Deleted Items. All the items that you have deleted within the time frame set in the policy should be available for you to select. Just select the one’s you want back and hit the recover button. But by default the Recover Deleted Items functionality is only enabled on the Deleted Items folder; items that are hard deleted using Shift + Del cannot be recovered. A small change need to be done for that as explained below

Case 2: A mail is hard deleted using Shift + Del
Solution: A small change to the Registry can recover the hard deleted mails from any folder.

Caution If you use the registry editor incorrectly, you might cause serious problems that might require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using the registry editor incorrectly. Use the registry editor at your own risk.

Steps to change the registry

Exit Outlook.
Start Registry Editor(Regedt32.exe).
Browse to My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options.
On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
Type the name DumpsterAlwaysOn.( Note Do not type any spaces in the name.)
Set the DWORD value to 1.
Close Registry Editor
Restart Outlook.

The Tools menu now has the Recover Deleted Items command for every Outlook folder.

Unprotect Excel Worksheet : Crack Password

2008-09-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we come across an Excel file that can be opened and viewed but can’t be edited, since it is has been protected? And when we try to unprotect, it asks for a password.

Here are a couple of ways to overcome the problem.

Scenario 1: If the cells that you are interested in are selectable, then you can create editable copies by simply selecting the cells, copying the contents, and pasting them into a new worksheet or file. The new worksheet would be perfectly editable. While, this may appear too simple, many people are not aware that this works.
Scenario 2: There is a possibility that the creator of the file has disabled cell selection while protecting the worksheet. Obviously you can’t use the first method to deal with such worksheets, because without the ability to select the cells you can’t possibly copy the contents. A better way to find the password is described in JE McGimpsey's site: http://mcgimpsey.com/excel/removepwords.html which provides a macro to extract the password and unprotect the worksheet.

First hands-on experience with Google chrome

2008-09-03T02:05:00.000-07:00

As Google launched its browser, Google Chrome, I downloaded the tool and had a first hands-on experience with this tool. Below is what I examined to be the advantages and disadvantages of this over IE and firefox.

Advantages

New and simpler looks. On startup it just has the address bar and few icons to start with. You can even drag tabs to rearrange them or move it to a new window.
Fast browsing. Typically very useful for watching videos.
You can reate a desktop icon for web applications.
A site crash on one tab will not cause the browser to crash. This is because google chrome is multi-threaded process. Each tab is a separate thread with its own memory space.
A privacy feature called 'incognito', which will tell the browser not to log anything. So when the browser is in incognito mode it will not set any cookies also.
When you open a new tab, the default is to show you thumbnails of your most visited websites.

Disadvantages

Missing status bar. Although chrome claims to be of high speed, there are slow sites where status bar helps you know that something is being done by the browser.
Missing the search bar. The address bar does both the things for you. Although it is a new approach and could be very helpful once you become used to it but could be annoying sometimes.
Missing feature to deal with RSS feeds, which is very popular nowadays.

Although its looks and innovative idea of handling each tab as a separate process are very exciting but it lacks the third-party add-ons right now, which are all build up for Firefox and IE.

Unblocking websites via proxy

2008-09-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

I have seen most people fed up while surfing at school or work. They end up with most of the sites that are blocked. An easy solution for this is to go to some proxy sites and access the URLs via them. Some of these sites being RockTheProx, Freeking .

But every time you need to access a blocked site you need to go through these sites. I will show you another way by which you can access the blocked sites through firefox without every time going to these sites. Just follow the simple steps below.

Go to Xroxy proxy list and get yourself one proxy (preferably in a country close to you) and copy the IP and port. (Note: This works for Mozilla Firefox only)
In firefox, Go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings and set it to “manual proxy configuration”. Copy the IP in the first slot and after that copy the port number. (Note: All of them does not work perfectly so you might have to try a few of them until you get a good one).

You should now be able to open the blocked site through firefox.

Secure the stored passwords in Firefox

2008-09-01T04:22:00.000-07:00

There is a potential risk in Firefox that by default all the passwords remembered by Firefox can easily be viewed by anyone who happens to access your computer. You can check this for your system by following these steps :

Go to Tools menu and click Options...
Go to Security Tab and click on Saved Passwords button.
A new window will come up and click on Show Passwords button and you see all the passwords stored by firefox.

This is a potential danger since passwords are not stored in encrypted format and anyone who has access to your computer could easily read all your passwords.

The way to protect your system from such users is to either use KeePass to store passwords or use Firefox's own Master Password Option(MPW). By setting the master password, firefox becomes a lot safer.

Enabling the Master Password:

Go to Tools menu and click Options...
Go to Security Tab and enable the option "Use A Master Password". This will ask you to enter a password that you need to remember.

Now, every time you start your browser and log in somewhere, Firefox will ask for the Master Password for the first time. It will also ask the Master Password when trying to view the list of saved passwords or when doing anything else with your personal data.

Tracing location of email sender

2008-08-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

Often it becomes very useful to track the location of the person who is sending you the email for verification purposes. Here are the simple steps by the way of which you can easily track the location by determining the IP Address of the email. The email comes with headers that carry information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it.

The process of tracking the location basically comprises of two steps :

Finding the IP Address of the sender in email header.
Lookup the location of the email address.

Step 1 : Finding the IP address of an email sender in GMail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook

Finding IP Address with Gmail

Log into your account and open the email in question.
Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link.
Click on Show Original from the list.
A new window will open, which will contain lot of information. Look for "Received: from". The IP Address just following this tag is the Ip Address of the sender. There might be lot of "Received: from" in the header because it contains IP Address of all the servers involved in routing the email to you.
The person who originally sent the email is the last "Received: from" pattern in the header.

Let's go through Yahoo and Outlook before talking about tracking the location of that IP address.

Finding IP Address with Yahoo Mail Beta

Log into your account and open the mail you want to track back.
At the top right, you’ll see there is a drop-down option where Standard Header is selected by default.
Click on it and choose Full Header.
A new window opens up where you see the same information. Search for the last "Received: from" tag.

Finding IP Address with Microsoft Outlook

Open the email in Outlook by double-clicking on it.
Go to View at the top menu (the menu options for the email, not the main Outlook window).
Click on Options menu.
A dialog box appears where you see the the Internet Headers box. Again search for the last "Received: from" tag.

Step 2 : Tracking the location of an IP address

After determining the originating IP address, next step is where that is! You can do this by perform a location lookup on the IP address. Useful sites for this are IP2Location and GeoBytes IP Locator.

If you want more information, you can do a WHOIS database search also. Go to WHOIS Database Search. This will give you information on who hosts that IP address and their registration information. You can always contact them to try and find more information on that particular IP address.