Slalom Canoe 2012 Google Doodle Trick

Google has been releasing the doodles with the Olympic themes and the latest one is the Slalom Canoe doodle. If you guys have not been trying these doodles, you are missing the obvious fun. In this post, I'll reveal a very very simple trick to obtain extremely short timing so that you guys can share in fb and boast with your friends :D

Most of the people have been using the HTML inspection and editing to have an awesome statistics in the doodle. The trick is to use the "Inspect Element" feature of the browsers and edit the values of different HTML elements that wrap the scores and stars.

However, many non-techies might have found that method to be cumbersome so here's even more simpler trick. The trick here is to note the system time you start canoeing and once you are near to the end of race, edit your system time to retain the value, for example, only 1 second ahead of system time you had noted while you were starting.

If you don't know how to change system time, windows users can access through the bottom right part of the Desktop where your system time is displayed and linux users should right-click and select preferences in one of the panels containing time.

You can even leave the slalom canoe tab as it is and continue your other tasks and once you feel you are to the end of the race, adjust the system time so that the difference from starting time is minimal (as you need).

The best thing about this trick is its simplicity and clean nature which leaves no trail for finding the cheating (of course, unless you decide to have too low time or negative time).

Note that this is cheating and is discouraged though :D

Original credits to Brisha for this trick.


Read more...

Download Windows Binaries For Python Packages

Someone from the University of California has made it easier for windows python users to install python extension packages easily by providing several 32-bit and 64-bit windows binaries for several scientific open source python libraries.

If you can't figure out your way in installing python libraries, you can download the binaries for several libraries from HERE.

Most binaries are built from source code found on PyPI or in the projects public revision control systems. Definitely the page to be bookmarked for the windows python'ers if you want to easily install python libraries :)


Read more...

How To Easily Install EasyInstall In 64 bit Windows

Easy Install(easy_install) is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages. Easy Install gives you a quick and painless way to install packages remotely by connecting to the cheeseshop or even other websites via HTTP. It is somewhat analogous to the CPAN and PEAR tools for Perl and PHP, respectively. This How To will guide you in installing the easy_install utility easily in windows.

First download the ez_setup.py file.

Run the above script by typing in command prompt the following:

python.exe ez_setup.py

Once the script finishes, new directory "Scripts" will be created in the python installation directory and it will contain the easy_install.exe file in that directory.

Now all you have to do is add the Scripts path to system's Environment Variables to access this tool easily.

Right click on computer, go to properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables, System Variables and edit the "Path" variable by adding correct path to the Scripts directory.

I hope this helps :)


Read more...

Determine Your SATA Disk Model And Vendor In Ubuntu

Sometimes you need to determine the model and vendor of your hard disk and here is the small tips on how to find those information.

All you have to do is type one of the following commands for the respective outputs:

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/model

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/vendor

I hope this becomes useful sometimes. :)


Read more...

Why Alias Command With Itself

Aliasing the command to itself to suppress the original functionality of the command and provide it new added sets of functionality can come quite handy for linux users and administrators.

If you have been using linux shell for a while, I'm pretty sure you are now familiar with the `ls` command, if not I think you have just learnt to use man pages. Probably you've been using `ls -l` command to list files with the files size as well. Too bad, you won't just be able to instantly make the sense of the file size displayed using this command so why not alias `ls` command to always provide human readable file sizes. So here is my alias:

alias ls='ls -lh'

This is what I always want to see as the output with `ls` command. The same kind of alias can be used with `du` and `df` commands. There are number of other cases where aliasing a command with itself is good choice.

Another example is the less command. By default, you need to press q to exit less which can be quite annoying if the entire content can fit in a single screen. However, adding -F flag will gracefully quit after displaying the content if the content fits in a single screen. So I have my alias for less as below:

alias lesss='less -F'

If something shoots in your mind, feel free to share here as a comment :)


Read more...

Russian Hacker Bypasses Apple's App Store

A Russian hacker known as ZonD80 has discovered a method to retrieve apps from in-app for iOS apps free of cost. The best thing about this bypassing method is that this method does not require the i-device to be jailbroken. This method works on most of the major iOS versions from 3.0 to 6.0.

The step by step guide on using this method is available at the russian website HERE. The Russian guy has also setup a website called www.in-appstore.com.

Original Link

Watch Video About This Method

HERE is the copy of the instructions to follow.

*Take care while using this trick. I've not tested it and don't know if there are any security implications as the side effect of this bypass method.


Read more...

Fast Share Your Files Using Python Script

If you were unaware, there is a command line switch for python that lets you the python library module as a script and I'm sharing a small trick on how you can easily share your files with other computers over LAN/Internet by running a python module that lets you run the tiny web server. Isn't it great when you don't have Samba?

Fire up the terminal, change to the desired directory you wish to share and type the following command:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Be cautious with the cases of characters of module 'SimpleHTTPServer' else you'll never find your mistake with this command :D

Once you've run the above command, the HTTP server will start to listen on the port 8000 (by default) so the other parties will just have to open up their favorite web browser and type the correct address followed with the colon and port 8000(eg. 192.168.1.21:8000)

I hope this proves useful sometimes. :)


Read more...

Stack-based Directory Switching For Easy Reversal

So how many times have you used the `cd` command repeatedly to go back and forth of two or more directories. Probably you are already familiar to the `cd -` command which lets you switch between the current and the previous directory. But, many times this current and previous directory switching restriction will not suffice and hence a better option in such case is to use the `pushd` command instead of `cd`.

For example, just use the `pushd somedirA`, `pushd somedirB`, ... and like that. Now if you need to switch back, you can just use `popd` command and you'll be switching back easily. The `pushd` command saves the current directory path and then cds to the supplied path.

If you dig more, you'll come to know about the -n and -N switches you can combine with these commands so I will let you explore on this. Also, you can use the `dirs` command to view the stack of directories. If you are some computer student or enthusiast, you have already gotten an idea from a famous data structure called stack. Anyway, I hope this comes handy sometimes like it does to me :)


Read more...