I am sure that everyone has given presentations on a beamer / screen and will have to do so in the future. Most people I have seen presenting use the default slide show view in which the laptop/computer shows the same view as the projector / screen. This is quite unhandy when you want to refer to your slide notes or want to have an idea of the time you took till now or simply want to switch to a different slide by jumping a few in between without letting your audience being obvious of that fact.

Here is where the presenter view functionality comes in use. It has to be one of the handiest tools while giving a presentation. The presenter view allows the user to take full advantage of the dual screens. While showing the full screen presentation on the screen the laptop/computer screen shows an organized collection of slide notes, navigation controls, drawing tools, timer, slide view shown on the projector and other powerful features.

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Stumbleupon has taken up my huge amount of hours, stretching deep into the night, into the wee hours of many mornings while promising a never ending stream of interesting randomness at the click of the mouse. Recently in January Stumbleupon with its 12 million users surpassed Facebook and its 600 million users in the amount of web traffic. Thats 50 times more traffic per average Stumbleupon user then an average Facebook user!!

So what is Stumbleupon? To be put it is an adventure that takes you around the wonderful world of Internet. Traditionally Internet is designed to work like most other computer related technologies; which is answer based systems. It does not allow you to discover content on its own. On the other hand Stumbleupon is all about discovery. It lets you discover, share and recommend web pages based on your topics of interest. There are currently about 700 million pages served per month to its 12 million + user base!

Once you register for an Stumbleupon account you set up your list of topics that you would like to read about. The best way to stumble your way through is to get the Stumbleupon tool bar which lets you stumble/rate and discover new pages from the tool bar. The concept of Stumbleupon is straightforward, when you come across a webpage you like, you “stumble” it telling people that you like it. Similarly you can also rate a page with a “thumbs down” if you don’t like a certain page. These pages are known as your “stumbles”.

It is one service that I would recommend everyone to give a shot at!

Dell is notoriously infamous for selling adapters that tend to go bad after few years of heavy usage. In the last 3 years of my laptop use, I’ve already had to change my adapter thrice due to an unrecognized adapter bios warning. You can read about why this issue occurs here .

I don’t really mind this message but dell has gone further to annoy their consumers by forcing a cpu throttle to the lowest scaling frequencies. Also, they will not allow you to charge your battery if this message pops up, for no reason but to force you into buying a new adapter. Since this is expensive business and all three of my dead and dying adapters work perfectly fine as far as the voltages required for operation are concerned, I was desperately searching for a software bypass to somehow allow frequency scaling on my CPU and work on reasonable speeds. However googling didn’t help much at which point I started reading up on BIOS and ACPI, the ones responsible for power management. Finally, I stumbled upon this beautiful solution to bypass this limit dell forces upon me.

On probing ACPI on the linux kernel I came across /proc/acpi/processor/CPUx/bios_limit which is the limit the bios is asking the kernel to respect. Hence, all one needs to bypass it is to ask the kernel to ignore bios_limit using a kernel parameter via grub namely processor.ignore_ppc=1. So just add this line to grub.conf [ or to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/grub.d/grub if you're using grub2] and you’re set.

Alternately, you can use rmclock[gui] on windows to achieve the same. However don’t forget to set the processor type to mobile if you’re using a laptop to get the right voltage values for various p-states. I hope this helps folks who’ve been annoyed by the way dell handles its adapters like me.

A while back, I had to write a few papers. Typing was going fine with my three or four fingers. Or so I thought. Until I saw one of my friends spewing out letters like a machine gun. Would it be worth the trouble to learn to type with ten fingers? Probably not. Learning to type is boring and takes lots of time. Or so I thought.

I forgot when I first heard of TuxType. It is a game created for children, but I really liked the game. You can use the game to learn ten-finger (blind) typing. Learning how to use your fingers to press keys on your keyboard is fun. The program shows you which key to press with which finger and plays music on the background.

Shows which finger to use to press a key.

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Being just out of college I realized that one thing I am going to miss is the LAN and how easily everyone was just a net send away. And the main thing the GAMING experience you share with friends is never the same. With everyone being behind a NAT and some even behind proxy servers a direct connection is out of question. But there is still way to play those lan games over the Internet. While I wrote the previous post Lan over internet using Hamachi, this one uses wippien

There is a very sleek solution in form of VPN (Virtual Private Network) over the Internet which gives you alternate IP’s for your private LAN and you can now do anything you want just like it was a real LAN. Wippien is a P2P based VPN application so you do not have to worry about delays or speed limitations due to routing all the traffic via a central server. While Hamachi is a server based VPN.

Installation of Wippien is very simple just visit the site to download the small < 2 Mb file and it will guide you along to creating your own VPN network. Once setup you can use your Wippien IP as in you were directly connected in a LAN and begin to play games online or to use other services such as remote desktop or windows file sharing.

Wippien uses the Jabber protocol to connect you to your friends. I would recommend creating a new account rather than using your existing jabber account for convenience sake.

To connect to a LAN/network from a computer over Internet, firstly you will need to setup a VPN between one on the network to the computer outside, Wippien will do this for you. Now to be able to communicate/connect with the other computers on the network you will have to use the internal computer connected to you via Wippien as a proxy. To set up a proxy on the computer you can use tools like ccproxy, winproxy, or if you just want to communicate/ connect on a particular service you can simply use port forwarding.

Also VPN can be used by two or more users to connect directly when they don’t have an Internet IP, it can be used to play LAN games, file sharing netmeeting and various other services that require direct connection.
Wippien is available for both windows and Linux environments and what’s more its open source for those who want to try something extra.

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continuing from the last post. If your network is all Windows based, then using the tricks mentioned in the previous post are of no use to you. That’s because Windows servers use NTLM authentication. It’s different from normal authentication, in the sense of a user, you won’t be able to use Linux happily on a network with that kind of authentication scheme. You need to keep an eye on how to use this tip to your benefits.

You need this to create your very own NTLM workaround proxy server. It’s called NTLM Authorization Proxy Server.

Setps for those-who-don’t-know-and-want-to-learn

1. Download the NTLMAPS script.
2. Download python.
3. Unzip the NTLMAPS zip file and install python.
4. Configure(edit and save) the server.cfg (read below).
5. Double click on runserver.bat

voila, you see a console!

Configuring the server.cfg

You will need to modify these variables in the config file named “server.cfg” according to your network needs

LISTEN_PORT:5865

PARENT_PROXY:your_parentproxy

PARENT_PROXY_PORT:8080

NT_DOMAIN:your_domain

USER:username_to_use

PASSWORD:your_nt_password

And these variables if you need, normally they won’t require a change, but you might need to.

LM_PART:1

NT_PART:0

SCR_DEBUG:0

ALLOW_EXTERNAL_CLIENTS:0

FRIENDLY_IPS:

For me the configuration looks like

LISTEN_PORT:4000

PARENT_PROXY:10.100.56.45

PARENT_PROXY_PORT:3128

NT_DOMAIN:your_domain

USER:200301001

PASSWORD:

LM_PART:1

NT_PART:0

SCR_DEBUG:0

ALLOW_EXTERNAL_CLIENTS:0

FRIENDLY_IPS:10.100.90.90 10.100.96.69

Note, if you don’t fill in the password, it will automatically ask when you run the “runserver.bat” file.

So now it’s all done, tell me if you use it successfully, or failed at it miserably!