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Recently I had problems trying to make Nokia LifeBlog work for my Nokia 6680: the last version available for my model (or similar ones, like the 6630) is the 1.8, but it is incompatible with the newest PC Suite 6.81.13. In addiction, the newer 2.x version is nicer, it has more functions and it doesn’t require any license to work, but it is (officially) only for Nokia N-series phones.

… no everybody knows that it’s possible to have it work also with our series 60 devices, using a quick trick

1. download and install Nokia Life Blog phone version on your mobile (currently it’s v. 1.6);
2. tell a little lie and choose a N-series phone (for example, I have a Nokia 6680 and I selected Nokia N70): the wizard will make you download Life Blog for PC v. 2.x (currently: v. 2.1);
3. Install it on your PC and then go to the application folder (for example: C:\Program Files\Nokia\Nokia Lifeblog); open the file named SyncConfig.xml with Notepad or another text editor;
4. Un-comment the part of the text between <!– and –>(in other words, you’ve only to delete <!– and –>);
5. It’s done! Now you can use Life Blog also with your 6630, 6680, etc…

Also the name of this malware is ugly
Today I had to deal with an infection of a rootkit that is also known as “LinkOptimizer“.

I don’t know where it came, anyway I had an unknown process in the Task manager, named “dbtl1.exe“, and sometimes my cellular phone was starting to try to call an super-expansive number, because bluetooth is active on my PC and it can use it like a modem… luckily, that number is barred by my cellular operator :D

Finally, I found an excellent removal tool. It is produced by Prevx.com, a software house that promotes a (commercial) anti-spyware application.
The Removal Tool is absolutely free.

http://www.prevx.com/gromozon.asp

This is probably not a news for a lot of people, but it’s surely a good tip for someone

On Mess.be one of the most appreciated patches for MSN Messenger (that since some time has a new name: “Windows Live Messenger”) is spreaded: who applies it to the famous application can activate many addictional features, like Messenger Plus! does, but the most important is the possibility to turn off the banners and the advertising texts of which Microsoft’s Messenger is nearly full.

In addiction, this patch can also deactivate other ugly functions, like the texts that invite to buy a webcam (they are visible if a webcam isn’t connected to the pa, but sometimes I see them also if I HAVE IT… this is ironic!), or the buttons to download animoticons or other paying stuff.

www.mess.be

1 – Are you tired of playing videogames at low screen refresh on your old CRT monitor? Me too…
Usually games runs at a 60Hz refresh mode, (I think) to be ”safe” for older monitors, and it’s often impossible to configure them to run at higher refresh rates. Reforce solves this problem, allowing you to exclude screen modes that you don’t want (for example, 1024×760 @60Hz), to leave on only more confortable modes (1024×768 @85Hz etc…).
Of course, it’s useless for LCD monitors, because they use a different system that haven’t a real refresh (but a “response time”) and so they don’t suffer of this problem.

2 – Looking for Reforce, I found also a little trick to activate CoolBits, some addictional features into the Control Panel of Nvidia Graphic Cards: after you installed the latest version of Nvidia Graphic Drivers, open Regedit (Start -> Execute… -> REGEDIT) and go to this path:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
now create a new DWORD value and name it CoolBits, then edit it and assign value 3 (exadecimal).
A new section of Nvidia parameters will be available. Search for it into:
Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > (The tab with the name of your Nvidia Card) > Clock Frequency Settings (or something like that)

You will have the possibility to manually set the frequency of your Graphic Card. Of course, USE IT CAREFULLY, because this setting may damage your hardware.

Tonight a virus chiseled me: I received an e-mail (in italian) with a nonsensical joke about the ex-president Berlusconi, with a .zip attachment. I opened it: it had 2 GIFs in it… I opened the first one, and it was a little picture of Silvio Berlusconi with his son; then I opened the second one, and nothing appeared. Damn! It wasn’t a .GIF, but a .PIF!

After a couple of system checks, I discovered that Windows’ Firewall control panel was no more accessible: “Due to an unidentified problem, Windows cannot display Windows Firewall settings“. In addiction, Internet Connection Sharing didn’t work.

I Googled about this error, and I found a quick fix. I want to restate it here, to spread the word:

- Download and execute this .REG file;
- Reboot;
- Go to a command line and execute this command: NETSH FIREWALL RESET;
- Now you can enter Windows Firewall settings, to go there and reconfigure it as you like.

Sometimes I discover some new… old part of Windows
I did some research on Google to learn how to download a file daily, via FTP, and now I know that Windows has a little FTP client (named, with a lot of fancy, ftp.exe) that can do everything a “normal” FTP client like FileZilla or CuteFTP can do.

It hasn’t a graphical interface, the only way to use it is from the command line, and so it’s perfect to be scheduled, to execute repeated tasks. This is how I programmed Windows to accomplish my need:

- I created a new text file (next I renamed it “ftp.bat“) with the following text:
@ECHO OFF
echo open ftp.mydomain.com >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo mylogin >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo mypassword >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo lcd D:\Backup >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo prompt >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo mget %DATE:~8,2%%DATE:~3,2%%DATE:~0,2%*.psc >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo bye >> D:\Backup\script.txt
echo ftp -s:D:\Backup\script.bat >> D:\Backup\script.txt

C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.exe -s:D:\Backup\script.txt
del D:\Backup\script.txt
exit

This script connect to ftp.mysite.com (just change the address to any other FTP server you want), sends login and password, changes (with “lcd”) the local work path to D:\Backup and disables the prompt to void confirmations;

then it downloads (mget) a file with a variable name, for example 060725050315.psc (this is the daily backup I would like to download). My additional problem was that I knew the first part of the file name (060725… it’s today date!) and its extension (.psc), but not the hour (in the example, 050315), because it indicates the hour when the remote backup ended. So I used a little Windows batch script that extracts current year, month and day (DATE:~8,2, DATE:~3,2 and DATE:~0,2) from my system’s local time (it’s in italian format, DD/MM/YYYY), then a “*” wildcard character and the fixed extension.
So I’m sure to download the today backup(s), regardless of the hour…

at the end, it disconnects (“bye”).

Because of the variable date problem (see above), the whole script first writes updated FTP commands in a temporary file (D:\Backup\script.txt), then it call ftp.exe with the new .txt file as argument. Finally, it delete the text file.

The last step I did was to add my .bat file to the Windows’ scheduled tasks, to make it run daily, at 5.15 AM

I spent some time searching for the “Puma Pace 2006” font on the Internet. It’s the custom font used by Puma for players’ t-shirts at Germany FIFA World Cup.
It seems to be impossible to find it: it wasn’t released and it’s not for sale.

The only decent source I found was this little GIF with a sample of the font. So I thought to try to re-create the original font, starting from it. It was a good chanche to try a couple of font creating applications.

So, I found FontCreator, that is a good app (it’s not free, but a trial version is available) and I vectorialized the characters I took from the above GIF. Unfortunately, only 16 of them (all in lower-case) were available, so the TTF file I obtained is very incomplete (ok it’s also bad because I didn’t a precise work… ), but it’s sufficient to write my name like it could be on a soccer t-shirt

I also found that there’s an another free font, Electrotome that is similar to Puma Pace 2006. It could be interesting to continue my work and to do a “mashup” of the two fonts (and maybe finding some other original characters from anywhere), to get a complete set of an “unofficial” Puma Pace 2006 font

Is there anyone that has time to do it?

Since February, italian Government blocked access to 500+ Casino and Betting sites, forcing italians to use only the “official” governative web site, www.snai.it. After a couple of days, italian people discovered that it was only a stupid sabotage of local DNS servers, and it was sufficient to do a WhoIs of blocked addresses to get real IPs and to connect correctly.

Now, an italian blogger, Giuseppe Iuculano, released a .txt file with the whole list of the 504 blocked addresses, and the relative IPs. Giuseppe explains that it’s sufficient to append the content of the file to the Windows’ HOSTS file (located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc), with a simple copy n’ paste, to override the sabotated block on DNS server, and to correctly connect to any site without problems.

As Giuseppe said, I want to highlight that I’m strongly irritated by this illiberal law, that puts Italy near to the Chinese Censorship, but on the other side I want to remember that, currently, it’s prohibited to bet on these sites from Italy.
Anyway there’s nothing that can prohibit italian people to connect to a site (I often connect myself to BetAndWin to check sport results in real time )

Today I encountered a strange problem: the main Windows account on my computer, the “Administrator” one, was missing after a reboot. The only available account was the second that I set some time ago, so I logged in with this one.

I want to share with everyone how I did to restore Administrator user. It was very simple (even if I still don’t understand the reason because it disappeared!).
Basically, it was simply excluded from the “Welcome screen“: the quickest way to restore it is TweakUI for Windows XP, a free Microsoft tool.

Just open it, go to Logon options and activate the Administrator account (or any other account that is no more available into the Welcome screen).

Now reboot… et voilà

When we try to delete, move or rename an AVI file (a movie, a video clip, etc.), Windows XP often answers “Cannot delete xyz: Access is Denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use”.
This is because of a feature of the OS, that reads AVI informations (lenght, codec, resolution…) as soon as we select it with the mouse, or when we simply “hover” its icon with the pointer. Same informations are then available in the AVI properties page.

We can disable this function from the Windows System Registry:
Click on “Start” > “Run…”, type REGEDIT and press enter;
Browse the registry following this path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}\InProcServer32
Delete the entire “InProcServer32” key (displayed as a folder)

You’ve done! Now (it can be necessary a reboot) Windows has stopped reading AVI details, and you can move, rename or delete AVI without problems.

Consider that now your system doesn’t give you any info about AVI files: if you need this, I suggest to install an additional free tool: Gspot, that will give you a lot of useful details about your movie clip files.