With the Nexus 5 and Android 4.4 KitKat, Google begins an age in which their Google Now service is right up front and center – and you can opt-out from the outset. What you’ll find when you first start up the Nexus 5 is a series of option pages, much like versions of Android before […]
This article was written on August 29, 2007 by CyberNet.
AutoPatcher is an application that hundreds of thousands of people, especially those working in IT, depend on and use regularly. It’s a simple and free application that has been around since 2003. It has served a vital purpose for many people by providing Windows Updates in one consolidated package that could be downloaded. These were available for XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, and even various versions of Office.
The entire point of AutoPatcher was to make updating multiple computers a piece of cake. I always used this after formatting my PC so that I wouldn’t have to sit and download all of the updates just to get my computer back up to speed. The great thing was that AutoPatcher was updated monthly therefore providing the latest updates. Each of those updates came in two different flavors:
Core releases – these are the main releases which contain the bulk of the patches. These are rather large in size (normally several hundred megabytes), and are often only downloaded by first-time users.
Update releases – these allow you to update a Core release with additional patches as new ones are created.
AutoPatcher does require that you install the app first, but after that you can pick and choose which updates you want installed. The program even gives you a brief description of what each update does:
Unfortunately Microsoft saw this application in a different light, and decided to shut it down. As of right now the AutoPatcher site remains available, but the links to the downloads have since been removed. From the looks of it Microsoft hasn’t been able to reach the mirrors yet to have the files removed:
Download AutoPatcher Cores (most recent versions):
Alternatively the downloads are readily available from several sites, or you can download AutoPatcher via Torrents. The only bad part is that the software probably won’t be updated anymore. 🙁 Maybe this wouldn’t be such a big deal if Microsoft made it easier to install these updates offline. Honestly they should be offering a tool themselves that does the same thing as AutoPatcher.
Of course the only thing that AutoPatcher is doing wrong is redistributing the patches that Microsoft provides. They could possibly get around this by having users download a small application that will retrieve all of the updates from Microsoft. I’m sure there has to be a workaround, and hopefully the AutoPatcher team will find it!
Source: AutoPatcher [via Neowin]
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
Intelligent photo filtering system Everpix has announced it will shut down, with no further uploads supported, and existing subscribers refunded after the company failed to secure investment to cover its sizable image hosting bills. Access to Everpix – in read-only mode – will be allowed until December 15th, the company says, with instructions promised to […]
This article was written on January 14, 2011 by CyberNet.
How many times have you wanted to archive a webpage or save its current state for one reason or another? I know this has happened to me, and I’ve almost always turned to a scrolling screenshot to snap an image of the entire page or I’ve used a print-to-PDF app. These methods aren’t bad for most purposes, but I know very few people who try to save a webpage using the “save as” option that is built-in to most browsers. If you do go that route you’ll normally end up with a bunch of helper files (images, CSS, scripts, etc…) that also get saved in order to fully reproduce the site.
There is an awesome Google Chrome extension called SingleFile that will actually make modifications to a page so that everything (except videos/Flash) are stored in-line and can therefore be saved to just one HTML file. It encodes images and embeds CSS so that there are no helper files needed, and since it is a standard HTML file it can easily be shared with other people without worrying whether they’ll be able to open the file.
There are several different “SingleFile” extensions available for Chrome and I want to point out the differences:
After installing the extension a new button will be added to the toolbar, and what happens from there depends on the settings you have configured. If you enable the “save processed page” option it will automatically save the file in an obscure directory within your Google Chrome profile. You can create a shortcut to this folder (which is listed in the help section for the various operating systems), but I recommend just enabling the “display processed page” option. Then all you have to do is click the button, wait for it to finish processing the page, and then use Control+S (or Command+S on Mac) to save it to your hard drive.
I highly recommend checking out this extension if you’ve ever found yourself snapping a screenshot of a page or saving it as a PDF for later reference. At least this way you can still fully interact with the page and click on any of the links.
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
This article was written on March 24, 2007 by CyberNet.
It’s here! People were wondering where Mozilla’s next milestone was for Firefox 3 and it has finally come. This release, like other Alphas, are geared towards developers and don’t really include much that casual users would find exciting. Here’s what’s new according to the release notes:
HttpOnly cookie attribute, which marks a cookie as readable only by the server and not by client-side scripts.HTTP-EQUIV=refresh.The APNG’s (Wikipedia article) are new and is something that could change how we see animated images on the Internet. Animated GIF’s have been around for quite awhile but their quality does not match the advancements made to date. There are some examples of APNG’s (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6), but they only work with the latest nightly releases of Firefox 3, and not with Alpha 3.
Since the images contain many more colors than animated GIF’s, it is only expected that the files would be much larger…and they are. The other thing that came to mind was whether these would start to become popular. Sure they are higher quality, but at this point very few people would create APNG’s because they are not supported across all browsers. I guess Mozilla is the first one stepping up and they’re probably hoping that other browser would soon add APNG support as well.
I had already found the feature to notify users of a redirect and mentioned that here along with providing screenshots. It is a great feature from a security standpoint but a lot of sites use redirects, such as Gmail when clicking on links in emails, which can make this feature annoying. As of right now they don’t have a whitelist option which would make it easier to approve common sites, but hopefully that is something that they add…just like they have for approving popups.
Lastly, I have put together a portable version which you can download below. This will make it easy for you to play with it, see what’s been happening, possibly test your own sites to make sure they still look okay, and then go back to your primary browser.
Windows: Gran Paradiso Setup Alpha 3.exe
Mac OS X: Gran Paradiso Alpha 3.dmg
Linux: granparadiso-alpha3.tar.gz
Firefox Portable 3 Alpha 3 (for Windows)
Source: FF Extension Guru’s Blog
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
Sony has announced a new update that began rolling out for the PS Vita today, bringing the handheld’s firmware up to version 3.00. This is a big update for the gaming device, and with it comes a variety of PlayStation 4 related features, including PS4 Link for playing PS4 games on the handheld’s display. We’ve […]
Business talks about what Microsoft’s future holds have picked up extra speed in recent weeks since the announcement of Steve Ballmer’s departure and the hunt for a replacement CEO. According to various sources, the board in part has to decide what area of expertise the next CEO should have, even looking at potential candidates in […]
This article was written on April 24, 2012 by CyberNet.
If you’re trying to treat your XBMC install like a settop box there is no doubt that you’ll want to get a remote control working with it. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases it’s not as simple as just plugging in a USB IR receiver and using a remote that was made for the computer. There is a rather extensive wiki page that lists many of the remotes that have been tested and found working, but I wanted to focus on the two that I use.
One thing I wanted to point out right away is that you don’t want to test whether a remote control is working through a Remote Desktop (RDP) session. That may be tempting if you are trying to remotely configure a box, but the output of the remote won’t be reflected on the screen when using RDP.
This makes sense if you think about it. With RDP, any locally attached input devices (keyboard, mouse, etc…) are all rendered useless. A remote control is just considered another input device, and trying to troubleshoot through RDP may leave you frustrated and wondering why it’s not working.
I’m not going to go too in-depth about the receiver since I already covered it in my hardware guide, but the important thing is for you to have an RC6-compatible IR receiver to have the best chance of getting a remote control working in Windows. You can take a look at the HP IR Receiver I chose back in my hardware guide.
Generally getting your remote to work can take quite a bit of time, but one developer has really tried to streamline the whole process. Jump on over to the XBMCCustomregis page to see what I’m talking about. From there you can grab the setup file which will make a specific change to the Registry, and will then copy over a lengthy pre-configured Keyboard.xml file to your XBMC profile.
If you don’t trust what the script is doing you can go ahead and run through the settings manually as well. It’s not that hard, but the setup utility is just there to try and eliminate any potential errors.
After you’ve run through the setup you’ll have to switch to XBMC and go to Settings -> System -> Input Devices and turn on the Remote Control Sends Keyboard Presses option.
Since I previously used my Xbox 360 as a Windows Media Center Extender I already had one of the Xbox 360 Universal Media Remotes. It is a pretty nice remote, and since I was trying to save some money I wanted to get by with that. There is just a couple of minor Registry changes that need to be made that aren’t covered by running the XBMCCustomregis mentioned above.
In the Windows Registry navigate to the following section:
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
>> SYSTEM
>>> CurrentControlSet
>>>> Services
>>>>> HidIr
>>>>>> Remotes
>>>>>>> 745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da
And then make these changes:
Just reboot your computer and you should be ready to go. Everything should work on the remote now, but the volume button will still be tied to the TV due to the way Microsoft designed the remote. Lucky for me that’s what I wanted anyway.
Thanks to the XBMCCustomregis script, getting your Logitech Harmony Remote working with XBMC is pretty painless. All you have to do is add a new device from the Harmony Remote Software and select Computer for the type of device, Microsoft for the manufacturer, and type Media Center SE for the model.
From there you should be able to set this up and configure your activities to control the XBMC. You’ll be able to control all aspects of XBMC as well as sleeping/waking the PC.
Want to dig a little deeper? You can customize what happens when any keyboard shortcut is executed. The file you need to edit is the Keyboard.xml which is located in %appdata%\XBMC\userdata\keymaps\. If the file doesn’t exist you’ll want to create it, but if you ran through the XBMCCustomregis script that should have already added a very extensive keyboard configuration file.
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
This morning the folks at HTC have confirmed their intentions with the HTC One, HTC One Max, and HTC One mini for updating software builds to Android 4.4 KitKat. With the United States and the likes of Europe, the Middle Ease, and Africa, HTC will be working with carriers to update to KitKat starting – […]
This article was written on October 14, 2006 by CyberNet.
There are all kinds of rumors and misconceptions that are floating around the Internet with what is going on with Windows Vista lately. We have been hearing about several changes in the License Agreement that are supposed to limit people more so than XP, and there has also been a lot of talk about the European Union (EU) forcing Microsoft to make some changes before Vista launches. Paul Thurrott has decided to cover both aspects so I decided to provide a “quick” summary of each.
I have read so many different articles regarding the changes in Vista’s End-User License Agreement (EULA) that I am on the verge of insanity 🙂 . Everyone has their own interpretation of the agreement but Paul contacted Microsoft in order to clear things up.
People apparently think that you can transfer Windows XP to as many computers as you would like but Paul is quick to point out that Windows is tied to a device and not a person. The Windows XP EULA doesn’t exactly say that it is limited to the number of transfers but a transfer should only be used in special circumstances, such as a hardware failure causing you to buy a new machine. Paul concludes by saying:
And if you do actually have a catastrophic PC failure, you’ll be able to transfer your license just as before. The process, as it turns out, hasn’t changed at all. “The escalation process is exactly the same in Vista,” Boettcher told me. “You have to call support. It just wasn’t clear in Windows XP. But we wanted to do the right thing by the customer. So we let them move a license, while being clear about what the license is intended for. In the past haven’t been super clear up front.”
Virtualization has also raised quite a few eyebrows I think mostly because no one understands how it is going to work. You will be able to use Microsoft’s Virtual PC or other virtualization software such as VMWare on any version of Vista. However, you will only be able to legally use Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate Editions on that virtual machine. The key is legally, because you will be able to install any version of Vista on a virtual machine if you would like.
You will still have to activate Vista on that virtual machine which requires you to have a legal copy of the operating system. Vista Enterprise is a little different because of the volume licensing that it uses. Users that have a valid Enterprise edition will be able to install and activate up to four virtual machines provided that they are all on the same computer and for the same user. That means if you are really looking to use Vista on virtual machines then the Enterprise edition is probably what you need.
It seems like there is always a company that will get angry with Microsoft for releasing some new feature in Windows because someone else probably makes a profit from Windows lacking that feature. Paul Thurrott’s article on the last minute changes in Vista covers a few aspects that Microsoft is being forced to change in order to comply with the European Union.
It starts off with some security changes that Microsoft originally did to help protect the user. Paul starts off by saying “I want to be clear here: Microsoft security improvements in Windows Vista should be applauded by all Windows users, and any security company that wants to bypass them while not providing equivalent or better functionality is more concerned about their own profits than they are about users.” The primary concern that security companies have had is that they can’t change the kernel at run-time in Windows Vista 64-bit versions. Well, no one can and that includes Microsoft! However, Microsoft decided to create some API’s that would allow security companies to access the kernel in a secure fashion, but nothing is as secure as no access!
The other primary area of concern was with the default search in Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft, of course, would like it to be set by default to Windows Live but other companies, like Google and Yahoo, for some reason aren’t so fond of that idea. For users upgrading from IE 6 to IE 7 they will now be prompted with a screen that shows them what their current search engine is as well as several other search engines ranging from Google to Lycos. The user will see this screen every time that they start Internet Explorer until they make a choice to keep the existing search engine or pick a new one, so the program will not be choosing for them.
The last change comes in response to Adobe’s complaints. Microsoft has developed a new format for files called XPS which is very similar to PDF’s. By default this is included in Windows Vista and, and just like with Office 2007, Adobe wasn’t too happy about that. Instead of making this a separate add-on for Vista like Microsoft has done for Office 2007 they decided to open up the XPS format as an international standard so that everyone can use it how they please and create applications that support it.
As you can see there are a lot of last minute things going on with Vista that Microsoft needed to take care of before they officially release it. Some of the things are a little disappointing to see Microsoft being forced to change when some were implemented to protect users, but I guess that is the corporate world.
In the next month we should be seeing Vista available to companies and I’m still not sure if the public release date of December is true.
Thanks to ”Jack of all Trades” for the tip!
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
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