IT and Infocom

Archive for the ‘IT tips’ Category

以下是Mozilla Firefox使用者可在面子书里使用的一些快捷键：

1. 可按Alt + Shift + ?以快速至搜索框。

2. 可按Alt + Shift +M以编写新讯息。

3. 可按Alt + Shift +1以快速至面子书首页。

4. 可按Alt + Shift +2以快速至个人资料页。

5. 可按Alt + Shift +3以显示好友请求列表。

6. 可按Alt + Shift +4以显示讯息列表。

7. 可按Alt + Shift +5以显示通知列表。

8. 可按Alt + Shift +6以快速至帐户设置页。

9. 可按Alt + Shift +7以快速至隐私设置页。

On Facebook, the Firefox users can press:

1. Alt+Shift+? to go to the search box.

2. Alt+Shift+M to compose a new message.

3. Alt+Shift+1 to go to the home page.

4. Alt+Shift+2 to go to your profile page.

5. Alt+Shift+3 to open the Friend Requests list.

6. Alt+Shift+4 to open the messages list.

7. Alt+Shift+5 to open the Notifications list.

8. Alt+Shift+6 to go to the Account Settings page.

9. Alt+Shift+7 to go to your Privacy Settings page.

Have you ever remembered that there is some important information in one of your pdf documents, but you don’t remember which of those documents contains the information? Perhaps a sinking feeling of dread came upon you, as the prospect of going through the documents one by one and searching pushed aside happy emotions in you? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to search through all those hundreds of documents with one click, or one command-line command? (like using something like “grep” to search multiple text files at once)

Guess what? Adobe Acrobat provides that capability!

    As seen in the image on the left, there is the option to specify “where would you like to search”, and you can set that to be “All PDF Documents in ..” any folder on the hard disk! wonderful! joy, oh joy!

Just select “Advanced search” under the “Edit” main menu. Nice.

Ever tried to share a folder located on the desktop, with Windows Vista? You might have been horrified to find, some time later, that not only was your intended folder shared, but the entire c:\Users folder was also shared! Sure, c:\Users contains the desktop (and Documents and other such folders for possibly multiple users of the PC), and in the desktop is that one folder you tried to share. But why does Windows Vista then go and share the entire c:\Users folder?

I encountered this problem before, and was too busy to investigate, so I just copied the contents to be shared into some other folder that was being shared, and that was fine. Today, again, I wanted to share a folder located on the desktop, and ran into the same problem.

Did some google searching and found that it is a known Windows Vista bug (that Microsoft never bothered to fix, apparently?). It was reported in this post from 2008, and you can see that one responder didn’t believe it was possible and that the questioner was at fault, but another responder acknowledged the bug, and posted a solution. The solution is to go to “Advanced sharing” in the folder properties for both the c:\Users and the to-be-shared folder. Uncheck “Share this folder” for c:\Users, and then check “Share this folder” for the to-be-shared folder.

One more thing: if you have subfolders inside that folder you wish to share, doing the above will not cause them to automatically be shared (like they should .. they should inherit the sharing properties of their parent!). You have to manually go and check “Share this folder” on each subfolder that should also be shared. Ugh! Wonder who was responsible for testing file sharing in Windows Vista ..

Let’s say you have a Mac running OS X Lion or Mountain Lion, and you want to use git and other command line developer tools. You open a terminal window, and type “git” and it doesn’t find it.

Turns out that when you install Xcode (at least, Xcode 4.5.2 — I haven’t verified this with all versions of Xcode), it puts git and other developer tools in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin , but it doesn’t add that directory/folder to your path. So, assuming you are running bash (the default shell), you can add it as follows

export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin

for the current shell. If you wish it to be “permanently” added, you can add this line to your .profile (where the bashrc looks for customizations whenever it starts). If this is a new Mac that doesn’t have .profile in your home directory yet, just create a new .profile file, and put the line there.

For more information and related details, see stackexchange

请点击这里以放大看以上的Facebook表情图示列表。

Please click HERE for viewing the list in larger size.

Please follow the steps below to apply a new action, such as “Switch user” or “Restart”, to the power button which is located at the bottom-right of the Start menu in Windows 7:

1. Right-click on the Start button, and then select “Properties” from the pop-up menu.

2. Under the “Start menu” tab, open the drop-down menu next to “Power button action”, and then choose a new action, such as “Restart”, in the menu.

3. Click “Ok”.

Did you know that we can improve the performance of Windows 7 by using “ReadyBoost”? We can just simply use a USB thumb drive to turn on “ReadyBoost” on a computer running Windows 7. The way of turning “ReadyBoost” on is shown below:

1. Connect your USB thumb drive to your PC or laptop.
2. Choose the option “Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost” in the AutoPlay window.
3. Select “Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost” in the ReadyBoost tab, and then click OK.

Be careful about working on a gmail email across devices/platforms. Twice, I’ve been bitten by gmail, where my email vanished into some blackhole or other.

I’m not sure what causes the problem, but in both cases, I was sending gmail using the default email client on my iPad. It seems that if you start an email draft on a web browser, and then continue working on the draft from an iOS device like iPad, then try to send it, you may get an error message, and then lose the entire message after you press “send”. That is what happened to me the first time. The second time, I didn’t even get an error message, so was at first mistaken into thinking gmail successfully delivered my email. However, when I went to check, I couldn’t find my email in the relevant email thread. Furthermore, while my message doesn’t appear in “sent mail”, there is a weird error message there: “this message may not have been sent by: <myemailaddress>@gmail.com      Learn more    Report phishing”

After clicking “learn more”, there are some trouble shooting options,  but none helped me. It does seem that google is trying to get feedback on this, to flush out bugs like the one I encountered.

Moral of the story: don’t start a gmail email on a browser and then continue working on the draft with a mobile device. Start, complete, and send each email from the same device.