Ever wish you could make one of your computer’s drives invisible to anyone snooping around on your system? Well, happy days are here my friend! Whether you have sensitive docs, pictures, or any other private data, this is one of the easiest ways to keep them safe. Keep in mind that you’ll still be able to access your hidden drives; you just won’t see that they exist in Windows Explorer or the My Computer folder. Back up your registry before you start!

1. Open Regedit.

2. Navigate to one of these strings:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer - this only changes the settings for the current logged in user

HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer - this changes the settings for all users on the machine. You may have to create the key folder “Explorer” manually.

3. In the Explorer key folder, create a new DWORD value by right-clicking Explorer, then choosing New DWORD value. Name the value “NoDrives” (without the quotes). This value defines local and network drive visibility for each logical drive on the computer. All drives will be visible as long as this value’s data is set to 0.

4. Following the table below, enter the decimal number corresponding to the drive(s) you want to hide as NoDrives value data. When you right-click on NoDrives and choose Modify, make sure you select Decimal base, not Hexadecimal.

Drive Number to hide
A: 1
B: 2
C: 4
D: 8
E: 16
F: 32
G: 64
H: 128
I: 256
J: 512
K: 1024
L: 2048
M: 4096
N: 8192
O: 16384
P: 32768
Q: 65536
R: 131072
S: 262144
T: 524288
U: 1048576
V: 2097152
W: 4194304
X: 8388608
Y: 16777216
Z: 33554432
All drives 67108863

If you want to hide more than one drive, you simply add the drive amounts together for a combined total.

For example, to hide the D:/ and T:/ drives, add the decimal value for the D:/ drive to the decimal value to the T:/ drive.

8 (D) + 524288 (T) = 524296

To disable all of your visible drives, set the value to 67108863.

You must reboot your PC to see your changes.

A while back, I purchased a Napster membership. At $14.95 a month I could download all the MP3 files I could find, and listen to them as much as I wanted. No restrictions right? Wrong. Unless you use their proprietary MP3 player to play the music, then you can’t listen it on any other device. IE… the Ipod. I couldn’t believe it. What an utter crock of shit. I didn’t particularly like iTunes soley on the fact, I wanted free reign to all the music I could find. Sound wrong? No, I fucking paid what they wanted, now give me my fucking music!

Much to my dismay, Napster instituted a form of DRM protection on their music. This fucking sucks. What am I supposed to do? I bought this subscription purely on the intention of filling my iPod with lots of music to listen to. /sigh indeed.

So I was on a conquest to figure out how I could get this music to play on my Ipod. One method was using a winamp plugin to record the the soundcards output, and save it to a file. Apparently it took a long time to complete, and was buggy. Great, so what next? The next option, was burning all of the files to a CD, then bringing them back to the computer, thus removing the DRM protection. Wow, that’s not going to take for-fucking ever!

There HAS to be some sort of software to fix this right? At the time (this was about two years ago) there wasn’t much honestly. A few proof of concepts here, and few alphas there. Nothing. - Flash forward 6 months, and I stumbled across FairUse4WM, which worked marvelously. Albeit EVERY song was prefixed with a damn FAIRUSE4WM_ tag, which was… annoying to say the least, I dealt with it. It worked fine, and then stopped working, and I gave up. Meh…

Well apparently there is a new kid on the block, for everyone dealing with DRM issues. This will handle not only music files, but video, and even streaming files!

From the Author:

From the author - After many hours of fighting with WM-DRM protection I decided to create new tool that would allow people to remove it from from files and streams. Of course FairUse4WM is great tool and it works nice but there are few reasons why have decided to create a new one:
1) FairUse4WM is closed source. Everytime MS releases new version of IBX people have to make binary patches or start from scratch.
2) FairUse4WM doesn’t work with video streams since it wasn’t intended to. Of course it is possible to record video stream and then undrm it but this is pointless when we are talking about tv channels.
3) There is no platform independent tool for ms wm-drm. There is no point of running windows every time you want to undrm some file or stream.

FreeMe2 is the program. Based on famous freeme app created by Beale Screamer and based on viodentias (FairUse4WM) findings. It strips wm-drm protection from wmv/asf/wma files as well as video/audio streams.

Download and info at SourceForge
More Instructions and information at Stream-Recorder.com

FootNote: I canceled my Napster subscription long ago. This rendered my music unusable, and my files were removed. They billed me for another year afterwards, after repeated complaints to them, the credit company. Finally it stopped… they gave me $30 back. Fucking morons.

Wow, ran across these just now. Very cool!

StumbleUpon Alerter

StumbleUpon Alerter is a small tool that sits in the system tray. It keeps an eye on all of your discoveries on StumbleUpon and plays a noise whenever someone reviews or gives your sites a thumbs up. Open the main window to view information about each discovery - including a list of people who have reviewed, thumbed up or thumbed down your sites. More details »

Digg Alerter

Used by some of the influential Digg users. Digg Alerter is a program that sits in your system tray and plays a little noise whenever your submissions are “Dugg”. You can also click on a submission to view a list of people who have dugg and commented on your articles. Click here for more details »

Creators:  http://blog.adamant.com.au/

I don’t do a lot of posting of my own videos on YouTube (ironic isn’t it?), however a friend of mine sent me an email, with some information on increasing the quality of the videos posted to youtube.

As an avid visitor, and watcher of all things youtube, this is definitely of interest to me.

Apparently, but simply putting: ” &fmt=18 ” at the end of your youtube videos link, it will appear as an .mp4 file, which has a better quality rating than that of Youtubes normal compression.

Original Youtube Quality:

Afterwards with this little trick:

This was emailed to me, if you see this elsewhere, please let me know so I may properly source them. Thanks!

On MacOS, the option key functions as a modifier key like the shift key. Hold it down and press another key simultaneously. For option - shift, hold down both the option and shift keys and press another key simultaneously.

On Windows, the Alt key functions as a modifier like the shift key. To make special characters, hold down the Alt key and type in the numbers from the numeric keypad.

Very interesting piece of code here. Essentially this will take all .php files, and change their extensions to a .sphp file extension. Then it will replace all instances of ".php" in the files, and replace them with ".sphp" for purposes of linking, and inclusion. Very neat script.

Source: 3Till7

I recently came across a repository of the Oreilly "In a Nutshell" book series in PDF, and CHM formats. I do realize most are dated, but some may come in handy none the less.

C++ in a Nutshell 2003

VB.NET Language in a Nutshell 2001

VB.NET Language in a Nutshell 2nd Edition 2002

VB.NET Core Classes in a Nutshell 2002

.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell 2003

MCSE: Windows 2000 Exams in a Nutshell 2001

VB & VBA in a Nutshell: The Language 1998

ASP in a Nutshell 1999

Ruby in a Nutshell 2001

ASP.NET in a Nutshell 2002

ASP.NET in a Nutshell 2nd Edition 2003

Windows Server 2003 in a Nutshell 2003

Windows XP in a Nutshell 2nd Edition 2005

Linux in a Nutshell 4th Edition 2003

Cisco IOS in a Nutshell 2001

LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell 2001

J2ME in a Nutshell 2002

PC Hardware in a Nutshell 2nd Edition 2002

PC Hardware in a Nutshell 3rd Edition 2003

SQL in a Nutshell 2001

Sequence Analysis in a Nutshell 2003

Dreamweaver in a Nutshell 2001

ADO.NET in a Nutshell 2003

AppleScript in a Nutshell 2001

C# in a Nutshell 2nd Edition 2003

Cocoa in a Nutshell 2003

MacOS X in a Nutshell 2003

Python in a Nutshell 2003

Web Design in a Nutshell 1999

Webmaster in a Nutshell 3rd Edition 2002

Unix in a Nutshell 2nd Edition 1992

Unix in a Nutshell 3nd Edition 1999

Lingo in a Nutshell 1998

Source: Hell.Org.Ua

Google, Youtube, Amazon, del.icio.us, all the big names release APIs for development and interaction with their services. It can be daunting trying to break into the external API scripting arena of programming. Here is a very long list of 302 USeful APIs. Upon clicking on any of them, you will be taken to a page that lists all of the information about that individual API, along with a download link. Definitely worth checking out!

List:

Read the rest of this entry »

David Hurth over at Ajaxonomy have created a pretty cool little web application. Here are the specifics:

If you have been using the popular service Digg you know that it is very easy to submit a story and to see it start to gain traction just to be buried into the dark abyss. What I find particularly frustrating is that you don't know how many people buried the story and the reason for the bury. If you have seen Digg Spy you have noticed that the application does show buries, but you can't just track data for a particular story.

After much frustration Ajaxonomy is now releasing a Bury Recorder application. How the application works is you take the story's URL (This is the URL of the page that the "more" link on the Digg upcoming/popular pages takes you or the page that clicking on the story title takes from your profile i.e. http://digg.com/[story]) and put it into the application and once you click "Watch for Buries" the application will start recording any buries that the story receives. This will allow you to see if your story had 100 diggs and 5 buries before it was permanently buried, or if it was more like 100 diggs and 300 buries. The idea is that you would submit a story and then have the recorder capture any buries from the time that you start the application watching for buries. You'll want to note that in this Beta 1.0 release, so currently you have to leave your machine on and the application open in order to make sure that it continues to capture buries.

Definitely worth checking out, a small program full of ingenuity.I'm fast becoming a regular reader over at Ajaxonomy. I suggest any JS/AJAX programmers do the same.

Link: Get Insight Into Digg's Bury System With Ajaxonomy's Bury Recorder.

Regardless of how long you've been programming in a language, let's face it, here and there, it'd be nice to just pick up a sheet of paper, view a simple image, click on a single link, and get a good reference table to aid you. In todays time, there are so many languages that people are trying to cram, that they sometimes lose focus, and mix and match, or just dilute them selves so heavily (think of the butter spread to evenly on the bread example), that they know a language, but sometimes just can't recall some of the functions.

Below you will find a list of as many cheat sheets as I could find on the internet. If you have one you've made, or links that you know that contain cheat sheets, let me know via comments. Thanks!

Visual Development

• Photoshop CS2 shortcuts
• Photoshop CS3 shortcuts
• Maya
• Maya
• 3D Studio max shortcuts

Web Development Cheat Sheets

• JavaScript
• CSS
• CSS
• CSS
• CSS Shorthand
• Hex Codes
• HTML
• XHTML
• HTML Entities
• XHTML / HTML
• HTML Character Entities
• RBG Color
• UMBC Semantic Web Reference Card
• DreamWeaver

Databases / SQL Cheat Sheets

• MySQL
• MySQL
• Oracle
• SQL
• Sybase
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server
• SYSBASE IQ

Language Cheat Sheets

• ColdFusion - work in progress
• PHP
• Ruby
• Regular Expressions
• JSP
• Java
• Python
• Perl
• Perl
• ASP/VBScript
• Ruby On Rails
• AJAX
• ASP.NET
• C
• C++
• C# vs VB.NET Syntax
• WML
• JSP 2.0 XML
• LATEX
• LUA
• XSL/XPATH
• ActionScript 1.0
• ActionScript 2.0
• XML
• RUBY
• Prototype
• DOJO

Version Control Cheat Sheets

• CVS
• Subversion

Other

• Google
• Windows
• Unix
• Unix
• Unix
• Vi
• Vim
• mod_rewrite
• ASCII Character Codes
• htaccess