Asher Bond

iWish the iPad had:

1. USB
2. Firewire
3. Ethernet
4. A Camera
5. Multitasking
6. Adobe Flash Support
7. A more powerful OS than the one running on iPhones

Realistically, I don’t think keyboards are obsolete. I was hoping the iPad would be a less expensive alternative to Jazzmutant’s Lemur or Dexter, but… it’s just not happening without the proper inputs and outputs and it’s just not happening without a proper OS.

Trending Tweeters prefer iTampon instead of iPad

There is a lot of hype forming around the iPad, but iWonder how it’s better than a regular hackintosh tablet PC. iThink things will probably improve by the second generation, but iDoubt Apple will be the only one in the market by then.

For now, it seems to make much more sense to get a more powerful netbook. The iPad is supposed to cost $499-$699, but Acer offers a new Windows 7 netbook for only $299.

If you are particular about screen resolution, You can buy this 12.1 inch 1280×800 Netbook for $399

Its price is still $100 lower than the cheapest iPad… which only does 1024×768.

“Antivirus 2008″ a.k.a “Vista Antivirus 2008″ is actually a virus. When you boot up, it runs all kinds of stuff you don’t want in the background of your computer. One of the worst things it does is disable your ability to stop processes from running in the background.

You know you’re in trouble when you hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE and you get the message:

“Task Manager has been disabled by your Administrator”

LULZ! You can’t even get to your Task manager to stop who knows what from running in the background of your computer. Wow you really got owned this time.

BEFORE YOU START

1. Boot into safe mode with networking and run Symantec’s Norton Antivirus or Avast (if you want a free one) from www.avast.com to make sure the virus isn’t running in the background anymore. You might have to download this from another computer or buy it from the store. Some viruses will even redirect you to their own web site when you try to go to symantec.com, trendmicro.com, etc.
2. Don’t put credit card information into a computer that might have a virus. It’s better to download the trial or buy it in a store.
3. Don’t use shady “virus scanners” like StopZilla or Viruses acting like anti-viruses such as “error cleaner” or “Vista Antivirus 2008″ etc.
4. Make sure that you have the latest update of your virus scanning software. What makes you think it’s gonna find the virus if the software hasn’t been updated for weeks.
5. Vista AntiVirus is probably running on every time your system boots up and it’s probably running as vav.exe. You might want to find and delete that file if your Antivirus program missed it for some reason. It’s probably under C:\Program Files\VAV. You can’t delete it while it’s running, but you can rename it to novav.exe and delete the other files in this folder. When vav.exe can’t find the files, it will crash and you can then delete it. Also delete folders named “Antivirus 2008.”
6. Run Trend Micro’s Hijackthis and remove malicious files from the system boot process. If you aren’t sure if the file is malicous or not, look to see when the file was last modified. If you got the virus recently, then that file may be one of the malicious ones. Look the filename up on google from another computer and see what people are saying about it. Watch out for .dll (especially random letters like c:\WINDOWS\xokvrpwg.dll) and .exe files. Also check for system policies like “DisableRegedit=1″. Viruses often change your desktop using Desktop component 0… file://somedirectory\index.htm. Delete these.
7. Continue with the rest of these instructions once you have scanned your computer and cleaned out the viruses.

Here’s how to fix your Task Manager:

1. Don’t panic. Don’t download any more “error cleaners” or garbage that probably messed up your computer in the first place.
2. Shut down your computer (by force if you have to) and boot it into safe mode.
   (If you don’t know how to get to safe mode, all you have to do is hold down F8 during the boot up process). LOG IN AS ADMINISTRATOR. Don’t see Administrator as an option? Hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE and type Administrator.
3. Once you’re LOGGED IN AS ADMINISTRATOR in SAFE MODE, click “Start”, then go to “Run”… Oh noez.. where’s run? Wow, you sure got owned this time. You can’t even get the run menu up in SAFE MODE. Don’t worry, you still don’t have to scrap everything and do a clean re-installation.
4. Right click the task bar and go to “properties”.
5. Click the “Start Menu” tab.
6. Click the “Customize…” button.
7. Click the “Advanced” tab.
8. In the “Start menu items:” list, go through and click all the buttons that say “Display as a link”.
9. Click “OK” after you are done clicking all the “Display as a link” buttons.
10. Click “OK” again to get out of the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties”.
11. Now you should have your Start Menu back to normal. Try to find the “run” button. If you can’t see it, it’s probably because you’re in Safe Mode and it’s scrolling off the screen. Don’t panic, just hit the up arrow on your computer once. This should highlight the “shutdown” button. Hit the up arrow on your keyboard again and you will be at “Log Off”. If you don’t see “Log Off”, then you’re not logged in as Administrator and you need to go back to step 1. Hit the up arrow a third time and you will be at “run” (even though you can’t see it). Now hit enter.
12. Now that you have the “run” menu up, type regedit in the “Open” box. and click “OK”.
13. You probably will get a box that pops up saying “Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator” LULZ! You can’t even get to regedit? Wow, you sure got owned this time. Don’t panic.
14. WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL: Go to Start, Run and type gpedit.msc and press ENTER. This should bring up a screen that says “Group Policy”.
15. If that didn’t bring up “Group Policy” then you don’t have Windows XP Professional. I guess that means you’re not really much of a PC professional are you? That’s ok, you aren’t missing much.. you will have to type in this nice long command though: REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f.
16. If you’re at the “Group Policy” screen, Click “User Configuration”, then click “Administrative Templates”, then click “System”. Double-click “Prevent Access to registry editing tools” and set it to “Disabled”.
    Note: If the setting already reads “Not Configured”, set it to “Enabled”, and click “Apply”. Then revert it back to “Disabled”. This ensures that the “DisableRegistryTools” registry value is removed successfully.
    Repeat this step for every item that says “Disable…” or “Prevent Access to…” (for example “Prevent Access to the command prompt”). Repeat this step for the CTRL+ALT+DEL options as well. This is where you can disable the policy of “Remove Task Manager”. When you’re finished, close the “Group Policy” screen.
17. If you still don’t have regedit back, it’s possible that the virus may have put a regedit.com file in your windows directory. Windows chooses to open .com files before it opens .exe files. If you get something different when you run regedit.exe, then you should delete regedit.com from your windows directory. Do a file search for regedit* and see what comes up.

The Problem:
For a long time I have been having a problem where I’ll be watching a Youtube videos, myspace videos, etc. (This is on a Windows XP computer by the way. I’m using Flash 9 and Firefox 2.0.0.14) Everything is fine when I first start my browser, but as I open more and more tabs in Mozilla Firefox things begin to go downhill. Eventually, Flash .SWF movies just simply won’t play for more than a few seconds. When the problem happens, a flash movie begins playing with no sound, then after 2 or 3 or a couple seconds the movie stops playing. I can fast forward it to a later position in the flash movie and it will play for another 2 seconds or so (without sound), but then it stops again. If I close out of Firefox and start it back up from scratch I can watch movies for a while until I open a lot of tabs again.

The Work Around:
It turns out that this problem is some kind of a bug (probably with the Flash 9 plugin for Firefox.) I guess I should probably upgrade to version 10, but I have found that I can work around the problem by closing out of all those extra windows that have extra flash movies in them, then refreshing the page that I’m trying to watch the flash movie on. I guess that works a lot better than closing out of Firefox entirely. If you find a better solution, please comment.

This morning I was bombarded with about 4,000 spam messages. All of these spam messages were relayed through Google Groups. Fortunately, Gmail has an excellent filtering and labelling system that made it easy to report all of these messages as spam very quickly. Here’s how you can fight thousands of spam messages in just a few minutes using your Gmail account:

Step 1
Open a spam message (any spam will do) and click the “show details” link.

Step 2
Click “filter messages from this mailing list”.

Step 3
Go to the “Has the words” box, and change it to listid:.googlegroups.com>". This will tell gmail to match the pattern .googlegroups.com in the listid header.

It should look like this when you’re done. Click the “Next Step” button.

Step 4
Create a new label for google groups. You can call it “google groups”

Step 5
Check the “Skip the Inbox” if you don’t want to see this spam in your inbox.
Be sure that “Apply this label” is checked.
Check the “Also apply this filter…” box so that the filter retroactively works with existing messages.
Click “Create this filter” and you should see all the spam moved from your inbox to your “google groups” label.

Step 6
Here’s how to report the spam:
Navigate to your “google groups” label (there’s a link to it on your left sidebar).
Click “Select All.”
Now just make sure it’s all spam and report it.

You can also select more than one page at a time, but Gmail won’t let you report multiple pages as spam. You can, however, delete multiple pages of email.