fixdit

I work in a small computer shop. I fix everything, from viruses to hardware to websites. This is the journal I'm keeping to hopefully help spread the info I learn on my daily grind.

[kitsolo]

Best trailer food in downtown Austin!

[fixdit-blog]

Fix Vista KSOD

Been a while since my last post, I blame it on me not learning anything new.

Today I come to you with a "hopefully" universal fix for Vista/7 KSOD.

I found this fix while browsing a thread on Reddit (sorry no source link).

if you replace windows/system32/sethc.exe with cmd.exe and mash the shift key 5 times at the login prompt you get a command prompt at local system permissions. From there you can create a local admin account with control userpasswords2 or start explorer

If you have a PC with a KSOD, either enter a bootable live CD or plug the drive into another computer via an external adapter and rename "%windowsdir%/system32/sethc.exe" to "sethc.exe.bak", then copy cmd.exe and rename it to sethc.exe.

Boot back into the OS and hit the shift key 5 times, and assuming Sticky Keys is on this will launch a command prompt. From there, type "explorer" to launch the windows shell and get access to everything again.

If sticky keys is not enabled there is a quick registry fix to re-enable it (more on this below).

Type Regedit and go to key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\StickyKeys

and change the key "Flags" to "511" (in windows 7 at least).

Now, if you've got a KSOD, obviously you can't get into regedit... so how do you change the registry file to enable Sticky Keys?

Hiren's Boot CD has a registry editor that will allow you to load remote hives and edit them directly!

[andrewhoule]

[fixdit-blog]

andrewhoule:

It’s great to see the progress CSS has made over the last few years. With CSS 3 comes all kinds of new tricks and techniques. Marcofolio has put together this example page of many common jQuery animations that can now be done in CSS 3. Very impressive.

[fixdit-blog]

Ubuntu Server: Enable Apache .htaccess

Setting up a new file server here at work, I ran into a snag with Apache not recognizing my .htaccess files. Apparently on Linux installs of Apache the Allow Override is set to None by default.

The file to edit is:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

and you need to change the /var/www (assuming you have it default) to "AllowOverride All". Then restart Apache with:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

[zackify]

Install LAMP With One Command

[fixdit-blog]

h4ckr:

installing a webserver in Ubuntu really isn’t that hard. Just type this into the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 phpmyadmin

All of the other packages will then get installed.

[fixdit-blog]

Moving the close, minimize, and maximize buttons in Ubuntu

The default theme in Ubuntu has the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on the left side, which is backwards from what most Windows users are used to having.

To move these to these to the right side, and reorder them, you need to edit one line in the gnome configuration editor.

To run this, enter the following command in either a Run Application window (alt+f2) or a terminal window:

gconf-editor

This will bring up the configuration editor:

The "key" you need to edit is /apps/metacity/general/button_layout (you can see this in the bottom of the window in the above screen. The value for this key has a few possible values, most commonly being minimize, maximize, close, and a special character ":". The colon defines where the "center" of the title bar is rendered. As you can see from the above screenshot "close, minimize, maximize:" is the default layout which we are trying to edit. Obviously the colon needs to be moved, but also the close button, so my preferred layout is ":menu,minimize,maximize,close".

I added a "menu" option here, this will give you a handy little menu for managing windows across various workstations, feel free to omit it if you do not utilize this feature.

[fixdit-blog]

Changing the iPhone System Sounds

I'm a fan of Homestar Runner. Especially Strongbad's email skits. I recently wanted to change the email notification sound on my iPhone to a clip of the intro from one of his skits.

I've found the information in a few different places with a few different methods, but I'll list the steps I took to get this accomplished.

The process starts with picking out your audio sample. You're going to need to find the clip in an mp3 (or some other common audio format), and import that into Audacity. After that is imported, trimming the audio file down to just your clip isn't terribly difficult. Listen to the file until you hear the part you want, and drag and delete (delete key) the parts you want to remove. Do this for the beginning and end of your clip so that it is all that remains.

After you have your perfect clip cropped out of the original file, go to the File and choose Export. You want to save the file as a .wav extension (see footnote, if you do skip to next paragraph). After you have your "file.wav" you will need a converter to convert it to .aif file. I used Switch Plus Audio Conversion from NCH.

However it appears as if Audacity can save files directly as .aif from the export menu (I didn't see this before). After you have your file.aif simply rename the file [sound you are replacing].caf where [sound you are replacing] is the exact filename of the sound you want to replace. These sounds can be found by accessing your iPhone's filesystem using a program like iPhoneBrowser and navigating to the directory:

/System/Library/Audio/UISounds/

In the case of the "new mail" sound the filename should be new-mail.caf exactly.

After you've replaced the file, reboot your iPhone and you are good to go!

[fixdit-blog]

Install0us download directory

In preparation for the Windows release of PwnageTool 4.3.1, I was looking into a way to back up some .ipa's I had downloaded via Install0us.

I used the program iPhone Browser to navigate my way to the correct folder (for Install0us v4+):

/private/var/mobile/Documents/Installous/Downloads/

Select the first file and Shift-Click the last file, and Right Click and select "Save As..." You'll be prompted to select a folder to save into, and you're done!

[fixdit-blog]

Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Installation Error

Ever since Adobe released the 10.2 update for Flash Player, I haven't been able to upgrade. I would receive an error:

The installation encountered errors: No error information is available.

Here at work I run a dual monitor setup, and surprisingly it was UltraMon (desktop management software) that was preventing the Flash Player installation from working.

Closing the Ultramon applet was the trick. Using the direct Flash Player installer worked perfectly for me!

[fixdit-blog]

MYSQL Left Join Multiple Tables

I'm working on a little side project that has multiple tables inside of a MYSQL database. This is more of a learning project for myself, but here is where and how I learned to join multiple sets of tables together!

PHP is my scripting language of choice, and I have broken this statement up into multiple lines to make it easier to read (using the concatenate operator ".").

$query = "SELECT Table1.field, Table2.otherfield ".

"FROM Table1 ".

"LEFT JOIN Table2 ON Table1.id = Table2.id ".

"LEFT JOIN Table3 ON Table2.anotherfield = Table3.anotherfield";

I hope this can be of help to someone!

Although I'm still kind of at a loss to how this should be implemented on a table that will have multiple identifiers.

[fixdit-blog]

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer

This is a rather uneventful post, but I guess its important enough to finally inspire me to make this account.

I was working on a customer's computer and they had a virus. That wasn't the issue though, after I was finished cleaning the virus, I checked its antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials) only to find that the program was being blocked.

After some searching I came across this source. Turns out the virus had added several programs to the black-list in the user policies to prevent them from even running.

A quick run through in regedit to

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun

and I was good to go!

[fixdit-blog]

My Journal: Life as a nerd.

This tumblr will be dedicated to posts that are just random facts/knowledge that I gain in my day-to-day crawl around the internet. Subject matter will range from basic PC repair to various Linux problems to full website design and coding. Get ready for your first post!