To cut the geek-speak, this simply means that you hard disk may have certain files that may have "bad sectors", or are corrupted in other words.

Fortunately, this is a common enough problem in our technically advanced world of external storage. I recommend solving this on Windows (I use both XP and OSX Leopard at the time of this writing).

Step 1: CHKDSK

Use what Windows offers you by default. The chkdsk command. Just open an MS-DOS command prompt window and go to the drive you wish to check (I'm hoping you already know your way around a command prompt; if you don't please consider Step 2 below). With the command prompt showing the drive letter of the disk you wish to check, enter this command:

e:> chkdsk /R

Here, "e:" is my drive to be checked. The "/R" attribute asks the chkdsk command to "recover" whatever bad sectors it finds during its scan. In most cases, and if you're lucky, this ought to do it.

Step 2: CDCheck (Free)

Only if the problem you were facing still remains after you have run the chkdsk command, should you consider doing this. This is a freeware program that makes it super-easy to check/recover your disk. It can be any disk–your current hard disk, a CD or a DVD, or even an external hard disk. The interface is pretty simple as you can see in the screenshots here.

Step 3: SpinRite (US$ 90)

If all else has failed, just save yourself some heartburn and go straight to SpinRite. This is hands-down the best software for this purpose, as anyone in a dire need of data recovery will confirm. I would trust any piece of software from GRC. Only catch: it's not free, but when you use it you know why it's worth every last cent. It gives you a simple option to save an ISO file, which you can then easily burn on to a CD using any CD writer tool (including Windows' own right-click). Then reboot your machine so it starts from the CD. SpinRite will automatically report and recover whatever is recoverable.

Next Steps

Basically, a CRC error is the beginning of the end. If this is on an external hard disk, I highly recommend that you consider backing up the data immediately.

On Windows, there is the fantastic SSH2 tool SecureCRT. Or if you're cash crunched, a combination of Putty and Putty Connection Manager works for many.

On Mac OSX and Unix/Linux systems, one doesn't truly need an SSH client at all, because the "Terminal" application is inbuilt. People talk of iTerm and such, but I have still to see a value add for such tools.

But one does miss the convenience of SecureCRT on OSX, because I have still to find a true SecureCRT alternative for the Mac platform. Something that allows me to make pre-determined connections so I can just click on them to connect (which tools like JellyfiSSH do) and then logs me in directly without prompting for a password (which JellyfiSHH does not do).

So I have simply made aliases in my [code].profile[/code] file, which gets executed everytime you start your Terminal window (so it's a good place to put your shortcuts and any code you wish to execute when the terminal starts, such as paths).

1. Start the Terminal.
2. Open the profile file for the current user (you).

pico .profile

3. Enter a new line for our shortcut.

alias s='ssh -2 -p 22 user@host.com'

Quick explanation for that command in step 3. The letter "s" is the shortcut I make for connecting to the sniptools.com server. Change it to what you wish. This will mean that when I start Terminal, all I need to do is type "s" and it connects me via SSH to the sniptools.com server. The "-p" switch is an important one because some of us with paranoid security settings might have a different port number than the default port 22 for secure SSH. The rest user/host stuff is self-explanatory. The "-2" is to force SSH2 connections instead of older vanilla SSH.

Now. Save the profile file and source it to try it out:

source .profile

Sourcing is only for this one time, for your current Terminal window, which had already executed the profile file *before* we added this alias. When you start a new Terminal session, these aliases et al will be automatically set for you.

Done. Now your profile has the alias for "s". From now when you type "s" in your Terminal, it will connect, but it will ask you for a password. To get rid of the nagging password, we need to create public authentication key for the domain. This, in fact is what SecureCRT does behind the scenes on Windows too.

Here are the steps to accomplish this. Run these one-time commands in order from the Terminal window.

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# generate pub and priv keys, leave the passphrase empty
# (simply press ENTER when asked for it)
ssh-keygen
 
#copy the pub key to the remote computer
#(change port number if different from the usual 22)
#change "user" to your user name
#change "host" to your domain name
scp -P 22 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@host:~/
 
#log on to the remote computer
ssh -p 22 user@host
 
#create the .ssh directory in the root login directory, if it doesn't already exist
mkdir .ssh
 
#append key to file
cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
 
#delete the public key file, no longer needed
rm -f id_rsa.pub
 
#log off the remote server
exit
 
#logon to the remote server, without password prompt
ssh -2 -p 22 user@host

That's it. This is a huge timesaver. Now all I need to do to login to the sniptools.com server is type one letter, "s" in the Terminal, and I'm on! Follow these instructions for each host you connect to on a regular basis and you'll love the convenience henceforth.

Office 2007 — First Look

Now I don't know about you, but to me this bloo-ey look is hideous.I am not on Vista yet, by choice, so that sky blue gradation thing going on the top was not my cuppa. Why software designed for a certain platform cannot honor a user's general system UI preferences is beyond me, but Office 2007 does insist on having it's own look and feel. As though the new ribbon clutter was not enough.

I wanted to get rid of those ribbons to begin with. So I downloaded the the free version of Ribbon Customizer. They offer some Pro version but it does things I don't particularly care about. Alternatively, there is ToolbarToggle, but on their site I did not seem to catch a free version, and I was unwilling to pay for this stuff.

The RibbonCustomizer install is pretty straightforward and when you start Word 2007 after its installation, here is how Word looks. There is an additional item in the View menu at the end:

Word 2007 after RibbonCustomizer

I clicked on the obvious menu option to make ClassicUI my first menu tab. This is what this does:

Classic 2003 interface

That's a good start, but I now wanted to clean up some other stuff. Fortunately, Microsoft chose to include the additional "Minimize Ribbon" feature, which contextually hides the ribbon when your focus is on writing inside the document. So let's do that:

Minimize the Word 2007 ribbon

Now to get rid of the forced Blue. Click on the "More Commands" option in the menu shown in the screenshot above. Choose Silver and make other adjustments to your taste:

Choose silver

Now this is what Word 2007 looks like, with minimized ribbon, classic 2003 UI, and a somewhat less intrusive silver gradient:

Phew. I also recommend setting the default "Save" options as your regular Word ".doc" instead of the new ".docx" (or other .xlsx and .pptx equivalents) as that is a bit more standard even today in 2008.

Apple is on to some exciting things. After the iPhone and the new eagerly awaited of the Max OSX, it even announced Safari 3 Beta for Windows!

The install was painless. Especially if you choose the no-Quicktime option (which Apple has no qualms about plugging shamelessly with almost every download it offers). I was also asked during the installation for 'Bonjour' — a tool that supposedly allows better sharing of things such as printers.

The immediate uninstall

When I started the browser, it came up in some weird language. Greek, or Russian, or a specific kind of Celt. Who knows. I tried to reinstall, and it insisted on removing Safari first, which is ok, but it also required me to close Firefox, SecureCRT (for SSH) and WinSCP (for SFTP). I like my browsers to be independent of each other thank you. Opera never bothers with what else I am using.

The second and final uninstall

After the re-install, it showed up yet again in the strange language. Nowhere on my system is this language set up. All my browsers are set up to show only English, but support Japanese and Chinese. I guess it's "beta" for a reason. It surely has a long way to go if it wants to be anywhere near decent contention to FF and Opera. Below's a snapshot of what this gunk looks like on my machine:

Turns out these junk characters are not really a language at all. When I try to type something in the location bar, it comes up in this junk lingo. I try and rummage through these nonsensical options to see if one of the menus or submenus may have "English" as an option, but no luck.

Conclusion

This mutt is off my PC before it could even bark. So long, Safari, and thanks for all the fish.

Here's a nifty little utility that allows you to set most often-used folders on your PC and access them quickly from a FILE OPEN dialogue box.

FileBox Extender

These little icons appear in all the File –> Open boxes in Windows. Which is very handy. Among the several customizations you can make to this oft-used file dialog box is the ability to automatically sort the file names by name, date, size, or type, and the ability to see the file names in Details or Thumbnails views. (Btw, the skin you see in that screenshot above is from Flyakiteosx).

How to Change FbX Button Images

You can tell a utility is well coded if you can customize it to your tastes. I have changed the icons that come with the tool as default (which are somewhat Win3.1-ish). This is simple. In the folder where you installed FileBox eXtender, there's a sub-folder named ICONS. Inside that are several standard format Windows icon files (with the extension .ICO). Copy a pair of these files into the main program folder, and then rename them to FAVORITE.ICO and RECENT.ICO. Now exit and restart FileBox eXtender. (In some cases you will have to reboot your machine—exiting and restarting the program may not be enough to effect the change). That's it. Your new icons should now appear.

Firewalls are dime a dozen these days. When the concept of a firewall first became important on home computers, with the advent of real high-speed broadband, Tiny Personal Firewall was the best. It even had the approval of experts. Unfortunately, CA stepped in and gobbled up the company.

Zone Alarm was already a strong contender, but with Tiny gone, it soon became the de-facto firewall on the machine of users who knew better than to let this computer flounder under the bloatware of Mcafee or Symantec.

Unfortunately, of late, Zone Alarm has been a bit of a hog on my machine. It's a Core2Duo, which means software such as Zone Alarm should cheerfully work in parallel with no fuss. AVG for instance scans my entire machine for an hour without my so much as bothering about it.

It is in this context that I came across Comodo Firewall, one that is recommended by more than a few techies. Being a born tinkerer, I was off in a jiffy to download the thing. And short story: it rocks.

Below's a screenshot. It looks more professional than even Zone Alarm Pro. There are more options, explained more clearly.

Google is full of tools and utilities that allow MKV to AVI conversion. Many of them are shareware. You download them free but then you have to cough up $29.99.

I have found the FREE tool, All2AVI ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/alltoavi/ ) does the job and does it superbly. It's fast, free, and the conversion from MKV and other formats to AVI happens pretty efficiently and reliably.

If you're on OSX, you can use VisualHub or Submerge, but both of them are a bit unreliable. VisualHub in particular is a fantastic way to do any conversion on Mac OSX, but if it collapses with a cryptic "Sorry, could not convert for some reason", then you may wish to use AlltoAVI inside an XP virtual machine.

Want a Mac look on your Windows machine? Skins and themes would be nice, but there's more to that when you want to REALLY emulate a Mac OSX interface entirely. There are plenty of programs available to emulate specific features of OSX, e.g. Finder, icons, etc [example].

But Flyakite OSX is a project that's looking mature, and it comes with a very complete theme, including sounds and mouse cursors and Explorer customization, things you don't typically expect from a simple 'theme'.

The website goes for a Mac look itself, which is a bit painful, but it's worth the download.

Before you go for it, some caveats

1. The performance of your machine in general may be affected, of course. Not too much though.
2. The theme does fundamentally change some core files like Explorer.exe but (a) it makes a backup so you can go back with a simple uninstall, and (b) it doesn't screw up any additional functionality like my Groove button on my Explorer bar.
3. I don't like shadows under my windows, but that seems to built-in in the skin.
4. Some things like Windows Media Player will not change. WMP has its own skin, which remains untouched.

Own Microsoft Windows XP Home but would like to own Windows XP Pro? Gizmodo is running a simple hack that apparently upgrades the system inadvertently.

No point duplicating it. Read it at Gizmodo.

YMMV, and of course, I do not endorse bootlegging. Enjoy

A calendar on the desktop is a handy feature. My option to date has been to settle for Webshots, which is a nifty screensaver rotator utility and all that, but a bit bulky. Even when I turned off its screensaver functionality, its startup utility took up more time than I'm comfortable with.

Enter Rainlendar, the cute windows desktop calendar! Tricky names aside, this is simply a fabulous find. It's small, cute, has a negligible memory footprint, and looks great with its avant garde font.

It's a breeze to configure. You can place it anywhere on the desktop screen by simply dragging it and it latches into place. Best of all, you can have your To-Do lists and Events show up on the desktop as well. In a cool, semi-transparent manner (and the colors readjust automatically to make sure the text is visible.)

Best feature: It integrates right into my Microsoft Outlook through a MAPI interface — Calendars & Tasks. It even recognized my Archive.pst and pulled the calendar entries from there! No need to have a separate to-do list.

Brilliant!