CAPTCHA's are those annoying pictures with characters on them that you have to type to prove to a website that you're human. They're meant to prevent automatic programs to mimic humans and spam. While they undoubtedly are a great good for the internet, they're also a bloody waste of time. The inventor of the CAPTCHA's Luis von Ahn, realised this and decided to put this human effort to good use - to convert old books into electronic form.

Listen to this interview with Luis von Ahn at the IT Conversations Network

Today I came across an easy to follow tutorial on how to create professional HDR images. This technique lets you combine multiple pictures of the same subject taken at different exposures to create "a perfect picture" with no under or over exposed areas.

After my camera decided to die just in time for the warranty to expire I abandoned photography for a while. After reading this tutorial today I just feel like giving myself a very expensive Christmas present.

The Ryan McGinnis tutorial - Found via Hackzine

Are you so poor you cannot afford a video ipod, yet you still want to get the best out of google video presentations?

Google techtalks are talks and presentations about a diverse range of subjects which make perfect candidates for ipod listening. For most of the talks you can afford to sacrifice the powerpoint presentation and listen only to the audio. To extract the audio from a google video follow these steps:-

Software Required:-

• Google video player
• GVI2AVI Converter
• Media Coder

1. Locate the file you want to download and save it to disk. This saves a gvp file of around 2kb on your drive.

2. Open the file with google video player. When you open the gvp file with google video player a gvi file is created. The gvi file is the actual video file (around 300mb for an hour of video). The default folder on windows is my documentsMy videosGoogle videos.

3. Convert the gvi file into an avi file using GVI2AVI, to be able to manipulate it.

4. Use media coder to extract the mp3 file from the avi file

I can't explain why when I borrow DVDs from friends my usually dormant sysadmin nature kicks in. All of a sudden I get this urge make a backup of their DVDs just in case. We all know that backups should be kept offsite so from the kindness of my heart I offer to keep the backup copy of the DVD myself. After all they wouldn't want to lose their collection if their house goes on fire.

For some cruel reason some movie companies try to dampen my altruistic spirit and make it very difficult to make backups by adding encryption to the DVDs. Guess they're right when they say that there's no room for kindness these days.

Well, I keep doing my best to help friends, and until today these are the most effective ways to copy DVD's. I'm in no way an expert on this, in fact I keep asking my brother how to do it and the reason I'm writing this down is not to have to spend another hour on the phone with him.

Required Software:

• Clone DVD
• DVD Shrink
• DVD Decrypter

1st attempt: Use Clone DVD to make a clone of the DVD and copy it. This is the easiest way to copy but the least likely to succeed.

2nd attempt: If Clone DVD doesn't work then try DVD shrink. (This never worked for me but apparently it sometimes does)

3rd attempt: Extract the DVD files using DVD Decrypter than use Nero (or any other writer software) to burn on DVD. If the extracted files are greater than the DVD storage size then use Clone DVD to write the extracted files to DVD.

Play the ripped DVD
You can play the ripped DVD without having to burn it using VideoLan. This software lets you to play a DVD from a folder retaining the menu structure and chapter markers of the DVD. (Link found through hackszine)

This week I had to learn some advanced Excel techniques. As usual I went to the web to look for some ideas on how to achieve what I was looking for. When looking for information on such a broad and popular subject Google isn't my favourite engine because it tends to return many results of services and courses offering excel tuition rather than the actual tips. I used the following resources to get a much more focused set of results and ideas about what I was looking for.

Del.icio.us - This got me started in the right direction. The first couple of bookmarked sites here linked to several other Excel resources literally flooding me with Excel information.

Google video - A video hosting site might not be the first place to come in mind when looking for excel stuff. After I searched for 'excel reporting' in Google Video I found a whole series of 2mins shows by Mr. Excel on how to power-use excel.

These are some of the best sites I found after searching these sources and linking sites

• My Excel Pages - Loads of Articles on Excel
• Juice Analytics - Nifty Information Representation blog with several articles on Excel with how-tos
• Perceptual Edge - Information Representation Papers and Research
• Contextures - Good examples and how-tos on advanced excel especially on Pivot Tables

If you've got only one login profile on your windows XP computer you can turn off the nagging login screen when the computer restarts. This simple procedure lets you specify a user with which the machine will automatically logon on startup.

1. Click Start -> Run, and type control userpasswords2.
2. Clear the 'Users must enter a username and password to use this computer' check box.
3. Click Apply.
4. Enter the user name and password you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.
5. Click OK again

Reference: Auto Logon to Windows XP

I managed to finish the Tip a Day project. This is a list of all the tips in the series:

• Tip 1: Synonymn and NOT web searches
• Tip 2: Use your homepage as a reminder
• Tip 3: Multiple home pages in Firefox
• Tip 4: Restoring pre 2.0 tab behaviour in Firefox
• Tip 5: Date Arithmetic in Excel
• Tip 6: Reclaim disk space disable hibernation
• Tip 7: Restore missing desktop icon
• Tip 8: Invoking oracle tools with sysdba role
• Tip 9: Middle mouse button click
• Tip 10: Time wasting
• Tip 11: Disable system restore for improved performance
• Tip 12: Icons in system tray
• Tip 13: Speed testing your internet
• Tip 14: Removing auto-startup programs
• Tip 15: Quick Searches in Firefox
• Tip 16: Note taking software
• Tip 17: Currency conversion with Google
• Tip 18: Selecting text with ALT
• Tip 19: Synchronising Firefox Bookmarks
• Tip 20: GTD TiddlyWiki - Productivity tool
• Tip 21: Why I use Winamp and not other media players
• Tip 22: Tracking down large files
• Tip 23: Google Game - GoogleWhack
• Tip 24: Back to the past
• Tip 25: Application Shortcuts
• Tip 26: Play Quicktime and Real Player files without installing the applications
• Tip 27: Automatic log file
• Tip 28: Converting a FAT filesystem to NTFS
• Tip 29: Pausing Applications in *nix
• Tip 30: Word Count in vi
• Tip 31: WinXP Funnies

For the last tip of the series these are some windows XP funnies (Easter Eggs).

• Win solitaire automatically by pressing ALT + SHIFT + 2
• Make windows speak slang.
  1. Open the control panel
  2. Open speech -> properties
  3. In the preview box type crotch
  4. Press preview voice
  5. Instead of crotch the voice will say crow's nest
• Save a text document with the words "bush hid the facts". Open it with notepad and the words are replaced by square boxes.

Reference: The Easter Egg Archive

It's 4.30pm on Friday. The weekend is at the corner but there's one thing in the way. The Weekly Report. The last thing you'd want to do is think what you've done during the week and write the report. The solution?

Use any text editor, GTD TiddlyWiki or a plain piece of paper and write down tasks as you complete them during the week. Come Friday afternoon all you need to do is to type the list in the report.

In notepad if you save a file with .LOG (caps) as the first line, each time you open the file the current date and time is added to the end of the file.

Need to convert a currency quickly? Just type in your query in simple English to Google and you'll get the answer. You can either use the currencies full name or the three letter currency code. For example:

• 250 New Zealand Dollar to USD (specifying New Zealand dollar will avoid confusion with other dollars)
• 9000 Philippine Pesos to GBP (specifying Philippine will avoid confusion with other pesos like the Mexican Peso)
• 25 Euros to ARS (ARS is the Argentinean Peso)

[This entry was edited to reflect the removal of the default Quick Search folder from Firefox. Previous entry can be found here]

In Firefox you can associate a keyword with any bookmark. If you right click and select properties on a bookmark you'll notice there is a keyword field. If you type a keyword in this field you can access the bookmark by typing the keyword in the address bar instead of the whole web address.

There is also a feature called smart keywords which allows you to specify a placeholder (%s) in the location textbox which is replaced by the text following the keyword. In the example below you can see that the location URL ends with "/search?q=%s". When you type the keyword g followed by a search sting, for example g smart keywords in the address bar the %s in the URL is replaced by the words "smart keywords" and a Google search on these two words is executed.

The system restore function in windows XP takes snapshots of your system to be able to restore it back should something go horribly wrong. While this is a great function (if you know it exists) it also uses up resources both in processing time when monitoring and disk space to store the system state.

To disable system restore, choose system from the control panel (or press windows button + pause), select the system restore tab and enable "turn off system restore on all drives".

Make you've got a good backup strategy if you decide to turn off this feature.

Source: Computer Active: PC Tuning Solutions

Reference: All about System Restore in WinXP

This article is part of the Tip of the day project

Sometimes it happens, the show desktop icon vanishes. To restore it all you have to do is to create a text file with the following contents.

[Shell]
command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save this file on your desktop as "Show Desktop.scf", include the space. Now the desktop shortcut should appear on your desktop. Drag this to the quick launch bar. If you lost the quick launch bar right click on the start toolbar, click on toolbars and select quick launch.

Reference: Show Desktop icon restore if missing from quick Launch Toolbar

This article is part of the Tip of the day project

If you have hibernation enabled windows is using disk space to store the state of the machine before it hibernates. This file is usually c:hiberfil.sys and can take up between 250MB to over 1GB depending on the amount of RAM installed. This space is still occupied even if you don't use hibernation so you can turn it off if you've never hibernated your computer (or don't know what that means). To turn off hibernation:-

• Open Control Panel
• Double-Click Power Options
• Select the Hiberation Tab
• Untick the Enable Hibernate option
• Restart your computer and watch your hard disk space free up.

Source: The mysterious hiberfil.sys

This article is part of the Tip of the day project

If you want to find the difference between two dates in Excel you can use a normal subtraction formula. Ex. =A1-A2.

This returns the difference in days but autoconverts it into a date. The converted date is incorrectly formatted so to get the number of days between the two dates change the cell format to general (type Ctrl+Shift+~).

If you want to get the number of years between the two dates divide by 365.25 and round up by 1 decimal place. Ex. =ROUND((A1-A2)/365.25,1).

Source: Excel Timesaving Techniques for dummies - Greg Harvey

This article is part of the Tip of the day project

Ever had a unprintable pdf document that had the print function disabled? I've just managed to find a solution the problem which is as easy as installing ghostscript and ghostview. If you open the pdf document with ghostview you'd be able to print the document from there, bypassing adobe acrobat's security.

Reference: Gallery of Adobe Remedies