Saturday, December 13, 2008

Linux : Turning Off The System (hardware) Beep

The system speaker is controlled by a driver in the Linux kernel. This allows the pc speaker to beep at you for different reasons or at different events. If you remove the module which drives the speaker, the beeping goes away, as the machine no longer knows how to interface with that device.
This can be done manually with a command such as:

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

or you can set it as a persistent change by adding the module to your system driver blacklist, available at:

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

simply append the line “blacklist pcspkr” for that driver to be disregarded at every boot.

If you’d like to manually re-insert the module use:

sudo modprobe pcspkr

Enjoy Silence.

-Mihir


Linux : Turning Off The System (hardware) Beep

The system speaker is controlled by a driver in the Linux kernel. This allows the pc speaker to beep at you for different reasons or at different events. If you remove the module which drives the speaker, the beeping goes away, as the machine no longer knows how to interface with that device.
This can be done manually with a command such as:

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

or you can set it as a persistent change by adding the module to your system driver blacklist, available at:

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

simply append the line “blacklist pcspkr” for that driver to be disregarded at every boot.

If you’d like to manually re-insert the module use:

sudo modprobe pcspkr

Enjoy Silence.

-Mihir


Installing MP3 support for amaroK

Unfortunately amaroK doesn't come with MP3 support in Ubuntu. But that's easy to fix.

1. Check, if you have included the Universe sources in /etc/apt/sources.list

2. Type "sudo apt-get update" in the shell (or use the Update Button in Synaptic)

3. Type "sudo apt-get install libxine1-ffmpeg" (or select and install it in Synaptic)
This will install the needed libmad0 library as well.

4. Start amaroK and play your MP3 files :)

if this does not work in the first go then restart the computer and it should work.

If you have any better idea please do add it as a comment.

- Mihir Patel.

Setting up Kismat in Ubuntu 8.10

Getting up Kismet running on Ubuntu 8.10. ( HP Laptop)
  1. Open up a Terminal: Applications > Accessories > Terminal
  2. sudo apt-get install kismet
  3. sudo gedit /etc/kismet/kismet.conf
  4. Change
    source=none,none,addme

    to
    source=ipw2200,eth1,wifi
    • If you don’t know your relevant network driver, view the Kismet Readme and scroll down to the section “12. Capture Sources”. My driver is ipw2200.
    • If you don’t know your interface name, use iwconfig to find your wireless interface (mine is eth1).
  5. Save the file
  6. sudo kismet
- Mihir Patel.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

change the colour of cell on the condition

A simple example would be to use Conditional Formatting to highlight

all cells in any given range that are greater than 100. Let's say this range is A1:A100. We would Start by selecting cells A1:A100, Starting from cell A1. This will ensure A1 is the active cell in the selection and from this, Excel will know all other cells we specify are relative to cell housing the Conditional Formatting. Now go to Format>Conditional Formatting and then choose "Cell value is", then "Greater than" and then type 100 in the far right, see below;


Conditional Formatting Dialog


Now click the "Format" button and choose the desired formatting for all cells greater than 100. After this, click "Ok" then "Ok" again. The same logic can be applied to any other of the criteria we can choose. E.g "Less than", "Equal to" etc

The only drawback with this way, is that cells housing text may be seen as having values greater than 100! We can over-come this by resorting to the "Formula is" option as apposed to "Cell value is". When using the "Formula is" option, any formula we use, MUST evaluate to either True, or False. With this in mind, here is a formula that we can use in place of simply 100.

=AND(ISNUMBER(A1),A1>100)

Again, it is vital the you select Starting from A1 as all other formulas, in A2:A100, will change their cell references relatively. That is, A2 Conditional Formatting will read;

=AND(ISNUMBER(A2),A2>100)

If you are not already aware, both conditions in an AND Function must evaluate to True for the Function to return True. In other words, all cells in A1:A100 will need to house a number AND the number must be greater than 100 for the chosen formatting to be applied.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Wireless Key view - Wep key retrival

Wireless Key View.
Very useful little tool for managing the wireless network WEP/WPA keys
stored on your Windows PC. You can view the plain text version of the
key, delete old keys and copy paste them to a file for safe keeping.
It’s especially great if you’ve forgotten your WiFi access key and are
locked out of your wireless router. C’mon admit it, we’ve all had
moments when the old memory has failed us…!



 WirelessKeyView recovers all wireless network keys (WEP/WPA)
stored in your computer by the ‘Wireless Zero Configuration’ service of
Windows XP and by the ‘WLAN AutoConfig’ service of Windows Vista. It
allows you to easily save all keys to text/html/xml file, or copy a
single key to the clipboard.