Siddharth Abbineni

If you are wondering why your friends list in GMail chat is suddenly showing friends’ status messages, wonder no longer! You are not alone. With Google concentrating on useless new stuff like buzz, wave etc, they seem to have forgotten what the users really want.

As I value screen space more than gold, I hate it when status messages show up and bloat my list size to twice its original size. Most people think that this is the aftermath of Google’s new Buzz. Well, no actually, this happens because the setting to hide the statuses isn’t an inbuilt feature in Google Chat, but is a Google Labs feature. Its called Muzzle and Google have silently removed it from the Labs database, along with it some other features listed here [Gmail Labs graduation and retirement]. I can understand when they say they want to clean up, but keeping the Back to Beta feature which just adds a beta label to GMail and eliminating Muzzle seems utterly stupid.

The only solution that I have found so far is to use a greasemonkey script which will hide the statuses and make it behave normally. You can find it here [GMail Muzzle Lab Reviving]. If you are not familiar with scripts read this [Installing Scripts]. I will update this post when there is a better alternative to this.

Been using a lot of Facebook lately and I hate spam accounts that add you even after you ignore them. I need to write a profile eliminator script, something that will eliminate/hide a certain specified profile forever. I not only want that profile not view my updates (which I can do by removing that user as friend) but also completely eliminate any appearance of that profile when I am viewing Facebook, such as comments on other friends’ posts etc. So eventually the script should block all instances of that profile (X) including comments, likes and notifications once I specify Facebook’s unique user ID. Something like AdBlock but instead of ad divs it should eliminate all X’s divs. I wish Facebook provided such an option to ignore/block users.
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We want survivors

Anyone got any idea what the hell this means? I am totally stumped!

I am in the middle of an ongoing experiment, where in I am trying to get a Bluetooth headset to work simultaneously with my windows mobile phone and also my PC. I recently got my hands on a Nokia BH-209 headset, I tested the audio quality on the and its amazing! I tested it with skype by pairing it with my PC and the voice clarity is brilliant. I have always been searching for a good reason to ditch my table Mic and this headset maybe the one.

Right now, I am still unable to make it work with both the PC and the phone at the same time, so I need to pair it to the device every time I need to use it. Although pairing is not a tedious process, it still needs some manual labour, like deleting existing devices, adding and re-pairing. Almost a 5 minute task every time I want to use it. I want to avoid this hassle. Yes I am lazy.
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Well, no game seems to come out all ready to play these days. Something has to be done to get it working always. The latest game Mirror’s Edge is no exception. The game seems to lock up after playing for a couple of minutes, usually 5-10 mins. This happens to people with the new nVidia 8000+ cards / all cards which are Physx capable show this symptom. The problem is because Mirror’s Edge’s handing of Physx is like a baby handing a sniper rifle.  A lot of people contacted me for a possible fix. Well, there is good news.

The fix is the new patch (Mirrors Edge v1.01) that EA released a couple of days ago which deals with the lockup issue. Download it here. Install and play. If it still locks up, disable Physx and then restart.
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My maruti doing 170 kmph

We were just roaming around trying to find a fuel station near the Golkonda fort and we found this nice stretch of STRAIGHT road and decided to give it a go. You will see this road on the way to ocean park. BTW its VXi (petrol).
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Wordpress 2.7 is out! Here is the way to upgrade from any of the previous versions of wordpress ( 2.6.*  /  2.6.5) to the latest version i.e. 2.7. The process is very simple, involves only a few steps and I assure you the upgrade is worth the effort. Wordpress 2.7 was released to wordpress.com users earlier but for individual sites it is out now! Lets get started.
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It has been almost a full year since I made the shift to Vista from the trusty old XP. I am now officially bored of Vista’s default aero scheme. After an hour of googling and testing various themes and skins, here is my new desktop.

1. Transblack FINAL v1, Visual Style for Vista.
2. Darkwood wallpaper pack
3. VistaGlazz, for patching Vista theme files which enables custom themes.
4. SimpleX 0.33, Winamp skin. (“Wow! Its really dark!” Color theme)

Also if you are feeling “I want something more sexier!”, you can try this winamp skin, just make sure you enable Desktop Alpha Bending in Winamp reflexion by ~sXnc | See the Last 2 images in the gallery.

When you start a new solo game in COD-World at War, it refuses to start, especially with the RELOADED version. It doesn’t start even if you go via the missions menu, it just stays idle. If you are facing this issue, there is a simple fix thankfully. Follow these simple steps.
EDIT : FIXED VISTA PATH

1. Navigate to the folder :
   • XP users :C:Documents and Settings\USER_NAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\
   • Vista users : C:Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\
2. Delete all the folders in there.
3. Create a new folder with the name of the Profile ex: tHeSiD (folder remains empty)
4. Create text file: active.txt (must NOT be readonly)
5. Open active.txt and type in your profile folder name (tHeSiD)

Thanks to ju7er117 at mininova for this fix :)

I had the All-in-one SEO package installed and I thought it took care of the titles but it didn’t. The only thing in the title tag was the blogs name/title. Even though the settings in the SEO plugin were set properly, it just refused to show the post title in the main title. I even tried setting the custom title for a post individually and that didnt work either. Sucks really coz all the pages in google had only one title, the title of the blog.

I eventually disabled the plugin and the titles were reverted back to Wordpress default. Blog name – Post title. I didnt want that either. I want Post title | Blog name. I checked the template header file and rearranged the wp_title() function and the bloginfo(‘name’) variable. There was still a problem with that, the separator was still on the left side. The title looked like this ” » Post title | Blog name “.

I went on to codex and researched a bit, unlike the older versions wp_title() does take parameters. Setting the right parameters can help customize the way the title of the post is displayed. Here is an example, one I used for this blog.

Originally

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<?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?>

This resulted in a Title of this format. “Blogname » Post title”

You can change that to this

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<?php wp_title('|',true,'right'); ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This results in a title of this format “Post title | Blogname”

A small tweak but really helpful when you want your search listings proper.

For more information and customizations of your own read the wp_title() documentation here. Template Tags/wp title