Super User 
Archive for April, 2011
On Lion’s Reversed Scrolling
Mac OS X Lion is going to introduce a new feature to further make it like iOS: reverse scrolling. When you scroll down, the content will move up instead of down, and vice versa. I am not a member of the Mac Developer Program and so I do not have access to the Lion beta. However, there is an application called Scroll Reverser that allows the replication of Lion’s reverse scrolling in Snow Leopard. Here’s a video demonstration:
How to Mess up your PC‽
Who in their right mind would ever want to mess up their computer? Don’t we already have enough problems to fix as it is? Well, that didn’t stop pHelics from asking this:
How to mess up a PC running Windows 7?
Ok, so for my PC class I have to find 3 hacks that would mess up the lab’s PC. Me and my partner are going to mess up the PC and then another team will try to fix it. The system on it is Windows 7. Anything that would stop the normal use or render the PC useless works. The conditions:
- Can’t open the case
- Can’t use the registry settings (due to how big it is, it would take the other team a long time to fix)
- Needs to be fixable (meaning, nothing that would mess that bad so it would require an reinstall) within 15-30 minutes (by my teacher, preferably not by the other team 🙂
- Can use the administrative tools
- No downloads (PC is not even connected to a network)
That’s actually an honorable question, and can be useful for the training of other learning Super Users, so if you’re looking some ideas here’s a brief summary of some of our favorites of this questions and some suggestions of our own:
IObit Advanced SystemCare 4
IObit Advanced SystemCare4 is your one-stop shop for all your computer management needs and is, quite honestly, the most full featured and complete PC cleaner application I have ever seen.
Along with the standard suite of malware, registry and disk drive cleaners SystemCare4 also includes privacy protection, several speed boosting modes, closing of application vulnerabilities (which in my case recommended a couple of Microsoft updates that were not dished out by Windows Update) and several other useful features. It even has disk defragmentation which moves into disk optimization in the “Pro” version.
Peter Mortensen, Editor-in-Chief
As you may know, I have a ‘weak spot’ for useful users. This week’s MVU (Most Valuable User) is Peter Mortensen, editor-in-chief.
Listen to Pandora in your terminal via Pianobar
I constantly listen to Pandora (even while I sleep). However one thing I’ve always disliked about Pandora was that it required Flash. You remember Flash, it’s that enormous resource hog that’s constantly crashing. Then I discovered Pianobar, the open-source Pandora client that runs in your terminal. Pianobar is chock full of features:
- play and manage (create, add more music, delete, rename, …) your stations
- rate played songs and let Pandora explain why they have been selected
- show upcoming songs/song history
- configure keybindings
- last.fm scrobbling support (external application)
- proxy support for listeners outside the USA
VirtualBox and Networking – How you do it.
I have often had to answer questions on setting up advanced networking with VirtualBox. The most common ones are along the lines of:
Connecting to a VirtualBox machine from the host, using an ip address
and others of a similar ilk.
Well, let’s delve into the mysteries of VirtualBox’s networking (and networking in general) to unravel the secrets behind setting it all up right.
VirtualBox has 4 basic types of network available:
Why you should forget about 4GiB of RAM on 32-bit systems and move on
In my previous post on 64-bit systems I was somewhat dismissive of applications being able to use PAE and other technologies to allow a 32-bit operating system to use more than 4GiB of memory. We’ve since asked:
If my operating system is 64 bit can my 32 bit applications use 64 bit memory (> 3.5GB)?
And the answer is, in truth, yes. Yes, you can. But it’ll cost you and, probably, make your life difficult. It’ll also make people wonder why you wanted to try it in the first place too, what with all these new-fangled 64-bit processors and operating systems flying about using whatever memory they need to do whatever they like.
There are many technologies for achieving this, these include PAE, PSE, PSE-36, AWE (Windows), mmap (Unix/Linux) and they all have one thing in common: they require special support to use properly. In some cases forcing the issue means things can and will break, horribly.
TL;DR Version: All these technologies are there for developers. They provide no immediate solution for end users.
Linux permissions demystified
I have seen a large number of questions on Super User recently all around the same topic of Linux and Unix file permissions. For example:
unix file permissions
File permissions in UNIX are frequently specified as an octal number. Why is octal the preferred base for this purpose?
… and …
Linux file permissions
I own a particular file on a Linux system. I would like to give 2 groups (accounting, shipping) read access and only read access, and 3 users(Mike, Raj and Wally) write access and only write access. How can I accomplish this?
In a world of Windows where file permissions can be granted on a per-user basis, Linux and Unix permissions seem to be very hokey and restricted.
Well, let me tell you, they’re not. For such a seemingly basic arrangement they are an incredibly powerful tool.
Most people forget that to do anything even remotely fancy with permissions in Linux you really have to couple them with groups. And you really can do some fancy things with them!
Battle of the Giants: Microsoft vs. Google (Online Docs Edition)
In this edition of the Battle of the Giants, we look at both Google’s and Microsoft’s online document editing programs.
History:
Microsoft has been in the market of document editing software from the inception of Windows 1.0 with Windows Write. Now Office 2010 has been selling for some time now, and while you might prefer other solutions like OpenOffice or the newer LibreOffice, Microsoft Office has a major foot hold in the Word Processing market.
With the release of Live services in 2005, Microsoft started to offer for free, online versions of their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs. Microsoft’s online services have now gone through 4 major updates/releases and currently offers Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNotebook.
Google moved into the online documents world with the acquisition of Writely, a Word alternative, in 2006. Later support for spreadsheets, and presentations were added. Currently Google offers Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Form, and Drawings.
