tricks « The Don's Craptastic WorldThe Don's Craptastic World

20Nov/090

Firefox: “I see where you are!”, Me: “No, ya don’t!” [Turning off Geolocation Tracking in Firefox]

Geolocation Tracking/Tagging, ever heard of it? No? Check out the link!

Short version: It's the identification of your geological location. Can be good, can be bad. I don't like being stalked though! Firefox, by standard, has geolocation tracking enabled. If you don't want it, turn it off with a few simple steps:

Type in "about:config" in your url bar
Type in "geo" in the filter bar
Look for "geo.enabled" and turn its value to "false"
For an extra icing on the cake: look for "geo.wifi.uri" and change its content to "WHATEVERYOUDESIRE"

This is how it looks after the change:

Enjoy your stalking-free Firefox!

Filed under: Security, Tips and Tricks No Comments

7Sep/0949

Fraps & VirtualDub: How to save disk space and enjoy good quality, small file size HD video clips

VirtualDub & Fraps settings

The biggest problem most of us face while recording gameplay clips with Fraps is its disk space usage. Fraps records everything uncompressed, continuously (free version is limited to 30 sec.) and sequential. Meaning from start till stop the "whole" clip is split into single 4GB files (For FAT32 filesystem user convenience).

The length of a single 4 GB clip depends on the resolution and the in-game scene you record it in. For example, for me a 4 GB clip has about 90 sec. worth of gameplay in 1920x1200 resolution.

Because of this uncompressed real-time recording your frame-rates drops significantly while playing. There is NO way to keep up 40+fps with Fraps running unless you have one hell of a monster system.

Imagine what happens when you want to capture a 30+ min gameplay clip. Either you buy yourself a Terabyte HDD or you use a very simple trick: recording in half-size, upscaling and sharpening. Read the How-To guide!

Filed under: Software, Tips and Tricks Continue reading

5Sep/0926

How to fix the video lag in Firefox!

firefox Lately my video (HD) playbacks in YouTube seemed to be lagging a LOT! I wondered why. I thought it would be me and my years old OS or perhaps even somehow my pc.

But no it wasn't. The lag was caused by Firefox's session saving feature. A simple and fast change in it and "poof" went the lag.

Open Firefox and type in "about:config" (without the ") in the Address Bar and hit Enter.
Type in "session" in the "Filter" line at the top of the list.
Find “browser.sessionstore.interval” and double click it. The 10000 milliseconds (equals 10 seconds) is the interval in which Firefox keeps saving your session in case of a crash; same amount of time between video lags.
Change it to something different. 120000 equals 2 minutes, 300000 equals 5 minutes or something else you desire. I went with 600000 (10 minutes), because I don’t particularly care about session saving.

Filed under: Software, Tips and Tricks 26 Comments

30Aug/090

Remove driver leftovers with Driver Sweeper!

Delete Leftovers with Driver Sweeper!

A long time ago I had DriverCleaner, a tool to remove certain driver leftovers! Lately I've had to battle with some odd issues about my graphic card driver leftovers. They just won't delete. I wanted a clean de-installation because some games started to act up.

So I set out to look for a modern and up-to-date (and possibly free!) alternative to DriverCleaner and I came across Guru 3D's Driver Sweeper. I recommend this application! It's up-to-date (latest 23.07.2009) and deletes everything (as far as I can see, it resolved my issues at least).

Drive Sweeper deletes ATI (Display), NVIDIA (Display and Chipset), Ageia (PhysX), Creative (Sound), MMouse (whatever that is) and Realtek (Sound) drivers. I wanted it to delete my ATI driver leftovers.

According to Guru3D it also runs on any modern Windows system including Win7:

System requirements:
The Guru3D - Driver Sweeper is fully tested on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows & 7 RC. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported.

The absolutely best and sure way to delete anything is first to uninstall it via its official Uninstaller, then reboot your system into Safe Mode and fire up Driver Sweeper. Skiping Safe Mode also works but some files might not get deleted in the process.

Filed under: Software No Comments

30Aug/090

Using Firefox 3.x? Speed it up by vacuuming its SQLite database!

Firefox Recently I stumbled onto some tips how to speed up ones Firefox. Firefox, since the version 3, uses a SQLite database for various tasks such as storing bookmarks, histories, site specific preferences and backups.

Over time it's get filled up with unnecessary and old info if you want, and there's a simple method to ditch those useless info and speed up your Firefox considerably, or like most of the guides say to "vacuum" it.

Use it once in a while, I've seen an improvement on my Firefox since I used it.

Go to "Tools" -> "Error Console"

Paste this in the "Code" text box:

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

Press enter or click "evaluate"
Your Firefox will freeze for a short time, just wait
Enjoy your speed up Firefox!

Filed under: Internet, Software, Tips and Tricks No Comments

10Aug/0921

Real-Time Screen capturing/recording easily done with VirtualDub and VHScrCap

Video Editing I've been looking for a way to capture my screen (not screen-shot it, but real-time capture) while on my OS (WinXP). I've found a lot solutions, but all of them involved shelling out money one way or another. Now why would I do that, when in the age of Open Source and Freeware there are free solutions for almost everything?