This might be a useful feature for average users who visit Facebook and YouTube dozen of times a day as it reduces the time the browser takes to download pages from the servers of the websites by eliminating the need for a DNS server by caching the most visited url.

So if you are a server admin like me or are a newbie in this field and are facing the same problem clearing/flushing your DNS cache may do your job.

To clear dns in windows: Go to All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt or Go to Run and type cmd. Once in there type

ipconfig /flushdns

Mac and Linux both being UNIX based system have the same method to do this.

For Mac go to Applications -> Terminal

For Linux press Alt+F2 and type in gnome-terminal

Then give the command

dscacheutil -flushcache

This will clear all your DNS cache and should solve your problem If not have a look at your DNS server.

Okay so let’s get started. So first find out how to forward ports on your router. This tell your router to allow traffic from certain ports and redirect it to a given IP. Go here and find out how to forward ports on your router. Click on the Default Guide for a general instruction guid for port forward.

Now go ahead and forward ports 137(TCP/UDP) , 138(TCP) , 139(TCP) , 445(TCP) to the ip of the computer you are hosting the SMB server on. This pity much completes the job the only thing you now need is your external IP. You can go to ip.pixeltine.com or if you are a Linux/Mac user you can give the command

curl ip.pixeltine.com

Now mount the partition using this external ip and you are done.

If you want help mounting these partitions I found these posts helpful.

• Linux
• Mac

Just use the external ip the we derived above instead of the local ip suggested in these posts.

I found a solution to this in Google Chrome. In it you can install a plugin the will skip the video ads that load before the desired video and plave text ads instead of it. It is a totally legal practice.

You can add this extension to your browser and click the blue button every time to skip video ads.

One feature that I really missed in non-magazine themes is the featured images function which I was not able to find in any other non-magazine theme. So I decided to do something my self. At the end of the day I was able to come up with an approximate of the thumbnail system in some of the premium magazine themes . When you add a featured thumbnail of any size most magazine themes automatically resize the thumbnails to the desired size and add them to the post.

In this tutorial I will tell you how to enable this feature and the make some changes to your theme so that you will be able to see the featured thumbnail next to post.

So first let us enable the feature, which is the easy part of the job. For that go to Appearance -> Editor -> Theme Function(On the right hand side) then add the following code at the top.

if ( function_exists( 'add_theme_support' ) ) {
  add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
}

Update the file. Now you would be able to see an option like this while writing/ editing a post.

This will allow you to add thumbnail to your post. But the size of the thumbnail also matters. While the big magazine themes have pre-installed plugins to do the job but I think light as installing too many plugins on your blog may lead to some problems on your blog that are very difficult to diagnose as I am facing problems with light box.

So you can use an online tool Pic Resize. This tool allows you to edit your images in great detail but we need to only to resize our images, so click on Quick Resize enter 64 as the width and leave the height option as blank. This is the optimum size  of a thumbnail that should be used. Now add this image as the featured image of your post.

I think Most themes would display the thumbnail by default but some might not. For those who are not getting the thumbnails beside the post you would need to edit your theme. I am giving a general over view which would work for most of the theme.

For this we would need to make a division to correctly format the location of the image and then call the function

<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>

So first go to Appearance -> Editor -> Stylesheet . At the end of the page add this

#thumb {
	float:left;
	width:64px;
	background:#fff;
	color:#000;
}

This would probably set the division we need to put the thumbnail in. Update the file and select Main Index Template.

This is probably where you would find the code that displays the headings of the post. Our aim is to place the thumbnail on the left side of the post heading. If your want to place it on the right of the post heading just replace “float:left” with “float:right” in the above code.

The code is between the tags <h1>……….</h1> if you are using a good theme but can also be between <h2>………</h2>. So just before the heading code add

<div id=”thumb”><?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?></div>

Update the file . Now you would be able to see the thumbnail next to the post heading.

The dialog in the beginning just ruins the taste of the song.

So what to do about this.

Yes there is a solution , at the end of the url of the video add the anchor #t=

So your final link should look some thing like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N46x3_cObxM#t=01m01s

where 01m01s mean 1 minute 1 second. You can replace this with any value you want.

Coming to the embedding and sharing youtube video part of the tutorial. Adding a time stamp in an embedded videos is only possible with the “Old Code” so while generating code to be embedded make sure you check the box “Use old embed code”

Now the code should look something like this

<object width=”500″ height=”311″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/N46x3_cObxM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/N46x3_cObxM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”500″ height=”311″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

Now add &amp;start=t where t is in seconds. So if you want to go to 2 minute 3 sec you would need to add &amp;start=123 

So the final code should look like

<object width=”500″ height=”311″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/N46x3_cObxM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0&amp;start=123“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/N46x3_cObxM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0&amp;start=123” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”500″ height=”311″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

If you have any queries about this feel free to leave a comment

Apple Safari also has a similar feature known as Readable which  removes every thing from your page and just displays the text and the images included.

If you are a blogger you can give the same experience to all your readers irrespective of the browser they use.

So lets go on and do it.

STEP1: Create a page on your wordpress blog named something like “Reading” by going to Pages-> Add New.

SETP2: Change the permalink or the URL(slug) to read.

STEP3: Now you would need to edit the .htaccess file. So better get an ftp client. Add the following line at the top of your .htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^read/([0-9]+)/?$ /read/?u=$1 [QSA,L]

STEP4: Download this zip file extract the php file in it and upload it to your WordPress theme folder usually /wp-content/themes/ .

STEP5 Lastly you need to create a link on your page from where your uses would be able to use this service. Top of a post or some prominent place on your sidebar are the some places I would recommend to you for placing the link.

<a href=”/read/<?php the_ID(); ?>/”>Read story without the clutter</a>

If you have any queries feel free to post a comment.

So if you want to change the DocumentRoot in apache2 you will not find the setting under httpd.conf. To chance the DocumentRoot of the apache2 server follow the steps:

STEP1: First you need to make the directory to which you want to change the DocumentRoot to. Preferably make this directory in your home folder so that you have all the permissions to edit the files that are kept in the folder. So issue the command

mkdir ~/name_of_your_folder

STEP2: To change the DocumentRoot you would need to edit the file default file placed in /etc/apache2/sites-available . So issue the command

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

In this file you would see something like

DocumentRoot /var/www/

Change it to

DocumentRoot /home/username/name_of_your_directory/

On line 9 you would see something like this

<Directory /var/www/>

Change it to

<Directory /home/username/name_of_your_directory/>

STEP3: Save the file.  Go to the terminal and issue the command

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And its done. Now place any of your file in the folder you made and you would be able to see the file by going to http://localhost/

IF you have any queries regarding the process feel free to leave a comment.

So 2 of my buttons (Tilt wheel Right/Left) were not working. So I went to google and found a really complicated method to do the thing , and it was a bit out dated too. So I went on experimenting with the devices and finally was able to come up with a vary easy process  to activate the additional buttons on the mouse. Follow the steps:-

STEP 1:First we need to find out the name of your mouse and its handler. For that issue this command in shell

egrep “Name|Handlers” /proc/bus/input/devices

Now you would be able to see something like this:

N: Name="Power Button"
H: Handlers=kbd event0
N: Name="Power Button"
H: Handlers=kbd event1
N: Name="AT Translated Set 2 keyboard"
H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event2
N: Name="Logitech USB Optical Mouse"
H: Handlers=mouse0 event3
N: Name="HDA Intel Headphone"
H: Handlers=event4

Note the name of the device and the event. For me it was Logitech USB Optical Mouse and event3 .

STEP 2:Now we need edit the 10-evdev.conf located in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ (Exclusively for Ubuntu 11.04 users). To edit the file issue the command

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

users using earlier versions on Ubuntu need to  edit the xorg.conf locate in /etc/X11/xorg.conf . You can issue the command

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Once you have opened the file go all the way to the bottom of the page and add the following thing

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "<name of the device we found in step 1>"
Driver "evdev"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/<event of your mouse>"
Option "Resolution" "800"
Option "RelHWHEELMapTo" "Buttons 7 6"
EndSection

The final thing should look like

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Logitech M100"
Driver "evdev"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3"
Option "Resolution" "800"
Option "RelHWHEELMapTo" "Buttons 7 6"
EndSection

And it is done. If you want you can also modify the resolution of the mouse. Caution: It may stop the mouse from working.

If you have any queries feel free to post a comment.

STEP1: First we need to know the names of all the drives you want to auto mount at the start up. For that issue the command

sudo fdisk -l

Now you will be shown a list like this

from here select the partitions you want to add.

STEP2: We now need to create a mount point ,a directory, for mounting the drive to. So me make one. Issue the command

sudo mkdir /media/any_name_you_like

STEP3: For mounting the drive to the directory we just made automatically every time you boot in we would need to editthe fstab file placed in /etc directory. So issue the command

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

For the new ubuntu the file looks something like this

#" / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=ad8b4f9e-a235-446b-8069-b420ed9388e7 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=e2098109-8b3a-4b28-8ceb-8d77d8cbafa9 none swap sw 0 0  "

In this example I am going to mount sdb2.

So I add

/dev/sdb2 /media/your_directory ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

If you are using any IDE hard disk your drives will appear as /dev/hda or /dev/hdb. You can also change the locale according to your region.

For those users who wish to mount the drive only as read only replace ntfs-3g with ntfs.

For those who wish to mount FAT partitions you can use fat(for read only) and vfat (for read and write) .

If you have any other queries feel free to leave a comment.

STEP1: You first need to unmount the already mounted filesystems using default permissions. Issue the command

sudo umount /media/yourmountpoint

STEP2: Now we need to mount the partition with the correct permissions. For that first we need a directory to mount it to so issue the command

sudo mkdir /media/anynameyoulike

STEP3: Now we will mount the drive using read-write permission for that we need to know device name. So issue the command

sudo fdisk -l

You will be shown some thing like this

Identify the drive you want to mount. Is you have an IDE hard disk you will have something like /dev/hda or /dev/hdb .

STEP4: Now we come to mounting the partition. For this tutorial I am mounting /dev/sdb4 you would need to replace “sdb4” with the one you want to mount. Now issue the command

sudo mount.ntfs-3g /dev/sdb4 /media/the_directory_you_made_before

This should do the trick. But if you are still having problem mounting a partition you can use -f with the above command.

Now you navigate to the file you wanted to execute. You would be able to execute it this time.

If you have any further queries feel free to leave a comment.