I even reset the router settings and set it up again in the hopes of fixing the problem, but every once in a while my browsing would stop working whilst everything else would work.

Today i noticed my other PC that is connected to the same router, had internet and browsing working just fine whereas browsing stopped working on my main PC. In the hopes to fix the problem, i experimentally noticed there was Hamachi 2’s virtual network device in the same network connections window. As soon as i disabled the Hamachi network, my browsing was back to normal. So browsing issues with WRT54G2 were due to Hamachi 2 (I remember having Hamachi 1.0 on vista earlier, never had this issue)

It’s such a relief having my browsing back and to have solved the problem. Posting it in the hopes it fixes someone else’s headache if they’re experiencing the same.

HD200 / HD800 drivers can be installed in Windows 7, but there's a small problem

I’ve used 2,3 HD800 headphones from A4Tech. The sound and bass is really awesome and its the best bang for the buck in a gaming grade head phone gear market. The Problem with HD800 was its delicate design, nearly all of my HD800 headphones got cracked from the sides and finally went useless.

So on a friend’s suggestion, I went to buy a HD200, The design is pretty slick and it feels rock solid. The bass is also nearly as good as the HD800’s. Well its more durable than HD800 so i like it anyway. I’ve been enjoying it for over 2,3 months now.

But the issue i’ve faced recently is when i upgraded to Windows 7. The Dedicated sound control application for the A4Tech HD200 (Which is the same for HD800 headphones also) isn’t compatible with Windows 7, and you’re warned about this issue when you try to install the drivers/app for the headphone.

I installed the same setup with Vista Compatibility in Windows 7, and after a reboot, i was surprised to see the nice bass and sound again. Without it, the Sound is unbearable with generic Windows 7 drivers for the HD200/HD800.

The issue arises when you try to click and run the HD200/HD800’s Sound Configuration App (The application you get after you install the drivers from A4Tech) from the system tray. The OS hangs up for a while, then, you can move the mouse cursor only, but nothing else responds. Even alt+ctrl+del doesn’t work.

I hope A4Tech release a Windows 7 version of their HD200/HD800 drivers/sound configuration control.

If anybody knows a fix for this PC hanging Problem, please share.

PTCL broadband on the go

Most of our Pakistani readers might know that PTCL had announced a launch date of Dec 1st 2008 for their EVDO wireless broadband internet service. Looking at PTCL’s past track record, we expected PTCL to miss the launch date of this “Broadband on the go” service and they did!. Anyway word on the interwebz is PTCL has launched its EVDO internet service in Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore regions.
From what can be understood from the rumors is that currently only 3.1Mbps data rates is provided for a fixed 2500 Rs/month if you dont pay for the CPE. You’ll end up paying 2000 Rs/month after a year of that. On the other hand, you can lower the monthly fee to 2000 Rs/month if you pay a one time fee of 4000 Rs for the CPE.

The speeds are said to hover around 160 kBytes/sec for now. PTCL is still mum on details and their official webpage for “Broadband on the go” is still unchanged since last 2 months. Better take this with a grain of salt, or two.

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First of all, select the YouTube video that you want to download. In this guide, I’ll be using a video from a quick search. Lets say you want to download one of Britney Spear’s latest videos, here are the easy steps to get that or any other video:

1. Open YouTube.com, and in the search box type whatever video you want to download. I’m going to type Britney so that we can proceed with downloading one of her videos in this tutorial.
2. Once you get the results, the next step is to get the address of that specific video. 
   Select any video from the list and right click on its title and then choose “Copy Link Location” or “Copy Link Address”.
3. The video address should be copied to the clipboard now.  Now we’ll use this address to get the direct link of the video. Click HERE , and a you should see KeepVid’s frontpage in a new tab/window.




4. Simply paste in the textbox the video url that we copied from youtube earlier and then click the Download button, as show n below
5. On the next page you should see two links as shown below. the first green download link lets you download the default quality video and the second download link gets you a high quality mp4 video of that YouTube video of your choice.
   
6. Right click on any of the two download links (whether you want the high-quality video or the regular quality one), and select “Save Target As”. Simply select the folder on you computer where you want the video to be stored and downloaded and the video should start downloading now.
7. After the video is downloaded, you should be able to play the video. If your media player doesn’t play the video correctly, download THIS codec pack, it should install all the required plugins and a nice small media player called Media Player Classic that’ll play all your mobile/YouTube etc vidoes.

I hope this guide helped you in some way. Happy surfing!

If you used to search the web for a 3GP version of your favorite video so that you could enjoy some high quality movies on your mobile phone, your search is over. No you won’t have to ask others to compress a video for your mobile phone because at the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to compress any of your favorite video or movie to a high quality .3GP format movie yourself.

If you regularly watch videos on your mobile phone, you already know how pixelated and badly compressed most of those movies look. With this tutorial, we’ll follow some steps, use a nice compression software, and tune up a few things so that you’ll get videos with the the highest quality possible, and even that with a minor increase in the file size.

In order to compress the movie, first you’ll be needing this very nice audio/video compression tool called Super © video converter, to download it go here and you’ll see a very lengthy page, go to the very end of the page and you’ll see a link saying “start downloading Super (C)”, click on that link and you’ll be forward to a final page, where you can download the program (Yes, I know the download is a little awkward, but thats how the Super (C) wants people to go through their pages before they’re able to get a download).

After you’re done with downloading the setup for Super C video converter and install it. During the installation process, you might get a few messages just ignore them.

Once Super C is installed, open it up (if you’re on vista, you might need to right click on the icon and run it as an administrator). Super C will check some requirements that it needs, whatever message it gives, just press ok (as normally any current PC is ok to run Super C, unless you want to compress huge videos as then you’ll need more RAM and CPU power).

Since we’ll be compressing our videos to 3GP format, select “3GP” as the output format, MPEG4 as the video codec and AAC LC as the Audio codec just as shown in the pictur below.

After choosing the right options, now we have to select the video options. If you’re using a phone like Sony Ericsson’s K750, W700, W800, W810, W550 etc, then select the 176:144 “Video Scale Size” from the Video row, 25 frames per second, with 250 kbps bitrate.

If you’re using Sony Ericsson’s K790, K800, K810, K850, W850, W900 etc then because of the large screen and powerful mobile cpu you can choose 240:320 “Video Scale Size” (which’ll give you far superior video quality (as you can see from the top image of this post)). Same 25 frames/sec video speed and choose a bitrate of 450 kbps for the video, just like as shown in the screenshot below.

The next step is to select some nice audio options so that you can enjoy a good audio experience along with he nicely compressed 3GP video. Choose 22050 as the sampling frequency, 2 Channels and choose the bitrate to 96 kbps (if you’re using K750, W700, W800, W810 etc you can also choose 64kbps audio quality if you are going to compress very long videos like movies for example, it’ll save your mobile videos from lagging). Select the options as shown in the screenshot below.

After choosing these options, now all you have to do is to select your favorite movie or video, and get it encoded by Super C. To select the media file that you want to encode, (1) right click on the area below OUTPUT, as shown in the following image, and (2) click on “Add Multimedia Files”.  A browse window should open up and now just locate and select the required video file.

Now you’ll see the video file in the list. In my case I’m compressing Alizee’s La Isla Bonita (very famous video of this hot and nice singer). After the video is in the list just click on “Encode (Active Files)”. Make sure the video is ticked in the list just like as shown below.

Now give Super C a little time to compress your video. The compression doesn’t take very long, time-taken depends on the video size and the compression options. After the compression process is done, your compressed 3GP file will be stored in C:/Program Files/eRight Software/Super/Output directory.

As you can see by the status bar screenshot below, Super C has compressed a 49MB file to a nice and neat, high quality 13MB 3GP file (320:240 version),

i’ve followed the 320:240 size as I wanted this video for my Sony Ericsson K790. For the 176:144 video phones like K750, W700, W800, W810 etc, the size of the compressed 3GP video file will be much smaller.

The end product will look something like this:

I hope you’d love the end product  This 3GP video is now worth watching over your cell phone over and over again. Oh and do comment about how you found this post, and of course, how hot do you think Alizee is?

Rockstar’s Steve Hahnel showed off the some teaser info like more details and screens at Leipzig Games Convention today. So here’s whats new GTA IV’s PC version:

1. Much improved visuals (more polished compared to the Xbox360, PS3 versions)
2. Increased number of multiplayer count, so you can easily play gang-war sort of multiplayer games in GTA IV (hopefully).
3. If you’ve got the rig, Rockstar’s got the games to use it to full potential. GTA IV’s PC port will be support a max resolution of 2560×600. That alot of detail.
4. You can control camera view in replays, and can upload your replays to Rockstar’s social club for others to watch.
5. Multiplayer games can be defined more explicitely now. E.g. you can limit your death matches to a certain weapon only (no sniper cheatin, eh?)
6. Xbox360’s controller is being supported. I like using the analog stick for controlling vehicles, much smoother that way.

Following are the relesed screenshots by Rockstar today GTA 4 will be released for PC on November 18th, by the way. Hit the Read More link for more screenshots.

[via thegtaplace]

So you want to install one of those .vkp patches to add more functionality to your Sony Ericsson phone? Well I’ve been thinking about writing an easy guide to patch your phones without any trouble.

After you’ve followed this tutorial, you’ll be able to add more such patches to add other extra features to your phone. If you don’t know about .vkp patches, let me tell you what .vkp patches can do. Patches actually let your phone do alot of things than it isn’t allowed to do therwise. For example .vkp patches can:

1. Remove java restrictions so that you won’t be annoyed by those permission messages everytime opera mini tries to access the internet or every time you start a file reading program
2. Add extra menus on the phone’s desktop for easy accessiblitity
3. Increase sms (inbox) storage size to thousands of sms msgs.
4. Add a blacklist (call-blocking) feature so that certain people can’t call you.
5. Add other smaller features like make your phone vibrate once when you call someone and they attend the call.

Installing the .vkp patches:

We’ll be using a program called Far Manager to apply the patches to your sony ericsson phone. Get Far Manager from here, now we’ll be using the SEFP plugin (Sony Ericsson Flash Plugin), you can download it from here. Now install Far Manger and  and don’t run it yet. Extract the SEFP  plugin file you just downloaded. You’ll get a folder named ‘SEFP’, copy that whole folder to C:/Program Files/Far/Plugin/

Now beffore we can use FAR manager with your phone, you’ll have to install the USB Flash Drivers for your Sony Ericsson phone, google search for the flash drivers for your certain model, after you’ve downloaded the flash drivers extract them to a temporary folder.

Now turn OFF your phone, keep the ‘C’ button on your phone pressed and connect the USB cable. Keep ‘C’ pressed and windows will ask you for the drivers of  the USB Flash device, just point it to the temporary USB Flash drivers folder and it’ll install the drivers. Now disconnect your phone, take out the battery for a few seconds, put it back in and start FAR manager.

Press alt+f1 and you’ll see see a menu, click ‘0- Far Manager’ as shown in the image below

You’ll see a new window pop up, select your phone from the list, and select the rest of the options as they appear in the picture below. In this case I’m using a K750 so I chose the K750-w800 option from the phones list (make sure you phone is CID36)

You’ll see two options on the right side list (Flash and FS), select Flash and you’ll see a loading screen, where data is being passed. Wait for a while and now you’ll see “Memory” written on the right half of FAR manager. Now navigate the patches folder in the left half of FAR manager (the patches should be in .vkp format and be for your phone (i.e. apply patches that are for your phone model and firmware only)). Select the patches folder as shown below

After selecting that patches folder on the left side of far manager, double click it and you should see your vkp patches that (.vkp format, remember).  Now click on any patch that you want to apply to your Sony Ericsson phone and click on copy, as shown below.

Again you’ll see a new window, don’t change anything and press ‘COPY’ from the new window as shown below.

In the next window, tick the “process VKP script” option, and click on “Flash” as shown below. The vkp flashing should start now.

After the flashing is done (which takes a few seconds per patch), you’ll see a completion message.

Now you’re done. You can either choose another vkp patch to apply or you can click the “..” over the memory on the right side of far manager and choose shut down option. Once done, just take out your battery, put it back in, and turn on your phone. You are now the lucky owner of a patched sony ericsson phone with extra features  Good Luck.

P.S. You can get lots of other .vkp patches from here.

Can’t really understand all this MIT-gibberish? Well here’s what it does in simple words: The MIT team magically force the viruses to start storing energy for all your future micro-gadgets. The viruses even though dislike all constructive stuff like this and love to spread bad diseases instead, are forced to work in these micro batteries for ever and ever. How sad.

What you see in the image is the device used to test those micro batteries, the batteries themselves cant be seen by us mortal human beings.

[Read]

For all you techy boyfriends, you could gift a LumiTop to your GFs to strenghten the never-ending love bond b/w the two of you. That IS a pretty nice bra anyway.

LumiTops are avilable both for men and women and there are some sexy new shawls, cusions, bags, Lumi LED belts and lots of products available in the same category.  Currently being sold for 100-170 euros, so if you want the attention and can pay for it hit the read link.

[Read] [via Slipperbrick]