TechLighten

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 

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Ever seen a micro battery? I haven’t caz its invisible to the naked eye. Well, team from MIT is currently working on such kind of a micro battery that uses genetically modified viruses and use them as a replacement for ultra-thin wires. Basically, the genetically modified viruses “start making protein coats that collect molecules of cobalt oxide to form ultra-thin wires — together, the anode”.

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]

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A french design house called Lumigram has released quite interesting evening wear lately. I’m pointing to their LumiTop product that’ll get all you nice ladies the attention you deserve. LumiTop runs on 1.5v replaceable batteries and will keep you all lit-up for 12 hours.

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]

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If you’re like me and can’t trust all those app-launching programs available from shareware sites, here’s something you might like, an app-launcher from Microsoft Office Labs. The basic idea is to let you launch your most frequently used applications with convenience and less-headache.

So, if you have a desktop like mine, cluttered with all kinda applications, IDEs, games, folders, temporary files etc, wait no more, you wont have to keep searching for your favorite app’s icon on desktop anymore, just drag that favorite program to “Speed Launch’s” Bull’s eye (which happens to right above your system tray). And thats almost all about it.

Speed Launch window can be launched by the Win+C key combination, and you can add as many applications as you want. Five of those applications will appear on the main window (as in the screenshot above), whereas you can use the textbox to type and launch any of the applications you’ve added to Speed Launch.

[Speed Launch] [via Download Squad]

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Ever wanted to compress your huge 4GB+ DVD movies to 700MB dvd-rips while still retaining the original DVD quality? Well thats what we’re gonna learn today. You might be familiar with the regular 700MB dvd-rips ’scene’ releases, where most underground DVD movies are in 700mb compressed avi format. Today we’ll learn how to compress your personal DVD movies to small 700MB compressed format like the ’scene’ releases, so that you can keep your DVDs safe in your drawer and enjoy watching the compressed rips from your hard disk drive.

Now if you’re familiar with the ‘xvid asd’ compression format used for those tv-shows rips, you might know how nicely compressed those videos are. You get a complete 50minutes season video in a 350MB avi file. We’re gonna use that sort of superb compression for our DVD today in this following tutorial. You’ll see that even when our ~4GB DVD movie is compressed to a 700MB dvd-rip, there wont be much difference in the video or audio qualitybecause of the compression softwares and audio/video settings we’re going to use.

We’ll be using this very nice Xvid/DivX conversion tool called

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Considering how easy it is for hackers to guess your password by dictionary attacks, its not a good idea to use dictionary words as your password, and remembering alpha-numeric passwords that help against dictionary attacks is such a tough task, I mean I can’t get myself to learn a password like ‘hC2zTtx45p’ by heart.

Well, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve got a savior for you all. Now you can use your favorite images, songs and videos etc as your password. Two researchers from Carleton University have created this protoype that lets you generate passwords from images, songs and video etc.  Now all you have to do is to select a unique file (image for example) and use Carleton university team’s ObPwd firefox extension to generate a 12-character alphanumeric password. Don’t worry non-firefox users, there’s a standalone version of this thing available from the same download page (check out the read link at the end for the download page).

The team says the extension is

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Thats right folks, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu linux distros) joined Linux Foundation today. Linux Foundation that was formed last year acts as a collective representative of the whole Linux community in different areas such as Public Debates etc. Though many Linux distributions haven’t joined Linux Foundation yet, it is expected that they will eventually.

Canoncial joined LF with silver status, the lowest of all (still better than nothing). Many prominent companies like Nokia, Dell, RedHat and Dreamworks are also silver status members. Silver status members contribute between $5k to $20k annually. Canonical move has made Linux Foundation even more powerful and has helped moving it one step more closer to becoming a collective representative of all Linux distributions.

Canonical’s CTO Matt Zimerman said in a statement:

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