Just an update to tell that now my blog has been indexed by Google. The sacred Googlebot crawled my blog on 8 July 2006. Now my blog is searchable on Google.
Month / July 2006
Setting movie brightness etc. when these settings are not available in the media player.
Today I saw a movie. I had copied the full DVD to the hard disk because my PC had trouble reading it. I clicked on the .ifo file but PowerDVD failed to open it, same thing with VideoLAN, then I found refute in Media Player Classic. It played it exactly as if it were being played from the DVD itself, but there was a problem – the picture was too dark to see. My monitor’s brightness settings and contrasts were already 100%, now how do I increase its damn brightness, Media Player Classic doesn’t have any such brightness control feature as VLC or PowerDVD has. Idea!
Why not use Intel Graphics Controller Properties? This thing is only available for computers with Intel made motherboards. This tool may not be available even on ur Intel made motherboard comp if ur comp is quite dated. Search Intel’s website.
Now, open Control Panel and double click on Intel(R) Extreme Graphics. This will open the above mentioned dialog.
U can alternatively open it by right clicking on an empty area on ur desktop then navigate to Graphics Options and then to Graphics Properties.
If u can’t see Graphics Options then click on Properties on that menu. Then on Settings tab. Click Advanced button. Now click on Intel(R) Extreme Graphics tab in the newly opened dialog box. Click on Graphics Properties .
Now u r there. Click on Color tab. See here the Brightness and Contrasts sliders? There u r, but wait….If u drag these sliders then u affect the whole screen. Wouldn’t it be nice if could just set these values for the movie only? Yes u can! Just look on that page. Click on Video Overlay option. There, now u have another option, Saturation, available. Now there u r. Don’t forget to cick on Ok. Click on Restore Defaults if u want to goto the default values.
It is recommended that u open the movie while changing the settings. This way u will know how much to move the sliders.
It would had been really nice if we were allowed to save them as schemes. I don’t understand why on earth do they disable the Save as Scheme button for Video Overlay.
Pics for Laughs.
It seems the cow has some tastes for dogs.
Quack-Highness
Royal Bengal Tiger. Is McDonald responsible for it?
“Who is that, with wierd hairs?”
“There u r.”
Cross Atlantic Cruisers.
“It’s just a bad hair day”
“The coast is clear.”
Cross breed-ed?
“No I won’t go with u. I will stay at home.”
“Hey sis. Look at that wierd face.”
“Hmmm…”
“Aaaah! This smells so sweet. Will make a good snack.”
“Ha ha. Who am I?”
“Hey u go off. He is my prey.”
Chicken Littles.
Snaps from Movies (edited)
All pics from Opera community @ http://my.opera.com/community/
Almost all pics (maybe all) has been taken from Mathilda Tómasdóttir’s album at Opera Community.
Well the captions are mine.
How to drive and some more on NFS.
If my friends see me giving advice on playing games then may laugh off their beds. Actually I am not much of a gamer, but I do love racing games. NFS is the best, but the recent Most Wanted Black Edition was verrrrrry tough to play. One or two bangs here and there and bye-bye to being a winner. My repeated attempts to play has now paid well. Now I know to tricks to drive (somewhat).
The golden rule is: never pull the brakes (space-bar). In NFS if u steer even slightly sidewards and pull brakes at the same time, ur car goes out of control and it spins. So rule 1, don’t use brakes. When u r approaching a turning then decrease ur speed, by releasing ur throttle (UP arrow key). If u sense that u need to gain some speed then tap on the UP key, don’t keep it pressed. Keeping the UP key pressed is like increasing the throttle and hence u will be accelerating, and if u have auto gear transmission enabled then u may quickly gain too much speed. This is also true for LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys, used for steering. Keeping them pressed means increasingly steering more and more to that direction. Hence, if for example u keep the LEFT key pressed then u r steering ur steering wheel continuously towards the maximum extent on the left. So rule 2, if u want to maintain the throttle or the steering of the steering wheel to some value between zero and maximum then tap the respective keys repeatedly; keeping it pressed will result it to go to the maximum value. When u r through the turn then fire a short burst of nitro to gain for the lost time. A long burst of nitro is no better than a short burst of it. So rule 3, fire only short burst of nitro, u will immediately accelerate. The trick to good driving is to learn the skill to get the ideal speed for the turning.
While playing NFS, while I was behind the A.I. cars I noticed that the computer too slows down just before a turning and when it is through it fires a short burst of nitro.
After unsuccessfully trying to beat #15 blacklist member for many days at last I discovered these golden rules. Then I successfully beat #15 and just after that in single attempt I beat #14 yesterday. U can download my NFS MW Black Ed saved game from here. I have only beaten #15 and #14 and I have cleared two challenges.
Some good NFS links:-
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1) ZModeller : It is a free complete 3d Modelling software exclusively made to edit and create 3d-Models for games. It supports many games including NFS.
2) NFS Cars: As its name suggests it is dedicated to NFS cars. It has a very big and active forum on of course NFS cars.
3) Ferrari for NFS MW: This is a link to a thread in NFS cars which deserves special mention. Forum member Arushan is busy cracking the file format of NFS MW and is making a tool which will allow u to add ur own car into NFS MW. He has already created the much missed Ferrari for NFS MW. Though still he has neither released the tool or the Ferrari. He promises it will be out when he has ironed out the problems.
4) NFS Planet: All about the Need for Speed games with actual News, many downloads, addon cars and tracks, cheats, pre- and reviews and tutorials.
‘Euro English’ is coming…
Today I received a letter from my friend. Read it below.
—
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English
will be the official language of the European Union rather than German,
which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that
English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year
phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.
In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will
make the sivil servants jump with joy.
The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up
konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the
troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like
fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted
to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben
a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag
is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th”
with “z” and “w” with “v”.
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining
“ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in
ze forst plas.
—
I juess I will have to start learning German to get a hang of this ‘English’.
Blogger troubleshootings, and tips and tricks.
Yesterday (night) I struggled to put some bits of code into my site and crank it up a bit. It was a real struggle, which took 4hrs! Well the blame is shared by both blogger.com and the very slooooowwww net. So, here u may find some workarounds to get over the nasty bugs in blogger.com; particularly when the help is not handy and the helpdesk is deserted. (I am still awaiting replies from the helpdesk. They r taking eternity). So, below r the problems I faced.
Prob1: In the template edit window when I click preview, all I get is a pile of codes and no webpage.
Cause: Look closely. Scroll to the bottom of the field showing the code in the template edit window. The code u see is incomplete.
Sol: I found that reloading that page always works. Now u should be able to see the full code. Hit preview and it is alright.
Prob2: Previously the Google ads window was single lined box. Now, as u see, it is multi-lined. U can change this from template edit section’s Adsnse page. But I had a problem. Blogger didn’t save the changes. It just gave me an error 113. This was the problem.
Cause: I don’t know. Ask blogger helpdesk and wait for eternity as me.
Sol: U need to edit the code manually. Frightened? Oh no, be brave. I did it all by myself, and the only thing I know about CSS and html things is that they r used to make web pages. I figured out what I need to do from the pattern in the code. For u the task is even easier, just follow me…
First locate the code for adsense. It should be near the top. Search for the word ‘adsense’ in the code. The code may look-like.
<div class=’adsense’ style=’text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;’> <script type=”text/javascript”><!– google_ad_client=”ca-pub-3649938949418707″; google_ad_width=300; google_ad_height=250; google_ad_format=”300x250_as”; google_ad_type=”text_image”; google_color_border=”FFFFFF”; google_color_bg=”CCDDBB”; google_color_link=”333333″; google_color_url=”333333″; google_color_text=”FFFFFF”; //–></script> <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js “> </script> </div>
Note the code
google_ad_format=”300x250_as”;
This is the place where u mention the ad format. As u can notice that the syntax of ad format is dimension_as. When I had the 234×60 format then the code was
google_ad_format=”234x60_as”;
U can know the ad dimension from the dimensions mentioned in parenthesis in the Adsense tab in Template Edit section. And don’t forget to set the heights and width of the ad window accordig to this dimesion. See codes
google_ad_width=300; google_ad_height=250;
Note the lack of quotes around the numbers 300 and 250. Also note the code
google_ad_type=”text_image”;
If u set the type to text then only text ads will appear. For the current setting, as u can see above; text or picture will appear. Other codes r self explanatory. They r to set colours of different things. If u don’t find any colour which u like, then this is the place to change them. First u should find out the RGB values of that colour. If u have that colour in some pictures on ur computer then use Paint (pre-installed in WindowsXP) or Photoshop or GIMP to find the RGB values, using their dropper or color pick tools. Then u must find the corresponding HEX (hexadecimal) code for them. U can do that at this site: http://www.kenjikojima.com/java/RGBHexConverter2.html . Now paste these characters replacing the original ones. Mind the quotes around them.
Prob3: Look at the side bar in the right. See the Google Search there? Well its background was blue before, now it has my theme’s colour. I used the method described just above. The problem here was that it used to show a long text like ” applegrew.blogspot.com” instead of the present “This blog”. Adsense doesn’t have anyway of coustomising the text to be shown. U need to do it manually. My motivation for doing this was to contain the search box within the side-bar. Previously due to the long text my search box used to stick its belly out of the side-bar. Now this trick slimmed it down. BTW, when I used to previwe my blog then even with the long text my search box remained within the side-bar, but when published, the search-box used to bully its way out of the side-bar.
Cause: I don’t know.
Sol: Have a look at the code below. U will be given a similar code from Adsense. <!– SiteSearch Google –> <form method=”get” action=” http://www.google.co.in/custom” target=”google_window”> <table border=”0″ bgcolor=”#CCDDBB”> <tr><td nowrap=”nowrap” valign=”top” align=”left” height=”32″> <br/> <input type=”hidden” name=”domains” value=”applegrew.blogspot.com“></input> <input type=”text” name=”q” size=”31″ maxlength=”255″ value=””></input> </td></tr> <tr> <td nowrap=”nowrap”> <table> <tr> <td> <input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=”” checked=”checked”></input> <font size=”-1″ color=”black”>Web</font> </td> <td> <input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=” applegrew.blogspot.com“></input> <font size=”-1″ color=”black”> applegrew.blogspot.com</font> </td> </tr> </table> <input type=”submit” name=”sa” value=”Google Search”></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”client” value=”pub-3649938949418707″></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”forid” value=”1″></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”channel” value=”8766575449″></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”ie” value=”ISO-8859-1″></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”oe” value=”ISO-8859-1″></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”safe” value=”active”></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”flav” value=”0000″></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”sig” value=”AqHpMLRK75FykyuG”></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”cof” value=”GALT:#008000;GL:1;DIV:#336699;VLC:663399;AH:center;
BGC:FFFFFF;LBGC:336699;ALC:0000FF;LC:0000FF;T:000000;
GFNT:0000FF;GIMP:0000FF;FORID:1;”></input> <input type=”hidden” name=”hl” value=”en”></input> </td></tr></table> </form> <!– SiteSearch Google –>
Here the thing of interest is the code portion
<td> <input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=”applegrew.blogspot.com “></input>
<font size=”-1″ color=”black”>applegrew.blogspot.com</font>
</td>
U will just need to edit the portion
<font size=”-1″ color=”black”>applegrew.blogspot.com</font>
Change applegrew.blogspot.com to whatever text u may will. In my case I changed it to This blog. And yes obviously for ur blog u will have ur blog’s address written instead of applegrew.blogspot.com .
Prob4: This isn’t really a problem, but just a tip. As u can see in the side-bar I have my custom headings like ‘hit map’, ‘sponsors’, ‘site stats’, etc. This is relatively simple to do. Edit the code.
Sol: Just at the place where u want the heading to appear just insert the following code.
<h2 class=”sidebar-title”>Heading Here</h2>
But within the
<!– Begin #sidebar –> <div id=”sidebar”><div id=”sidebar2″> . . . </div></div> <!– End wraps –>
portion.
Change Heading Here to ur custom heading. Note as I am not a html coder or a CSS stylist, I am dont know if this will work for other templates (mine is 565 by Douglas Bowman); though I see no reason that it shouldn’t work for others.
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Precaution: Always copy, paste and save the code of ur template before making changes. U never know when u may mess things up. Also I am never the person to be blamed ever for anything wrong happens to ur blog because of following the above guidelines.