Archive for December 28th, 2007
Libra – Organize your stuff – Beautifully.
I was always looking for a good media organizer. Many frustrating attempts googling for a great software failed me. When I stumbled upon this gem of a Open source software, I was just amazed.
Libra is a library software to organize your stuff: Books, Audio CDs, Movies, & Games (for a start). And it does so beautifully, and at an amazing price ($0 for non-commercial use).
Find Free Open Apps at Open Source Living.
There are countless arguments for using open source applications, but one of the strongest is having a single interface to learn when working on Windows, Mac or Linux systems. Web site directory Open Source Living helps you find just those kind of programs. It’s not an extensive, all-in-one directory, but it seems to narrow its choices based on quality and widespread acceptance. And while not every application listed at Open Source Living is entirely cross-platform, a good deal of them are. For more free or open source applications.
Open Source Living [via etc.]
Kill Windows with the Blue Screen of Death in 3 Keystrokes
Have you ever wanted to show off your keyboard ninja skills by taking down Windows with just a couple of keystrokes? All you have to do is add one registry key, and then you can impress your friends… or use it to convince people to switch to Linux.
This isn’t a bug, it’s a “feature” in Windows that is designed to let users trigger a crash dump for testing purposes. There’s even a whole Microsoft KB article on the subject.
To enable this feature, open up regedit and then browse down to one of these keys, depending on your keyboard type:
USB Keyboard
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters
PS/2 Keyboard
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
Now right-click on the right-hand pane and add a new DWORD key named CrashOnCtrlScroll, giving it a value of 1.
Reboot your computer, and when it starts back up you can trigger the Blue Screen of Death by using the following keyboard shortcut:
Hold down Right Ctrl and hit Scroll Lock twice
To remove this “feature” you can just delete the registry key and then restart your computer again.
Please note that following this article WILL crash your computer… really isn’t very useful, but it’s lots of fun =)
[Via the How-To Geek]
