Install Chrome without admin rights

At my agency we actively encourage users to switch to a browser other than IE. Unfortunately I understand there are many IT departments in the world who still maintain a draconian insistence on IE. Without administrator privileges it's not possible to install Firefox, but luckily Google has built Chrome to install without them! Take that tyrannical IT overlords! Faster and safer browsing without your permission! I understand there may be some GP or something somewhere that disables this but for the most part it seems to work. Another downside is that the default Chrome installer only makes the application available for a single user. Google has thoughtfully provided an alternate installer which addresses this issue as well (alternate installer DOES need admin though).

Bit.ly ads sneaking past Adblock Plus?

I can't stand ads. I don't like them on TV, I don't read magazines due to the rampant advertising, and I definitely don't like them on the web. I've been using Adblock Plus for several years on Firefox and more recently on Chrome. I even run AdFree on my rooted android phone for system wide adblocking. Today I saw an ad, though. While blocking it I noticed something very unusual - the URL of the banner was on bit.ly. As this type of URL shortening service creates essentially pseudorandom URLs this seems like the perfect ploy to defeat Adblock.

I worriedly searched Google but I haven't found any information. I sure hope that one lone ad wasn't a canary in the coalmine of obnoxious banners returning to my web viewing experience.

Backup a VirtualBox VM

I just installed FreeBSD 8.2 in VirtualBox 3.2.10_OSE under CrunchBang linux. After getting everything configured in terms of guest additions, and display setup I wanted to take a snapshot. Turns out there's a nifty one step command to facilitate this process that I found on here. Simply run

VBoxManage clonevdi ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/image.vdi ~/image_Backup.vdi

That's all there is to it! Easy as pi.

Remove Intel sticker adhesive

I unbox a lot of laptops in the course of my work. One of the first steps after opening the lid is to remove all of those annoying stickers OEMs seem determined to plaster all over everything. For the most part these come off very nicely, but there's one sticker which causes more problems than any other. Intel. For some reason they've chosen to use an adhesive that never comes off completely leaving a sticky unsightly mess on the body of a brand new laptop. Luckily for me (and now you!) I've found the solution. First after removing the inevitable Windows sticker don't discard it. After removing the Intel sticker stick the Windows sticker onto the remaining adhesive. It may take a couple passes to pull it all up, but I've used this trick dozens of times now and it's saved me a fair bit of aggravation. I bet the energy star, or Lenovo, or whatever other sticker you have will work just as well as the Windows sticker.

No more unsightly adhesive residue and no wasted time! Now if only it was this quick to remove the bloatware...

Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 14 display problem

I was recently brought one of these units with a peculiar problem. The display would power off, seemingly at random. After some basic testing I discovered that I could reproduce the problem by pressing the enter or backslash keys though other combinations of circumstances seemed to cause this glitch to resurface as well.

I initially chalked this up to a damaged display connector that was coming loose but after disassembly I found there was nothing wrong with the connector or display cable. This led me to some other wild and ultimately fruitless theories so I turned to Google. A few hits in I found this thread which seemed to describe the problem, at least superficially. I think a lot of unrelated problems have ended up in this thread, but there was enough commonality that I kept on pressing. On page 3 of the thread I found this little gem by a user named jimtristate:

"I experimented with holding a (fairly weak) magnet in various positions next to the power button and figured out how to turn on and off the display. I'm now going to wait until the mystical black screen appears and see if I can turn the screen back on just with the magnet. This, I feel, will demonstrate that the magnetic switch is probably getting triggered."

I opted for a strong magnet (from a stripped HDD). Sure enough placing the magnet near the power button caused the display to power off and removing it brought it back. Then I turned the display off with the enter button, and again placed the magnet. When I removed it the second time the display came back!

Well, jimtristate was right: this appears to be a problem with the magnetic sensor. My theory is that some aspect of the physical geometry or wiring of the keyboard is causing an errant magnetic field to be generated or perhaps simply directed towards the sensor. I've disabled the lid sensor in Windows and removed the Lenovo Power Manager with no effect. I'm unsure if this can be fixed short of removing the hall effect sensor / reed switch which controls this functionality.

**UPDATE** The aformentioned jimtristate at the Lenovo support forum updated the thread with the fix he discovered. He said he simply placed about 5 layers of electrical tape below the keyboard approximately where the P key would be and this seemed to solve the problem. I gave it a go:

and sure enough it works! Problem solved. This lends further credence to my theory that a magnetic field is leaking up from somewhere below, perhaps the HDD?

Remotely enable RDP

This morning I was stuck in what seemed to be a precarious catch22. I needed to make a remote desktop connection to a computer, but RDP was disabled. My first search of the web turned up a remote registry solution. Unfortunately remote administration of the registry was disabled by policy. Luckily it is possible to remotely enable "terminal services" without remote registry hacking as I learned in this blog post. You'll need a copy of psexec which you can download here, and you need to be logged in with an account which has local admin (at least) on the target. Then run the following command:

psexec \\machinename reg add "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server" /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Then fire up mstsc and you're in.

Also This.

I feel this comic is part of my inspiration for starting this blog.

Silvertone Tube Amp

I'm in the process of attempting to take a stab at rehabbing an old tube amp from a sears brand blower organ from the 60s.  Here are the "before" pics.  I'll update with progress when achieved.