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[How To] Copy A File Or Folder Path To Clipboard Without Any Software

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Windows7_Logo

Are you using any third party software or any registry hack to copy the path of any file or folder in windows? Do you know that Windows 7 allows you to copy the full path of any file right from the context menu itself? Here’s how you can do this:

Use Shift + Right-Click on any file or folder and you will find “Copy as path”.

Copy as path in windows

You can now use the copied file path from the clipboard anywhere including in a command prompt DOS window:

paste file path in cmd

file path copied in cmd

This is very helpful if you are using some commands via the Windows command prompt (DOS windows) that needs the full path of the files on which the DOS commands are used.

Hope this tip helps you.You may also subscribe to our RSS feed via email for more tutorials under Windows 7.

Add Or Remove Items From Windows Context Menu

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messy windows context menu

Context Menu appears when you right-click on any Windows folder or a file.When you install programs, it is very common that they fight with each-other to occupy the content menu.This context menu list will just keep on increase as you install new programs in your PC.But it is very unlikely that you use all such programs from the context menu, then why have it there? It is very annoying in such cases and you might want to get rid of all such menu items.Read on to get the possible solutions..

Using Registry Editor:

You need to find two items in registry editor which pops up by typing Regedit in your run command area.

In the registry editor, find the following items:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

Shell Context Menu Handlers in regedit

As shown in the above diagrams, you will find most of your context menu items under shellex, which you can edit to hide or disable.

Regedit shell context menu handlers

To hide any context menu item, just right click on the key> choose Modify data?> just add some dashes before the Value data filed, this will hide that particular item for appearing in the context menu handlers.

Well, working with registry values is always going to be dangerous particular if you edit some other key values instead of the correct one.So I always prefer using simple programs available for obtaining the same result in a easier way.

ContextEdit:

ContextEdit displays list of static context menu handler items that appear when you right-click on any folder or file.You can easily disable them by unchecking against it.

ContextEdit

Download ContextEdit (487 KB)

FileMenu Tools:

FileMenu Tools, is another great free utility which allows you add, delete or manage the context menu items, you can even choose move a particular context menu item down (or up).

FileMenu tools

Download FileMenu Tools (7.4 MB)

Google Now Shows Short Answers To Your Questions

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google logo

For people like me Google isn’t just a search engines, it’s more than that.I bombard it with lot of innovative queries/question to find accurate answers.This accuracy will only get better in Google, as they have announced a new feature in Google search that shows the short answers to your questions on Google, queries that you perform to find some basic facts.

For example, if you search for independence day of india, this is what you’d see as the first result.

The first result August 15 is the short answer to your query here.

Google Short Answers

If you expand Show sources,you will see the list of sources from where the result snippet has been taken.For example, try searching Sachin Tendulkar Date Of Birth:

Google Short Answers test

I guess this would be a time saving feature in Google search.You need not read the entire web page to get your answer just the result page would suffice.Remember that Google may not show these short answers to all types of your queries.

Download Picasa Web Albums Without Installing Picasa Desktop Software

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Picasa logo

Are you using Picasa web albums to store your pictures online, but doesn’t have Picasa desktop software installed in your system to download the Web albums to your hard drive? Well, here is a solution available if you want to download entire picasa web album of any user (albums set to public only).

Thanks to Bradley Beach, for coming up with Picasa Webalbums Assistant, who has developed this simple Java program primary to help his dad who is a Mac user to download photos from Picasa web albums when Picasa was not available for Mac OS.I’ll help you out in using this tool to download picasa web albums of any user that are available publicly.

1. Download Picasa Webalbums Assistant 3.1 and extract the zip file [You will see PWA3.jar file and a lib folder].

2. Now you need to run the .jar file in Windows.Here I’m going to run it using command line.Go to Start Menu and type cmd in the search.Right click on the cmd.exe and click Run as administrator.

run cmd as administrator

3. Now in the command prompt, type java –jar followed by the file path, as shown in the following screenshot:

Running a .jar Java program in command line

Here G:\\Soft\\PWA0_3_1\PWA3.jar is where the .jar file is located in my system.

4. Just click Yes (accepting the terms)when you get the Welcome message of PWA as shown here:

PWA welcome message accept

5. Now you will the main PWA program running with basically three options.If you know the user ID of the Picasa Web albums, click Get User Public Albums and enter the user ID and click OK.

PWA screenshot

User ID in PWA

6. Now you will have a list of all the public albums of that particular user ID.Use CTRL + Select to many albums and click select to get the thumbnail previews.

Select an album in PWA

gathering information PWA screenshot

7. From the thumbnail previews generated, select the files that you want to download and click Download Selected at the bottom.

Thumbnail preview in PWA

8. Select the location to save the pictures and wait till the pictures have been downloaded completely.

Select Save Location in PWA

Downloading PWA Picasa web albums

That’s it, you have now downloaded the entire Picasa Web albums of the user without even installing Picasa desktop software in your system.

Details: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-031 (KB978213)

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Windows Update

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-031 (KB978213)

The Microsoft Patch Tuesday has arrived once again, this time Microsoft has come up with two critical patches (MS10-030 and MS10-031) addressing various vulnerabilities that could allow remote code execution without user consent.We have already covered about MS10-030(KB978542) in an earlier post, now let’s talk about MS10-031.

This new security update KB978213 resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Visual Basic.Similar to the latest vulnerability found in Outlook Express & Windows Mail (addressed in MS10-030), this particular vulnerability too could allow remote code execution, especially when an user with admin user rights logged on and runs the Visual basic for Applications, through the above said vulnerability, the attacker can pass a specially crafted file to the VB for apps runtime, allowing the attacker to take the control of the victim’s computer, the attacker now gains most of the admin rights, he may install new programs, or view/change/delete user sensitive data or he may even create a new user with full administrative rights.

This update has been rated “Critical Update” for all versions of MS Visual Basic for Applications SDK and other third-party apps that use MS VBA.

Rated ‘Important Update’ for: Microsoft Office XP, Microsoft Office 2003, and the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Affected software include: Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 3, MS Office 2003 Service Pack 3, 2007 Microsoft Office System Service Pack 1&2.

You should install this critical update patch without delay.You may also be interested in downloading Visual Studio 2010 to keep your Visual Basic up-to-date.
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Microsoft Windows Security Update KB978542 (Bulletin MS10-030)

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Windows Update

Microsoft has released a new critical security bulletin “Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-030” on May 11, 2010 addressing vulnerability in Outlook Express and Windows Mail that could allow remote code execution (KB978542) for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

outlook express logo

This new windows security update KB978542 addresses a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook Express, Windows Mail & Live Mail which could allow remote code execution if the mail client user visits a malicious e-mail server setup by the attacker.Then the attacker may successfully exploit this vulnerability to gain the same rights as that of the mail client user, this could be even worse if the client user has administrator user rights.

Security Update KB978542 Rating:

Microsoft Outlook Express – Critical

Windows Mail – Critical

Windows Live Mail –  Important

Update Type: Important

Date Published: May 11, 2010

Download and Install this important security update to keep your Windows up-to-date.

KB978542 Direct Download Links:

Windows 7 x64 – Windows6.1-KB978542-x64.msu (3 MB)

Windows 7 32-bit  – Windows6.1-KB978542-x86.msu (1.8 MB)

Windows Vista – Windows6.0-KB978542-x86.msu (1.8 MB)

Windows Vista x64 – Windows6.0-KB978542-x64.msu (3 MB)

Windows XP –  WindowsXP-KB978542-x86-ENU.exe (1.3 MB)

For more details on this bulletin, read MS10-030

This critical update is part of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday (May 11, 2o1o) patches.Read about MS10-031.Also read about previously released bulletin from Microsoft, MS10-018

Disable Facebook Notification Emails

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facebook logo

Many Facebook users while signing up, normally ignores to setup their notification settings that they normally ignore to setup notifications settings and as a result, they start receiving too many emails for various actions taken on Facebook involving that particular user.This at times may be annoying for those who usually spends good amount of time in Facebook involving in many actions in the social networking site.If you want to disable such notifications from Facebook, this is what you must do:

1. Login to your Facebook account , under the Account menu on the top right screen, click on Account Settings.

Facebook account settings

2. Now under the My Account, click on the Notifications tab.

Facebook Notification settings

3. Check against the notifications for which you want to notifications via email or SMS.Uncheck against all to stop receiving all email notifications.

That’s it, you will now be able to control your email and SMS notifications as you wish.

You might also want to read our guide on how to setup Facebook page for your site.

Convert YouTube Videos To Animated GIFs

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youtube logo

GIFs are always the preferred choice if you want to embed any short video (length typically less than 10 seconds).This allows users to quickly watch the video as animation instead of waiting for the video to load fully which also requires a user’s click to start streaming.Also these GIFs can be used as avatars for your profile on web forums.

You can easily make an animated GIF from any video on your computer using desktop programs like Adobe Photoshop or Camtasia Studio or VirtualDub.

Even though you can download any YouTube video and save it to your PC and convert it into a GIF, but then you may want a direct conversion tool that doesn’t require you to download the video and do the conversion for you online, right? Here’s a website GifSoup, that will do this for you for free.

1. As a first step, register yourself for GifSoup.

2. Now go to GifSoup and enter the YouTube video URL in the box and click “Create Gif”.

Enter YouTube URL in GifSoup

3. Now you will be taken to the customization page, where you can preview the video, and also enter your custom parameters like custom video length etc.Click Finish to complete the conversion process.[Note that there’s a 15 second limit on the length of the video, as the output file size will increase upon the increase of the video length].

Custom GIF conversion settings in GifSoup

4. Now your converted GIF will be shown on another page.Click on the image to download the GIF.

YouTube Video Converted using GifSoup

Sample Output:

Here’s the converted GIF of a  YouTube video that I have got after conversion.

MJ Moonwalk GifSoup conversion

Check & Compare Your Video Streaming Speeds At YouTube Video Speed History

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youtube logo

Have you ever checked out this new YouTube Video Speed History Page? If you haven’t, go and check it now.It actually gives you some idea of the broadband speed (at what YouTube videos could load over a period of time) with comparison to your neighbours ISP speed.

By looking at the graphs, you can easily decide whether your ISP is justifying the charges you pay for them by providing the speed as promised.

Look at the following screenshots taken by me, I’m at least happy that my ISP is providing me a speed which is slightly greater than the average speed of my City (Hyderabad), and the country, even though we are far behind the global average speed Sad

Go to YouTube Video Speed History page and check your ISP’s performance now.

ScreenShots:

YouTube_Video_Speed_History

Pic-2

YouTube speed comparision chart

Also the sudden small dip in speeds around the end of April and beginning of May 2010 is possibly due to the SEA-ME-WE 4 Undersea Cable System Outage and the repair that was going on at that time.

How To Report About Third-Party Adsense Ads Distributing Malware

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Google Adsense Logo

Earlier this year, Google has made Google-Certified ad networks available to all publisher by default.It is intended to benefit the users who can now attract additional advertisers from third party ad networks to their site through Adsense.This was really an impressive move by Google to benefit its Adsense publishers.

But off late, we have been hearing various complaints about the ads from these third party networks circulating malicious code through Adsense.

For example, quite a number of Adsense publishers with a good anti-virus program installed on their system have figured out that the following virus alerts protruding from their program whenever they open the page containing that particular ad:

http://curves.com/?=345 contains a trojan

Are you one of those publishers experiencing the problem? have no clue about how this is happening ?

Google-certified ad networks who want to place ads in Adsense publisher sites must adhere to all AdWords policies in general.But in this case, the particular ad network which was already certified by Google, started spreading malware later on and as a result some Adsense publishers who were displaying ads from these third party ad networks have been recieving the reports of attacks on their website readers computers through Adsense code.Google however has revoked that particular network’s certification.

We recently learned of a malware-infected creative that came from Aggregate Knowledge, a third-party ad network that was certified by Google at the time. As a result, we revoked that network’s certification, and their ads are no longer eligible to appear on any AdSense publisher sites.

How To Report If You Face Similar Problem?

You need to report through AdWords ads feedback to report about  ill behaviour of a particular ad network from this page.

You need to note the URL of the webpage that this particular ad takes you to when clicked (Warning: Don’t never click on your own ads, instead ask your readers who had faced the problem to pass on the URL to where they were being taken by the ad).Also you need a screenshot of the ad to submit to the AdWords team for analysis.

The report from would look like this one:

AdWords feedback report