HAK5 shows you how to get free WiFi by tunneling through DNS.
<edit: If you don’t have the patience to watch the video, follow the guide here>
Ubuntu 4GB Ram Limitation and Solution 
Take advantage of a PAE enabled kernel to access more than 4GB RAM on a 32bit computer.
<via>
New Hotkey Keyboard Shortcuts in Windows 7 beta 1
Windows 7 beta 1 includes some handy new shortcut key combinations that allow you to navigate and manage the Windows workspace more efficiently. Here are 10 new Windows 7 shortcuts that will help you speed up your workflow (“Win” means the Windows Key):
Win+Home: Clear all but the active window
Win+Space: All windows become transparent so you can see through to the desktop
Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window
Win+Down arrow: Minimize the active window or restore the window if it’s maximized
Win+Left/Right arrows: Dock the active window to each side of the monitor
Win+Shift+Left/Right arrows: If you’ve got dual monitors, this will move the active window to the adjacent monitor
Win+T: Shift focus to and scroll through items on the taskbar
Win+P: Adjust presentation settings for your display
Win+(+/-): Zoom in/out Shift+Click a taskbar item: Open a new instance of that particular application
source
Clearing up paravirtualisation
With a recent upgrade to ESX 3.5 I now have the option to enable “VMI Paravirtualisation” on the virtual guest machines. I was hoping to enable this specifically on our Windows guests.
I was not clear on what this meant and I had found a lot of confusing information on the Internets about it. Luckily it seems I was not the only one! I found this really cool summary of what does and what doesn’t support it. Check out Joyrex’s Blog for the full article, but here’s a snip:
Windows Guests:
- As of now, nothing supports it.
- Windows 2003 32-bit would boot with VMI turned on in VMware, but it refused to recognize the PCI Memory Controller properly, and couldn’t find a driver for it.
- Windows 2003 and 2008 64-bit wouldn’t boot with it enabled.
- They have “paravirtualized drivers”, that apparently give better performance when used in the Guest, but I’m not 100%. Whatever the case, “paravirtualized drivers” != full paravirtualization.
Wikipedia also has a nice article on what it is and how it came to be.
Virtualising virtualisation
So I needed to test some patches before commiting them on a live ESX environment. I was contemplating using a spare hard disk and building a simple ESX environment on a desktop PC, but I figured hey, this is what virtualisation is actually for, let me install ESX on my VMWare Server (v2.0) and test it from there.
It works!
…but, when I tried to boot a virtual machine that I’d created on the (virtualised) ESX server it threw the error:
“You may not power on a virtual machine in a virtual machine”
Fair enough. They must be running a check for that somewhere. The clever pidgeons at Google revealed this cool hack to bypass it:
Shutdown your ESX virtual machine (not the VM you created on ESX).
Edit its .vmx file, and add the following two lines at the bottom:
monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”
A word of warning tough, as you’re essentially working through two hypervisors, the machine will run like snails charging through peanut butter.
Thinkpad external keyboard
I know at least one of my readers will be drooling over one of these for their Christmas present.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t shell out the $80 for one if I was unhappy with my Logitech G15.
Console for Windows
If you’re working in the command shell of Windows frequently you’ll understand how frustratingly backward the normal cmd.exe shell is.
Console is a fanstastic replacement/frontend to it allowing you to customise and resize on demand.
