City of Heroes (Europe) – Skip Updater

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I used to play City of Heroes when it was first released back in 2004. The server used by the updater was sometimes unavailable which would stop me from playing the game. This was even when the server used for playing the game was fine, but it wouldn’t let me past the updating stage.

There was a quick workaround for this, which was to create a shortcut to the cityofheroes.exe file, and add “-project coh” to the target.

cohproject

Nowadays, however, I play on the European servers, and their internal name for the game is no longer “coh”, but “eucoh”. Therefore in order to skip the updater the target must have “-project eucoh”. Again this is a shortcut of the cityofheroes.exe and not the updater.

eucohproject

This also allows a non-administrative user to play City of Heroes on Windows Vista as the updater requires Admin rights to run, but the game does not.

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“Locate Link Browser” in Outlook & Vista.

Everytime I click a link in Outlook it would load Firefox but also pop up a request to “Locate Link Browser”.

Searching the web found this solution in newsgroups.

In Vista, Goto:
Control Panel
Programs
Make a file type always open in a specific program
Under Extensions, look for “.url” and change it to Firefox.

Worked for me!

Update: (8th March 2008)

Although I no longer have this issue, I have come accross a wiki page which suggests a registry edit could also fix the problem. Its a little more advanced, but if the above doesn’t work, its another solution.

From mozillaZine …

You will need to manually edit the registry in Windows Vista or in cases where the File Types listing is missing certain entries such as “URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol” (HTTP) and “URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Privacy” (http).

Caution: Editing the registry incorrectly can damage your system. Do not attempt these steps if you are inexperienced or uncomfortable using the Registry Editor.

  1. Go to “Start -> Run” (or press the windows key+R) then type regedit and click OK
  2. Use the directory tree hierarchy to navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\HTTP\shell\open\ddeexec
  3. Delete the “ddeexec” registry key
  4. Repeat for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\httpshell\open\ddeexec (and any other protocols you want to fix)
  5. Repeat for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Firefox\URL\shell\open\ddeexec
  6. Repeat for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Firefox\HTML\shell\open\ddeexec
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    Postfix Transport Maps – Diverting Mail Traffic

    If like me, you host your own mail server on your broadband then you may of come accross this problem. Some ISP’s refuse to accept mail from dynamic IP ranges, and so they should! E-mail aware worms and viruses are used all over the world to send us spam, and the majority of them are on consumer PC’s hosted on dynamic IP ranges.

    Now, if you don’t have a static IP, and you want to send mail to a Gmail address your mail will be rejected. Using postfix as your MTA, you can work around this.

    Most ISP’s offer an SMTP relay server, now you may not want to use this all the time, so transport maps can send only mail for gmail addresses to your smtp relay, and the rest can go direct.

    Find out what your ISP’s SMTP server address is, usually smtp.yourisp.com. Create a file named transport in /etc/postfix and add the following text,

    gmail.com smtp:smtp.yourisp.com:25
    googlemail.com smtp:smtp.yourisp.com:25

    Remember to swap “smtp.yourisp.com” for the address of your ISP’s smtp relay server.

    Now we need to compile this file using the postmap command,

    postmap /etc/postfix/transport

    Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and add this line at the bottom,

    transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport

    Restart postfix and you should find all mail addressed to @gmail.com or @googlemail.com will be redirected to your smtp relay.

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    Changing Colour of Files/Directories in Linux ‘ls’

    A default colour set is available in Debian for many file types. A quick look at ~/.bashrc shows that we can uncomment a few lines to enable the colouring of directories and files by extension.

    The relevant lines in my ~/.bashrc are,

    export LS_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
    eval "dircolors"
    alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS'
    alias ll='ls $LS_OPTIONS -l'
    alias l='ls $LS_OPTIONS -lA'

    The command dircolors outputs the line needed to put the colour information into your environment space. A man dircolor revealed the ability to edit its output.

    Using dircolors --print-database you can get the list of colours in an editable form, so if we pipe that to a file,

    dircolors --print-database > /etc/dircolors

    We can edit this file name and add the colors we want. The file has some explanations as to what the numbers represent.

    I added a couple of lines so that .7z and .rar files appear the same as the other compressed archives did.

    .tar 01;31 # archives or compressed (bright red)
    .gz 01;31
    .bz2 01;31
    .deb 01;31
    .rpm 01;31
    .rar 01;31 # added
    .7z 01;31 # added

    Following this change we need to edit the ~/.bashrc file again to use this new configuration file rather than the default in-built database. Just edit the line beginning with “eval” so it reads,

    eval "dircolors /etc/dircolors"

    Now you’ll find the new file extensions coloured how you want them. 🙂

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    Remove border from smiley images in WordPress

    The theme I use in WordPress gives all images a thin border. For smileys, this is ugly.

    Luckily WordPress gives smilies their own CSS class, so we can rectify this by making a small addition to the end of the themes stylesheet (style.css)

    img.wp-smiley { border:none; }

    Add this to the very bottom and it will overwrite earlier border changes to images, allowing smilies to have a special style of no border.

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