Keyboard LED as Indicator for Windows Incoming and Outgoing Network Packets
I like the network connection icon for XP that is in your notification area compared to Vista or 7 because it’s very clear and visible whenever you have network activity. The connection icon for Vista and 7 has improved with nicer and smoother looks but I personally felt that the “blink” is not bright/visible enough to know if there are incoming/outgoing traffic.
All keyboards has LED so you can easily tell you if you have Numlock, Capslock and ScrollLock enabled/disabled. I found a small tool called Network Lights which really doesn’t do much except giving you a nice little indication on your network traffic by blinking your keyboard LEDs whenever you have outgoing or incoming packets on network interface.
This utility is a standalone executable. Run the program, you’ll see a new system tray icon. Now you can monitor your network traffic using the ScrollLock and NumLock LEDs on your keyboard. You can use the system tray icon (click the mouse) to customize program settings. If you have an older motherboard and your keyboard LED doesn’t blink when there are network traffic, try going to Settings and enable “Force Keyboard Capture” option.
Network Lights is only 96KB in size and takes only 1MB of memory when it is running. Lasted updated on June 2006 but I’ve tested it on Windows XP and Windows 7, both seems to work without problems. I am not sure which network connection it will indicate if you have more than 1 network connection. I bet this program will make your keyboard looks cool especially at night when all lights are turned off.
[ Download Network Lights ]
All keyboards has LED so you can easily tell you if you have Numlock, Capslock and ScrollLock enabled/disabled. I found a small tool called Network Lights which really doesn’t do much except giving you a nice little indication on your network traffic by blinking your keyboard LEDs whenever you have outgoing or incoming packets on network interface.
This utility is a standalone executable. Run the program, you’ll see a new system tray icon. Now you can monitor your network traffic using the ScrollLock and NumLock LEDs on your keyboard. You can use the system tray icon (click the mouse) to customize program settings. If you have an older motherboard and your keyboard LED doesn’t blink when there are network traffic, try going to Settings and enable “Force Keyboard Capture” option.
Network Lights is only 96KB in size and takes only 1MB of memory when it is running. Lasted updated on June 2006 but I’ve tested it on Windows XP and Windows 7, both seems to work without problems. I am not sure which network connection it will indicate if you have more than 1 network connection. I bet this program will make your keyboard looks cool especially at night when all lights are turned off.
[ Download Network Lights ]
Easily Block Visitors from a Country using HTACCESS
If you have a website, sometimes you would want to block visitors coming from a country. For example you are running a promotion for certain countries and you don’t want visitors from other country to see it. Other than that, many years ago when I was in the e-book selling business, there are two countries (I am not going to reveal) which has very high chargeback cases, meaning they buy with their credit card and then inform their credit card company that they did not authorize the charge. The credit card company will then reverse the charges, allowing the buyer to get the intangible product for free by cheating. No matter how much proof I provided to the company that charged the credit card, the buyer still gets the advantage of reversing the charges.
So my last resort was to block the whole country and sending them to a Forbidden page that says “You don’t have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request”. It did reduced the amount of chargebacks significantly and I didn’t notice any drops on the sales because the legitimate buyers comes from other countries.
To block a country using .htaccess, you must first need to know the IP address
range but Block A Country and Country IP Blocks simplifies all that.
Block A Country is a free service that automatically generates a .htaccess with countries that you want to block. All you need to do is select the countries from the list and click the “Go” button. You will then need to create a .htaccess file at the root of your public html folder and paste the codes to that file. Do take note that the default code generated by Block A Country redirects the unwanted visitor to http://www.blockacountry.com/blocked.php
[ Visit Block A Country ]
Country IP Blocks is similar to Block A Country but it allows you to choose CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing), Netmask, IP Range, .htaccess deny, .htaccess allow, Decimal/CIDR, or Hex/CIDR. It will also tell you what’s the ISO code for the country, total networks and subnets in the list.
Once in a while the forum will be disturbed by a person named Gurjeet Singh Komal from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh India. He was probably the biggest fan of this website but backfired and turned into the biggest enemy because he was banned for not following the forum rules even after several warnings. He’d sign up a new account and start creating new threads by posting nonsense. It’s definitely unfair to block India from this site just because of him. As far as I know, there are many nice people from there too! Moreover it is also easy to get around this country banning restriction by using web proxy.
So my last resort was to block the whole country and sending them to a Forbidden page that says “You don’t have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request”. It did reduced the amount of chargebacks significantly and I didn’t notice any drops on the sales because the legitimate buyers comes from other countries.
To block a country using .htaccess, you must first need to know the IP address
range but Block A Country and Country IP Blocks simplifies all that.
Block A Country is a free service that automatically generates a .htaccess with countries that you want to block. All you need to do is select the countries from the list and click the “Go” button. You will then need to create a .htaccess file at the root of your public html folder and paste the codes to that file. Do take note that the default code generated by Block A Country redirects the unwanted visitor to http://www.blockacountry.com/blocked.php
[ Visit Block A Country ]
Country IP Blocks is similar to Block A Country but it allows you to choose CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing), Netmask, IP Range, .htaccess deny, .htaccess allow, Decimal/CIDR, or Hex/CIDR. It will also tell you what’s the ISO code for the country, total networks and subnets in the list.
Once in a while the forum will be disturbed by a person named Gurjeet Singh Komal from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh India. He was probably the biggest fan of this website but backfired and turned into the biggest enemy because he was banned for not following the forum rules even after several warnings. He’d sign up a new account and start creating new threads by posting nonsense. It’s definitely unfair to block India from this site just because of him. As far as I know, there are many nice people from there too! Moreover it is also easy to get around this country banning restriction by using web proxy.
Search a Particular Word in Multiple Editable Text Files
I have my own private RapidLeech server which is hosted in Malaysia and it’s very useful whenever I am downloading a file at a very slow speed. I can make use of the server that has a very fast connection to download the file for me and save it to the server and then I will download it from the server. Since the server is located in the same country as I currently am, I am able to achieve maximum download speed. The only thing I have to worry is I have to make sure that my hosting does not run out of the given bandwidth which is 200GB. Once I exceed the bandwidth limit, all websites will be suspended until it reset in the new month.
’ve updated to the latest Rapidleech v42 pr-t2 because the v41 wasn’t working very well. After the upgrade, I am seeing an error message at the footer of the rapidleech page which says “getCpuUsage(): couldn’t access STAT path or STAT file invalid“. I have tried installing RapidLeech on another server and there’s no such error message. It is supposed to display a nice information on server space and CPU load.
That error is not a big deal but I don’t want that error message to show. There are 447 files in RapidLeech archive and I am certainly not going to edit one by one with notepad and search for the getCpuUsage keyword. So I use TextCrawler to automatically help me find a keyword across multiple files
and folders.
TextCrawler is a free tool for searching and replacing over multiple plain text files. It can search for straight text and supports advanced search/replace via regular expressions.
’ve updated to the latest Rapidleech v42 pr-t2 because the v41 wasn’t working very well. After the upgrade, I am seeing an error message at the footer of the rapidleech page which says “getCpuUsage(): couldn’t access STAT path or STAT file invalid“. I have tried installing RapidLeech on another server and there’s no such error message. It is supposed to display a nice information on server space and CPU load.
That error is not a big deal but I don’t want that error message to show. There are 447 files in RapidLeech archive and I am certainly not going to edit one by one with notepad and search for the getCpuUsage keyword. So I use TextCrawler to automatically help me find a keyword across multiple files
and folders.
TextCrawler is a free tool for searching and replacing over multiple plain text files. It can search for straight text and supports advanced search/replace via regular expressions.
TextCrawler Features:
Find and Replace across files Fast searching, even on large files Simple to use interface Flexible search parameters Text Extractor – rip text into a new file Search and replace using Regular Expressions. Create sophisticated searches Regular Expression test tool Regular Expression library – Save your searches Create backup files Highlighted search results Export Results Batch find and replace operations
To use TextCrawler search for a word, I first select the folder (Start Location) that I want to search in. Then set the Filename/Filter as *.* so it will try to search all files in that selected folder. At Find, I entered the word getCpuUsage and then clicked the Find button. In less than 3 seconds, TextCrawler is able to let me know which text files contains the word “getCpuUsage” and at which line.
In another scenario, during software giveaways, there are more than 1000 entries and copying every single email address to a text file to randomly select a winner is tough. So I hacked the Wordpress core file to set it to display 300 comments for an article. Then I saved all the contents to a text file, and use TextCrawler’s Regular Expressions to easily extract all the email addresses.