term 1 finale

Yay end of Term 1 why not celebrate with a blog post.

I had a cool conspiracy theory about the outcome of this year.
You are hereby warned that if you are religious and hence liable to offence because of my flippant attitude towards Jesus et al, you should bail. Please note that if you read it anyway, and you want to talk to me about it, I only have energy to hear how awesome you think this theory is. If you want to preach at me I'm likely to just ignore you. You have been warned. Page break just in case.

Easter of Doom

Unconfirmed theory number 1
Jesus rose from the dead and hence that's why Easter is so special

Unconfirmed theory number 2
The world ends in 2012, specifically on the 21st of December

Unconfirmed theory number 3
Jesus had omega powers and by extrapolation, can destroy lots of stuff with those powers.

Now to tie it all in nicely, my theory is that Jesus will rise again over the Easter holidays, and be all looking at the world and going "what the fuck is going on here. I leave for one week and... what do you mean 2000 years?!?!"
Then in a rampage/tantrum (he's angry either at the state of the world or he's angry that someone corrected him) he goes off and methodically destroys parts of the world.
By the time 21/12 comes around, he will have fully destroyed the world as we know it. Then he can do whatever he likes (Beam me up, Scotty) and return to Heaven.

In this best case scenario, everyone wins. The Mayans win because they predicted the end of the world correctly. The Christians win because they (finally) have some evidence that their god has some sort of physical influence on the world. I'll win because I'll be right, and also because my (if unconventional) hope in our saviour Jesus Christ will be fulfilled, making my purpose in life complete and all that pizzazz.

I'm not done yet. There will be no more religious crap for today.

Tech Crap Instead

As most of the people who read this blog would have known by now, I now own a shiny new Asus Zenbook. I was bored and feeling adventurous so I had a genius idea - what if everything I wrote onto my USB, also got synced to a cloud service?
Enter the Dropbox.

So what I did was install a portable version of Dropbox on my USB, so ay changes to my USB will go directly to my DropBox.

However, allow me to divert your attention to OneNote first.
As those of you who I have talked about OneNote to may recall, I set up my OneNote notebooks so that any edits I make go straight onto my USB. This is also the case with my desktop computer. This means that if I make an edit on my laptop while my USB is plugged in, the changes are saved, and I transfer that USB to my desktop (while OneNote is open), the changes will be synced to the document before my eyes.
This means I essentially have 3 copies of my OneNote notebooks ready to use - one cached in my desktop, one cached in my laptop, one stored in my

Why not skip the middle-man USB and just use Dropbox to sync my changes to the cloud and back down to my computers?
Because I still would like to have access to these files on computers not linked to Dropbox. Also if Dropbox goes down or the company goes belly up or something I'd have to copy it to USB anyway.

Plus, now I will have racked up an impressive 6 up-to-date copies of my OneNote files - cached in my desktop, cached in my laptop, in the Dropbox folder on my desktop, in the Dropbox folder on my laptop, on my USB, and also on the Dropbox cloud itself.
I classified that as 6 places because they are distinct and you can actually delete them one by one if you so desired. (It's possible with the Dropbox folder if you disable Interwebs)

Tech Crap that you may care about

JSYK everything linked to here should be free. I am just as cheap as you are.

Virus removal

If you have an issue - ANY AT ALL - that could be attributed to viruses or malware or spyware or whatever the shit types of -ware they make, the first program I use is Malwarebytes Antimalware. It has never failed me in removing annoying stuff like lame popups and other symptoms of viruses.

Virus prevention

I can't really vouch greatly for their ease of use or w/e because I am not techy enough to bother looking into the deeper behind the scene workings of virus preventors.
However I hope everyone knows you need at least one antivirus and one firewall (unless they try to do both like Norton and everything just freaking explodes). They do different things.
Make sure you don't go idiot paranoid mode and download more than one of each - it is very very unlikely to benefit you in any way, but it more likely that they will conflict each other and do something that ends up lagging your computer like crazy.
I can't say for sure if what I'm using is the best, and I'm not ruling out better combinations, but for a long time I have been using Avast! as my antivirus and Comodo as my firewall. They haven't ever bloated up to eat up all of my CPU, so that's pretty good.
If you know of/have heard of better combinations pl0x share.

Defragmentation

The best program I found for defragmentation is Auslogics Defragmenter - It cleaned up my C:\ drive in less than 5 minutes (it was probably 3-ish but I don't want to be wrong so I'll cover my ass) after I neglected to clean it for like a year. If you've used Windows defrag, you'll recognise that this is lightning fast.
What's better is that in the analysis you can see which files are actually fragmented and will be moved in the defrag process.
Note that you shouldn't defragment SSDs and other flash drives.

Cleaning up useless shit

Ages ago, Didi told me about this. Probably would've taken me many more years to find it myself. At first glance it does not appear to be thaaaat useful so I probably would've skipped it. But it can do some pretty sleek stuff so I never regretted. I'm talking about CCleaner. As well as doing cleaning jobs such as deleting all the caches and cookies and other crap you don't need, it can make tweaks to the registry by deleting broken keys (or something. Don't quote me. But it works).
Even better it provides an easy way to see all your programs and be able to run uninstallers from one place.
Also you can edit which programs are allowed to boot at startup. If you have ever tried to edit which programs are allowed to do this, then you'll know that it's not easily accessible. But CCleaner makes it easy!
LASTLY it can do full drive wipes. If you're giving a USB or laptop or something away and want to remove all traces of your porn stash, and your friend might be techy (and nosy) enough to be bothered to restore drive's previous contents, this will overwrite all your data up to 35 passes, which sounds plenty enough that nobody will ever find your shit.

Okay I'm almost done but now I just want to mention some Chrome addons I use (most are also available on Firefox, but I quit Firefox when it managed to become a resource hog. I'll add an asterisk if it's NOT available on Firefox)
Adblock Plus - This blocks everything. I swear it even blocks the Youtube embedded video ads (though I can't be sure that it's because of this add-on)
FastestChrome (FastestFox on FF) - Does infinite pages (loads next page and allows you to scroll onwards), allows you to highlight and Google, Wiki, Youtube, Ebay + others that search term. There are plenty of tweaks that this can add
Google Mail Checker - Gives an icon badge of how many unread messages you have. Click to view inbox. Unreliable if you are using multiple Google accounts on the one browser.
Google Reader Notifier - Gives icon badge of how many new posts in Google Reader. Click to view Reader. Also unreliable with multiple account signins
Reload All Tabs - Reloads... all tabs. Not that useful tbh. Might uninstall it now. It's one of those things I thought I needed because Firefox had it.
StayFocusd - Words cannot express my praise for this - I love it. Add a blacklist of sites, and the addon will track how much time you are spending on them. When your allocated time is up, bam those sites are gone. Ultra-ly recommend this.
Wolfram|Alpha - Easy way to type in all those annoying equations. Not as powerful as an addon as I would like might also uninstall this.
WOT - This is Web of Trust. It is like a pre-firewall. I kinda feel bad for never rating any sites because I cbf - I would do it if they prompted me for sites with very few ratings... Anyways it provides a visual rep of each link in Google searches, and you can see its reliability rating. Not sure if the porno site you're visiting will eat your computer's software from the inside out? This addon will help you. Also stupid popup ads with malicious software will most likely be intercepted by this addone before it even reaches your firewall. I recommend this for people scared of being pinged by dodgy links on the net.


This was a monster of a post but I hope either you liked the conspiracy, or you gained something from my tech(ish) rambles