Gamesome Tonight?

Some free-for-all sock ‘em and shoot ‘em action.

If the khel pundits and kundli walas of computing are to be believed, the future of electronically gaming is going to be sensational. Quite literally. Apart from being incredibly more immersive, games in the hereafter will toy, tease and enthrall all the five human senses. Seeing 3D holographic images and hearing realistic sounds aside, you feel a twinge of pain as a bullet nicks your shoulder, smell the burning napalm, or the dank foggy air, and even flavour a bar of chocolate...

Realism in the sight and sound department is already happening, I know. It is this savouring of cyber choco seems the farthest away to me. As for the virtual stink, companies like DigiScents and TriSenx are already in the process of devising devices like iSmell and SENX. These digital scent spectrum devices will hook to your USB port and release appropriate aromas triggered via program and Web events occurring on your PC! But that is another story...

Until till then we pujaris of play must make do with whatever's being served. And being the do-kauri ka admi that I am, my aukaat is only fit for chotu-motu freebies. And these are quickie boomtown brat relaxers I have on offer this week:

Scorched3D
A 3D version of the DOS classic. Chitty-chitty, bang-bang tank warfare genre of game. No complicate strategising. You make moolah from successful battles and use it to but new weapons and accessories. You can play with up to twenty four other players at a time, mixing virtual players with humans. And there are diverse changing environmental conditions and terrains to cope with. At the end of each round you can buy ammo using the prize money you won from previous matches. IT offers both single- and multi-player support with damn decent graphics and great artillery action.
www.scorched3d.co.uk

Little Fighter 2
This one is about street fighting... Not the Bunty ki Mummy versus Babli ki Mummy kinda street fighting but the mukka-mukki kind of thrash-'em-up fighting. Flash-based and 2D mebbe, but solid action boss! Thoroughly enjoyable retro graphics, varied cast of characters, a variety of attacks, hand-to-hand combat, gang wars etc. all make for addictive game play. You can play solo, up to 4 human players on one comp, or 8 characters in network play at one time. Game modes include VS mode, Stage mode (where one or more players move through the environment killing increasing numbers and difficulties of enemies), Championship mode and Battle mode (involving mass armies led by a player). Sock it to ‘em now!
www.lf2.net

Warning Forever
If you want to thrash your boss, perhaps this one is for you. Metaphorically speak. There are only two combatants: You and the boss monster spaceship, bristling with cannons, lasers, rockets, and other weaponry. And the more bosses you thrash, the tougher they become. Take on bigger and bigger bosses until you can't take no more. A 360-degree shooting game with vertical scrolling and an adjustable cannon reminiscent of the early space shooters, it will keep you glued.
http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza

Productivity Cheat Sheet 4: Excel - 3

Microsoft Excel was born in 1984-85—on the Apple Macintosh platform—as the world’s first graphical interface spreadsheet with pull down menus and point-and-click mouse-driven capabilities. It was also the first app boot up on Windows PCs in 1987. Today, it is almost as ubiquitous as Microsoft Windows.

To help you emulate Schumacher on the keyboard, here’s the last lap of our fast-track to Excel series.

Ctrl + F1: Closes and reopens current task pane
Alt + F1: Creates a chart of data in the current range
Alt + Shift + F1: Inserts new worksheet
Shift + F2: Edits cell comment
F3: Pastes defined name into a formula
Shift + F3: Displays Insert Function dialog box
F4: Repeats last command or action, if possible
Ctrl + F4: Closes selected workbook window
Ctrl + F5: Restores window size of selected workbook window
F6: Switches to next pane in split worksheet
Shift + F6: Switches to previous pane in split worksheet
Ctrl + F6: Switches to next workbook window when more than one workbook window are open
F7: Displays Spelling dialog box
Ctrl + F7: Performs Move command on workbook window when it is not maximised
F8: Turns extend mode on or off
Shift + F8: Enables you to add a non-adjacent cell or range to a selection of cells by using the arrow keys
Ctrl + F8: Performs Size command (on the Control menu for the workbook window) when a workbook is not maximised
Alt + F8: Displays Macro dialog box to run, edit, or delete macro
F9: Calculates all worksheets in all open workbooks
F9 followed by Enter (or followed by Ctrl + Shift + Enter for array formulas): Calculates selected portion of formula and replaces the selected portion with the calculated value
Shift + F9: Calculates the active worksheet
Ctrl + Alt + F9: Calculates all worksheets in all open workbooks, regardless of whether they have changed since the last calculation
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F9: Rechecks dependent formulas, and then calculates all cells in all open workbooks, including cells not marked as needing to be calculated
Ctrl + F9: Minimises workbook window to an icon
F10: Selects menu bar or closes an open menu and submenu at the same time
Shift + F10: Displays shortcut menu for a selected item
Alt + Shift + F10: Displays menu or message for a smart tag. If more than one smart tag is present, it switches to next smart tag and displays its menu or message
Ctrl + F10: Maximises or restores selected workbook window
F11: Creates a chart of the data in the current range
Shift + F11: Inserts new worksheet
Alt + F11: Opens Visual Basic Editor, in which you can create a macro by using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
Alt + Shift + F11: Opens Microsoft Script Editor, where you can add text, edit HTML tags, and modify any script code
F12: Displays the Save As dialog box

Productivity Cheat Sheet 3: Excel - 2

It may sound like a fact from “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”, but spreadsheets have been used by math minded mammals for hundreds of years. Of course, the first electronic spreadsheet as we know it, was the invention of a Harvard Business School student named Daniel Bricklin in 1978. Bricklin and Bob Frankston co-created a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc—which became the first killer app on PCs.

Nearly three decades and several program avatars later, we provide a reference sheet to help you become master and commander of Excel spreadsheeting shortcuts:

Ctrl + `: Alternates between displaying cell values and displaying formulas in worksheet
Ctrl + ': Copies formula from cell above active cell into cell or Formula Bar
Ctrl + ": Copies value from cell above active cell into cell or Formula Bar
Ctrl + +: Displays Insert dialog box to insert blank cells
Ctrl + 1: Displays Format Cells dialog box
Ctrl + 2: Applies/removes bold formatting
Ctrl + 3 or Ctrl + I: Applies/removes italic formatting
Ctrl + 4 or Ctrl + U: Applies/removes underlining
Ctrl + 5: Applies/removes strikethrough
Ctrl + 6: Alternates between hiding objects, displaying objects, and displaying placeholders for objects
Ctrl + 7: Displays/hides Standard toolbar
Ctrl + 8: Displays/hides outline symbols
Ctrl + 9: Hides selected rows
Ctrl + 0: Hides selected columns
Ctrl + A: Selects entire worksheet
Ctrl + C and another Ctrl + C: Displays Microsoft Office Clipboard
Ctrl + G or F5: Displays Go To dialog box
Ctrl + K: Displays Insert Hyperlink dialog box for new hyperlinks or Edit Hyperlink dialog box for selected existing hyperlinks
Ctrl + L: Displays Create List dialog box
Ctrl + Shift + O: Selects all cells that contain comments
Ctrl + R: Uses Fill Right command to copy contents and format of left most cell of selected range into cells to right
Ctrl + N: Creates new, blank file
Ctrl + O: Displays Open dialog box to open or find a file
Ctrl + P: Displays Print dialog box
Ctrl + W: Closes the selected workbook window
Ctrl + Y: Repeats the last command or action, if possible
Ctrl + Z: Uses Undo command to reverse last command or to delete last entry
Ctrl + Shift + Z: Uses Undo or Redo command to reverse or restore last automatic correction when AutoCorrect Smart Tags are displayed

Versus Satanics

Bug the life out of shaitans shacking up in your silicon with some free antivirus artillery.

You know about the classic celluloid combat between good and evil in The Exorcist. And the horrific struggles of 14-year old Regan and Father Merrin in their fight with the fiendish foe. Perhaps what you don't know is the series of eerily unfortunate events that befell the making of this film: Jack MacGowran (Burke Dennings) died within a week of finishing his scenes. Max von Sydow's (Father Merrin) brother died even as Max commenced shooting. Jason Millers’ (Father Karras) son met with a gruesome accident at about the same time. Ellen Burstyn (Chris MacNeil) seriously damaged her back during filming. A carpenter accidentally chopped off his own thumb while a gaffer lost his toe... What do you call all that? Uncanny coincidence? Or overwhelming evidence of the evil spirit?

Mull over that as you may. I'm more concerned about embattling the evil Satanic spirits lurking in our PCs. And exorcising them. Let's see what we can do to bug the life out of these shaitans shacking up in our silicon with some free antivirus artillery, ammo and armour.

Trend Micro HouseCall
Housecall is a free online tool that scans your hard disk for malicious code and spyware. And fixes infected files as well--unlike the more popular Symantec online tool which only scans and reports. Here you just can choose the drives you want to scan and simply hit on the "Scan" button and await salvation. It's quite fast (notching up approximately 17,000 files in five minutes), but given the humungous disk real estate all of us occupy these days, a complete scan of a loaded disk can taken a couple of hours or more.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
http://housecall.trendmicro.com

Trend Micro CWShredder
You've heard the hushed whispers of browser-hijacking, haven't you? The prime accused for this is usually an evil piece of code called CoolWebSearch, a moniker for a wide range of insidious browser hijackers. Apart from changes to your home page, CoolWebSearch significantly slows the performance of your PC, and afflicts Windows with modifications that can cause it to freeze, crash or randomly reboot. CWShredder is a tool to find and remove traces of CoolWebSearch.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
www.trendmicro.com/cwshredder

Panda ActiveScan
Another free online antivirus utility. Portraying itself as "your second opinion on the security of your PC", this Panda allows detection, disinfection and elimination over 110,000 viruses, worms and Trojans from all system devices. It employs ActiveX technology and works within your browser using a heuristic system to detect even unknown malware (malicious software). It is updated at least once a day, and can scan dialers, hacking tools, jokes, security risks as well as e-mail messages and compressed files.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
www.pandasoftware.com

Avast! Home Edition v4.5
This ICSA certified downloadable AV freebie uses a resident protection shield for real-time defence against the viruses that can sneak into your PC. You can set it to scan your e-mail, your auto-start items, and instant messaging and P2P programs. It features a generic SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 scanner, a specific Outlook plugin, and heuristic analysis in mail. It also scans IM programs Windows/MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, mIRC and Trillian.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

So obtain. And deploy. Shaitan willing, you'll be able to safeguard yourself from all nasty bugs and burgers in future with these AV shields. Talking of bugs, try a site called www.bugmenot.com. It provides logins and passwords to free sites that require compulsory registration. Janta seva site hai, so you too can contribute to it. Anything for the good of cyber humanity dahlin’…

And chatting chumps, go to www.meebo.com. You can conserve all your calories on keyboard calisthenics, switching betwixt Yahoo! Messenger, GTalk, MSN, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber by going to just one site for all of the aforementioned. Best baat: No downloads required!

Productivity Cheat Sheet 2: Excel - 1

Microsoft Excel has made spreadsheeting a way of life for a lot of us. Yet few of us can really fathom the mind boggling number of shortcuts and commands in this amazing application. So in the next few cheat sheet episodes we're going to be concentrating on productivity quickies this app—for newbies to nitros. We'll be zipping our way around function and combo key shortcuts for formulas, movement, cell selection and all that jazz to snazz up your worksheet efficiency.

F1: Launches Help
F2: Edits current cell
F5: Goto
F7: Launches spell check
F12: Saves file as
Alt + =: Autosums
Alt + F8: Macros
Ctrl + F: Displays the Find dialog
Ctrl + H: Displays the Replace dialog
Ctrl + Y: Redos the last undone action
Ctrl + 1: Displays Format Cells dialog
Ctrl + ;: Inserts Current Date
Ctrl + :: Inserts Current Time
Home: Goes to beginning of row
Ctrl + Home: Goes to top of worksheet (A1)
Ctrl + End: Goes to end of worksheet
Ctrl + PgDn: Goes to next worksheet
Ctrl + Spacebar: Selects the entire column
Shift + Spacebar: Selects the entire row
Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow: Selects all cells to the left of the active one
Ctrl + Shift + Right Arrow: Selects all cells to the right of the active one
Ctrl + (: Unhides any hidden rows within the selection
Ctrl + ): Unhides any hidden columns within the selection
Ctrl + &: Applies the outline border to the selected cells
Ctrl + _: Removes the outline border from the selected cells
Ctrl + ~: Applies the General number format
Ctrl + $: Applies the Currency format with two decimal places (negative numbers in parentheses)
Ctrl + %: Applies the Percentage format with no decimal places
Ctrl + ^: Applies the Exponential number format with two decimal places
Ctrl + #: Applies the Date format with the day, month, and year
Ctrl + @: Applies the Time format with the hour and minute, and AM or PM
Ctrl + !: Applies the Number format with two decimal places, thousands separator, and minus sign (-) for negative values
Ctrl + -: Displays the Delete dialog box to delete the selected cells.
Ctrl + *: Selects the current region around the active cell (the data area enclosed by blank rows and blank columns)

XP Tweak Time - 2

Telling XP how to behave.

I'm still swimming in a deluge of responses to last week's XP tweaks column. Thanks folks. Am trying to reply to all of you. But no promises. Actually this happens every time I tickle this topic. What to do... XP ka mamla is like that only. Hear this: Apparently, some years ago Bill Gates was demoing a "new and improved" version of Windows to thousands of people at an annual techie convention, his PC froze and the infamous (and very familiar) Windows "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) appeared onscreen. But Gates carried on smilingly, without skipping a beat, saying, "I guess we still have to get some bugs out of this one.”

So let's tweak on... And may the System Gods protect the well being of thine and mine from BSOD.

Quicker Off the Blocks
The most frequent whine I hear from XP users is that it takes ages to start up. Here’s a temporary solution to help you ascertain how fast your PC can really boot sans all add-ons. Because this tweak disables all non-system services—including essential ones like antivirus proggies et al.

Click on Start and then Run. Type "msconfig" into the text field. Go to the Startup tab. Click on the Disable All button here. Then in the Services tab, check the Hide All Microsoft Service box and click Disable All. When you reboot, XP will reignite with just the system services and applications running. Result: A speedier startup. But I repeat, this is strictly a short term solution.


Flushing Fonts for Faster Booting
If you delight in curves of the font genre and have stockpiled a multitude of them in your font folder, you should stop getting grumpy about XP’s speed boss. A lot of your system load during boot up is due to the active fonts in your PC. Do you really use most of them most of time? Nahin na. So just flush them out of the Fonts folder. Keep them on the hard disk, but in another folder.

For this, make a new folder by right clicking on the desktop. Call it Extra Fonts. Next, open the Fonts folder via Start > Settings > Control Panel. Change your View to List or Details to locate font families easily. Shift-select all the fonts you don’t need on a regular basis and move them into the newly created Extra Fonts folder on our desktop. When you’re done, move this Extra Fonts folder to C: or My Documents. (From here, you can re-install whichever ones you want, whenever the need arises.)

If you’ve managed to neutralize loads of faltu fonts, you’ll notice the difference when you boot next. If there’s no difference, dump the flushed files back into the Fonts folder again. And curse me.


Killing the Welcome Screen
If you find the Welcome screen a tad tedious, here what you should do. Click on Start > Control Panel > User Accounts. Here pick "Change the way users log on or off". Next, uncheck the "Use the Welcome screen" option. And click "Apply Options". That’s it. Next time you reboot, no Welcome screen. You can also tinker around with the “Log on” option and see what you can come up with, including espying any hidden users of your system! Try karna. But meri pitai mut karna…

Lot and lots more hai, but I’m out space here. So maal more another time. Meanwhile here’s a tailpiece: Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the ubiquitous Windows reboot/flush app sequence was invented by a coder named David Bradley. And “auto-marketed" by the Big Bill!

Productivity Cheat Sheet 1: Win XP

There's a lot to computing life in the big, bad mousy world of Windows XP than we care to deploy. The mouse may be very nifty tool, but the keyboard is still the speed king when it comes to shortcuts.

So here's an all-velocity-no-mouse-drag cheat sheet of fundamental keyboard commands that breathe speed and sprightliness into you click-chick Windows routines.

F1: Launches Help and Support Center
F2: Renames selected item
F3: Opens File Search
F4: Displays Address bar list in My Computer or Windows Explorer
F5: Refreshes active window
F6: Cycles through screen elements in a window or on the desktop
F10: Activates menu bar in active program
Windows key + D: Shows Desktop / Restores all windows
Windows key + E: Opens Windows Explorer
Windows key + F: Opens File Search
Windows key + R: Displays Run dialog box
Windows key + L: Locks workstation
Windows key + U: Opens Utility Manager
Windows key + Break: Opens System Properties dialog box
Windows key + Tab: Moves through taskbar buttons
Ctrl + Drag: Copies selected item/s
Ctrl + Shift + Drag: Creates shortcut to selected item
Ctrl + Tab: Moves forwards through tabs
Ctrl + Shift + Tab: Move backwards through tabs.
Alt + Enter: Views properties of selected item
Alt + F4: Closes the active item, or quits active program
Alt + Tab: Switches between open items
Alt + Spacebar: Displays System menu for active window
Alt + Esc: Cycles through items in the order they were opened
Shift + Delete: Deletes selected item permanently without placing item in Recycle Bin
Right Shift for 8 seconds: Switches FilterKeys on/off
Left Alt + Left Shift + Print Screen: Switches high contrast on/off
Left Alt +Left Shift + NumLock: Switches MouseKeys on/off
Shift - 5 times: Switches StickyKeys on/off
NumLock for 5 seconds: Switches ToggleKeys on/off
Backspace: Views folder one level up in My Computer/Windows Explorer
Insert CD + Shift: Prevents CD from playing automatically