The Zana Zen

In this post you can get some hints on what to do in case you accidently ruined your partition table, for example, you deleted one of your volumes (drive letters) and you cannot see it.

First of all, I want to start with a warning… doing this stuff to your hard disk may gets you to a point of frustration, losing all your data and getting the middle finger from the kind and beloved mr. samsung/WD/whatever/(made in China). I’m not gonna describe how to backup your hard drive, I assume you know that

The number one rule is to never try to edit or change anything from the Windows Disk Management tool, it’s crap. Most chances it is the reason for you ending  up on this page

Here are some information about the data structures that are used to manage your boot partitions, I’m not going in-depth here but rather just describing some basic things that are good to know. If you want, you can skip this section. Lets start with the MBR (Master Boot Record). The MBR contains a small piece of code at its begining, your BIOS loads it into memory and then exeute it in real mode. Anyways, the MBR basically just manages the entries in the partition table. Part of the MBR (at offset 0×1BE) is the partition table itself, there you have 4 entries to 4 Primary partitions on your disk, where each one can be defined at Extended and point to a number of Logical partitions (which used to be non-bootable, but today boot loaders handles them fine).

• Primary – bootable partition
• Extended – Pointer to a number of logical partitions
• Logical – data partitions, intended to be non bootable

I would recommend reading more about this right here.

Here are some tools that you want to know:

• TestDisk – this is a really good tool that can analyze every sector of your hard drive and find lost volumes, then it lets you edit the partition table and write it to disk.
• Acronis Disk Director – good partition manager with disk editing capabilities, this is good if you want to investigate your sectors closely and see the data structures.

There are tons of other tools, I’m using these ones and they are great! I wouldn’t recommend hiren boot cd which has all these tools and more preinstalled and configured.

Ok, so here is the flow for reconstructing the partition table with TestDisk, and maybe add fixups using Windows bootrec.exe if you are running Vista.

1. Execute TestDisk and let it analyze your disk, if it didn’t found exactly the partitions you are looking for, perform a deeper search. When you get the results all of the partitions are marked DELETED, you should turn the wanted partitions to Primary and Logical, the partition you used to boot into should be set to Primary Bootable.
2. When you are ready, the partition table appears in a neat green color, telling you everything is ok. Write the partition table to disk.
3. Try to boot the hard drive, if it fails, you may want to look at Super Grub and maybe later on, install to disk. Super Grub is a really handy boot loader that you can execute without installing to disk. It lets you boot from any partition. I’m not going to cover how to use Grub, try looking for info if you need this.
4. If you are a windows user, insert the installation disk of windows vista, or download the neosmart recovery custom Vista disc, when the disc loads go to ‘Recovery’, and open a command prompt. Execute these commands:bootrec /fixmbr
   bootrec /fixboot
   bootrec /rebuildbcd

   See the output and confirm

5. Load your operating system.

In case you want to hide some partitions, like the recovery partition of your laptop, you can user Acronis boot director.

Well that’s about it… even if this post doesn’t speak to you, just remember, never use the Windows Disk Management console

Thanks,
Guy.

Sometimes selecting text with the mouse can be troublesome, it could have been nice if you could fix your selection by adding or removing parts of the text.

Photoshop has made this nice, where by choosing the selection tool and holding down the the ALT or SHIFT keys you can add or remove pixels to or from your selection.

I wish this were built-in in the operating system, so you could easily fix your selection of text if you got it wrong.

Comes a time, when you wish you knew what goes in that twisted head of your best friend/worst enemy.
These people are often in your windows live messenger contact list, among their friends and relatives.

When a new message pops up from your best bud in the windows taskbar,
you don’t see much details it usually looks like “Dany – Conversa…” not much to think about besides – Dany wants to chat (:

So you open the new message window and chat away,
little that you know, it actually not Dany!

In messenger, this is so easy to achieve, you just change your :
(None require registration, and are all immediately updated)

• Display name (The name that appears in the contact list)
• Personal message (The message people see next to your display name in the contact list)
• Display picture (Just print screen and cut it from the victim’s display picture)
• Fonts and colors (Easy to obtain, not so easy to identify)

This is usually more then enough to fool the next guy.

Let’s say A B & C are all friends and have each other in their contact lists,
A Changes his own details to look like B, and sends C a message : “Hey man, What you think about A????”
C, Having harsh and repressed feeling for A, uses the chance to say everything he was hoping to say about A, to B, But B is A!!!
Be careful about what you do with this,
from my experience, it works every time, but i have only used it to trick friends and create funny events.

The only way your victim could know something is wrong is to see that he has TWO ‘B’s online at the same time,
or to check out B’s e-mail address, but people never check these things.

(Results of misuse of this trick are your responsibility and you are taking your own risks…)

Cheers,

Well, it’s all about the numbering

You start with 1.txt and ends up with 1756.txt, too many logs and they always seems unorganized on your disk, so you are arranging the file by date but this may also be a problem with asyncronous writing to log files. And either way, it still it look bad when you arrange the files by date.

So do what I do, start numbering your files from 10000, this way they’ll be arganized by their name properly.

This is silly I know

This guide provides detailed information on how to sell your own digital products by yourself, by digital products I mean: ebooks, software, graphics, etc… digital files. I’ll show you, step by step, the easy way to sell a digital file, I’ll describe to you how PayPal works and how to use PayPal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service into your advantage in order to send your digital products automatically when you receive payments from your customers. Passive income, here we come

This guide is focused on absolute beginners, if you feel you can skip some of these sections, it won’t hurt my feelings

Choose Your Hosting Service

A Hosting service allows an individual to host his files (usually a website) on a server, in exchange for a monthly or a yearly payment. I’m using Hostgator as my hosting service and I’m really satisfied, you can also try to check if this coupon still works: “freetrial”.

Be sure that you get what you need from your hosting service so ask questions and read what they offer, it can be MySQL databases, PHP scripting, Python, CGI, etc…

Choose a Good Domain Name

In choosing a domain name you have 3 options:

• Going for a brand name, the advantage here is that your site will be more reliable, a brand name is a name to trust on. An example will be www.amazon.com
• Going for a more generic name, if your site is small and you do not plan to spend a lot of money on advertising then I guess this option is better for you – its advantage is that your site will be found more quickly by search engines. An example will be www.FreeWebsiteTemplates.com
• This method is just the combination of the last two, just create a brand name that contains two words or a derivative. This is the best choice of the three in my opinion

Your domain name will eventually be controlled by the DNS network protocol.

What is DNS?

DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System. It is a method of conversion between IP addresses, which are difficult to remember, to domain names, which are easier to use and remember. When your computer tries to connect to a remote computer by using a domain name, it needs first to resolve the remote computer’s IP address.

All connections throughout the Internet are done using the IP network protocol, the IP protocol identifies each computer by a unique IP address. An IP address is a 32 bit number which is represented in the following way: “aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd”, where each dotted separated bin is a number between 0 to 255.

In order to resolve the IP address from a domain name, there is a need for a DNS server. A DNS Server is a computer that is connected to the Internet and responds to DNS queries. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) provides you with a DNS server, your computer probably queries it.

How To Setup the DNS Settings?

Now that you have a domain name, you should setup your DNS settings, if you don’t know how to do that, then you should contact the technical support of your domain registrar. In the settings, make sure you set the right values for the MX record of the DNS, it should be set to your hosting mail server, and it will let you receive emails to your domain name.

Also add some sub domains that will let you manage your hosting more easily:

• ftp.your-domain.com – should point to your hosting FTP server.
• mail.your-domain.com – should point to your hosting mail server.

Getting Money From Buyers using PayPal

I presume that you know what PayPal is, and that you have used it some time in your life, I won’t cover the basics here. PayPal offers some merchant tools, the one that we will talk about is the buy now button. If you sell something, your website should describe the features & benefits of your product and contain a buy now button at the bottom.

When your customers push this button, they will be redirected to PayPal for checkout, after they will pay, you will receive a payment notification from PayPal. The Buy Now Button is the most common merchant tool that PayPal has to offer, it’s simple, fast and secure. It’s easy to configure too. Actually, the button is a simple HTML form that POSTs (sends) data (like the price of the product and the name of the product, see for a list below) to PayPal. A Buy Now Button could also be encrypted with PayPal’s public key, so it prevents hackers from seeing the button details.

A standard Buy Now Button’s form contains these fields:

• business – who to pay for. This is the seller’s email address, your email address that you use to login to PayPal.
• item_name – the product’s name. When the customer clicks the Buy Now button, he will be redirected to PayPal to purchase your product, item_name is the name of the product that will be displayed at PayPal.
• amount – the product’s price.
• currency_code – states what currency to use, where “USD” identifies US Dollars.
• return – the URL that the customer will return to when he is done paying.
• cancel_return – the URL that the customer will be redirected to if he presses cancel after he is redirected to PayPal.
• notify_url – this is optional, it states the URL that receives a payment notifications from Paypal using the IPN service, read more below.

How Paypal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) Works?

1. When a user are pressing on your buy now button, he will be redirected to PayPal.
2. PayPal receives the payments and POSTs the payment details to your IPN URL you specified in the notify_url parameter.
3. Your notification url should be a web script that will validate the request against PayPal (security measurement).
4. PayPal IPN responds and verifies the payment or denies it. The IPN script should processes only valid payment requests.
5. The PayPal IPN script should send your digital product by email to your customers automatically, unless passive income doesn’t interest you and you wish to send it manually every time by yourself

EasyIPN

EasyIPN is a script that lets you automate online orders, protect your products from distribution and manage everything from a simple admin panel. You may wish to you use it if you don’t want to mess with the PayPal settings by yourself. EasyIPN’s responsibility is to offload the work you need to do in order to integrate with PayPal IPN.

EasyIPN will send your digital product to the purchaser without your intervention, thus making your website a true passive income source.