Today I plugged my USB at school and noticed that I had a little but annoying virus that converted all my files into .lnk files. So when I came back home I plugged it to recover my files and format it but then I realised that Windows Defender put the virus in quarantine and made my files “invisible” (couldn’t see it even with show hidden files at Windows Explorer).
The good thing is that this can be easily fixed, but I don’t know if any common user actually knows how. So this is the main reason of this easy pie tutorial.
Open your My PC and see where your USB drive is located (or sdcard, whatever).
Then, just open the Command Prompt and write this (change the drive letter to your own).
It’s been 18 months since the release of Windows 8 and 6 months since the release of Windows 8.1. But yet, many people are using outdated operating systems.
Windows XP and Windows 7 still have a big user base. The main reason is because they been told that the Windows 8 interface is not friendly. Some of those people claim that they used it a little and that they didn’t like it. The main reason is the introduction of the “Start Screen” and the removal of the “Start Menu” that has been used from Windows 95 to Windows 7.
So, what are the reasons to upgrade to Windows 8?
Faster startup: Apparently Microsoft started to realize how important it is to get the desktop running as fast as possible. It’s the first improvement that you notice when you update. They also added an easier way to disable some applications that run at boot from Task Manager. You can disable a few things to make it even faster. My start-up time currently is 7.8 seconds, which is awesome. The time used by Windows 7 can even be the double.
Starcraft looks as it should. It looked really bad on Windows 7. This also happens with other old applications that used to work fine on Windows XP and didn’t work as they were supposed to since Vista.
Windows App Store, some applications may be so useless but we have to admit that some look neat, like Twitter and Netflix. If you have 2 screens or more you will be in love.
PC settingsis easier for computer illiterates that have used to have a bad time using Control Panel on older versions.
Touch screens are a nice extra. Although this post is about desktop computers, most of the newest notebooks are shipping with a touch screen and Windows 8.1 support is awesome. Just use a Surface and you will know what I’m talking about.
There are lots of bad things about Windows and sometimes I wish I could be using an *NIX shell or using applications like Linkinus, Transmit and Sequel Profrom OS X. But Linux and OS X are far from being usable on some work environments because of the lack of professional applications. (Solidworks and Proteus for example).
After many months after I said that I would talk about Starcraft, finally, I found a right topic to start, micromanagement.
What is micromanagement?
Micromanagement relies on getting more juice from your units, which means doing more for less and doing it better. The most important things may be: getting information from your enemy ground, correct unit placement and little but highly mobile engagements with few units avoiding his army. And of course, micromanagement on a battle.
Scouting
Scouting is the most important thing on the game since your strategy will be based on how to defeat your opponent strategy (which means that is also very important to avoid being scouted).
An example of scouting could be looking into your Protoss enemy ground and see a very early Twilight Council, a heavy gas production, a low gate count and probably Chrono Boost on Cybernetics Core. Based on that, anyone should know that getting detection should be a priority. Dark Templars are coming. This early game scouting is essential but you need to do it throughout the whole game to reveal your enemy strategy and act in consequence.
I took this little list from Liquidpedia that describes what an early scout can reveal by seeing just the basics.
Proxy: Lack of buildings in base.
Cheese: Lack of workers and more unit-producing structures.
Double gas: Would indicate a fast tech build.
No gas: Usually indicates a fast expand.
Structures: The type of unit producing structures will give an indication of what build or what units the opponent will use
Placement – the placement of the buildings can indicate if the opponent will turtle or play aggressively.
Scouting will reveal what your opponent haves now and what he will have on the next 5 minutes, at least, as long you know how to read this. This will allow you to get a counter or doing a timing attack.
Each race have a different approach of how to scout on mid/late game more effectively and cheaper. Terrans do buildings, Zergs do overseers and changelings and Protoss have observers and hallucinated phoenixes.
Positioning
While scouting focus on knowing your enemy, positioning is more about how your own army must engage your enemy. This is hard, as your enemy will try to avoid awkward grounds where is possible to set up a concave, this heavily depend on which match are your playing and the map. This video will give you an idea of how important positioning is and how to deal with it on TvT for example.
Positioning can be approached using different techniques depending on your unit composition and how to use ranged units as BroodLords, Tempests and Tanks and also having enough of other units to tank damage and by using terrain. You can also put units as this ones on unreachable places for your enemy. Other terrain techniques are used with units like High Templars, so they can use storm from places without visibility for the enemy while his army goes by. There is a full article about this on Liquidpedia that is a must-read.
Engagement micro
This is more about keeping your units alive and attacking for more time, so they can be repaired/healed/recharged for the next engagement. This can be done on big fights and little ones to get more juice from each unit. An usual kind of micro could be the stalker blink or something very usual (at least for me) wait until the enemy targets the colossus and bring it back, so all enemy units try to get my colossus while his units are being attacked by the rest of the army.
How to get better at micro?
There are lots of games at arcade such as Starcraft Micro Tournament that can be play with your friends and Starcraft Master that allows you to learn the basics and also gives you a new avatar.
Today, May 1st, is the commemoration of the death of Ayrton Senna, a Brazilian that is better known for being one of the best F1 pilots ever. Senna was born in São Paulo in 1960 and died at the age of 34 in 1994 at Imola, Italy.
Senna was recognised for being faster than anyone before. He won three F1 championships, 41 Grand Prix, had 81 podiums and 65 pole positions at the end of 10 years career in the maximum motor sport category.
His qualifying times were insane! He was faster than anyone at the grid. Including his own team mate, Alain Prost. He surpassed all the limits previously known with an innate driving talent.
All the other drivers at the grid were his rivals but also his work partners, his friends, as he demonstrated when he saved Érik Comas after his crash. He was the first to arrive to the crash scene and disregarding his own security ran to help him. He was a winner, as he demonstrated at Brazil. All his fans were shouting his name, wanting him to take his homeland Grand Prix. His McLaren transmission got jammed and was stuck on sixth-gear, but he still amazingly keep the lead from start to finish. He was someone that learned from his mistakes, as seen when he took his first championship by winning six of eight races after his crash at Monaco in 1988.
The main thing is to be yourself and not allow people to disturb you and change you. You have to be yourself, even though many times you make a mistake due to your own personality. You learn, and you must learn through your mistakes and get better.
I believe if you have the ability to focus strongly on something then you have the ability to gain from it. It’s been like that all my life—it’s always been a question of improving. There is no end, as you go through you just keep finding more and more, it’s fascinating. We are made of emotions and we are all looking for emotions—it’s just a question of finding a way to experience them.
– Ayrton Senna
Besides his performance at the sport, his legacy is bigger than that, as he was also knew for being a man of faith, a devout Christian and his philanthropicgenerosity.
When the Brazil football team won the 1994 World Cup, they dedicated their victory to Senna by holding a banner after winning the finals. The FIA greatly improved the safety to the sport after this, which included improved crash barriers, more safety standards and redesigned tracks.
Many people that have lots of money do philanthropy to have a better image. Senna was different as he really wanted the best for the youth of his country. His family continued his philanthropy work by founding the Ayrton Senna Institute months after his accident.
He will always be a hero to remember for his personality and skills, rest in peace Ayrton.
Edit: The talks and poll about this topic has been delayed until another date later on summer.
The complete world is aware of the problems that Mexico currently has.This is due to a large list of issues like police abuse, a drug war, and a corrupt government. These issues make Mexico the most dangerous country to work as a journalist.
Now, the country faces a bigger problem that is completely killing our freedom of speech. The new telecom bill will make the government able to censor and sanction certain types of internet content that don’t fit into ambiguous concepts which are not yet defined and will be used for convenience of certain political parties. These practices are a violation to our online freedom of speech, which is an human right.
The ISPs will be able to charge for a premium internet service. Which means that net neutrality will die too. So they’ll to limit the bandwidth or block services as they want. An example could be, that Telmex will able to limit bandwidth and slow down Netflix to boost their own service (ClaroVideo) unless we pay an additional fee. Alternatively, ISPs may try to negotiate a deal with the service providers (for example, Comcast tried to get Netflix to pay a share). Either way, ISPs win while everyone else loses!
You may think that this will not be an issue, but as we learned, we can’t trust the government of Mexico. They will censor anti-government protests and the activism that informs people about facts about the drug war (which are censored at TV and newspapers).
The future of this bill will be determined tomorrow (April 22). The bill requires a majority (or 65 votes) which means that the ruling party (PRI) and PVEM that usually vote together, will only need 4 extra votes from the opposing parties.
Many years ago me and some friends used to play this game that taught us too much, gave us interest to do lots of stuff (developing things as websites, servers, scripting, etc.). So we decided to play it a little to remember those times, so here I’ll show you some screenshots I took from Dennis and I adventures. Sadly our friend Fofito wasn’t online to come to the adventure but I’m quite sure he and others will be available later.
Here me and DennisTT met some great people that helped us to make the desert quest, without killing us (maybe because is a non-PvP server). So we got a nice reward.Swimming a little bit on Thais south shoreThen we lured some minotaurs and bring our donkeys to Noah’s Ark… and even killed a dangerous DragonThen we went to the Thais Lighthouse to look the beautiful blue sea, and then traveled to Fibula and other places that bring us back to 2004.
We all know that Apple is the kind of company that likes to push users to renew their computers by limiting them using proprietary and not well documented software and hardware that restricts people from upgrading their computers, even for the users that are supposed to want this as they are doing on almost the whole of their products as the MacBook Pro – with Retina, the iMac and the Mac Pro and although I’d like to talk more about how they limit their hardware much more lately, this post is about installing Windows using Boot Camp from a USB. To read more about this new horrible new computers, you should see this post made by DennisTT.
This feature is blocked (although it works) from not that old models, so you need to modify a configuration file to make it work as any other recent model. Follow the next steps:
Step 1 Verify if your computer needs this modification, you can see this by just opening Boot Camp and seeing that there is no choice other than optical drive.
Step 2 Modifying Info.plist from /Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant.app/Contents, this can be done using the terminal by writing:
When you open nano search for PreUSBBootSupportedModels and modify it to look like this by removing Prefrom the tag
Now continue with the rest of the terminal command, so you will sign this new Info.plist, otherwise Boot Camp Assistant will crash when you open it. It may ask you to install an XCode addition, just click yes is an small thing.
Step 3 Open Boot Camp Assistant and see, you have this new option and you are ready to create a Windows image from OS X and the option you had before will let you install from USB.
Has been quite a while since my last post, but some Arduino projects,Linux Administration guides, VM related stuff and even some Starcraft guides are coming later this or the next month, so stay tuned!
Many of this content will be new and some stuff is coming from the old blog :).
I’ve had this weblog since about seven years ago and I ran out of ideas of what to post for about almost the same time, so I think that making a “refresh” would fix this and maybe motivate me a little to write new things (I’m unsure about what). I been thinking about which topics I should write of, before I had some Linux, Android and OS X guides and some personal stuff, so probably I will try to explore new things to not run out of ideas as I did before.
I want to thank Dennis Tsang for providing me the hosting since some time ago, thanks!.
