The solution is simple: Cygwin.

Cygwin provides access to a plethora tools you might find on your average Linux system, including an SSH server and related tools. I won’t go into the gory details of getting it up and running, as Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame has already written a wonderful tutorial on this very topic. It’s an old article (from 2006), but it should still be accurate as far as all the steps go.

One thing you may notice if you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7 is the addition of a mysterious user account called Privileged Server on your login screen. When SSH was being set up in Cygwin, a separate user was created for the SSH server, presumably so you couldn’t muck up too much on your own account when tunneling into your computer. It’s supposed to be there, but it may be kind of annoying to have a user account you’re never going to directly access taking up space on your login page. This can be fixed using the registry, but don’t edit it if you’re not entirely sure what you’re doing. Screwing up the registry can potentially result in irreparable damage to your Windows installation, computer hardware, and personal relationships. Yes, it’s that powerful. (I’m kidding.)

First things first, open up regedit via either the search box in the Start menu or the Run dialog. Once it’s open, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. Right-click on Winlogon in the tree directory (left panel) and select New>Key. Type SpecialAccounts in the box that appears and hit Enter. Again in the tree directory, right-click on SpecialAccounts and create a new key titled UserList. (Note: these keys may already exist. In that case, simply click to enter them.)

Now, in UserList, right-click in the right panel and select New>DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name it cyg_server. (Note: I believe this is the account name, but you can double-check by right-clicking on My Computer, selecting Properties, then Advanced Properties, and clicking the Settings button under User Profiles. There may be a number of profiles there other than your personal account, but the SSH server likely has cyg somewhere in the name.)

Double-clicking on the value name will allow you to modify the data contained within. The default of 0 hides the account from the login screen, but you can show it again by changing that to 1.

Now you can exit out of regedit and log out or restart your computer to see the login screen sans Privileged Server! Congratulations, you are now a computer wizard. You may now put on your robe and hat.

I wouldn’t recommend this method for major upgrades, but I suppose it’d work out just fine. I’ve used it for the past few minor updates and it’s been great. Less time spent using an FTP client and more time spent…uh…writing, I suppose. Maybe. Sometimes.

Anyways, I know all about group policy. On any other version of Windows, you could simply go to your Start men, and type “gpedit.msc” (no quotes) in the Run box. Here’s a short tutorial for this on Windows XP and earlier. It should also work on Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Unfortunately, you can’t use gpedit.msc to edit group policy on Vista Home Basic or Home Premium. Instead, you have to directly edit the registry. Don’t panic! I’ll guide you through. But always be sure to make a backup before editing the registry. This is easily done by clicking File>Export… in the Registry Editor and selecting “All” at the bottom of the screen that comes up. Do it now. Do it.

Go ahead and open up the Registry Editor by typing “regedit” (no quotes) in your Start menu search box and pressing enter. Find the following registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. (HKCU stands for HKEY_CURRENT_USER.) Double-click on the value inside the key labeled “NoRecentDocsHistory”. Change the 1 to 0. If it’s already 0, you don’t even need this tutorial and have wasted five minutes of your life. Way to go.

Anyways, now that you’ve edited this value, you should be able to view recent documents in Office programs and Windows itself. At the very least, you can actually edit the recent documents options in Windows and Office. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone. Maybe I just have strange computer problems that never show up for anyone else… And if I was too technical or confusing in this guide, feel free to leave me a comment.

Finally, if you’re interested in editing more group policy stuff in Vista Home Basic or Home Premium, I suggest downloading this Excel spreadsheet from Microsoft, which lists all the group policy settings and their corresponding registry keys. Very useful, especially without gpedit.msc (which is basically an easier to use interface for these particular registry keys). Or you could spring for Vista Ultimate.

Why use NTFS? Well, there are plenty of good reasons, such as metadata and larger file sizes. FAT32 limited filesize to 4 GB, but it’s nigh-unlimited in NTFS. However, FAT32 has a bonus over NTFS in that it is easily read by other operating systems, such as Linux and Mac OS. Both other operating systems can only read NTFS partitions, so special software or drivers must be installed in order to give write access. That’s really the only advantage, but it doesn’t beat the 4 GB filesize limit or the 32 GB partition limit inherent in FAT32, making NTFS the all-around better choice if you just use Windows.

History lesson aside, how do you go about converting a FAT32 partition to NTFS? That’s rather easy, and it involves Windows’ convert utility. This tutorial should work in Windows XP as well as Windows Vista.

First off, click on the Start button and click Run (or just click in the search box in Vista). Type in ‘cmd.exe’ and hit Enter. Note: in Vista, you’ll need to hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter in order to get the Administrator privileges necessary to run the convert utility.

When the command prompt pops up, type in the following:

convert volume /fs:ntfs

replacing ‘volume’ with the drive letter of the volume you want to convert. So, if I was to convert my drive E to NTFS, I’d type:

convert e: /fs:ntfs

Hit Enter after typing this and wait for Windows to work. If the drive is being used, Windows will prompt you to restart so it can convert during the start-up process. Otherwise, it will work for a while and give you the all-clear. Also, if you’re wondering what else the convert utility can do, just type ‘convert /?’ and it will display a list of useful commands.

Now, say you want to convert NTFS to FAT32. Well, I really have no idea why you’d want to do this (unless you want interoperability between Windows and Linux and/or Mac OS), but it’s not as simple as typing a few things in the command line. In order to go from NTFS to FAT32, you’d need to buy a program like Partition Magic to do it or simply backup your data, erase the partition, and reformat it as FAT32, which could cause major headaches. My advice is to stick with NTFS unless you really need the compatibility FAT32 offers.

Anyways, there’s my little tutorial. If you run into problems, I suppose you could bug me about them, especially if my tutorial is incomplete or flawed. I’d hate to have something bad happen because I was wrong.

1. Make a shortcut by right-clicking on the program you want a shortcut to and selecting Create Shortcut. Rename it as you see fit.

2. Click the Start orb and click in the quick search box. Type in “shell:sendto” (without the quotes). Press enter.

3. Copy the shortcut made in step 1 to the folder that popped up in step 2 and you’re all done.

Now, if you want to send a file to this program (the program I did this for is Emacs), right click on the file, go to Send To, and select your program. How easy was that? (Don’t answer.)

Anyways, the rendering (or layout) engine of a browser determines how HTML and CSS are displayed. Most browsers display things similarly, but not Internet Explorer. IE has always been the black sheep of the browser family, preferring proprietary functions (such as ActiveX) to standards. Of course, no browser is completely standards-compliant, but IE is as far off as it can get. The most recent version, IE7, has solved quite a few problems, especially with CSS, but it can still be a hassle to code a website that will work perfectly in all browsers. The problem is that IE is still the most used browser. If your site doesn’t work in IE, you’re going to have a lot of people who will steer clear of it.

The answer? Well, you could just eliminate anything in your site that’s causing problems with IE. Or, you could let web surfers know about Firefox. Chances are that the only reason most people are still using IE is that they don’t know about any alternatives. Read on to see an easy way to let IE users know they should switch to Firefox while allowing non-IE users to continue on with no trouble.

First off, get an account at Spread Firefox. Well, you don’t really have to, but the site gives you a bunch of tools for spreading the word about the browser. Plus you can get cool buttons, complete with an affiliate link that will gain you points every time a person clicks on it. These points can get you prizes and visibility which can drive traffic to your site.

Next, create a text file with the following PHP code inside it, positioned before the opening html tag:

<?php
if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],’MSIE’)===false)
{
header(‘Location: http://www.yoursite.com/’);
exit();
}
?>

Now, change the link to whatever you want. Put the rest of your website in with a warning about IE, a link to download Firefox (the affiliate link you got from Spread Firefox), and a link to continue on to your site. Finally, save this file as a .php file, such as index.php. This is necessary so that the code is recognized as a PHP script, and not simply HTML.

In order to get this fully working, you should make the existing front page of your website index2.htm, or index2.php (depending on what extension it already is) and modifying any links to the home page in the site to point to index2, so IE users aren’t constantly reminded to get Firefox.

Now, whenever an IE user visits your site, this page will show up. But if person using Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Opera, or any other browser that doesn’t use IE’s layout engine visits the site, they’ll be redirect to the URL you specified in the PHP code. This is just a basic tutorial on implementing this, and there are ways to do it in other programming languages as well. Experiment with it and see what you can come up with.

5 Things You Can Do With Google (that I bet you had no clue you could do)

This is first and foremost a guide for complete newbies. In other words, if you know what Google bombing and Google whacking are (and how to do both), you shouldn’t be reading this. Anyways, Google is, hands-down, the most useful thing you can find on the Internet. Except maybe Wikipedia. There’s really no end to what you can do with Google services, but this guide is mainly concerned with the various uses of the basic Google search. These are in no particular order, just so you know.

1. Define words: When using the Google search box (be it the one on the Google homepage, or one in a third-party program like Firefox or Internet Explorer), simply type in “define:” followed the the word you wish to have defined. Google will bring up a page of definitions for your word gleaned from online dictionaries from across the Web. So, typing “define: love” (without the quotes) will bring up any definitions of love that Google can find.
2. Perform calculations: Can’t find a calculator and are too lazy to use the one in Windows? Simply type in your math problem in Google, press enter, and it will solve it for you. The Google calculator can do basic math functions (add, subtract, divide, and multiply) as well as more advanced functions (such as square roots), units of measure and conversion, and finally give you the values for physical constants (try typing “pi” in the search box and see what you get). So, typing in “(sqrt(4)*3)-1″ (again, no quotes) in Google will return an answer of 5.
3. Convert currency: Figuring out just how much your buck is work in Grenada has never been so easy. Type in the currency conversion you want to figure out and Google does all the work. So, if you need to find the number of British pounds sterling in US$10.54, type in “$10.54 in British pounds” (or any variant of pounds; for instance, GBP works, as well as pounds), which returns an answer of about 5.37 British pounds.
4. Find movie times: Forget the newspaper. Google is an easier way to find up-to-date movie times for theaters anywhere. There are many ways to do this, but my favorite is by zip code. Other ways to find movie times include using the movie title or simply typing in the search term “movies.” Anyways, if you were to use the zip code method, you would type in “movies xxxxx” where xxxxx is your five-digit zip code. Google will then return movie times for the theaters nearest to that zip code.
5. Check the weather: Again, why wait for the newspaper when you’ve got Google? It will give you a four-day forecast (as well as current weather conditions) easily. Type in “weather” followed either by your city and state or zip code. So, checking the weather in Beverly Hills would either turn out to be “weather 90210″ or “weather beverly hills.” Google returns the results right at the top and off you go.

There are, of course, more things Google can do for you, but these are the five I’ve found to be most useful. Yes, it does seem like Google will one day rule the world. I won’t mind.