There is two part for this, the software, and the setup in your game itself.

- There is only one thing you need to know about HLSS. The website says it works with the ORIGINAL Half-Life (1), but it will in fact work with newer games too. What this program does in reality is to copy a wav file into your game folder at the location where your game will read “voice_input.wav” as a replacement for your microphone input. (Source: Valve Wiki). The thing is that this never changed, even since the first Half-Life!

Also, note that games requires a VERY specific wav bitrate. As you can see here, Source-based games requires to have a wav recorded at 11025 Hz, mono, 16 bits. You can change all this in Audacity, and while you’re at it, you can crop your sound to keep the interesting part too.

- Onto the setup, in all goes around the same config for Steam-based games, which is:

alias hlss-START “voice_inputfromfile 1; voice_loopback 1; +voicerecord; alias ToggleWAV hlss-STOP”
alias hlss-STOP “voice_inputfromfile 0; voice_loopback 0; -voicerecord; alias ToggleWAV hlss-START”
alias ToggleWAV “hlss-START”
voice_fadeouttime 0

Now, all you need to do is to bind a key to ToggleWAV, and use it after you chose a sound from HLSS. For more infos/setups on different situations, see the HLSS website

As a last tip, if you want to rip youtube off and play that in a Steam game, you’d have to use Youtube Downloader to get the video, and FFMpeg to split the wav out of the video, using this command:

ffmpeg -i youtubevideo.flv MyNewWavFile.wav

Happy spammin’!

I’ll let you make your own conclusions after watching the video at the front page of getdropbox.com, but theres a key point missing: there is no login/logout option in the running application. Once it’s opened, it’s already syncing the files without asking for anything. It seems rather insecure to me. Also, it seems impossible to change our dropbox syncable folder. It’s stuck under My Documents\Dropbox, and that’s it! It could work for most of the people, but i’ve partitioned my hard drive so my Windows partion has just enough space to run.

Otherwise, it’s really working out of the box. My guess is that they’re really pushing at that front, and it may kick ass once it’s out.

So here’s my little app. I didnt named it, really, but let’s call it “File to clipboard”, for simplicity’s sake.

To use it, extract the executable anywhere, i’d recommend into \Program Files\ or \Windows\ . Execute it once directly to install the right-click menu element into the system. From on now, you can right-click any file an select “Copy path to clipboard” to.. surprisingly, copy the whole file path to the clipboard.

Let me rephrase: you only have to execute the program direcly once so you install the right-click menu into the system. Even if you have to execute it only once, it gets executed everytime you use the menu item “Copy path to clipboard”, so do not erase it.

Installation and usage: Download the zip file here, and copy filetocb.exe in a directory of your choice. I recommend Program Files or Windows, as stated above. Execute once to add the right-click menu item, and profit!

Tip: Holding Shift when clicking on “Copy path to clipboard” will instead copy a 8.3 (DOS) formatted path, if available. If there is no 8.3 path, it will revert to the long (standard/default) file path. Either way, an audio dignal (Windows’ “ding!”) will play, indicating you really copied a 8.3 path into the clipboard.

Open source, newbie friendly: in the zip file, there is a folder named “source”, which is my source files used to build filetocb.exe. I have fully documented main.c so if anyone wanted to learn abit how it works, they can do so. There is also a GIMP XCF file, used to make a simple Windows icon for the program.

As explained in the link above, you may set up a fake e-mail message appealing to anyone who (for whatever reasons, intended or not) has access to your e-mail account, and this message should trigger a warning back to you. I didn’t like the method used in the post for some reasons. With the method used in the post, the “hacker”, or whoever accessing your e-mail account, should open an HTML file attached to your fake e-mail message, and the actual trigger is stored inside this HTML file. I don’t know about you, but i would double-check in a Notepad this HTML file before opening it. And storing, let’s say, a password list (or whatever trick we’re using to lure the attacker to your fake e-mail) in an HTML file attached to a message is… quite strange and unusual.

Here’s what i’ve done to enhance this trick.

• Like the original trick, I store a fake e-mail message on my own account with something appealing to the attacker in the subject line,  like: a password list, a CC number, whatever.
• The actual e-mail message, which is “rich-text formatted” (actually a HTML formatted e-mail message),  contains an external image, displaying what it seems to be a password list. Smash on your keyboard to fake some passwords
• That external image is hosted on a PHP web host, and we’re not actually calling this image directly (like example.com/passwords.jpg), but we’re calling a PHP script which outputs the image. It also reports back to you that your password is compromised.

Here’s the fun part. The PHP file should be hosted somewhere on the net, but I prefer to host it on a separate directory and named index.php, so we can just point our browser to http://www.example.com/passlist/ and this script is run. Along this PHP file, make a fake password list in an image file in GIMP or Photoshop. I used a white background with black text formatted as Tahoma 12 pixels high, which is rather close to what webmail services use as a font formatting.

Here’s the PHP code in action:

header('Content-Type: image/jpg');

$open = fopen("passlist.jpg", 'r');

fpassthru($open);close($open);

@ini_set("sendmail_from","Bilange's hacker alert <alert@bilange.net>");

@mail("__MAIL ADDRESS__","EMAIL HACKING ALERT!","Referrer: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']."\nAgent: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']."\nAddr: ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

The first four lines actually outputs an image file which is read from passlist.jpg, and the last two lines actually reports back to whatever address you want it to report. In this example, you would replace __MAIL ADDRESS__ to any e-mail address you want to recieve your warning.

But wait… isn’t reporting back in an e-mail idiot? We’re ACTUALLY trying to protect our e-mail account!

Since most of us has one or more than one cell phone with SMS enabled, you can send your warning on a cell phone. You can send your SMS by sending a short message to a specific e-mail address. Bell Mobility users would send an SMS to (phone with area code here)@txt.bellmobility.ca, and Telus users would send it to (phone with area code here)@mms.telusmobility.com.

I hope this helps!

This mini-howto provides some information about changing your network card’s order (or priority). This is handy to specify on which network connection your programs will go. Be sure to backup on paper everything you change so you can come back to safe defaults in case of troubles.

Open a Run box using the Start menu and clicking Run (this may be quickly reached by typing Win+R, that is, holding the Windows key between Ctrl and Alt and pressing R), and execute ncpa.cpl — which is a quick shortcut to your “Networking neighborhood” ’s Propreties.

Select advanced in the top menu, and choose Advanced Settings. The first list in the first tab (Adapters and bindings) is the actual order of your physical network adapters. That is,   everytime you or some program tries to connect over a network card, it will go thru all those cards (unless specified otherwise) until the destination is reached. You can re-arrange the order by selecting one of the adapters in the list, and clicking on the arrow buttons on the right side. Click OK when done.

If you happen to have disabled the Printing Spooler service, clicking Ok will warn you about not being able to completly do the changes, which is false to some point. Since our objective is to move around the priority of the adapters, this part is actually done BEFORE the error message popping up, so the changes (at least, the parts we’re interested in) are actually done. You may discard the error message and click on Cancel in the adapters window– note that it doesn’t cancel what we’ve done, you may verify if you wish so.

You may try to test your network at this point, but it didn’t made the trick for me. You may ALSO have to change the TCP/IP Routes priority too. Follow these steps, and do not fool around too much, since we can really funk up the system’s networking in there! You’ve been warned

Still in the Network Connections window (the ncpa.cpl window), right click and choose propreties on every network connections than you think it causes troubles. Or, to reverse the problem around, choose Properties on the network connection you want to push up to the first one being used at all times.

In the General tab, select the TCP/IP option in the list and click on Propreties (shortcut: you can also simply double-click on TCP/IP), and click on the Advanced button in the lower part of the General tab. In the IP Parameters Tab, uncheck “Automatic Metric” and in the textbox below, enter a numeric value between 1 and 9999. This value is actually important and deals with the TCP/IP routing priority of the Windows networking. By putting a small value, this network connection will be used first, and with a large value this will be used as later as possible, depending of the others connection’s Metric value.

In other words, your connection attempt will use every connection (shown as connected or not disabled in the Networking window) ordered by the metric value specified here.

• Dependency walker: this free program will show you an hierarchical view of dependencies (DLL’s needed, what these DLLs needs in return, etc) for a given program. You can also view the dependencies for a DLL file, an OCX file, and god knows what else. What’s cooler, you can “trap” a program so it runs inside Dependency Walker, so you can view in real time what DLL it needs at a certain point. There may be others features, but I haven’t messed around too much.
• DLL Help database: Directly from Microsoft, this database lets you search from a file name, from a package name (Like Microsoft .NET Framework), and you can see some basic stats (file size, date, where it came from). Handy when you’re not sure if the DLL’s installed in your system are the good one or some fake installed by a spyware. It would be safe to assume that only Microsoft products are listed in this database.
• Process Library: Lets you search with an executable filename (like iexplore.exe) and this site will explain where it comes from. Ideal to locate running spyware/trojans or to identify unknown running processes.
• Process Explorer: This, along with Process Library above, will give you as much information as possible on running applications. Process Explorer is one of the programs created by the guys from SysInternals (which is now part of Microsoft), and is a replacement for the task manager, except that its a task manager on steroids. Just like dependency walker, you can get information about dll’s used, subprocesses running, and you can even see what files, directories and even TCP/IP ports is opened by a program! You can set it so it completly replaces the Windows Task Manager: even if you try to run “taskmgr.exe”, Process explorer will be launched instead. Quick tip: Ctrl+Shift+Escape will launch Task Manager (or Process Explorer if it overrides Task Manager) from anywhere inside Windows. Some programs that tries to block user input like Ctrl+Alt+Del doesnt know about this keyboard shortcut, so this one works 99.9% of the time.

Happy(ier) Windows debugging!

Why reinvent the wheel? Google decided (it seems) to use the very same keyboard shortcuts than in the (very) old but still used text editor vi. j and k to change lines, / to search, and g seems to be a combination key. In GMail you can type “g a” to go to your archives, whereas “g f” in vim will take the word around your cursor, assume it’s a file on your drive and try to open it.

As a sidenote, Google keyboard shortcuts seems to not work well on Opera, at least on Linux.

I used to like iTunes back in the day, I used it although I know it was kind of bloated to start with. Since then, I was hooked on the fact I could manage all my music library from one app. This is something that, at least by default, is impossible with foobar2000 (which you should definately check out if you’re still stuck with some old Pentium 133), and unthinkable on Winamp (I never really migrated to Winamp 3/5, since it was a more heavy than Winamp 2, which I still (sometimes) rely on today)

I now run on KUbuntu for day-to-day tasks, and I really like amarok because of the similar “music library management” point of view.

Musikcube is one app that makes me want to switch back to Windows (why would I do that to start with?!). The download size is 2-ish Megabytes, and for that size you have an music player that goes straight to the point: music management. See the screenshot of the main window for example. All you need to do is to add some folder(s) or files, and you’re ready to go.

The only thing I don’t really like is how the Dynamic Playlists are made (see screenshot). To create dynamic playlists, you have to write in your own custom SQL statement that directly queries the Musikcube’s database. Personally, since I use alot of SQL stuff (language and databases) at work this is almost natural to me, but for the new user’s point of view who dont have to program, getting to know how to make Dynamic Playlist can be a pain. In the other hand, this translates into alot of flexibility.For example (see same screenshot), I can choose to display files that contains either “single” or “top40″ in it’s file path (in other words, I chose to pick files that are stored in either of those two directories) but not those that contains “electro” somewhere in the file path. Then I order the results by its track’s title.

For the rest, since this is a iTunes look-alike, you should be able to get your way around this app. Also, this app supports Vorbis (.OGG) files natively. This is a plus that kept me away from iTunes. Overall, this is a nice start, but the app isnt quite polished, and I wish there was a console somewhere so it could give me some reason why, for example, shoutcast streams fails to play (at the time I wrote this blog entry, when I tried to play a shoutcast stream that couldn’t connect Musikcube silently fails and does nothing afterwards to warn it’s user.). Otherwise, Musikcube can be extended using plugins, so there’s alot of possibilites for expansion.

Final rating: 8/10. Give it a spin!

Extras for dynamic playlist creation: SQLite “select” clause reference, fields that Musikcube use in it’s database

If you happen to expect my personal blog and you found this site instead, everything’s okay. You may be surprised for the least, but my personal stuff is put on the dot-ca domain.

Otherwise, lets explain what’s to expect on this blog. In fact I don’t expect to have a solid user base that will visit this site on a regular basis. The reason is that I will post technical articles here, mostly howtos and such, so a specific problem can be solved (and eventually found via your favourite search engine), but the subject of every single post will vary alot. For example, between every posts I may jump from Windows Registry to Vim scripts, then to Unix iptables, and the next thing you’ll know I’ll post a new article stating that I created a Win32 application for you to download.

So this blog will rely on user’s problems to be popular. (I know blog and popular doesn’t go in the same sentence usually, but I want to do my part.)

Besides all that, who I am, you say?

I’m your average geek working in the IT field in tech support. After many years of messing around i’m fairly comfortable in both Unix and Windows world, and I have a strong basic knowledge in software and everything Internet based (networking, protocols, etc).

Mind you, I don’t have any company given dipomas (MSCE and A+ comes to mind). All I got, besides a lousy t-shirt, is a college-like IT certification, given by Quebec’s Minister of Education. Needless to say, it doesn’t worth much outside Quebec.

Either way, I don’t rely on this alone to know my facts, I’m usually a curious guy regarding tech in general and I don’t mind reading tech specs or whatever to know more on a subject.

After a few years of being curious, I know for sure some tricks that maybe some of you can discover on this site– that’s my objective precisely.

Or at least, that’s the main idea.

See you around!!

PS. Sorry if some sentences may sound a bit weird; English isn’t my mother tongue.