Wiping battery stats in Android does NOT improve battery life

Whaat?! But what about all those posts on xda-developers forum preaching how it will miraculously breathe new life into my battery? No, unfortunately, you’ve been duped. From the words of Dianne Hackborn herself, an engineer of Google’s Android operating system:

It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.
It has no impact on your battery life.
Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your device more fantastic and wonderful…

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How to Get Chrome’s PDF Viewer in SRWare Iron

If you are a fan of the Iron web browser and Chrome’s built in pdf viewer, you are in luck. For a while, I assumed there was no way to get Chrome’s pdf viewer to work in Iron. Turns out I was dead wrong. According to a commenter from my SRWare Iron post, it is as simple as copying and pasting a single file into Iron’s directory.

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How to Run a Startup Program with Admin Privileges

I share a love-hate relationship with Windows’ User Account Control (aka UAC). According to Microsoft, UAC is supposed to add an extra layer of security for system files, and therefore minimizing the damage malware can inflict on infected hosts. From a security standpoint, this is indeed very good, but unfortunately it can sometimes interfere with the way certain programs run.

Not too long ago, I decided to re-enable UAC on all my pc’s (I initially had it disabled because of the constant and annoying prompts!!) and came across a bug. Long story short, I had Anvir Task Manager running on one of my older laptops, but after enabling UAC, Anvir’s temperature monitor tray icon stopped working properly. It just would not show the temperature when Anvir was set to run on startup (on a manual start, everything works but I would have to confirm a UAC prompt). I eventually found that the reason this was happening was because Anvir needed to run with admin privileges in order to work properly. My guess is that Anvir’s method of checking the motherboard’s temperature requires elevated permissions to work. So we need a way of getting the program to run on startup, but with elevated privileges. Fortunately, there is a clever workaround to bypass UAC using Windows’ own Task Scheduler.

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Search Google via SMS

Image Credit: Mike Kline
Say you are reading a book at a park, and you have no internet connection whatsoever. Then you come across a word which you need defined immediately. You proudly take out your dumb-phone and text “define <insert word here>” to Google. Seconds later, you receive a text with a definition of the word, and you get a pat on the back.

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Reset Windows Media Player 12 to Default Settings

I cannot emphasize enough the power of search engines when it comes to troubleshooting. I have been having some issues with Windows Media Player 12 for a while now. Song albums just refuse to display when a song is playing, and visualizations do not work anymore (they are enabled, but all that shows is a black screen).

I found some suggestions online to reinstall Windows Media Player altogether, but that is burdensome. Fortunately, Google led me to another quick and easy fix, which I will share here for anyone else experiencing similar problems. Apparently, just resetting Windows Media Player to default settings will fix a lot of problems. Here’s how:

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Fix Chrome's Resolving Proxy Delay in Windows

If like me, you recently updated your copy of Chrome/Iron to version 15, you may have noticed a slight delay in the initial loading of the first page when you open the browser. Fortunately, this only happens at the very first page when you start the browser afresh, but it is still very annoying. If you look at the browser status bar down below during this two second delay, you will see a strange “Resolving proxy…” message. After a short encounter with Google, I came across a simple solution.

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