By default, Google allows group managers to invite and/or add you to their groups. This is annoying, causing spam, and you have to manually leave groups you didn’t want to join in the first place.

Last night, my brother bought our forth SSD—another Samsung SSD RBX Series 64GB MCCOE64G5MPP-0VAD1 SLC solid-state drive, disassembled from a Dell Latitude E Series—for $130. Having bought three of the same Samsung SSDs about a week ago from the same shop, the Dell dealer joked with my brother asking “do you have a research lab?!”

Yesterday I and two of my friends bought three Samsung SSD RBX Series 64GB solid-state drives for $130 each from a Dell laptop dealer. These fine SLC SSDs were disassembled from brand new Dell Latitude E Series laptops requested by stupid customers who preferred a 500GB slow, noisy, heavy, and power-hungry HDD over an agile, silent, light, and green SSD. All manufactured on 5/23/2008, the three of them revealed “Power On Hours Count” of less than 10 in HD Tune Pro. Dell OEM labeled MCCOE64G5MPP-0VAD1, they shockingly had around 40 reallocated sectors each, showing us how immature the SSD technology is, albeit for the moment.

The Windows Help program or WinHlp32.exe is a Windows utility needed when you’re using old software containing “.hlp” help files. For example I was faced with this problem with the “.hlp” files when I first used Borland C++Builder 6 on Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008.

This old post describes why I needed to replace Microsoft Windows’ own Persian (Farsi) keyboard layout—kbdfa.dll.

Playing video on machines powered by Nvidia GPUs, Windows 7 x86/x64’s own Windows Media Player (WMP) video playback quality is just fine, but when it comes to any other player such as Media Player Classic – Home Cinema (MPC-HC) or VLC media player, jagged edges are annoyingly obvious, especially when the video is resized. Well, an MPEG-2 PAL video (DVD format) stored at 720×576 (4:3) is displayed at 768×576, that’s simply called resizing!