nstth

NStth (tips, tricks, and hacks from NS) started as a hashtag on Twitter that I came up with when wanting to share the tips, tricks, and hacks with the world.

So here are the tips, tricks, and hacks right below; I hope you find them useful, and if you do, share them so that others can benefit from them as well!

#7 (2022-10-24, updated 2024-03-27)

According to the Youtube blog, Youtube Shorts have been introduced in September 2020.

Shorts are portret (vertical) videos whose length is capped at a minute.

If you have ever watched one, you might have noticed that Shorts also use a different player that loops the video, and (more problematically), starts playing another video as soon as the cursor is focused on it, which makes navigating frustrating, and disables volume and seek controls, too.

The Solution

Luckily, we have a way to play shorts in the regular Youtube player.

• The Manual Way.

No matter what browser you use, the manual way to use the regular player is to go to the address bar, and change the “/shorts/” part of the URL to “/watch/”, so that a link like

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EyxTWC4r_XU

Looks like

https://www.youtube.com/watch/EyxTWC4r_XU

• The Automatic Way.

This, however, is not ideal since you would have to do this for every single video.

My solution: A browser extension that does this automatically.

One such addon is Redirector by Einar Egilsson.

Once you have it installed, you may need to restart your browser.

After that, find the extension.

Firefox: Press control+e to set focus to the navigation toolbar, tab until you hear save to pocket, right arrow until you get to extensions, press space, and once you have found Redirector in the list with up/down arrows, press enter.
Chrome: While inside webpage contents, press alt, then left arrow a few times until you get to “Extensions” menu, then tab until you get to “Redirector”, and press space.

Once you're in the Redirector options, find the “Edit Redirects” button, and press it.

In the new page, you should see a clickable text that says “Create new redirect”, press it.

Now you will get a form to fill out.

• Description: Replace /shorts/ with /watch/ on youtube.
• Example URL: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EyxTWC4r_XU
• Pattern: ^(https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?youtube\.com\/)shorts\/([^"&?\/\s]{11})$
• Redirect to: $1watch/$2
• Pattern type: Regular Expression

If everything checks out, the save button will be enabled, and pressing it means that the shorts are now officially redirected to the regular player.

You may test the redirection by opening a Youtube Short like
this one of a cat who says «OK” (you're welcome 😸).

If an error occurs, the save button will be unavailable, and you will see an error. Please follow the instructions carefully, and paste the text in the list above exactly as it is written.

#6 (2020-06-29)

While looking for a way to send audio from my iPhone to my Windows computer, I stumbled across a way to do it natively… almost.

It turns out that Windows 10 2004 provides a way to receive, and not just send audio via bluetooth.

Steps:

Pair your iOS device with Windows just as you would pair any other bluetooth device.
1. Go to settings→devices→bluetooth and other devices→add bluetooth or other device→bluetooth.
2. A wizard will display, waiting for a bluetooth device to be visible.
3. If it finds any devices, it will show them in the list.
4. If nothing happens on its own, try turning on/off bluetooth on your iOS device, and the wizard should find it.
5. Once your device is found, press enter on the device in the list, then click on add device.
6. A confirmation might pop-up on both of your devices, asking you to make sure the code given to you on one device matches the code on the other device.
7. If they do, confirm pairing on both devices.
Get Bluetooth Audio Receiver from Microsoft store.
Once it is installed, open it, and you should see your iOS device's name in the list.
Press enter on it, and then click connect.

And that should be it!

Warning: you need to keep Bluetooth Audio Receiver program open as long as you wish to receive audio from your iOS device.

#5 (2017-2-25)

Programs tend to come in both 32 bit (x86) and 64 bit (x64) versions. In most cases, the setup or the executable file of the program clearly indicates the version (processor architecture) that it corresponds to, but sometimes that is not the case.

“So what do I do then?” you might ask.

the easy way
1. open the file properties (Alt+Enter on the file)
2. go to the compatibility tab
3. check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:”
4. if the oldest Windows version offered is Vista, the executable is 64 bit, if it is the older one (95 or alike), it is 32 bit
the harder way (also useful for dynamic library (.dll) files)
1. open the file in the text editor of your choice (notepad is an option, but beware that executable files take some time to open in notepad, so an alternative editor such as notepad2 may be better suited for this)
2. search for: “PE ” without the quotes
3. if the two characters passed “PE ” are “L”, then the executable/library is 32bit, otherwise if the characters are “d†”, then it is 64 bit.

#4 (2016-12-18)

This is how to disable “open file security warning” from appearing on every launch of the executable (applies to Windows 7 and above):

go to control panel (press windows+r and type control)
go to system (in case you can not locate it, search for it by pressing ctrl+f and typing system)
go to advanced system settings
go to Environment variables
go to system variables, and go to new
now in the “variable name” field enter:
SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS
and in the “variable value” field enter:
1
and hit ok
hit ok once more once you're in advanced system settings
That's it :)

Windows automatically blocks the files downloaded from the internet that are known to be potentially harmful. These files include the executable files (.exe), word documents (doc/docx), etc. If the files aren't unblocked, they may behave differently, or may not work at all, e.g., a blocked word document will appear in the protected view mode. You can always unblock the blocked files manually by going to the file properties, but if you wish for Windows not to blocks the files in the first place, here's how to do it:

open the run dialog (press windows+r)
enter
gpedit.msc
select User Configuration
Administrative Templates
Windows Components
Attachment Manager
press enter on “Do not preserve zone information in file attachments”
Choose “enabled”
click on “Apply” and then on “OK”.

Note: this will auto unblock files downloaded with web browsers and is known not to tell other programs like e-mail clients to do the same (so if you save attachments from with your e-mail client, chances you're still gonna get the file blocked).

#3 (2016-10-06)

Not happy with Firefox/Seamonkey loading a bunch of pages after a crash? Go to about:config (enter that inside the address bar), if prompted to promiss that you will be careful, do that, search for “browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash” and toggle it to false. Restart the browser, and next time Firefox/Seamonkey crashes, it won't load any page on its own anymore.

#2 (2016-8-14)

Yeah, false positives are inevitable. They are gonna happen sooner or later because of the way all antiviruses work.
Luckily, all antiviruses allow you to exclude the single files, folders, and even the whole drives from the virus scan.
However, you should think twice before adding the exclusions in some cases.

Exclude only the files or folders that are on a drive that you are absolutely sure will relate to the same device, i.e., never ever exclude the false positives from the drives that could be pointing to different devices, e.g., pen drives, memory cards, etc.
But why?
Imagine you exclude the file on your pen drive, because it is a false positive.
then imagine you plugging in someone else's pen drive in.
Often, pen drives will be assigned the same drive letter, so the file you have excluded from (e.g., f:), that used to be your pen drive, now is someone elses.
This means if you excluded f:\false positive.exe, all devices that are given the f as their drive letter, won't be scanned for the file you excluded.
So imagine that the friend's pen drive has the same file on his pen drive, but that it is infected.
Congrats; you have just successfully allowed a virus through.
TL;DR: Don't exclude the false positives from drive letters that aren't fixed to the single device all the time.

#1 (2016-6-25)

Need to switch sound devices often?
You can make a shortcut pointing to “mmsys.cpl” or you can just enter “mmsys.cpl” into the run dialog.
You can take it even further by assigning the hotkey for the shortcut like I did, and have it pop up from wherever you are.