Mac OS X: Burining disc

There are many ways of burning a disc on Mac OS X. This is one of the way.

1. Insert an empty DVD/CD into the DVD tray/drive and wait till it mounts. Once it is mounted you would see an icon with name “Untitled DVD“. Drag and drop the contents to be burned into the icon.

2. Go to Finder Menu and select File -> Burn “Untitled DVD” …

3. Finder will, throw up a dialog asking for Disc Name and Burning Speed. For Disc Name give an appropriate name and for Burning Speed keep the default value or set the maximum speed available. Click the “Burn” button.

4. A progress dialog will be shown for the burn process.

5. DVD/CD icon will be replaced by the locked folder icon.

NOTE
1. If you cancel while the disc is being burned, the CD/DVD will be incomplete and unreliable. You should not use it.

How to Uninstall Apps (Software) from Windows 8

Steps for uninstalling application/software on Windows 8:

1. Press the Windows key to go to the Start screen.

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2. Type “Control” in the Start screen. Click on the “Control Panel” on the left handle.

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3. Click on “Uninstall a program” in the “Programs” tab.

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4. Select the software/application to be uninstalled and click the “uninstall” button.

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5. A confirmation dialog pops up. Click “Yes” to uninstall or “No” to stop uninstall.

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6. If “Yes” was clicked in the previous dialog, an uninstall progress dialog will be shown.

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Application/Software will be uninstalled after the progress dialog.

Disk partitioning on Windows 8

Normally new machines come with single partition but it is safer to have multiple partitions. If the OS goes bad for some reason you may have to format the OS drive which may lead to loss of data if all the contents are kept in the OS drive.

Windows 8 has simple steps for partitioning the hard disk. These steps are given below.

1. Press Windows + R and type diskmgmt.msc. This would open Windows 8 Disk Management tool.

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2. In the Windows 8 Disk Management tool window, right-click on any drive you want to partition and select “Shrink Volume“.

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3. In the pop-up dialog, enter the amount of space to shrink.

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4. Click “Shrink” in the previous dialog and we can preview a unallocated space next to the drive that was shrinked (In this case C drive).

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5. Right click on it and select “New Simple Volume“. Then, we can partition a new volume in Widows 8 by following the guidance.

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6. A new window will open, click “Next“

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7. Click “Next” again.

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8. Assign any letter to the drive and click “Next“.

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9. Preferably select “Format this volume with the following settings:“. Keep “File system” and “Allocation unit size” as it is. You can set “Volume label” to any name you want. This will become the name of the partition/drive.

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10. If everything goes right, you should see this screen.

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11. Mission accomplished! If partition is successful, new drive will show up on Windows 8 Disk Management tool.

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Ubuntu apt-get install error

I tried installing few packages using apt-get on my Ubuntu machine and it kept failing and also the Ubuntu Software Center kept crashing on launch.

Error

Reading package lists… Error!
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.canonical.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_partner_binary-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

To fixed the issue by deleting all the package lists files inside “/var/lib/apt/lists/” and downloaded the package lists from the repositories and “updated” them to get information on the newest versions of packages and their dependencies (sudo apt-get update).

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
sudo apt-get update

This seemed to fix the problem. Not sure what was the reason for the corruption of the files in the first place.

Java is running on 3 Billion devices

I was installing the latest security patch provided by Oracle and this banner caught my eyes.

3 Billion devices run java

The patch had fixes for some of the recent security issues raised on Java. Some of the recent security lapses in Java are highlighted in the posts below.

Critical bug in newest Java gives attackers complete control of PCs

U.S. says Java still risky, even after security update

It is Pretty scary to think that all of those 3 Billion machines are unsafe! Oracle is doing what it does the best. Purchase a company and kill it! I miss SUN.