Vicky's Technical Blog

On a Saturday night, after happily and proudly connecting my Verbatim USB 3.0 External Drive I was shocked to hear a clicking and fearful noise. I thought the drive has failed. The drive is 1 TB (2.5 inch hard disk). I had to copy some important files from the External drive to my Laptop. I switched to another USB port and guess what... my drive worked correctly J The real culprit was one of the USB ports on my laptop. (Oh My DOG, this USB port is a real B*TCH !!) “Clicking Noise does not absolutely mean that the external drive has failed.” The USB port on my laptop is not faulty – a USB mouse connected on this port works correctly. I did some research to investigate this issue. Other users got similar problem “Low voltage to a hard-drive can mimic all manner of failures.” So, insufficient power from a USB port on a laptop or pc can cause clicking noises on an usb external drive. My drive is safe. I can copy my data from it. Long live my drive J

Below is the message I usually get when the 260 characters limit is exceeded while extracting an archive especially if it contains lots of HTML files. This limitation is by design in Windows. WinRAR or any software is not to be blamed. On Linux you don’t have this limitation. From MSDN : “In the Windows API (with some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length for a path is  MAX_PATH , which is defined as 260 characters.” I found a couple of workarounds to deal with this issue: 1.Print my favorite online pages as PDF (You can use doPDF  or online web2pdf convertors. I recommend printfriendly.com ) 2.Move the archive file (ZIP or RAR) to the root of the drive. Example, You can copy or move it to C:\  or D:\  then extract your ZIP or RAR file from there.

Traditional T9 Style Keyboard for Android If you are looking for traditional keyboard on your android smartphone welcome!! I am used to the traditional style keyboard on my Nokia N73 mobile. So I find it a bit difficult to type using the QUERTY Keyboard especially on smaller screens. As solutions we have the following  apps on Google Play Store : 1. Perfect Keyboard Free - Free and Commercial Versions 2. (EvenBetter)NumberPad Keyboard - Commercial There might be other similar (FREE) apps but these two looks great. Just for your info, from Wikipedia : "T-9 , which stands for Text on 9 keys, is a USA-patented predictive text technology for mobile phones (specifically those that contain a 3x4 numeric keypad), originally developed by Tegic Communications, now part of Nuance Communications."

Even if you have passed the CCNA or higher certifications, there’s always something which still teases your mind and challenges your technical knowledge. I am talking about password encryption in cisco routers. I did some research and investigated it myself. From Official CiscoIOS Password Encryption Facts webpage: “To determine which scheme has been used to encrypt a specific password, check the digit preceding the encrypted string in the configuration file. If that digit is a 7, the password has been encrypted using the weak algorithm. If the digit is a 5, the password has been hashed using the stronger MD5 algorithm. ” Summary: 7 = type 7.weak encryption (reversible encryption) 5= type 5. strong encryption (MD5 one way hash encryption) enable password = plain text enable password in configuration file (show running-config) enable secret = encrypts enable password using the MD5 Hashing algorithm . Password is encrypted in configuration file (show runn...