How To: Save yourself from stupid Tech Support Questions

Kulbir Saini — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:57:16 +0000

Almost every other geek is pwned by his friends or people he/she knows by their stupid tech support questions. And sometime they drag you to the limits that you get frustrated enough to shoot yourself and bang your head onto your computer screen How on earth can someone be so stupid But luckily I found a Pidgin Plugin called STFW(Search The F**king Web). This is one really awesome plugin I have seen recently and I (and most other geeks) needed something like this for ages

What it does?

When somebody asks you a question, you can reply back with relevant keywords from the message you received prefixed with the command /stfw. The plugin will automatically convert the keywords to a URL understood by the site Let Me Google That For You (lmgtfy.com) and asker will get a URL like this http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+http.

How to use?

The Download, installation and usage instruction can be seen on plugin page. So, when someone ask you “Wireless not working on my laptop”, just reply back with the following message

/stfw Wireless not working on my laptop

C’mon guys, ask me tech support questions

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How To: Yahoo Messenger on Teaching Lab Machines

Kulbir Saini — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:46:43 +0000

Though the pcs in the labs are not having any support for applications except terminal or command line, Linux version of yahoo messenger can be opened there. This is a step by step procedure.

Step 1

Open two terminals and through one of them logon on to your mirage server account because that supports the Gaim(Linux version of yahoo messenger).

Step 2

Now I will call the terminal in which you are logged into mirage as remote machine and the terminal of the machine at which you are working as local machine.
At your local machine execute these commands.

[kulbir@localhost ~] xhost + [Enter]
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host

The messege displayed above should appear otherwise you may have problems.

[kulbir@localhost ~] /sbin/ifconfig [Enter]
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:2F:57:C5:9D
inet addr:372.12.226.25  Bcast:122.12.226.123  Mask:212.223.345.138
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1520  Metric:1
RX packets:136851 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:82928 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:71106959 (67.8 Mb)  TX bytes:40997603 (39.0 Mb)
Interrupt:10
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:122.4.4.1  Mask:252.2.2.1
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:11436  Metric:1
RX packets:46123 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:46123 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:22001021 (20.9 Mb)  TX bytes:22001021 (20.9 Mb)

The address against inet_addr in 3rd line is the IP address of your local machine.

Step 3

Now switch to your remote machine terminal and issue the following commands…

[kulbir@server ~] export DISPLAY=[IP address]:0.0  [Enter]

e.g.

[kulbirsaini@server ~] export DISPLAY=222.26.36.5:0.0 [Enter]

If no error comes, means things are going fine.

[kulbir@server ~] xterm [Enter]

Now also if no error comes and a new teminal appears then you are ready to open the gaim.
Issue this command on the new appeared terminal

[kulbir@server ~] gaim [Enter]

yahoo messenger will appear and now you are ready to chat.
Add your account to the messenger and chat