Welcome to Kirsle.net!

Welcome to Kirsle.net! This is my personal homepage where I upload my software projects and other creative works, and it's where my web blog lives.

Force MSN Messenger to Use a Proxy

For anybody wanting to know how to do this, it's possible to force Windows Live Messenger to obey your proxy settings.

In my case I wanted MSN 2011 to connect using a socks proxy (using SSH port forwarding to use an SSH tunnel as SOCKS 5 proxy).

To set the proxy settings, go to the "Connection" page in the preferences of MSN Messenger, click Advanced Settings and enter your proxy details.

The problem is, MSN will only use your proxy settings if it can't normally connect to MSN without them (i.e. if your default TCP internet connection will work, MSN will always use that instead of your proxy settings). This is how you can force MSN to use the proxy settings.

You have to block MSN from being able to connect to its authentication servers without the proxy. To do this, we have to tamper with the Hosts file.

The Hosts file on Windows is kept at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (note that it doesn't have a file extension). Open this in a text editor like Notepad or the edit command in Command Prompt (I prefer the latter approach because you can open a Command Prompt window as Administrator and then editing the file is a snap without having to deal with permission issues when saving changes).

Add these lines to the Hosts file:

127.0.0.1       messenger.hotmail.com
127.0.0.1       msgr.hotmail.com
127.0.0.1       gateway.messenger.hotmail.com
127.0.0.1       login.gateway.hotmail.com

And then restart MSN and it should have difficulty connecting without the proxy settings (if using a SOCKS proxy, attempt to sign into MSN before you open the proxy to be sure that it fails to connect. Then start the proxy and see that it successfully signs in).

This works by routing all the MSN Messenger hostnames to the loopback address and blocks MSN from being able to authenticate. But with the SOCKS proxy, it can connect because it would do the DNS lookups from the SSH server instead of the local system.

Hope this helps someone!

VirtualBox Scale Mode

Updated: added pictures. Bumped the timestamp to make this post new again.

I don't know how I missed this, but apparently VirtualBox finally supports a "Scale Mode."

I've always wanted this feature. Why, you ask?

One easy example is for running an old operating system (older than Windows 2000) that isn't supported by VirtualBox, so that there are no Guest Additions for it. Guest Additions for supported OS's install extra drivers for the virtual machine, so that when you put VirtualBox into "Full Screen" mode, the guest OS will automatically increase its screen resolution to fit your display. When it can't do that, it will just display the screen at its literal resolution and put a black margin to fill in the extra space.

Here is an expertly Photoshopped demonstration of what I'm talking about. If you were running a Windows 3.1 virtual machine at an 800x600 screen resolution, and you put the VM full-screen, this is what it would look like on your 1366x768 monitor:

Another example: even on supported guests, running an older game like Starcraft (which runs in a resolution of 640x480) had this problem too: if the VM is running Full Screen and you start Starcraft... instead of the game's display stretching across your whole monitor, it stays at 640x480 pixels and is centered on the screen. This sucks.

So it seems VirtualBox has finally added Scale Mode (available in the "Machine" menu along side Full Screen and Seamless modes). There's one quirk to it, though: Scale Mode and Full Screen don't work together. On my system, going into Scale Mode put the virtual machine into a window on my screen. This window could be maximized, but it couldn't be made full screen. So that sorta sucks.

Luckily, my Linux window manager (xfwm4, the window manager of the XFCE desktop environment) supports putting any window full screen, whether the window wants it or not. This means the window decorations are taken away and the contents of the window are resized to fill the display. Success! I can now run full screen, scaled resolution guest operating systems.

Scale mode with xfwm4's full-screen option gives you a "native" experience.

Xfce for Gnome 2 Refugees

Ever since I jumped ship from Gnome to Xfce a few years ago when Gnome 3/Shell was first announced, I've configured my Xfce desktops to strongly resemble the standard Gnome 2 panel layout.

Click the screenshot for the full size version.

Along the top panel I have my Applications and Places menus, app launchers for my commonly used programs, my CPU usage graph, notification area and clock. On the bottom panel are my task bar and workspace switcher. These are all standard Xfce panel applets.

The details for anyone who's interested (the only panel applet options shown are the ones that differ from the default options):

• Top Panel:
  Orientation: Horizontal
  Size (pixels): 24
  Length (%): 100
  • Applications Menu
    Button title: Applications
    Icon: a Fedora icon in /usr/share/pixmaps...
  • Places Menu
    Show: Label Only
    Label: Places
  • Separator
  • Many Launcher applets for my commonly used programs
  • Separator
    Style: Transparent
    Expand: checked
  • Brightness plugin
  • Screenshot
  • CPU Graph:
    Background: black
    Width: 48
    Show frame: checked
    Show border: unchecked
  • Separator
  • Notification Area
  • Separator
  • DateTime:
    Layout Format: Date Only
    Date Format: Custom: %a %b %e, %l:%M %p
    The DateTime applet has a drop-down calendar, unlike the normal Clock applet.
• Bottom Panel:
  Orientation: Horizontal
  Size (pixels): 24
  Length (%): 100
  • Window Buttons
  • Workspace Switcher

So, any Gnome 2 refugees who can't stand Gnome 3... Xfce 4.8 is a very good option and you can configure it to look and feel just like Gnome 2.

Sequence Breaking

I spent most of the day today toying around with Pokemon FireRed Version - trying to sequence break it, mostly.

Originally, I wanted to see what would happen if you got to Fuchsia City without having taken one of the fossils from Mt. Moon... because in the Fuchsia City Zoo, there will be either an Omanyte or a Kabuto there -- the opposite fossil from the one you chose early in the game. So I wanted to see what the game would do...

But then I realized that, Fuchsia City is the perfect city to start the game in because, while there's a steep difficulty curve to get your bearings, you can actually continue the game from there and get back on track. This can't be said of all the other cities (especially Cinnabar Island).

I've divided my whole quest up into four parts, complete with screenshots. Read about my sequence breaking quest here.

Google Voice for Firefox

Just a simple little way to get Google Voice notifications if you're a Firefox user... and it doesn't even involve any add-ons.

How to do it: simply go to the Google Voice website (https://www.google.com/voice), then right click on the tab and click "Pin as App Tab." In Firefox, if a pinned tab changes its page title (to put a "(1)" in it for example), the tab will highlight as its attempt to notify you that something has changed.

So if you're a Google Voice user and you want to know when somebody texts you but you don't want to use Google Chrome, this method is easy and works pretty well.

Incidentally, if you pin Facebook, its tab will also highlight if you get new messages or notifications. It works on any web page that notifies you by changing its page title.