Eddie's Tech Notes

Get annoyed with the ads in the official Windows Live Messenger, but don't want to switch to other IM clients? Here are some simple steps you can take to minimize the disturbance. They do not require use of any other external programs. Open Internet Explorer. From the main menu, select Tools -> Internet Options . Under the Security tab, click on the Internet icon. Set the security level of the zone to be High . This blocks advertisements from showing in the Windows Live Messenger main window. Click on the Restricted Site icon. Press the Sites button. Add http://rad.msn.com . Open \Windows\Systems32\drivers\etc\hosts.ics . Add the following line at the end of the file. 127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com (If it happens you cannot save your change, try this .) Then your message window will be free of text advertisement. Reference: here

Although looking elegant, the My RTHK radio player available in the official site (at least the Windows gadget version) suffers from two critical problems on displaying the schedule. If you are in a time zone different from HKT (GMT +8), the on-air program shown in minimized mode is based on the program schedule of the day and your local time . Suppose you are in the US. At the time you are in your morning while Hong Kong is at night, the live stream plays the night show, but the on-air program shown is some morning show. The gadget retrieves program schedules which is updated every midnight. However, each schedule covers time from 6.00am - 5.59am the next day. This means when you are at time from 0.00am - 5.59am, the schedules you have are for the next day. Fix: Download the gadget file. Unzip it. (Renaming the extension to .zip may help.) Open script/common.js as a text file (with Notepad, for example). Look for the line var currentH = current.getHours(); (which is in the de