TeCh-CoSmOs

Every one of us has watched Star Wars on television, computer or in a theater. It is the same movie with aliens fighting each other for galaxies and such stuff. There is nothing new in it. But wait, have you watched an ASCII( American Standard Code for Information Interchange) version of Star Wars and that too in Windows usingtelnet. A word mostly linked with computer wizards. Well if you have not, then you must do it now!
There is a complete copy of Star Wars done entirely in ASCII characters that you can watch in the Windows operating system (or any OS that supports telnet). The only thing required to watch it is an internet connection; speed does not matter.


To watch it on Windows XP,
1.Go to Start, Run.
2.Now type "telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.

On Windows 7 and Windows Vista

Telnet is turned off by default in the latest versions of Windows. So, in order to watch star wars, you must first enable telnet by going to Control Panel › Programs › Turn Windows Feature On or Off and ticking both the telnet check boxes. After doing that, follow the steps given below:-

1.Go to Start, Search.
2.Type telnet and press Enter.
3.In the following command prompt window, type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
4.Now type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
If you do not need telnet anymore, you can turn it off.

The Run command on Microsoft Windows operating system allows you to directly open an application or document with just a single command instead of navigating to it’s location and double-clicking the executable icon. However, it only works for some of the inbuilt Windows programs such as Command prompt (cmd), Calculator (calc) etc. So, have you ever wondered how to create your own customized Run commands for accessing your favorite programs, files and folders? Well, read on to find out the answer.

Creating the Customized Run Command

Let me take up an example of how to create a customized run command for opening the Internet explorer. Once you create this command, you should be able to open the Internet explorer just by typing “ie” (without quotes) in the Run dialog box. Here is how you can do that.
1. Right click on your Desktop and select New -> Shortcut.
2. You will see a “Create Shortcut” Dialog box
3. Click on “Browse”, navigate to: Program Files -> Internet Explorer from your Root drive (usually C:\) and select “iexplore” as shown in the above figure and click on “OK”.
4. Now click on “Next” and type any name for your shortcut. You can choose any name as per your choice; this will be your customized “Run command”. In this case I name my shortcut as “ie”. Click on “Finish”.
5. You will see a shortcut named “ie” on your desktop. All you need to do is just copy this shortcut and paste it in your Windows folder (usually “C:/Windows”). Once you have copied the shortcut onto your Windows folder, you can delete the one on your Desktop.
6. That’s it! From now on, just open the Run dialog box, type ie and hit Enter to open the Internet Explorer.
In this way you can create customized Run commands for any program of your choice. Say “ff” for Firefox, “ym” for Yahoo messenger, “wmp” for Windows media player and so on.
To do this, when you click on “Browse” in the Step-3, just select the target program’s main executable (.exe) file which will usually be located in the C:\Program Files folder. Give a simple and short name for this shortcut as per your choice and copy the shortcut file onto the Windows folder as usual. Now just type this short name in the Run dialog box to open the program.
I hope you like this post! Pass your comments.