Scroll wheel equivalent (mouse wheel emulation) on Synaptics TouchPad

In case you have a Windows laptop with Synaptics touchpad, and you are not using mouse, chances are you've stumbled upon the following little annoyance: In some applications, actions mapped to mouse's scrolling wheel can't be triggered by touchpad. I'll use the example of Foobar2000, but there are many programs suffering from the same incompatibility with Synaptics TouchPad at its default settings. In this post I will present a simple workaround, which anables a proper emulation of mouse wheel, at the cost of software not changing the cursor into scrolling indicator anymore. Personally, I hardly consider this a lost of functionality, as I really don't think I need an indicator to tell me I'm scrolling a page. Doh!

How to sign up for U.S. Spotify without Facebook account

Short version: 
Create a German account and switch to U.S. afterwards.
Long version: 

The jury is still out on how exactly Spotify affects music industry around the world. Some say it makes it harder for small, unknown outfits to brake through, because, with all that music available at user's fingertip, competition's becoming too tough. Others say it's a great opportunity for labels and artist to collaborate with the service and pocket some extra money, otherwise lost to "piracy". To some extent controversies stem from the fact that one of the major investors in Spotify is Sean Parker - a founder of Napster (portrayed by Justin Timberlake in Social Network movie), thus a person universally hated in music business circles. What matters for us is, he was certainly a man responsible for very tight integration of Spotify with users' Facebook accounts, mostly in the USA. Although, as of September 2012, U.S. users are not restricted anymore to accessing the service solely via Facebook login, they still need an account in this popular social networking service in order to sign up.

How to watch Live BBC on iPlayer outside the UK

One of the simplest and most effective free methods for accessing from abroad Geo-blocked UK sites, is installing on your Windows computer an Expat Shield application. Ads placing in this program is on the verge of being intrusive, but it's easily "cured" with the help of AdBlock or other ad-blocking software. Speed and ease of use are there, application never causes any system instabilities (I've been using it on my Windows 7 64bit laptop for quite a long time now) and most importantly, IP addresses of the proxy servers it uses are happily accepted by BBC iPlayer and ITV Player. Live feed is nice and stable, and any amount of buffering or bitrate throttling  there is, it's probably caused by overloaded Akamai media servers used by BBC.

How to access services like Netflix, Hulu or Pandora outside the USA

Spotify, Pandora, CWTV, Netflix or Hulu - these are only few from so many services accessible exclusively within the U.S. Because of international laws regarding media rights, US citizens traveling abroad can't, for instance, access Netflix, which they paid for. It's very unfortunate that media companies seem unwilling to try and work something out, in order to satisfy their customers. Not to mention the rest of us, poor citizens of the (supposedly) globalized world, dying to watch videos on Hulu, or listen to some music on Pandora. :-)