Software I use
I got impatient. Microsoft announced SP1 of Vista and I couldn't wait for it to trickle out onto MSDN. I installed SP1 on my three main machines.
It seemed to dramatically reduce HDD chugging on my laptops, especially on startup. This was a big deal for me.
My Toshiba M200 power management problem is still there, but thanks to bullet #1 it is easier to recovery from. (Every other time the computer sleeps, the LCD won't come back on)
My custom desktop was rock solid before and it is...
If you have two or more computers in the same physical space that you want to control with a single mouse/keyboard you need "KM switch software". I've tried three products Kavoom KM -- Very Solid product. Windows only. Unfortunately it is $39.95 Synergy -- Cross platform (Windows/Linux/Mac), free and open source, but unfortunately the least capable of the three (as tends to happen with things cross platform). Input Director -- My current choice. Nearly as good as Kavoom. Windows only. Free.
Have you noticed your digital pictures sometimes have an unwanted red or cyan outline?
DP review has a nice detailed description of the problem here: Chromatic Aberration by Vincent Bockaert. It has to do with the way digital sensors work and the angles of light involved.
Since I'm a semi-semi-professional digital retoucher, I can tell you how to fix it.
In Photoshop, you could select the area in question, go to Hue/Saturation, select "reds" and reduce the saturation. But in an image like this one* you can't just select a big chunk because the flesh tones have red in them,...
“Steve Austin: astronaut. A man barely alive.” “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better…stronger…faster." Tim, Rajiv and I took a road trip to Boston last Friday on official Notches business. Tim was using his tablet with EVDO on the way up in the rental car when about 1/3 of the way there, he says "uh, that doesn't sound good" and held up the computer when the obvious click of death sounds became...
I'm going to go ahead and declare these things dead. While I haven't signed the contract yet, and I can't vouch first hand for the service, the online backup service Mozy wins over tape in every dimension imaginable. Helping out my dad's company take over some IT related tasks today and this seems like such a no-brainer in 2007. MozyPro supports encryption, Exchange Server, SQL Server, open and locked files, automatic/continuous block level incremental backups! MozyPro (the business version), as of this post, costs $3.95 per server and $.50 per GB/month. Doing the math on what it costs...
One of my rules for blogging is that I spend more than 15 minutes searching for something I should do a post that will help someone else in the future.
I am using a second monitor attached to my laptop when I'm at the office. I'm able to put everything (mail, IM, firefox, etc) on the second monitor and just keep Visual Studio and IE open for development on my main screen. Fantastic productivity enhancer. Except this is a laptop so when I'm connecting from somewhere else, and I'm don't carry a second monitor with me, windows will sometimes open...
First of all, this picture cracks me up. For those that missed it the first time, the tron guy page is here: TRONcostume
And I would love to dedicate three pages worth of text regarding my complex relationship to Linux, but I'm in the middle of focusing here, and will offer just a couple of generalizations for now.
I would really like to be into an open source operating system. I would use it, I would donate, I would evangelize, I would blog tips, hang out in forums, the whole nine yards. Except I don't really like *this* open source operating...
This is one of those store it on the intarweb so someone else can benefit deals. Nothing but tech follows.
I upgraded my primary work PC to Vista (RC2).
Notes:
My upgrade from XP failed twice before I uninstalled enough stuff to get it working. I believe the culprit was Virtual PC, but I can't confirm this.
I really really didn't want to have to reformat, but I was going down that road, fortunately I didn't have to (this time). Here's where syncronization tools can really help. 1) Foldershare 2) Google...
I was not-at-all surprised by this report by The PC Spy called "What Really Slows Windows Down" that chronicles common applications and the performance impact they have in Windows. The top offender is Norton Internet Security 2006, with a whopping 46% boot delay and 20% cpu delay and 2369% File IO delay. The top thirteen (worst) are all antivirus packages. A developer I used to work with always said that the McAfee enterprise AntiVirus software was in itself a virus.
I'm turning off my realtime virus scanner. Permanently.
I haven't had a legitimate virus blocked or alerted in this century....
One of the main reasons I had to upgrade the blog software was blog spam. You might have noticed I shut down comments entirely about a week ago. Well, I was getting up to 100 blog spam posts per hour. I had implemented database triggers that I found via NetNerds.Net, thanks Chrissy. But they were no match for the relentless assault I was enduring.
As I just mentioned, I'm now on Subtext and they have implmented ReverseDOS from AngryPets. The way it works is you have a file full of regular expression keywords and their DLL gets hooked up as...
I mentioned a while back I mentioned that I was using Office 2007. I have also mentioned that I use Plaxo to keep all my tasks (and calendar and contacts) in sync between home and work and laptop. Seems Plaxo isn’t 100% compatible yet with the new task style in outlook 2007, and who can blame them, it is only in beta 2 at this point and there are still many rough edges.
So as a temporary measure, I decided to try an online todo list, and via TechCrunch I tried Ta-da Lists, found it lacking, and then went for Remember...
Freeware program Who's Connected analyzes and displays your active Internet connections. It's a quick and simple tool for finding out what programs are using your bandwidth.
Who's Connected may come in handy when you suspect a bandwidth hog on your computer, but can't seem to find the culprit. While the software currently lacks a bandwidth monitor for each connection, the feature is currently in development.
Who's Connected
[via LifeHacker]
I’m one of those guys who has to make things difficult computer-wise, running all sorts of strange application combinations that the designers never imagined someone would do. The other day I ran...
Outlook Tip: Two Time Zones:
My company has offices on both the east and west coasts. People often schedule video conferences or phone calls with people on the opposite coast and there is confusion about when the meeting is taking place. Outlook has a feature that can help avoid confusion.
1. In your Outlook calendar, right click on the time and select "Change Time Zone."
2. Click "Show an Additional Time Zone"
3. Select the additional time zone that you need
[via Lifehacker]
Neat
As one who grew up computer-wise in DOS, I still break out the cmd prompt now and then.
One that I use that I never see mentioned is COPY CON filename.ext
The point is that it lets you create a file and put some text in right there, without having to open Notepad or whatever. It is useful if you want to create a file with an obscure file type. Note, you type what you want then hit F6 to save. (Logical right, F6, duh)
Anyway, this is my submission for obscure error of the week:
C:\>copy con test.txtthe quick brown fox jumps...
Okay, now everyone was impressed by the original google search.
Gmail has got everyone’s attention. (I have invites available btw)
Here’s the newest absolutely killer addition to search from Google:
(image linked)
[via BetaNews]
You know when you click on a PDF or MS Word, Excel file and it opens in the IE window? Yeah, I don’t like that. Seems so 1996 - “Let’s pretend like it is all part of the intarweb.”Here’s how to disable that behavior. Open Adobe Acrobat Reader; Choose Edit, Preferences Select the Internet tab, click off Display PDF in browser. Close Acrobat ReaderFor Office apps: Open up any explorer window like My Computer. Go to Tools, Folder Options, click on File TypesBrowse to .Doc, .XLS, and .PPT, for each one select Advanced and click off Browse in same window.
Those of us who self-host blogs and email for ourselves and others are obliged to take on the role of administrator and operations staff. Since cable modems and home routers aren’t really designed with the same level of reliability as enterprise equipment, frequent outages are not uncommon. My regular old Linksys router has a habit of freezing and requiring an unfolded paperclip poke once every ten days or so. This was usually ok because I could get home during my lunch hour, hit the button and get back before any real damage occurred. The real problem is when I was traveling...
First off, this is good. I've been needing this for a while now.
ClipPath
...ClipPath adds a small addition to the context menu when you right click in Windows Explorer. At whatever depth you are in the folder structure if you right click a file it puts the entire path to that file or folder on your clipboard (with either / or \ or straight to an Outlook email). So the next time your getting down in the framework directory and you need to pull out a long path you can use this tool to do that. [via Early Adopter]
Now, I...
Absolutely loving Konfabulator. Now available for Windows.[note the site is really slow now for me, loads of traffic I guess]
If you had been following my previous advice for multi-monitors and MaxiVista you should have room for this eye-candy.
PS. I apologize to those readers with 250 feeds for which this will be another one of those me too posts.
I have been using this application for a long long time now. It is called Beyond Compare. It does directory and file comparisons. I won't delve into all the features, but do check it out if you are in the market for such a tool. There are plugins to support all sorts of file types like MP3 (id3 tag info), images, etc.
Via Stever from way back in my ZEFER days.
Update: Forgot URL: http://www.scootersoftware.com/
Years and years of heavy reliance on MS Word's auto-correct and red squiggly spell-check means any time I type anything that doesn't get fixed for me I blame it on the program. I dug this up today. I use MSN Messenger Plus! a MSN add-in that adds a whole bunch of extra features to the regular MSN client. One feature is word filtering. The main intent is so your foul mouthed friend's rants can be set to show up as "<f-word>", etc. Well somebody had a good idea, took Microsoft Word's auto-correct list and turned it into a registry file to import the list into the program. So now whenever I invariably spell common words incorrectly it...
My #1 network troubleshooting tool is called PortQry. Microsoft provides it as a download here in command line version and here with a GUI front-end. This is how you would find out if a machine had remote desktop running:C:\>portqry -n server01 -e 3389Querying target system called: server01Attempting to resolve name to IP address...Name resolved to 10.1.1.1querying...TCP port 3389 (unknown service): LISTENINGSince ICMP (ping) is disabled so often these days PortQry is now the new ping.
I've been using Audioscrobbler for a while now to suit my OCD music telemetry needs. It works as a plugin to whatever media player you use, Winamp 5 for me, and uploads every song you listen to for analysis at their site. They offer a host of features like creating a network of like users for you to browse and hopefully pick up new artists and such.
You can browse my history here - and always on the left nav link under Music + (what I'm listening to right now).
Now of course with the massive amount of data available they...
On my XP Build List I have two items: MaxiVista and UltraMon.I've been using multiple monitors since my days at BondNet in 1995. There are lots of documented productivity improvements with multi monitors and I say with certainty that once you go multi-head you won't go back. I am able to keep my Outlook tasks and calendar open all day long on the second screen. I keep MSN Messenger and Winamp open there too. This way I don't have to stop what I'm doing to look over at my calendar and interrupt, click, click to get back to what I'm...
Downloading the pictures from Beach Party 2004 using the normally stellar XP Picture transfer wizard thing I pointed the files to be saved into a folder that doesn't exist anymore (partially my fault, partially MS's) with the "delete pictures after copying them" checked on. So you know what comes next, the pictures vanished. Fortunately I have experience with undelete and the memory cards on cameras. Basically its pretty easy to do. I purchased Undelete from Executive Software makers of Diskeeper - which I swear by. Downloaded the installer and chose the "emergency recovery" option when the installer runs - you don't...
I really really don't like web ads. Fortunately I haven't seen one in almost a year (almost). I use a program called Admuncher. It blocks all web ads including inline and popups. A regular banner ad gets replaced by a simple [munched] text link. It costs $25 but has saved me from viewing 162,555 ads and 1.269 Gigabytes of bandwidth.It is fast, lightweight and stays out of the way. Recommended.
So this will be a recurring theme on coreyh.com.
An application I use that other people might like...
Lookout for Outlook. Basically think of it as Google for email. It will do a full text index of your entire mailbox and provide search results in less than a second in most cases. This app has saved me tons of time over the last month I've been running it. I don't obsess over folder organization the way I used to; I just know that I'll be able to search for it and find it later.
Note, this is a free-for-now app...