Archive for the ‘Download’ Category:
Download/How-to overload
I found a great new site this past week. Howtogeek.com is a site that was developed to show you how to do a whole lot of things you never really thought you would want to do. At least that is what it is for me. Things like getting a Expose Clone for Vista to customizing your Vista logon screen. Or a few things I found that can even improve productivity like adding “Copy to” or “Move to” dialogs to the right click menu or Disabling delete confirmation. All I have to say is they defiantly made the cut to make it on my RSS feeds.
Download Squad also came through and showed me how to remove unwanted programs and improve battery life with vista. I haven’t used either of these yet but they are still pretty nifty. I have been wanting to try out adding folders and applications to My Computer but with howtogeek rolling out so many tools I haven’t really messed with it much. One thing I have tried and really like is the ability to upload youtube videos directly from my cell phone. You have to register your number first but after that all you do is send the video to YTUBE and it will be ready for you once you get to a computer. If you have a nifty phone that can view youtube from your phone you can just as easily view the video after a few minutes wait.
Finally Lifehacker had a neat (and not very useful but cool) tutorial on how to hide a file in a jpeg image. I have seen this before but it is always nice to link to at least one.
Hopefully I will have more stuff for you guys in another week or so but work has been really busy and I haven’t been home much.
Vista Downloads, and other stuff
Download squad has been kick’n it into high gear with some great downloads. First lets start with Vista tools.
There is something about programs that don’t need to install in order to run that I just love. Vispa is one of those programs. It is similar to TweakUI for Windows XP but it doesn’t quite have all the cool customizations. It still has enough customizing to hold me over until something better comes out. Stardock TweakVista has a few more options but it is a paid program. 
Or at least it will be when it comes out of beta, so grab it now. CyberNotes also has a pretty neat walk through on making your Alt-Tab icons bigger. I have not tried this one myself yet but I plan on doing it once Vista is fully reinstalled for me.
The last few tools are kinda random but still great. Angry IP Scanner is the first one and it does just what you think it does. It can scan for IP addresses easily with a pretty decent GUI. Add Remove programs in Windows XP is only good if the program is listed. If it isn’t there you are left in the dark. Fortunately there is a dll file that lets you get a lot of the hidden programs back on that list. Finally here are some great icons for free.
That is all I got for now so enjoy.
It has been a while
I guess it hasn’t been THAT long since my last update but I have a few new things to through your way (actually my way because no one reads this).
First of all I don’t know if I gave a link to Ze Frank his show is simply awesome and his website is pretty cool too. To bad I found out about his show after he was done with his internship.
I had an idea this morning. Why doesn’t any company make a car stereo that can strip the vocals out of live songs (cd’s, radio, etc.) so you can sing your own tracks in the car. Really is that so hard? My Sega Saturn and Xbox can both do it.
How about a download! Pitaschio is seriously one of the best plugins for Windows XP I have seen (or at least tied with Tweak UI). Thank you downloadsquad for giving me yet another tool that I use almost every day.
I don’t have anything else right now but I have a couple of posts notes coming about my upgrade to knoppmyth R5F1 and my Kubunutu 7.04 install.
Wasting time
I was wasting time waiting for my Kubuntu 7.04 Beta iso to download and I stumbled across 7 things to ask myself weekly to help “change my life”. I am all about bettering life and learning but most of the times I just forget to think or ask questions. Hopefully this will be fairly easy to implement into some sort of routine.
1. What will I try to improve on next week?
2. What was I most proud of this week?
3. What was my biggest accomplishment this week?
4. What have I done to get closer to my life goals this week?
5. What was hard for me this week, and why?
6. What was my biggest waste of time this week?
7. What did I do this week that made me ashamed?
Oh and while you are asking yourself hard questions and thinking about the meaning of life (or at least your past week) check out the keepon dancing video.
Thats all for now. Happy Birthday Bubbles!
Print to PDF’s
Thanks to Download squad I can once again print to searchable PDF’s without the need for Adobe professional installed (I hate that software). The software they talked about is called doPDF and it is basically just for printing to PDF. The readers left some comments to some other PDF creators that are probably worth a look. Some mentioned were cutePDF, PDFCreator, and BullZip PDF Creator.
I went ahead and attached doPDF v5 to this post for some reason if the site gets taken down I couldn’t figure that out.
Microsoft Photo Info Edit tool
I saw this tool and found it very useful for managing large photo collections. It helps if you already have things somewhat organized but this will allow you to edit all that information that is usually hard to get to. Below is a quick review I copied from gizmodo also.
Microsoft just released its Photo Info Tool that digital photogs will dig. Without messing with the actual photographic image, it lets you edit the metadata that accompanies each image without having to open Photoshop or any other image editor. You can access all of its functions right there in Windows Explorer with a quick right-click, and then you can change metadata such as copyright information, the title, keywords, the capture date and all other EXIF properties. You can edit a single image or lots of them at the same time. Plus you get a lot more information about each photo when you hover your cursor over it. It’s free.
How To: Transfer your PuTTY settings between computers
You can backup your putty settings with this quick command in a run dialog box,
regedit /e “%userprofile%\desktop\putty.reg” HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\<Your_username>
or you could just use PortaPuTTy.
Just in case you can’t figure it out from those two tips, here are the full instructions.
I am taking this right from one of my favorite blogs.
Exporting Your PuTTy Configuration
Putty stores its settings in the Windows registry. To save a backup of your Putty settings, you’ll need to export this registry key to a file.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham
(Simon Tatham is the original developer responsible for PuTTy)
1. Click Start->Run and type “RegEdt32″ in the “Open” dialog. Click “Ok”
2. One RegEdt32 starts, you’ll be presented with an application which looks something like:
3. Press “Ctrl+F” to bring up the Find dialog. Enter the name of the key, “SimonTratham” in the “Find What” field, and make sure only “Keys” is checked in the “Look At” section of the dialog. Finally, click “Find Next”
4. The search may take a while, reminding us that the Windows Registry is a large and mysterious place where dragons be. Let’s use these few seconds to reflect on the fact that you should never, ever, never change things in the registry unless you are absolutely, positively, totally, completely, 100% dead sure that you know exactly what you’re doing. When the search completes we’ll see the key name for which we’re looking.
5. Click File->Export. Give your file an appropriate name like, “putty.reg” and click “Save”
6. We’re done! Save the putty.reg file somewhere safe. The file doesn’t contain any passwords or actual SSH key values so, it’s relatively safe from prying eyes. Still, it does contain your configuration and that kind of data is a private matter.
Importing Your PuTTy Configuration
To import your saved PuTTy configuration on any other Windows computer simply copy your exported registry key, right click on the file and click “Merge”
Windows will ask you for confirmation that you want to import this set of registry values. We know this file is safe, because we created it but, you should never import registry information from an unknown source.
That’s all you need to know about moving your PuTTy configuration from one machine to another. This can be really useful information when upgrading to a new PC or, if you’re an office IT guy where your users all have a standard list of servers they need to connect via SSH, you can create a reference configuration on once machine and “share” it between every computer in the office.
MythTv Theme installation
Now that I have Knoppmyth up and running for more than .78 days I have had a chance to mess around with some of its features. I must say I definatly underestimated it. Anyway the thing I have today is how to install a new theme in MythTv. The one I chose is ProjectGreyhem because it is the closest to my modded xbox skin that I have now.
I am taking these instructions directly from the ProjectGrehem site because this is exactly hew it worked for me. It is really nice to have things work as they should!!
It is very easy to install Project Grayhem or Project Grayhem Wide
- Download the tarball
- Copy it to /usr/share/mythtv/themes
N.B.: Check where themes are stored on your installation as themes can be stored at /usr/local/share/mythtv/themes depending on your distro.- Unpack the tarball with: tar -xvjpf Project-Grayhem-foo.bz2
- Your new MythTV Theme should now be ready to use.
- Either theme should work with MythTV 0.20
Thanks a lot to whoever maintains this skin (I couldn’t find any credits)
Just in case anyone is wondering “download the tarball” means to use the wget command (make sure you are saving it in a directory you can write to).
and the “tar -xvjpf Project-Grayhem-foo.bz2″ actually means to type in whichever version you downloaded. To make it really easy just type “tar -xvjpf Project<tab>” in the correct folder as root.
Leave a comment if you have any problems.
Why Windows takes so long to shut down.
Ever want windows just to turn off? I found this helpful tool through another tech site. They found there was a windows tool that is called User Profile Hive Cleanup Service. Here is what Microsoft says about the tool.
The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.
What that means for you is this tool helps windows shutdown fast. Simply run the installer after installation finishes go to run and type “services.msc”. Find the service labeled User Profile Hive Cleanup and make sure it is running,
and restart. (you have to restart before the settings take effect. I just thought I would share one of the many random things I have found.
Windows automatic restarts
I found a couple hacks a while ago and I thought I would share them with the world. This one I have been using on my work computer for a while and I really like it.
This will disable the pop-up windows gives you to restart you computer every 10 minutes after you install updates.
Go to run and type “gpedit.msc” then go to this directory in gpedit computer config > admin templates > windows components > windows Update. Change the value of “re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” to something like 720 minutes. Make sure the service is enabled and then you are done. Enjoy not having to stop windows from turnning itself off.
Here is one that that will not prompt you if you are logged into the computer. I have not tried this one but it looks pretty useful. All you have to do is create a new dword value called NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers in HKLM\SOFTWARE
\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU and set it to a value of 1. Seems pretty easy. Let me know what you think. Thanks to Ryan for finding this one out.
I have so much stuff I am working on that I haven’t been able to update my page for a while. Once I actually start to get stuff done (and not just progress reports I will be posting more.