Jan 02

CyberNotes: Words of Wisdom from Homer Simpson

Posted in: CyberNotes, Humor, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Funny Friday

With the recent release of The Simpsons Movies in theaters, I thought it was an appropriate time to turn to Homer Simpson for some words of wisdom. Simpsons fan or not, his “wisdom” is funny. Feel free to share your own favorite moments from the show whether they involve Homer, or any of the other characters. I’ve also included a YouTube video that’s a compilation of Homer’s funniest moments. Happy Friday!

From the mouth of Homer Simpson…

  • Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They’re about to announce the lottery numbers.
  • Maybe, just once, someone will call me “Sir” without adding, “You’re making a scene.”
  • What do we need a psychiatrist for? We know our kid is nuts.
  • Marge, you’re as beautiful as Princess Leia and as smart as Yoda.
  • Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably.  The lesson is, never try.
  • Operator! Give me the number for 911!
  • Bart, with $10,000, we’d be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like…love!
  • I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me Superman.
  • Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.
  • Marge, don’t discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn.  It’s what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.
  • Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?
  • All my life, I’ve had one dream, to achieve my many goals.
  • Dad, you’ve done a lot of great things, but you’re a very old man, and old people are useless.
  • “To Start, Press Any Key.” Where’s the ANY key?
  • I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

 

Source: Thatwasfunny.com

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Jan 02

CyberNotes: Informer is the Ultimate Yahoo Widget

Posted in: CyberNotes, Features, Freeware, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Yahoo

This article was written on April 01, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Time Saving Tuesday

It’s not often that I come across a single widget/gadget that is good enough to constitute it’s own article, and I never expected to find one that would be good enough for its own CyberNotes article. When I tried out Informer, a Yahoo Widget, I was absolutely blown away at everything it could do. It’s almost an entire application in itself!

What could this possibly do that makes it so impressive. It rolls about ten or fifteen different widgets up into one. It can monitor your network/CPU usage, check your IMAP/POP3 mailboxes, show your battery life, fetch RSS feeds, and provide quick access to files/folders that you use often. To keep it all organized Informer shows everything in a single toolbar located on your desktop:

informer overview
(Click to Enlarge)

Before we proceed with the different features that Informer has you should know that each thing you add to the toolbar is called a “sensor.” They are kind of like mini-widgets in some sense, and as seen in the screenshot above there is quite a lengthy list of different sensors that can be added.

Heads up: I’ve found that this widget alone will consume between 10MB and 40MB of memory depending on what and how much you add to it. With all the different things it’s capable of doing this might be worth it, but I know some of you covet your memory as if your life depended on it.

–Email Checker–

Informer is capable of checking email from a variety of different email accounts. It has special options for Gmail (both regular Gmail users and Gmail for Domains) and Yahoo Mail accounts, but it can be configured to work with any IMAP or POP3 email account. When you receive new mail you’ll be alerted with a slick little notification window that pops out of the side of the screen.

You can add as many mail accounts as you would like, and then pick how many messages it displays as well as the retrieval interval. Heck, you can even specify a custom icon to be used with each different mailbox you add.

informer email 

–System Stats–

I know that a lot of you are stats addicts, and find enjoyment in knowing how hard your computer is working. Informer has a variety of different sensors that can be added for monitoring different areas of your machine: CPU, network, system uptime, battery, memory, disk, and swap.

informer stats 

–RSS Feeds–

Is it ever possible to have too many ways to read your RSS feeds? Apparently not because Informer is also able to retrieve and display RSS feeds for your favorite sites. With every feed that you have the widget monitor you can specify the update interval, and you can provide a custom icon.

informer rss 

–Shortcuts–

To make this widget even more useful you can use it as a place to hold shortcuts to your favorite files, folders, and websites. If you want to add a shortcut just drag and drop a file, folder, or URL onto the toolbar. If it’s a folder that you’ve added you’ll be able to open it right there and view the contents. What’s really nice is that the window that appears is completely resizable:

informer start menu 

–And More–

Is that it? Not quite. There are several more sensors that we haven’t covered in this article including:

  • A power button to turn off, reboot, or lock your computer
  • Recycle Bin
  • WiFi signal strength
  • Internet Radio
  • Date/Time (with a pop-out calendar)
  • Images
  • Text

–Preferences–

Not only can you customize each of the sensors that you add to Informer, but you can also customize the toolbar itself. You can do things like specify an external RSS reader and mail client, change the appearance of the toolbar, enable multiple monitor support, and much more. Here’s a glimpse of the different areas that can be customized:

informer preferences

If Informer sounds like something that would be useful to you head on over to Yahoo Widgets to get the Informer widget. It’s completely free, and I think you’ll be pretty shocked with everything it is capable of.

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Jan 01

CyberNotes: Advanced Photo Effects

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Photos, photoshop, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on February 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons Adobe Photoshop has become so popular is because of all the advanced photo affects that can be applied to images. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of free alternatives emerge onto the scene saving users hundreds of dollars, but many of them don’t have the effects and control that I’m looking for.

The tool that we found for you today is called PhotoFiltre, and it is completely free just like most of the software we write about. It’s far from becoming a Photoshop replacement, but I’ve found that it is extremely handy at applying effects and touching up the digital photos that you have lying around. Lets look at some of the things that it can do…

 photofiltre overview
(Click to Enlarge)

–Features–

  • There are over 100 filters available including ones for standard adjustments (brightness, saturation, etc…) and even artistic ones (watercolor, puzzle effect, etc…). We’ll get into these more in the next section of the article.
  • You can select portions of an image with an automatic shape (rectangle, ellipse, triangle, rhombus, rounded rectangle) or with the lasso, magic wand, and polygon tools.
  • Well-organized toolbars make it easy to switch between the most used tools.
  • PhotoMasque lets you create advanced effects of contour and transparency on your images by using preset masks. These masks are grayscale images, where white is the transparancy color, while opacity increases as the shades of gray become darker. Black means complete opacity. There are several basic masks included.
  • The Automatisation module lets you apply basic functions/corrections (conversion, image size, framing) to a group of images.
  • Advanced text effects are available including rotation, shading, and bevel.
  • Assemble and blend multiple images.
  • Automatic photo corrections that enhance your images so that they look the best.
  • Free plug-ins add even more functionality including red eye removal, animated GIF importing, page curl effect, gradients, screen capture, and much more.

–Effects–

One of my favorite things with the PhotoFiltre application is the wide array of special filters that’s available. I wanted demonstrate what some of the filters can do, so here are some examples using the image pictured in the screenshot above as the starting ground:

  • I cropped the image so that the mountains were removed, and then I applied the Lake reflection filter (in the Deform menu). It really does look like a reflection in a lake, doesn’t it?
    photofiltre lake reflection
  • This is the Puzzle effect (in the Stylize menu)… you could really create your own puzzle if you had a steady hand with the scissors. :)
    photofiltre puzzle
  • This is the Trapezoid/Perspective filter (in the Deform menu) which can be used to angle your photos:
    photofiltre perspective
  • Here I used the Lasso tool to select just the grass area, and then I applied the Fog filter (in the Visual effect menu) to the selected area.
    photofiltre fog
  • In a single click I was able to turn this wonderful afternoon photo into what appears to be a night shot. This was done using the Night effect filter (in the Color menu):
    photofiltre night

Those are just a handful of the filters available. Here’s a quick list of some of my other favorites that you might find useful:

  • Blurring (several different types of blurs)
  • Antialias
  • Dust reduction
  • Revive colors
  • Sunset effect
  • Colored pencil
  • Comic strip
  • Ripple
  • Glass
  • Mosiac
  • Frames
  • and dozens more…

–Overview–

PhotoFiltre has become a beloved application of mine over the last month simply because I do a lot of photo corrections and enhancements on a regular basis. If you want to edit your images this is a great solution, and once you throw a couple of the plug-ins into the app it will become a really powerful photo editor.

PhotoFiltre Homepage

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Jan 01

CyberNotes: Create a Custom Software Update Notifier

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Tips and Tricks, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on October 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Tutorial Thursday

One of the most common things that I’ve been getting asked is how people can stay up-to-date on the latest software. I got really excited about the free UpdateStar application which I mentioned last week, but it still didn’t have information on a lot of the software that I used.

There are hundreds of sites out there that provide RSS feeds for downloads, and I began to think to myself that there had to be a good way to use some of those feeds to my advantage. Then Yahoo! Pipes came to mind since I had just used that last week to show how to translate RSS feeds, and it works perfectly in this situation.

–Overview–

What we’re going to do with Yahoo! Pipes is combine several feeds from popular download sites into one central feed. I recommend a handful of sites at the end of this article that should offer exactly what you’re looking for.

Then we’re going to use Yahoo! Pipes to sift through every item in each of the feeds, and pull out only the items that interest us. Because of the nature of Yahoo! Pipes it will only take a second to go back and add more things to watch for, so don’t worry if you forget to put an app on the list to be monitored.

–Instructions–

  1. Go to the Yahoo! Pipes homepage, and begin creating a new pipe.
  2. Drag the “Fetch Feed” item over onto the grid (located under the Sources menu):
    Software Update Notifier 1
  3. Add the feeds you want to monitor for the downloads (a recommended list can be found at the end of this article). To add multiple feeds just use the plus sign located next to “URL”.
    Software Update Notifier 2
  4. Drag the “Filter” item over onto the grid (located under the Operators menu):
    Software Update Notifier 3
  5. Adjust the filter so that it will only “Permit” a feed item to make it through if it matches one of the names you are looking for. You can add multiple names to search for by hitting the plus sign next to “Rules”. Just make sure each one has the “item.title” selected.
    Software Update Notifier 4
  6. Now you just have to connect the dots, literally. When you’re done hit the “Refresh” link at the bottom to see a live preview of what the resulting feed will look like. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see any items because there may not have been updates to your programs in a little while.
    Software Update Notifier 5
  7. Go ahead and hit the “Save” button in the upper-right corner of the screen, and give your Pipe a name. Then click the “Back to My Pipes” link towards the top, and you should see your new feed listed there. Click on it, and then subscribe to it with your feed reader!

–Feeds–

There are hundreds of different download sites that you can subscribe to, but that’s not really necessary. Below is a list of five different feeds that should take care of all your needs. All you need to do is copy and paste each of the URL’s that I provide into Step 3 above.

  1. Download.com: http://www.download.com/3409-2001-0-10.xml?tag=lr_rss
  2. Fileforum.com: http://fileforum.betanews.com/rss2
  3. MajorGeeks.com: http://majorgeeks.com/news.xml
  4. FileHippo.com: http://filehippo.com/rss/
  5. CyberNetNews.com: http://feeds.cybernetnews.com/CyberNetDailyDownloads

–Tips–

  • One feed will probably be enough, and that way you eliminate the possibility of receiving duplicate entries in the feed which you can see happened to me in Step 6 above. I like to know as soon as possible when new programs are released (for obvious reasons), and having multiple feeds lets me do that. I recommend the MajorGeeks feed if you are going to choose just one of them.
  • Let’s say you have something that you’re tracking called “ER”. You can’t just enter that into the filter because every title that has “er” somewhere in the words will match. To get around this just put spaces before and after the “ER” in the filter so that it is treated as a word.

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Dec 31

CyberNotes Giveaway: NoteScraps is the Perfect Post-it Note Replacement

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on April 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Microsoft Monday

Notescraps1One of the ways that I keep myself organized is by writing little notes here and there, and making “to-do” lists. It’s suited me well, but the problem is that sometimes the notes have important information that I want to hang on to, and so I never throw them out. I end up with a desk and monitor filled with post-it notes, and finding notes when I need them turns into a hideous task. I knew there had to be a better way to manage my little notes, but I just wasn’t sure what.

My problem was solved recently when I was introduced to NoteScraps which does exactly what my post-it notes have done for me all along, except better! NoteScraps is a program for Windows Vista or Windows XP to help you store all of the bits of information that you’d normally write down.  The difference being, not only can you take notes, you can search your notes to find the one that you’re looking for.

Features

  • Each note is automatically time stamped so that you know when you wrote it.
  • Use shift + windows key + “N” to open a new note
  • Use shift + windows key + “F” to search your notes
  • Clean, simple interface with no menus
  • Color-code notes with a choice of 5 different colors

Another nice feature is that you’re able to export all of your notes.  All you have to do is go to your My Documents folder, and find the NoteScraps folder.  Within that folder you’ll find one document with all of your notes in plain text.

My two favorite features are that you’re able to color-code your notes, and you can search them.  Color coding has been extremely helpful because I’ve chosen one color for work related notes, and another color for home related notes.

If you’re using the trial version, you’re limited to 10 notes, and for the majority of the people, that’s enough. If you’d need more than 10 notes open at a time you can purchase NoteScraps for $20.00. It requires .NET Framework 3.0 if you’re using windows XP.

Notescraps

Suggestions

So far over the last few weeks that I’ve been using NoteScraps, I’ve found it to be the perfect replacement for all of my post-it notes. However, there are a few things I’d like to see changed. First, I’d like to see simple formatting like bullets and bold text. There are certain things in my notes that I’d like to have stand out. I’d also like an option to quickly delete a note. As it stands, you need to select all of the text within a note and press delete.  An X in the corner would be helpful.

I’d also like to be able to choose the order of my notes.  Right now it shows the most recently modified item first.  This is a logical way to do it, however, I’d like to be able to select which note goes where.

I realize that the application isn’t intended to be feature intensive. There are applications that are designed with all of the bells and whistles like EverNote which was just recently mentioned in the Forum. However, I think a few small changes like the addition of a delete button and minimal formatting would make NoteScraps even better.

Wrapping it up

Notescraps2NoteScraps is the perfect post-it note replacement, and a great way to keep all of your scraps of information organized in one location. I love that I’m able to color-code each of my notes, and that I’m able to easily search my notes using the find feature.

Remember, you can download the free trial that never expires and you’ll be able to use 10 notes.  You can delete notes and create new ones, you just can’t ever exceed 10 at a time.  The paid version while a bit high in price at $20.00, gives you unlimited notes. Just download the trial, and then once you have the trial installed, you’ll see the option to “Buy Now.”

My desk and my monitor are finally free of post-it notes, and now all of my important bits of information have been moved to NoteScraps.

Click here to watch a high resolution movie demonstrating NoteScraps.

Giveaway!

If you think that NoteScraps would be useful, leave a comment below.  We’ll select five people at random who will get the full version of NoteScraps valued at $20.00!

  • This is open to anybody over the age of 18 worldwide with an email address, except void where prohibited.
  • You MUST include an email address in the email field of the comment (this is not displayed publicly) because we will be passing on the five winning email addresses to the developers so that they can email the license code to you.
  • Only one entry per person. If more than one entry is submitted, all entries will be void.

You have until 11:59 PM on Tuesday, April 24th to enter. Winners will be announced Wednesday morning on April 25th.

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Dec 29

CyberNotes: World’s Most Expensive Private Jets

Posted in: CyberNotes, Gadgets, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 27, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Million Dollar Monday

The chances of coming across celebrities and the world famous while traveling by air  are getting slimmer as more of these people opt for their own luxury private jet.  Last week we talked about luxury yachts, which are probably owned by the same crowd that own the world’s most expensive jets! Prices can run well into the tens of millions with amenities most of us could only dream of, like gold-plated bathroom fixtures, hand-woven carpet, original artwork, etc.

One particular jet has crocodile leather trim all throughout including the toilet seat! Yes, the toilet seat! As of June, there were over 219,000 non-commercial airline, non-military planes in the US. Just like the yachts we wrote about last week, it appears that the bigger the jet is, the better.So, here’s what we’ve dug up about the world’s most expensive private jets!

Boeing is pretty well known for their commercial aircraft like the 747.  They also have a line of business jets that are designed and configured to be luxurious.  Some of them include a master bedroom, showers, fancy bathrooms, conference rooms, and dining areas. These particular jets cost anywhere from 42-47 million! Capacity is anywhere from 24-63 people plus 3 crew members. One particular jet (pictures to the right) has 807 square feet available for “working space.” Any business leader would have anything and everything imaginable to keep business running from the air.

Another well known maker of luxury jets is Bombardier with their BD-700 Global Express jet. This particular jet is considered to be “high speed” and is owned by people such as Celine Dion, Bill Gates, Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), and Steven Spielberg. This is a smaller jet in comparison to the Boeing version and can hold anywhere from 8-19 passengers with 2-4 crew members. It has similar features from the Boeing like the separate conference area, living cabin, galley, crew rest area, etc. The price begins at around 45 million!

If I ever make 45 million in my lifetime, I’ll be a happy camper! This type of transportation is certainly for the privileged traveler. There’s nothing like running your business from the air, which these jets are completely capable of doing.  When price is no object, a luxury jet is what your money can buy!

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Dec 29

CyberNotes: How To Automatically Login To Windows XP

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on August 03, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Tutorial Thursday

One thing I hate is to restart my computer, walk away to do something, and return just to find my computer sitting at the login screen. Then I have to wait for it to load all of my programs when really I just want it to be ready to use. I could just remove the password from my account but I also share files on my hard drive and don’t want to expose them to prying eyes. It took a little searching but I was able to find a few ways to automatically have Windows login for me.

The easiest way is probably to download TweakUI from Microsoft and use it to “enter” your password every time you boot Windows. Besides for just that feature it also has several other things that it does to let you customize Windows XP, so it is probably worth downloading anyways.

However, I wanted a quick fix that I could do for anyone without having to download some software. It takes just a few steps and about 60 seconds:

  1. Go to Start->Run and type control userpasswords2 into the box.

    How To Automatically Login To Windows XP

  2. In the box that pops up you need to select your username (the “Administrator” username will not work for Windows XP Home Edition users). Then uncheck the box that says “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.“

    How To Automatically Login To Windows XP

  3. Press OK to continue. You will be prompted with a box that asks for your password so enter it in and press OK again.

    How To Automatically Login To Windows XP

  4. That’s it, now every time that you start Windows up it will automatically log you in.

Even though this is very convenient you need to think of possible security risks. I use this primarily at my house because no one else has easy access to that computer. If you do this to your laptop then anyone who steals it could gain access to your system without needing a password. So think wisely before using this feature on all of your computers.

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Dec 27

CyberNotes: Changing the Sounds in Windows Vista

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on June 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Microsoft Monday

I’m one that tends to turn off most of the system sounds on my computer. I’ve never really found them useful, and in fact, most of the time they annoy me. Last August when it was reported that Microsoft was not going to allow you to disable the startup sound in Vista, many people including myself were a little upset. Luckily they changed their minds, and I can now disable it.

If you enjoy all of the sounds in your operating system and you’re using Windows Vista, you’ll notice that many of them sound much different than those in XP.  One major difference besides the actual sounds is the difference that they were encoded.  XP Sounds were encoded at 352 kpbs while Vista sounds were encoded at 1,411 kbps.  Vista sounds are clearly better quality, but they also tend to be shorter than any of the sounds in XP as well.

A nice comparison of Vista Sounds versus XP sounds can be found here.

Customize System Sounds

I don’t know how many of you go explore the Sound menu found in the Control Panel, but there are different sounds that you can choose from to customize what you hear and when. There’s an entire drop-down list of sounds so that you can select a particular sound for a certain event. By clicking the “Test” button, you can hear what a sound sounds like before you select it. You can also click “browse” to select your own WAV file.

Soundmenu

 

Convert Your Own Sounds to WAV

As mentioned above, you can browse to select your own sounds. That means you can search around the Internet looking for sounds clips to then be used for your system sounds. The only requirement is that the sounds must be converted to WAV before you’re able to use them.

If you find sounds that you like that are in any other format like MP3 or WMA, you can use a tool like dBpoweramp to convert it to WAV. It’s free, and simple to use.

Download dBpoweramp Music Converter

Here are three websites where you can find sound clips:

  2. Bravenet (you can filter by WAV sounds)

Create Your Own Sounds

Instead of going around looking for sounds around the web, why not create your own? Vista already comes with a Sound Recorder, so all you’ll need is a microphone.  Please note: It will record in WMA format, so once again you can use dBpoweramp Music Converter to convert the file to WAV.

Once you’re done recording your sounds and have selected which ones you’d like for different events, you can save it as a Sound Scheme by clicking “Save as.”

SoundPackager

If you’re familiar with IconPackager, SoundPackager will do something similar.  It’s a project in the works over at Stardock, and it looks like a beta will be available in July.  On their website, they say: “It applies sets of sound effects to a host of common Windows actions. Stardock has teamed up with famed composer Mason Fischer to create a series of elegant replacement sounds on Windows.” This will probably end up being one of the easiest ways to modify your system’s sounds, but there hasn’t been any word on the cost.

The screenshot below gives us an idea of what it will look like when it becomes available:

Soundpackager

Vista Startup Sound Facts

Just in case you’re interested in more than just how the startup sound sounds, here are a few interesting facts that the Windows Vista Blog posted a few months before Vista debuted regarding it:

  • The startup sounds is made of dual ascending “glassy” melodies played on top of a gentle fading Fripp ‘AERO’ Soundscape
  • Has two parallel melodies played in an international “Win-dows Vis-ta” rhythm
  • Consists of 4 chords, one for each color in the Windows flag
  • Is about 4 seconds long from start to finish
  • Is a collaboration between Robert Fripp, Tucker Martine and Steve Ball

The video below shows Robert Fripp recording some of the sounds. He was one of the individuals involved.

There you have it, more than you ever wanted to know about Vista sounds!

 

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Dec 26

Share Your Opinion & Create Polls With Tezaa

Posted in: CyberNotes, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on July 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Free For All Friday
Tezaa

Tezaa, an online web service that is all about polls is described as a ‘community-driven knowledge base of opinions.’ With this service, people are able to create polls, and vote on a variety of topics from technology to sports. Tezaa is said to ‘aggregate public perception and opinions allowing everyone to benefit from information sharing.’

Ideally, Tezaa could be a very useful tool if you’re in a position that deals with the public and you need to know what the public wants, likes, or uses the most. However, for it to truly be effective, you need a random sample, and a large sample group. Currently, Tezaa is aggregating 15,202 opinions by 711 members. Many of the polls I took a look at had as few as 6 or 8 opinions, but were still listed under the ‘Most Popular’ on their web page. While the sample group is lacking in size right now, I can only imagine it will continue to grow thus giving more accurate, well rounded results to polls.

Polls

One of the features I like is the ability to search for a topic. I typed in ‘technology’ and it pulled up all of the topics tagged technology. This could be very helpful if you’re looking for results regarding a specific topic or product. After participating in a few polls, I noticed that your choices are always listed in the order of which answer is the most popular at the time with the highest percentage of results. This could possibly influence the poll results because they’re ordered from most popular to least popular before an opinion is made and the results are shown. This is one of the only minor flaws that I’ve come across while testing out several different polls.

With a Tezaa poll, you’re able to get code to enter on your website to display polls on a personal blog. If you decide you want to display polls on your site, you’re given a few choices. You can select the kind of polls you’d like such as the polls only created by you, or polls containing specific tags such as technology. You’re also able to select the look and feel of it with a few options that they give you for colors. After you’ve made your selections, you’re given a code (Java Script) to paste on your site. Pretty simple.

Ironically, one of the polls that I came across was ‘What would you like to see in Tezaa next?’ 27 people have provided their opinion, and out of those, 29% would like to see image polls, 25% would like user groups, and 14% would like some guidelines for better poll construction. While it is a small sample group, it seems that from this simple poll, Tezaa has been given some ideas of what their visitors would like to see- thus they will be able to cater to those needs.

A few additional notes: Tezaa has an RSS feed so that you can get recent polls and recent comments. Additionally, they have a blog to keep everyone updated on the latest. Finally, if you’re pretty crazy about Tezaa, you can get a T-shirt with their logo proudly displayed.

I believe that Tezaa could potentially become a great source of information to find out what it is that people want or need. As they grow and become more popular, the sample of population being polled will continue to rise, providing everyone with a better rounded result.

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Dec 25

CyberNotes: Disable And Remove Thumbs.db In Windows XP

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on November 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Tutorial Thursday

If you have your computer set to show hidden files and folders then you may have noticed a Thumbs.db file located on your computer. You can delete it and no damage will be done, but it will probably just reappear. The Thumbs.db file is used to cache the thumbnails of the images located in that particular directory. If the thumbnails are cached they should be able to display themselves a little quicker, but I don’t even notice a speed difference if I disable this feature.

It is a really easy to disable the thumbnail caching and once you have done that you can go ahead and delete all of the files from your computer by doing a simple search:

  1. Go to the Start Menu and click on the Search option so that we can search the computer for files.
  2. Windows Explorer should startup and there should be a sidebar available for searching. Before we search and remove the Thumbs.db files we’ll go ahead and disable them from being created in the future. Go to
    Tools->Folder Options->View and the 7th option down should read Do not cache thumbnails. Check that box and hit OK to close the window.
    Cache Thumbnails
  3. Now we’ll need to perform a search for the Thumbs.db files. In the file name box type Thumbs.db and expand the Advanced Options so that you can check the box that says Search hidden files and folders. It is important that you check that box because this file is always hidden.
    Thumbs.db Search
  4. After it finishes scanning your hard drive just select all of the files and delete them.

That’s all there is to it. These files do not typically get very large but if you have a lot of images then they could quickly consume space. More than anything I found them to be annoying because I always have the hidden files visible so they can be distracting. They won’t be any longer though!

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