Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Sure you might be a geek, but there’s a good chance that you don’t conform to the geek-code of ordering a pizza for dinner every night. If that’s the case then it might be time to trade-in your recipe box for a digital alternative. To help you make the switch we scoured around looking for a few recipe management applications for both Windows and Macs. We managed to find two free solutions that can both simplify your recipe management.

You might be wondering what kind of benefits there are for having an application store your recipes. The most notable feature in each of the applications is probably the fast search capabilities. With them you can actually pull up recipes that deal with, for example, chicken, within seconds. No more flipping through a recipe box looking for a specific index card… these apps will do the digging for you!

–Recipe Center (Homepage)–

Windows only
This is one of the most powerful recipe managers out there, and the best part is that it will get your recipe collection rolling by giving you 200 different recipes to start off with. One of the really nice features is being able to copy and paste ingredients from a recipe on a website into the application. With some quick reformatting you can have it automatically parse the text, and insert the ingredients accordingly into the application.

Here’s a list of Recipe Center’s best features:

• Advanced Recipe Encoder: You can copy and paste ingredients into the special recipe encoder so that it doesn’t take so long to enter in your favorite recipes

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• Create New Recipes: Quickly add new recipes thanks to the IntelliSense that suggests ingredients as you type
• Recipe Download: Recipe Center can import thousands of recipes from various compatible recipe websites
• Recipe Resizing: Type in how many people you need to serve, and it will adjust the amount needed of each ingredient accordingly
• Advanced Search Filters: Search by recipe name, ingredients, or keywords
• Recipe Card Printing: Print out recipes, with the option to attach pictures
• Recipe Exchange: Send recipes to your friends by email (PDF format, Text format and Recipe Center format)
• Shopping List: Print your shopping lists based on ingredients of selected recipes
• Unit Conversion Tool: Convert between an extensive list of units for cooking
• Spell Checker: Spell check your recipe ingredients, procedures, and shopping list

(Click to Enlarge)

Note: This app does display an advertisement in the bottom-right corner.

–Yum (Homepage)–

Mac only
Yum isn’t quite as extensive as Recipe Center for Windows, but I’ve found that entering in recipes is a faster process with Yum. The reason for that is it includes a “paste ingredients” option that doesn’t even compare to how Recipe Center makes you enter in ingredients. All you have to do is copy the ingredients to your clipboard, and click the Paste Ingredients button. Yum will automatically parse what you have on the clipboard, and pull out all of the ingredients along with their corresponding measurements. In the few tests I ran this worked flawlessly.

Some of the other features are:

• Instantly search through all of your recipes
• Create as many categories as you would like, and you can even place recipes in multiple categories
• Print a single recipe, all recipes, selected recipes, recipes in a certain category, or recipes from your search results
• Customize the appearance of recipe directions including fonts, styles, paragraph settings, graphics (copy and paste, or drag and drop) — a few different themes are included by default
• Ingredients are recommended as you type

(Click to Enlarge)

Note: This program will display a popup window every 10 times you run it, but you can get a registration code to eliminate the “nag” screen by donating to the developer. There’s no mention as to a recommended donation amount, so that is up to you.

–Overview–

I can definitely see how any recipe manager would be tedious if you’re trying to convert your handwritten collection into a digital format. What I recommend doing is performing some quick searches online to see if someone has digital copies of your recipes, because it will be much faster in both applications if you can just copy and paste.

How do you store your recipes? Whether it be an application like one of these, or a simple text file, we want to hear what you use to manage your recipes.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Are you one of those people who like to conserve every square inch of screen space when it’s possible? If so we have a treat for you today! We’re going to demonstrate how you can become the ultimate Firefox minimalist with the help of some extensions and themes. If you implement everything that we have listed below you’ll wonder where half of your browser has gone. You might also go cross-eyed… don’t say we didn’t warn you.

–Themes–

The first major step that a minimalist Firefox user takes is often in changing their theme. By choosing a more compact theme you can eliminate nearly any and all spacing found throughout Firefox, and the end result can save a lot of area in your browser.

The screenshot to the right shows the Classic Compact Firefox theme laid overtop of the classic theme. The double-ended arrows indicate how much space you save by simply applying this theme. There are a few other themes (like miniFox) that are similar, but Classic Compact is really the one that has won the hearts of minimalists around the globe.

–Toolbars & Menus–

There is a lot of “fat” that lies within the toolbars and menus in Firefox. The themes aim to take some pounds off the toolbars, but there are some extensions that can take the minimalist design to a whole new level:

• Searchbar Autosizer [Homepage]
  Keep the browser’s search box small when it’s not being used. This will let you have a really small search box that expands as you type. That means your Address Bar gets even more room!
• Faviconize Tab [Homepage]
  You’ll be able to double-click on a tab and have it collapsed down to only it’s icon. Now you won’t feel like such a pig when you have 40 different tabs open.
  
• Personal Menu [Homepage]
  How often do you really use those menus (File, Edit, etc…) anyway? If it’s not very often you can stuff them into a single icon by using this extension. All of the menus will still be accessible, but they will just take an extra click to get to them.
• Smart Bookmarks Bar [Homepage]
  If you’re not ready to give up your Bookmarks Bar then maybe this extension will help keep things a little more tidy. By default it will only show the icons for the sites located on the Bookmarks Bar, and then when you hover over them it will expand to show the name as well.
  

–Status Bar–

I wouldn’t say that the Status Bar is the hugest space consumer, but hey, we’re trying to scrounge up every pixel that’s possible. Right? So we’ve got a few specialized styles and one extension that can clean up your Status Bar a little bit.

• Mouseover for Clutter [Homepage] Requires Stylish
  This will hide the excessive number of icons that you probably have in the Firefox Status Bar, but they will reappear each time you hover over the bar. That way you’re not really losing any functionality, unless of course one of those icons also serves as some sort of notifier (such as a new mail notifier).
• Autohide Status Bar [Homepage] Requires Stylish
  Get the Status Bar completely out of the way with this style. Once installed it will create an area that is just one pixel in height, and when you hover over that it will show the Status Bar.
• autoHideStatusbar [Homepage]
  This is an extension that’s similar to how the previous style operates, except that it goes one step further. With this extension you can set it so that when you hover over hyperlinks it will show the Status Bar, which means you can still see where the links point to. The Status Bar can also be shown when the page is loading so that you can monitor the progress.
  Note: This extension is currently experimental, and you’ll need to login to your Mozilla account before downloading it.

–Overview–

I think you have a pretty good set of tools to work with so that you can be well on your way to becoming a Firefox minimalist. I’m sure many of you have trimmed down your Firefox in one way or another, and I would love to hear how you’ve managed to conserve space in Firefox! Shoot us a comment below with your thoughts.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on January 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you ever wondered what the disgustingly rich buy for their spoiled children during the holidays? Take a look at some of the top toys of 2006 for rich kids.

Grand Victorian Mansion

Send the kids out to the backyard to play in their Grand Victorian Mansion. No need for sand boxes, or swing sets when you have a mini house of your own to play in. No Victorian mansion would be complete without a wraparound porch. It also includes stained glass windows, window boxes (for your flowers, of course!), a door bell, and a door-knocker. This is available for purchase from FAO Schwarz for $22,000.

Dimensions: 204″ L x 108″ W x 132″ H

Scallywag Sloop Pirate Themed Club House

For $18,499.99, this Pirate Ship Club House could be yours from Costco. Talk about one unique tree house that your neighbors sure won’t have! The base is made from an old tree with a hallowed-out opening.  The opening is large enough that even and adult would be able to fit through.  There are two parts to it, and it includes a swing, and a fireman’s pole. It comes complete with a cannon hole, a ships mast, crows nest, and a ships wheel! Other options include a spiral turbo slide for $920, and a real cast iron cannon bow support for $2500.

Dimensions: 18′W x 10′D x 20′ H

7-Foot Robby the Robot

The 7-foot Robby Robot comes from the 1956 film “Fobidden Planet,” and now it can be yours.  All seven feet of it. He’s programmed to recite lines from the movie, and the sound can be connected to your home theater system, or you can even project your own voice using a wireless microphone. Weighing in at 100 pounds, this is an extraordinary gift that only the spoiled rich could have. Robby is also programmed to spin his planetary gyro stabilizers, and rotate his scanners while lights are flashing. The body is extra durable, made out of rugged Fiberglass.

Price: $49,999.95

Made by: Hammacher Schlemmer

Life Sized Lego Batman

You could find this guy in the FAO Swartz Christmas catalog for 2006 with a hefty price tag of $27,000! I wonder how many kids had this on their wish list? Measuring 6’6″ tall, he is constructed out of Lego’s! He wears a black bat-suit, yellow utility belt, and a fabric cape. It would come delivered to your house in three separate crated sections with some assembly required.

Price: $27,000

Dimensions: 24″ L x 24″ W x 78″ H

Rough & Tumble Outpost

Now this is what rich people buy their kids for the holidays! The Rough & Tumble Outpost is a mega playground for your own backyard. Why would you want a swing set when you could have this outpost for $97,610? It includes:

• Swinging bridge
• Rock-climbing walls
• Look out tower
• Jailhouse
• Earthquake Landing Platform
• Fire Pole
• Wrap-around ramp up to second story

You’ll need a 47′ x 48′ piece of land to put this on!

Actual dimensions: 35.5′ L x 28′W x 15′H

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on August 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

There have been plenty of occasions where I have been left wondering if I had lost everything in my Gmail account. If you don’t know about any of those situations that I’m talking about, just view all of the past occurrences that we have written about. People have lost every email in their account numerous times, and how do you know that you’re not going to be next?

Honestly, I don’t think people ever really see the value in backing up their data. In the last few months we’ve had two hard drives completely crash leaving the data unrecoverable. One of the drives was for our website, and it could have been really devastating if we didn’t make nightly backups.

I really do hope you realize that in the blink of an eye your data could be gone, and you should take every precaution available to protect it. That’s why we’re presenting you with several different ways to backup your Gmail account, and some are easy while others can be a little more time consuming.

–Configuring POP Access–

A few of the solutions we reference below require that POP access is enabled in your Gmail account. This is a simple process, but I thought that I would mention it before we dive into anything. Here’s what you need to do to enable POP:

1. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Open the Forwarding and POP tab.
3. Select Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded).
4. Click Save Changes.

–Backup Gmail by Forwarding (only future emails)–

This is going to be the easiest thing that you can do, and could actually prove to be very useful. All this entails is forwarding all of your email messages from your current account to another one. I recommend forwarding to a Hotmail or Yahoo! account so that it is completely separate from Google, and then if Gmail isn’t accessible for some reason, you’ll be able to access your old mail.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Click Forwarding and POP along the top of the Settings box.
3. Enter the email address to which you’d like your messages forwarded.
4. Select the action you’d like your messages to take from the drop-down menu. You can choose to keep Gmail’s copy of the message in your inbox, or you can send it automatically to All Mail or Trash.
5. Click Save Changes.

If you only want to backup emails from a certain person, or mail that contains a certain word, you can try setting up some filters (video demo) to do the dirty work for you. That way the important stuff will get backed up.

–Backup Gmail with an Offline Application (past emails and future emails)–

The first solution that I’m going to talk about is probably the most common. All you have to do is setup Outlook, Thunderbird, or another email application to download the emails from your account. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Enable POP access on your Gmail account using the steps outlined in the beginning of this article.
2. Now all you need to do is follow Google’s instructions on setting up your specific application. If you’re using Outlook 2003 there is a video tutorial available, or if you really know what you’re doing, all you’ll probably need is the port and server information found here.

Now once you get that all setup, your email application will begin downloading all of the email from Gmail. If you have a lot of email in your Gmail account, the process might take a short while. This is because Gmail only allows the download of messages in batches, and from my experience it will download a few hundred at a time.

–Backup Gmail to Another Gmail Account (past emails and future emails)–

This is an idea that you probably haven’t heard about before, but it is something that I’ve recommended to other people who don’t want to use a desktop application for backing up all of their emails. All you have to do is setup another Gmail account, and you’ll use Gmail’s new Mail Fetcher to retrieve all of the messages from your main account.

First enable the POP access for your main Gmail account that you want backed up by following the instructions earlier. Then from your secondary Gmail account configure the Mail Fetcher:

1. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Click Accounts along the top of the Settings box.
3. In the Get mail from other accounts section, click Add another mail account.
4. Enter the full email address of the account you’d like to access, then click Next Step.
5. Enter the email address to which you’d like your messages forwarded.
6. Now on this page you’ll need to enter the following information (screenshot below):
   • Username is your email address including the @gmail.com at the end. You can also use a Google Apps account, and if that’s the case you still need to enter in your full email address.
   • The POP server needs to be pop.gmail.com for this to work.
   • Set the port number to 995, and then make sure the SSL box is checked below.
7. Click Add Account.
8. Choose the option you desire for being able to send mail as that address.

Here is a screenshot of what step 6 looks like (we’re using a Google Apps account that manages our site’s email):

After everything is setup, Gmail will go and retrieve all of your past emails. For some reason, a majority of mine were sent to the spam or trash folders, but I easily moved them around after they were finished downloading. Remember, Gmail allows bulk POP access requests in smaller batches so it might take a little while for all of your emails to get retrieved. I do recommend setting up some filters to organize the mail as it comes in though.

–Other Gmail Backup Solutions–

You may have thought that those are the only ways possible to backup your Gmail account, but that isn’t the case. Where there is a will, there is a way, and with the millions of Gmail users, people are bound to come up with some pretty unique stuff. Here are a few other solutions that I found which you might see being useful:

1. Backup Gmail using Fetchmail
   This guide is brought to you by Lifehacker, and uses the POP access that we gave instructions for above. I wouldn’t exactly say it is for the faint of heart because it involves some command line work!
2. Backup Gmail using Google Groups
   This is kinda like the mail forwarding that we walked you through above, but it’s using Google Groups. You are able to make your group private, so you don’t have to worry about others seeing your mail, and it might be good to have this on another service other than Gmail.

–Overview–

There are a lot of solutions available for backing up your Gmail account, but unfortunately the best one is still not an option. By that I mean Google offering some sort of backup solution. If you would like that to be an option in the future, head on over to the Gmail survey and pick the “Export message to a CD for storage” option.

The bad thing about all of these solutions is that they make it extremely difficult to replicate the label structure that you have given your emails. The best thing that you can probably do is either forward your emails to another Gmail account, or use the Gmail-to-Gmail POP access I discussed. That way you can at least setup filters to be applied to the incoming messages. They may not catch everything perfectly, but it’s better than nothing.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 28, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Keyboard shortcuts step aside! Mouse gestures have been around for quite some time, and are often used as a way to quickly issue commands. One of the places that these are used the most is in the web browser, and that’s because a lot of repetitive actions are performed there. Just think about how many times each day you click the back or refresh buttons.

Today we’re going to demonstrate the various ways that you can use mouse gestures in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. The only problem you’ll run into is trying to absorb everything you can do with the mouse gestures.

–Firefox–

Windows; Mac; Linux
As you can imagine there are quite a few Firefox extensions out there that provide some sort of mouse gesture support. Here are two of my favorites (they both work with Firefox 3, although they are not officially compatible yet):

• FireGestures [Homepage]
  This is everything that you would expect from a mouse gesture system, and more. There are dozens of different commands you can associate with your own gestures, and you can even take it one step further by creating your own commands. My guess is that you’ll be more than satisfied with the built-in commands though.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• Easy DragToGo [Homepage]
  This isn’t a full-fledged mouse gesture extension like the one above, but it does use mouse movement to perform useful actions. What you can do is set it up so that when you drag-and-drop text, links, or images in a certain direction it will perform a special action. This can be an easy way to open links in a new tab, perform a Google search for text, or save images to your computer.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

–Opera–

Windows; Mac; Linux
Opera has got to be the easiest browser to use mouse gestures simply because they are included out-of-the-box. You can perform a gesture by holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse in one of the basic patterns described here, or one of the more advanced gestures here.

The first time you perform a mouse gesture it will prompt you with a box asking whether you want the gestures to be enabled. Alternatively you can open the Preferences and go to Advanced -> Shortcuts to turn them on. While you’re in the preferences you can also have it flip-flop the back and forward gestures if you’re left handed.

If you find yourself having trouble remembering the various gestures then you may want to consider adding this site as a panel in the sidebar. You can do this by bookmarking the site and choosing the option to show it as a panel. You’ll be more inclined to use the mouse gestures if you leave that site open in the sidebar for a few days while you grow accustomed to the various mouse gestures.

–Internet Explorer–

Windows only
Of course Internet Explorer isn’t without mouse gestures. There are two plug-ins that I believe do a good job of executing mouse gestures in Internet Explorer, and the best part is that both come in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors! Here they are:

• Mouse Gestures [Homepage]
  What I really love about this mouse gesture system is that it integrates very well into the browser. You can assign gestures to dozens of different commands, and it is also capable of opening a bookmark or simulating a keyboard shortcut.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• IE7Pro [Homepage]
  This is a pretty popular plug-in for Internet Explorer, but if you’re looking only for mouse gestures this won’t likely be what you want. It’s a feature-packed add-on that does dozens of other things besides just gestures. Not only that but the configurability of the mouse gestures is not nearly as good as the previous plug-in that we mentioned. However, if you’re already using IE7Pro for some of the other features then you might as well take advantage of the mouse gestures.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

–Overview–

As you can see mouse gestures are all over the place, and can be found in all the major browsers. Do you use mouse gestures, or are they not your thing? Personally I’m more of a keyboard shortcut person myself, but I’m sure many of you would rather keep your hand on the mouse.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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