Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Our Weekend CyberNotes Articles originally started out as “Weekend Warrior.” We wrote about all kinds of travel sites and things that would apply to what you do on the weekend. Eventually we ran out of ideas for that topic and switched to “Weekend Website” where we feature one site each weekend that’s worth checking out. Today’s compilation of our favorites will include articles from both themes. Enjoy!

Insanity Cubes to Help Occupy Your Time
If you plan on taking a road trip or a plane ride anytime soon, here’s a few ideas on what you can do to keep your sanity and occupy the time using puzzles (although some may drive you nearly to insanity).

Farecast Predicts the Best Time to Purchase Airfare
With airline ticket prices jumping around just as much as gas prices these days, you never know when the best time to buy is. It is so frustrating to buy your tickets one day only to find the next day or week later they’ve dropped in price. Airfare can become one of the most costly aspects of any trip or vacation, not to mention the hassle of constantly checking for lower prices. The site, www.farecast.com is a great website that does a lot of the work for you and may even help you save some $$$ by telling you if they think the best time to buy is now, or if you should wait until later.

Woot! One Day, One Deal
Once you make your first purchase on Woot, you certainly won’t forget it, and you’ll probably find yourself making repeated visits throughout the week. There’s one word that can sum up Woot …. Surprise! There are so many surprise elements to Woot which is why it’s half the fun that it is.

Soundpedia – Listen to Entire Albums of Songs for Free
Soundpedia allows you to listen to streamed music or watch videos right from your browser. While you can listen to entire albums, you’re not allowed to download any of the content. They have a large sampling of everything from independent artists, to commercial artists, and it’s all free. You just stream the content using their built-in player.

Create a Floorplan with Floorplanner.com
Floorplanner.com makes creating online floor plans simple and easy. If you have a room to design, this site is definitely one design tool that you’ll want to use. Best of all, it’s free and easy to use. According to their CEO, it is “so easy a child could do it, so easy a grandmother could do it, and so enjoyable to use that both would actually want to.“

Analyzing Competitors with Google Trends
Google Trends has proved to be a great way to see what’s hot and what’s not in Google searches. There’s a lot you can learn, particularly with their “Hot Trends” which is compiled daily. It’s also proved to be a great way to analyze search trends which is what we’ve done with some of the more popular technology competitors.

Online Finance Management with Mint
Mint is “Refreshing Money Management” online. Likely designed to compete (although not directly) with Quicken, one of the most popular current methods that people use to manage money, Mint is an all online version that will help you keep your finances in order. It has the capability to sync all of your accounts (bank, credit cards, etc.), and best of all, it’s free.

Keep Your Bookmarks Organized Online with Quick Bookmarks
With so many “social” online bookmark services available like Del.icio.us, some of the “non-social” services have been pushed to the background. Quick Bookmarks is one of them and it’s a great tool to help you manage your personal bookmarks without the social side. Not only does it utilize tabs and groups to keep all of your important links organized, it can also be used as an RSS aggregator.

Free Desktop Wallpaper Sources
This article provides you with two great sites for getting desktop wallpaper. One of those sites is Social Wallpapering, a “community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as computer wallpaper.” The other site is “InterfaceLIFT” which offers free high-resolution wallpapers divided into categories based upon size.

Is that Forwarded Email Fact or Fiction?
Everyday, many of us receive a handful of forwarded emails. Many of them are the “true story” types of forwards where the author of the email is warning the reader about something they experienced or something they heard about. Often times, people read them and actually believe whatever was said, and then click “forward” and pass it along to all of their contacts. The problem with many of these “true” stories is that they are actually false. The place to go to find out whether an email is actually true or not is Snopes.com.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 31, 2007 by CyberNet.

Fun Friday

There’s no getting away from advertisements these days. They’re everywhere, and they serve an important purpose for most businesses. However, sometimes these ads are placed in spots that aren’t always the perfect location. Here’s a collection of simple ads turned funny because of their location…

1. Nestle Chocolate… mmmm
   
2. Yahoo! – 404
   
3. No explanation Needed
   
4. Obviously Not By Coincidence These Cars Were Parked There, but still funny…
   
5. Christ Died for our Dunkin’ Donuts?
   
6. The Fight Against Cancer
   
7. Enjoy a Second Cup…
   
8. Fighting Childhood Obesity with McDonalds
   
9. “If you don’t have GIO Third Party Property Insurance, we suggest you don’t hit this bus.”
   
   

Sources: Here, Here, and Here

Thanks to Max in the forum for posting some of these images!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

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

Web Browser Wednesday

As we’ve shown before, Opera is an extremely customizable browser, but it does so much that it can be difficult to remember it all. Then again you would have to know what it does in order to remember it. 🙂

Today we want to walk you through a dozen tips and tricks that will inch you closer to becoming an Opera grand master. So lets go ahead and jump into it, and as always, hit us up with your tips in the comments!

–Bookmark & Folder Nicknames–

Opera has a nickname feature for bookmarks that I’m guessing most people use. With it you can enter in an abbreviation for a bookmark that can quickly be typed into the address bar to pull up a particular site. One thing that you may not have realized is that the nicknames can also be assigned to entire folders of bookmarks, and entering that into the address bar will open every site within that folder:

–Bookmark & Open Multiple Links–

Let’s say you’re on a sight such as Digg, and you’re trying to quickly go through all of the news. Enter Links Panel! The Links Panel (a.k.a. sidebar) will let you handle hyperlinks throughout the page in bulk. You can Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click to select multiple links from the current page. Then just choose the bookmark or open the option from the right-click menu.

–Click to Save Images–

Do you find yourself frequently saving images from websites? Instead of right-clicking on an image to save it each time, just Ctrl+Click on it. You’ll immediately be prompted with a Save As dialog box for you to enter in the name, or you can just press Enter to use the image’s current name.

[via Opera Watch]

–Customize the Browser’s Name and Icon–

Did you know that you change the name of the browser, and even replace its icon with your own? Yep, that’s all built-in. To change the icon you’ll need to enter opera:config#UserPrefs|ApplicationIcon into your address bar, and then provide the location of the icon you want to use.

To change the browser’s name, just enter opera:config#UserPrefs|Title into the address bar, and in the box type the name you want to appear. Additionally, you can use these combinations to insert dynamic items:

• %t for page title (entering just %t in the box will remove the browser’s name all together, which is what I currently do)
• %s for build number
• %v for version number

In this example I choose to display the browser’s name before the title of the page:

[via Tamil]

–Detach/Move a Tab–

Want to open a tab up in a new window? Just drag it onto the title bar of the browser. You can also move tabs between multiple windows simply by dragging and dropping them from one tab bar to another.

–Fast Navigation–

If you’re trying to open several links on a page, you should try using Shift+Arrow keys to move between the hyperlinks on the page. The nice thing is that this doesn’t jump back up to the beginning of the page where the first hyperlink appears. It starts with the first hyperlink in the area that you are looking at.

Shift+Ctrl+Enter will then open the currently selected link in a background tab.

–Fit to Width–

When you come across a site that requires horizontal scrolling, why not try and enable the Fit to Width feature (located in the View Menu, or press Ctrl+F11). The site will be adjusted so that no horizontal scrolling is necessary, and for the most part it won’t look all that bad.

–Hide the Menu Bar–

I hardly ever need to use the Menu Bar, and it takes up more room that I’m willing to part with. So what I do is I add a button that will remove the Menu Bar, and at the same time provide all of the menu options in a single condensed drop-down list. Just click here to add that button, and for more menu buttons visit the Opera Wiki.

–Hide the Tab Bar for a Single Tab–

In Firefox when you only have one tab open, the tab bar is not visible, and there is an option in Opera to do the same thing. Just right-click on the Tab Bar, choose the Customize option, and then check the box that says “Show only when needed.” The tab bar will now be hidden anytime only one tab is open.

–Right-Click Address Mapping–

It’s super easy to map any address on a site using your favorite map service. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Open up your favorite map service (ex. Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps).
2. Right-click in the service’s search box, and choose the Create Search option. Enter in a keyword (it’s required by Opera, but isn’t used in this trick), and then press Save.
3. The next time you see an address on a site just highlight it with your mouse, right-click, and then go to “Search with.” You’ll see a list of all the possible search engines that you’ve added to Opera, and all you have to do is select the mapping service.

–Promptless Downloading–

If you’re like me you probably save all of your downloads to the same folder so that you don’t end up with things scattered all over your computer. In Opera you can set your default download location in the Options, and then when you right-click on a file or image, there will be a “Save to download folder” option. Clicking on that will initiate the download without prompting you for any information.

–Speed Dial Homepage Button–

This is something that I was yearning for, and luckily the Opera Community came through. For reasons unknown to me, the Opera developers never associated an address to the Speed Dial page. That meant you couldn’t assign it as your browser’s homepage, but dragging this button onto the address bar will do the trick. It will take on the look of the homepage button, but it will actually open the Speed Dial page.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on September 06, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Firefox is a big topic here at CyberNet News as many of you have probably realized by this point. I do, however, receive emails quite frequently asking why I don’t write more about Opera. There are actually two reasons and the main one is that I don’t use Opera as my default browser. It is great to use from time to time because of the large number of features but too many Google services lack complete compatibility with it.

The other reason that I don’t write about tweaking Opera is because an amazing wiki already exists that has just about everything I would be able to tell you. If you’re an Opera user then you need to bookmark that page. The list of bookmarklets that they have is absolutely insane!

That wiki is so extensive that I won’t really be able to cover anything new, but I can let you know a few of the speed tweaks that I have found to be useful. Alright, here we go…

Every time you start to type something into the Address Bar Opera goes out and looks for a networked machine with that name. I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t use Opera for searching for a networked machine. This just makes your computer do even more unnecessary work so I went ahead and disabled that feature:

1. Open your Preferences by either pressing Ctrl+F12 or by using the Tools menu.
2. Navigate to Advanced -> Network -> Server name completion.
3. Uncheck the box that says Look for local network machine.
4. You can also uncheck the Try name completion which will try to find the address your typing in your bookmarks and such. This can also cause more CPU usage.

After using Opera for awhile I start to notice that it takes longer to load. You can solve this issue by having it remember fewer addresses that you visit:

1. Open your Preferences by either pressing Ctrl+F12 or by using the Tools menu.
2. Navigate to Advanced -> History -> Addresses.
3. Change the value to 100.
4. Press the Clear button to reset the list.

If you are constantly opening a ton of tabs then they will probably load the sites slowly. It isn’t because Opera can’t handle the load but it is that the number of connections that Opera can make is limited. By default they only want you to make 8 connections to a single server and 20 connections total. That is probably good for dial-up users but if you’re on broadband then you should try increasing it:

1. Open your Preferences by either pressing Ctrl+F12 or by using the Tools menu.
2. Navigate to Advanced -> Network
3. Increase the Max connections to a server value (I use 64).
4. Increase the Max max total connections value (I use 128).

Okay, so those are the tweaks that I have applied to my Opera installation. Let me know if you come across any other helpful options to change because I love trying to make things faster! 🙂

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

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

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the greatest features in Windows has always been the Run command. It’s such a simple concept, yet if exercised properly, can be a power user’s dream come true. What we’ve got in store for you today might be a little much to absorb all at one time, but rest assured that once you become accustomed to how the Run command works you’ll be thankful that it is at your beckon call.

For starters it is important to know how you can bring up the Run command. In any version of Windows it can be done by using the keyboard shortcut WinKey+R. The odds are pretty good that there will also be an option located in the Start Menu labeled Run, or if you’re using Vista the search box essentially serves as a Run box as well (clever, huh?). Now lets get going running…

The Run box has a lot of different elements to it. There is the box where you enter in your command, the OK and cancel buttons, and, oh, I guess that’s pretty much it. Don’t mistake the simplicity for weakness! 😉

Here are some of my favorite things you can do with the Run command:

Quick Tip: Capitalization is ignored in the Run box, so don’t worry about whether you accidentally capitalize a letter or not.

• Launch a program – If there is a program that you’ve installed, such as Firefox or Nero, you can launch them by simply typing in the name of their main executable file in the Run box pictured above. For example, to run Firefox simply type firefox into the box, or to run Nero type nero. This will only work for applications that have been installed on the computer.
• Open a Control Panel item – You can open every single Control Panel option from the Run command, assuming that you know the proper command needed. Each Control Panel command starts with the word control (which by itself will open the Control Panel), and is then followed by the name of the item that you want to open. For example, to open the Mouse properties type control mouse into the Run box, or control printers for the printer configuration. Microsoft has a helpful guide with some of the commonly used Control Panel options listed.
• Shutdown a remote computer – By using a command such as shutdown /r you can restart the computer you’re using, but that’s not where the command comes in real handy. Assuming that you know the name or IP of a computer on your network you can actually shutdown or restart it from your own Run box. Just type shutdown /m \\MACHINE /r where “MACHINE” is the name or IP address of the computer you want to restart. If you just want to shutdown the computer leave off the “/r” on the end. More information on using the shutdown command can be found here.
• Remote Desktop – We’ve showed you how to create a shortcut for some of your Remote Desktop destinations, but you can also use it with the Run box. To connect to a computer with the IP address 192.168.0.101 just enter mstsc /v:192.168.0.101 into the box. For a few more parameters that you can use consult our last article.
• Refresh your IP address – In the past I’ve had troubles with our ISP, and I would frequently have to get a new IP address in order for my Internet to continue working. That could simply be done by entering ipconfig /renew into the Run box, which disconnects the computer from the network and then reconnects it again. The ipconfig command can be used in a lot of other ways as well, all of which can be found here.

There are many other things that the Run command can be used for, but those are the things that make it useful for me. In doing my research I came across an extensive list of things that can be used in the Run box, but many of them only apply to Control Panel items.

We know that many of you are Run command guru’s, so let us know what you use it for in the comments below!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com