Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

John’s Background Switcher is a free application that does exactly what you would expect it to, but likely goes a step further than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not only capable of grabbing images directly from your computer, but it can also interact with multiple online services including Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, and Yahoo. What’s really nice is that it even supports retrieval of your private images for nearly all of the online services either through authorization or by providing your username/password. Heck, you can even mix and match the sources you want to pull images from. Neato!

Need a calendar on your desktop? No problem! Background Switcher has an option to display a monthly calendar directly on your wallpaper, and it will highlight the current day. Now how convenient is that?

Oh, right, but you use multiple monitors. Yeah, it supports that, too. You can have it show the same picture on each monitor, one picture for the entire desktop, different pictures on each monitor, or only show one picture on the main monitor. I think you get the point… this is a very full-featured background rotation utility.

(Click to Enlarge)

One thing that I do want to point out is that you can obviously specify the interval that the backgrounds will rotate, but it can also be done manually. To do that just double-click on the System Tray icon, and it will immediately begin processing a new background to use.

–Very Impressive Layouts–

Not only can this flip through your images, but it can also take multiple photos and lay them out in a way that is sure to make your friends go “wow.” Take the “Snapshot Scrapbook” mode for example, which takes a handful of your photos and lays them out in a polaroid fashion. It also takes one image and converts it to black and white to be used as the background. The number of images shown on the screen at any given time are dependent on your monitor’s resolution, and here’s what it looks like using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

Note: The application does place some text in the upper-right corner of the background with the program’s name. I didn’t see any option to eliminate this.

If you want to see more images at a time just switch over to the mosaic mode where it will grab a lot of thumbnails, and then tile them on your desktop. Here’s what that looks like once again using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

–Performance–

One of the questions that I frequently get asked when writing about apps like this is what kind of performance hit a PC will take for running this. As you can see above there are a handful of multi-image layouts that you can choose from, and Background Switcher has to generate the background each time the wallpaper is switched out.

On my Vista machine the memory usage for the app sat around 13MB when idle, and 21MB when hard at work. The processor usage obviously spiked while putting together the background, but the highest I saw it go was 65% (it only did that for a split second, too). That’s not all bad for what the program accomplishes.

The nice thing is that Background Switcher is actually a performance-conscious app, and offers several different settings to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your work. Here are some of the things you customize:

• On start up don’t switch the wallpaper for a specified number of seconds. This gives the rest of your apps a chance to finish loading before it starts working on the background.
• Stop switching the background when the screensaver is running.
• Stop switching when running over terminal services (ex. remote desktop).
• Only switch when the system has been idle for at least 15 seconds.
• Stop switching if any programs you specify are running. Great for games or applications that require extensive use of your computers resources.

–Overview–

To be honest I haven’t gotten this excited about an application in a long time. The interface is very intuitive and simple, but at the same time there are tons of things you can customize. And the fact that it supports so many online photos services is astounding. Plus it’s free! The developer is even very active in the support forum in case you need help using it, or just have a feature request. It’s not often that you see an application and developer of this caliber that doesn’t charge a dime.

Get John’s Background Switcher

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Automatically Rotate Desktop WallpapersYour Week In Review with Sunday’s SummaryGet Your Widescreen Wallpapers For Your ComputerShow Your Love: Firefox 2 WallpapersCyberNotes: Our Favorite Thursday CyberNotes Articles

This article was written on March 09, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
I can think of a handful of times that I’ve wanted to export a list of all the files from a particular directory so that I could share them with someone else. That kind of task sounds like it should be really easy, but there aren’t too many apps out there that are versatile enough to meet most users’ needs. One that I stumbled across, getFolder, should cover most aspects that you’re looking for in an app like this.

Aside from being both free and portable, getFolder will let you export a list of files and folders to an HTML, XML, TXT, RTF, or CSV file. All of these options mean you can create an ultra-simple list, or get a bit more complex by using a CSV file and opening it up into a spreadsheet app such as Excel.

Looking for more features? getFolder can do basic bulk renaming of files and can filter out results according to criteria you specify. It’s not exactly a ground-breaking program, but since it’s portable I’d say there’s some value in keeping it around for those one-off situations where you need to list out the contents of a folder.

getFolder 2.0 Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Time Saving Tuesday

Last Thursday we showed you how to make Windows Live Writer portable, and today we are going to show you how to create powerful text templates that will save you incredible amounts of time. Unfortunately the plugin you’ll need to install, Dynamic Templates, won’t work with the portable version.

Dynamic Templates was created by Joe Cheng who happens to be one of the primary Live Writer developers. For that reason I had expected the plugin to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be this good!

As of two-weeks ago I was using the free Post2Blog software for writing all of my articles, and it had a built-in template manager. It was designed to let users quickly enter in some HTML code that would otherwise be found repetitious. It was limited to doing what Dynamic Templates can do in the first example below, so if the plugin doesn’t seem special from that demo make sure you move on to the others!

Before we get started with the four demonstrations I want to give you a heads up that there is some C# code involved in some of the examples. I’ve never actually programmed in C# before, but I’ve done 7 or 8 other languages so I was quickly able to pick up on the basics. The Dynamic Templates page has some instructions on how to insert the syntax, but you’ll probably learn the ropes from the videos.

–HTML Templates–

This is a basic HTML template that is what most of you will probably want. We use these all the time to insert things we frequently use in posts, such as our daily CyberNotes logo. That way we don’t have to insert the image every time we want to use it.

Code:

<p align="center"><a href="http://cybernetnews.com/category/cybernotes/"><img alt="CyberNotes" src="http://tech.cybernetnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/CyberNotes.gif"></a><br><strong>Time Saving Tuesday</strong></p>

–Selection Formatting–

The Dyanmic Template plugin has a command, "_selection", that lets you insert the highlighted text anywhere in your template. You might be asking yourself how that would be useful, but I think you’ll be surprised at how many things you can do with it. In this example we show you how to wrap multiple HTML tags around the text that we’ve highlighted thereby creating a one-click colorful header.

Code:

<h3><strong><font color="#800000"><%= _selection %></font></strong></h3>

–Selection Processing–

This is using the same "_selection" command mentioned in the previous demonstration, but now it is really starting to tie in some of the C# programming. More specifically this code will send the highlighted text through an HTML filter which will transform any plain text HTML tags into valid HTML.

Code:

<%= HtmlDecode(_selection) %>

–Advanced Video Insertion–

This demonstration shows you why I love the plugin so much, but you’ve got to know a little bit of programming to completely understand what it’s doing. Here I setup the plugin to prompt the user for a Google Video ID and the desired width/height for the embedded video. If no dimensions are entered in it will fall back on some defaults which can be designated in the code.

Tip: This code can easily be configured for use with any video service, but sites like YouTube specify the ID, height, and width twice in the embed code. Make sure you replace all necessary instances if you want it to work properly.

Code (there are also a few variables which you can get from the video):

<% if(width == "")width = "400"; %>
<% if(height == "")height = "326"; %>
<embed style="width:<%= width %>px; height:<%= height %>px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=<%= ID %>&hl=en" flashvars=""> </embed>

–Overview–

While the plugin is very complete in my eyes there are a few things that could make this even better:

• Hotkeys! Oh man, it would be really sweet if you could assign hotkeys to some of the templates you use the most often.
• I would like the option to set the size of the window which lists all of your templates. I have about two-dozen templates, and I don’t really like having to scroll to get to some of them.

To wrap things up Dynamic Templates is a great way to remove the strain of repetitive tasks, but to harness the true power you’ll need to sit down for an hour or so and learn how to write code that works well with it. Believe me, you won’t be sorry!

Dynamic Templates Homepage (Download)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Sometimes finding a great deal online is like trying to win something out of a claw machine. The key is knowing how to beat the claw machines, and there are some techniques that can let you walk away a winner (watch the video at the end of this post).

Just like the claw machine you can also save a lot of money if you know where to look, and I’ve come up with a list of my favorite five places that I watch for great deals:

• Slickdeals.net [RSS] – This is my favorite place to hunt down a deal because it has a huge community backing it up. If you want to find the deals before they hit the front page just watch the Hot Deals forum area [RSS]. If you create an account with them you can also setup keyword notifications for things such as “computers.” That way you’ll get emailed whenever a forum post matches your query.
• FatWallet [RSS] – A site that is similar to SlickDeals. It has a very strong forum that receives hundreds of posts every day. Just like with SlickDeals you can get email alerts for keywords that you designate. Generally speaking the same things show up on here that show up on SlickDeals, but that’s because forum members from both sites copy off of each other.
• DealsPlus [RSS] – I really like this site because it has an uncluttered interface, and an easy voting mechanism. The deals you’ll find here aren’t quite as amazing as those from FatWallet and SlickDeals, but it’s worth subscribing to the feed in my opinion.
• Woot [RSS] – This is a pretty unique site in that sells one item per day at a significantly reduced price, and once it’s gone…it’s gone. I’ve actually found some great deals on their, such as a pocket hard drive, and you should checkout Ashley’s review of Woot for a more complete understanding of how it works.
• DealCatcher [RSS] – This is my favorite place to search for coupons, and I always check for “promo” codes here before making a purchase at most online stores. If you’ve got some money burning a hole in your pocket hop on over to their page with the 50 most popular coupons.

I have a few other sites that I’ll check here and there, but I give the ones above the highest priority. You’ll notice that I included links to each of their RSS feeds as well, and that’s because it’s the easiest way to keep up with them. Let us know some of your favorite sites for saving money by dropping a comment below.

And finally let’s wrap things up with a video explanation on how to beat the claw machine:

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 10, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
We’ve shown you some tools in the past that lets you automatically rotate your desktop backgrounds (like this one), but the sheer simplicity of Wallpaper Juggler is what makes it so great. Basically what it does is download wallpapers from InterfaceLIFT and WallpaperStock, and you can choose to have it grab only the most popular wallpapers. Then you can setup an interval so that it automatically rotates through the downloaded wallpapers. Once setup the whole process happens transparently in the background without any interaction needed from you.

Here are the features the free Wallpaper Juggler app has to offer:

• Controllable from the System Tray (enabled/disable, juggle now, switch back to last wallpaper, etc…)
• Can be configured to…
  • start with Windows
  • look for wallpapers in multiple folders including/excluding subfolders. Best results when used with matching resolution wallpapers
  • change wallpaper once every preferred duration between 1 min and 500 hrs. It will understand “000 Hrs/Mins 000 Min” format. It can interpret M/Min/Mins/Minutes and H/Hr/Hrs/Hour as Minutes and Hours respectively
  • confirm before changing wallpaper
  • adjust image positioning for odd size wallpapers
• Change wallpaper manually by clicking ‘Juggle Now’ menu or double clicking the icon
• Displays the last updated wallpaper and the time stamp when the next change will occur

If you hate having the same wallpaper on your computer this might be just the thing you need. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Wallpaper Juggler Homepage (for Windows only)
Thanks Raj for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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