Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 01, 2011 by CyberNet.

Windows only
There is something nice about finding an application that focuses on doing one thing, and doing that thing very well. That’s how I feel about the Default Programs Editor app. It accomplishes a task I feel should be better managed in Windows itself, but with this no-install/portable program I start to forget about this shortcoming in Windows.

This app is a single executable that can be used to manage just about anything related to opening files. With it you can choose which context menu entries appear when you right-click on a particular filetype, you can add/remove the programs associated to a filetype in the “Open with” menu, and much more:

• Add, edit, and remove context menu items
• Edit file type icon and description
• Change the ‘Open with…’ programs list
• Change context menu item icons
• Change an extension’s associated file type
• Add, edit, and remove autoplay handler programs
• Change the default autoplay handler
• Change autoplay options for any media type
• Optional install to the Control Panel
• Export changes to .reg files
• Remove unchangable default associations
• Disable “Search web for unknown extension” dialog

You may not have noticed the export option in that list of features, but that can be extremely useful if you want to set up multiple machines with the same settings. That way you can just execute the “.reg” file to have those same settings applied without even needing to download this program again. Pure genius!

Here are a few more screenshots of the Default Programs Editor in action:

Change the applications in the “Open with” menu for TXT files

Change the context menu options that are displayed when you right-click on a TXT file

Default Programs Editor Homepage (Windows only; Freeware; Portable)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

There are all kinds of websites available for finding great deals, but a lot of times it takes some extra work to find the items that you’re looking for. With the holiday season coming up I’m sure you’ll be trying to hunt down all kinds of stuff for friends and family, but you don’t have to go out of your way to save some money.

We have already laid out several tools that can help you along the way, such as price drop notifiers and Black Friday savings, but we’re going to take it one step further. We turned once again to Yahoo! Pipes because of the sheer power it harnesses. Unlike with our custom software updater there will be little work for you to do this time around.

What do you have to do? Pull up the CyberNet Deal Finder that I’ve already taken the liberty of creating. You should see a screen similar to this, but without the coloring or numbering:

Using the diagram above here is what you have to do:

1. You can enter in up to five different items that you want to track.

   Tip: Put spaces before and after each item for more accurate searching. For example, if you’re looking for a “table” you’ll want to put a space before and after the name, like this: ” table ” (ignore the quotes, but note the space before and after the word). If you don’t do this it will match any words containing “table” such as “tablet”.

2. By default I fill in the form with 5 of the most popular deal sites. I decided to let users customize the sites because most of the deals available in the feeds I supply are for the United States only.
3. Run the pipe and examine the preview at the bottom of the page to make sure it is what you expected. You may not see any results initially, it all depends on how common your search words are.
4. If everything looks good go ahead and subscribe to the feed. All of the settings that you configured in the first two steps will automatically be stored in the feed’s URL.

If you have more than 5 items that you want to track that’s not a problem. Just create more than one feed, or you can clone the pipe that I’ve created and edit it accordingly.

So now it is time to prepare for the holidays and watch for the falling prices!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Tutorial Thursday

Have you ever wanted to change the resolution of your computer in a single click? There are various reasons that you may want to do that, such as playing a game that requires a certain resolution or developing a program that needs to be tested in various conditions. Today we’re going to show you how to create a simple shortcut that can be used to switch between multiple resolutions.

This trick is going to require a third-party application called Resolution Changer, but it requires absolutely no installation and will eat up a mere 150KB of your hard drive. With it you’ll be able to adjust the resolution, color depth, and refresh rate with the shortcuts you create. It even has support for multiple monitors!

–Instructions–

Setting up a shortcut to use Resolution Changer is a quick process, but there are a ton of different options that you can configure. Be sure to checkout a list of some other options available at the end of this article.

1. Download Resolution Changer (the console version), and put it in a location you’ll know how to access from the command line. The easiest spot for it would probably be at the root of the C:\ drive, which is where I’ve placed it on my system.
2. Now we need to create the shortcut to the application. Right-click on your Desktop and choose New -> Shortcut. You’ll need to enter in the location of the shortcut followed by the width and height that you want the resolution set to. Here’s my example where I’m changing the resolution of the screen to 800×600:

   C:\reschangecon.exe -width=800 -height=600

   In Vista it should look something like this (Click to Enlarge):
   

3. Now specify a name for the shortcut, and finish the wizard. Double-clicking on the new shortcut will set the resolution to whatever value you specified.

–Other Options Available–

There is a lot more that you can do with Resolution Changer, and if you’re feeling ambitious you might want to tinker with some of the other settings:

• Multiple Monitor Support
  This does support multiple monitors, and more information on that can be found here. To sum it up you can change the resolution of a specific monitor by providing the monitor number in this format:

  reschangecon.exe -monitor="\\.\DISPLAY1" -width=800 -height=600

• Launch an Application
  After the resolution has been changed you can have an application or document opened immediately afterwards:

  reschangecon.exe -width=800 -height=600 "c:\test.exe"

  What’s cool about that is after the program or document is closed the resolution will revert back to what it was like before it was executed.

• Adjust the Color Depth and Refresh Rate
  There are two other options that can be used to adjust the color depth and refresh rate of the monitor. Accepted values for the color depth are: “4″ = 16 colors, “8″ = 8-bit, “16″ = 16-bit, “24″ = 24-bit, and “32″ = 32-bit. Here’s how you can adjust the depth and/or refresh rate:

  reschangecon.exe -width=640 -height=480 -depth=8 -refresh=72

–Extra Credit–

You can also assign an icon to the shortcut that you just created and/or establish a keyboard hotkey for quickly switching between resolutions. Just right-click on the shortcut and choose the Properties option. From there you can configure the shortcut key or change the icon:

I’m sure this is going to spark some discussion about alternative ways to changing resolutions on your computer, and there are all kinds of apps that run in the System Tray doing the same kind of thing. The reason why I prefer this shortcut method is that the program only runs when I need it to, which saves on both processing and memory. It’s just my personal preference, but I like to minimize the number of applications I have running at a time.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

I’m definitely a big fan of using Google Chrome, and last week I came across what has quickly become my favorite extension. The one I’m talking about is called Chromey Calculator, and with an average 5-star rating from 800+ reviews you know this has got to be good.

As you can see from the screenshot above Chromey Calculator puts some heavy-hitting computational power just one click away in your browser. With it you can do calculations, conversions, equation solving, basic calculus, and much more. What I love, however, is that this doesn’t just rely on one source. Instead this taps both Google Calculator and WolframAlpha for answers to anything you ask.

As you can see above there are quite a few unique queries it is capable of handling, but that is only part of what it can do. Here are some tips from the developer for those of you wanting to maximize the usefulness of the extension:

• Use up/down arrow keys to access input history.
• Click on any result to insert it into the input area.
• Ctrl+Click on any result to copy to clipboard.
• Click the little arrow at the upper right to pop out to new window.
• Last result can be accessed using the “@” variable.
• Create your own user variables — @abc_123 = 42
• Store an unevaluated expression — @x := 10 meters
• Hover over the the space to the left of a result to reveal a “G” or “W” link. Click the link to see the original source of a result.

Personally I’ve always wanted an extension that was capable of something like this, and now that I have it I’d find it hard to switch to any other browser without this functionality. I’ll admit that it took a little bit for me to remember that I had this sitting there just one click away, but after a few days I found myself turning to this for all my calculation needs. Sometimes I even pop this out into its own window when I am using it a lot, which is nice because you can then Alt+Tab to this.

Chromey Calculator Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 21, 2009 by CyberNet.

In 2008, Google said there’s no such thing as complete privacy. You’re being tracked all over the web by their AdSense ads, by sites that use Google Analytics and – probably the most important – their search engine. But Google Search isn’t the only search engine that tracks your behavior. Concerned about your privacy? In this article, we’ll show you how you can get rid of click tracking in search engines.

The secret redirect

Google

Whenever you click a link in Google Search, your click is redirected through a secret URL. If the site you’re going to is http://www.cybernetnews.com/, Google will do a secret redirect through a URL that looks similar to http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.cybernetnews.com/. In some cases, you can reveal the secret redirect by right-clicking on a linked search result. If that doesn’t work, your last resort is an HTTP sniffer.

There are several Firefox add-ons that claim to get rid of Google Search’s click tracking. CustomizeGoogle is one of them. Among other tweaks, it promises to remove click tracking and disable Google Analytics cookies. If you just want the anti-tracking feature without the bells and whistles, there’s a Greasemonkey script you can download called Google Tracking B-Gone. To use Greasemonkey scripts, you need to install the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox. Also, if you use an international version of Google such as google.co.uk, you have to change the script’s URL range from http://*.google.com/* to http://*.google.*/* to ensure that the script is allowed to operate on your local Google site.

Yahoo

Unlike Google’s redirect, the one Yahoo uses is always easy to find. Right-click on a link and look at your status bar to reveal an intimidating garglemesh of strange characters originating from rds.yahoo.com. You can get rid of that by installing this Greasemonkey script. However, my HTTP sniffer revealed that Yahoo does some additional click tracking from a URL that starts with http://search.yahoo.com/ra/click?. To disable this, add http://search.yahoo.com/ra/click?* as a filter to Adblock Plus.

Bing

Bing seems to have a very subtle click tracking mechanism. The only fishy thing Bing does is call some URL’s that start with http://www.bing.com/fd/ls/ whenever you click a search result. Again, Adblock Plus can help you deal with this if you add http://www.bing.com/fd/ls/* to its filter list. Turning off JavaScript on bing.com seems to help too.

Shutting off the HTTP referrer

Although the tips listed above can help you stop search engines from tracking your clicks, it does not keep websites from gathering information about your web search. This is done through the HTTP referrer. Any page on the web can retrieve information on how you stumbled upon it, i.e. which URL referred to their web page.

The referrer is also known to be used by site owners to retrieve information about the search engine you used and what your search query was. On rare occasions, some sites alter themselves if you found them through web search. For example, I’ve seen sites display “Welcome, Googler!”-esque messages and even sites that highlight your Google search terms on the page you landed on. Although this rather creepy practice is not widespread, it just shows how much a site really knows about you.

Fortunately, you can disable the sending of the HTTP referrer to the websites you visit. While it is possible to disable the HTTP referrer entirely in Firefox’s about:config, this can break certain functionality on some sites. There’s a Firefox add-on called RefControl that does away with this issue by allowing you to add exceptions for sites that need the referrer.

Other browsers

It is possible to use the Google Tracking B-Gone and Yahoo Click-Tracking Disabler scripts in other browsers. So if you’re really serious about extending your tinfoil hat protection to other browsers, you can check out these resources:

• Internet Explorer: Greasemonkey for IE
• Opera: How To: Greasemonkey in Opera
• Safari: GreaseKit
• Chrome: Greasemetal

To disable the HTTP referrer, follow these instructions:

• IE/Opera: How do I Disable Sending Referrers?
• Safari: Is there a way to disable header referrals in Safari?
• Chrome: currently really difficult

Since I’ve only tested this with Firefox, I cannot guarantee that the content from these resources is accurate.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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