Hasta La Gadget! Page not found

Jan 17

Robots Invade Firefox 3… World Domination Next

This article was written on April 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

The robots have begun to invade the world, starting with Firefox 3! That’s right, the next-generation browser may not be what we were expecting all along. They are trying to pose as friendly inhabitants of the browser, but don’t get sucked into their evil spell. It’s too late for me, but save yourselves by switching to Internet Explorer!

Okay, maybe that’s a bit over-the-top, but the robots have definitely found a home in the latest Firefox 3 Beta 5. As James pointed out via a comment all you have to do is type about:robots into your address bar and press Enter. You should see this message:

Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!

Welcome Humans!

We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill!

Robots may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Robots have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Robots are Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With.
Robots have shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten.

And they have a plan.

Here’s a screenshot of the message you’re presented with.

(Click to Enlarge)

You’ll notice that the title of the page is “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” What does it mean? It’s from the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still released in 1951, where that particular message was meant to stop the robot Gort from destroying Earth [via Wikipedia].

What’s even better is that clicking the “Try Again” button will just replace it with another button that says “Please do not press this button again.” Naturally you’ll want to click it again, and then it will just disappear.

Note: This Easter Egg is only available in Firefox 3 Beta 5 and beyond.

Jan 16

More Windows 7 M3 Screenshots Leaked

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last week we saw a revamped version of Paint in the third Windows 7 milestone. At the time there weren’t any other screenshots available, but it looks as though someone who got their hands on Windows 7 M3 has decided to post some screenshots showing off more of the enhancements.

Here are six of their screenshots of the new calculator, WordPad, Paint, slightly reorganized Windows Explorer Sidebar, better theme selection, and a different display management window:

(Click to Enlarge)

I’m actually happy to see that Microsoft is polishing up the operating system, and look forward to some of the future enhancements they’ll be adding to the operating system. Unfortunately we don’t know what the under-the-hood improvements are like yet.

Jan 16

CyberNotes: EverNote Stores Your Life in Notes

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on May 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Evernote Our daily lives continue to become more and more overwhelmed with information. The problem that most of us face now is finding an efficient way to keep all of that information organized in a fashion that makes it easy to find what we’re looking for.

Evernote has got to be one of the best solutions for taking notes for just about everything imaginable. Whether it be creating to-do lists, shopping lists, or clipping stuff from the Web…Evernote does it all. Check out some of the amazing features that it includes, and it’s all free:

Note Formats: Create notes in multiple formats, including text, Web, email, handwriting, image clips and custom templates.
Multiple Categories: I’m not sure if categories is really the right name for these because they behave more like tags. Basically you can add as many categories to a note as you want.
Powerful SmartSearch: Multiple methods for finding notes: visually, by time, categories, automatic labeling and keywords, complete with matching note count.
Web & Email Clipper: Instantly add web pages and emails into EverNote from Internet Explorer, Outlook, Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird using an ‘Add to EverNote’ button along with context menus.
Drag & Drop files: Drag & drop or paste text with images from any applications into EverNote.
To Dos and Note Templates: Create and monitor To-Do lists, expenses, contacts and other common note templates. Here are some examples of the different templates (click to enlarge a screenshot):
Embedded To?Dos: Click Ctrl-Shift-C or right-click and select “Insert To-Do checkbox” anywhere in your notes to place a checkbox at the cursor position in any note. This means the note will automatically appear in the To-Do category until all of the boxes are checked off.
Send notes via IM: Drag-and-drop your notes into Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype and other IMs to instantly transfer interesting bits of info to your buddies.
Keep Your Sensitive Info Secure: Encrypt notes you want to keep private or protect from accidental changes or deletion. You can also password protect an entire EverNote database.
Backup: Automatic and manual backup are available via the Tools>Options>Backup tab.
Spellchecker
Note History: All changes to edited notes in “History Notes”.

One of the cool things with Evernote is that you never have to think twice about saving your notes because it is done automatically while you work.

The Web Clipper is a very integral part of Evernote for myself. In Firefox it just adds a small icon next to the address bar, and clicking on that button will automatically create a new note from any of the content highlighted on the page. This is a very quick process and doesn’t require any other interaction. Once the note is saved you’ll see a little popup in the corner of your screen that you can always click on to edit the newly created note:

Evernote

Evernote Universal Clipper There is also an experimental feature that they currently have available called the Universal Clipper (pictured to the right). This is a separate download and once installed you will be able to quickly note just about anything by using double-clicking on the Universal Clipper icon in your System Tray. As seen in the screenshot, you can even specify an area on your screen to store in a note.

There is also an EverNote Plus version available for those who need synchronization capabilities or handwriting recognition features. I think most people will be content with the free version of Evernote since there is no time or note limitation, but Tablet PC users may find those more advanced features useful.

Visit the Evernote Homepage

Thanks for the tip JavaSharp!

Jan 13

Ubuntu 7.10 Review & Screenshots (Beta)

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop

I started off my morning with some Ubuntu 7.10 action since the first Beta had just been released. I downloaded the 688MB ISO image, burned it to CD, and got started immediately with the Live CD. It took a few minutes for it to boot up, but that’s expected since I’m running the operating system off of the CD I burned. I contemplated upgrading my current Ubuntu 7.04 installation with this version, but I didn’t want to risk the instability.

As soon as Ubuntu started up I was able to select my wireless network. Occasionally in the past it has had issues recognizing my wireless card, but this time it did a great job. It managed to pull in all of the networks in the vicinity:

Ubuntu 7.10 Wireless Networks

UPDATE:We have put together guides on enabling restricted drivers in Ubuntu and how to enable Compiz Fusion in Ubuntu 7.10! We also wrote a complete Kubuntu 7.10 review.

There are several new features in Ubuntu 7.10, and here’s an overview of them:

Compiz Fusion – I tried this on my laptop but couldn’t get it to work for the life of me. Every time I tried to enable the “Extra” option the configuration screen would freeze up. This could be because I was running the Live CD, but I’m not ready to give up my stable Ubuntu installation yet to see if that was the root of the cause. To try and enable it yourself just go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> Extra.
Desktop Search – The desktop search is a nice addition to Ubuntu, and makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for.
Fast user switching – I didn’t have multiple users on the computer to test this out with, but I’m guessing that it will be nice in those instances.
GUI for Screen Configuration – I was really excited about this because Ubuntu has always had a hard time recognizing my native widescreen monitor resolution. My native resolution is 1680×1050, and the closest I could get is 1600×1200. I tried switching the drivers for my ATI graphics card, changing screen models, and just about everything, but it had its heart set on not giving in to the widescreen resolution. 🙁
Automatic printer installation and non-free device drivers – Printers are now automatically setup when they are plugged in, and restricted drivers can now be installed in just a few clicks. This is great news for anyone with a wireless card from Broadcom!
NTFS writing – Users can now read and write to NTFS partitions. I tried to do this, but again, I was running the Live CD which wouldn’t let me mount the Windows drive. So for right now I will assume that it works. 🙂
And more…

It’s still a bit early for me to give an official thumbs up, but I would say things are looking pretty good. The final release is due out in October, and at that time I’ll go ahead and upgrade my current installation. Hopefully that will solve any of the issues that I was having with the Live CD version.

Ubuntu 7.10 Homepage

Jan 12

Google Images: Out with the New, In with the Old

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on February 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

Google images is back to the old style pictured above

One month ago Google released an update to the Images search that didn’t seem to be anything too major to me. All they did was hide the details for images until you hovered over them with your mouse. The resulting search screen therefore looked cleaner but users had to take an extra step if they wanted to see the details of an image, such as the resolution or filesize.

Not surprisingly Greasemonkey scripts started to popup to put the Images search back to how it was, but apparently Google did not receive positive feedback regarding the change. The old style has now replaced the new style that was in place for just a month.

I am very happy that Google put it back to the old way because it did frustrate me a little bit not being able to quickly see the domain name and image resolution when flipping through the search pages. If you think about it the few lines of text below each picture does not actually take up that much room compared to not having it, but I guess the page does look a little cleaner without out it.

SearchMash Images Google’s test site called SearchMash also has an image search that I actually like even better, well, if it worked properly. By default it shows you the thumbnails along with what is supposed to be details. I would expect that enabling the details should show things such as the domain, image size, etc… but it doesn’t. Clicking the “hide details” link in the upper-right corner just makes the thumbnail images smaller so that you can see more on the page without having to scroll.

I think Google Images should actually have a feature similar to what SearchMash offers where in a click of a button you can get a view of the images that can all fit on the page without having to scroll. Actually, right now I have SearchMash set as my homepage simply because I think I can find the information I’m looking for much quicker. I really like that it shows Wikipedia, images, videos, and blog results in the sidebar so that I can get even more info without navigating away from the page that I’m currently on.

Hopefully Google will start bringing some of the features over from SearchMash since they already have started to implement some AJAX into the Google search results page. They’ll probably keep sneaking in features here and there trying not to disturb Googlers too much.

What’s a feature from SearchMash that you would like to see on Google?

News and Image Source: Google Blogoscoped

Jan 10

CyberNotes: Best Application Launcher?

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on August 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

8Start Could you imagine using a computer without having shortcuts? Probably not, and that’s why shortcuts play an important part in how we use our computers. Now what if there was a way to manage your shortcuts in a way that gives you the fastest access possible to all of the apps you use the most? 8Start is exactly that and more…

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of application launchers before, but I promise that this one is different. Its goal is to put all of your favorite shortcuts at your fingertips.

–Using 8Start (Windows only)–

It took me about 15-minutes to get used to how 8Start works, and so I thought it would be important to explain a few things first. The three most frequently used terms are categories, groups, and buttons. Here are definitions for each (using the picture to the right as an example).

A button is an icon, which is what you would expect. You can customize the size of the buttons just about any way that you want.
A group is a collection of several buttons. In my example screenshot, “Browser” and “Games” are considered to be two groups.
A category is a collection of groups, and they almost feel like tabs to me. In my example screenshot “General” is the selected category which contains the groups “Browser” and “Games”. Then “CyberNet” is another category that I could switch to, and therefore expose more shortcuts.

After I had that figured out, it took no time at all to setup 8Start the way that I wanted it. One of the best things is that you can configure a keyboard hotkey or mouse shortcut that launches your 8Start. Anytime that you bring up the program, it is displayed underneath the mouse, and that is the reason why this is so great. It minimizes the distance that you have to move your mouse to open your favorite applications.

Here are a few more screenshots of different categories that I created with smaller buttons:

–Adding Buttons–

Creating and arranging buttons in 8Start isn’t quite as easy as dragging and dropping stuff around, but it is still pretty convenient. The configuration screen has all of the tools that you need to create categories, groups, and buttons:

8Start

It’s also easy to add some of your Internet Explorer favorites to 8Start. I wish they offered the option to use Firefox bookmarks as well, but I’m not one to complain. 🙂

Once you get familiar with how the organizer works, you’ll probably be able to step up to the file explorer view. This is where you can drag and drop shortcuts from anywhere onto your computer and organize them yourself into the proper structure. If you have a ton of shortcuts that you want to organize, this method will be a lot easier:

8start5

When using the file explorer view, don’t get confused by the numbering scheme that 8Start uses, because all you have to do is drag-and-drop shortcuts into the proper folder. Then when you’re all done just hit the “Apply” button back on the Organizer. 8Start will automatically name the files in the correct format, and you don’t have to do a thing.

–Customizing Buttons–

You can customize just one button, a group of buttons, or all the buttons in an entire category. 8Start offers a great interface for picking the size and layout of the button(s), so that if you want the text to go along with the icon that is a piece of cake:

8Start Button

–Configuring Settings–

There aren’t many settings to configure, but there are enough to satisfy most power users. You can do things like create a keyboard hotkey to use the middle mouse button for launching 8Start. Perhaps the best thing, however, is that you can choose which of your drives you want to show the remaining hard drive space for.

8start6

–Change Skins–

Lastly, there are a variety of skins available for 8Start so that you can make it fit well with the look of Windows. I went through most of the skins, but I found myself going back to the default because of its simplicity and classy look.

8Start Skins

–Overall–

I haven’t been using 8Start very long, but I’m already getting it worked into my routine. It’s one of those apps that you have to remember to use, and after a little while it will become second nature.

If it becomes hard to use computers that don’t have 8Start installed, don’t worry, you can have it installed to a Flash drive and it will use relative paths to point to all of the shortcuts. So you can even use this as an application launcher for all of your portable apps!

8Start Homepage

Jan 08

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 & the Pre-Built Ubuntu Laptop

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on February 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Windows might be the most common operating system but there is no doubt that Linux is gaining ground rather quickly. The biggest complaint that I always hear about Linux is that the hardware on a computer never quite functions right with Linux. Ubuntu is trying to conquer that problem, but wouldn’t life be a little easier if the computer you bought was built for Linux? Then you know that everything would work how it is supposed to.

Ubuntu Laptop

No problem! System76 has several different laptops that vary in price to accommodate nearly everyone’s needs. You can even go as far as to customize them so that they are exactly what you want…you can even get a built-in camera. Honestly though, for the operating system being free I am quite surprised that their cheapest laptop is $700…and by the time you add some of those finishing touches I’m sure you can take it over $1000. Right now, without any coupons, I can go over to dell and pick-up a Windows Vista laptop for $689. I guess if you are looking into the future then the Ubuntu laptops might be appetizing since the operating system upgrades will always be free, but it would have been nice to see these in the $500 range.

Source: Engadget (Thanks for the tip Mohan!)

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 Control Panel

Since we are on the topic of Ubuntu I thought I should mention Ubuntu’s newest pre-release of version 7.04, which is still two-months away. This pre-release is dubbed Feisty Fawn Herd 3 and sports a few new features over the previous versions. The most prominent feature is the new Control Center (pictured above) which pulls in the feature I love the most from Windows Vista…instant search! Now you can just start to type the setting or option that you are looking for and it will instantly show you the results. Figuring out how to change that one hidden setting is now going to be a thing of the past.

A lot of the other things that are new in this pre-release are updates to existing programs, so they are primarily building on what already exists. I definitely like that idea because people aren’t necessarily looking for a lot of new features, but instead they want to see the existing features and applications made even better. With the popularity of Ubuntu it surprises me that they have not integrated XGL/Beryl to spice it up with the 3D effects, but I would guess that they might be holding back until the stability of those features gets a little better.

Thanks for the tip Chris!

Jan 07

New Mac Leopard Dock on Windows

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

It seems as though there are some big fans of the Mac OS Leopard Dock that will be launching later this year with the new operating system. Well, they might be Leopard fans, but they’re running Windows. 🙂

I’m talking about a developer who took the latest Beta version of the free RK Launcher application, and bundled skins, icons, and plugins together in a single package that give this Dock clone a true Leopard feel to it. Here’s the result of the hard work:

7 different languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Turkish
Integrated KKMenu simulates the Stacks feature on the Leopard Dock (pictured above). Here’s what the configuration of the Stacks looks like:
Over 175 wonderfully reflective icons are included for the most popular apps
Screen capture utility that’s actually pretty useful for taking fast screenshots
Mac-like calendar docklet
Shutdown manager so that you don’t have to go to the Start Menu to turn your computer off or restart it
Address book

I tried this out, and I have to say that I’m really impressed with all the eye candy it has to offer. If you’ve been itching to get your hands on a free Mac-like dock for Windows then I don’t think it could be any easier than this!

You can download the Leopard Inspired RK Launcher (for Windows XP/Vista) in this forum (no registration required), and here is a list of what’s included with the 50MB download.

Jan 02

CyberNotes: Powerful Free Backup Software

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

A few weeks ago we demonstrated an extremely simple backup solution called IdleBackup. It was nothing too fancy, and this time around we wanted to go to the other extreme with a freeware Windows backup application that will really knock your socks off. The program is called Cobian Backup, and I wouldn’t have found it without Leland’s help.

Cobian Backup is one of the most full-featured backup utilities that I’ve seen, and the best thing about it is that it’s completely free. I’ve been a proud owner of SyncBackSE for quite some time now, but Cobian Backup includes almost all of the same features in it’s latest version 9 Beta release. The interface is well designed, creating and scheduling backups is simple, and it is busting at the seams with customization!

(Click to Enlarge)

–Features–

Now I could have just listed off the features that the developer had put together, but I actually think the developer is rather modest of what the program is truly capable of. So I put together my own set of features highlighting all of the things that I find to be the most useful in Cobian:

Can be installed as a service, which means it is able to run even when a user isn’t logged into the computer
3 different types of backups are available:

Full backups: Every single file in the source will be copied or compressed. If you are overwriting, every file will be replaced. If Overwrite is unchecked, you will have several copies of the same source.
Incremental: The program will check if the source has been changed from the last backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. The incremental procedure checks the Archive bit attribute of the file. You may want to manually reset the attribute to force a full backup: use the “Set the archive attributes” on the Task menu.
Differential: The program will check if the source has been changed from the last FULL backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. The differential procedure checks the Archive bit attribute of the file. You may want to manually reset the attribute to force a full backup: use the “Set the archive attributes” on the Task menu.
Dummy task: This backup doesn’t need a source or a destination. It is useful to use the task just as an scheduler to execute applications, close services, reboot the computer, etc.

Remotely connect to and manage your backups (Cobian will need to be installed on both the host and client machine to do this). Go to Tools -> Remote Client in Cobian to access this feature.
Backup to or from a network or FTP location
Compress your backups using 7-Zip or regular ZIP

Split the compressed files up into multiple files according to a maximum size that you specify

You can have multiple source and/or destinations
You can have a timestamp added to backup filenames so that existing backups are not overwritten
Perform a variety of actions before and/or after a backup starts:

Pause for a specified duration
Start or close a program
Start or stop a service
Restart or shutdown the computer

If you choose to perform an incremental or differential backup you can set Cobian to automatically do a full backup every X backups, where “X” is any number you want.
It will retrieve files from the Volume Shadow Copy (on XP and Vista) if a file is locked by another application
You can provide a list of files and/or folders to exclude
UNICODE support

–Creating a Backup–

When making a decision on which backup application to use it is pretty critical to see first-hand whether it is going to do what you want it to. And that’s what this screenshot gallery is for!

In Cobian there are seven different areas that you can configure for each backup task that you create. Below you’ll find a screenshot of each different area so that you can appropriately decide whether Cobian will be able to perform the backups in the way that you want it to.

(Click to Enlarge)

–Overview–

Cobian Backup is a tremendous application that will likely have much, if not all of what you’re looking for. It might take some time to get the backups setup just the way you want, but once you’re done the end result could save you days of frustration. Believe me, in the last two years I’ve had two different hard drives fail on me. If it wasn’t for the regular backups that I performed there could have been a lot of unrecoverable settings, pictures, and documents. Software like Cobian Backup can really come through in a pinch!

Cobian Backup Homepage
Note: In this review I was using Cobian Backup 9 Beta.

Dec 28

Automatically Sort Files by Extension (Vista Gadget)

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on November 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

I just stumbled across a Vista Gadget called Magic Folder, and after seeing that it had been downloaded over 100,000 times I thought it should be something to look into. As it turns out this gadget is really amazing, and can save you a bunch of time.

What it does is add a folder (pictured to the right) on your Desktop or in the Vista Sidebar. Where you put the gadget is up to you. Then when you drag and drop files onto the Magic Folder gadget it will automatically sort through the files according to the file extensions. Images (jpg, png, gif, etc…) will be put in your Pictures folder, documents (doc, xls, ppt, etc…) will be put in your Documents folder, and so on.

Of course this gadget isn’t going to have every file extension pre-programmed the way you want it, so it comes with a fully customizable system where you can specify any extension to be moved to any folder. You can also change where the pre-programmed extensions get moved to.

In case that’s not enough for you Magic Folder can also do one other awesome thing. It creates a “watch” folder in your user directory cleverly called The Magic Folder. When this feature is enabled Magic Folder will automatically scan that directory for new files. Anything it finds in there will automatically be sorted and moved to the respective directories that you’ve specified.

–Settings–

I’m sure one thing that many of you want to see are screenshots of the different configuration options. The developer doesn’t really have any on his site, so I snapped some of my own:

(Click to Enlarge)

Magic Folder Vista Gadget

Hasta La Gadget!

Robots Invade Firefox 3… World Domination Next

More Windows 7 M3 Screenshots Leaked

CyberNotes: EverNote Stores Your Life in Notes

Ubuntu 7.10 Review & Screenshots (Beta)

Google Images: Out with the New, In with the Old

CyberNotes: Best Application Launcher?

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 & the Pre-Built Ubuntu Laptop

New Mac Leopard Dock on Windows