Hasta La Gadget!

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

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows only
Searching for files on your computer was something that was once a tedious process, but in the last few years it has been one of the most talked about features in new operating systems. Sure you could always search for files on your computer, but do you remember when you’d have to sit there for several minutes while the computer scavenged everything on the hard drive looking for files and folders matching your search.

The benefit that search applications have these days is that they can index files on your computer so that search results are retrieved nearly instantaneously. Mac OS X 10.4 started doing this back in 2005 when Tiger it was released, and Vista followed it up with its own indexed search capabilities. Making search a strong focus of the operating system is a smart thing to do as it becomes harder and harder for users to find the files they are looking for. Without being able to search it can almost be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

What about the other operating systems like XP? Many of you have probably turned to Google Desktop or Copernic to do your searching, but I believe both of those programs use more resources than they need to. They’re constantly monitoring and indexing results on your computer, and Google Desktop even comes bundled with their own gadget/widget system.

Today we’re going to take a look at two excellent applications that focus on quickly searching for files on your computer without the unnecessary bloat. Both of them are free, use very little memory, and aren’t constantly indexing files on your computer… although they do use an index/database for retrieving results. Sound nice?

–Locate32 (Homepage)–

This is one of my favorite search applications for Windows XP, and it is always getting better. Locate32 is capable of indexing all of the files on your computer in no time at all, and after it’s done you can use the intuitive interface for searching and viewing results. It’s not the most snazzy-looking application, but functionality is more important than appearance when it comes to searching.

What does Locate32 have to offer? Take a look at some of my favorite features:

• Search the contents of files (takes longer since the content is not indexed)
• Save frequent searches as presets
• Long list of customizable keyboard shortcuts
• Pressing the Windows Key + F while in Windows Explorer brings up the search dialog, and sets it to search the current directory you were viewing
• Huge list of options
• and more…

The developers of Locate32 are currently on the homestretch to releasing version 3.1, and with it comes a lot of bug fixes and features. Things like find-as-you-type are automatically enabled making searches even faster and more natural.

Interface (Click to Enlarge):

Options (Click to Enlarge):

–Finder (Homepage)–

Finder, not to be confused with Mac OS X’s Finder, is a program that accomplishes the same goal as Locate32, but with a different interface. It will index your files and put search results on your screen in the blink of an eye.

There are some things that I like better about Finder, such as the wider interface, but generally speaking it’s not as powerful as Locate32. The more unique aspect of the program would be the things you can do with the search results:

• Perform operations on files and folders (copy, move, etc…)
• Designate default applications for specific extensions. You can customize what program is used to execute, view, and edit a particular type of file.
• Copy path(s) or name(s) to the clipboard
• and more…

A new version of Finder is in the works, but the developer is shooting for a November 2008 release. I can’t wait to see what good stuff is in store for Finder 3.

Interface:

Options (Click to Enlarge):

–Overview–

There’s one thing that I didn’t cover yet, and that is the performance of the two applications. Both of them are nearly identical coming in under 6MB of memory usage when they are active. That is significantly lower than most desktop search applications, and a large part of that is thanks to the on-demand indexing rather than trying to monitor your computer for new files. Both offer an option to only index the files that have changed since the last time the database was updated, which means the first indexing operation will be significantly longer than the others.

Let us know in the comments how you go about searching for files and folders on your computer. We are always interested in trying out new software!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

When I’m listening to music it is nice to have the lyrics available within the media player so that you don’t have to venture off onto the Internet to hunt them down. So many of the online services bombard you with advertisements and popups, and it becomes more of a chore to find what you’re looking for.

I came across a free plugin today that does exactly what I wanted. It automatically retrieves and displays lyrics in Winamp or Windows Media Player (WMP) for the songs as they are played. I downloaded and installed the plugin for Windows Media Player, and it managed to get the lyrics for a large number of my songs. And I can’t forget to mention the simplified interface that makes reading the lyrics easy.

If you’re a lyric buff I highly recommend you give this a shot!

Lyrics Plugin Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

The great thing about Flickr is that they host your photos without costing you a thing in bandwidth or storage costs. That is awesome but a problem arises when you want to get your pictures from there. Sure you could go through and save each one individually but that could take an insanely long time for some people! Flickr has a tool to do that though, right? Nope, they have bulk uploading tools but the last thing they want you to do is waste their bandwidth downloading all of your photos to a PC.

Have no fear…FlickrDown is here! This freeware utility will let you download any user’s images in just a few clicks and they will neatly be stored on your computer. You can choose from certain sets of photos, a few images here and there,  or just check the last box and it will download everything that is available to the public. The program isn’t made to be all fancy but it sure gets the job done and couldn’t be much easier to use.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberSearch Special

It’s been exactly one month since I uploaded the first version of CyberSearch to Mozilla’s site, and since then we’ve had 4,000 downloads of the extension. What’s really kept us going are all of you who have expressed how valuable the extension has become, and we’re now averaging 4.60/5.00 stars from the 34 reviews we’ve received thus far. As a way to show our appreciation to those leaving reviews we’ve placed quotes from some of them on the CyberSearch homepage.

My hope is that one day CyberSearch will make it out of the Mozilla Sandbox so that more people can enjoy it, but I know the editors are still rather swamped. Sometimes my impatience gets the best of me though.

To celebrate our one month anniversary I’ve decided to release a rather major upgrade that hopefully includes the features many of you have been looking for. We’ve also cleaned up the code, fixed some bugs, and much more. And so we are proud to unleash CyberSearch 1.0…

–Import/Manage Built-in Keywords–

This is by far one of our most requested features. As many of you know Firefox 3 includes a simple interface for managing all of your search keywords in one central location. This is normally done by clicking on the drop-down menu in the search box, and then selecting the Manage Search Engines option.

What people have been wanting us to do is provide a way to tie our keyword system together with the one that is built-in to Firefox. Unfortunately this is rather difficult since the two keyword systems are completely different in the way they work, but we’ve come up with the best solution we could.

In the CyberSearch settings there is now a new section on the Keywords tab dedicated towards importing and managing the keywords you’ve customized in the browser. If you choose to import keywords it will scan through the search engine keywords (not those in your bookmarks), and it will automatically add any of them that you haven’t already assigned a keyword for. When it’s all done it will notify you of how many keywords couldn’t be imported because they were duplicates.

By ignoring duplicates this means that you can reimport the keywords from the browser as more are added, and you don’t have to worry about it doubling up on some of the existing keywords.

How does it determine the URL to search? We tried to put some intelligence behind this, but it’s not going to be perfect every time. What we’ll do is truncate off the end of the URL so that there isn’t all of the garbage. For example, a Wikipedia search URL normally looks like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

After it gets imported it will look like this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

In that example it works out as it should, and will pull in search results from Wikipedia as the user would expect. However, you should probably go back through the imported entries to make sure the various sites are searching the URL you want.

One thing that I want to make clear is that this doesn’t import any of your keywords from your bookmarks. The Add to Search Bar extension makes it a bit easier to add any search box to the search bar, and so I recommend installing that if you decide to transition your bookmark keywords over to the search bar keywords.

–Image Search Previews–

We’ve also enhanced image searches per your request! When creating a keyword for performing a Google Image search I recommend leaving the icon URL field blank. When you do this it will use a thumbnail of each resulting image as the icon:

We’ve also decided to place the dimensions of each image at the end of the title in brackets so that you know whether the image you’re opening is small or large.

Existing CyberSearch users: You will need to go back and clear out the icon URL for any Google Image search entries in the settings before seeing the previews.

–Auto Retrieval of Site Icons–

Now when performing a Google Web, Blog, or News search it’s possible to have it show each site’s icon next to their results. What it does is look for the “favicon.ico” file at the root of each domain, and then displays it accordingly:

The catch? Not all sites put the favicon.ico file at the root of their domain, which means no icon will appear next to those results. More often than not it is able to find the icon at the root of the domain though.

To enable this feature just leave the icon URL field blank when creating a keyword for a Google Web, Blog, or News search.

Existing CyberSearch users: You will need to go back and clear out the icon URL in the settings (for the supported search types listed above) before seeing the automatic icons.

–Pull Up the Results Page–

The very last entry for every type of Google search will now is now designated to taking you to the corresponding Google page. In the event that no results from Google can be returned it will be the only option shown to you:

The reason we show this even when Google returns no results is that going to the actual Google page might be able to provide you with “did you mean…” results.

–Quick Add the Current Site-–

The odds are probably pretty good that if you’re opening up the CyberSearch options that your intentions are to add a keyword for the site you’re currently on. If that’s the case we’re making it a lot easier! First off when you open up the CyberSearch options it will automatically grab the address of the site you’re currently viewing, and will insert that into the “new keyword” form.

Still not fast enough for you? There’s now an “Add to CyberSearch” option located right under your nose in the context menu (a.k.a. right-click menu):

Clicking that will pull up the CyberSearch options with the current site’s URL automatically filled in. Talk about speedy!

–Better Identification–

Have you noticed anything else new in several of the screenshots above? We’ve made it easier to identify results produced by the extension by placing the CyberSearch logo in the upper-right corner of each entry:

UPDATE: Before reading on you should know that we’ve added the background customization option back to the CyberSearch extension. We also improved how it works!

As a tradeoff we’ve removed the feature in the options that lets you customize the background color of the results. The new icon does the job of making the CyberSearch results distinguishable from the rest, and at the same time it will look nice on all of the themes out-of-the-box. Not only that but I just wasn’t happy with the way I implemented the option.

Don’t worry, if you’re heart is set on customizing the background color of the results you can use Stylish. Here are the instructions needed to change the background color in Stylish:

1. Install Stylish
2. In Firefox go to Tools -> Stylish -> Write Style -> Blank Style
3. Give it a description, such as CyberSearch
4. Copy and paste the following code into the box, replacing EEEEEE with the hex color you want:
   richlistitem[type ~= 'cybersearch'] > hbox {
background-color:#EEEEEE;
   }

After that all you have to do is save the style, and you should see the results immediately without having to restart the browser. If you need help coming up with the 6-character hex value for a specific color you may find this site to be of assistance.

–And More–

Still want more? This release also includes a handful of bug fixes (all reproducible bugs up until now have been fixed), performance improvements, and cleaner code. What more could you ask for? Oh, okay. You twisted my arm. I’ll throw in one more minor feature.

When working with the keyword menu next to the keywords we also show what type of search corresponds to that particular keyword:

For those of you who already have CyberSearch installed you should be prompted shortly (if you haven’t been already) to install the updated version. New and existing users alike can install the new version from the Mozilla Add-ons site, or you can watch a video demonstration I previously made when the extension launched.

Enjoy!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Yesterday word started getting around that come October 1st Comcast would be enforcing a 250GB bandwidth cap for all their users. This is obviously their way to get back at the whole BitTorrent rigmarole that started last year, and this way people are more apt to know what they consider to be “acceptable use.”

The new policy won’t go into affect until October 1st, and if you’re a heavy user you’ll likely be contacted by Comcast:

If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.

Hitting the 250GB limit would take a lot of Internet usage, but it’s definitely possible if you’re streaming videos all day long or are active on the BitTorrent network. They’ve also not said what will happen once you hit that limit (pay extra, get cutoff, etc…)

Scott, the individual who sent us the tip on the Comcast news, was wondering if there was a good free program to use for monitoring your bandwidth usage. After looking around a little bit I found that the AnalogX NetStat Live (for Windows) was a highly recommended program. With it you can track both the current month and last month’s bandwidth usage, set it to start with Windows, and it can be minimized to the System Tray.

If you’ve got a tool you use to monitor bandwidth usage let us know in the comments. We’re particularly looking for apps that keep track of monthly usage, and not just real-time data.

Get NetStat Live for Windows
Thanks Scott!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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