Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Sure you might be a geek, but there’s a good chance that you don’t conform to the geek-code of ordering a pizza for dinner every night. If that’s the case then it might be time to trade-in your recipe box for a digital alternative. To help you make the switch we scoured around looking for a few recipe management applications for both Windows and Macs. We managed to find two free solutions that can both simplify your recipe management.

You might be wondering what kind of benefits there are for having an application store your recipes. The most notable feature in each of the applications is probably the fast search capabilities. With them you can actually pull up recipes that deal with, for example, chicken, within seconds. No more flipping through a recipe box looking for a specific index card… these apps will do the digging for you!

–Recipe Center (Homepage)–

Windows only
This is one of the most powerful recipe managers out there, and the best part is that it will get your recipe collection rolling by giving you 200 different recipes to start off with. One of the really nice features is being able to copy and paste ingredients from a recipe on a website into the application. With some quick reformatting you can have it automatically parse the text, and insert the ingredients accordingly into the application.

Here’s a list of Recipe Center’s best features:

• Advanced Recipe Encoder: You can copy and paste ingredients into the special recipe encoder so that it doesn’t take so long to enter in your favorite recipes

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• Create New Recipes: Quickly add new recipes thanks to the IntelliSense that suggests ingredients as you type
• Recipe Download: Recipe Center can import thousands of recipes from various compatible recipe websites
• Recipe Resizing: Type in how many people you need to serve, and it will adjust the amount needed of each ingredient accordingly
• Advanced Search Filters: Search by recipe name, ingredients, or keywords
• Recipe Card Printing: Print out recipes, with the option to attach pictures
• Recipe Exchange: Send recipes to your friends by email (PDF format, Text format and Recipe Center format)
• Shopping List: Print your shopping lists based on ingredients of selected recipes
• Unit Conversion Tool: Convert between an extensive list of units for cooking
• Spell Checker: Spell check your recipe ingredients, procedures, and shopping list

(Click to Enlarge)

Note: This app does display an advertisement in the bottom-right corner.

–Yum (Homepage)–

Mac only
Yum isn’t quite as extensive as Recipe Center for Windows, but I’ve found that entering in recipes is a faster process with Yum. The reason for that is it includes a “paste ingredients” option that doesn’t even compare to how Recipe Center makes you enter in ingredients. All you have to do is copy the ingredients to your clipboard, and click the Paste Ingredients button. Yum will automatically parse what you have on the clipboard, and pull out all of the ingredients along with their corresponding measurements. In the few tests I ran this worked flawlessly.

Some of the other features are:

• Instantly search through all of your recipes
• Create as many categories as you would like, and you can even place recipes in multiple categories
• Print a single recipe, all recipes, selected recipes, recipes in a certain category, or recipes from your search results
• Customize the appearance of recipe directions including fonts, styles, paragraph settings, graphics (copy and paste, or drag and drop) — a few different themes are included by default
• Ingredients are recommended as you type

(Click to Enlarge)

Note: This program will display a popup window every 10 times you run it, but you can get a registration code to eliminate the “nag” screen by donating to the developer. There’s no mention as to a recommended donation amount, so that is up to you.

–Overview–

I can definitely see how any recipe manager would be tedious if you’re trying to convert your handwritten collection into a digital format. What I recommend doing is performing some quick searches online to see if someone has digital copies of your recipes, because it will be much faster in both applications if you can just copy and paste.

How do you store your recipes? Whether it be an application like one of these, or a simple text file, we want to hear what you use to manage your recipes.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

It’s crazy to think about how unpopular encyclopedias have become thanks to the various references found online, and the same thing is happening to dictionaries. These days word processors (and other apps) are integrating dictionaries so that they are even more useful to the end user. The next logical step for dictionaries is a system-wide integration, which gives the user access to definitions from within any application.

What we’ve got in store for you today is how you can maximize the convenience factor of system-wide dictionaries for both Mac OS X and Windows. You can literally retrieve definitions and synonyms within seconds if you know the right keys to press.

–Mac Dictionary–

Mac only
If you’re a Mac user you probably know about the built-in dictionary/thesaurus that you can pull up at a moments notice. What you may not know, however, is that in Cocoa applications such as Safari, iChat, and Mail you can also get in-place definitions. Just hover your mouse over a word and press Command+Control+D to bring up the definition:

The menu in the bottom-left corner will let you switch between viewing a dictionary definition and synonyms from the thesaurus. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in non-Cocoa applications such as Firefox.

–WordWeb for Windows–

Windows only
Last week one of our commenters, “skh.pcola,” pointed out a fabulous application called WordWeb. It operates much like the built-in dictionary on the Mac, except that it is compatible with nearly all Windows applications. The simplicity of WordWeb is really what makes this an indispensable app for any Windows user. Just Control+Click as you hover over a word and you’ll instantly see a definition appear:

If you don’t know how to pronounce a word just click the speaker button towards the upper-right corner. This only uses the built-in Windows text-to-speech engine to speak the word, but it will give you some idea as to how it’s actually pronounced.

WordWeb comes with 150,000 words and 120,000 synonym sets making it ideal even when you’re not connected to the Internet. It offers definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and more all in one place.

One thing that I want to point out is that there will sometimes be plus/minus signs when viewing different tabs, such as the antonyms pictured to the right. Clicking the plus sign will add more results by making the search criteria less restrictive, and the minus sign will do just the opposite.

There is support for viewing Wikipedia articles from within the application, but it’s nothing to really jump up and down over. It doesn’t modify the layout of the page at all, and is really no different than viewing the actual article in your browser:

Interestingly the free version of WordWeb has a license unlike any other that I’ve seen. They are actually trying to help the environment with the restrictions they’ve imposed:

WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue use it after a 30-day trial period.

–Overview–

Now if those aren’t two fast ways to get dictionary definitions then I don’t know what is. Drop a comment below with the tools you use to lookup words, whether it be a site like Dictionary.com or an application.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows only
You know that scroll wheel on your mouse? It’s pretty handy to have when you’re navigating around documents quickly and whatnot. But did you know that there is a lot more that you can use it for other than just scrolling?

An awesome freeware utility called Volumouse will breathe new life into your scroll wheel. As seen in the screenshot above you can configure different uses of the scroll wheel based upon certain criteria. For example, when Windows Media Center or iTunes is focused you can have the scroll wheel adjust the volume levels rather than actually scroll. Alternatively you can have Volumouse adjust the screen brightness or window transparency instead of just the volume.

To make things a little nicer Volumouse will also show a visual indicator whenever you are adjusting one of the various components using your scroll wheel. Features like this can all be configured on a per-rule basis by clicking on the “More” button located at the end of each row.

When it comes down to it this is a pretty incredible app, and I’m left wondering whether there is any other values this could be useful for adjusting? They do have a handful of plugins available on the Volumouse homepage, one of which will let you resize windows using the mouse wheel. Are there any other things you can think of that you would like to change using the scroll wheel?

Volumouse Homepage
Note: Volumouse has a version available that doesn’t require installation, but it’s not portable since it uses the Windows Registry to store settings.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

When we mentioned the Vystal software a month ago I was pretty excited. It was the first solution to come forward which offered Vista-like visual effects in Windows XP. Now there is another one called FastAero (Download Mirror) which hopes to do the same kind of thing, but it looks much more promising.

On FastAero’s homepage you’ll find several downloads available, with the latest claiming to be pretty unstable. I decided to give build 0510 a go (Download Mirror) on my only remaining XP machine, and getting it to run couldn’t have been much simpler since you don’t have to install it.

Unfortunately it didn’t work quite right probably because my graphics card in this machine isn’t the greatest, but I was still able to see the blurring effects in action. There were no borders to the windows though, so I took the liberty of outlining the borders in red so that they were a little easier to see:

Click to Enlarge

I tried multiple versions of FastAero, and the latest one was the best. None of them put the minimize, maximize, and close buttons on the top toolbar for me though. If you do get it to work properly it would look something like this:

Click to Enlarge

I recommend trying it out just for giggles if for nothing else. A new version is expected next month that takes advantage of the Mirror Driver. This will mean that a direct link can be made between the video driver memory and FastAero, effectively bypassing the CPU for much of the processing.

After you get done trying it out leave a comment letting us know how well it worked.

Note: This will not “skin” windows that you currently have open, instead it will only skin windows that are opened after enabling FastAero. And after closing FastAero, it will automatically restore the normal Windows XP borders so there should be no concern with it screwing up the appearance of your operating system.

FastAero Homepage (Download Mirror)

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 25, 2006 by CyberNet.

From the makers of the ever-popular Red Hat Linux comes the new (free) release of Fedora Core 6! It has all kinds of amazing goodies packed with it but here are my favorites:

• New theme (I think this is my new favorite Linux theme)
• GNOME 2.16
• KDE 3.5.4 (the latest version is actually 3.5.5)
• Can run on Intel Macs
• Better virtualization manager
• Extensive performance improvements

One thing that they also mention is that it comes with the latest releases of the most popular software. They specifically mention Firefox but I’ll give you a heads up that this version of Fedora was finalized before Firefox 2 was released, so you’ll have to download it separately if you actually want the latest Firefox.

They also say that there are “extensive performance improvements” which is good to hear. A few months back when I tried Fedora it seemed so sluggish that it actually made Windows feel like a Ferrari. Okay, maybe not that bad but it was pretty slow.

The popularity of the Fedora download must have been a little unexpected because their official homepage is replaced with a low-bandwidth version. You can, however, visit the Fedora Wiki for more information regarding this release and OSDir.com has a great screenshot gallery posted.

I am currently in the process of downloading this from one of their several mirrors that are available. Unfortunately it is 5 ISO images that you have to download to burn onto CD’s…too bad there isn’t just one DVD ISO. I’ll probably end up installing Fedora in a virtual machine before I put it on a partition just so I don’t waste the 5 CD’s and find out that I don’t like it.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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