Hasta La Gadget!

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

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows only
Desktop shortcuts can be extremely useful for doing common tasks like launching applications, opening commonly used folders, and pulling up your favorite websites, but few people take the time to use shortcuts for anything else. With the help of some very small programs we’re going to show you how to create supercharged shortcuts that can do more than you probably thought was possible.

What will you be able to do? Things like adjust the volume on your computer, turn your monitor off, lock your computer, disable WiFi, and much more. The shortcuts that we’ll create can be especially useful when used in conjunction with a keyboard launcher, such as Launchy.

I have two different free applications that are going to assist us in creating the advanced shortcuts, and each one weighs in under 100KB. You don’t have to install them, but one thing you will have to do is manually create the shortcuts. So the first thing we’re going to show you is how you can manually create a shortcut, and we’ll follow that up with the two applications you can use to enhance the shortcuts.

–How to Create a Desktop Shortcut–

1. Right-click on the executable of one of the applications (wizmo.exe or nircmd.exe) and click the Create Shortcut option:
   
2. Right-click on the new shortcut that was created, and choose Properties. Now what you need to do is edit the “Target” field by appending commands onto the executable. Using the Wizmo application as an example, the Target field would look like this to turn the monitor off:
   
3. Repeat these steps to create however many shortcuts you would like.

–Wizmo (Homepage)–

Wizmo is one of my favorite tools for creating advanced shortcuts because it has a wealth of features buried within it. It includes options to power down your computer, put it into standby, lock it, open/close the CD drive, enable/disable WiFi, turn the monitor off, adjust the volume, and more. Multiple commands can be used in a single shortcut making it even more useful. You can do things like mute the volume, turn off the monitor, and disable the WiFi all in one shortcut. The shortcut for this would look something like:

wizmo.exe mute=1 monoff wanlock

Additionally Wizmo has a nice feature, called graviton, that will activate the built-in screensaver, and will execute some command(s) once the user returns. For example, entering this into the shortcut:

wizmo.exe mute=1 graviton mute=0

will cause the music to be muted until the user returns to the computer. Similarly this shortcut will increase the volume to 80% when the user is away from the computer, and decrease it when the user returns:

wizmo.exe volume=80 graviton volume=20

Once you get into mixing and matching the various commands you’ll find that this will become an indispensable tool. Visit the Wizmo homepage for more commands that you can use.

Tip: If you double-click on the wizmo.exe file it will show you a list of commands available to use in the application. That’s all it does though.

–NirCmd (Homepage)–

NirCmd is actually very similar to Wizmo in that you modify shortcuts to create a powerful commands. I find Wizmo to be a bit simpler to configure, and NirCmd can’t recognize multiple commands in a single shortcut. On the flipside NirCmd has a lot more things that you can do including adjusting the window transparency of a certain application, terminating a process, modifying the registry, emptying the Recycle Bin, and dozens of other things.

Here is an example command for setting the transparency of all Internet Explorer windows to 75% (note that the 75% is calculated as 192/256, similarly 50% transparency would be 128)

nircmd.exe win trans ititle “internet explorer” 192

We’ve also shown how to create shortcuts to kill processes in the past, but you can do the same thing with this application. Here’s an example for killing off Internet Explorer:

nircmd.exe killprocess iexplore.exe

NirCmd does a lot more than I’ve ever needed, and for that reason I’ve always stuck with Wizmo. It’s always good to have options though.

–Overview–

Who would have ever thought that something as simple as a shortcut could be so handy? If you’re trying to decide which of the two apps to use I would start with Wizmo, and become acquainted with that first. Once you get that under your belt you can checkout some of the things NirCmd offers to see if it would be any more useful to you.

If you decide to give one of the apps a whirl feel free to mention in the comments some of the shortcuts you come up with.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryGet Drive Shortcuts on Your Windows DesktopYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Create Shortcuts To Shutdown Or Restart Your ComputerUltimate List of Keyboard Shortcuts

This article was written on August 19, 2009 by CyberNet.

For a little while Digsby has been bundling software with their installer as a way for them to make money. They try to get users to install the third party apps, and in return they get a pretty good payout. This isn’t anything new, and we’ve tried to point this out to our readers whenever we’ve written about Digsby.

As Lifehacker noticed last week it’s starting to get a little out of hand. During the setup routine it tries to get you to install up to six different pieces of crapware now, which is something I wasn’t aware of. The last time I had to install Digsby from scratch was months ago, and I only remember there being one or maybe two different apps it tried to push on me. Ever since then Digsby has just been self-updating so I’ve never had to go through the process again.

That’s enough to irk me right there, but the thing that really made me jump the bridge was what Lifehacker noticed in the Terms of Service:

You agree to permit the Software to use the processing power of your computer when it is idle to run downloaded algorithms (mathematical equations) and code within a process. You understand that when the Software uses your computer, it likewise uses your CPU, bandwidth, and electrical power. The Software will use your computer to solve distributed computing problems, such as but not limited to, accelerating medical research projects, analyzing the stock market, searching the web, and finding the largest known prime number. This functionality is completely optional and you may disable it at any time.

Yeah, you can disable this functionality… but how many people actually knew it was even doing this? And for that matter how long has it been doing this? Every time Digsby updates itself I don’t recall having to accept a new agreement, and so are they pushing this on me without ever having shown it in an agreement? Granted I probably wouldn’t have read the agreement anyhow, and I’m sure they’re aware of that which is why they tucked it there in the first place. That’s what makes this even more double-crossing.

Digsby came forward to comment on all the negative publicity they were getting, and have since rolled out a release that makes the whole “distributed computing” thing a bit more transparent to users. Overall I’m pretty disappointed with Digsby. I don’t know if I can trust a company that only admits to something once they’ve been confronted about it. They knew darn well what they were doing when they put this in the Terms of Service, and then tucked the option to disable the functionality in some menus that most people never look at (and for that matter should never have to look at). I’ve seen plenty of other programs go down this road, but some are a bit more tasteful about it. CCleaner, for example, has a version that tries to install a toolbar, but at the same time they also offer a “slim” version that is bundled with no third-party software.

I’ve recommended this software to so many other people that I’m now left wondering how many PC’s have been unknowingly contaminated. Most tech-savvy people are smart enough to not install the extra junk, but what about everyone else? For now I’m going to hold off on recommending Digsby to anyone until their team finally figures out what revenue model they are going to pursue.

In the meantime I’ve switched to Miranda, and even though it’s taken a significant amount of time to customize I’d say the end result is well worth it. I now have a messenger that uses less than 7MB of memory on my machine, and some of the plug-ins available really make it shine. I’ll talk about these customizations more in a future article for those of you who are also looking for another alternative.

So what about you… are you sticking with Digsby?

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Digsby: A Nice Cross-Network MessengerDigsby Getting Performance ImprovementsNew Digsby Getting Huge Performance BoostDaily Downloads: Digsby, Pidgin, Miro, and MoreDaily Downloads: Digsby, Launchy, and More

This article was written on September 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is on the home stretch with the first Release Candidate being made available today. It’s been over 5-months since OpenOffice.org 2.2 was released, and I’m sure most users will be welcoming this update with open arms.

The release notes for OpenOffice.org 2.3 isn’t exactly easy reading, and so I went looking through the OpenOffice.org Wiki for some info. That’s when I stumbled upon their draft of the press release which mentioned several of the more notable features in 2.3. To make it a bit easier to follow I’ve put them in a list format:

• Charting component (available for use throughout OpenOffice.org)
• A new chart wizard
• Enhanced 3D chart designs
• Replacement colour palettes
• Additional axis options and scaling
• Improved toolbars
• Flexible data sources
• Improved data editor
• OpenOffice.org Writer (word processor)
• Create Wiki pages with a new filter (example of a page created with it can be found here)
• Documents aligned to the center of the window rather than to the left
• Language guessing of unknown text, which provides better spelling recommendations
• Simple Mail Merge now allows the saving of the merge to a single document
• Support for ODF specification soft page breaks added
• Pages are not being centered
• Changed link behaviour in Writer (Ctrl+click for opening links)
• OpenOffice.org Calc (spreadsheets)
• Default print settings have changed to suppress the printing of blank pages and to only print the selected sheets
• Additional simplification of shortcuts
• Improvement of various functions
• Changes to context menus and dialogues
• Improvements to import filters
• Modifications to toolbars
• Enhancemed AutoSum feature
• OpenOffice.org Impress (presentations)
• Performance improvements
• The ‘move along curve’ animation feature has been re-introduced, giving ‘cartoon-like’ abilities to presentations.
• OpenOffice.org Base (databases)
• Additional features for expert users such as keyboard shortcuts, and a Report Builder, available as extension on http://extensions.services.openoffice.org.
• OpenOffice.org Draw (diagram creation)
• Improved exporting to HTML/web by adding support for exporting the images to portable network graphics (PNG) format
• Provide alternate text for image maps and layer titles and descriptions.

Interestingly enough most OpenOffice.org users had little to no urge to make the jump over to StarOffice when Google started offering it for free. I thought the idea of more clipart and included templates would have been more than enough to entice new users, but that didn’t end up being the case.

As of right now OpenOffice.org 2.3 is scheduled for release on September 12th or 13th, and with the numerous improvements it will be well worth the upgrade. Oh yeah, don’t forget to improve the startup time of OpenOffice.org by following the info Bob posted in our forum.

Download OpenOffice 2.3 RC1 [via Ghacks]

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Will Microsoft Lose Users To OpenOffice.org?OpenOffice.org Has Released An Update To 2.0.1OpenOffice.org: Take A Test Drive – Keep The Car!OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 ReleasedOpenOffice.org Starts A Contest For Templates And Clipart

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

Tutorial Thursday

More and more people are deciding not to shutdown their computers after each use because they don’t want to wait for their computer to boot back up the next time they want to use it. For the sake of conserving energy, maybe I can get you to put your computer into stand-by or hibernation each night when you go to bed. Right now you’re thinking about having to wait for your computer to bootup in the morning when you’re just itching to get on the Internet.

Why not just schedule your computer to wakeup when you want it to, maybe 5 minutes or so before you get up each morning? That way your computer will be ready to go as you stumble down the stairs trying to find your way to the pot of coffee.

The program that I have for you is a simple no-installation required application that will do exactly what you need. In just a few seconds you can have your computer setup to turn back on at a designated time throughout the day. All you have to do is remember to put your computer in stand-by or hibernation when you go to bed and the application will do the rest…

1. Download the program from the homepage or from our mirror.
2. Once the download completes you just need to run the program…there is no installation required. You should see a screen similar to this one:
   
3. Choose from the different configuration options where you designate a time for your computer to wakeup as well as any programs you want to run. That means Firefox (or any other browser) can be up and running without you even needing to touch your computer!
4. Hit Start to activate the program.

Once you have that all setup you should be ready to go! I do have a feature similar to this one in my BIOS that will allow me to schedule the computer to wakeup at a given time, but the extra options this program offers is well worth it. This version is said to work with Windows 98/ME/2000/NT/XP and I can confirm that it also works just fine on Vista. So go check it out. After all, there is nothing to install!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryHelpful Vista Tip: What is Hybrid Sleep Mode?Fast Sleep in Mac OS XCyberNotes: How To Schedule Your Computer To Shutdown And MoreWindows Vista – Have To Restart Less And Use Standby More

This article was written on December 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Vista’s Flip3D is one of the most notable features, and something you frequently see in demonstrations of the operating system. It presents a unique way to flip between your open applications, and for the longest time I didn’t think it would ever make me more productive. I was proven wrong when Logitech launched a new version of their SetPoint software that gave their mice a quick way to launch Flip3D without needing a keyboard shortcut.

I ran into a problem, however, when I was using my laptop’s Touchpad mouse which didn’t have such capabilities. It left me yearning for a way to launch Flip3D from my Touchpad so that I wouldn’t have to touch the keyboard, and after thinking about it for a minute I got an idea! Using AutoHotKey I could doing something similar to my middle-click Touchpad script.

Note: Vista is required for this to work. It is not a Flip3D clone or anything of that nature!

So what do you need to get it working? Download Mouse Flip3D and run it. There’s nothing to install, and the only indication of it running will be a Vista-like Orb in the System Tray. Anytime you press and hold the left mouse button, and then press the right mouse button you should see Flip3D come up:

If you want the program to start with Vista just copy it into your Startup folder, and you should be all set! Here are a few pointers on why this is great and how exactly the script works:

• One of the reasons that I never thought Flip3D was productive was because of how much time it takes to shuffle through all of the windows to find the one you want. With the mouse that is obsolete because you can click on any of the windows to bring it to the front! Go ahead and try it, and you’ll see just how fast it really is.
• If you decide that you still want to flip through the windows just use the scroll wheel on your mouse or Touchpad. Alternatively you can hit the Tab key to shuffle through the windows, and use Enter key to select the foremost application.
• You may not have realized it, but there are two different ways that you can launch Flip3D from the keyboard. The WinKey+Tab is the standard way that most people know about, but you can also launch it using Ctrl+WinKey+Tab. The difference between the two is that using the Control key makes Flip3D remain open until you click on one of the windows. That’s what we ended up using for the script. For the code junkies out there here is the entire AutoHotKey script for launching Flip3D with the mouse:
  

  ~LButton & RButton::send, {lwin down}{lctrl down}{tab}{lwin up}{lctrl up}

Some mouse gestures that you use, such as navigating forward in Opera, may not work because of the overlapping shortcut that is used for this script. Personally I’d rather have Flip3D at my finger tips than anything else, so I was willing to sacrifice that mouse shortcut.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

AltTab Mouse ShortcutHow To Get The Flip3D Feature In Windows XPMicrosoft Redesigns The Windows Vista SiteHelpful Tip: Use a Keyboard to Move the MouseHelpful Tip: Right-Click in Boot Camp