Hasta La Gadget!

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

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

John’s Background Switcher is a free application that does exactly what you would expect it to, but likely goes a step further than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not only capable of grabbing images directly from your computer, but it can also interact with multiple online services including Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, and Yahoo. What’s really nice is that it even supports retrieval of your private images for nearly all of the online services either through authorization or by providing your username/password. Heck, you can even mix and match the sources you want to pull images from. Neato!

Need a calendar on your desktop? No problem! Background Switcher has an option to display a monthly calendar directly on your wallpaper, and it will highlight the current day. Now how convenient is that?

Oh, right, but you use multiple monitors. Yeah, it supports that, too. You can have it show the same picture on each monitor, one picture for the entire desktop, different pictures on each monitor, or only show one picture on the main monitor. I think you get the point… this is a very full-featured background rotation utility.

(Click to Enlarge)

One thing that I do want to point out is that you can obviously specify the interval that the backgrounds will rotate, but it can also be done manually. To do that just double-click on the System Tray icon, and it will immediately begin processing a new background to use.

–Very Impressive Layouts–

Not only can this flip through your images, but it can also take multiple photos and lay them out in a way that is sure to make your friends go “wow.” Take the “Snapshot Scrapbook” mode for example, which takes a handful of your photos and lays them out in a polaroid fashion. It also takes one image and converts it to black and white to be used as the background. The number of images shown on the screen at any given time are dependent on your monitor’s resolution, and here’s what it looks like using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

Note: The application does place some text in the upper-right corner of the background with the program’s name. I didn’t see any option to eliminate this.

If you want to see more images at a time just switch over to the mosaic mode where it will grab a lot of thumbnails, and then tile them on your desktop. Here’s what that looks like once again using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

–Performance–

One of the questions that I frequently get asked when writing about apps like this is what kind of performance hit a PC will take for running this. As you can see above there are a handful of multi-image layouts that you can choose from, and Background Switcher has to generate the background each time the wallpaper is switched out.

On my Vista machine the memory usage for the app sat around 13MB when idle, and 21MB when hard at work. The processor usage obviously spiked while putting together the background, but the highest I saw it go was 65% (it only did that for a split second, too). That’s not all bad for what the program accomplishes.

The nice thing is that Background Switcher is actually a performance-conscious app, and offers several different settings to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your work. Here are some of the things you customize:

• On start up don’t switch the wallpaper for a specified number of seconds. This gives the rest of your apps a chance to finish loading before it starts working on the background.
• Stop switching the background when the screensaver is running.
• Stop switching when running over terminal services (ex. remote desktop).
• Only switch when the system has been idle for at least 15 seconds.
• Stop switching if any programs you specify are running. Great for games or applications that require extensive use of your computers resources.

–Overview–

To be honest I haven’t gotten this excited about an application in a long time. The interface is very intuitive and simple, but at the same time there are tons of things you can customize. And the fact that it supports so many online photos services is astounding. Plus it’s free! The developer is even very active in the support forum in case you need help using it, or just have a feature request. It’s not often that you see an application and developer of this caliber that doesn’t charge a dime.

Get John’s Background Switcher

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
Seeing that Ashley and I are still relatively new to the Mac world we are still finding some little gems that demonstrate Apple’s eye for detail. A fine example of this is something I saw on the help page Apple developed to explain what Exposé is. It was there that I found out you can drag and drop files from one window to another using Exposé:

If you need to drag a file from one window to another, start dragging the item, press F9 to see all windows, drag the item over the target window until the window becomes active, or press F9 again, and drop in your item.

If you need to copy elements between two windows in the same application, start dragging the item you wish to copy, press F10 to display all open windows for that application, drag the item over the target window until it becomes active or press F10 again, and drop it.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s come in handy for me on numerous occasions. Having the ability to drag and drop using Exposé means that I no longer have to think about placing the two windows side-by-side before performing this operation. Plus you can make it a little more useful by putting these tips to use:

• Setup a hotcorner that will launch Exposé. That way you don’t have to worry about pressing the Exposé shortcut on the keyboard.
• Instead of hovering over a program in Exposé and waiting for it to become active you can press the Spacebar to immediately be taken to that application.
• This trick also works with the shortcut that shows your desktop (F11). It makes dragging items to/from your desktop a breeze.

When I first started using a Mac getting accustomed to using Exposé felt like more of a chore than anything. I have to admit that it has really grown on me though, and I now use it all the time.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

For some weird reason, I’ve been a Microsoft Excel addict for as long as I can remember. When I was younger I remember being told by one of my teachers that Excel is one of the most powerful applications available, but most people will never touch it with a ten foot pole.

For over 7 years I’ve been programming Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Excel, which is essentially a way to extend Excel to do everything your heart desires. With it you can add more formulas, and create buttons that will execute queries on the data located in your spreadsheet. VBA is one of Excel’s best features in my opinion.

What I’m going to cover today is how to highlight cells based on their values in Excel 2007. This method is extremely simple and doesn’t use an ounce of VBA, despite an abundance of sites out there saying that VBA is required to do such a task. It’s all about Conditional Formatting!

Tip: This tutorial was created for Excel 2007, but the general principles will also work in older versions of Excel. The free OpenOffice.org Suite even has a Conditional Formatting option located under the Format menu, but it’s pretty basic compared to the one in Excel 2007.

–Preparation–

The values in column “C” and “D” are both formulas that I created to calculate the age of the person, and then how many days are left until their next birthday. That way I can prepare gifts or cards for any upcoming birthdays well in advance. The only problem is that when the list gets large it can be hard to see what birthdays are coming up.

I’m not going to walk through what all of the formulas mean, but to make it easier to follow along with our example, here’s what the content of the second row looks like:

• A2: John
• B2: 11/19/1984
• C2: =FLOOR(YEARFRAC(TODAY(),B2),1)
• D2: =DAYS360(TODAY(),DATE(YEAR(B2)+C2+1,MONTH(B2),DAY(B2)))

What I want to do with the data is highlight anyone with a birthday that is coming up within two weeks. To do cell highlighting, a lot of sites talk about how to use the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but that’s way more work than needed. It’s actually really easy to do …

–Instructions–

Note: Most of the screenshots below are thumbnails, so click on them for a fullsize version.

1. The first thing that you need to do is fill in a spreadsheet with some data to apply the conditional formatting. I’m using the data that I provided above for keeping track of birthdays, but you can use whatever you want.
   
2. I want to have the birthdays highlighted that are coming up in the next two weeks, so I need to highlight the cells in column “D” for that:
   
3. On the Home Ribbon is the Conditional Formatting option. Click on that and select the option for a New Rule.
   
4. There are several different types of data that you can look for in the cells that you’ve highlighted. For example, you can have duplicate entries or max/min values highlighted. For us we want to choose the Format only cells that contain option, and we want to check for a cell value that is less than 14. After that is entered in press the Format button.
   
5. Now we need to pick what the cells should look like that match the criteria, which in our case is all birthdays that occur in less than 14 days. I chose to make the background orange and also made the text bold.
   
6. You should see a preview of what matching cells will look like. Just hit the OK button to complete the conditional formatting.
   
7. Yay, it worked! Looks like John has a birthday coming up in 4 days!
   
8. Anytime the values in these cells change, Excel will automatically reanalyze them to see if they meet any of the conditional formatting rules. That means that once John’s birthday passes in 4 days it will no longer be highlighted.

This is just one of the nearly unlimited uses for conditional formatting. I use this all of the time in my spreadsheets because it helps recognize when an item needs attention. Some things I’ve used this for in the past is attendance lists for parties to highlight who’s coming and who’s not, budgets to see when money is getting low, gift lists to pinpoint who I still have to buy for, and a countdown fir events (similar to the birthday example I did in this article), and much more. Get creative!

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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This article was written on July 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Hard drives are absolutely enormous these days with capacities reaching the terabyte mark, but with all of this storage we often forget to go cleanup unused files. Why’s that a big deal if you have virtually “unlimited” storage? The more files you have on your computer, the longer it will take to do a lot of things. It means more items that your antivirus software will have to scan, and it can even slow down your entire computer.

Here’s a good analogy as to why you should keep your computer clean. You inevitably have a path to get from your couch to the bathroom, and hopefully that path is free from obstacles. What if you started to buy all kinds of stuff and out of disparity for space you place it in that path. By placing the items there you managed to keep the patch from the couch to the kitchen squeaky clean. That’s great, but now it takes you longer to get to the bathroom since you have to go around a bunch of stuff. Even if you try to move things around to optimize all the paths, which is equivalent to defragmenting your computer, you would still have to find a place for all of that junk.

That’s how I explain the point behind defragmenting a hard drive, and I think it serves as a good learning tool here as well. The moral of the story is that you can try and optimize your hard drive all you want, but if you have a lot of unnecessary junk on it, there will be side affects.

So how can you remove the junk? First you have to find it, and MetaMan over in our forum found a great tool for doing just that. It’s called WinDirStat and it is open source (free) software that will point out where all of your space-hogging files are at. It works on almost every version of Windows (even Vista although it’s not stated) and takes just a second to install.

After you get it up and running you should see a screen similar to the one above. It shows horizontal “progress” bars that represent how much storage each area on your hard drive is taking up. The little Pacman characters will continue to go back and forth until WinDirStat is completely finished scanning your drive for information. When it’s all done this is what you should see:

Now the real fun begins. There are a bunch of color-coded blocks at the bottom of the screen, and I want to explain how those work. That is referred to as a treemap which is a common tool used for graphing data. It almost looks like some freaky piece of art, but in reality it is a graphical map of your hard drive where each block represents a single file. The key in the upper-right corner of the screen details what filetype each block represents.

There is a reason behind the ordering of the blocks on the treemap even though it may seem random. They are actually grouped by folders, and if I click on the Program Files folder WinDirStat will outline the block of files on the treemap with a white border:

As you can see, the Program Files area on my computer only takes up a small portion of the room. Now I’ll go ahead and click on a sub-folder in the Program Files…let’s do Microsoft Games:

As you can see WinDirStat continues to maintain my drive’s folder structure even on the treemap. I can go all the way down and select a file which will still be highlighted accordingly:

This process also works in reverse, which makes the treemap even more useful. If you see a big block on the map, such as the big red ones on the right side of my drive, you can actually hover you mouse over the block and in the Status Bar it will tell you the corresponding file:

As you can see, one of the big red blocks is my computer’s hibernation file, which is always equal to the amount of RAM that is installed. Therefore it makes sense that it is one of the largest things on my drive. If I wanted to see more information I could just click on the block, and it would immediately navigate to that file in the folder list located above the treemap.

MetaMan mentioned in his post that he was able to cut 25GB of temporary and log files from his computer using this tool. I’m sure that combining this with CCleaner (our review) you can trim a lot of fat from your hard drive, and you may even see a boost in performance as a direct result.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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