Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

RSS feeds are a wonderful thing that have revolutionized the way many people read news. If you use feeds to keep up with your news, think about how difficult it would be to follow all of the sites your subscribed to if there was no feed available.

I use FeedDemon (our review) to keep up on all of my news, and it was definitely worth the $30 I had to pay to get it. Keeping up with 400+ sites would be a huge chore if I didn’t have a great desktop application to use, which is why I’m grateful to have a program like FeedDemon. If I didn’t use FeedDemon I think the next best thing would be Google Reader.

Now you just have to find the feeds that will be the most beneficial to you, and that’s why we’re here. We’ve compiled a list of what we believe to be the top-10 most useful feeds. They’ll increase your knowledge, save you time, and they are just plain awesome. Check them out, and get your feed readers ready!

–This Day in History (Feed URL)–

We all like to get some interesting facts from time to time, but what about getting one each day? The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a cool RSS feed that tells you what interesting things have happened for each day. It reminds me of something you would see on one of those desktop calendars that you flip through.

–Amazon Price Monitor (Feed Generator)–

Seeing that Amazon guarantees the lowest price for up to 30-days after your purchase, it might be in your best interest to monitor for price changes. After you buy something, you probably never think to check the price again, but it can be greatly beneficial if you do.

If you’re skeptical of prices flucuating that much, just checkout the feed for the full version of Vista Ultimate. Since the beginning of March the price has dropped $60!

All you have to do is provide an Amazon URL or Wishlist to this feed generator service to monitor for price changes. Each time the price goes up or down you’ll receive a notification in your feed reader.

–Tracking Airfare (Feed Generator)–

With the rising cost of airfare we all want to make sure we’re getting the lowest price possible. Thanks to Farecast, it is possible to track the prices of airfare using your feed reader, and they will even tell you whether the price keeps going up or whether it has been going down.

–BitTorrent Search Feed (Homepage)–

BitTorrent is a wonderful tool that is used by millions of people everyday, but have you ever been guilty of sitting around waiting for a torrent to get posted? You sit there refreshing, refreshing, and it just never pops up. Eventually you forget about it and check back a week later at which time you notice that it has already been available for a few days.

Don’t go looking for the torrents, instead let them come to you with an RSS feed! If you go to the BTJunkie.org homepage and perform a search there will be an orange RSS icon located at the top of the results. There’s your RSS feed, just subscribe to that and you’ll automatically be notified via the feed as soon as a new result is posted.

–Word of the Day (Feed URL)–

This is kind of like the “this day in history” feed in the sense that it provides knowledge that can actually make you smarter. Not only that, but it is also fun to impress your friends with big words.

–eBay Auctions (Homepage)–

At the bottom of every eBay search is a small discrete RSS button. It’s almost as if they didn’t want you to know that you can use RSS to monitor search results, but it works wonderfully. You can monitor for newly added items that match your search results…this is another great tool to hunt down deals!

–DHL, FedEx, and UPS Package Tracking (Homepage)–

This is one of the most useful feeds that I have. The site offers package tracking for a variety of shipping services, including UPS and FedEx, and also provides an RSS feed for keeping up-to-date with the status of your package. In fact, I somehow get the status updates from the site before they are even available on the shipper’s website.

–Weather (Homepage)–

We all want to know what the weather is like right now, as well as what to expect in the future. After all, that is probably the most used gadgets on computer desktops and personalized homepages. Now you can bring it to your feed reader! Just go to the Yahoo! Weather homepage, enter in your area, and click the RSS button.

–Using Google Calendar for Cool Feeds (Homepage)–

You probably already realize that you can retrieve a feed for your Google Calendar, or for any calendar that you’re currently subscribed to. The usefulness of subscribing to your own calendar might not be apparent because after all, you can send yourself email reminders along with several other notification options. I, however, use it for other purposes.

For example, I subscribe to the Mozilla Developer Calendar so that I can see when they add anything new to it. After subscribing to an iCal calendar, all you have to do is go into the Google Calendar Settings -> Calendars and then click on whatever one you want to subscribe to. You’ll then be presented with an XML address which you can use with your RSS feed reader.

Apple has a nice list of iCal’s that you can subscribe to in Google Calendar. They include things like DVD and movie release dates as well as the top iTunes songs. By subscribing to these you’ll be one of the first to notice the new content.

–CyberNet News (Feed URL)–

If you’re not already subscribed to our feed, there has never been a better time! We are constantly providing cool tips on using Vista, Ubuntu, and a ton of freeware applications that are sure to save you some money. What, did you really think that we wouldn’t include our own feed?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

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This article was written on January 17, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

In the past we’ve shown you how to create batch files for synchronizing two folders, and today we’re going to demonstrate how they can be used to launch your favorite applications. If you’re like me you probably start the same applications every morning, such as your feed reader, web browser, and your calendar. If that’s the case then you’ll be in love with what I’m about to show you. In under a minute you can create a batch file to launch several applications, documents, files, and more in a single click.

What some people don’t realize is that you can also use this method to reduce the startup time of your computer! It’s likely that you have at least a handful of applications that startup with Windows which you don’t need immediately. Things like an instant messenger or email checker. You can place all of those applications into a single batch file, remove them from the startup list, and then just run them when you’re ready.

Update: Be sure to checkout how you can use a batch file to close multiple programs as well.

You may think that doing something like this is a tedious process, but it’s actually rather easy:

–Instructions–

1. Open Notepad (Start Menu -> Accessories -> Notepad):
   
2. Get the paths for the programs you want to start. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on each of the existing shortcuts, choose the Properties option, and then copy the Target path.
   
3. Enter the paths for each of the programs into Notepad, one per line. Be sure to put

   start "" 

   at the beginning of each line, and put a space after it to separate it from the application path. If the path of your application has a space in it, you’ll need to surround the entire path with quotes. It should look something like this:
   

4. Save it as a .BAT file by manually entering in the extension at the end of the file name.
   
5. Double-click on the new file that you just created to test out the results.

–Examples–

There are all kinds of things that this can be used for, especially since you can throw parameters onto each of the applications. Let’s say you wanted to open our website in Firefox, one of the lines would look like this:

start "" "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" "cybernetnews.com"

You can also have it open a document by providing the path to it, like this:

start "" "C:\Users\Wagner\Documents\CyberNet.doc"

In the end you can create several different batch files each for different tasks. Batch files are powerful tools that can greatly enhance your productivity, and this is one of the ways they do that.

Thanks to Tim for asking us how to do something like this!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only

Have you ever been working on a project where you wish you had a copy from a few hours or days ago before you made some changes? Most people never think about being able to setup a system that manages revisions of files (a.k.a. version control) because they think it’s too complicated, but it takes only minutes to do using the free Cobian Backup software.

I’ve been a huge fan of Cobian Backup ever since I wrote about it back in April. It has a number of features that truly makes it one of the most complete backup solutions I’ve found, and today we’re going to demonstrate how it can also serve as a revision management system for you’re most precious files. What it will do is make a copy of a file every time it recognizes that a change has been made. As you can imagine this type of system can be priceless for programmers, writers, designers, and more.

How do you set it up? Here is the step-by-step guide on what you need to do:

1. Download and install the free Cobian Backup 9. You should see a screen like this when you run it the first time:
   
2. Click Task -> New Task. Give the new task a useful name, and choose Differential as the backup type:
   
3. Click on the Files section along the left side, and in the upper-half of the window choose the files and/or directories you want revisions kept for. After you’ve done that move down to the bottom where you’ll choose the location you want the revisions to be placed.
   
4. Now switch over to the Schedule section. Change the type to Timer, and then at the bottom of the window enter in how many minutes you would like between each backup. If you’re working on something where having lots of revisions is very important you can have it check every minute, otherwise every 15 to 30 minutes should be suitable. Alternatively you can set a specific time/day for the backups to occur, but generally a timer works better for keeping track of revisions.
   
5. That’s it! Press the OK button to have it start creating your revisions. Any file(s) that get changed will be copied over into a new folder that is labeled with the date/time that the backup was performed:
   

Now that you have everything setup you can rest easy that you’ll have revisions available for your most important files and folders. I know what you’re probably thinking now. What do you do when you want to see all of the revisions for a particular file? Do you have to navigate through each folder individually? Nope, you just need to perform a search in your backup folder for the particular file. This can easily be done by right-clicking on the backup folder, and choosing the Search option.

One thing that you want to keep in mind when doing all of this is that duplicates are made of a file every time a change has been made to them. So if you’re working with large files (movies, music, etc…) these backups can really start to eat away at your disk space.

–Other Configuration Options to Consider–

If you’ve followed the steps above your backups should be working just fine, but there are a few things that you may discover that you want to configure:

• Changing the Timestamp Format
  Each time a new folder is created to hold your revisions the name is assigned to the current date and time. The format of the time can be changed by going to Tools -> Options -> Advanced and altering the value in the Date/Time Format field.
• Disable the Popup Alert
  Whenever a backup starts a little popup is shown down by the System Tray telling you what’s going on. If your backups are frequently getting executed this can get quite annoying, but they can luckily be disabled. Just go to Tools -> Options -> Functionality, and uncheck the Show backup hints option.
• Archive Each Backup
  If you’re frequently doing backups they can quickly start to take up a lot of room. One thing you can do to help conserve space is archive/compress the files each time they are backed up. When you’re configuring your backup you should see a section along the left side labeled Archive, and clicking on that will let you choose your compression method. I recommend using 7Zip since it will save the most room, but the standard ZIP format might be the easiest for you to work with since Windows includes built-in support for it.

–Overview–

As a programmer and writer I’ve found revision systems like these to be incredibly useful, and that’s largely because everything doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. Being able to revert back to a file’s previous state can save a lot of frustration. If you’re working on a report, project, or anything else that’s extremely important I’d recommend setting up a revision system like this so that you don’t regret it later on.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

I was recently approached by a friend who had just installed Quicken 2008 onto his computer, and previously he had kept his transactions in a complex Microsoft Excel spreadsheet much like myself. He thought that the import process would be a piece of cake, but that didn’t turn out to be the case since Intuit, the parent company behind Quicken, decided to start phasing out Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) file support a few years ago.

The decision came about because QIF was seen to have many inefficiencies that the new format, Open Financial Exchange (OFX), is able to conquer. Intuit wanted to make it extremely difficult to import QIF files into Quicken 2008 (as well as 2005, 2006, and 2007) so that banks and credit card companies would start using the new format. This has angered many people because some banks only provide their data in the QIF format.

But wait, why do I even care about QIF if I’m trying to import data from Excel, which doesn’t have the ability to save a QIF. Actually there is a nifty little add-on for Excel called XL2QIF that will convert your spreadsheet to a QIF file using the data that you specify. In just a few seconds I had the Excel data converted into the needed format.

TIP: All QIF files can be edited and examined in any text editor, such as Notepad or WordPad. This is important because we’ll be doing some manual editing in a minute, but don’t be intimidated because it is pretty straightforward.

Here are the steps you need to take to import QIF files into Quicken 2008:

1. Open Quicken and create an account for the data that you want to import. You don’t have to create another account if you already have one made.
2. Now go to File -> Export -> QIF File, and select the account that you want to deal with from the Quicken Account to Export from. This should be the account that you created/used in Step 1. It’s crucial that you check the Account List box.
   
3. Now open the QIF file from Step 2 in a text editor, such as Notepad. Copy all of the text up to the line that specifies the date for the first transaction (highlighted in yellow below). The data we want should look something like this:

   !Option:AutoSwitch
   !Account
   NCyberNet Credit Card
   TCCard
   L0.00
   ^
   !Clear:AutoSwitch
   !Account
   NCyberNet Credit Card
   TCCard
   ^
   !Type:CCard

   Now open the QIF file that you want to import. Paste the text that you just copied, and replace all of the data up to the date on the first transaction. The entire process should look something like this:

   (Click to Enlarge)
   

   Wondering why you just did that? The data that you just copied is used by Quicken to identify which account the transactions belong to. The original file was missing that critical information, and without it Quicken will have no idea where to put the transactions. In older versions of Quicken it would let you select which account to apply the transactions to, but that doesn’t work anymore. Needless to say it’s an important part of the process if you want to import a QIF file into Quicken.

4. In Quicken go to File -> Import -> QIF File. Browse for the file location on your computer, select All Accounts as the account to import into, and make sure the Account List box is checked. Then hit the Next button!

   (Click to Enlarge)
   

5. Now all that you have to do is accept the transactions that you just imported from the QIF:

   (Click to Enlarge)
   

It may seem like a long process, but once you understand how it works you can probably import a QIF file into Quicken in under 30 seconds. Just save the account information that you copied in Step 3 if you regularly download QIF files from your bank. By saving that information you will never have to go through the export process in Step 2.

Believe it or not it took me upwards of two hours to figure out that this trick would work. I tried dozens of different techniques mentioned around the web, and then I finally figured that if Quicken can still export the data as a QIF that it should also be able to import it. Turns out that I was right.

Whether you’re trying to import Microsoft Money data or import an Excel spreadsheet this trick should be just what you’re looking for!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Fast Uploads to FTP, Imageshack, TinyPic, and RapidshareQuicken Online – How do you Manage your Finances?Import Documents from Google Docs to ZohoSave Google Presentations as a PowerPoint (PPT)

This article was written on December 21, 2009 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Predator Drones Use Less Encryption Than Your TV
The military in Iraq and Afghanistan have been intercepting U.S. Predator drone communications because, well, the transmissions between the unit and ground control weren’t encrypted. They were able to grab transmissions using some laptops and a $30 Russian application.

Shuttleworth Steps Down as Ubuntu CEO
By March 1st, 2010 Mark Shuttleworth will have completely transitioned out of the CEO position of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. His replacement is Jane Silber, who has been the COO of Canonical since 2004. Shuttleworth says that he isn’t leaving the company, and that the move will let him work closer on the design process.

New in Gmail Labs: Mark as Unread from Here
Google continues to amaze me as they roll out more and more Gmail labs features that greatly enhance the web email experience. The newest is a “mark unread from here” option that will let you flag parts of an email conversation as unread so that later on you can pick up where you left off. Individually these Gmail Labs aren’t earth-shattering features, but together they make web-based email more appealing to those who tend to lean towards desktop applications.

–News in Brief–

Google Confirms: 1 is Indeed the Loneliest Number
Not really news… more like a little bit of fun to start your holiday week!

Android 2.1 Hacked onto Droid
The iPhone isn’t the only one with a community to hacking the mobile OS every waking moment!

Dell Gets Pranked After Announcing Layoffs
Dell laid off 16% of its Malaysian workforce (about 700 people), and shortly thereafter some “price adjustments” were made to their site: a $4000 laser mouse and an $11 computer.

Microsoft’s Free Tinker Game
Tinker used to be a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra game, and now they’ve released it to all XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users.

Bing App Debuts on iPhone
Last week Microsoft released a Bing search app for the iPhone with a dazzling interface.

Reddit Users Band Together for Largest Secret Santa Ever
This year over 5,000 gifts were shipped for a Secret Santa program between Reddit users. In all over $160,000 in presents were exchanged.

Merge Duplicate Gmail Contacts
If you have a lot of clutter in your contacts you may want to try Google’s new contact merging tool that tries to combine records together for (what it believes) are the same contact.

McDonalds Offering Free WiFi Starting in mid-January
Now you’ll be able to surf the web and devour a Big Mac at the same time… without having to bring the food back home first!

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Add a Little 3D to Your Desktop
This Windows app will let you view open programs in a 3D view that lets you flip windows, zoom, move, and much more. What’s nice is that on Windows 7 it works with features like Aero Peek to give you a more streamlined experience. I’m not too confident that I’ll use this all that often (I’m an Alt-Tab kind of guy), but it can be pretty cool to show off to people.

Mutlifox: Log into Multiple Online Accounts in Firefox
This is something that should absolutely be built-into all browsers. Mutlifox is a Firefox extension that will let you open a new tab with a clean set of cookies, and you can therefore log into multiple accounts for the same service (eg. Gmail). I mean really, how many people actually have just one Gmail account these days? I think I have like six… I just can’t remember what they all are.

Packagetrackr Aggregates Package Delivery Information
Got a lot of last-minute holiday packages being delivered this week? If so this will be the perfect time to start using this service. Once you enter in all your tracking numbers you can follow the status of your deliveries from your web browser, or through your mobile device (with the mobile-optimized version of the site). Windows 7/Vista users can also grab the gadget for some package tracking “fun” on your desktop. After all, it’s pretty hard to wait for those nifty little gadgets to arrive at your doorstep.

–Tips in Brief–

Desktop Blog Editors for Ubuntu
While these blog editors may not be as powerful as Windows Live Writer they do certainly offer the basics from the comfort of your open source operating system.

Visually Organize Your Tasks
Get a virtual corkboard to post up all of your tasks, movies you want to watch, and more. (Note: Spaaze says it’s free while in Beta… which means they may charge for it later on down the road).

Quickly Remove Backgrounds from Images
This tool doesn’t do the best job removing backgrounds, but it is possible to get decent results depending on how clear the separation is between you and the background.

Osmo: A Simple Personal Organizer
A calendar, task, contacts, and notes manager doesn’t get much cleaner than this.

Session Manager for Google Chrome
Save your tab sessions in Google Chrome with this add-on.

–Downloads–

• Avant Browser 11.7.43 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dropbox 0.7.79 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Evernote 3.5.0.862 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.0.16 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.6 ^{Beta 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Flash Player 10.1.51.66 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.0 ^{Beta 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Desktop 5.9.911.3589 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Miranda 0.8.11 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Notepad++ 5.6.3 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Picasa 3.6.95.25 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• SeaMonkey 2.0.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Songbird 1.4.1.1419 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• VirtualBox 3.1.2.56127 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Winamp 5.57 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Wireshark 1.2.5 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Xbox Media Center 9.11 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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