Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Mac only
When on a Windows computer one of the things I always did was make the Taskbar twice the normal height. The reason I did that was because it would then show the date in addition to the time, which is something I use quite regularly. Sure I could have hovered my mouse over the time to see the same information, but that often took more time than was necessary.

So naturally when I got my Mac I was surprised to see that I couldn’t do something similar with the Menubar. There is a checkbox in the time configuration options so that you can add/remove the day of the week, but there’s no setting to add the current date. Being the geek that I am I begun a quest for someway that I could get this, and as it turns out there’s a rather simple solution. The best part is that it requires no additional software! Here’s what my end result looks like:

Notice how the Menubar shows the date without needing to be clicked? Cool, huh? Here’s how you can add the date to the Mac Menubar clock:

1. Go to System Preferences -> International -> Formats, and click the Customize button listed in the Dates section.
   
2. Now you’ll want to build the format of the date that you want shown next to the time. To change between the different different date formats use the arrow located next to each element, or drag and drop elements from the lower section to add more of them:
   
3. Now you need to copy and paste the elements by highlighting everything in the contents of the box, and then pressing Command+C to copy it. Once you have the elements copied press CANCEL:
   
4. Now click the Customize button located next to the Times section in the International settings. Make sure you switch the Show option to Medium, and then paste in the formatting where you would like it to appear. Remember, you can add spaces, punctuation (hypens, slashes, semicolons, brackets, etc…) by simply typing them in where the should appear. After you are done formatting press OK.
   
5. You should now see the date in the Menubar located alongside the time (no restart is required). If you don’t, you may need to change the Show option in Step 4 to Long and paste in the formatting elements from Step 3 again. One of those two styles should work for you. When all is said and done you should see something like this:
   
6. Note: By changing the time format you might noticed that the day of the week is automatically shown in the Menubar. If you don’t want this just go to System Preferences -> Date & Time -> Clock, and uncheck the Show the day of the week option.

I do want to point out that there could be some adverse affects from manipulating the Menubar clock in this fashion, such as an application showing the date and time where it would only show the time before. That will only happen, however, if the application uses the Medium time format that you altered in Step 4. I’ve found that most programs, such as iChat, use the Short format when doing things like timestamps though so they really aren’t affected.

This might not be as simple as checking a box, but I was actually surprised that I didn’t have to go diving into a system file to adjust the setting. It’s not optimal, but it definitely works. This is a must-have tweak in my book!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten some really tremendous deals on eBay before. The general consensus that I’ve found when talking with people, however, is that they normally make impulse purchases before they take the time to see if they are getting a real bargain. Today we’re going to walk you through a 5 step process that can save you a lot of money in the end.

Ashley and myself ran an eBay business for over a year, and it was quite an interesting experience. From it we found ourselves knowing more about eBay than we ever wanted to, and now our friends always poke and prod us for tips on how they can get the most out of the online marketplace.

1. Search eBay

The first thing that you’ll obviously want to do is search eBay to see what kind of prices they have. Don’t get sucked into the low-priced auctions… no, you’re not going to get a $1,500 laptop for $25. Many people wait until the last minute to bid (a.k.a. sniping), and we’re going to show you the best way to do that as well.

What may prove to be helpful is to checkout the completed listings. On the search page you’ll notice the “Completed listings only” checkbox which will show only those listings that have already ended. If the item you’re looking for is rather common then there should be a fair amount of listings that have already completed, and with those you should be able to get a rough idea of what future listings will realistically sell for.

When sifting through the completed listings be sure to also watch for people who are constantly relisting the same item… especially if it never sells. That’s normally an indication that they really want to get rid of it or they have a bunch that they need to unload. In situations like those you might be able to bargain with them even if all you may get is the shipping fee waived.

Believe it or not eBay actually has their own Deal Finder search engine. When you perform a search on there it will only show items that have zero bids, less than 4 hours left, no reserve price, and free/fixed price shipping. So it is actually different than the regular eBay search engine, and can be beneficial for finding those gems that no one else has come across.

2. Search for Misspellings

Ahhh, we’ve all been criticized at one point or another for not proofreading the things that we write. Well, here’s where you can really benefit from the mistakes that others make. Maybe it’s poor typing skills, a genuine mistake, or maybe they are just in a rush to get a listing done. Whatever it is there are quite a few people out there who like to misspell words in their listings.

So how can you capitalize on the mistakes of others? It’s rather simple actually. There are all kinds of sites, such as Fat Fingers, that will help you search eBay for misspellings of any word you specify. A really good example of this in action would be searching for Oakley sunglasses. You’ll quickly find quite a few different ways that people spell it, including Oakly and Oakely.

3. Shop Around

I definitely don’t see this happening enough with people who buy things on eBay. They naturally assume that if an item is on eBay that it’s gotta be a steal, but that’s surprisingly not the case for most items. Be patient and shop around at some other stores for goodness sake. You have to remember that eBay sellers have to pay rather excessive fees for every item that sells, and they will definitely make sure that those fees are recouped.

When it comes to shopping around I normally do a quick run through on Amazon, PriceGrabber, and Google Product Search to see if any of them point to a better deal. More often than not I can find an item brand new for nearly the same price as some used/refurbished items on eBay… so it’s definitely worth doing your homework.

4. Subscribe to Feeds

When Ashley and I were selling items on eBay for a full-time job one thing that we always tried to do was turnover the merchandise quickly. Ideally we wanted to get the things out as fast as we got them in, and to do that we had to slap low Buy it Now prices on them. What this meant is that the people who took the time to find the Buy it Now listings that still have several days remaining are normally the ones who get the best deals. Most people never look beyond the first page of search results, but that’s normally where you’ll find the most reasonable prices.

If you don’t need the item right away it will likely serve you well to hold out for the low Buy it Now listings. If you use RSS feeds I highly recommend subscribing to a feed for any particular search that you perform. That way you’ll be one of the first people to know when there is a new item listed. To do this just look for the orange RSS button at the bottom of any search results page:

5. Snipe the Auction

The art of sniping is becoming more and more popular on eBay. It’s where someone swoops in at the last second to place a bid, and often doesn’t leave enough time for you to counteract their offer. It’s sneaky, pisses a lot of people off, and sellers hate it. But you can do it with little to no effort thanks to JBidWatcher (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux).

We’ve already assembled a more detailed tutorial on how to use JBidWatcher, and it’s been getting some welcomed updates lately. It’s pretty much an automated sniping system that you can easily setup. With it you can even target multiple auctions for the same item, and it will continue to bid on them all within seconds of them ending. What’s nice is that once you win an auction at the price you specify it will not bid on any of the others! This can save a lot of hassle for people who have to work during the day, and don’t have an opportunity to check on their eBay auctions.

It is possible to snipe an auction without using any software, but I’ve ran into some problems when trying to do that before. When doing it manually I try to leave about 15 seconds left on the auction before submitting my offer, but one time I went to do this and eBay unexpectedly made me login before submitting my offer. Needless to say I wasn’t ready for that and ended up not getting my bid in on time. So software like JBidWatcher is definitely nice to have.

–Overview–

These are the five steps that I feel most people should follow when purchasing from eBay, and hopefully they will help you save some money. Be sure to share your eBay money saving tips in the comments below!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I’m one of those people who doesn’t know what they would do if their Web browser didn’t have tabs. The problem is that I am a tabaholic and always seem to have 20+ Tabs open at any one given time. As you can imagine, I am often left with very little room for each tab, andfind myself clicking through them all when I’m looking for something. Well, that’s how it was until I decided to put my tabs on the side of my browser.

All of the monitors that I have on both my desktops and laptops are widescreen, giving me extra screen space in the horizontal direction. Because of this extra space I have started to place things like my Windows Taskbar on the side, and that’s when I thought to put my tabs on the side as well.

It’s actually pretty easy to do…

—Firefox—

There is no option in Firefox to move the tab-bar to the side, so the first place I turned was to the extensions. It took a little bit of work but I was able to find an extension called Vertigo which was recently updated to work with Firefox 2. By default the extension is designed to place the tabs on the left side of the screen while still allowing normal operations, such as the rearranging of tabs:

I also noticed that the extension had a few options, including one to adjust the width of the bar:

Then I saw that the developer commented saying that the problems with TabMixPlus were also fixed, so I decided to try that out as well. One of the cool things that I stumbled across when playing with various tab-bar settings was that changing the tab-bar position to “bottom” in TabMixPlus would position the tab-bar on the right-side of the browser if Vertigo was installed:

I also noticed that TabMixPlus took control of the width, but that could easily be changed in the settings:

Personally, I prefer to have it on the right-side because I keep by bookmarks open in a sidebar on the left-side. It just feels weird if you have two sidebars immediately next to each other.

I also tried having TabMixPlus put close buttons on each of the tabs, but that didn’t work out so well. If having a close button on each tab is an important feature for you then you probably shouldn’t try this out.

—Opera—

Opera is a slightly different story because it already has this feature built-in. All you have to do is right-click on any of your open tabs and click the Customize option. You should now see a screen where you can select the positioning from the Placement drop-down list:

After you click the OK button, the tab-bar should be in its new position:

—Overview—

If you don’t have a widescreen monitor this might not be as beneficial to you since it can take up some valuable screen space. Feel free to checkout our other post on reducing tab clutter if you’re looking for more space-saving techniques.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on September 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

There have been a few times where I’ve wanted to extract audio from video files, but it’s not always easy to find a free tool that can successfully do that. I highly recommend grabbing the free Pazera app if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. To make it even more useful the program also doubles as an audio conversion utility.

What are some things you can do with this? One great example is taking an FLV video (such as one from YouTube), and turning it into a standard MP3 music track. Think of all the free music you could get by doing this! It’s important to note, however, that the audio quality of a YouTube video isn’t exactly the greatest.

Here’s a list of video and audio formats it supports during the conversion process, and also some great features you should know about:

• Video conversion: AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG, MPG, WMV, ASF, MOV, QT, FLV, SWF, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, RM, RMVB, MKV, VOB, VCD DAT, OGM, AMV to MP3, AAC, AC3, WMA, FLAC or WAV.
• Audio conversion: WAV, MP3, AC3, AAC, M4A, MPC, MPA, MP2, WMA, FLAC, SHN, APE, OGG, WV, AMR to MP3, AAC, AC3, WMA, FLAC or WAV.
• Profiles. Users can create custom profiles, or you can select from one of the many already available.
• Doesn’t need any installation. Just extract ZIP archive and click AudioExtractor.exe file. All of the settings are stored in a single file so that it can be carried around with you!

I guess if Super doesn’t do the trick that this just might.

Get Pazera [via Lifehacker]

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

The Windows System Restore functionality has been around since the days of Windows ME, and it was pretty rough around the edges. At that time I remember having issues with it storing viruses into the restore points that it created, and it made cleaning up other people’s computers a pain because you had to wipe out all of their restore points.

System Restore has come a long way in Windows XP, and even further in Windows Vista. Ashley has shown us how System Restore can now be used for restoring individual files and folders in some versions of Vista, and that is an incredibly powerful feature to have. I’ve also shown how System Restore stacks up against the Last Known Good Configuration feature, and today we’re going to demonstrate how to get the most out of System Restore.

–How it Works–

Windows is good about automatically creating restore points which is wonderful since a large majority of computer users would never touch the feature otherwise. Users can create restore points on-demand, and later on we’ll show you how to make a shortcut for quickly creating restore points.

Aside from manually creating restore points Windows will create them when [via Wikipedia]:

• A piece of software is installed
• Windows Update installs new updates to Windows
• The user installs a driver that is not digitally signed by Windows Hardware Quality Labs
• 24 hours has passed

If you ever run into a problem on your machine the restore points might come to the rescue. In Windows XP you’ll still have to bootup into Windows before being able to roll back to a restore point, but Vista users can do it straight from the installation disc (or with the recovery disc). Rolling back to a previous restore point will replace newly modified system files with older copies. The Registry and drivers will also be taken back to the time of the restore point. Generally all of user’s documents will remain untouched.

–Shortcut for On-Demand Restore Points–

You can manually create restore points by opening the System Restore wizard at any time. The problem is that this can get rather tedious if you have to do it frequently, but we’ve got your back. As it turns out there is a quick Visual Basic script that you can whip up to create a restore point anytime you click on it. Here’s how:

1. Open Notepad and enter in these two lines of code:

   rp = "Scripted Restore Point by " & WScript.ScriptName
GetObject(”winmgmts:\\.\root\default:Systemrestore”).CreateRestorePoint rp, 0, 100

   

2. Save the file as restorepoint.vbs
3. Vista Users Only: Vista users need to create a shortcut to the script that was just saved. This can be done by right-clicking on the desktop, and then choosing New -> Shortcut. In the box enter:

   wscript.exe "C:\path to script\restorepoint.vbs"

   Where “path to script” is the location of the script. Complete the shortcut wizard, and when you run the shortcut right-click on it and select the Run as Administrator option.

–Changing the Restore Point Interval–

By default the System Restore automatically creates restore points every 24 hours. This value can be modified, but you want to be careful not to set it too low. At an interval of 24 hours System Restore will likely be able to hold restore points for a week or more. If you have it create restore points, for example, every hour you would only be able to access a a day or so worth of restore points. Take this into consideration before continuing.

To change the Restore Point interval you’ll need to dive into the Registry to modify a value, or you can use this simple tool created by Vista4Beginners. Once you download the program you can immediately start using it. It’s very simple, and you just have to specify the interval at which you want the restore points to be created:

If you’re a Registry buff and want to do the editing manually here’s the info you’ll need:

1. Open the Registry editor and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore
2. Find the value RPGlobalInterval and set it to whatever interval you would like. By default the value is 86,400 (seconds), which is equal to 24 hours.
3. There are also some other values you can freely modify if you wish:
• RPLifeInterval – This is the maximum life of a restore point. The value is specified in seconds, and by default it is set to a very large amount (equals about 136 years). If you set it to 2,592,000 restore points older than 30 days will automatically be deleted. Remember, old restore points are deleted to make room for new ones, so adjusting this probably isn’t necessary.
• RPSessionInterval – This value is specified in seconds, and it only slightly differs from the value in Step 2. A restore point will be created at the interval that you specify here, except this is in terms of computer usage. For example, setting this to 43,200 would force a restore point to be created every 12 hours that you use the computer.

Now you should have your System Restore setup the way you want it! Just make sure you give it some love and attention, because it will be your best friend when you’re in a bind.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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