Hasta La Gadget!

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

Microsoft Monday

Apple touts their Time Machine feature in OS X as a breakthrough automatic backup system, but they’re not the only ones that offer such a thing.  Believe it or not, Windows Vista has a feature that is much like Time Machine, except I’d like to think that it’s better. I’ll explain…

–Apple’s Time Machine Defined–

Since we are going to be explaining how Vista can do exactly what Time Machine can, I thought we should start by explaining what Time Machine is for those of you who are unfamiliar.  Apple defines it as:

Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything.

The big downside here is that you have to have an external drive connected to your Mac to be able to use this feature.  Once you have the external drive connected, it will do it automatically for you.

Vista’s Previous Versions Feature

We’ve mentioned little known features in Vista before before, and there are several. One of them is “Previous Versions” which essentially does what Time Machine does on a Mac except you don’t need an external hard drive connected. That’s what makes it great! The only thing it’s missing is a snazzy interface.  It’s a bare-bones feature, and creating a easy-on-the-eyes interface clearly wasn’t a top priority for Microsoft like it was for Apple. Additionally, keep in mind that this feature is available only in Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise versions of Vista.

Previous Versions are accessed by right clicking on any document or folder (yes, even whole folders are backed-up) and then clicking on “Restore Previous Versions.”  Previous versions come from shadow copies, which are saved automatically to your hard drive. If you need a refresher on what a shadow copy is, reference this article.

A list of archived copies will be displayed in the “Previous Versions” tab, and they’re all sorted by date. Remember, these were all done automatically — without the need of an external drive. Retrieving the archived copies is simple, and you have a few different options for doing so. They include:

• Copy – copy the entire folder and paste it on your desktop or wherever else you’d like to
• Browse – Open the folder to see what’s in it
• Restore – This will replace any existing copy that you have on your computer.

This feature is perfect for any files or folders you may have accidentally deleted or changed. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the “Previous Versions” tab for a folder on my computer containing music from the B-52′s:

Backup and Restore Center

While the Previous Versions feature is great, there are other options included with Vista that will help you keep backup files and restore them if necessary.  To access the Backup and Restore Center, click on the start menu and type “Backup and Restore Center” into the search box and hit enter.

Depending on the version of Vista that you have, you can do various things in the Backup and Restore Center.  One of the nicest features is the option to “Back up files.” Like Time Machine, this does require an external drive of some sort whether it be a hard drive, USB drive, or an optical drive. Clicking on it will pull up a box where you can choose which files types you want to backup.  The screenshot below shows you what this looks like:

Once you select the types of files you want backed-up, you can decide how often you want a backup created as shown below:

For those of you running Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise editions, you can do the following:

• Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore – this is a comprehensive, image-based backup tool that will “help you out of a tight spot if you need to recover your entire system.” It can be accessed from inside Windows Vista- or even from the Windows Vista installation CD should your computer have issues with starting up normally

Wrapping it up

To me, the Previous Versions Feature is something that Microsoft should have offered with Vista Home Premium.  Because they don’t offer it with Home Premium, they should at least talk it up as an incentive for buying Ultimate because it’s a great feature to have.  What I like about it best is that you do not need an external hard drive connected (like Apple’s Time Machine) to make use of it.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows; Mac
As you may recall sLife is a free application that you can use to monitor which applications you use on a regular basis, and then graph the usage on a pretty chart. Previously sLife 2.0 application was only available for Mac users, but after four months the Windows version has also been released.

Most of the features available in the Mac version are also available for the Windows version. This includes things like setting goals, managing activities, viewing computer usage according to application/document/website, and more. Here’s a quick overview of the primary features:

• 5 visualizations to help you understand and manage your computer time and productivity: Day View, Applications View, Web & Documents View, Activities View and Goals View.
• Activities let you group computer interactions according to a criteria that you define. You can call an activity anything that you want such as ‘Checking email’ or ‘Consulting for client A’. As an example, imagine that you create an activity called ‘Reading news’ and associate it with the web page titles ‘New York Times’ and ‘Google News’. Every time that you visit the web page of the New York Times or Google News, Slife will associate the visit with the ‘Reading news’ activity and track time against it.
• Create a goal to help you spend less time performing an activity (i.e. ‘Watching YouTube videos’), or to motivate you to make more efficient use of your time.
• You can easily disable all activity logging in Slife without quitting the app by going into “Private Mode”. To do so, look for the Slife menu icon in the system tray, right-click on it and select the “Private Mode” item.

If you’ve been looking for a good way to track your computer usage I’d say sLife is about as good as it gets for the price… free! It’s like having your own personal stalker.

Get sLife for Windows or Mac

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft has started to send out emails to select individuals indicating that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is right around the corner. The email is targeted to people whom they would like to receive feedback from before they open the doors to the general public, and no specific date for the IE8 Beta release has been given.

Activewin has posted the full email that was sent out to people, but this is the only part that really matters to me:

We are nearing the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and we will be making it available for the general public to download and test. IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community, with the goal of gaining valuable feedback to improve Internet Explorer 8 during the development process.

We don’t really know what to expect from IE8 other than the fact that it will pass the Acid 2 test when running in the Super Standards Mode. The Beta version will also let users switch the user agent of the browser between IE8 and IE7 for compatibility reasons, and you won’t have to restart Internet Explorer each time you change it.

The real question is whether Microsoft can do enough in Internet Explorer 8 to prevent more users from flocking to other browsers. Personally if Internet Explorer 8 is well developed I would consider switching to it, but Microsoft would really have to impress me with features and performance. I know a lot of you have the minds set on the fact that you’ll never switch back to Internet Explorer, but I like to always keep an open mind.

The guy who runs the Internet Explorer team is going to walk through some of the features in Internet Explorer 8 at MIX08 this year, which is held on March 5th to March 7th. This seems like a good point for Microsoft to release IE8 Beta since all eyes will be on the conference, but we’ll keep you posted if an official release date emerges.

[via All About Microsoft]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 12, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
It seems like on Windows I always come across those pesky files I can’t delete because another process is using it. Up until a few months ago I had always used a program called Unlocker to get around this, and it has served me well. I had to stop using it, however, when I moved to Vista 64-bit since it only includes support for 32-bit versions of Windows.

LockHunter, on the other hand, is a similar free utility that works on Windows 2000 up to Windows 7, and comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Just like Unlocker it integrates into your Windows Explorer context menu to save some clicks each time you want to unlock a file.

Here’s a rundown on some of the features:

• Shows processes locking a file or folder
• Allows to unlock, delete, copy or rename a locked file
• Allows to kill locking process
• Allows to remove locking processes from hard drive
• Integrates in to Explorer menu
• It deletes files into the recycle bin, so you may restore them if deleted by mistake
• Supports both 32 and 64-bit Windows

There’s just one more thing that I’d like to see LockHunter do, and that’s add a command-line interface. I have some scheduled tasks that used to use Unlocker’s command-line functionality to ensure that a a file wasn’t locked before trying to perform an operation on it. Unfortunately automated tactics like this don’t appear to be possible in LockHunter, but I’m sure that’s something they could easily add. Oh, and a portable version would also be pretty cool.

LockHunter Homepage (Windows only; freeware)
[via Lifehacker & gHacks)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Continue reading Maide Control iPad app lets you build and view 3D models with your bare, sweaty hands (video)

Maide Control iPad app lets you build and view 3D models with your bare, sweaty hands (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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