Add Move To/Copy to to your right click menu
Here’s a nice XP/Vista hack to add Move to…/Copy to… to your right click context menu
Just run the zipped reg key files located at the below link page
Found on the www.howtogeek.com website
VBSEdit – The VBS editor with a killer feature
VBSEdit is a great vbs editor in itself however its got a great feature which makes it useful for vbs wranglers that on occaision need to turn their vbs creations into exe files.
Just install from the download link below then open your vbs file in VBSEdit then save as an exe from the “File” menu.
VBS to EXE quick and easy. The unregistered version is for evaluation purposes only but there’s no time limit even if you don’t register…
Sure there are other ways of converting your vbs files to exes but I don’t think there’s an easier way then with VBSEdit.
Give it a try its got some great inbuilt code samples too for Group Policy/AD Management for any IT Admins out there.
Spotify gets a vague release date for the US
Spotify will finally be released in the US in the third quarter of this year.
Why am I excited?
Well that will mean it should be possible to login to Spotify at home without getting locked out.
I live in a country where Spotify isn’t supported. Whenever I connect to Spotify using my DSL line Spotify logs the attempt and the IP address used to connect. 14 days after logging in with an IP address located in a country that Spotify isn’t available in it will lock you out.
How will Spotify being available in the US help?
Well it should be possible to use HotSpot Shield with Spotify to create a US based VPN connection.
This will allow anyone to login to Spotify and based on the IP address (if you have HotSpot Shield) Spotify will determine you live in the US.
That will mean no lockouts…
Friendlier Claris it – Strange name/great function
Friendlier Claris It – A bunch of Entourage scripts with a preposterous name which provide quite useful functions…
If you work in an office and use Entourage you’ll know a lot of extra work’s involved if you want to sort e-mail and jpg attachments. That’s where Friendlier Claris It scripts come in. The scripts allow you to sort messages and save message attachments highlighted in Entourage by pressing a predefined hotkey.
Saving attachments is the most useful feature of those scripts in my opinion so I’m going to focus on that.
In the original version of Friendlier Claris It which can be found here the script would remove attachments and save them to whatever location was defined in the config script. It would also update the message(s) the script was executed against with the location attachments were saved to – useful but there are a lot of people who would like to keep their e-mail and attachments intact.
I’ve modified the original version to still save attachments but leave the messages you run the script against intact. The modification also includes an automatic flagging of the message(s) to indicate which ones you ran the script against.
Simply copy the zip contents into “/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items” and from the Entourage script menu run “Change FCI Preferences” to choose where you want to save attachments to.
At the end of the config if asked to “Sort unified e-mail by e-mail account” or “File group contacts into subfolders” answer no to both prompts. The rest of the config setup is self explanatory.
Note that even though the config script indicates mail attachments will be removed, in my version of the scripts this will not happen. Once you have the configuration part done hit CTRL + X on a highlighted e-mail for the juice.
The scripts can also be executed against public folder content.
I hope this will be useful to some of those Entourage users out there.
Don’t forget to donate to Friendlier Claris It’s author if you find the script useful and please find out where he came up with that name – Friendlier Claris It???
Paint.Net – A free alternative to Photoshop
Image manipulation isn’t something the average home user has to worry about for their average day to day computer use – but come on Microsoft, Paint hasn’t been updated in a major way since – what Windows 95?
Before posting this blog I had a look at the Paint application on my new Win7 Ultimate installation and the only new additions to the app I could find are shapes, new brushes and the ability to save files as png…The UI has changed – I’ll give you that but that doesn’t add any new functionality!
Ok – The new brushes are cool – but where’s the layer based image composition?, the magic wand-like selection tool? and all the other blahde blahde blah yakedy smakedy?
Well they’re not there…
So do yourself a favour and get Paint.Net installed. It’s got more than enough features for the average PC user that doesn’t need Photoshop.
Shazam – The music recognition service on your phone
One of my co-workers showed me this app on his iPhone which I was really impressed with.
Shazam is a music recognition app thats being pushed on the big mobile phone platforms at the moment.
Usage couldn’t be simpler just startup the app on your phone and let it record a few seconds of audio. It then sends this clip to Shazams servers and you receive the name of the song back. And it really works!! Even recognising tracks from some of the less well known genres of music like electronic.
Unfortunately Shazam doesn’t have a PC or Mac client available. Why I don’t know? This technology could be really useful for internet radio users. With a “Buy in iTunes” feature integrated into a PC/Mac client it would be indispensable.
They also don’t publicise the fact that the app is available for the Symbian platform – well the N95 and N97 at least. You can find it on the Nokia OVI store here, where its free until the end of November. If you want to continue using the version you’ve installed after that time you’ll have to pay. But there will apparently be another version release after that time – Shazam Lite.
Get a List View on your desktop
I don’t know why Microsoft haven’t gotten around to providing a builtin feature like this to their OS – but if you’re one of those people that like to store everything on your desktop this is for you.
Desktop List View gives you the List View from Windows Explorer on your desktop simply by executing a small exe. The Unload.bat file in the zip folder can be used to kill the running program if you don’t like what you see.
If you want to startup the program upon login just place the Desktop List View exe in “Start – Programs – Startup” by dragging the exe first to the Start button then Programs – Startup finally release to drop into the Startup folder. Delete the exe from the same location to stop it from starting up automatically.
Mileage may vary on Vista and Windows 7 – Untested on those OS platforms
Microsoft attempts to silence their critics…
Are you tired of those Mac users that always whine about how their OSX operating system “never gets viruses….” blah blah blah? Are any members of your family Mac fanboys?
If you answered No Please-please-please enjoy the silence while it lasts. Those moments are golden.
If you answered Yes – I commiserate because I feel your pain…
You could try hitting back at these fanboys by saying that Microsoft operating systems get viruses because they have a greater market share. If there is a greater percentage of interconnected PCs running the same OS it makes for easy virus propagation. Estimates of global OS usage can be found here but statistics just seem to boggle the typical fanboy. There’s no place for numbers in their minds…
Finally Microsoft have also decided to strike back. Microsoft Security Essentials is a free A/V scanner which will use the same anti-virus definitions used in Microsofts Forefront line of security products, so MS is putting their business money where their mouth is…
Benefits:
Its free – Is free good?
Low resource usage Microsoft say
Drawbacks:
Unproven as yet
I’ll be installing it on my desktop PC which is running Windows 7 Ultimate – Thanks Microsoft!!
Update 01-11-2009 Microsoft’s Security Essentials been rated the best free anti-virus for Windows
Making your browsing more secure
There are lots of free anti-virus, spy-ware/malware detection and firewall apps out there to choose from. So if you’re running Vista or XP and contract a virus – there’s really no excuse for your PC being unprotected with all the free options to choose from.
My favorites at the moment are AVG-Free A/V, Comodo Firewall and Spyware Blaster
Still you can never be too careful when browsing the internet.
OpenDNS provides a DNS service for your PC or internet connections router which can:
- Filter out certain website types from your browser. Great for keeping kids out of trouble.
- Speed up your internet browsing experience overall. Who doesn’t want some of that?
Best of all you don’t need to install anything. Well if you’re confused – here comes the techie bit…What the heck is DNS anyway?
Put simply DNS or Dynamic Naming System is the method your PC uses to find and return websites hosted on servers located on the internet. It can also be used separately from the internet environment to do other stuff but we’re not interested in that for now…
So – say when you type www.ibm.com into your internet browser and hit return have you ever thought about how that IBM welcome page is returned to your browser? The contents of the internet aren’t stored on your computer are they??
Well when you type that url/link into your browser and hit return – it sends out a request to your DNS server. This servers located in your internet service providers data centre and receives all the browser requests you make. The DNS server holds a database of IP addresses for a bucket load of websites that match up with the urls which we humans like to use.
If the DNS server doesn’t know the IP address of the website we want to access from the url we send it – it will query another server, and another and maybe another until it finds the IP address of the server we want and connects us to it.
So how does OpenDNS help in this situation??
It holds a giant database of DNS records (which map our urls to IP addresses). We get a result first time and this results in our webpage being returned faster than if we use the DNS servers our internet service provider connects us to.
You can change the DNS servers you use to OpenDNS servers and it will not affect your internet connection – it’ll make it better
Click on this button to get started and see what OpenDNS can do:
Adobe Reader is Bloatware…
Personally I’ve never seen the need for PDF documents…
I think all documents should be created in MS Word – and everyone should have it installed on their PCs or at least an application that can open and edit Word docs.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve had to download and install Adobe Reader on a new PC just to open a scanned PDF in an application that’s so cumbersome to use it sometimes beggars belief. You can’t even edit PDF’s on the fly without outlaying some serious cash….
But I have the solution…
Foxit Reader Ok you actually have to download and install it – but its a joy to use. Its small, its fast, you can copy text out of the PDF, it even lets you scroll easily through those scanned PDF’s that for some reason you always receive at 1000% height x 1000% width of the original document. Great app – I’ve not gone back to Adobe Reader since.
If you’ve got an application you think does a better job than Foxit Reader – let me know….
