Shortcut Key for New Folders in Windows Explorer

I don't spend much time in Explorer (I'm a Total Commander fan, myself.) In my opinion the biggest pain in the butt about Windows Explorer is that there's not hot-key for creating a new folder. Well, this little app takes care of that as our friends at LifeHacker explain:

"There's never been an elegant or efficient way to create new folders in Windows without getting the mouse involved. Alt+F+W+F? Definitely not quick. But lightweight application mdAxel can assign a keyboard shortcut to the act of creating a new folder."

Featured Windows Download: MdAxel Creates New Folders Faster

SENF Finds Credit Card Numbers, SSNs on Your PC

Like most security tools, SENF (Sensitive Number Finder) seems very useful not only for those wishing to up the ante on their personal security and for security experts, but for hackers as well. From Lifehacker:

"Free, open source application Sensitive Number Finder (Senf) scans your hard drive for personally identifying data worth stealing, like Social Security and credit card numbers. The software points out these vulnerable digits so you can remove or encrypt them to keep your personal finances or identity safe."

SENF

Code Execution Vulnerability Found in Firefox 3.0... Already!

It looks lie IE isn't the only one sporting major vulnerabilities these days:

"Just hours after the official release of the latest refresh of Mozilla’s flagship browser, an unnamed researcher has sold a critical code execution vulnerability that puts millions of Firefox3.0 users at risk of PC takeover attacks."

Code execution vulnerability found in Firefox 3.0 | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

Firefox 3.0: First Thoughts

The new Firefox final release is slated to be officially released today at 10am pst (1pm est.) If you are incredibly anxious, you can download it now, but it will be slated as "Firefox 3.0 RC3" not the official release. Adrian from ZDNet had a good "first thoughts" article on his favorite new features. Here's a breakdown:

• Pretty new GUI - See screenshot above.
  
• Improved password manager - Asks if you want to save the password after you successfully log in!
• Improved download manager - Supports resumable downloads.
• Intuitive address bar - See a screen shot here.
• Beefed up security - Integrated phishing, virus, and porn protection!
• Über fast - Firefox 3.0 is now the fastest browser, with one of the smallest memory footprints.
  

ScribeFire Lets You Blog Like a Mutha!

In my recent article on DashBlog (another blogging add-on for Firefox), I asked you readers out there what software you used for publishing. Faithful reader Liz responded "I use scribefire and LOVE it!!" With a response like that, I had to check the thing out! So what is ScribeFire? Here's the description, straight from the horses puhtoot:

"ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog."

The thing that really caught my attention was its support for uploading images. As I mentioned earlier, I hate hotlinking. What I would really like to see in a blogging tool is the ability to drag-and-drop and image from a page and (instead of the tool hotlinking the image) have it upload the image to your server and link to it from there. Although ScribeFire doesn't do this, it does allow you to select an image from your PC which it uploads to your server via FTP and links to the image via the HTTP URL. This in itself saves me a heckuvalotta time - and enabling this feature took me less than a minute to set up.

All in all, I'd say ScribeFire is a keeper. Coupled with FireShot (enuff w/ naming every Firefox plugin "FireSomething", already!) for the occasional screen shot, my blogging life (and life-blogging) is now much easier. Thanks Liz!

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging

WARNING FOREVER!!!!

WELCOME TO OUR FIRST INSTALLMENT OF CRAZY HAPPY FUN POST!!!!!! This is the first of a new segment of posts that will bring you some of our our favorite crazy, happy and/or fun things from Japan.

Bored? Want some crazy Japanese video game fun from 2004? Go download Warning Forever.

FireShot Firefox Add-on Takes Screen Shots & More

I ended up all but giving up on DashBlog for adding new posts to this blog. It doesn't allow you to preview and edit the post before you submit it, and it kept posting to my personal blog when I told it to post here. Rather lame. I realized all I really needed was something for screenshots, and I could use the Send To: Blogger option added by the Google Toolbar for creating the actual post. This eventually led me to the FireShot Firefox Add-on.

FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages.
Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.
It's possible to choose whether entire web page or only visible part of this page should be captured.
Screenshots can be uploaded to server, saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing.

[Emphesis added.] I liked that it could upload to a server. I hate hotlinking to images b/c not only is it morally questionable (if not objectionable) but you never know if the image might be taken offline.

FireShot :: Firefox Add-ons

DashBlog Firefox Add-on

I found a new toy today called Dashblog. I may or may not use this for the occasional post. Basically it's a Firefox plugin lets you take parts of a page and blog on them quickly, but I'm not sure if I like the way it rolls. What software do you use for blogging?

Daily Link Roundup

Today brings us some gorgeously geeky artwork, a brew baking Bender and (of course) more new neat gadgets from CES.

"Supersonic" Zeppelin-Shaped Theremin by Björn Schülke - Visit the link to his site for more geek-savvy sculptures. Take Screenshots of Complete Web Pages with Screengrab (Firefox) CES: LG Watch Phone Prototypes - A watch phone that doesn't suck? Saitek’s New Cyborg Gaming Keyboard Lets You Assign Colors To Key Zones CES: Flir's Predator-Vision Security Cam Defends Conference Hall Table The beer brewing Bender replica - Robots and beer! Naps Help Your Memory, New Study Suggests CES: Hands-on with the Philips 'WOW vx' 3D Display - True 3D without the glasses. CES: Panasonic's Enormous 150" Plasma TV Dwarfs All Competitors Case holds stun gun and iPod Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org - The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse it elsewhere. Sceners Threaten to Destroy BitTorrent, “One Step at a Time” TV star publishes bank details in anti-privacy editorial, gets ripped off

Daily Link Roundup

CES is here, and we'll be bringing you highlights from the conference whether you like it or not. Why? Because that's all anyone is blogging about, so take it and like it! Seriously though, we have some great articles for you from CES and even mixed things up a bit from a few that (dare I say) are not from CES!

CES: Logitech MX 5500 Revolution - If I were a keyboard, I'd have sex with this keyboard. CES: WowWee's Tribot Spins, Sasses, and Kicks RoboSapien in the Crotch osliving.com - "Welcome to Open Source Living, an archive of the Web's best Open Source software, applications and references for a zero-cost / top quality digital experience." CES: Alienware's Curved LCD Monitor Prototype - You gotta see this thing (with video). CES: Pepcom: PocketFinder GPS Locator - Wherever this pocket-sized device goes, you can locate it's position to within 5 feet. Starry Night Bed Lacking Only a Toilet Sony BMG Sort of Drops DRM CES: Pepcom: Fujitsu Concepts - A few out-of-this-world concepts from Fujitsu. It’s People! Soylent Heat Is People! - A new office building being constructed near Stockholm’s Central Station plans to tap the rush of daily commuters as an economical source of heat. Flunked: 14 Signs of a Deficient Intellect (TheMishMash.com) New Year’s Tech Resolutions - These are resolutions that tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook should adopt, in Erick Shonfeld's opinion. Flickr to Authenticate Using OpenID Foliage Covered Botanical Building by Mass Studies - If you’re a fan of botanical architecture, this might just be the coolest building ever.

Simple Work Timer

Einstein once said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." To help me keep track of the time I spend working on a particular project, I wrote a simple little app called Simple Work Timer (or SWT.) It is the simplest of devices but a piece of software that I use more than just about any other program.


All it is is a little window with 4 buttons. The top one displays the hours, minutes and seconds since the timer was started. The second button displays the amount of time that has passed in hours (for example this button would show 1.5 after 1 and a half hours.) The third button starts and pauses the timer. The last button resets the timer to zero.

Clicking either of the top two buttons will copy that button's text to your clipboard. I use this most often with the second "hours" button. This allows me to paste the exact time I've spent on a project into Quickbooks or a spreadsheet for tracking and billing my time.

As the timer runs, the title of the program will display the hours and minutes since the timer was started. So, a simple glance down at your taskbar is all you need to take a peek at your current hours. This will also tell you if you forgot to unpause the timer when you went out for your smoke break, since SWT will also append the text "Paused" to it's program title when paused.

Perhaps you occasionally need to have multiple timers running at once. All you have to do is run multiple instances of the program and it will add multiple, independent copies of itself to your desktop. To help me keep track of which timer is which, I always place the timer in the same location on my screen for a particular client. For example, for my (fictional) client Joe's Widgets I always put the timer in the lower-right-hand corner of my screen. That way if I start another timer for another task, I'll always be able to distinguish between it and Joe's timer. I've found that SWT works very well coupled with Launchy, especially when launching multiple timers.

I've provided two links at the bottom of this post. The first link is to download Simple Work Timer. SWT is Windows only and requires version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. If you don't know what that means, don't worry - You probably already have it. If not, follow this link to download and install the Framework. SWT itself doesn't require any installation. It's just one executable file that you can put anywhere on your hard drive and run it.

The second link is to download the source code of SWT. It was originally programmed in VB.NET 1.1 but I've up-converted it to 2.0 for you and translated it to C# as well. Both the VB.Net version and C# version are contained in the solution in their respective folders. Obviously this program is very basic, but it's (fairly) well commented and could be a good learning tool for new developers. Here's some of the things you can learn from this code:

• A comparison of VB.NET code to C#.
• How to add an icon to your application.
• How to modify the title of your window.
• Using the timer component.
• Copying text to the clipboard.
• Casting and type conversion.

Without further ado, here's the downloads:

Download Simple Work Timer Executable
or
Download the Source Code

Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher

I have a new favorite toy and it's name is Launchy. Launchy is what's known as a "Keystroke Launcher". A Keystroke Launcher is a program that lets you launch other programs, files, web pages, etc. by typing what you want on your keyboard. The idea is that, if you know what you want and have a Keystroke Launcher with a good selection algorithm, it's easier to type what you want than to have to search through menus to find it.

And Launchy has a very good and very simple selection algorithm. It "remembers" what you commonly launch and will make assumptions about what you mean as you type. For example, I commonly launch Firefox with Launchy. At first I had to type out "firefox" into Launchy's interface before it picked up what I meant. Now I only had to type "fire" and it knows what I mean.

But what if Launchy's assumption is incorrect? No worries: If you wait about a second in-between keystrokes, Launchy will display a drop-down list of possible answers to your inquiry. It can even handle most misspellings and typos.

Launchy also has myriad plugins - many of which come preinstalled. For example Calcy provides simple calculator functionality to Launchy. Just type "4+5" into Launchy and as you type the "5", Launchy displays 9. My favorite plugin is Runny which allows you to run customized commands (complete with arguments) from Launchy. Coupled with the Weby plugin which allows you to launch webpages by typing the URL into Launchy, you can set up Launchy to allow easy and immediate access to your favorite web-based applications such as Google Calendar, or Remember the Milk. More user-submitted plugins can be found on Launchy's official plugin Forum.

Launchy isn't just for launching programs and web pages, either. You can have Launchy index whatever directories and file types you want. So, you could have Launchy index your My Documents folder, giving you quick access to those hard-to-locate documents. Using Launchy on your laptop is particularly useful because it further frees you from that cumbersome touch-pad. Coupling Launchy with a macro application such as AutoHotKey allows Launchy to do damned well anything! ...But you'll have to wait until my next blog for that.

Read: Launchy

1-Click Answers

One of my favorite tools that I've never written a blog entry for is 1-Click Answers from Answers.com. If you've yet to use Answers.com, it's a search engine that lets you search for a particular word or person or subject (or just about anything else) and it pools various reference sources such as Wikipedia, Houghton Mifflin, or the American Heritage Dictionaries to tell you about that subject. 1-Click Answers from Answers.com is a tool that simplifies searching Answers.com. All you do is Alt-Click any text from just about any window, and a small bubble (like you see above) will appear with the abridged results from Answers.com relating to that word. Here's a few of the ways I find 1-Click Answers useful:

• When I'm reading an article and I'm not sure what a word means.
• If I'm writing an article and want a quick thesaurus, or I'm not sure if I'm using a word correctly.
• To quickly check the spelling of a word (Google Desktop is great for this, too.)
• If there is a person or subject referenced that I want to learn more about, quickly.

Another optional feature of 1-Click Answers is "Today's Highlights". When turned on, this feature will display facts about things that happened on this day in history, links to today's top news stories, and an interesting or little-known word or phrase that has been used in the news recently. This is a nice way to get yourself a little better educated and keep up with basic current events.

Read: 1-Click Answers to download.

Free VoIP to Landline Calls for Life... Kinda.

According to a recent announcement on their website, Skype rival Gizmo is now offering free calling to land line and mobile phones in 60 countries! What's the catch? The land line or mobile phone must be owned by an active Gizmo Project user. So although you'd be able to call from your Internet phone to your buddy's land line or mobile, you'd have to still get all your friends to sign up for the Gizmo Project.

This begs the question: What's stopping someone from just saying they own all these numbers that their buddy needs to call? Well, you can only enter two numbers into the interface as your own: Home Phone and Mobile Phone. So unless you want to go changing these numbers around every time your buddy wants to make a call, you'll just have to take the honest route.

These Gizmo guys make their money off of any outbound calls you make to people who aren't Gizmo Project members (for 1.0¢/min), and off of those who purchase "Call In" numbers (basically a phone number you can give out for unlimited inbound-calls to your Gizmo) for as little as $3/month.

Digg it
Read: engadget

Google Calendar as a Replacement to Outlook

One of the main reasons I sat down to write my previous blog Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook is the issue with synchronization of Google Calendar with my cell phone. Well, today Google announced that not only are they "working on full calendar syncing for mobile phones and other devices", but they've released a new set of commands you can use with SMS messaging to retrieve information about your incoming events and even post events to your calendar (which was only do-able with a bit of trickery before.)

This still falls short of the functionality we'd have with a full-on-sync, but it gets us a bit closer. To write a simple WAP-enabled web-based calendar to at least plug into a private RSS feed and display future events doesn't seem so hard. Perhaps I'll write that over the weekend.

Something else cool that was announced today was an official Google Calendar Plug-In for Google Desktop. It's an improvement from Manas Tungare's goocal and supports alerts (make sure you turn them on by going into Desktop's Options>Customize Alerts and checking GoogleCalendar), so it pretty much negates the need for Outlook for event reminders. That is, unless you have multiple calendars. Currently, like many other Google Calendar tools, it only displays items from your main calendar. C'mon, Google: Throw us a bone!

So you might not be quite ready to throw out your Outlook calendar for Google, but at least we're getting closer.

Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook

Word to the wise: This article was posted in April of 2006 and hasn't been updated since. However, people still thank me every day for posting it and find that it works -- Just know that things might not go exactly as they did in April 2006, so be ready for a surprise or two ;)

Google recently released a new service that's an online calendar for scheduling your day and planning and organizing events with your friends, enemies, co-workers, co-worker friends, enemies from work, and all other variation of enemy, friend, and co-worker. Anyone who uses the calendar in Microsoft Outlook will find the layout to be quite familiar, and everyone can appreciate Google Calendar's simplistic and eye-friendly design. Very Web 2.0.

The best thing about Google Calendar is that it's online. We here at Grinn Productions do a lot of web-based applications and have developed plenty of them for our clients. However, they do have their limitations. A major one is that of hardware support. We are impressed with how Google has given this application a very "it's not a web page, it's a program" sort of feel, but not even Google can integrate a web-page to your Bluetooth phone (although I can think of a few ways they could, but that's another article.)

So we have a dilemma. We have this wonderful, beautifully crafted web-based calendar program and no way to sync it with our cell phone. Thankfully, there's a project over at SourceForge called Remote Calendars which allows us to download our Google Calendars to Outlook 2003 at the click of a button. The installation is a bit tricky, so I'll walk you through it and show you a few tricks along the way.

1. Close all instances of Outlook.
2. Visit the Remote Calendars download section and download the latest copy of the Remote Calendars zip file.
3. Extract and run setup.exe from the downloaded zip file.
4. If you get an error message saying "The Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime is not installed.", you'll have to download and install VSTO 2005 from Microsoft's Downloads Center then run the Remote Calendars setup again.
5. If you get an error message saying "The Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies have not been installed.", take a trip back to Microsoft's Download Center; This time to download and install the Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies. Don't let the technical jargon scare you. It's just a simple download and install.
6. Once you have Remote Calendars installed, open Microsoft Outlook. It may take a while to load the first time you run it after installing Remote Calendars.
7. When Outlook opens, you'll be presented with the Options Screen. You can tweak these as you like, or leave them as the defaults.
8. You'll notice a new toolbar that looks like this:
9. Click on the "Subscribe a remote calendar" button (the +.)
10. The dialog prompts you for your Remote calendar's url. In a separate browser, go to calendar.google.com or click here. Click on the down arrow next to the name of the first (or perhaps only) calendar you want synced with Outlook and select Calendar Settings. Right-click on the icon next to Private Address and select Copy Shortcut (or Copy Link Location in Firefox.)
11. Go back to Outlook and paste that url into the "Remote calendar's url" field.
12. Enter whatever you want for a name for this calendar, and adjust any other settings you like then hit Ok.
13. If you have more calendars on Google Calendars that you'd like synced with Outlook, complete steps 10-12 for each additional calendar.
14. Click on the "Reload all iCalendars" button in the plug-in's toolbar (second from the left) and all your Google Calendars will be imported into Outlook! Click this button whenever you make changes to your Google Calendar that you want imported.

Now all your Google Calendar items will work with your Outlook alerts, and you can sync them with your phone or PDA.

Here's a few extra tips for tweaking your Remote Calendars:

• If you imported your Outlook calendar into Google Calendars, using Remote Calendar will put duplicates of each item into your Outlook calendar. I haven't found a good way to do this, but here's what I did:
• Once you're comfortable with Remote Calendar, delete all your Remote Calendars using the "delete remote calendars" button.
• Manually delete all the entries from your Outlook calendar that would conflict. Your Outlook calendar at this point should be basically bare.
• Re-enter your entries into Remote Calendar. You'll then have just the entries imported from Google Calendar.
• If you have multiple calendars on Google Calendar, you can make entries from your separate Google Calendar appear in different colors in Outlook much like they do in Google Calendar. Here's an example of how to do this:
• Let's say on Google Calendar you have two main calendars, Business and Personal colored blue and green, respectively.
• When adding your Business calendar to Remote Calendar, click on the "Add categories to this calendar" button and select Business. Select whatever other options you prefer, then click Ok.
• When viewing your calendar in Outlook, go to Edit>Automatic Formatting in this toolbar.
• Click the Add button. Type in Business for the name, and select Business for the label.
• Click the Condition button. Select the More Choices tab. Type Business in the Category field and click Ok, and Ok.
• Do the same for Personal, substituting Personal for Business. Now your personal items in Outlook will appear in green, and your business items in blue. You can do the same thing for any type of category with any of the available label colors.
• Any items you add directly to your Outlook calendar will not show up on your Google Calendar.
• If you have synchronization software for your cell phone or PDA that works with Outlook, it will now be NSync (bwaahahaha!) with your Google Calendar as well!
• To have your Outlook sync with your Google Calendars whenever Outlook is loaded, go to the Options in Remote Calendar (rightmost button on the toolbar) and check the Automatic Update check box. Be careful! If you have a lot of items in your Google Calendar and this option selected, Outlook could take a long time to load.

Well, I hope this helps someone out there. If you did find this article helpful, put me on your calendar to thank me later!

Found this article helpful? Digg it!