Working at the Application Support Center (ASC) at the University of Florida, I have come across a number of Mac users. One thing that has always surprised me about them is that no matter what, they always vehemently swear by the Mac. I have, till date, never met even one disgruntled Mac user. And its for this reason that even though I love the Windows Operating Systems (including Vista), I have made up my mind to buy a Mac for myself one of these times, and see what the fuss is all about.
We at the University of Florida have a bi-annual Career Fair/Career Showcase where students can meet hiring managers from different companies. Most of these companies give away various kind of tchotchkes at this event, I guess, to help students remember the company or maybe just to keep with the norm that started some time ago. These momentos are most often pens, Rubik’s cubes, bottle holders, caps, shirts etc. While these are what you would normally expect, Microsoft had a very interesting giveaway this time. They gave away some circular sticker (part plastic, part cloth), woven on which were some letters.
I love Windows 7 and its awesome new taskbar. However, as intuitive as many of the things on this new taskbar appear, I think missing the feature of letting include separators between pinned items on the taskbar is a big oversight. It is quite obvious that to exploit the Windows 7 taskbar and its purposefulness, one must pin as many of their most commonly used applications onto it. However, what that leads to is a whole list of seemingly unorganized icons in your taskbar.
With this clutter, it is only natural for someone who likes an organized desktop (pun intended) to be able to categorize the things he lays on it. I, not being any different tried to do the same but only drew up a naught. There is no such feature in Windows 7.
Here is my take on what the taskbar could have looked like -
Alright, I’ll be honest. The only reason I came up with this post in the first place was because I myself had a hard time figuring out how to do it. As cool as the idea of having an image pop-up from your blog, graying out everything behind it seems, its easy to feel like you’re chasing a distant dream when there are multiple ways to do it wrong, and make it complicated.
Before you begin reading further, I must tell you that this technique will be relevant only to certain people. This post is primarily for those people hosting their wordpress blog themselves. If you have a wordpress.com blog, this post will not help you as it is not possible to edit theme files in your blog unless you use wordpress.org. Any other person using something else might also find this post useful in terms of weeding out the good options from the bad ones when you are trying to achieve what we’re trying to achieve here. Ok! Now that that is cleared up we can get into the real stuff!!!
Microsoft doesn’t want you to use the vertical taskbar in Windows, or so it seems.
As the number of widescreens in the computer market increases, more and more people have begun experimenting with ways to make most of their screen estate. The easiest method to accomplish this is to drag your taskbar such that it lines up vertically along the left/right edge of the screen. This simple trick helps the purpose because most websites (including this one) have a limited width and thus fit on one’s screen perfectly despite the taskbar taking some extra space. At the same time, it gives your document some extra “height” providing more readability. Elegant and effective. If you haven’t tried it yet, you must (if you can put up with some annoyances; read further).
A few months back I had discussed how to use keywords in firefox, and make your browsing experience better. Well, if you’ve begun using keywords, you might as well use them for grooveshark to play almost any song in the world.
The stumbling block however, is that grooveshark’s keyword can not be made in the same way as we had described earlier. And the reason for that is, that the current grooveshark website is made entirely in flash. Right clicking on the search bar, doesn’t give you the regular options you expect! So what do you do? Don’t despair. I have a nice piece of nugget for you :)
In firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+B to open up the bookmarks library. Then click on “Organize”, followed by “New Bookmark”.
A new window should come up. Fill in the empty fields with the following:
I wonder if you have ever used the keyword feature in firefox. If you haven’t, I cannot stress how handy a tool it is to speed up your internet experience in firefox. If you find yourself going to a number of websites where you have to search for stuff, (eg. Wikipedia, IMDB, youtube, dictionary.com etc) then this feature is for you.
Next time you go to youtube.com, just before you get down to searching for your favorite videos, right click in the youtube search bar, and then click on “Add a Keyword for this Search”. Fill in whatever you want for the “Name” section, but in your keywords put something short, something like “yt” or “y”. Once everything is filled in, click on Save.
While we’re on the topic of mobile phones, let us continue some interesting discussion on that topic.
I wonder if I have ever told you this, but I own a Blackberry Curve 8320. As much as I love it, I also hate the fact that it doesn’t do a lot of stuff that the iPhone can, including being touch sensitive. This always has me mining the internet for killer apps that would make me love my phone even more.
I love Windows 7 and its awesome new taskbar. However, as intuitive as many of the things on this new taskbar appear, I think missing the feature of letting include separators between pinned items on the taskbar is a big oversight. It is quite obvious that to exploit the Windows 7 taskbar and its purposefulness, one must pin as many of their most commonly used applications onto it. However, what that leads to is a whole list of seemingly unorganized icons in your taskbar. 
Before you begin reading further, I must tell you that this technique will be relevant only to certain people. This post is primarily for those people hosting their wordpress blog themselves. If you have a wordpress.com blog, this post will not help you as it is not possible to edit theme files in your blog unless you use wordpress.org. Any other person using something else might also find this post useful in terms of weeding out the good options from the bad ones when you are trying to achieve what we’re trying to achieve here. Ok! Now that that is cleared up we can get into the real stuff!!! 
The stumbling block however, is that grooveshark’s keyword can not be made in the same way as we had described earlier. And the reason for that is, that the current grooveshark website is made entirely in flash. Right clicking on the search bar, doesn’t give you the regular options you expect! So what do you do? Don’t despair. I have a nice piece of nugget for you :)
