Time to vote on what I should work on next… I can’t decide!
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- off-the-case
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- fist fight
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- sword duel
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- bank-raid
Democratic Doodles
Jul 24
One Wheelie Bin = Ten Months
Jul 23
Our wheelie bin is almost full, for the first time since I moved to my new house last October! Here’s how we managed that:
Reducing
Well, its hard to ‘reduce’ in this country, but we do what we can. When I buy veg I usually forego the plastic bags if I can manage it (they only get chucked anyway). I bring my own shopping bags like everyone else, but other than that, there just aren’t too many ways to reduce the amount of rubbish one accumulates without simply reducing the amount of stuff you buy. If anyone has suggestions of course, I’d love to hear them. You often hear green blogs in the US and elsewhere talking about getting ‘refils’ on things, but its not something thats really been embraced here.
Reusing
We get the most use out of fast food containers – ie the plastic boxes you get from takeaways. Great for freezing, reheating, taking lunch to work, putting screws in – infinitely reuseable. We use larger plastic packaging (from things like bags of potatoes) as bin bags for the kitchen. When the container is smaller, you will put less into it. If you have a giant bin in the corner with a big black bag in it, it will fill up in no time. We reuse plastic bottles where possible, jars of course get reused a fair bit, especially honey jars with plastic screwtops.
Recycling
Cardboard, glass, paper, plastic, tin, steel, fabrics. All recyclable. The trick to getting the most out of recycling is to clean food containers before dropping them in the recycling bin – that way you can store them in a shed for the inevitable weeks before u get time to go to the recycling centre. And DO go to the centre if you have one nearby. A lot of stuff is not accepted in the collection bags despite being recyclable. Our local recycling centre even accepts soft plastic packaging and wrapping.
Composting
My folks have a large compost bin to which I make a weekly contribution. All the leftovers that don’t feed the dog go to the bin (although to be honest she spends a lot of time trying to dig a tunnel through the compost pile anyway, looking for rats).
The biggest impact has been the composting and recycling. I’d love to do more re-using, and I’m always on the lookout for new ways to use things, but most of the containers end up being recycled. Composting and recycling handles between 80-90% of our waste. The contents of the wheelie bin thus far are mostly things which are (to my knowledge) non recyclable, such as broken cups or plates, light bulbs, aerosol cans, etc.
A bin bag for a wheelie bin costs around €10, and without composting or recycling i’d say we would need to put out a bin at least once every month. So far thats a saving of €100, and a saving of a couple of tons of landfill every year. It’s also been very educational, seeing what can be recycled, seeing how much waste a household creates, and how much can avoid the wheelie bin.
blog changes
Jul 21
finally got my act together on the blog front! Wahey! Have now imported most of about 4 years worth of blogger blogs into one. It makes more sense than trying to maintain all those other blogs
Firefox Extensions revisited
Jul 13
Firefox (currently 3.5) is my favorite browser. I use it for hours every day, and I could barely manage without it. It has one big advantage over all the other browsers out there – extensions. No other browser has the same community, the same wealth of extensions that firefox has. If you need to do something that firefox doesn't do, chances are there's an extension out there for you.
I've listed my fave extensions before, but on re-reading it recently I realised that it does change a fair bit from year to year.
The Old Reliables:
- Adblock Plus & Adblock Filterset.G Updater
- Download Statusbar – puts progress indicators for downloads in the status bar.
- Firebug – debug javascript
- PDF Download – download PDF files instead of trying to open them.
I can't imagine ever not needing those four. Google basically included 2 & 3 in chrome, even tho the focus is on a stripped down browser. Absolutely essential.
The Fallen
- faviconize Tab - just don't find myself using it that often anymore. Prism has seen my most regular windows move to their own processes
- All-in-One Gestures – mouse gestures are cool, but once I became more laptop centric I found them very hard to do on a touchpad
- SmartBookmarks – I don't care about bookmarks anymore. I save some important work stuff at work, but I hardly ever use bookmarks at home, except for on the toolbar.
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – see above.
- Piclens – Now called CoolIris I think. Still very cool but I never used it enough.
- All-in-One Sidebar – I used to do things in the sidebar but I can't for the life of me remember what they were anymore
- Web Developer – viewing CSS can be handy, but its one toolbar too many
The Newbs
- Downthemall – download manager which can't be beaten. Indispensible
- FoxTab – A cool graphic tab manager like safari is always bragging about. rarely used, I doubt i'll still have it come this time next year
- GoogleGears – More of a plugin really but it comes up as an extension
- Fission – turns the Location bar into a progress bar
- Growl/GNTP – extension to add growl (for windows) support to firefox
- LocationBar2 – linkifies sections of URLs in your location bar
- Personal Menu – hides the top menus (file view etc) and puts them in a button on the side of the location bar. with a custom menu
- Prism – The best thing since sliced bread. Turn oft used websites (hint – GMAIL) into separate web apps!
- Source Viewer Tab – view the source in a tab next to the window, chrome style
- Ubiquity – command line web stuff – my most common uses are defining, googling or wiki-ing words, or mapping things.
Rocketdock and Taskswitch
Jul 13
Two more productivity apps that I find very useful
RocketDock
http://www.rocketdock.com
A windows version of the dock application based on the Mac dock. Except its better because its on windows of course. =)
If you’ve ever seen the Mac dock you’ll know what to expect. You can add icons to the dock, and also folders of icons using the Stacks Docklet (a separate download, here). In fact there are all kinds of addons available on the site, although most are fairly simple stuff, usually just adding a shutdown button or some other trivial function.
Rocketdock also shows your minimized tasks, and I can happily report it works very well with previously blogged app miniMize.
Apple recently won a legal battle to patent the dock, so it may not be around forever, as they’ll no doubt try and keep it exclusive to macs. hopefully by that stage the geniuses behind XGL or Bumptop will have created some ingenious new way to interact with our PCs.
TaskSwitch XP
(http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp/download.html)
Even with miniMize and RocketDock, you’ll still need to alt-tab occasionally (sometimes its just more instinctive). TaskSwitchXP replaces the default alt-tab menu with a much better one, which allows sticky mode (the menu stays on the screen until you pick something with the mouse) and is super-customisable.
I’ve blogged about some of the bits of this before, but just for convenience sake, here’s all the steps together.
1. Open up regedit and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.
2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK
3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.
Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:
The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:
One Missing Feature
The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.
One Unfortunate Side Effect
Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.
Windows 7 Taskbar Hack
May 6
This is a picture of my current taskbar.
As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:
1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255
3. Restart (or log off and log on again)
Simple!
Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.
Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.
I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:
Whenever I take a pic with my camera phone, transferring a file is as easy as right clicking on the bluetooth icon in the taskbar, sending the file and clicking 'next' on the Bluetooth dialog. Microsoft have made it wonderfully simple to transfer a file to your PC from a bluetooth device.
Transferring lots of files, however, is a different story. by the time your on the 5th or so file, you'll be getting fairly tired of right clicking on tray icons.
I put the following command in my autohotkey script, using WIN + SHIFT + B as the shortcut key.
%windir%\system32\fsquirt.exe -receive
Now if I want to transfer ten photos, I hit WIN+SHIFT+B ten times, ten dialogs spring up, and I can fire away all my photos from the phone end.
PS: fsquirt? Who thinks up the names for these things?
Mp3Split 0.9.1
Apr 25
http://www.merlinsoftware.com/free.htm
Sometimes you need to split a large mp3 file into parts. Sometimes. But you never remember the last program you used, and you end up downloading 5 things that don't do what you need them to.
This splits large mp3s into auto named files at a length of your choosing. That's it. No frills, its this easy.
step 1
drag mp3 to window
step 2
choose length of segments (I chose 10 minutes each)
step 2a. (optional)
have it stick all the files in the same folder, or pick a folder
step 3
click 'Split Files'
It'll even do multiple files in one go, to their respective folders. Go Mp3Split!
Rory
Disaster!
Jan 28
Well, the good news is iRex got back to me. The bad news is that they want €275 to fix the iliad.I’m torn. On the one hand, I’d love to have my ebook back, and getting it repaired will mean a screen upgrade to a sharper, faster display.
On the other, it cost me €400 on ebay, and I can’t really justify spending another €275 on it when I could pick up a Sony PRS-505 for €249
In any case, I’ll be posting the remainder of my scribblings here in the months to come, but I think I’ll also be turning this into a general blog about e-book readers.
-Rory