Latest Updates

Top Tips for Staying Safe Online

Lifehacker has put together a comprehensive list of tips for staying safe online. Worth a read for anyone who isn’t too sure online.

9th December

Useful Apps for Better Productivity

Over the years I’ve found a number of applications that help save me time and effort and I find living without them a complete pain so they’re some of the first things installed on any new computer or after a reinstallation. Even better, these are all completely free.

I thought I would highlight them in case they benefit others.

Text Editing

Notepad has been a great servant and is useful for jotting down quick ideas, using as a visual clipboard, using as a middle-man when trying to remove formatting on text the Windows seems determined to hang on to for no reason but you either have to have multiple copies open or end up with a really large document.

There are plenty of alternatives out there and I’ve tried various applications but my (current) favourite is the awesome Notepad++.

Aside from a tabbed interface that means you can have multiple documents open it has line numbering, syntax highlighting, useful find and replace functions and host of other nifty features. I use it every day.

Shortcuts

I used to use AutoHotKey for everything, it’s very powerful, you can use it to do almost anything. I had shortcuts to launch applications, replace text, open my optical drive, control iTunes and you can even build applications with it.

The only issue is that it means coding all of it by putting in the relevant commands in a script file and that gets old. So, recently I have switch to two applications: Texter (for text replacement) and HotKeyz (for application launching, etc).

Ironically, Texter is written using AutoHotKey, but it adds a nice front end, some management and generally makes AHK easier to use for text replacement. From email signatures to email addresses I use it so I can use small keywords to fill in often-used text.

HotKeyz allows you to assign hotkeys to trigger specific events (I mainly use it for launching applications, for example, I have Win + C to open Calculator). Setup quick hotkey combinations for often used applications and save searching for them in the start menu.

Desktop Control

I like having my applications in a certain order on my taskbar, it means I find them faster when I’m switching between them, and being able to reorder at any time means that, if you’re switching between applications for some reason, you can just drag them to be next to each other. For that reason, I use Taskbar Shuffle.

Password Management

We’re all getting bombarded with more and more passwords to remember. Even if you can set them all to be the same (unlikely and not recommended) you have to remember the usernames, which is where the excellent KeePass comes in. It’ll store all that info, and more, securely and there’s plenty of options for easily using them again.

Web Browser

IE has come on with version 8, but it’s still behind and Chrome is still lacking extension support so, for the time being at least, Firefox with add-ons rules the roost.

The add-ons I use are:

Tab Mix Plus – all the options that should be included in FF with regards to how tabs behave.
Context Search – Select a word or phrase on the page, right-click and pick any of the search options from the quick search box to use to search for the work.
Download Statusbar – a much better download manager.
Fetch Text URL – highlight an unlinked plain text URL and select to open in a new/same tab, which saves copying and pasting into the address bar.
Firebug (probably only for web developers) – web development helper.
Web Developer (again, probably only for web developers) – various tools for web development.

I’m also a big fan of Smart keywords, which are a quick way to search sites from the address bar (so I type ‘w my search phrase’ and it searches Wikipedia, no need to change to the quick search box and pick the right site from the dropdown).

Portable Versions

If you’re unable to install applications (at work, for example) then all of these have versions or options that allow them to be run without being installed so you could run them off a USB stick. If they’re not available from the developer’s site you can usually find them at sites like PortableApps.com and Pendriveapps.com.

21st November

Getting Your Touchpad Recognised in Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop recently, it’s an old Fujitsu-Siemens S6120D, but despite finding others who got it working, my touchpad was just being recognised as a generic PS/2 mouse when I used:

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

in a terminal window.

After a lot of searching I found a post that indicated removing and ‘finding’ the mouse made it display as the ALPS touchpad that it is:

sudo rmmod psmouse sudo modprobe psmouse

The only problem was it meant doing this each time.

I couldn’t find anywhere to add this as an automated solution, but some suggestions made me check my BIOS and I found an option to disable legacy support for USB devices and voila, the touchpad was recognised on boot (so presumably the legacy support meant it was treating it is a normal mouse, or was cutting in before the USB drivers).

So, quick tip in case it comes in useful, if removing and installing the mouse works, check your BIOS and switch off legacy and PS/2 support and see if that solves it.

11th October

Tips to Save Money When Buying Software

Digital Inspiration has a great article on saving money when buying software online. I’d certainly agree with their points about comparing prices, signing up for newsletters, etc to get a special offer, upgrade versions and academic versions.

I’d also add it’s worth checking if your company has any deals. Microsoft, for example, often offers deals to employees of companies on some of its schemes.

8th September

Zenphoto Flickr Importer

I wrote recently about the fact that I did really use my Flickr account enough to warrant keeping it, plus I had space on my hosting accounts to store my photos, so I decided to take them back into my control. The issue with that was I had put a lot of work into loading, tagging and describing my photos, which I didn’t want to lose. Plus, since my account had expired, I couldn’t remember exactly what I had and had not loaded. So after I hunted around and found I liked Zenphoto I wrote a script to grab my photos, photosets, comments and descriptions and copy them into Zenphoto, setting up albums for the photosets, adding the images and the rest.

It worked for me so I thought I would make it available for everyone else should it prove useful.

DOWNLOAD
(Note: this only works with v1.2.5)

DOWNLOAD for Zenphoto v1.2.6

1st August