Articles marked as "general" :
Site Changes to Come
[ 5 December 2007 ]
Marked under general.
All Things Marked has been running for over a year now. Since August 2006. I think it’s time to change the look, so I’m developing a new design for the site. It should be coming out within the next month hopefully. Please feel free to contact me about anything you’d like to see in the new design. Let me know if there’s something you do or don’t like about the current one, for example, having just the most recent article on the home page.
I will also start writing about software and websites that I think are useful. These won’t necessarily be HOWTO’s but they will cover some good apps out there. Feel free to contact me about anything you think deserves to be covered. Stay tuned to see some new stuff.
Utility Center: Free x 4
[ 14 August 2007 ]
Marked under general.
Here are four new additions to the Utility Center:
Notepad++ - This is an excellent choice for a free text editor. It like the built-in Notepad for Window, but better (hence it’s name); and, it’s free. One of the best things about this program is that it’s fast, so it’s not a strain to right-click a file and click Edit in Notepad++.
WinDirStat - Running out of space on your hard drive? Not sure why? Run this program for a graphical representation of your hard drive and the space being used. Free of charge.
Power Defragmenter - Need to defrag? Don’t bother with te built-in utility. Power Defragmenter uses the power of Contig, another great Sysinternals app, to get the job done. It’s basically a GUI for the CLI-only contig. I’ve also written about it in the past.
Audacity - This is the obvious choice for simple audio editing. It’s free and easy to use. It’s stable and I’ve recommended it in the past for creating your own MP3 ring tones.
HOWTO: Quickly Remove Misspelled URLs from Firefox History
[ 25 July 2007 ]
Marked under general.
Have you ever misspelled a website in the address bar [in Firefox] and now it shows up in the drop-down history when you start to type the URL? Well, recently this happened to me when I was going to Engadget. To get rid of the misspelled domain, just start to type the URL in and use the down arrow until the misspelled domain is highlighted. Now hit the Delete key. And…done. Who would’ve thought that Firefox was smart enough to delete stuff when you hit the Delete key? I’m using Firefox 2, but feel free to let me know what other browsers this works in.
Utility Center: New Tools
[ 4 June 2007 ]
Marked under general.
Some new additions are in place over in the Utility Center.
Launchy - this is an excellent time saver. It’s a keystroke launcher to launch programs…. and just about everything else. Just run it, hit Alt + Spacebar and enter in a program name, document name, music….or even search Google from it.
Winamp - this is a great, lightweight, fast audio player. It’s small, can be skinned and launches quick. It can play music and videos and there are plenty of add-ons to it
7-Zip - this is a free alternative to Winzip or WinRAR. It’s so good because…it’s free. It supports plenty of formats for compression and decompression.
PuTTY - this is for you SSHers out there. It’s lightweight (as in…fits on a floppy…but who uses those still). This program is a simple stand-alone telnet/SSH program. It’s easy to use an has been featured in a previous article.
Utility Center: 4 New Additions
[ 9 April 2007 ]
Marked under general, mobile, multimedia, time savers, windows.
Here are a few new additions to the new Utility Center.
IrfanView - this program goes back to my days with Windows 95. This is an excellent image viewer…a perfect replacement to the default view in Windows. You can open plenty of different image formats as well as play audio formats. This program has been written about before for ability to take great screenshots.
FileZilla - this is a very reliable FTP program — and it’s completely free. I highly recommend it for any FTP use. It has n account manager that lets you save passwords and addresses.
CleanUp! - this program has been mentioned in the past as a good way to clean up your hard drive. It can scan though a lot of common areas looking for temporary files, cached files and other junk. This is definitely a good program to have.
BitPim - this program is a great one for cell phones. If you are able to connect your phone to your computer (either hard wire or wireless), you can use the bad boy to transfer media over to the phone. It’s been mentioned in the past in a detailed tutorial on putting MP3s on the LG Chocolate as ringtones.
Introducing the Utility Center
[ 26 March 2007 ]
Marked under general.
Today dawns a new feature here at All Things Marked. Say hello to your new friend, the Utility Center. The Utility Center will be my place to post my favorite and most used apps. These utilities (some new, some previously mentioned) will have a simple explaination and link to a download. I highly recommend any and all of these programs. Right now there are a few apps in there to start the list.
Feel free to email me if you want me to consider a program for the Utility Center. Make sure you give me a good reason why I should even consider it. Just note that I may already have it on queue though.
Easily get rid of change, 10 coins at a time
[ 18 October 2006 ]
Marked under general, time savers.
Everyone has coins they want to get rid of. I randomly thought of an easy way to carry change and always have enough change for a purchase. For the sake of this article, I consider change to be less than $1 of coins. To be able to make any change combination, you need to carry $0.99 of change through 10 coins:
3 quarters
1 dime
2 nickles
4 pennies
These amounts will add up to $0.99 of coins. Given any “change” value, you can come up with that amount with these coins.
$0.55 = 2 q + 1 n
Left over = 1 q + 1 d + 1 n + 4 p$0.79 = 3 q + 4 p
Left over = 1 d + 2 n
No matter what change value you need, you can come up with it. So, if you want to start using up your coins, just carry these 10 coins with you. Say you buy breakfast every morning and pay with cash. You will always be able to give exact change for the change part of your order, even if you buy different stuff each day. This method obviously only works per transaction, meaning once you use some coins, you can’t guarantee you will have exact change for another transaction.
You no longer need to carry a handfull of change when you want to get rid of it — just carry 10.
I tried to come up with an even smaller amount of change but I don’t think one exists. If you figure one out, let me know.
UPDATE: It seems as though my intentions for this are being misunderstood. This is just a simple, but usable way to get rid of some change. If you prefer to just keep change in a jar (as I do), then fine. All I am saying here is if you are going to go buy something and you have change you want to get rid of, you can do this. You can also just grab a handful of change — that’s fine, your decision. You can also just never use change and always break bills. Fine. I am in college, thus…I don’t want to waste bills of a few cents, so if I know I’m going to buy something with cash, I can bring change.
HOWTO: Send free text messages through email
[ 4 September 2006 ]
Marked under general, time savers.
NOTE: Messages still incur the cost to the receiver who will always have to pay for an incoming message. This method makes sending free.
If you ever need to text someone on their phone and you’re at a computer you can actually send one through your email account. Just send an email to their address below based on their phone service:
Verizon: 10digitphonenumber@vtext.com
AT&T: 10digitphonenumber@txt.att.net
Sprint: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net
Nextel: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: 10digitphonenumber@cingularme.com
Virgin Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@vmobl.com
Alltel: 10digitphonenumber@message.alltel.com
CellularOne: 10digitphonenumber@mobile.celloneusa.com
Omnipoint: 10digitphonenumber@omnipointpcs.com
Qwest: 10digitphonenumber@qwestmp.com
Or, if you don’t know the person’s phone service, you can send a message to their 10digitphonenumber@teleflip.com
Remember, they will receive this message as a txt, so keep it short and basic.
Info was from Gmail: Help Center
RSS: explained
[ 30 August 2006 ]
Marked under general, mozilla, time savers.
These days, there are so many websites out there that have little orange boxes on their sites that say RSS, Atom, or XML. Many people get confused by them and wonder what they’re used for. It’s a fairly new form of technology to keep up-to-date with website content. RSS and Atom are two separate forms of “feeds” built on XML technology. The earliest form of RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. The n, it stood for Rich Site Summary. The latest version of RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. When a website updates — for example, this blog — the XML-based feed file gets updated with the new content of the site. This file contains the date and time of the update, the title of the topic and the actual content. It is all stored in an XML file. RSS and Atom are just two different types of this technology, but both are very similar and are an extension of XML.
So what’s it good for?
Feeds are good for keeping up-to-date with frequently read websites. Websites that provide content feeds have a special feed URL. You can enter this into a “feed reader” or “aggregator” which will pull in the content and display it to you. Feed readers are good beause you can read the content of a bunch of different websites in one central place. I use a homepage portal, Netvibes, to read feeds from my favorite websites. Below is a picture of two feeds from my homepage.
(click image to enlarge)
The above screenshot shows two different feeds, TechCrunch and Slashdot. The bold entries are new, unread entries. The number next to the feed name indicates the number of new entries on the respective website. As you can see, feeds are a great way to get a lot of content in one central location. Now you don’t have to visit a bunch of sites to see if they have any updates. Now the updates come to you, and you can actually read the updates right there.
Browsers like Mozilla Firefox and the new Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 have feed-reading capabilities built into them. In the latest version of Firefox (currently 1.5), if a website provides a feed, it will have a little orange box in the top right corner that looks like:
If you click that box, you can add the feed to your bookmarks. Once you do that, you can navigate to it in your bookmarks and the feed will expand and list the topics like such:
(click image to enlarge)
Now that you understand RSS, you can subscribe to my RSS feed to stay in-tune with my blog.
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More information on RSS/Atom/XML:
Wikipedia RSS entry
mezzoblue explanation
XML.com: What Is RSS
Get free sports scores from 4INFO
[ 18 August 2006 ]
Marked under general, time savers.
If you’ve ever been away from a TV, radio, or computer during an important game, you’ve probably had a hard time getting score updates. I’ve been using 4INFO for over a year now for updates. You can use it whenever you want by sending a txt message on your phone to 4info (44636) with the name of the team as the message. You will receive a score of the current game and the date and time of the next scheduled game. You can also choose to create a free online account. There you can manage updates by enabling them or disabling them. I have an account I use to manage my Red Sox score updates.
I have 4INFO send me a txt any time the Red Sox or their opponent score. Of course, I disable it when I’m watching the game.
They offer other txt services too, like weather, stocks, flight statuses, movie time, etc. Try them all out at 4info.net