Every so often, I reinstall my computers. One of the biggest hassles of this, is installing all the software I use. I recently discovered a simpler way to do so; Ninite. You simply go to the website, check the boxes for what software you need, then download the installer.
Having downloaded the installer, you start it, then leave it to its business. It automatically downloads and installs all the software you have specified. That’s it. You’re done!
The list of software isn’t terribly long yet, but they are adding new software all the time.
Blog
-
A simpler way to get your apps
-
WordPress and the Mystery of the Disappearing Line Breaks
I’ve been running my blog on Wordpres for over a month now, and I am mostly happy with what I’m seeing. It does most of what I want it to do natively. As for what it doesn’t do natively, there is usually a plugin to do that for you.
The only thing I’ve as yet been unable to make it do satisfactorily, is line breaks. TinyMCE, the text editor in WordPress, executes a back-end filtering process every time you switch from Visual to HTML and back, as well as whenever you save your posts. This filtering process, for some reason, filters out both<br>,<p>and</p>.
I originally tried to resolve this by installing a plugin called TinyMCE Advanced, which worked pretty nicely, except that, when I was typing up this post, it filtered so that my code examples above were converted so that they became actual HTML tags.
I then installed another plugin called TinyMCE Valid Elements, in which I defined<br>as a valid element. Sure enough, TinyMCE no longer filtered out the tag, but it wasn’t parsed either.
I will continue to try to fix the problem. In the meantime, I have a workaround. By adding wherever I want a break, I get my line breaks.
Note: Comments disabled due to massive amounts of comment spam -
Google Wave: First Impressions
For the last month or so, I’ve been playing around with Google newest online toy; Google Wave. Billed as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”, it is designed to combine email, IM, wikis and social networking. Written in Java, using OpenJDK, Google has announced plans to release most of the source code as Open Source.
As a communications platform, it is fun, and I like the way it combines instant messaging with logs, meaning that you can see how a conversation has taken place. The playback function is simple to use, and allows you to see context in a nifty way. It also means that you can use Wave as a presentation tool, should you so wish.
As for using it for project planning and communication, which I think is likely to be one of its most used applications, it looks pretty good. Indenting messages could, and should be simpler – they now get automatically indented if inserted between two other messages, but otherwise they are not indented. That’s definitely a function I’d like to see.
Another feature I’d like to see, is an option to share a wave publicly, giving you a URL to post to a tweet, a blogpost or the like, so that people who don’t have a Wave account can see the discussion. I hope this is something that will be coming, and I think it’s likely that we’re going to see it, keeping in mind that this is a feature that the guys at Google are more than somewhat familiar with, as we can find it in Google Calendar as well as Google Docs.
The last thing that kinda irks me, is that there is no print-function. While I’m all for a Wave being a digital entity, it would be good, I think to have the option to print a wave. I’ve already had one situation where I wanted to do so, but ended up having to copy all the text over to a document, which somewhat makes the point of the wave go away.
All in all, I’m pretty impressed by Google Wave. I see a lot of potential in it, and I’m definitely going to keep playing around with it. I’m already using it to plan one project all by my lonesome, as well as communicating with a mate about the translation of his role playing game to English. -
Free eBook: Troubleshooting Windows 7
Working in IT, I often have people ask me about issues they are having with their computer. Now, while I’m happy to help out, I often find that the problems I solve for them are problems they could have solved themselves. Mitch Tulloch, a Microsoft MVP and lead author of the just-published Windows 7 Resource Kit (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735627000; 1760 pages), has created a short e-book called “What You Can Do Before You Call Tech Support.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
(more…) -
Simple file restore
Ever delete a file you shouldn’t have? Sure you have! We all have, at some point or another. And we have all regretted it. Whether it was a system file of some sort, the holiday photos of the family, or the lease for your house, it’s always annoying.
My girlfriend gave me a flash drive the other day, on which were some photos that she’d accidentally deleted. She asked me to see what I could save, and so I did. I’d seen a review a few weeks earlier of a program I wanted to try out, and here was the perfect opportunity. The program is simply called Restoration and can be found here.
When downloaded, you do not need to install it, rather the executable runs without installation. You then select the drive to scan, and the program shows you the files available like so:
While it does not necessarily find all deleted files, in my tests it found most of them, and allowed me to quickly and simply copy them to a different drive. -
A formula for success
(more…)
I try to keep out of trouble at work as much as possible, for many reasons, but mainly because I prefer being praised to being yelled at. There is a very simple way to achieve this; simply make your promises rarely and in such a fashion that you have leeway if something should go wrong, and then follow up on it.
I don’t mean to say that you should be ambiguous, but rather that you should promise to deliver so that you have more than enough time on your hands. If you’ve got a task on hand that should take three days, promise to have it done within five.
After promising to deliver in five, do the job, double check everything, then deliver in four. By taking the extra day, you can take your time to perform quality assurance, in turn lowering the chance of problems afterwards.
The mantra is known as Tom Peters‘ Formula for Success: Underpromise and overdeliver. -
Greener printing
Are you worried about printing too much? No? I’m not really, either, but from time to time, I’d like a somewhat simpler way to print parts of a huge document, or create a PDF from them. Normally, to make a PDF, you’ll need some kind of distiller software.
GreenPrint is a program that does exactly what I want it to; it allows me to select certain pages within a document, and I can choose what printer to send the print to. You can also create a PDF, right from the program, of whatever pages you want.
Here’s a demo of the program:
-
Find alternatives to the software you’re using
I use a lot of different software, and I am always looking to try out similar software to see if I can find something better. However, finding an alternative to, let’s say Sony eBook Library, isn’t always as easy as one would like.
Enter AlternativeTo.net. A simple search for eBook Library nets us five pages of programs (15 programs to a page).
One problem I can see right now, is that it doesn’t always display relevant hits. Still, it’s a lot better than the hit-and-miss that you get if you don’t try a lookup. -
Rename files as a batch
In my last post, I talked about a nifty little program called Restoration. One thing I didn’t mention, was that the program had changed the first letter of most of the restored files to $. Most of the files we restored were photos, and I knew that all of these started with the letter I.
I wanted to make sure that the filenames of all of the files were correct keeping in mind how the OS sorts the files. However, there were 220 of them, and renaming them manually would be a hassle.
I remembered that I had at one point used a nifty little program called A.F.5 Rename your files (can be found here), which renamed a batch of files without a hitch.
Note: Comments disabled due to massive amounts of comment spam -
RIP Geocities
Monday last marked the end of an era. Since 1995, Geocities has offered free hosting to anyone who wanted their own piece of the net. It has been the last bastion of the <BLINK>and<MARQUEE>tags for years. Monday, October 26th, 2009 marked the end of that, with the closure of Geocities
Seriously though, I know a lot of people around the world took their first steps as inhabitants of the world wide web at Geocities. I had my second site there, and seem to remember having chosen the username FizbanAR back then, a testament to my fandom of the Dragonlance Chronicles books.
I will certainly not miss Geocities, but a part of me keeps thinking “Well, it would be kinda nice if all that information would not get lost”. The rest of me just scoffs and says “Yeah, get real!” -
Migrating from Blogger to WordPress
I have been thinking of migrating my blog from Blogger to a WordPress-solution hosted on my own domain. After doing some research, I decided “what the heck”, and downloaded and installed the package. The installation went without a hitch, and I went on to find a decent theme for the blog. Having downloaded and installed a few themes, I then went on to migrate my posts from Blogger to the WordPress blog. WordPress has a built-in tool to do this, which imports both posts, tags and comments. The only snag was that tags are not imported as tags, but rather as categories. Luckily; WordPress has a tool to convert tags to categories, and categories to tags.