Tech Tuesday
Would you believe it’s been five weeks since the last time I had tech Tuesday? But to make up for it’s absence I have three pieces of freeware here for you. The first one is called Launchy.
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Launchy is described as a “keystroke launcher” for Windows. From the official website:
Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.
Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!
…and it does what it says it does. Pressing ALT+Spacebar on your keyboard brings up the application’s file finder that locates files or programmes as you type. Pressing “Enter” opens the file or programme. Simple as that. No more reaching for your mouse or searching through the start menu to find what you need. You can also set it to search the directories you want it to for example “My Pictures”
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Launchy is also fully skinable. So when you download Launchy (from Sourceforge) make sure to download the Skins pack. To use the skins, simply unzip it and add it to the skins folder.
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This next one is simple, but I’ve used it consistently ever since I downloaded it. This one is Volumouse and what it does is control the volume of your computer from your mouse. The default setting has you pressing ALT and scrolling the wheel to raise or lower the volume. However since Volumouse is customizable I set it to where I can left click and adjust the scrollwheel thereby using only one lazy man’s hand. Not only is the Volumouse for volume, the programme can also be used to adjust the brightness or transparency of your screen as well as a bunch of other stuff I haven’t really explored as yet. I understand that this won’t work with Vista though. You can download Volumouse here (it’s a little hard to find the link on the page, but scroll down and you’ll find it).
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Lastly, and since Tech Tuesday has been away for so long I’ll give you a third tip - a Firefox extension this time. This one is Highlighter - which is pretty self-explanatory. Highlighter highlights text on a page. Select text to be highlighted, right click and choose “Highlight” and presto. You have a lot of different colours to choose from, but the only bad thing is that it won’t stay on the page after you close it like the Internote extension will. But it’s still handy for quickly annotating important text on a page. Get Highlighter here.
Still don’t have Mozilla Firefox, download it from here:
6 Responses to “Tech Tuesday”
By Atasha on Mar 22, 2007 | Reply
Thanks Mani. I particularly like the second tip. But I ask myself, is this the ultimate form of laziness? (for me anyways) Was it so hard for me to click on that stupid little icon on my taskbar, click on the speaker and then adjust? Actually it was..hehehehe
By Jumbie on Mar 22, 2007 | Reply
Another excellent extension for Firefox is the Adblock Plus extension.
This allows you to add advertisements to a blockable list, so that in future there will be none shown an the website when you visit. You can also block javascripts, sound, flash etc that eat up your bandwidth.
This immediately frees up your bandwidth for the stuff you really need. As an example, when I read the Trinidad Express online, the only additional features on the page are the 2 webcams downtown POS. Everything else is blocked.
By Mani on Mar 22, 2007 | Reply
Atasha gyul, Volumouse is a Godsend. Yes it is too much work to click on the icon and then wait till it pops up to adjust it. This is so much easier. Glad to help.
Well Jumbie I would personally like to say that I am against Adblock Plus extension. I think the person who developed that has never had to depend on ad revenue to keep his or her site on the internet. I depend heavily on the revenue generated from people clicking on my ads in order to pay for my hosting (and my domain renewals) as do a lot of other site owners. So I’m pretty much against anything that will take that away. What yuh trying to do meh boy?
By Jumbie on Mar 22, 2007 | Reply
Mani boy, far be it from depriving yuh of some ‘hard earned’ dollars.
Personally, I have never clicked an ad on ANY website in the past 10 years, not while I have an icon for ‘HOME’ (GOOGLE) on my browser. So much easier.
I just recommend it because some websites have a surplus of dem lil irritants, and the majority of people who on dial up (student especially) know how frustrating it is to wait till they download before they could find what they really want in the first place.
And you really ent ready to hear meh rant bout these so-called webdesigners who think FLASH and imbedded audio is God’s gift to them….
By Lilandra on Apr 2, 2007 | Reply
so the launchy is like spotlight? for start menu?
By Mani on Apr 5, 2007 | Reply
um, I have absolutely no idea what spotlight is actually.