The Manicou Report

Tech Thursday

Yo, it’s Tech Thursday however. And today I’ve got three.

First up a tool called Karen’s Replicator. If you have a back up hard drive like I do, making sure you consistently back up all your photos, music, and documents could be a pain. If you don’t have a back up hard drive, then think of what will happen on that day when you could quite possibly lose all your stuff – especially the irreplaceables like digital photos. That won’t be fun at all. So do the right thing and go and get yourself a backup hard drive. But anyway, Karen’s Replicator is a free, simple backup tool that you can set to copy files from one folder to another on schedule. I use it to copy my entire My Documents Folder as well as other important folders.

Name the job, set up source and destination folders and the time. Works like a breeze. Get it here.

Next is a Firefox Extension called Menu Editor. This is something I’ve been searching for for a looooong time. But I guess I never used the correct keywords since it was right there all along. With all the extensions I’ve added to Firefox, my right click menu had become epic. Just finding simple options like copy and paste resembled trying to find a needle in a haystack. And the thing is I never even used most of the right click options. So what the Menu Editor does is allow you the user to remove some of the options not only from the right click menu, but from all the menus on Firefox.

Check and uncheck to your heart’s content and feel how easy it is to rid your life of some clutter. My right click menu no longer has a scroll button and I’ve reduced the 35 or so items down to a more manageable 10. Get Menu Editor here.

And now the best for last. I’ve long wanted an extension that better streamlines search capabilities into the Firefox browser. As with Menu Editor, this is also something I’ve searched for for a long time. This is my new favourite extension by the way, and probably the one I’ve been using the most as of late. What I’d been looking for was the ability to highlight some text, right click on it and and choose the search engine I wanted to use to search for those words. Not too much to ask right? Web Search Pro does exactly that and even better. With it I can also highlight text and drag it across the screen. As soon as I begin dragging it a grid appears with my search engines and all I have to do is drag the text and drop it into the appropriate box and voila, the search begins. If that isn’t a lazy man’s tool, I don’t know what is.

The drag feature is so impressive, I removed Web Search Pro from my right click menu which is funny because that’s why I wanted it in the first place. By the way, you can remove it from the options menu itself – it’s not necessary to use Menu Editor.

The search engines in the grid are completely editable so you can switch and move them around at will. The default settings for Web Search Pro were a little too funky for me so I fixed them to suit me. There are lots of options to mess around with so you are bound to find a combination that works for you. The only problem with the extension (which really is nitpicking) is that when the grid is activated it pops up whenever text is dragged. I found out later that you can disable it by holding down “Shift” before you begin to drag. You can find Web Search Pro here.

I hope you liked this week’s selections. Be sure to let me know if you like Web Search Pro as much as i did.

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Tech Tuesday

Staying on the Facebook theme for a bit, I want to give you two more tips for better Facebooking. As you know, implemented in your Firefox browser is a list of search engines that you the user can utilise instead of opening the page itself.

In addition to the default list, Mozilla also provides extra search engines that you can add to your browser. If you are technologically inclined you can also make your own, or if you’re like me you can rely on smarter folks at the Mycroft Project to come up with search engines instead.

On the Mycroft page just enter any address (for example Cnet.com) and chances are that someone has already come up with a search engine for that site. To make life easier, I’ve added my usual haunts such as NewEgg.com and IMDb.com. You could most likely find an engine for any site that has a search feature.

Facebook Search Engine

If you’re like me, you sit at your desk working and all of a sudden a name you haven’t heard, let alone spoken, in over 10 years will pop into your head and you will wonder, “Hmmm, I wonder if Such and Such is on Facebook.” Instead of pulling up the entire Facebook page, just choose the Facebook search engine, enter Such and Such’s name and voila! The Mycroft Project has a Facebook.com search engine that can be found here. Choose the first one on the list.

Facebook Autopoke 2.1

One last piece of Facebook ware is another script for Greasemonkey. The last time I spoke about Greasemonkey, I recommended Facebook Remove App Requests, and No Facebook Applications. Since then I see that Facebook has installed a button called “Ignore all Requests”. At last!. The other two are still valid, I guess. I also want to recommend a script called Facebook Autopoke 2.1 which does exactly what it says. If someone pokes you, it will poke them back and fulfill your poking obligation. Nice eh? Besides, poking is stupid and you probably don’t want to waste your time doing it. Of course, as with the others, if you want to use this, you need to get Greasemonkey first. Get it here.

Gimp

The last tip is some software a lot of you probably already know about. If you can’t afford Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator and/or feel guilty about stealing it, Gimp will ease your consciences.

Gimp, as described on its website, is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. If I knew more about photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, I would talk more about it, but I don’t, so I won’t. But I can tell you that all of my headers for this site (excluding the current) I’ve done using Gimp - not that that’s such a great recommendation considering the fact that I have no artistic skills. In any case, Gimp is free, very versatile (from what I understand) and version 2.4.4 is available here (Windows 2000 and above only). If you are installing Gimp, you need to install GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment FIRST in order for it to work. Get GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment here.

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Tech Tuesday

Back by popular demand, it’s Tech Tuesday. Yes, I know this is Thursday, however, Tuesday wasn’t anywhere near long enough. And it’s not by “popular” demand. Only one person demanded it, but you never know, she could be popular, right? But anyway, think of these tech tips as the gifts that keep on giving.

I suggest that you download and install a extension for your Firefox browser called Greasemonkey. This extension on it’s own does nothing, but it allows you to add a number of beneficial user scripts to your web pages. All Greasemonkey does is open a portal where you can add tiny bits of script to your Firefox browser so that web pages behave as you want them to.

After you install Greasemonkey, you can find your scripts at Userscripts.org. To install, click on the gray box to the right that says “Install this script”. A window will pop up to confirm so all you have to do is click “Install”. Left-clicking enables or disables Greasemonkey and right-clicking allows you to enable or disable individual scripts (among other things). I’ll tell you about four of my favourite Greasemonkey scripts now.

The first is a script called Facebook Remove App Requests. Most of us are addicted to Facebook - admit it. Many of us have friends who like to install (and then invite you to install) every single Facebook application that comes their way. I can’t stand that. Sorry I don’t want to pirate, a werewolf or a vampire. I don’t want to know what kind of fruit I am or what my stripper name is. Geez. I don’t know about you, but everyday I get tonnes of these invites.

So I installed this application that simply creates a button to the left of the “Confirm Requests” page which allows me to decline/ignore all requests with one click. Clicking “Ignore all Apps” will open up a confirmation window. Click “OK” and watch them all die. Make sure you confirm or decline any friend requests first because it’s possible that this application could deny those as well.

Next is another script for Facebook users called No Facebook Applications. As mentioned before there are some who like to load up their Facebook profiles with every single application that comes their way. All you want to do is find their stupid wall yet you have to read about their “Friends” comparisons and search through a mile-long Fun Wall. Not fun. Think of this as a Facebook decluttifyer. During the load the script will hide all user-installed applications from their profile making everything simple and uncluttered.

This last one will help a lot of you, particularly you blog commenters. I’ve had the experience of filling in a text area on a web page only to have the page to crap out. The Textarea Backup keeps a record of the text that you entered on a particularly page (for example the comment box on a blog post) and will keep it there till you enter new text. So if the page craps out when you are trying to send the information, you can come back to find everything as you filled it in. This may create privacy issues on shared computers since the text stays there till it’s replaced. Keep that in mind when you use this.

Still don’t have Mozilla Firefox? Get it here:

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Tech Tuesday

I know, it’s been months. And if you give me a few more months I’m sure I can come up with a good enough excuse.

First on the menu, a Firefox extension called RefreshBlocker. Two of the sites that I visit most frequently are the Newsday and Google News. Both of these sites however have a most annoying quality - they auto refresh. The auto refresh feature on the Google News website isn’t such a bad idea since it helps to supply fresh news to the visitors, but I still don’t like it because I can refresh my own browser when I feel like it. But auto refresh on the Newsday? Why? The Newsday like all other news websites in Trinidad and Tobago does not update their stories or publish new stories during the day. So in their case, the auto renew feature is completely useless. On top of it being useless, it sucks up my bandwidth if I have quite a few pages open )which is often the case).

Obviously I’m not the only person who feels that way about auto refreshing because someone came up with a Firefox extension to stop it from happening.

There are two drawbacks of using RefreshBlocker: (1) It creates a large yellow, blue-fonted banner at the top of the page (which I have learnt to ignore)

RefreshBlocker Screenshot: Ugly Yellow Banner

and (2) Many pages that naturally redirect are also inadvertently blocked. There is a whitelist/blacklist feature in the options to change the blocker settings per site, but it gives mixed results. However if the RefreshBlocker does prevent a site from redirecting, you can click on the link in the ugly yellow banner at the top to help it along its way.

RefreshBlocker Screenshot: Whitelist/Blacklist

I’ve read reviews of RefreshBlocker that state that the extension works only with auto-refresh pages that use a Meta tag element and won’t work with pages that use Javascript to refresh the page. However I haven’t yet encountered that problem.

By the way I’m aware that it is no longer Tuesday, but I began this post on Tuesday and I reserve the right to make up the rules as I go.

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google_ad_client = “pub-3697702736433773″;
google_ad_output = “textlink”;
google_ad_format = “ref_text”;
google_cpa_choice = “CAAQwaT2_gEaCK4YeWxdsHieKLGsuIEBMAA”;
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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.

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”

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.

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).

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:

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Tech Tuesday

So it’s Tuesday again and therefore Tech Tuesday. Although my last tech tip was completely ignored, (not even one comment?) I must persevere.

The best thing about Mozilla Firefox (to me anyway) is the extensions that developers are alowed to create. Extensions and themes allow the user to customize browsers to his or her liking. So I think that my tech tips will always include extensions for Firefox since developers continue to churn out better and more useful extensions everyday.

The extension I want to highlight todays is called All-in-One Gestures. This has made browsing the internet so incredibly easy, it’s not funny. It has made me realize though, that this is a lazy man’s extension. For the following screenshots I used Chennette’s site including photos of her Gulab Jamoon. (I hope you don’t mind, Chennette.)

Forward	Close Tab	Refresh Page

All-in-One Gestures will allow the user to control the Firefox browser with the use of gestures made by clicking and dragging the right mouse button. You can open new tabs, close tabs, duplicate tabs, go back or forward in history or refresh the page all by a combination of up, down, left and right movements. The possibilities are endless. I still haven’t learned about 80% of the gestures.

You can also customize the colour of the trail and it’s thickness and edit and add your own gestures. There is another “Gestures” extension called Mouse Gestures. It’ looks pretty much the same. I haven’t used it so I’m not sure which is better. Maybe you can use both and tell me. You can download All-in-One Gestures here, and if you so desire, Mouse Gestures here.

The next tip is for a programme called Folder Marker. This is not a Firefox extension. If you get tired of seeing all-yellow folders on your computer, this programme is for you. I hate going into My Documents to look for the same folder I’ve opened a hundred times before. Changing the colour, makes it super easy to find.

Folder Marker (the free version) allows you to change the colours of your folders (10 to choose from) and change icons that add descriptions, like High Priority, Done Work and Important Files. This is a great addition.

However make sure not to download the Pro or Home versions. They want money for that. Download the Free version here.

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Tech Tuesday Wednesday Thursday

I deeply apologise for the late appearance of the Tech Tuesday feature. And yes I am aware it’s no longer Thursday, but I began this on Thursday and well, I’m making up the rules as I go.

Taskbar Shuffle Screenshot

The first tip today is a programme called Taskbar Shuffle. This programme is pretty much what it says it is. Have you ever wanted the items on your taskbar to be arranged in a different order? Well I have, and I guess I wasn’t the only one since someone decided work on fixing that.

Taskbar Shuffle, once installed, allows the user to change the order of any items on the taskbar to his or her liking. With the ease of drag and drop you can change your taskbar itimes to any order you desire. You can get Taskbar Shuffle here.

My next piece if freeware is actually an extension for Mozilla Firefox. This one, FoxyTunes, allows the user to operate a host of different media players right from the status bar.

With FoxyTunes you don’t need to keep switching from your browser to your media player in order to raise or lower the volume, skip, search or even view song and album information. It expands to display all the controls and it can easily collapse into a single button when you need some status bar space.

There’s also a FoxyTunes mini that can be placed on top of all your windows (say the Word document you’re working on) in case you don’t want to have to switch back to your browser.

FoxyTunes works with Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes and many other media players. Controls are very easy and it even includes a sleep timer and an alarm clock. You can configure it to your liking and even learn the keyboard shortcuts. Definitely one of the best Firefox extensions out there.

You can install FoxyTunes from here.

You can also download Mozilla from my link on my sidebar to the right.

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Tech Tuesday

Foxit Reader

Foxit Reader

My first tech tep for today is about a PDF reader called Foxit Reader. If Internet Explorer is your Granny’s browser, then Adobe Reader is your Grandpa’s PDF reader. Foxit Reader is a “free” PDF reader produced by the Foxit Software Company.

Foxit Reader’s Many Features

I should say that I find this very useful because I depend a lot on PDFs everyday. One of my biggest problems with Adobe Reader is the inability for me to set my own bookmarks and the inability to mark up the text in any fashion. Being a lit student and having to use and examine a lot of eBooks in PDF, I find Foxit Reader valuable. If I’m reading an eBook using Adobe Reader, how am I supposed to remember where I stopped? Searching for an alternative led me to Foxit Reader.

Foxit Reader’s Highlighting Tool

Foxit reader lets the reader/user perform a number of tricks not possible with Adobe Reader. With Foxit I can highlight, underline, and strikeout text. It even includes a typewriter tool and a caret annotation tool. Each of these tools allows you to attach a note to the annotation made which can be quickly viewed by double-clicking on the annotation. If you are a lit student and you use a lot of PDFs like I do, this is a great tool. (By the way, the dull yellow colour of the background is my choice; it makes reading a little easier on the eyes.)

Unfortunately there is no way to bookmark my pages but I work around this by putting notes both at the top of the document and the point where I left off. The note at the top is where I’ll type in the page number.

Foxit Note

However (yes there is a however), since the free version is considered an “evaluation” copy of Foxit Reader, if you save the PDF with the annotations made, there will be a permanent notice at the top of each annotated page with that says “Edited by Foxit Reader…”. Even if you remove the annotation, the note stays. So consider this when deciding between Foxit and Adobe Reader. An easy way to avoid marking up your PDFs is to make a duplicate of the file in use and store it before making any annotations.

You can download Foxit Reader here.

PDF reDirect

PDF reDirect Screenshot

Since we’re on the topic of PDFs, my second and last tech tip is for a programme called PDF reDirect that can turn most any document into a PDF. All you do is “print” the document from the file menu choosing PDF reDirect as your printer and presto, instant PDF. That could be opened even in Adobe Reader. This helps a lot if you are a Project Gutenberg junkie like I am and you hate to read from notepad and HTML files.

You can download PDF reDirect here.

I hope I have made your lives even a little easier.

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Tuesday Tech Tip

By no stretch of the imagination am I a tech savvy person. If I were I would have created my own website without having to rely on blogger for a template. That having been said, I do manage to get by with lots of trial and error. And I guess because of that and my never-ending pursuit of good freeware and other bits of software that make life easier, I’ve found a lot of good stuff online that I like to use and I wanted to share with you.

So If I can keep this going, every Tuesday I want to share with you something I find valuable.

My first tip to you would be to get yourself a real browser. Honestly, why are so many of you using Internet Explorer? It’s not that I wanted to leave IE, but after using Firefox, I just couldn’t go back. Once you use it, you’ll realize how stagnant IE is also.

Microsoft Internet Explorer, whether it be 6.0 or 7.0, is dead. It’s your granny’s browser (no disrespect to your granny). Trust me on this one, if there is one bit of sound advice I can give you, it’s to download Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (Yes, you 1.5ers, 2.0 is available). You Internet Explorers, have no idea how much you’re missing. Do you know Firefox even spell checks for you while you type in form fields including e-mail and blog posts and comments?

By far the greatest thing about Firefox is that it allows individual coders to develop extensions for its browser. Which means, if you have talent and an idea, you too can develop a useful add-on. It also allows coders to develop theme so you can get your browser they way you like it. Most extensions are really tiny and take seconds to download. Themes are larger but rarely do they cross the 5mb threshold.

Gmail Manager Screenshot

I think my favourite extension (and the one I use the most) is the Gmail Manager, which allows me to see whenever I get new mail to my Gmail account and also delivers the subject line and a snippet of the mail. Definitely get that. No more opening up the page to an empty inbox. You can set it to how often it checks for new mail and you can even set it to play a sound when new mail comes in. My currount audio clip is from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” Where Napoleon shouts out, “Tina, come get some Ham”. But I digress.

Internote Screenshot

Another great extension is Internote that allows you to put virtual Post-it® notes on web pages you frequent. Even when you close the page the note stays there until you move it. In the options you can change the size and colour of the notes as well as the fonts. I use it a lot to remember things I need to remember to do on my site. It helps a lot also as reference notes.

So there they are my two tips for today (the Firefox one was a gift).

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