Amazon is Very Generous [_or_they_can't_do_the_math_]

A while back, Dad got me a screen protector and flexi_skin case from box-wave for my Palm T|X . (Thank you, Dad. )

You will notice that from the website that these two items are very ‘well-priced’. (The bad way.)

Here and Here*.

That’s daylight robbery! We decided to try our luck on Amazon instead. This yeilded the same results:

Here and Here*.

[ SOME OF] The low-star reviews for the over-priced boxwave products are not very valid, IMHO. They do make good screen protectors.

After a little bit more searching we found this.

You will notice that the item bundle is selling less than either one of the two included products sold seperately. What!? It seemed like something crummy was going on, (no reviews on the product.) but Dad decided to buy the two-pack anyway.

When the case and screen protector got here, instead of finding some cheap Refurb-o item in the package as we expected, we got a brand-new Palm T|X anti-glare screen protector and a ‘frost-blue’ flexi_skin Palm T|X case. Both had never been used, and had no cosmetic blemishes or other problems. In fact, I am still using the screen protector. ( Don’t be frightened by how much it costs. With proper care and usage, the screen protector should outlive your PDA. Plus, it is cut to fit  your model exactly, so you don’t need to trim any edges. The anti-glare works surprisingly well also. )

I still don’t understand the deals from amazon and boxwave. Maybe some kind of a loss-leader nobody has noticed?

[*In some places, a web-special is going on, making the flexiskin case worth 0.99 cents directly from boxwave, but the point still stands. It would have still costed more to buy both products seperately.]

First glance at the Executor Keystroke Launcher

A few days ago there was a little buzz about my favorite launcher application [Mundanely named launchy ]

Apparently this new application has recently come out that’s called ‘Executor’. _article on lifehacker_ Through the name, you might think that it kills processes, but in fact, it is actually another keystroke launcher that can be skinned to look just like launchy. (See lifehacker screenie for the ‘fancy alpha skin’ )

I decided to download it and try it out to see what all the excitement was about this ‘launchy killer’.  I right clicked and selected the options screen to see what I could do with the app.

The difference with this options menu and the launchy options menu is about the difference between Stardocks’ and Rocketdocks’.
o_O Intimidating.

All in all, that adds up to +50 different little options to tweak with (- the keywords stuff) .   And most of those options given are useful.  Thats a lot of stuff in comparison to launchy. (~25) Even though Launchys configuration is as simple as shoveling dirt, It doesn’t provide as many little features as executor does.

However, features really don’t matter as much as how well the application works.  Executor works great as an app launcher, and is packed with tonz of cool different features ( Customized and programmable keywords, macros[I think] etc. )

Executor’s autofill gets kind of annoying when you make a mistake, however. E.x. I type a ‘d’ instead of an ‘f’ in the launcher and it autofills the ‘d’ with ‘desktop’. I then have to reach all the way over to the [bckspce] key and push it twice to get rid of it all and start over. ( *sniff* it’s so hard! ) That’s fairly trivial, though.

Otherwise, it runs smooth as silk. It’s default keyword list is pretty good to begin with, and I can easily add another command if I need to. A few cool ones that I use frequently are:

‘wiki’ (looks up wikipedia)

‘youtube’ (Looks up youtube)

‘define’ (looks up a word on an online dictionary)

‘desktop’ (Shows the desktop)

’saveclipboard’ (saves the clipboard to a file)

‘clipboard’ (displays the clipboard contents)

’search’ (preforms a basic windows file search)

’shutdown’ (shutsdown)

‘hibernate’ (hibernates)

‘emptyrecyclebin’ (empties the recycle bin)

etc. etc. etc.

Most are followed by a suffix that provides aditional parameters. (E.g. I would type in ‘wiki’ [space] bazquirk to open up the default web browser and look up the wikipedia entry on a bazquirk in a new tab.  Sweit-Nass! )

Even though it is still pretty cool, launchy can do the same stuff with it’s ‘webby’ addon. (comes with install)

That’s another thing about executor. It doesn’t have any way to install addons that provide additional functionality. While executor might have tons of built in features that launchy doesn’t have, if you ever want to add aditional functionality, you would have to wait for the next version and add a feature request, or something. Mebe executor is plannign this for a further release?

I could go on and on about these software wars, but for now I will just list the pros and cons of each one:

Executor:

Pros:

• :wow: lot’s of different features.
• Really tweakable
• Incredible stuff you can do with keywords
• Skinnable
• Some skins can be edited to an extent within the applications
• Feels fast

Cons:

• Rather intimidating options menu is not easy to use upon first glance
• Add-ons are not available at the time
• Autofill is annoying
• Although it’s easy to optimize, the dropdown application list can get really big.
• Online documentation

Launchy:

Pros:

• Easy to configure
• You can sit down with launchy and automatically know what you are doing. (Really easy to use)
• Plug-ins for extended functionality
• Most plug-ins you would ever want are already built in
• Autofill is fast and easy [trivial]
• Skinnable
• Portable mode
• Feels even faster

Cons:

• Plugins are installed by manually putting them in folders
• Not very many plugins available
• Needs plugins if you want to do anything other than launching apps (features are not built in)
• Inadequate documentation (Last time I checked.)

All in all, I thinke executor wins on launchy, if you are willing to throw away half an hour of your life figuring it out and setting it up the way you want it. I’ll stick to launchy for now, until I can get my new computer.

Popular Culture vs. Viral Video

&lt;<title> Or, ‘I get Flamey on Popular Internet Titles‘ </title>

Many of us have been ‘privileged’ enough to have seen [or at least heard] of a viral video at one [sad, solemn] point in our lives.  Many haven’t. If you are part of the last group, then more power to you.

A ‘Viral Video’ is just some flick that some creep somewhere made [at some point in his life] and somehow at some time put online for some +1,000,000 people to watch over and over again. Much like a virus sucks your life away, the video gets watched over and over again by hapless civilians until it’s too late. (Ok, maybe that isn't the most professional description, but you get the idea. )

There are tonz of viral videos out there:

Charlie the Unicorn,

Magical Trevors I, II, III, IV,

BadgerBadgerBadger,

Human Beatbox etc., just to name a few

You will also notice that they all have over 1,000,000 views on youtube. How can this trash get so popular? Who knows, but kids all over the country who have watched them usually comment on how ‘lame’ or ‘funny’ they are. If they are so ‘lame’, then why do they watch them a million times? Maybe it’s the funny-ness that hooks them.  Ok, let’s go with that. They watch Charlie the Unicorn II over 4 million times over because it’s funny. Or MAYBE, it’s because of the person who RELEASES the movie! Maybe people will only watch Magical Trevor because it is released Weebel and Bob.

Magical Trevor is considered by most kids my age quite ‘lame’, [not me: Magical Trevor IS MY HERO] but the simplistic colorful song of the series could effectively entertain a 4 year old for a given amount of time.

So how much would we really enjoy 'Sesame Street' AS PRESENTED BY FILM COW [creators of Charlie the Unicorn series.]

I will leave you with that thought. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go and watch BadgerBadgerBadger loop a few more times.

*Viral video lists can become a religious discussion, so please don’t blast me if I didn’t list your favorite here. I don’t know about that many.  Also, [for your safety] plz browse the sites at your own risk. They might be, you know, unsafe.

School is starting! )c: / (c:

Tomorrow, I am going to start my new school year, so I won’t be able to engage in the buzzing horde of activity here @ nerdhow as much as I usually could during summer vacations, but since I am humbskulled, I might ( SOMETIMES ) have more (OR LESS) time than would otherwise be necessary. Also, sorry for the lack of posts the past few weeks. The condition of the laptop I work on is continuously deteriorating, and just yesterday the battery was officialy declared [by the computer] unable to hold a charge for more than 20 seconds.

On the plus side, some pretty cool guides should be coming up in the forseeable future, and when this laptop finally dies, it will give me an excuse to buy a new one.

I am looking forward to another interesting schoolyear.

How to brighten up your Windows UI

There are tons of methods that try to make the good ol’ Windoze XP Fisher-Price user interface look at least a little better. I’m gonna post up my favorite Windows GUI hacks that I use, and how to apply them right here on this post. I will add more and more things over time.

Most of these apply only to Windows XP.

I. Simple Stuff

Change your wallpaper

Change your desktop wallpaper into one of these (scroll down). I used the ‘SkyDrive’ windows thing for all of them. (Note the ‘Full Pack’ doesn’t contain all of the images. )

Alternatively, you could just try my activedesktop tutorial.

Turn off boring and unnoticed special FX

Another thing you can do is to turn off the built in Windows XP special FX that you don’t need. At first glance, you may think that windows doesn’t have any special effects turned on by default, but upon closer inspection… you still can’t really notice any. They just eat up RAM and annoy you.

To do this, right klik on the desktop and select ‘Properties’ from the dropdown menu. Go to the ‘Appearance’ tab, and click on the ‘Effects’ button. Uncheck everything you don’t want (or don’t notice) then click OK. I usually turn off everything except for ‘cleartype’. It doesn’t exactly make your computer look BETTER, but it certainly makes it run faster, so it gives us some more room for eyecandy that we actually notice.
.

Organizing folders

Coming soon…

II. Harder Hurdles

Secret Royale theme pack

-Now you can actually start REALLY changing the way windows looks. Go to istartedsomething.com and go to the Secret Royale Noir XP Theme post and download the zip. (Or the .rar if you have a good file extractor and a bad ‘net conection ) Follow the instructions in the little box below the download linx.
Here are the instructions copied from the website:

1. Extract files to “C:\windows\resources\themes\royale noir”
2. Double click on “luna.msstyles”
3. Select “Noir” from “Color Scheme”

Adding right click entries

- While this one doesn’t really affect how your UI looks, it still adds a whole lot of functionality and can save you from some really tedious work. Open up windows explorer ( Just dubble klik on ‘My Computer’. ) Navigate the menubar and dialogs:

Tools > Folder Options _ File types

Select the filetype you want to add a right click entry to from the gigantic listbox. You can get details for the selected filetype in the textbox below.
You might think to click the ‘new’ button, but that will just register a new filetype to the already bloated list. Instead, when you find the right filetype, click the ‘advanced’ button.
From the new window that pops up, you can now see all of the custom entries that external applications have added to the right click menu automatically. You can edit and delete them if you want. For now, just click ‘New…’
In the dialog that pops up you can enter the properties of what you want the right click entry to do. In the ‘Action’ textbox, type in the text you want to see in the right click listing. In the other one, click the ‘Browse…’ button and browse to the executable you want it to execute when the listing is pushed. Or, if it’s a windows executable, just type it in. ( e.g. cmd.exe would be the command prompt that is preinstalled with windows.)

You can also do this by editing the registry.

NOTE: WHENEVER EDITING THE REGISTRY, YOU SHOULD BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL. IT CAN SEVERELY DAMAGE YOUR SYSTEM. WHENEVER IN REGEDIT, YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BACK UP THE REGISTRY BEFORE YOU EDIT VALUES BY CLICKING FILE>EXPORT AND THEN SAVING THE FILE SOMEWHERE. IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG, DOUBLE CLICK ON THE FILE AND IT WILL BE REVERTED TO HOW IT WAS BEFORE.

On the startmenu, click ‘run…’ and run regedit.exe.
On the lefthand pane in the program that comes up, navigate to ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’ and find the file extention you are looking for. If you want it to appear in everything, open up the ‘*’ folder. If there is a ‘Shell’ folder, make a key inside of that named what you want the right-click listing to say, and make yet another key inside of that one named ‘command’. Open it up and double click on the ‘default’ key that was automatically put there, and type in the exacutable you want it to execute when clicked.

Swapping Icons

Swapping icons for individual files is fast and easy. Right click on a folder and click properties. In the dialog that pops up, click the ‘customize’ tab. There, you can edit various things about the appearance of the folder.
If you want to change system icons, then right click on the desktop and click properties. On the ‘desktop’ tab, click the customize button and then select the system icon you want to change in the selector menu in the box that pops up. Click the change icon button and find the icon that you want, or push the browse button to find other icons. (Remember to select ‘All’ from the bottom selector box to be able to see all your images. )

And if you are REALLY serious about how things look on windows, check out this FAQ for links to free windoze XP skins and how to make your own.  As it states in the tutorial, you must download a patch for windows xp. Running the executable makes your UI blow up and causes windows error messages to fly. Kind of what you would expect if you had a virus. I can assure you that it doesn’t do anything malicious. It just replaces a locked system DLL with one that allows third party imput, then restarts.

III. External Applications

Firefox skins

… Aren’t really necessary, but do lighten up your browser if you are using a dark desktop theme. For example: if I use the Windows XP Zune theme on my desktop, my web browser will look out of place.  So I can get a user-created skin for Firefox that will make it look more like the rest of windows. Skins are easy to find and use. You can get them here, or directly from the firefocks website. It can be kind of hard to find firefox 3 compatible themes, though, since some of the devs still haven’t updated their code.

–And if you aren’t using firefox yet, drop everything and get it right now.

Clipboard enhancement

Again- this doesn’t really make it look any better, but it adds some functionality. Unfortunately, unless you use MS Word or something, Windows XP does not have this feature in its operating system by default, so you have to go and find software that will do it for you. I use clipdiary. This is only really useful if you are moving files around a lot, so if you know you won’t use it, don’t get it.

Launcy

Launchy is a nifty little app that runs in the background until you push a hotkey ( which is, by default, “alt+space.” ) Then this nice little black glossy window pops up. You type the name of an application in and hit enter, then launchy it runs it! Launchy accurately calls itself a ‘keystroke application launcher’, but it can also search the web [or specific websites] , browse your computers folders, and more. It’s a whole lot faster than the Start Menu in XP, and looks nicer. You can get it here, along with some skin packs and plugins.

RocketDock

RocketDock claims to be “The single greatest piece of software. Ever.” Ironic that what makes it useful is other applications. It is a dock program, as its name implies. It’s like ObjectDock, only its opensource and it isn’t crippleware. It can even run the same plugins and docklets ( Dock-applets ) and it’s not dead.

If you don’t know what a dock is, examine this screenie to see what my RocketDock looks like :

Screenshot of my rocketdock

It looks kind of like that bar on the bottom of mac desktops. Use is fairly straightforward, but I will put something up on it later. Get RocketDock here. You might want to get the stacks docklet also. Put everything in the zip file inside the ‘C:/Program Files/Rocket Dock/Docklets’ folder.

KKmenu how-to Coming soon…

This will be described somewhere else. It gets incredibly annoying if you lack ram. [gets really slow]

Disposing of the Windows Explorer-Sidebar Coming soon…

Going fast down the water slide

I have been thinking lately on how to go down a water slide the fastest (.The big kind that they have at the local YMCA s. ) If you ask them, the lifeguard will almost always tell you the same thing: “Put your hands above your head and get into tight streamline while crossing your legs and laying flat on your back.” Putting your hands above your head will expose your shoulder blades more, so that you are actually using them as a kind of skid. Crossing your legs lets you use your heel as one too. So, really, what they tell you makes pretty good sense: only three parts of your body are touching the slide at once, and your entire body weight is divided onto just three points ( I think? ). With this technique I can get down a 25 foot slide in about 10~12 seconds.

If you think about it, however, the water on the slide is only going one direction, so the more water that hits you, the more pressure there is against you. If you sit up straight, more water is hitting you and so you should go faster, right? Wrong. You are not streamlined, so even if the water is going the same direction you are, you won’t be able to cut through it as fast, and you want to go fastER than the water is going. Also, your body weight is divided over a larger surface. ( An upside-down cone of metal will go down the slide faster than a block of metal of the same weight. I think. )

All of this is just speculation, and I have almost absolutely no knowledge in the field, so don’t bet yer life on it cuz it might be totally bogus.