Tech and life

One of the top monthly PC magazines, Maximum PC, has a pdf archive of back issues which you can read online or download if you wish. Obviously you won’t find the current issue there as this is only for subscribers and retail so the latest available issue in the archive is generally 3 to 4 months old but really that’s no problem. Many of the articles aren’t time-sensitive, for example Windows tips and how-tos, etc. And of course, the pdfs are searchable.

So download some back issues and see what you think. Do you know of any other tech magazines which have pdf archives? Drop a comment below and let us know.

I recently published my list of great tech bloggers. Now here’s a list of folk to follow on Twitter who consistently tweet great tech links. I follow many tech bloggers on Twitter but so that I don’t get overwhelmed with tweets, I send everything through SiftLinks to Google Reader. SiftLinks checks your Twitter stream every 30 minutes and stores the last 50 links that it finds. That way I get a nice feed of tweets with links. Over time, you get a feel for the people whose links you are clicking, retweeting and bookmarking the most and here they are:

@BlogPowerTool

@mrpaladin

@sujith_web

@WebTechWise

@dollars5

@Flipbooks

@TechZader

@Jankovitch

@2cre8

@kovshenin

@ruhanirabin

They’re all in my Twitter Tech List so you can follow that list if you like. And please add @techandlife too. I try and regularly tweet the best of what I see around the web – web apps and services, Windows, Linux, Photoshop, WordPress and blogging tips.

Do you follow anyone who tweets great tech links? Drop a comment below.

If you use Google Calendar to plan your appointments, etc., you’ll know that scheduling anything more than 6 months ahead takes time as there isn’t a button along the top to switch to Year View. Well in fact, there is a way to get to Year View but it’s hidden away at the moment. Here’s how to enable it.

Open Google Calendar and click the little green flask icon as highlighted above. This will bring up a list of experimental features and on it you’ll find Year View – although why it’s experimental I’ve no idea. Enable it, and try other features if you like. I’ve enabled Jump to Date as well. When you return to the calendar view, these features are shown in a new column on the right. Now click Go on Year View and you’ll get the full year on screen so you can quickly click straight through to any day on the year of your choice to schedule an event.

By the way, if you close the right column by clicking the button at the top right of the column, you’ll have to re-enable the features again as before. But you can toggle the column on and off by clicking anywhere on the vertical blue bar separating it from the calendar.

Doubtless, Year View will have a button along the top in a future update – I can’t understand why it’s not there already.

I was given a 300 page 13MB PDF today and had to extract a single page from it as a PDF. I don’t have Adobe Acrobat so had to find a quick, free way to do it. A Google search identified a number of free utilities but I wanted to make use of what I already had on my PC. Then it struck me. I already had the utility doPDF to ‘print’ Word files as PDFs and I’ve blogged about this before. So I could probably also extract a single page PDF from my multipage PDF.

And it worked. Once doPDF is installed, and you open the multipage PDF in your reader, an option to print to doPDF is added to your Print menu so that anything that goes to your printer can also go to create a PDF file – so on your Print menu you select either a single page or a range of pages to print to a PDF file. I use Nitro PDF Reader as my PDF viewer but I’m sure this will also work with Foxit Reader and other pdf viewers.

You’ve probably sometimes entered a search phrase on Google and it’s returned a number of hits where that search phrase perhaps isn’t in the title of the webpage, but occurs somewhere on that page. If you’ve actually searched for a phrase by enclosing your keyphrase in quotes and it’s a long page, it can be time consuming to find the phrase on the page, but there’s a quick way to do it. Install the Google Quick Scroll extension in Google Chrome browser and once you choose a page from the search results, a box will pop up in the bottom right corner of the browser window enabling you to click the phrase and jump straight to the first occurrence of the phrase on the page. And if you haven’t enclosed your keywords in quotes, the extension will search for the best matched fits to your keywords on the page.
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If you follow as many tech blogs as I do in your RSS reader (currently about 160 tech blogs in my Tech folder), a good number will probably be tech news blogs. When a big tech story breaks, the news can get blogged to death as each site puts up their own post rather than linking to or just tweeting someone else’s story. Understandable really, they all want to meet their daily quota of posts to maintain page visits and pagerank, and don’t want to miss out on big tech news stories.

Tech and Life isn’t a tech news blog. We concentrate more on blogging about useful web apps and services, and tips and tricks for Windows, Linux and WordPress. If I do come across some interesting tech news, I’ll generally tweet a good link, rather than adding yet another post to the blogosphere. Follow us on Twitter at @techandlife. I try and tweet the best 5 or 6 tech links I see each day.

I’ve noticed that Microsoft stories are particularly prone to reblogging. I’m thinking of Windows 7 ‘God Mode’ a few months back – everyone seemed to carry that story. More recently, it’s been Microsoft Fix It Center and just a couple of days ago, the Microsoft/FaceBook Docs.com story. Here’s the 16 posts on Microsoft Fix It Center gathered together in my Google Reader feed

This reblogging can really clog up your feed reader so here’s what you could do. Read the story on one of the bigger blogs like Download Squad, ghacks or Lifehacker, bookmark it if you like, then set up a filter in Google Reader to suppress that story from your feed in future. I’ve blogged about the awesome Google Reader Filter before and using it to filter out stories you just don’t want to appear in your RSS feed. After about a week, the surge over that particular item of tech news will have subsided and you can remove the keyword from your filter.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in following some good tech blogs in your RSS reader, there’s a few good ones there to get you started.

Quick tip: Filter out tech news stories being reblogged to death is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you regularly find yourself copying and pasting text from websites or desktop applications then you should really have a look at PureText. When activated, this free utility quickly removes text formatting such as bold, italics, colour, underline, bullets and hyperlinks allowing you to just paste the text. For example, I commonly find myself having to paste portions of information I’ve found online into Word documents but I don’t want all the web formatting to be carried over. Similarly, I sometimes copy sections out of Word files into other applications and I often don’t need all the Word formatting. With PureText installed, once the information has been copied to the Windows clipboard in the usual fashion, I just click the PureText icon in the system tray and paste the text into the new document (or there’s an alternative hotkey combination to paste without the formatting – by default, it’s Windows key + V). Pure Text only removes rich formatting from text and won’t remove carriage returns or tabs.

There are free utilities for just about everything you need to do on your PC. In fact, you could end up downloading way more than you need – and forget they’re there on your PC. But if copying and pasting is something you do regularly then this is one utility you’ll end up using on a regular basis. It only takes up about 3MB of memory.

PureText

If you carry your data on a USB drive, I’m sure you’re always worried about losing it. Of course you should always take the necessary precautions about protecting the data on it like making sure it’s backed up somewhere safe and encrypting the data on it if necessary. But we don’t always do this and so we might end up losing some valuable information.

You could use Flash Drive Reminder which pops up a reminder when you try and log off Windows without removing your USB drive. Putting the drive on a car key ring might also help you to remember it but if you haven’t done this, what about getting the stick back? Doubtless if lost, some finders would just keep it, look at the data, or delete the encrypted data and reuse the stick, but I’m sure many with good intentions would return it if given the chance.

Well you could use LostDrive and edit the contact details. Or just put a text file in the root directory of the stick with your contact details. You could call the file ‘Read-me-if-you-find-this-USB-stick.txt’. But you mightn’t be happy about putting contact details in there in case the drive falls into the wrong hands.

Well I’ve come across a free service called whspr! which allows you to be contacted by email without giving away any personal details in the text file.

If you fill out the form there they give you a URL which you could put in the text file. Anyone who finds your USB stick hopefully will open the text file. You could put a message thanking them for opening the file and that you’d be most grateful if you could get in touch with the owner by clicking the URL. This would send them to a form at whspr where they can send you an email message. whspr forwards the message to your email address and now you can get in touch with the finder whose email is on the form. The URL lasts for up to 365 days so you have to remember to renew it before then. So set up an email or text reminder with your reminder app, for example Task.fm, to remind you say a week before the URL expires and get a new URL from whspr.

Hopefully, these tips should help you minimize the loss of a USB stick. Have you any tips? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: jatop

I’m constantly going to my file manager throughout the day, opening files from there, moving, copying and renaming. A good file manager has always been important to me, ever since my first experiences with a PC back in the 1980s, well before the dawn of Windows Explorer. I used a program called PC Tools for file management back then and when I moved to the Windows OS I used a file manager called PowerDesk Pro which has seen me right through to Windows XP. On and off, I’ve use Windows Explorer but never really fell in love with it – too many restrictions on what I want to do.

I’ve recently moved to Windows 7, so I looked around for a good free replacement file manager to take over from my aging copy of PowerDesk. As usual, my first port of call was my Diigo bookmarks to check out my ‘file managers’ tag. Had a look at Free Commander and didn’t like it much, then looked at xplorer2 Lite – the free version from zabkat which is fully compatible with Windows 7. I’ve been using it for about 2 months now and found it’s a very able replacement for PowerDesk …and more. I find the free version has all the features I need for just now.

Some of the best features of xplorer2

One of the main features I need in a file manager is a very simple one. When I reopen the program I want it to have remembered which folder I was in when it was shut down – for my work I’m usually going back to the same work folder the next day so the ability to save settings on exit is really useful for me.  xplorer2 can also open multiple tabs as shown above, so you have quick access to a number of essential folders – again I find this a really useful feature. You can display the tabs at the top or the bottom of the window. Hit Ctrl-Ins to open a new tab. And you can rename tabs – right click and choose Rename. You can move or copy files by dragging them onto the tab of the destination folder. But if you don’t like multiple tabs in a window, you can set up quick access to all your favourite folders from the Bookmarks menu. And incidentally, you can set up FTP access for file transfers to your website or server again though your bookmarks. FTP access is explained in this excellent Lifehacker article which also gives a great summary of the program.

Filtering your list of files is easy. In the address bar, just type ‘*.jpg’ to list the jpeg files in that folder, or type ‘e*’ to list all files starting with the letter ‘e’. Incidentally, coloured folders as shown above on my Windows XP set-up isn’t a feature of xplorer2. That feature is from a free utility called Folder Marker Free. Once installed, just right click on a folder and change its colour.

I generally use the single pane interface (plus folder tree) as show above, but you can also have a dual pane set-up which is very handy for copying or moving files. I also like how you can  preview images, videos, pdfs and mp3s within xplorer2 using the Preview button at the top.

Another nice feature is the way it autorefreshes when you plug in an mp3 player or camera and the new drive shows up without having to press F5. PowerDesk didn’t do that.

Setting it up

I have it set up just the way I want it now. If you already use the program or want to try it out, here’s a list of the features I find useful and how to set them up:

1. Save program state on exit: Tools, Options, General tab and check Save program state on exit.
2. For single pane/double pane toggle: Ctrl-O.
3. To force file names ending in a number to list in ascending number order 1, 2, 3…10, 11, 12, rather than 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3… go to Tools, Options, Advanced tab and check Natural number sort.
4. To show folder in tree on left side, go to Tools, Options, Window tab and check Keep synchronized with folder in active view pane.
5. To allow slow double click renaming of files: Tools, Options, Window tab and check Allow slow double click to rename files.
6. To prevent truncation of file names when window is not maximized:  Tools, Options, Window tab and set Max list column width to 150 – although from reading the forums this doesn’t always work.

And there’s a good xplorer2 forum here.

I’ve only just scratched the surface here with the features I find useful.  Give xplorer2 a try and see what you think. You may find yourself quickly won over from Window Explorer.

I’m frequently opening new blank browser tabs in Firefox to load a new website. Well there’s a nice way to get a reminder note in the new browser tab instead of a blank page. First download and install the Firefox add-on NewTabURL and once installed click the Options for that plugin in your browser side bar:

Select the option for URL and key in the URL http://stickyscreen.org. Then in Firefox go to that URL and enter your reminder message.

You don’t have to register with this site to use it. Your sticky reminder is unique to you. According to the website, nobody will see it except you (and whoever you let use your web browser). You can change the reminder as often as you like. The info is stored as a browser cookie. Now any time you open a new tab in Firefox, the StickyScreen website will load showing your reminder before you key your new URL. But if you delete your browser cookies using a PC maintenance program like say CCleaner you will lose the reminder info and will have to rekey it at the StickyScreen website.

Incidentally, as you can see in the Options, if you like, in your new tab you can set NewTabURL to automatically load a URL that’s in your clipboard.