Tech and life

If you haven’t used bookmarklets before, they’re just useful pieces of JavaScript code which you can bookmark and which let you be more productive by simplifying tasks. Installing a bookmarklet is as simple as just dragging the bookmarklet link to your bookmark region or right clicking on the link and bookmarking it. I’ve made a folder for bookmarklets on my browser bar to keep them all together. Here are 15 of the most useful bookmarklets I’ve come across. If you think they may be useful to you, just drag the link at the start of each section across to your bookmark region and try them out.

BigTweet: Lets you share links on Twitter with your followers without leaving the webpage. It automatically shortens the link in the process and captures the title and any highlighted text. Of course you do have to log into your Twitter account through BigTweet to allow it to tweet your link but I’ve had no problem here in the year I’ve been using it. This is possibly the bookmarklet I use the most.

TwitterKeys: A pop-up box gives you symbols which you can copy and paste into your tweets.

Pagezipper: If you’ve ever come across articles split across multiple webpages, this bookmarklet combines them into one long scrollable page. Saves a lot of time clicking and waiting for the next page to load.

Clippable: Reduces all the clutter from a webpage and makes it easier to read. Adverts, sidebars, etc are all removed and you are left with the text and images. There are other bookmarklets which are very similar like Readability.

Printliminator: Lets you select what you want to keep on a webpage before printing the page – you could of course print to a pdf using say doPDF which I’ve blogged about before.

Clip to Evernote: Use this bookmarklet to save a webpage to Evernote, the popular notebook app. I know Evernote has a Webclipper to clip text from webpages or entire webpages, but I find this bookmarklet useful in combination with Clippable mentioned above to just clip the text and images to Evernote and leave the rest of the clutter behind.

Read Later: Save a webpage to your Instapaper account to read later. You have to register with Instapaper to use this.

Save webpage as pdf: Sends a webpage to pdfdownload which converts it to a PDF. You can then download the PDF.

Subscribe with GReader: Quickly subscribe to a blog in Google Reader with this bookmarklet.

Show RSS Feed: Try this bookmarklet if your web browser has trouble detecting the RSS feed associated with a site. It will show you the full contents of that feed and also give you options to subscribe in your favourite newsreader.

Delicious Talk: See how many people have saved a particular page on Delicious and what tags they have used to describe the page.

Map that address: Highlight an address on a webpage and get a map showing its location.

List all Links: Lists all links on a page in a pop-up window.

Translate: Uses Google Translate to display the content of the page in English.

Youtubian: Go to a video on YouTube and click this bookmarklet. The page will reload with the video, a search box on the right, related videos below, and download links for Flash, MPEG, and mobile versions of the video also on the right. Click on the Expand link at the top of the page to revert back to the original YouTube page.

If you want to search for more bookmarklets, there’s a directory at marklets.com and here’s a site with over 100 useful bookmarklets for better productivity.

Hope you find some of these useful. Drop a comment on any I’ve missed that you like.

It happens to us all at some time. We’ve read an interesting web page, bookmarked it and tagged it but when we go back to look for that page in our bookmarks sometime later, we just can’t find that exact page again no matter how hard we try. I hate losing things in the real world and get just as mad when I do the same in the digital world. Still, at least in the digital world we have tools at our disposal to make tracking down web pages easier.

Some people would say that bookmarking on a site like Delicious is an old fashioned way of doing things anyway. Better to just do a search on Google or Twitter. They may be right. I just feel that it’s still helpful to bookmark a useful web page and add it to your info archive of great pages so you can call upon it again to refresh your memory of what was said, for example, to use it as a tutorial for a task or to help write a blog post. The other really important aspect is that many web pages aren’t static and can be altered or deleted at a later date. Adding important web pages to a disk archive can get around this.

I thought I’d go through some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned about bookmarking and managing bookmarks which might help. I’ve bookmarked close to 12000 web pages in the 2 years I’ve been using Delicious, the online bookmarking tool, so I have to have an effective way of searching through them otherwise it’s all pointless. You wouldn’t throw paper willy nilly into a filing cabinet and expect to find a page again quickly. You have to file it in such a way that you know how to retrieve it again. So let’s look at how to try and avoid losing bookmarks.

Vital web pages which you just don’t want to lose… ever!

Web pages can get deleted, updated or otherwise removed from the internet. For example, the recent demise of Yahoo’s Geocities will lead to the deletion of 7.5 million web pages. Bookmarks can also be lost if your bookmarking service suffers a data loss as happened to ma.gnolia back in January this year. For vital pages which you must have a copy of, there are a few things you can do to keep a permanent copy:

1) Clip the web page directly from your browser into an organizer like say Evernote or bookmark the page with a research tool like Diigo which bookmarks the entire web page, unlike Delicious. More about that later. It will now be fully searchable within these apps.

2) Save the web page as a pdf and download it to your hard drive, then make sure to back it up. There are a few ways to do this. First, you could copy the URL of the web page to loopApps (choose add URL and paste the URL). Then click the disk image icon to the left of the pdf name and download it to your PC. The second way would be to install a print-to-pdf utility like doPDF which I’ve talked about before. From within your browser, choose Print from the File menu, then, rather than print to a printer, print to a pdf file. You may want to use a bookmarklet like Printliminator or PrintWhatYouLike to extract just the elements of the web page you want before printing to a pdf. If your web page is in fact split over a number of pages where you have to click ‘Next’ to read the full story, you could use a bookmarklet like PageZipper which automatically merges all the ‘Next’ pages into one page before creating the pdf. Once you have downloaded the pdf of the web page, it’s searchable from within a pdf reader like Foxit Reader, it’s searchable using a desktop search utility like Copernic Desktop Search, or again just add the pdf of the web page to Evernote where it will also be searchable there.

3) Saving a web page as a pdf doesn’t always preserve all the formatting, however saving as an mht file will. Then archive it on your hard disk. Rich Menga of PCMech has explained how to archive web pages using MHT files very clearly together with a video.

4) Use a service like backupURL to save a copy of the website online.

They give you a link to the backed-up website, which you could save in your Delicious bookmarks. I noticed that even if you elect to save a particular web page, it saves the whole website as the links away from that page are still active. Not sure about their claim that the link will last forever though. If it’s really important, I’d still back it up as well using methods just mentioned above.

Your vital web page is no longer online

If you’ve bookmarked a page and it’s no longer online and you hadn’t followed the procedures above to save it or backupURL hasn’t worked for some reason, you may possibly be able to retrieve the page at the Wayback Machine. Using this, you can often find pages that have been removed or deleted from the live web years ago. If you find it, save it using the steps I outlined above.

Save web pages to read later

If you’re in a hurry, have found a great site but haven’t got time to read it straight away and you don’t want to lose it, you could save it to read later using the Firefox extension Read it Later or the Read Later bookmarklet. Once you have time to read the web page, you can then follow the other tips I’ve listed to bookmark it, tag it, clip to Evernote or Diigo or save it as a pdf or mht file.

Using tags effectively to classify and group your bookmarks

Giving your web page a really specific tag can go a long way to tracking down that page again. If I can’t find a web page straight away, at least if I can narrow it down to a specific tag category, I can look through those and hopefully find it. When I first started using Delicious, I assigned pages into really broad categories, eg software, internet, computer, windows, backup, making it really hard to track down specific pages with any of these tags. More recently, I’ve been using hyphenated tag phrases to give pages more specific categories. Using the backup tag as the first example down my Delicious tag list, here’s a screenshot of those tags:

Notice that it’s helpful to put the common word first (backup) then the modifier (eg browser) rather than the other way round. This keeps them all adjacent in the alphabetical tag listing in Delicious. I notice that further down the list I have a category driver-backup which I should change to backup-drivers. Obviously, if you have been using both alternatives interchangeably (eg gmail-backup and backup-gmail), this will surely decrease your chance of quickly finding that elusive missing web page. It’s quite straightforward to sort this out by renaming a tag in Delicious. Go to Tag Options at the top right corner and clicking Rename under Edit Tags, fill in the old tag name and the new tag name and then click Save. Everything with the old tag will be given the new tag.

Another possibility for more effective tagging is to use Facette, a Firefox plugin, to force you to be more specific about how you want to categorize each bookmark. Facette is an enhanced version of the Delicious tagging tool and creates a number of additional tags in your Delicious library.

Searching your bookmarks

You can obviously search your bookmarks in Delicious for lost web pages, but remember that this actually only searches the bookmark title, tags and any notes you inserted in the notes field when you saved the bookmark. However, it may be that the vital things you remember about the page aren’t in the title tags and notes but contained within the content of the web page itself. I heard it put very well on an Evernote podcast as tip of the tongue syndrome – where any one of the little hooks or memories you have in your brain about the web page will hopefully be just enough to track down that lost web page. So to find lost bookmarks, it would be much more useful if you could search the content of the bookmarked web page as well. There are a few services which offer this: first Deligoo, but unfortunately, this Firefox extension is not compatible with the latest versions of Firefox; second Delizzy – but I can’t recommend this as it seems a little buggy – it can take ages to log into your Delicious account and read all your bookmarks. As an alternative, you could export your bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote but unless you’ve actually clipped the pages into Evernote, it will just search the headings of the bookmarks and not the content – at least that’s what I’ve found. If I’m wrong, please let me know and I’ll update this.

Another possibility is bookmarking the web page with Diigo which makes the entire page searchable. David Pierce has written a great post on Diigo at MakeUseOf. As with Evernote you can import all your Delicious bookmarks into Diigo.

Another choice is to build a custom search engine to search the full content of your bookmarks. There’s a great post by Sarah Perez at Read Write Web on building a custom search engine to search your Delicious bookmarks. This involves exporting all your Delicious bookmarks as an html file and importing them to a Posterous blog, then linking a Google Custom Search Engine to this to search the content of your bookmarks. Sarah’s post explains the method very clearly. I’ve tried it and it works well. The only real problem is that it’s a little cumbersome constantly updating the list of bookmarks on your Posterous blog.

So to summarize, the best ways to search the full content of your bookmarks for a lost web page is either with a custom search engine or with Diigo. So far I’m pretty impressed with Diigo.

Hope you’ve found these tips useful in managing your bookmarks and tracking down lost ones. Of course if you have other ways of avoiding lost bookmarks and keeping track of your info archive, please drop a comment. I’d love to hear how you deal with this.

Image credit: Artivex

Frequently, we come across websites or webpages we want to return to or refer to in future. But how best to store these bookmarks or links for future reference? How will we find them again?

Well, we’ve probably all got our own ways of storing this info. I’ll quickly run through mine then point you towards another site which is currently conducting a survey on how we process online information.

I use Google Reader as my main source of information. I’m subscribed to over 200 blogs mostly covering tech and blogging.  I also check out any interesting links posted in Twitter by the people I follow. I star any posts in Reader that I may want to refer to again then tag them with, I hope, a memorable tag, e.g. wordpress-tips, wordpress-plugins, ubuntu-apps, ubuntu-tutorials. Notice, I generally tend to make two-word tag phrases by hyphenating tags. That way I can quickly browse through tag phrases and have more success retrieving information when viewing these categories than more general single word tags like ‘wordpress’ and ‘ubuntu’. I also tend to assign these same tag phrases in Delicious. Yes, the belt-and-braces approach, but my feeling is that I would rather some bookmarking duplication than find that one bookmarking site has disappeared or started charging for access and I lose all my data. Some webpages I definitely want to ensure I keep long term, and so as to avoid any possibility that the website or webpage may disappear for whatever reason, I save these pages to Evernote. Finally, I try to tweet the best 5 to 10 weblinks I’ve found each day. I can make an archive of all my tweets using the methods suggested in a recent post at ReadWriteWeb.

So that’s just one way to do it. Have a look at the survey over at ProductiveWise for lots of other techniques and add your method to the comments there.

In a recent post on tech tips, I listed Firefox as my current browser of choice. I have also been using Google Chrome for the last 6 months or so and am pretty impressed with it. I do find Firefox slow to load and I find that recent Firefox updates still haven’t resolved the RAM issues. On the other hand, Chrome loads quickly and is pretty responsive.

For the last few days, I’ve been finding Google Reader and Google Mail really slow in Firefox, probably as a result of some disk maintenance I did over the weekend. Probably my fault and I should be able to track the problem with time. However, I’ve found that both Google Reader and Google Mail are still really responsive in Chrome – perhaps not surprisingly – they’re all from the same stable so should work well together. So that got me thinking. I wondered just what else I needed Chrome to be able to do so it might be a real alternative to Firefox. Well, really important to me is a Delicious plug-in like Delicious Bookmarks in Firefox so I can bookmark webpages straight to Delicious from Chrome. I also need LastPass integration with Chrome so I can quickly recall passwords and login to websites. I really like LastPass for password management and have blogged about this before.

Well it turns out that although Chrome doesn’t have plug-ins for these features yet, it does have bookmarklets which give the Delicious and LastPass integration I need. I found these two websites which show how to get the functionality I need in Chrome:

How to make a Delicious ‘Plug-in’ for Chrome

Use LastPass in Chrome

Using Chrome, I’ve also solved another problem that I had had with Google Reader that I had assumed was a fault within Reader but turned out to be due to Firefox. I have over 2000 tags and folders in Google Reader. In Firefox, when I went into Settings in Reader and selected Folders and Tags and scrolled down to the end, the listing ended around the ubuntu tag, i.e. way short of the actual end of the list of tags and folders. However, doing the same thing with Chrome as the browser, my complete list of tags and folders was displayed allowing housekeeping like deleting tags, etc right to the end of the complete list which I couldn’t do in Firefox.

How have you got Chrome up to speed? Drop a comment below.

Edit (13 August 2009): Thanks to Scotian whose comment below solved the slow Firefox problem.  It turns out that the latest Skype extension update for Firefox  slows down Google Reader and Google Mail to a crawl. Just uninstalled the extension and everything is fine again in Firefox.

Image credit: brunkfordbraun

I’ve been following the tech scene for about 2 years now since I discovered tech podcasts. Although I had reasonable tech knowledge before this, mostly from browsing tech forums, I found that listening to tech podcasts and subscribing to tech blogs in Google Reader uncovered many tech tips and great advice, and some of the best tips keep coming up again and again. I’ve tried to gather together some of the best that I can remember. If you’re a geek you’ll have heard most before, but for the tech beginner, hopefully there’s some useful advice here. I’ve tried to keep each tip as short and concise as possible. Just use Google to get lots of additional info.

Essentials

1. First and foremost, back up your data regularly. This can’t be stressed enough. Sooner or later, your hard drive will die and you don’t want all your photos, etc to die with it. Back all your data up to an external drive, or to one of a host of free online services like DropBox. If you’ve a lot of data, have a look at Carbonite, a paid service. Better still, image or clone your hard drive regularly onto an external drive using a product like Acronis True Image so you can quickly get back up and running after a disk disaster. I’ve written a how-to on avoiding a disk disaster.

2. Second and also really important, always use secure passwords online: long and with a combination of numbers, letters and symbols, never dictionary words. Don’t use the same password on multiple sites. Use a program like LastPass to manage your passwords. It’s free and will also help with filling out online forms.

3. Have a rescue CD to hand so that if you are caught with a non-booting drive, you can at least try to get your data off. A Knoppix CD or the Ultimate Boot CD may do the trick. And before disaster strikes, make sure your PC will boot off the CD drive when a CD is inserted at boot-up. You may have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the PC boots off the CD first.

4. Make sure you always have a firewall enabled on your PC.

Hardware

1. If you’re using the default router username and password, change them immediately. The default settings are all commonly known and listed here or here. So anyone with this knowledge can effectively hack into your PC if you have a wireless router and they are in range.

2. Uncheck all unnecessary programs launching at startup. To do this in Windows XP, click on Start, Run and enter msconfig in the box. Then click the Startup tab and uncheck any programs you don’t need at startup. Google any you are not sure of. Or use the excellent free utility CCleaner to disable startup programs. Click the Tools tab on the left then the Startup button. Revo Uninstaller can also disable startup programs through its Autorun Manager.

3. Get as much RAM as you can into your PC, 2GB or more if possible. Use the Crucial System Scanner to check what type of memory you need and how much you can fit.

4. Disable the annoying Caps Lock key. Here’s a short how-to.

5. By all accounts, many PC users, particularly in the US, seem to suffer from dust and dirt clogging up the fans, etc. and causing overheating problems which can damage your PC. It’s well worthwhile unplugging your PC, removing the side panel, taking it outside and carefully blowing out all the dust and dirt before you do permanent damage to your system. If you found a lot of dust, clean it regularly.

6. When using you laptop with the mains cable plugged in, take great care not to strain or loosen the power jack by for example by tugging or tripping over the mains cable. Treat that connection with great care. Once the connection shears from the motherboard you’ll only have hours of battery life left before a trip to your local computer repair shop is needed – and they mightn’t be keen on doing this type of repair.

Software

1. Firefox is a great multi-platform browser, particularly because of the vast amount of extensions which improve the user experience. Don’t load up too many plugins though or you’ll slow it down.

2. Don’t use the bulky Adobe Reader to open pdfs. Lightweight, free Foxit Reader is fine.

3. Thunderbird is a great multi-platform email client.

4. If you haven’t tried Skype, sign up for it. You can make free calls from PC to PC with this. If you both have webcams you can make free video calls – excellent for keeping in touch with friends and family abroad. Our daughter is away at college now and Skype is invaluable for keeping in touch.

5. VLC is a great multi-platform media player. It’ll play virtually anything you throw at it.

6. You don’t have to spend money on commercial software. Products like OpenOffice are really excellent, multi-platform free solutions and suitable for most things you might want to do. You can even open and edit pdfs in OpenOffice Writer.

7. There are many free utilities to convert Word documents to pdfs. I use doPDF which effectively prints your doc to a pdf file.

8. CCleaner is an essential free utility for a Windows PC for deleting temporary files, history, cookies, etc. Use BleachBit on a Linux machine.

9. Use the free utility Recuva to recover deleted files.

10. Revo Uninstaller is a great free utility that does a thorough job of getting rid of installed applications and the junk that they can sometimes leave behind.

11. Two great Windows anti-spyware programs are SUPERAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes. Free AVG is a good antivirus program, but if you’re careful where you go on the net, you may not need any of them – particularly if you’re using a Linux distribution as your OS.

12. Evernote is great for collecting web clippings, etc. Give it a try. Doesn’t support Linux yet though.

Online services

1. GMail is a great spam filter. Route all your email account inboxes through GMail. I’ve been doing this for over a year now and I find it almost never puts genuine mail in the spam folder and is brilliant at filtering out any imported spam emails. In addition, it won’t import any email when it identifies a virus in an attachment. Excellent.

2. If you’re search on Google isn’t getting the results you wanted, try searching for exact keyword phrases by putting your keyword phrase in inverted commas – or use the exact phrase box in Google Advanced Search. I use this a lot so I always have Google Advanced Search loading up in one tab when I launch Firefox.

3. XMarks is great for syncing your browser bookmarks between all your PCs.

Operating systems

1. By all accounts, Windows 7 is going to be a great OS. Upgrade to it when you can.

2. Don’t be afraid to try Linux, particularly Ubuntu if you’re a beginner. Although things are done slightly differently from Windows, it really is well worth trying out and it isn’t hard to use. You may well decide to switch from Windows afterwards. You may be able to use Wine to get some of your favourite Windows programs running on Linux.

General

1. If you have to put your email address on your website, make sure to cloak it so it’s not picked up by spammers. Use a service like HideText to do this. Better still, use a contact form on your webpage.

2. Subscribe to @makeuseof in Twitter for lots of useful info on web applications and services.

3. Subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog!

That’s all I can think of for the moment – I’ll come back and add additional tips when I think of them. Drop a comment if you have a great tech tip to share.

Oh and by the way, if this article has whetted your appetite for tech tips, have a look at David Pogue’s great article (and the comments) for even more useful tips.

Laptops and more recently netbooks have made us increasingly able to take our digital life on the road. I bought a netbook back in January but as I work from home, I don’t get much chance to go mobile. However, holidays are coming up this week and we’re all off to the west of Ireland. So I’m taking my Acer Aspire One netbook + Easy Peasy Linux with me, not to work, but to try and keep in touch with the tech blogs and hopefully to fire off the occasional tweet.

Problem is, I know there isn’t broadband where I’m staying in Ireland. I’m going to have to look out for wifi hotspots in cafes and bars in the area but I just don’t know how widespread they are yet down Ireland’s west coast. Googling and hotspot locator websites don’t seem to bring up many in the right areas for me. Guess I’ll soon find out.

So I may only be able to connect up say 2 or 3 times in 2 weeks and even then perhaps not for long. So what’s the best solution here to keep in touch? Googling ‘offline browsing’ bring up lots of possibilities but perhaps the most useful to me is Google Gears, particularly as there’s a Linux version for my netbook.

This will allow me to fetch the latest 2000 RSS items to Google Reader when I have a connection and browse through them later in offline mode. When I ran a test of what’s being downloaded by Gears, I noticed that for me, this seems to fetch about a week’s worth of posts. It’s a pity that there isn’t more control on this as I would have liked to fetch a few months worth to be able to browse back through stuff I’d bookmarked but hadn’t really had a chance to read.

So what about the occasional miserably wet days when it’s not possible to venture out into the great outdoors and you’re stuck without a connection? Well, I found this program called HTTrack, again with a Linux version, which allows you to download whole websites to your netbook to browse offline.

Installation was a breeze on the netbook. Just go to the terminal and type:

apt-get update
apt-get install webhttrack

Great, so I’ve picked out three or four great Ubuntu websites which I’ve discovered recently and downloaded them so now I can browse way back to my heart’s content and look at all the earlier posts offline.

So hopefully the combination of Google Reader+Gears and HTTrack will be able to feed my digital addiction while on holiday. What programs do you have on your netbook or laptop for offline browsing and keeping in touch on the road or on holidays? Am I missing anything useful here?

Continuing our Quick Tip series, this one deals with Google Reader and speeding up the Refresh, Mark all as read and Change folders actions. As I’ve mentioned before, I use Google Reader to aggregate new blogs posts but I’ve always been dismayed at the time it took to refresh Reader to show new posts, mark posts as read or change subscription folders. Around 15 seconds for each in my case. I’d always assumed it was because I follow over 200 blogs and Reader is slow because of this. But yesterday, I discovered that by hiding the navigation panel on the left, there’s a dramatic increase in performance. Perhaps you’ve already spotted this but if you didn’t know, you can show/hide the navigation panel by clicking the blue arrow shown below:

You’ll now just see the current folder. To navigate to other folders, just click the navigation tab which has appeared at the top left of the screen:

With the navigation panel hidden, Refresh, Mark all as read and Change folders are all down to about 2 seconds now! Hope you find this useful – if you didn’t already know about it.

I’m sure many of you have pdfs galore scattered throughout your PC hard drive. Just like your photos. But you can organize your photos into albums with programs like Picasa or Faststone Image Viewer so what about your pdfs? Well here’s your chance to organize them under a neat interface. Adobe Digital Editions is a free program for Windows OS for organizing all your eBooks (EPUB format) and pdfs onto digital bookshelves. I’m indebted to instant fundas for bringing this free app to my attention. It’s a bit like Adobe Photoshop Elements but for pdfs not photos, and with just the managing and viewing function. I don’t have an eBook reader yet so will concentrate on the pdf management features here as I really wanted a way to organize my pdfs just like my photos.

I already had most of my pdfs in folders in a separate directory but thought it would be neat to be able to view them all in one place as thumbnails, place them on bookshelves and read them all from within one app. Well with Adobe Digital Editions you can do just that.

However, before you plunge in and import all your pdfs, there’s a couple of things to note. Unfortunately, the thumbnails aren’t displayed with the file name below them, but with title and author metadata held within the pdf. So, for example, if the title metadata had been filled out incorrectly, the thumbnails won’t display in the order you want. So how do you check and edit the pdf metadata? Well, I’m grateful to gHacks for pointing out one free utility for doing this – BeCyPDFMetaEdit. With this app, you can load up your pdf, edit and save all the metadata just the way you want them without affecting the text and layout in the pdf itself.

Now that you have your title metadata correct, when you load the pdfs into Adobe Digital Editions, they will all initially go into the All Items shelf. You then have to drag them to the bookshelf of your choice or make a new one. You can’t put them directly onto the bookshelf you want.

You can of course click on and view your pdfs within the program. Single or double page layouts are supported. You can search within a document, and bookmark pages. Unfortunately, you can’t view all bookmarks on a bookshelf at the same time which would have been nice. The bookmarks for each document only show when that document is being read. You can highlight text and save it as text notes. Like other aspects of this program, I didn’t really find it intuitive enough but eventually worked out that you click and drag to highlight text, then press Ctrl-B to save it as a bookmark. Not ideal, but well it’s a free program and doubtless all these shortcomings will be ironed out in updates if people shout loudly enough. At the moment, I’m enjoying reading the free Full Circle (Ubuntu) Magazine in this interface.

So if your pdfs are languishing all round your hard drive, here’s a neat way to organize them on digital bookshelves and view them all in one spot … just like your photos.

Image credit: 123 Chroma Pixels

After 20 years in front of a keyboard, I finally tackled a pet hate this week – the Caps Lock key. I don’t think in those 20 years I’ve ever needed it once, and it causes havoc when pressed inadvertently. When it’s on, not only do you get sentences in block capitals but you may be left scratching your head when passwords don’t work – because their case sensitive.

Anyway, I searched for Caps Lock on Delicious and quickly found the answer I needed at JohnHaller.com. By downloading and double clicking a file on that site I was able to remap the Caps Lock key to the Shift key so it acts just like a Shift key when accidentally pressed. But as this modifies the registry, I backed that up first using the program System Restore Point which I mentioned in one of my first blog posts. After a reboot, the 20-year annoyance was permanently gone. You don’t have to remap the Caps Lock key to the Shift Key – other choices are also given on Haller’s site.

I also came across a simple fix for the same problem on a Linux system at Peterbe.com.

Give it a try and rid yourself of a real annoyance.

I came across a really useful blog post recently at Online Tech Tips on transferring your TweetDeck settings to another computer. It’s well worth a read if you are using TweetDeck on say a laptop and desktop and basically it involves copying two important files from your TweetDeck folder under Application Data to the same folder on the second PC. On my PC, the files are:

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\preferences_techandlife.xml

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\td_26_techandlife.db

However, it occurred to me that this method can also be usefully applied to restore your TweetDeck groups should you accidentally delete a group which you have spent a lot of time and effort defining. If for some reason you close a Group column, there is no way back unless you have backed up and can restore these two files. The file td_26_techandlife seems to be the important one containing the Group data.

The scrolling arrow and the remove column button are pretty close together in TweetDeck and not very distinctive so it is possible to select to delete a column when scrolling through your tweets:

Admittedly, if you chose to delete a column you get a warning that this is irreversible, but it’s nice to know that if you do mess up, your hard drive dies, or you decide you want to restore a deleted Group, it can be done.

So I suggest you add these two important files to your regular back-up routines and restore them to the above folder should the need arise.

Edit: Version 0.26 of TweetDeck introduced synchronization of groups to multiple computers so it’s now possible to backup and restore your columns. Click the Settings button in the top right corner of TweetDeck then click the Sync tab. Register for a TweetDeck account to sync and backup your columns.