Tech and life

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’ve always had a problem cooking rice the way I want it. Always turned out sticky, mushy and in clumps. I prefer it light, moist and fluffy and with the grains separate. Right I thought, the internet will surely solve my problem. Sure enough, trusty Google identified a number of sites explaining how to cook rice and all giving much the same kind of advice which can be summarized as:

First choose a quality long grain rice, for example, Basmati. Then wash the rice in cool water in a bowl. Swish your hand round until the water becomes cloudy, drain off the water and repeat two or three times until the water becomes clearer. Cover the rice with cold water and let it soak for about half an hour, then drain. Then boil twice the quantity of water to your quantity of rice, add the rice, bring back to the boil, cover tightly and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand for a further 10 minutes with the lid still on.

Effectively you are steaming the rice in this process. This worked great for me the first time but was a bit inconsistent after that. I couldn’t rely on it for perfect rice.

Enter the electric steamer. Initially, we bought this to steam vegetables, but the instruction book said it would do rice as well. Right, I’ll give it a go.

The first steps of washing, and soaking the rice were the same. But then I added the rice (we find that 1/2 to 3/4 of a mug of rice is enough for 2 portions) to the steaming basket along with just about enough lightly salted boiling water to not quite cover the rice. Then add enough boiling water to the steamer to steam for about 30 minutes. (Time saving tip: If you don’t have the time to soak the rice beforehand, you can actually just part-boil the rice in salted boiling water before transferring to the steamer.) That’s it. When the time is up, check the rice is cooked by tasting a spoonful, fluff the rice with a fork and you have a fantastic basket of light, fluffy rice which goes beautifully with a curry or is great when cold as part of a salad.

How do you cook your rice?

Ever had to get a list of filenames into Excel? You can’t just drag the files into Excel as this will import the complete files. I had to do this recently, and rather than key in the file names one by one, I asked on a forum and got a number of good replies. Here’s the best route I’ve found from that.

The first thing you need to do is create a text file in the file directory listing those file names. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds. To make this text file:

1. Open a command prompt: Click Start, then Run, and type cmd

2. Navigate to the directory with your list of file names using the command cd, e.g. type cd c:\photos\2008 and press Enter.

3. Create the text file: Still at the command prompt, type dir /b > tempfile.txt then press Enter

This will create a text file called tempfile.txt with a list of all the files in that directory. Now we have to import the list from that file into Excel:

4. Close the command box by typing exit and click Enter.

5. Open Explore (right click on Start and click on Explore) and navigate to the directory with your list of filenames. The file tempfile.txt should now be there as well.

6. Right click on tempfile.txt and Select Open with then navigate down the list to Microsoft Excel and click on it.

This will import the file listing into a new Excel workbook, but you’ll probably want to get them into another workbook:

7. Select the file listing in Excel by left clicking and dragging to highlight the list (or on the keyboard, hold down the Shift key and click the Down arrow key) and copy the highlighted block with Ctrl-c

8. Open the workbook you want and paste in the listing where you want it using Ctrl-v

You can clean up the listing now:

9. Among the file names you will have imported the file name tempfile.txt. Delete this row in Excel: Highlight that row then click on Edit and then Delete.

10. You’ll also have file extensions which you may not want (e.g. doc): Click Ctrl-H and just search for .doc and replace with blank throughout the spreadsheet.

And that’s it!

Update (10 September 2009): Thanks to a post at How-to Geek, I found a free utility called Dir Print to create the text file of the directory listing. This saves having to go to the command prompt. You can also filter the directory listing to just a particular file type by modifying the box in the top right corner of Dir Print, eg for only Word files, enter *.doc.