Tag: TIP

I stumbled across a cool feature in Trillian Pro today completely by accident. I was trying to rearrange some contacts when I accidentally dragged one of them outside of my buddy list, which created a second, mini-buddy-list. I'm sure this isn't new to everybody, but it's new to me, and I thought it was cool. Just click and drag any contact, meta-contact, or contact group off of your buddy list ...

I'm happy to say that I've only had this happen to me once before: Windows really, really won't boot. You can't even get to safe mode. All you get is "Windows NT could not start because the below file is missing or corrupt" and a prompt to reboot over and over again. This usually seems like a reinstall moment (especially if you ask tech support), but it doesn't have to be so: Short-Media is ...

I've been using Excel for a long time and might even consider myself a power user, so I'm surprised I never came across this tip before: You can toggle a formula view to see all of a spreadsheet's formulas at once by pressing Ctrl+`. That little fleck, in case it's not entirely clear, is a backtick (or, as this site takes way too many paragraphs to explain, a gravé), i.e. the seldom-used ...

Here's a nice trick I didn't know about until today, courtesy of Lifehacker: Windows has the built-in ability to rename whole batches files at once. Just highlight all of the files and press F2 (or right-click on them and choose Rename), and type in the new name. I suspect that the reason I never figured this one out is that when you press F2, your highlighted selection goes away, but rest ...

Over at the TiVo community there's a cool hack to enable an undocumented feature in TiVo Desktop for Mac OS X.  By default TiVo Desktop lets you share music, photos, and TiVo-recorded video between networked TiVos. With some command-line magic, however, users have found out how to make any TiVo-compatible MPEG video file show up on networked TiVos' Now Playing list. Cool. [Via Street Tech] ...

Too lazy to make an unattended XP install disc but don't want to stare at nothing but progress bars while it installs? Turns out it's easy to run Pinball, Minesweeper, or Solitaire while the Windows XP setup grinds along. User Boofis on the Whirlpool forums explains: "You just have to wait until the right moment the pinball files are copied. Sometime after where it asks you for the product ...

Before its final release, Windows XP's Remote Desktop function had a feature it now lacks: multi-user mode, whereby more than one person could log on and control the PC at once. When the final version of XP shipped, though, this feature was disabled, meaning if you log on with remote desktop, any other user must be logged off. Fortunately, there's a way to unlock the original functionality, but as ...

One of my biggest Windows pet peeves is the Restart Now/Restart Later nag box that pops up after your install a patch from Windows Update. Yes, Windows, I know there's a reason I shouldn't wait too long to reboot but there's absolutely no reason I should be reminded of it every 10 minutes. Fortunately, there seems to be a solution, at least for folks with SP2. Using the Group Policy editor you can ...

Out of the box, there's no way to make two different version of Firefox, or two copies running different user profiles, run at the same time. This can be a big pain when doing stuff like developing extensions or testing alpha builds, or maybe you just want to have both your and your roommate's profiles open at once. Of course, there's a workaround. It requires setting the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment ...

This weekend my girlfriend and I were visiting my mom. My girlfriend needed to view a PowerPoint file someone had sent her, but my mom's really, really old PC doesn't have PowerPoint and, believe it or not, is too old to run the free PowerPoint viewer. I thought for a moment and then remembered that whenever someone e-mails a document in a common format to my Gmail account, a handy "View as ...

Whenever a new version of Firefox comes out there's always some grumblings about it deciding that certain extensions are now incompatible. It seems especially needless with so minor a version change as 1.5 to 1.5.0.1. The fix is not new but not widely known, so it's worth posting here: In the address bar type about:config. Use the Filter field to find app.extensions.version (if it's not present, ...

I rely on Firefox's History to keep my most frequently-accessed web sites available at a keypress. I can type any letter into the address bar and immediately choose among my favorite web sites whose URLs start with that letter. That's not the tip; read on. Unfortunately, the History gets polluted sometimes -- somehow a web site I have no interest in visiting frequently will find its way to the top ...