CyberNet Classics - CyberNotes

CyberNotes: Listen to Music for Free, No Strings Attached!

Ashley — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:25:14 -0600

This article was written on January 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

A few days ago we wrote about Last.fm’s new service and how nice it is that users can listen to music for free. There are a few limitations though, and one of them is that you can only listen to a song three times for free before being required to subscribe. Epiac1216 commented that he has been using a service called Songza, and what was so great about it was that there were no strings attached. Epiac said that he could “prepare my own playlist with the selected songs and they will be played in the order I chose.” This got me thinking about how there are all kinds of music services out there that some of you may not be aware of. Today we’ll be taking a look at Songza, but we’re also asking you to fill us and everybody else in on the music service you use, and why you use it. This way everybody will have multiple options to choose from when they’re trying to find a way to listen to the music that they love online.

What is Songza?

On the Songza website, they describe themselves as “the music search engine & Internet jukebox” where you can listen. Now. It’s got a unique design and a color that makes it stand out. At first glance, it may appear that there’s not much to the service, however, looks are deceiving in this case. It’s got an extremely clean interface and a clutter free design and so while it may look like nothing, there’s actually quite a bit of functionality there.

Where does it come from?

The site was designed and brought to life by Aza Raskin who happens to be the son of Jeff Raskin, the Apple Macintosh co-founder. On the Songza about page, they say that “Like all good ideas, both the concept and design came to Aza while he was in the shower.”

Searching for music

Did I mention that they make awesome use of Ajax? Well, they do. Performing a search is so quick and easy, thanks in part to the Ajax. On the homepage there is a nice big search box where you can enter a specific song or an artist that you’re wanting to hear. I did a search for “Daughtry” and it pulled up a whole list of songs pretty quickly. And because of the Ajax, the page didn’t have to completely re-load.

Clicking on one of the results will pull up a menu so that you can play a song, share it, rate it, or add it to a playlist. Once you click to play a song, you’ll get links to “watch video” (it’ll be a YouTube video for the song) or buy the song via Amazon.

Sharing with others

If you find a song that you’d like to share with others, you have a few ways to do this. That menu I mentioned above will give you all of your options for sharing. They include embedding it into your blog, a Facebook or MySpace account, or other web sites. You can also get a direct link to the song, or email it to a friend. Embedding a player into your own site is simple. It’s a Flash player too, which is nice.

Another social aspect to this site is that you can vote a song up or down. In the pop-up menu that you’ll see when clicking on a song, there’s an option that says “rate.” It asks “is this a good recording” and then you can click a simple yes or no.

What it’s not

If you’re looking for a music discovery service, this isn’t it. It’s not going to tell you what you might like, instead it simply plays the songs that you search for that you want to hear. Additionally, this is NOT a music download service. You go to Songza simply to listen. Songza is simply about helping you find and then playing the music that you want to listen to.

Which music service do you use?

Songza has quickly moved to the top on my list of favorite online music services out there. There are so many different services out there though, so we’re wondering, which service do you use online? Pandora? Last.fm? XM Radio or Sirius Radio?

Source: Thanks Omar for mentioning this in the comments!

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CyberNotes: How to Customize the Windows XP/Vista Send To Menu

Ryan — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:11:41 -0600

This article was written on March 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the features that many people overlook in Windows is the “Send To” menu that is presented when you right-click on a file or folder. This menu offers you an array of things you can do with that particular file or folder including compressing it to a ZIP file, emailing it to a friend, and much more.

I have never used the “Send To” menu because it doesn’t offer any features that make it useful, despite it being manually customizable (XP instructions and Vista instructions). I started looking around for something that would really knock my socks off, and I found just the tool…Send To Toys (Download Mirror for version 2.5).

Send To Toys is essentially an application that makes customizing the Send To menu even easier than it already is. It also offers some functionalities that you won’t be able to do without the help of this handy little program:

Send To Toys Control Panel Applet allows you to manage the Send To system menu content, and configure the various Send To Toys settings:
“Add to Send To menu” and “Remove from Send To menu” allows you to personalize the Send To system menu for drives, folders, and programs.
Send To “Clipboard (as name)” copies the name of the file or files to the clipboard. Hold down the CTRL key to change the settings for this extension.
Send To “Clipboard” command line utility copies the output of a command to the clipboard.

Send To “Command Prompt” opens a DOS console window, setting the current directory to the selected file/folder.
Send To “Default Mail Recipient” creates a new e-mail with attachments and predefined defaults for the recipients, subject, and message.
Send To “Favorites” adds a shortcut to your Favorites list.
Send To “Folder…” sends a file or files to another folder, you will be shown a dialog box that lets you choose where the files should be copied, moved, or have a shortcut created.
Send To “Quick Launch” adds a shortcut to the Quick Launch toolbar.
Send To “Recycle Bin” sends a file or files to the Recycle Bin. Hold down the CTRL key to perform a file shredding.
Send To “Run…” sends a file or files to the Run command dialog.

The main reason that I wanted to get this utility was for the “Send to Folder…” option. I’m constantly moving files around on my PC and with this tool I can easily copy or move files from one location to another. Since my desktop is the most common place that I move files to, I decided to designate that as my default location, which means I can just select the Folder option from the Send To menu and press enter to move a file or folder to my desktop.

This is a freeware application and after you get it installed there will be both a shortcut in your Start Menu as well as in the Control Panel. It is compatible with Windows 2000, 2003, XP, and Vista so it will work for almost everyone! Give it a try because you might as well try to make the Send To menu actually useful.

Send To Toys Homepage (Download Mirror for version 2.5)

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CyberNotes: SWiK - Community Driven Resource for Open Source Software

Ashley — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:05:01 -0600

This article was written on May 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Some of the best software available originates from open source projects (i.e. Linux, and Firefox) where peers contribute and review the software in development. These projects give programmers the opportunity to change programs to suit their needs which also opens the door for a lot of customization.

One way that you can keep up-to-date with Open Source software is a website called SWiK. SWiK is a project of Sourcelabs, and they’re a community driven resource for Open Source software. Users come and document the open-source software that they’re familiar with, and then everybody benefits from their knowledge. SWiK relies heavily on the community, and without the users, SWiK wouldn’t exist.

It’s like Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, and Digg all mixed into one, but it’s just for anything related with Open Source projects. The great thing about SWiK is that it showcases all of the hard work that people have put into their Open Source projects. If you’re unfamiliar with Open Source projects and you’d like to find and discover new ones, this is the perfect place to start.

Features:

Tags are a big part of SWiK. All of their content is organized using Tags, so it’s a key element.
Digg-like element where people can submit stories regarding open-source software.
RSS: Subscribe to your favorite projects.
Feeds can be s

There’s not a lot of content that makes it to this site on a daily basis, maybe one or two new items per day. However this is nice because then you’re not over-whelmed with new content- it’s just enough.

Get involved:

Getting involved at SWiK is really easy. One way is by adding an open-source project that hasn’t been added yet. Another option is by editing already added projects with new/updated information. If you know something that hasn’t been added, add it (much like Wikipedia)!

Another important feature is the search. If you’re looking for new projects, you can use the tag feature to search. You can also search by Tags in a cloud-view, or just use the search box.

Wrapping it up:

While SWiK is not the most active community out there, it serves its purpose – to allow people to share information about open source projects. If you’ve come across a great project that you weren’t quite sure how to make the most of, visit SWiK and see if there’s a page for it that might give you more details.

Pages of Interest:

Visit SWiK: http://swik.net

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CyberNotes: Using GigaTribe to Share Files

Ryan — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:38:01 -0600

This article was written on June 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

File sharing is becoming huge, and better ways for sharing files are emerging as more people start joining in on the fun. Up until about a year ago, FTP’s were the best way to share large files that couldn’t fit in an email, but now there are things like AllPeers for Firefox and Xdrive for online storage. There is also another one called GigaTribe that I wanted to point out today.

GigaTribe puts its faith on the fact that people don’t want to take the time to setup FTP’s nor manage complex permissions for users. Instead, it has you create a GigaTribe username when you start the application and immediately goes to work at configuring your router (if you’re behind a router). It was able to do all of the necessary port forwarding since my router supports UPnP (it will let you know whether your router supports it).

After getting GigaTribe setup and configured, my next mission was to setup another account so that I could connect the two systems. That was pretty simple, and in no time I had two accounts setup that I could start sharing files between. So from one of the accounts I invited the other user which was as simple as entering in their GigaTribe username, but you can also invite people using their email address. They will then get notified that you want to share files with them, and give them instructions on setting up an account.

Next I went through and picked the folders that I wanted to share. This is done using the “Modify my shared folders” link on the homepage of the application. You should see your computer’s folder structure:

Click to Enlarge

When you find a folder that you want to share, just right-click on it and choose the “Share folder” option. A window will popup asking you for configuration options, but none of them can be used unless you pay $3.99 per month or $24.95 for a lifetime subscription. Don’t worry though, the network is still pretty locked down even with the free version:

You create your private network by inviting your friends.
No one can join your network unless invited.
You can dismiss or ban your guests at any time.
Your guests can’t see each other on your network.

After getting the folder shared, I checked my other account and I was able to instantly start sharing files between the two computers. Any files that I downloaded were placed in a GigaTribe folder located in My Documents, and the status of the transfers could be monitored via the Transfers tab in the application.

Overall, the program is really nice because it creates a closed network for you, your friends, and your family to share files. Unfortunately you cannot restrict groups to what files they can download unless you pay for the premium version, so whatever files you decide to make available can be downloaded by anyone. One other downside to the free version is that you are limited to one download at a time, which can become a big pain unless you get your friends to ZIP up the files that you need.

So whether this software is right for you depends on how many people you are going to be sharing files with. If there are a lot of people you might be better off setting up an FTP real quick instead of forking out the money for GigaTribe Premium, that way the only limitation is the speed of your Internet Connection.

Download GigaTribe

Thanks to JavaSharp over in the forum for pointing out GigaTribe! Another free file sharing application that you can try is Swapper, which was also mentioned in the forum by Chris.

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CyberNotes: EverNote Stores Your Life in Notes

Ryan — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:00:44 -0600

This article was written on May 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Our daily lives continue to become more and more overwhelmed with information. The problem that most of us face now is finding an efficient way to keep all of that information organized in a fashion that makes it easy to find what we’re looking for.

Evernote has got to be one of the best solutions for taking notes for just about everything imaginable. Whether it be creating to-do lists, shopping lists, or clipping stuff from the Web…Evernote does it all. Check out some of the amazing features that it includes, and it’s all free:

Note Formats: Create notes in multiple formats, including text, Web, email, handwriting, image clips and custom templates.
Multiple Categories: I’m not sure if categories is really the right name for these because they behave more like tags. Basically you can add as many categories to a note as you want.
Powerful SmartSearch: Multiple methods for finding notes: visually, by time, categories, automatic labeling and keywords, complete with matching note count.
Web & Email Clipper: Instantly add web pages and emails into EverNote from Internet Explorer, Outlook, Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird using an ‘Add to EverNote’ button along with context menus.
Drag & Drop files: Drag & drop or paste text with images from any applications into EverNote.
To Dos and Note Templates: Create and monitor To-Do lists, expenses, contacts and other common note templates. Here are some examples of the different templates (click to enlarge a screenshot):
Embedded To?Dos: Click Ctrl-Shift-C or right-click and select “Insert To-Do checkbox” anywhere in your notes to place a checkbox at the cursor position in any note. This means the note will automatically appear in the To-Do category until all of the boxes are checked off.
Send notes via IM: Drag-and-drop your notes into Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype and other IMs to instantly transfer interesting bits of info to your buddies.
Keep Your Sensitive Info Secure: Encrypt notes you want to keep private or protect from accidental changes or deletion. You can also password protect an entire EverNote database.
Backup: Automatic and manual backup are available via the Tools>Options>Backup tab.
Spellchecker
Note History: All changes to edited notes in “History Notes”.

One of the cool things with Evernote is that you never have to think twice about saving your notes because it is done automatically while you work.

The Web Clipper is a very integral part of Evernote for myself. In Firefox it just adds a small icon next to the address bar, and clicking on that button will automatically create a new note from any of the content highlighted on the page. This is a very quick process and doesn’t require any other interaction. Once the note is saved you’ll see a little popup in the corner of your screen that you can always click on to edit the newly created note:

There is also an experimental feature that they currently have available called the Universal Clipper (pictured to the right). This is a separate download and once installed you will be able to quickly note just about anything by using double-clicking on the Universal Clipper icon in your System Tray. As seen in the screenshot, you can even specify an area on your screen to store in a note.

There is also an EverNote Plus version available for those who need synchronization capabilities or handwriting recognition features. I think most people will be content with the free version of Evernote since there is no time or note limitation, but Tablet PC users may find those more advanced features useful.

Visit the Evernote Homepage

Thanks for the tip JavaSharp!

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CyberNotes: Blogmusik.net - Free Internet Virtual iPod

Ashley — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:55:21 -0600

This article was written on September 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

Free For All Friday

When I think of Blogmusik.net, I can’t help but think of the original Napster. You know, back in the day when Napster was the free peer to peer music sharing service that loads of people used? The good old days of Napster didn’t last too long, and I imagine Blogmusik.net won’t either. It is cool nonetheless and worth checking out.

They use an iPod like interface acting as your own personal jukebox to stream your selected songs over the Internet. It has a search feature with a rather large variety of songs to choose from. When you become a registered user, you’re able to save playlists with all of your favorites ready to go for the next time you’re wanting to listen to music. They even have some of those “one track wonders” you never thought you’d find or hear again!

The virtual iPod interface really couldn’t be any easier to use, and as for the quality of sound, it’s decent. Not great, but decent. Oh, and you can change the color of your “iPod” from black to white. The idea is kinda cool, however as mentioned, the legal status remains unknown which gives a good indication that it may not be around for long!

Alright, so that’s the free route you can take for now. There are alternative options that are legal and have similar features such as allowing you to save a playlist. One such option is brought to you by the ”new” (no longer free) Napster. According to their website:

”As a registered member of Napster’s free music service you can listen to all 2,000,000 songs in the Napster catalog up to 3 times each. After the 3rd free play, you must purchase the track to listen to it again. As a Napster subscriber, you can listen to the same song an unlimited amount of times without having to worry about any limits. You can also download your favorite music to your PC and listen to it when you are not connected to the Internet.”

To recap: Blogmusik.net is a pretty cool free service with the virtual iPod interface but probably won’t be around for long! Once/if they’re shut down, a good alternative paying option for $15.00 per month would be Napster.

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CyberNotes: Amazing Canstruction!

Ashley — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:34:35 -0600

This article was written on January 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Fun Friday

Canstruction is about two major things: construction and charity. It’s a design/build competition where engineers, architects and others come together to construct structures made entirely from cans of food. That’s right, all of the images you see below are creations made from cans of food– full cans of food. Now here’s where the charity portion comes into play - after the competition is over, all of the cans of food that were used to build the structures are then donated to aid in the fight against hunger. Cool, huh? These competitions are held all across the United States and in some locations in Canada — so see if your city participates, check this link. Below you’ll find some of the structures I came across while browsing their site that caught my eye. I think you’ll agree that they are all pretty impressive!

–Lion & Lamb–

–Cathedral–

–Champagne Bottle–

–Chinese Take Out–

–Dragon–

–Eagle–

–Hour Glass–

–Yellow Submarine–

–Japanese Teahouse–

–Hot Dog–

–Snake–

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CyberNotes: Customizing Opera To Fit Your Needs

Ryan — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:11:51 -0600

This article was written on July 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

If you have decided to give the new Opera 9 a shot then you might have been wondering how you can add more features to it. Opera isn’t exactly like Firefox where you can add extensions that other users have created in order to get the features that you want. It may sound like a downfall to Opera but it actually isn’t. While using Opera you will find that many of the extensions you sat there downloading in Firefox are implemented right out of the box. Pretty nice, huh?

If that isn’t enough for you then you can get bookmarklets/buttons that will make using Opera a little easier. Bookmarklets are snippets of JavaScript code that you can place on a toolbar to perform an action. There literally hundreds of these bookmarklets that people have come up with to help save you a little time. Here are some of the ones that I found to be useful:

Those are just a few of the bookmarklets that I use in Opera. You can really make your browsing experience quicker by looking through the lists of bookmarklets and finding tasks that you constantly perform. Here are three of the most useful sites that I found:

Opera Browser Wiki Buttons or Bookmarklets (hundreds of bookmarklets available)
UserJS.org (some unique bookmarklets like one for Bug Me Not)
Phil Burns (not many bookmarklets but some may be useful to you)

If those bookmarklets and buttons still aren’t enough then you will find this guide very useful for tweaking Opera. It has many tweaks and walks you through them step-by-step. They will soon show you how customizable Opera really is (especially if you haven’t gone to Opera:Config in your address bar).

Overall Opera is a great browser and the features that you receive are amazing. I would use it as by fulltime browser if they had complete compatibility with Google services, but I think Google is to blame for that one. The Opera Desktop Team is really dedicated to giving you the best experience possible, and it is only fair that you give them a shot. If you don’t want to install Opera then you can always get the portable version.

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CyberNotes: Shortcut to Change Resolutions

Ryan — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:50:49 -0600

This article was written on February 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Have you ever wanted to change the resolution of your computer in a single click? There are various reasons that you may want to do that, such as playing a game that requires a certain resolution or developing a program that needs to be tested in various conditions. Today we’re going to show you how to create a simple shortcut that can be used to switch between multiple resolutions.

This trick is going to require a third-party application called Resolution Changer, but it requires absolutely no installation and will eat up a mere 150KB of your hard drive. With it you’ll be able to adjust the resolution, color depth, and refresh rate with the shortcuts you create. It even has support for multiple monitors!

–Instructions–

Setting up a shortcut to use Resolution Changer is a quick process, but there are a ton of different options that you can configure. Be sure to checkout a list of some other options available at the end of this article.

Download Resolution Changer (the console version), and put it in a location you’ll know how to access from the command line. The easiest spot for it would probably be at the root of the C:\ drive, which is where I’ve placed it on my system.
Now we need to create the shortcut to the application. Right-click on your Desktop and choose New -> Shortcut. You’ll need to enter in the location of the shortcut followed by the width and height that you want the resolution set to. Here’s my example where I’m changing the resolution of the screen to 800×600:

C:\reschangecon.exe -width=800 -height=600

In Vista it should look something like this (Click to Enlarge):
Now specify a name for the shortcut, and finish the wizard. Double-clicking on the new shortcut will set the resolution to whatever value you specified.

–Other Options Available–

There is a lot more that you can do with Resolution Changer, and if you’re feeling ambitious you might want to tinker with some of the other settings:

Multiple Monitor Support
This does support multiple monitors, and more information on that can be found here. To sum it up you can change the resolution of a specific monitor by providing the monitor number in this format:

reschangecon.exe -monitor="\\.\DISPLAY1" -width=800 -height=600
Launch an Application
After the resolution has been changed you can have an application or document opened immediately afterwards:

reschangecon.exe -width=800 -height=600 "c:\test.exe"

What’s cool about that is after the program or document is closed the resolution will revert back to what it was like before it was executed.
Adjust the Color Depth and Refresh Rate
There are two other options that can be used to adjust the color depth and refresh rate of the monitor. Accepted values for the color depth are: “4″ = 16 colors, “8″ = 8-bit, “16″ = 16-bit, “24″ = 24-bit, and “32″ = 32-bit. Here’s how you can adjust the depth and/or refresh rate:

reschangecon.exe -width=640 -height=480 -depth=8 -refresh=72

–Extra Credit–

You can also assign an icon to the shortcut that you just created and/or establish a keyboard hotkey for quickly switching between resolutions. Just right-click on the shortcut and choose the Properties option. From there you can configure the shortcut key or change the icon:

I’m sure this is going to spark some discussion about alternative ways to changing resolutions on your computer, and there are all kinds of apps that run in the System Tray doing the same kind of thing. The reason why I prefer this shortcut method is that the program only runs when I need it to, which saves on both processing and memory. It’s just my personal preference, but I like to minimize the number of applications I have running at a time.

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CyberNotes: Pie Menus Increase your Productivity

Ryan — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:35:55 -0600

This article was written on July 31, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about pie menus lately, and several people have contacted us wondering what they actually are. Most of the time I mention them when referring to Windows 7, which is the codename of Vista’s successor. With the possibility of Windows 7 receiving an interface overhaul, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see pie menus being used.

I’ve mentioned pie menus because I believe that they are the future replacement of the current right-click menu. How so? They put all of the needed commands in a circular ring around your mouse, instead of in a long menu. This gives you faster access to the commands that you need the most (copy, paste, etc…) and, if designed correctly, would put your most-used commands at the root of the pie menu.

You’re probably still a little confused about how the whole thing works, so I searched for a good 2-hours trying to find a decent example of a pie menu that everyone can play with. Finally I came across a Windows app called Orbit that is completely free, and if you download one of the nightly builds you won’t even have to install it. You’ll probably find that it has some pitfalls, so watch my demonstration below before you go and try it out.

The brief video that I put together first walks you through the various settings that Orbit has, and then I demonstrate how the pie menu actually works. This one has a unique feature that I had never seen in a pie menu before, and it is something that I believe could make me much more productive. So checkout the video and then I’ll explain a few things afterwards:

As you can see, the pie menu is capable of putting a lot of useful tasks immediately around the cursor, meaning you have to move your mouse a minimal distance to get to what you’re looking for.

The feature I found to be unique to this pie menu is the list of running applications. Not only was it able to show which apps I had running, but it also showed a screenshot of what they looked like. I have to admit that I was thoroughly impressed with Orbit considering that this version had not been updated in well over a year.

So how is this actually useful? Imagine that your cursor is at the top of the screen, and you want to switch applications. Right now you have to move your mouse all the way to the Taskbar on bottom of the screen just to do the switch (unless you use keyboard shortcuts). Having a pie menu available lets you perform the switch in much less time than navigating all the way down to the Taskbar.

Now imagine a pie menu that not only contains your running applications, but also holds shortcuts to your favorite programs and your most used commands. A pie menu that adapts to my needs would surely be worth its weight in gold.

To my surprise, there is a lacking of applications that implement useful pie menus, but if I had to give a gold star to any of them it would be Orbit. It has a nice interface and a lot of features, but you can’t really control the programs that show up. The bad news is that development on the Orbit application also appears to have stopped early last year.

So where are all of the cool programs? I don’t know, you tell me. Microsoft gave a demonstration back in 2005 for where they thought Windows would be in 2010, and it used pie menus for a majority of the tasks. I’m not saying that it’s a sure thing for Windows 7, but I think we should be getting used to the idea of working with pie menus.

I do have another cool thing that I found regarding pie menus, but I’ll save that for tomorrow’s edition of CyberNotes!

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CyberNotes: Share a Taxi with Hitchsters.com

Ashley — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:05:35 -0600

This article was written on August 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Today’s featured website isn’t one that is going to be useful to everybody, at least not yet. The site is Hitchsters and it was chosen because it’s a great idea that could end up saving travelers money should they expand. Currently it’s available in New York City, and starting August 27th it will be available in Brooklyn. Hopefully they’ll be adding the service to other cities soon, which they’ve promised.

—What is Hitchsters.com?—

Hitchsters is a web-based system that will connect a traveler with another traveler on the same flight to share a taxi either to or from the airport to save money. In other words, it’s a matchmaker! If you’ve taken a taxi before, you know that it can get a little pricey. The whole idea of sharing a taxi with someone on the same flight is great because then you’ll never have to be waiting around for someone on another flight. And if there’s a delay, well, your co-traveler will be delayed too! They’re on the same flight.

Now, as mentioned, this service can be used either to or from the airport. When you’re going to the airport, if you live in the same area as another traveler and you’re taking the same flight, Hitchsters would match you together. They also offer the option to select a “gender preference.” If you’d only rather ride with a guy, they’ll do their best to meet that request. You can either select that it’s a preference and that if it doesn’t work, you’d be okay riding with either gender, or you can select that you “must” ride with a specific gender otherwise you’ll ride alone.

—How to use it—

Using Hitchsters is divided up into four simple steps.

Enter your flight time or the time you’ll be wanting to hail a cab
Hitchsters with find a match so that you’ll have a co-rider
Once you’ve been matched, you’ll receive an email or text message with the pertinent information of your co-rider. Only a first name is given for security purposes
Contact your co-rider so you can share the cab

—Hitchsters Etiquette—

As you can imagine, this service relies on people who follow through with their plans. If you back out at the last minute, this service is hardly useful. So, one of the first things to keep in mind is to not leave people hanging.

Another “rule” is that the first person who gets out of the cab will pay 60% of the fare. That means one of you will need to agree to get out first. They say that if you can’t figure out who should get out first, it’s a simple solution: rock/paper/scissors.

Hitchsters relies on the co-riders being able to communicate with each other, particularly for those using a taxi service when leaving the airport. That’s why it’ll be important to keep a cell-phone charged and ready to use so that once landed, you’ll be able to arrange to meet-up and get a cab.

—Wrapping it up—

If you’ve been to New York City, you know that taking a cab can run you as much as $100 depending on where you’re going. By the time you pay that fee to and from the airport, you’ve almost spent as much on the cab as you have for your airfare. Hitchsters is for smart people who just want to save some money. With little work involved to find a co-rider via Hitchsters, there’s no reason not to use it!

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CyberNotes: Monitor File And Registry Changes When Installing Applications

Ryan — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:35:37 -0600

This article was written on October 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Many times I am skeptical about installing new applications because I don’t know what they will end up doing to my computer. Will they install some spyware, delete some of my system files, or corrupt my registry? You just never know what the result is going to be but if you don’t try out new applications then you could be missing out on some great tools.

When I install certain applications I want to know everything that went on during the installation process. That way if I choose to uninstall the program later I’ll know exactly what it had created or modified. To do the monitoring I use InCtrl5 which is a small freeware program.

Here is what you need to do to use InCtrl5:

Download and install InCtrl5.
Start InCtrl5 and browse/enter the location of the install file:
After you have entered the location of the install file, selected the desired options, and pressed the “Go!” button the application will scan your computer so that it knows what is in your registry and file system for comparison purposes:
After the pre-installation check completes you should see the installation window for the program you are trying to install. In my case I chose Flock and after the Flock installation completed I pressed the “Install Complete” button in the upper-right corner of the screen. It then started to check the files and registry for any changes:
When InCtrl5 finishes the examination it will present you with a report that is nicely organized:

I don’t use this for every program that I install but it does come in handy every now and then. I typically use it if there is a possibility that I’ll uninstall the application later on because I don’t want things cluttering my computer that I know I can get rid of easily. You probably won’t want to use InCtrl5 for every program you install because it does take around a minute to for each the pre-install and post-install analysis. Sometimes it is worth the few extra minutes though.

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Your Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:29:35 -0600

This article was written on December 24, 2006 by CyberNet.

Sunday’s Summary

Here is your week in review with Sunday’s Summary! If you missed something, check it out. What was going on this week at CyberNet News with CyberNotes?

Million Dollar Monday: Million Dollar Cars for World’s Billionaires
Time Saving Tuesday: Creating Screencasts with Freeware Software
Web Browser Wednesday: Trimming Down Firefox for the Holiday Season
Tutorial Thursday: How to Test your Website in nearly all Browsers
Free For All Friday: New Version of Protopage AJAX Desktop
Weekend Warrior:We’re Giving Away 2 Licenses for MojoPac!

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CyberNotes: Using Basic Paint.NET Features

Ashley — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:15:03 -0600

This article was written on July 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

Paint.NET is one of my favorite free options for editing photos because it’s got a lot of great features, yet it is simple and easy to use. We’ve mentioned it on the site before, and some of you may already use it. While it may be a program that you use, you may not be aware that it actually started as a senior design project which was mentored by Microsoft. According to the Paint.NET website, it was originally intended to be used as a replacement for the current Paint which comes with Windows. Today’s article will focus on some of the basic features found in Paint.NET and how to use them. We’ll follow up with another article that goes into some of the more advanced features.

Red Eye Removal

We’ll start with one of the most basic features, but one that gets used quite often, red eye removal.

To remove red eyes from a picture, use a selection tool to select an area including the eyes. Next, go to the Effects menu and select Red Eye Removal. There you have it, your red eyes are removed! Below is the image from the Paint.NET tutorial which shows what the before and after looks like.

Auto-Level

This is another feature that gets used quite often once you know it’s there. Instead of manually adjusting the levels of the image so that it looks just right, use Auto-Level! It does all of the work for you. Sometimes the difference will be subtle, other times it will be drastic. Below is an example of what an image looked like before and after using auto-level.

Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Alt + L

Curve

If you like to have control over how the colors of your photo are adjusted, use the Curves feature. When you click to use the curves feature, you’ll notice a graph. Just start dragging your mouse around to notice the differences in your image. Horizontal values are the intensity input and the vertical values are the output.

To use the curve feature, go to Adjustments > Curves

Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + M

Other Effects:

There are a handful of effects that you can play around with to add something special to your image. And remember, if you don’t like the way it looks, you can always undo it by clicking on Edit > Undo, or by pressing Ctrl + Z.

Some of the effects that you can play with include:

Oil Painting
Outline
Frosted Glass
Pencil Sketch

Below is an example of what a photo looks like using the oil painting feature with a brush size of 5. The larger the brush size, the less detail you’ll notice.

Wrapping it up

As mentioned, these are very basic features within Paint.NET that some of you may already be very familiar with. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, take the time to play around with them because while simple, they can add a lot to your photos.

Next week we’ll get into some of the more advanced things that you can do with Paint.NET.

UPDATE: Want to make a Web 2.0 Logo Using Paint.NET? Here is CyberNet’s Tutorial including video!

Download Paint.NET

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CyberNotes: Using Firefox Portable to Test Nightly Releases

Ryan — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:54:02 -0600

This article was written on February 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of the things that really seems to draw people to CyberNet is the posting of Firefox Portable builds for pre-release versions of Firefox. Right now Mozilla is testing out Firefox 3 Alpha builds, and the ability to play with it appeals to a lot of people. A while back I wrote a guide on setting up your own version of Firefox Portable, but that was still when the application was called Portable Firefox.

I receive requests all of the time for providing nightly builds of Firefox 3 in a portable fashion so that there is no fear of messing up your stable profile. Heck, I’ll even show you where to copy the contents of your existing profile to in the Firefox Portable so that it is really easy to see if your extensions will work. Let’s go ahead and get started…

–Setting Up Your Own Firefox Portable–

The first thing that you’ll need to do is download my “blank” Firefox Portable ZIP file. I say that it is blank because it doesn’t include the actual Firefox files that are needed to run the browser. You’ll be adding those in a few steps from now. Also, it is important to note that the installation I am providing to you is setup to not show a splash screen and to allow multiple instances of Firefox to be running side-by-side. That means you’ll be able to run your nightly build at the same time you’re running your stable build! See this article for an explanation on how I did that.
Extract the contents from the file you downloaded in Step 1 which should result in a folder called “FirefoxPortable“.
Download the latest nightly trunk to play with the bleeding edge version of Firefox. This is the most recent that you can get, and to find the file that you want to download look for the most recent date that has a “win32.zip” extension.
Extract the contents from the file you downloaded in Step 3 which should result in a folder called “firefox“.
Drag the firefox folder from Step 4 into the FirefoxPortable -> App folder from Step 2:
That’s all, now just go back to the FirefoxPortable directory and run the FirefoxPortable.exe file. This is what your directory structure should now look like:
Note: For future reference, you can update Firefox Portable the same way that you update regular Firefox by going to the Help Menu -> Check for Updates.

–Copying Your Current Profile To Firefox Portable–

When you’re testing out Firefox, it would be nice to just copy all of your settings, bookmarks, and extensions over to the portable version so that you can see what works and what doesn’t. No problem! It just takes a few steps to copy everything over:

Locate your existing profile:
Windows 2000/XP: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\
Windows Vista: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\
Copy ALL of the files and folders of your existing profile into the FirefoxPortable -> Data -> profile folder (make sure to delete everything in that directory if it is not already empty):
That’s all, the next time you start Firefox Portable it should run your existing profile.

–Overview–

That is basically what I do each time that I test out Firefox builds. Similar things can be done using the portable versions of Thunderbird and many other applications. After you have done it once you’ll be able to do the whole process in a matter of seconds because it really is that easy. The thing that takes the longest to do is download the files. Enjoy!

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