CyberNet Classics - CyberNotes

Google Calendar Button Generator

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:14:01 -0600

This article was written on December 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Sunday’s Summary

What was going on this week at CyberNet News and Learn Firefox? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

Monday:CyberNet’s Birthday Bash Giveaway EXTRAVAGANZA!
Tuesday:Delay Startup Programs
Wednesday:Give Firefox a Vista Feel
Thursday:Sync Files Between Remote Computers
Friday:The Best Big Bang Theory Quotes
Saturday: Find the Best Auctions eBay Has to Offer

Nightly Tester Tools – Forces old extensions to be compatible with newer versions of Firefox.

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:55:53 -0600

This article was written on May 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

Sunday’s Summary

What was going on this week at CyberNet News and Learn Firefox? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

Monday: Apple Front Row vs. Windows Media Center
Tuesday: Get the Best eBay Deals
Wednesday: Top 10 Firefox Extensions to Impress Your Friends
Thursday: Track a Stolen Computer
Friday: Geeky Humor Continues…
Saturday: FixYa – Find Answers to Your Technical Questions

Bookmark Permissions – Adjust permission settings for each of your bookmarks.

A Reminder About CyberNotes…

CyberNotes: Ever Wonder How To….?

Ashley — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:43:59 -0600

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

Weekend Website

About a year ago, we wrote about a site called Expert Village which claimed to the the World’s Largest How-to Video Site. They have a team of experts who contribute videos explaining how to do something in categories like automotive, beauty & fashion, and parenting. It’s a great site and they have all kinds of information available to their site visitors. Their only limitation is that videos have to be done by one of their “experts” which in some ways is nice because you know the information is likely accurate. Today we’re going to take a look at another “how-to” video site called “Wonder How To.” They allow anybody to upload videos which too has its benefits.

What is “Wonder How To?”

“Wonder How To” is a site dedicated to providing a directory of free how-to videos. They say they have more than 100,000 videos as of March of this year, so they do have a good collection of videos that will help you figure out how to do something. They’re adding thousands of videos each week which means their collection continues to expand greatly.

Anybody can upload a video but that doesn’t mean that it will be displayed on the site. They do reject some videos if they’re a “glaring self promotion” or if they are excerpts from for-sale DVD’s that “serve as a “sneak peak.” They also try to keep the site safe for a broad audience which means that they do censor clips as well. Users help with this process by flagging inappropriate content.

If you want to submit a video, just look for the “submit” tab at the top of the page. You’ll be able to provide a url for a how-to video and then choose which category and sub-category the movie should go under.

Searching for videos

One of the most important aspects of “Wonder How To” is their search feature because without it, you wouldn’t be able to find what you’re looking for. Because of this they’ve added options to refine your search so that you can find exactly what you’re looking for.

I decided to put the search to the test, so in the main search box I typed “Photoshop” to look for different tutorials on how to do things in Photoshop. Once I typed in my key word, it pulled up 1,0001 different videos that matched my query. Photoshop is a pretty broad topic though, so I decided to refine my search further which I could do in the left sidebar.

Because I was looking for information on Software, I chose that, and then once again I was given options to refine again. This time I clicked “Photoshop” and then I was given different topics that I could refine the search by again.

Another simple way to search for videos is just by browsing their home page. They’ve got all kinds of great videos featured on there including recently added videos, overlooked great videos, and today’s popular videos. You can also click on “Categories” at the top of the page to sift through videos divided into categories. Each day they also have a “clip of the day” to watch.

The Community/Building a Profile

If you decide that you want to get social, you can join the community and like other sites out there, create a profile for yourself. They compile some lists of the members on the community page like top submitters, top watchers, top graders (those who rate the videos), top commenters, top playlisters (we’ll explain Playlists in a minute) and most popular (those with the most profile visits).

Make a Playlist

With how-to videos, you wouldn’t think that they’d offer you the option to create playlists but they do. People can put a bunch of their favorite how-to videos together in list form and they can be made public or private.

Wrapping it up…

If you ever need guidance on how to do something, definitely check out Wonder How To because they have an ever growing selection of videos that will guide you through the process on just about anything you could think of.

CyberNotes Celebrates 2 Years and 700+ articles

CyberNotes: Ultimate Computer Monitor Set-ups

Ashley — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:28:43 -0600

This article was written on October 16, 2006 by CyberNet.

Million Dollar Monday

Just when you’ve bought yourself a 24″ monitor and you think you have the biggest and the best computer monitor available, they come out with a 30″. The size of single monitors has reached new levels, and now so has the multiple monitor set-ups by using 6, even 7 monitors! These ultimate monitor set-ups using the latest flat-panel technology comes at quite the hefty price as well (although much more affordable today versus 5 years ago). Those who are already using such a set-up will tell you it’s worth it! Take a look at these set-ups from digitaltigers.com - we’ll start with the cheapest and most affordable first (which also means smallest).

The first set-up, the Zenview Arena 21s has six screens total with a 21.3″ center panel. It includes:

(1) 21.3″ arena panel with 1600×1200 resolution
(2) 17″ wing panels with 1024X1280 portrait resolution
(3) 17″ top panels with 1280×1024 resolution
Price – around $3,700.00

The second set-up, the Zenview Arena 24s also uses six screens total with a 24.3″ center panel screen. It includes:

(1) 24″ arena panel with 1920 x 1200 resolution
(2) 17″ wing panels with 1280X1024 resolution
(3) 19″ top panels with 1280X1024 resolution
Price – around $4,599.00

With the third set-up, the Zenview Arena Elite, you’ll be viewing 7 screens with a 24.3″ center panel. This one is huge! It includes:

(1) 24″ arena panel with 1920×1200 resolution
(2) 21.3″ wing panels with 1600×1200 resolution
(4) 19″ top panels with 1280×1024 resolution
Price – around $6,899.00

The last set-up is the largest and most expensive Zenview Arena Ultra HD and utilizes six gigantic screens! It includes:

(1) 30″ arena panel with 2560×1600 resolution
(2) 20.1″ wing panels with 1200×1600 portrait resolution
(3) 20.1″ top panels with 1600×1200 resolution
Price – around $7,499.00

These are undoubtedly huge “ultimate” monitor set-ups, perhaps a little excessive for the average Joe. So, who would actually purchase such a set-up? Maybe a hardcore gamer, or a stock trader would want the massive display. For most people, one monitor will do the trick, and if not one monitor, two at most. These set-ups take you to a whole new level. You can check them out at digitaltigers.com.

Asus Working on an All-in-one Eee PC?

CyberNotes: Getting Your Taskbar Onto Another Monitor

CyberNotes: We’re Giving Away 2 Licenses for MojoPac!

Ashley — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:26:24 -0600

This article was written on December 23, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

Read this to find out how you can get a free license key for MojoPac… we have 2 to give away!

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take your computer with you no matter where you are? If you have a laptop, this isn’t so difficult, but when you rely on a desktop computer, this becomes an issue. It’s always nice to have all of the applications that you want, the music that you like, and of course all of your important documents, files, and settings. Of course there are the portable apps, but what about your documents, or your music library? Being able to take your computer with you no matter where you are isn’t so difficult with the use of MojoPac. MojoPac makes use of devices such as an iPod, USB Drive, or any other USB 2.0 storage device to bring your applications and documents with you no matter what computer you’re on. There is bound to be a use for MojoPac for anyone; from the student to the professional.

–What is MojoPac–

MojoPac acts as it’s own PC which means that once you install it, you’ll need to install all of the applications on top of Mojo that you’re wanting to use. The Mojopac website offers a great demo that gives you an idea of what to expect while using it. Using Mojo gives you the portability of a laptop and allows you to have your applications, settings, and data with you no matter what computer you’re using. Besides acting as a portable computer, there are other versatile uses for MojoPac. If you share your PC, this is a great way to have your personalized setup at all times. This would mean that your browser settings, files, etc. would remain as you always had them.

When using your iPod, you’re able to install iTunes and QuickTime so that you can download your favorite songs and Podcasts. You don’t have to be on just one computer to have access to your iTunes account (but you will need to have a copy of the songs on the storage device in order to synchronize them with your iPod as well). If you’re at work or school and you’d like to download a song, no problem! Another awesome idea is to use it as your personal PC backup. You never know when your computer might crash, and your files are gone for good. MojoPac would serve as a reliable back-up. If you’re big into gaming, you can install your games and have them with you at all times, ready to play on any computer. If you typically use your laptop, and the battery has died, you can take your USB 2.0 portable device and move to another computer to continue your work.

They have created a list of applications that will most likely work well with MojoPac. It is divided into categories with a good list of apps in each category. Of course, there are others that potentially will work, however these are the tested applications. The categories with a sample of applications are:

Business and Productivity (Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop)
Games (World of Warcraft, Warcraft III, PartyPoker Client)
Communication and Instant Message Clients (AIM, Google Talk, Trillian)
Browsers (IE6, Firefox 1.5, Opera 9)
Multimedia Applications (iTunes 6&7, Windows Media Player, Winamp 5)
Photo and Graphics Editing (Picasa, Flickr Uplodr, AutoCAD 2007)
Email Clients (Outlook 2003, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5)
Developer Applications (MySQL 5.0, Visual Studio 2003)
Security (Anonymizer, Spybot, Ad-Aware Personal SE 1.06)
Miscellaneous (Yahoo Widgets, Google Earth, Nero 7, Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006)

–Download/Cost–

Currently, they are offering a free download trial to get a taste of what MojoPac is all about. The product is free to use for 30 days or 200 boots- whichever comes first. The trial can then be converted into the licensed version after you make the purchase and enter in the product key. Pricing is as follows:

Holiday Special: $29.99 for one license, up to three additional licenses for $14.99 each.
Regular Pricing: $49.99 for one license, up to three additional licenses for$24.99 each.

Licensing is per USB 2.0 storage device. That means that if you’re wanting to use it for an iPod and a USB Drive, you’ll need two different licenses.

The holiday special is really a great deal, and if you’re interested, you may want to buy now before it goes back to regular pricing.

– System Requirements –

Alright, so what are the system requirements? First, you’ll need your USB 2.0 storage device. If you’re wanting to use an iPod, essentially any of the latest iPod’s will work. The exception to this is the iPod shuffle, you’ll be out of luck with this device. If you’re using a USB hard drive, you’ll need a top-tier high performing drive. They recommend Seagate, Western Digital, or Hitachi brands. When using a USB Flash Drive, they recommend Memorex, Sandisk, OCZ, or Lexar. You must be using USB 2.0, otherwise Mojo won’t work.

The minimum storage that you will need is 128MB. However, you’ll have to keep in mind what you’re installing and how much room that will take up. For example, if you’re using Microsoft Office 2003, you’ll need 600 MB alone for that. They recommend a 2GB device or larger.

For the Host PC that you’ll be using, it will need to running Windows XP (Home/Pro (sp1, sp2), Media Center Edition (2003, 2005) or Tablet PC). They also recommend 512MB of Ram, although 256MB could get you by.

– Security –

One of the first things I thought about when I read about Mojopac was security. If I’m placing all of my important documents onto a shared computer at work, school etc., I want to be sure that it will be secure. Mojo appears to have thought this all through! First of all, it is password protected which means that if you were to ever lose your device, a password would be needed get access to your information. More importantly, anything that you have on your MojoPac will not be stored on the Host PC that you’re using. This includes settings, documents, etc. They also offer protection from viruses with a “layer of isolation.” If you’re hopping from computer to computer, you never know what type of virus protection they use, if any.

– In a Nutshell–

Mojopac gives you unbelievable portability with the capability to take your applications, settings, and data with you to any device no mater where you are. Your data is never left behind, and all of your applications and files are password protected to keep everything secure. System Requirements are pretty basic which makes this accessible to anyone that has a PC operating on XP. If you’re interested, take advantage of their holiday special and save $20.00! Whether you’re a student, parent, or a professional, there is bound to be at least one way you can use MojoPac.

How to get your FREE license for MojoPac!

We are fortunate enough to have 2 license keys for the complete version of MojoPac that we can’t wait to give-away! All you have to do is tell us in the comments below why it would be useful for you…that shouldn’t be difficult! We’ll randomly pick two people that submitted a ”legitimate” response (just saying “I want it!” is an example of what not to do). It doesn’t need to be long, we only expect a sentence or two. The winners will be announced on Wednesday morning (December 27) after the holiday rush has slowed down a bit.

Remember to include your email address in your comment. This is how we will send you the license key (we already have them, ready to give-away!).

MojoPac Homepage
MojoPac Demo

Thanks for the tip Chris!

Related Posts:

And the MojoPac License Winners are……

Mojopac Freedom – Make Any App Portable

Your Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary

Save Money When Purchasing Multiple Licenses of Vista

Don’t Forget…UltraEdit Giveaway Ends Tomorrow

CyberNotes: An Early Look At Maxthon 2

Ryan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:14:07 -0600

This article was written on August 23, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

New Web browsers seem to popping up left and right lately. Internet Explorer 7 is on the home stretch which means all of the IE-based Web browsers need to beef things up to make sure they don’t get outdone by the Microsoft team. A few weeks ago we took a glimpse at the upcoming Avant Browser 11 and now Maxthon seems to be quietly working on version 2.

Before I go over some of the features and show you a few screenshots I will let you know that you can download this preview version yourself. However, you will need to get a Maxthon Passport in order to even open the browser. Alright, now onto the features…

My first impression of starting up the browser was how similar this looks to IE7. Upon further examination I noticed that it is different but the tab bar has a lot of icons that look amazingly similar, including a thumbnail view of your open tabs:

The feed reader, pictured above, is nothing extraordinary. One nice thing about it is that you can choose your update interval instead of the normal 1-hour refresh cycle that many feed readers have.

Just like the new Avant Browser, Maxthon 2 will let users store their bookmarks online so that they will follow you to any computer. You can always disable this feature, like I did, because I prefer to use an online bookmarking system such as del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks.

My favorite feature with Maxthon 2 would have to be the wonderful organization of the options. Instead of having the typical pop-up window it utilizes the tabs to let you customize the browser. At first I wondered how they handled a window that was too small to display all of the options, but then after shrinking the size of the browser I noticed they just use scrollbars. Here is what the options looks like:

I can’t wait to see Maxthon release this browser after they fix some of the bugs, like the missing Stop button. ~~No, they didn’t combine it with the Refresh button like I originally thought they would have.~~ The Stop button has been combined with the Refresh button but it doesn’t appear to work for me. However, it is far from being complete since it is considered to be a pre-alpha build so they still have plenty of time.

Google Invests $1 Million in Maxthon Web Browser

Maxthon 2 Released as they near 100 Million Downloads

Maxthon Releases Version 1.5.1 Of Its Internet Explorer Browser

Maxthon Gains Popularity In China

CyberNotes: Must-Have Firefox Tab Manager

Ryan — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:08:18 -0600

This article was written on October 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

It’s not often that I come across a Firefox extension that does so much that it actually warrants its own CyberNotes article, but Tab Kit is one of those extensions. The only thing is that the extension is so new that it’s still in the Mozilla Sandbox, and therefore requires an extra step or two to actually get it installed.

I’ve got instructions below on how you can get it installed, but you might want to first take a look through the review to see if you want to give it a shot. I’ve also tried this extension in Firefox 3, but couldn’t get everything to work properly. The developer has said that there are plans to make it compatible with Firefox 3, but right now it will only work with Firefox 2.

–Installing the Extension–

The Tab Kit extension is located in the Mozilla Sandbox, which is essentially a holding room for extensions until they become popular. To access the Sandbox you need to have a Mozilla account, but if you really don’t feel like creating one here is a generic username and password you can use:

Username: bugmenot@mailinator.com
Password: bugmenot

–Tab Bar Orientation–

With this extension you can choose how you want to orient the Tab Bar. It can be placed on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser. I prefer to have it along the left side, but that is just a personal preference. Here’s what it looks like both ways:

Tab Bar on Side:

Tab Bar on Top:

–Tab Grouping–

One of the most prominent features offered by the Tab Kit extension is its ability to group the tabs. A group is signified by unique colors that is assigned to it. You can set the tabs to automatically or manually be grouped based on one of two conditions:

By domain – All articles by the same domain are grouped together. For example, all YouTube.com sites will be grouped.
By opener – Tabs are grouped by the site that opened them. A good example of this is if you go to Digg and open a bunch of the external links (a.k.a. the ones outside of Digg.com) that have been posted there. Despite each one being from a different domain all of those links will be grouped together.

Note: Any groups that are created will be fully restored when you restart the browser, given that you have the session restore capabilities enabled in the browser.

The great thing about the groups is that they can be contracted down to just one tab. To show just how useful that is I put together a video demonstration of the expanding/contracting capabilities of Tab Kit, with the Tab Bar located on both the top and on the side. The groupings are done “by opener,” and you’ll probably see why it is nice having the Tab Bar on the side:

–Tab Sorting–

The Tab Kit context menu is extremely powerful, and one of the best features it offers are all of the sorting options. In a single click you can sort all of the tabs by address, last loaded, last viewed, order of creation, origin, or the page title. This is something that any neat freak will love, and it can be a real time saver if you find yourself with dozens of tabs open.

–Settings–

Tab Kit has a ton of settings that practically guarantee it will do exactly what you want it to. I didn’t want to list everything that you can customize so I took five screenshots of all the configuration screens:

–And More–

You thought that was it? Did you see how many settings there were? There are actually a bunch of small things that Tab Kit does which I haven’t mentioned. What made me really happy was that it included an option to enable the mouse rocker gesture. That’s when you hold the right mouse button down, and click the left one to go backwards in the browser (or visa versa). This setting is disabled by default so, but it can easily be turned on in the Control section of the settings.

So go tryout the extension, and I’m sure that every person who downloads this will bring it one step closer to being brought out of the Mozilla Sandbox!

CyberNotes: Your Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary

CyberNotes: Creating A "Sandbox" To Test Firefox Extensions

CyberNotes: Share a Firefox Profile Between Ubuntu and Windows

CyberNotes: The Best Bookmarklets for your Browser!

Ryan — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:44:06 -0600

This article was written on December 27, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

As websites continue to become more and more AJAXified I believe that bookmarklets are going to become a larger driving force. Some of you may not be familiar with bookmarklets, so I was trying to think of a good way I could explain them. When I stumbled upon the Wikipedia article I thought it couldn’t be said any better:

A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be stored as a URL within a bookmark in most popular web browsers, or within hyperlinks on a web page. Because Internet Explorer uses the term favorites instead of bookmarks, bookmarklets are also less commonly called favelets by users.
Bookmarklets can be saved and used like normal web page bookmarks. Therefore, they are simple “one-click” tools that can add substantial functionality to the browser. For example, they can:
Modify the way a web page is displayed within the browser (e.g., change the font size, background color, etc.).
Extract data from a web page (e.g., hyperlinks, images, text, etc.).
Jump directly to a search engine, with the search term(s) input either from a new dialog box, or from a selection already made on a web page.
Submit the page to a validation service.

There are all kinds of services that provide bookmarks, especially for browsers that don’t support extensions or add-ons, like Opera. The problem is trying to find ones that are actually useful to you. Below I have categorized the different bookmarklets depending on what you are trying to do. I have quite an extensive collection of bookmarklets that I have gathered over the years with my two primary sources being SquareFree and OperaWiki. I’ll be mashing the two sources together to bring you my favorites, and each one will have images signaling which browsers they work with (Firefox 2 , Internet Explorer 7 , and Opera 9 ).

Note: To use any of the following bookmarklets just hold down the left mouse button and drag the hyperlink to the bookmark toolbar in your browser.

–Hyperlink Manipulation–

Color code links
Makes all internal links on a site red, external links blue, and links pointing to the current page (internal bookmarks) orange.
Hide visited hyperlinks
Removes all hyperlinks that you have already visited on a site, therefore making it easier to see which links you still need to open.
\s\)\]]/.exec(unescape(t)); if(p) x.href=p[0]; } else if (x.onmouseover&&x.onmouseout){x.onmouseover(); if (window.status && window.status.indexOf('://')!=-1)x.href=window.status; x.onmouseout(); } x.onmouseover=null; x.onmouseout=null; }})();">Rewrite redirects
This script will rewrite all URL’s to point directly to the source instead of routing through a redirect URL.
=0; --e) if (isDigit(L.charAt(e))) { for(s=e-1; s>=0; --s) if (!isDigit(L.charAt(s))) break; break; } ++s; if (e<0) return; oldNum = L.substring(s,e+1); newNum = "" + (parseInt(oldNum,10) + IB); while (newNum.length < oldNum.length) newNum = "0" + newNum; location.href = L.substring(0,s) + newNum + L.slice(e+1); })();">Increment URL
Increases the last number in the URL by 1. This will often work with sites where you go through multiple pages, and therefore simulates pressing the “Next” link.
=0; --e) if (isDigit(L.charAt(e))) { for(s=e-1; s>=0; --s) if (!isDigit(L.charAt(s))) break; break; } ++s; if (e<0) return; oldNum = L.substring(s,e+1); newNum = "" + (parseInt(oldNum,10) + IB); while (newNum.length < oldNum.length) newNum = "0" + newNum; location.href = L.substring(0,s) + newNum + L.slice(e+1); })();">Decrement URL
Decreases the last number in the URL by 1. This will often work with sites where you go through multiple pages, and therefore simulates pressing the “Previous” link.
Generate TinyURL
Creates a TinyURL for the current site.
\s\)\]]/); if(u>=0) { M=n.splitText(u); R=M.splitText(RegExp.lastMatch.length); A=document.createElement("A"); A.href=M.data; A.appendChild(M); R.parentNode.insertBefore(A,R); } }else if(n.tagName!="STYLE" && n.tagName!="SCRIPT" && n.tagName!="A")for(c=0;x=n.childNodes[c];++c)F(x); } })();">Linkify
Make all plain-text URL’s into hyperlinks.

–Form Manipulation–

View password
Shows password field in plain text instead of asterisks.
Remember passwords
Some sites try to block passwords from being stored by using the “autocomplete=off” option in the form. If a website is blocking the storage of a password using this option (such as Yahoo! Mail) then it will remove it from the HTML so that the browser can store the password.

–Appearance Manipulation–

"+(j==3?"third-party "+t:t)+"";N.parentNode.replaceChild(b,N);}}}catch(E){r=0}return r}R(self);var i,x;for(i=0;x=frames[i];++i)R(x)})()">Remove bloat
Eliminates all occurrences of Flash, Java, music, and third-party iframes.
Disable StyleSheets
Turns off all stylesheets which might be useful for hard-to-read websites.
L)i=L; y.status=i+"/"+L } if (speed>0) { e=document.documentElement.innerHTML; L=e.length; i=0; y=open(); x=y.document; T(); } })()">Slowly load the site
Choose how many characters to load on the site each second. Might be useful to test what your site looks like on a dial-up connection by setting the character limit to something low.
Duplicate tab
Opens the current site in a new tab.
=0){spannode=document.createElement("SPAN");spannode.style.backgroundColor="yellow";middlebit=node.splitText(pos);endbit=middlebit.splitText(len);middleclone=middlebit.cloneNode(true);spannode.appendChild(middleclone);middlebit.parentNode.replaceChild(spannode,middlebit);++count;skip=1;}}else if( node.nodeType==1&& node.childNodes && node.tagName.toUpperCase()!="SCRIPT" && node.tagName.toUpperCase!="STYLE"){for (var child=0; child < node.childNodes.length; ++child){child=child+searchWithinNode(node.childNodes[child], te, len);}}return skip;}window.status="Searching for '"+text+"'...";searchWithinNode(document.body, text.toUpperCase(), text.length);window.status="Found "+count+" occurrence"+(count==1?"":"s")+" of '"+text+"'.";})();">Highlight search term (submitted by “edwest”)
Prompts for a search term that you would like to highlight on the current page.
Ultimate Highlight (submitted by “Chad-)”)
Prompts for a search term to be highlighted. It will also display a box in the upper-right corner of the screen with the number of results on the page and a link to start a new search.

–Cookie Manipulation–

Remove site’s cookies
Deletes all cookies created by the current site.
View site’s cookies
View all cookies created by the current site.
C.length?s(c,-1):q.match(C)?(s(c,1),z=a+"
"+z+"';document.cookie='"+a):0}v.write(z+"';[].v\">my "+h+" cookies")">Transfer site’s cookies
Transfer cookies created by the current site to a different browser. This bookmarklet will give you the necessary code to re-create a specific cookie in a different browser.

–Other Bookmarklets–

Calculator
A popup window where you can enter in a simple calculation such as “7 + 4″ and have it return the sum of those two numbers.
ASCII table
Shows the ASCII character table in a new window
WebColors
Shows the 216 “browser-safe” colors with their corresponding hex codes.
Scroll by Dragging (submitted by “Chad-)”)
Executing this bookmarklet will turn the cursor into a scroller and executing it again will return it back to normal.

There you go…now you can start to utilize the power of bookmarklets. If you’re a Firefox user, than many of the bookmarklets mentioned above can also be found in extensions, such as the Linkify. Personally I prefer to use the bookmarklets so that I keep my extensions list to a minimum, and also because I don’t want an extension analyzing every site that I visit when it really isn’t necessary.

There are many more bookmarklets available, so I tried to keep the list concise, yet thorough. If you know of a bookmarklet that you can’t live without, let us know so that we can add it to the list.

Update:

We have written Best Bookmarklets Part 2.

Related Posts:

Manage your Bookmarklet’s with Blummy

CyberNotes: Customizing Opera To Fit Your Needs

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

We Now Have 1,000+ Registered Users and 380 CyberMarked Articles!

Dynamic Templates Homepage (Download)

CyberNotes: Dynamic Text Templates in Live Writer

Ryan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:34:59 -0600

This article was written on September 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Last Thursday we showed you how to make Windows Live Writer portable, and today we are going to show you how to create powerful text templates that will save you incredible amounts of time. Unfortunately the plugin you’ll need to install, Dynamic Templates, won’t work with the portable version.

Dynamic Templates was created by Joe Cheng who happens to be one of the primary Live Writer developers. For that reason I had expected the plugin to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be this good!

As of two-weeks ago I was using the free Post2Blog software for writing all of my articles, and it had a built-in template manager. It was designed to let users quickly enter in some HTML code that would otherwise be found repetitious. It was limited to doing what Dynamic Templates can do in the first example below, so if the plugin doesn’t seem special from that demo make sure you move on to the others!

Before we get started with the four demonstrations I want to give you a heads up that there is some C# code involved in some of the examples. I’ve never actually programmed in C# before, but I’ve done 7 or 8 other languages so I was quickly able to pick up on the basics. The Dynamic Templates page has some instructions on how to insert the syntax, but you’ll probably learn the ropes from the videos.

–HTML Templates–

This is a basic HTML template that is what most of you will probably want. We use these all the time to insert things we frequently use in posts, such as our daily CyberNotes logo. That way we don’t have to insert the image every time we want to use it.

Code:

Time Saving Tuesday

–Selection Formatting–

The Dyanmic Template plugin has a command, "_selection", that lets you insert the highlighted text anywhere in your template. You might be asking yourself how that would be useful, but I think you’ll be surprised at how many things you can do with it. In this example we show you how to wrap multiple HTML tags around the text that we’ve highlighted thereby creating a one-click colorful header.

Code:

<%= _selection %>

–Selection Processing–

This is using the same "_selection" command mentioned in the previous demonstration, but now it is really starting to tie in some of the C# programming. More specifically this code will send the highlighted text through an HTML filter which will transform any plain text HTML tags into valid HTML.

Code:

<%= HtmlDecode(_selection) %>

–Advanced Video Insertion–

This demonstration shows you why I love the plugin so much, but you’ve got to know a little bit of programming to completely understand what it’s doing. Here I setup the plugin to prompt the user for a Google Video ID and the desired width/height for the embedded video. If no dimensions are entered in it will fall back on some defaults which can be designated in the code.

Tip: This code can easily be configured for use with any video service, but sites like YouTube specify the ID, height, and width twice in the embed code. Make sure you replace all necessary instances if you want it to work properly.

Code (there are also a few variables which you can get from the video):

<% if(width == "")width = "400"; %> <% if(height == "")height = "326"; %> px; height:<%= height %>px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=<%= ID %>&hl=en" flashvars="">

–Overview–

While the plugin is very complete in my eyes there are a few things that could make this even better:

Hotkeys! Oh man, it would be really sweet if you could assign hotkeys to some of the templates you use the most often.
I would like the option to set the size of the window which lists all of your templates. I have about two-dozen templates, and I don’t really like having to scroll to get to some of them.

To wrap things up Dynamic Templates is a great way to remove the strain of repetitive tasks, but to harness the true power you’ll need to sit down for an hour or so and learn how to write code that works well with it. Believe me, you won’t be sorry!

Windows Live Writer now has XHTML Support

CyberNotes: Making Windows Live Writer Portable

Microsoft Is About To Release Windows Live Writer

Download Microsoft’s New Windows Live Writer

CyberNotes: Netvibes Saves You Some Time

Ryan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:31:21 -0600

This article was written on October 17, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I used to be a user of Google Personalized Homepage quite religiously because of the extensive list of modules that they have available but I recently decided to make the switch to Netvibes. I didn’t think it would be that easy because there were some “Google only” modules that I thought I would miss, such as the one for Google Reader and the one for Google Calendar.

I made the switch about a month ago when Google released the tabs feature for the Personalized Homepage. Yeah, it is a little ironic that Google releases a cool new feature and that is what made me switch to Netvibes. Primarily I changed because I heard so often that Netvibes was better, but I had not given it a fair shot yet. On top of that Netvibes released some stats that said they have over 5 million users…which definitely shows that they are doing something right.

Like most people who start using Netvibes you will find a majority of the best modules located in the “Add Content” sidebar. Besides for modules they also have some of the most popular feeds in the Feed Directory, and CyberNet happens to be located in the Internet – Web 2.0 -> Web 2.0 directory.

Here is a quick overview of the actual modules that I chose from the sidebar:

Weather
Webnote

To Do List
Calendar (I use the iCal address from my Google Calendars)
Blog Search
Web Search
Video Search
GMail
Meebo

One of the most useful features in Netvibes is probably the built-in feed reader. After you add a feed it will look just like the one that your Google Homepage has except when you click on a title you will receive a full-screen view of the articles from that site:

The last thing that I wanted to cover was making your own modules. Maybe you won’t be able to find something that does exactly what you are looking for but if you have a little programming skill then you can probably make your own module without any troubles. Even I created a module that will retrieve your FeedBurner feed subscriber numbers for the current day and the previous day. It utilizes a feature that FeedBurner offers and as long as a site makes their numbers publicly available you can track them, there are no usernames or passwords needed:

Note: My Feedburner module is now available at Netvibes.

I think you would probably be surprised at how may sites use FeedBurner. Slashdot and Gizmodo both use FeedBurner but they pay extra in order to have “their own” feed URL instead of one that obviously points to FeedBurner. Unfortunately they have blocked people from viewing the number of subscribers but there are several sites that it still works for such as GigaOm. They don’t publish the number of subscribers on their site but using this method you can see that they have around 35,000.

Overall, I have to admit that I am much more impressed with Netvibes than I was with Google Personalized Homepage. It has a lot more to offer and they are consistent about adding new and useful things. Netvibes is going to be a keeper for me and I would like to thank to everyone who recommended that I try it!

Netvibes Startpages Get Google Search

Netvibes Gets A Few New Features

Netvibes Ginger Launches to Public

Netvibes Introduces Several New Features

CyberNotes: Facts and Photos of Bill Gates’ House

Ashley — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:26:54 -0600

This article was written on September 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

A few weeks ago for our Microsoft Monday feature, we posted an article titled “Little Known Facts about Bill Gates.” While we all know Bill Gates as the King of Microsoft, there were still some things many people didn’t know – like his SAT score was 1590 and the top score for the test is 1600. Continuing on the same theme of Bill Gates, today we’re going to take a look inside his house with some photos and facts.

First, for starters, Bill Gates’ house is in Medina, Washington on a 5.12 acre lot and overlooks Lake Washington. According to Wikipedia, Bill originally bought the land back in 1988 for a measly $2 million, and the mansion was built over seven years. By 1995 it was complete. As you can imagine, this is one wired house filled with new technology.

View of the house from the air:

One of the most interesting things you’d experience if you lived in this house is that you wear a pin containing a microchip which acts as your ID. When you walk into a room, lighting, sound, and temp controls are customized for you. Any high resolution display that you walk by will know that you’re there, and your favorite art is displayed. And if you’re getting a phone call, only the phone nearest to you will ring. This is all thanks to the pin with the microchip.

Now we’ll take a look at some of the rooms in this house:

Library

If you were to peek inside the domed library, you’d find two “secret” bookcases with one of them containing a bar. Here you could sit in front of the fireplace and admire the Codex Leicester belonging to Leonardo da Vinci. Gates paid $30.8 million for it back in 1994.

Pool House

The pool building is 3,900 square feet and has a 17 foot by 60 foot swimming pool. While you’re swimming, you can listen to your favorite music underwater with the underwater music system.

Reception Hall

This is where Gates plays hosts to VIP’s and other social events. The room features a large video wall made up of 24 individual screens measuring 40 inches each. At 2,300 feet, this room is capable of holding up to 200 people for a cocktail party, or 150 people for a sit-down dinner.

–Random Facts–

The house is 50,000 square feet
In 2005, the house and land were assessed at $200 million
Annually, Gates pays nearly $1 million dollars in taxes for the property
Over 64 km of optical fiber was used in the house
300 workers at one time were working on the house – 104 of them were electricians
Every door handle in the house was custom made and cost $2,000 each
There are no visible electric outlets in the house

Additional rooms in the house:

Trampoline Room
I’m not quite sure why you’d need a trampoline room, but I suppose when you’re Bill Gates and you’re the richest man in the world, you can have nearly anything you want. Part of his exercise facilities includes a trampoline room with a 20 foot ceiling.
Formal Dining Room
Should Bill have 24 of his closest friends coming over for dinner, they can dine in his formal dining room in front of the fireplace. It’s on the third floor and has plenty of windows so that guests can enjoy the view. It’s 1,000 square feet.
Underground Garage
Apparently Gates likes to park his cars underground. Part of this mansion is a 6,300 square foot underground garage. This is only one of three garages that are on the property, and it’s got room for 10+ cars.

–Random Facts–

Hidden cameras are all over the property
Floor sensors can track you – up to 6 inches
As Gates is on his way home from work, he can fill his tub with water to his desired temp so it’s ready when he gets home
Woodwork in this house (which is abundant) is flawless
There are glass windows galore, and 7 varieties of stone were used to build the house
The actual “living” space is modest
All flooring is heated including the driveway and sidewalks
Much of the house is built underground into a hill so it looks smaller than it is

–Additional Pictures–

–Virtual Video Tour–

–Wrapping it up–

So there you have it, a look inside the mansion of Bill Gates. Anybody want to swap houses with Bill? If you want more information about some of the rooms in the house, this virtual tour from U.S. News (while old) is an excellent source. Just click on the part of the house you’re wanting to learn more about.

Sources: Download Squad, U.S. News, and itmweb

Bill Gates Falls to 3rd Richest Man

Original Microsoft Crew Reunites For Photo

CyberNotes: Little Known Facts about Bill Gates

Bill Gates CES Keynote From Engadget

CyberNotes: How To Reveal Vista’s Boot Screen

Ryan — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:22:19 -0600

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

Tutorial Thursday

More and more people must be using Windows Vista because I am starting to receive emails on a daily basis with questions or regarding cool features. There have been a few different people asking how they can replace the Windows Vista boot screen with something other than just the progress bar. Of course it can be done just like in other versions of Windows but if you are just looking for something a little more graphical it is pretty easy.

Microsoft may not have gotten around to updating the primary boot screen but you can get decent looking boot screen without having to mess intensely with system files (there is a screenshot of the boot screen towards the end of this post):

Go to the Start menu and in the Search Box type msconfig and press Enter.
When the System Configuration window appears switch to the Boot tab and check the box that says No GUI Boot.
Press OK and you will be prompted to reboot your computer. Go ahead and while your computer is rebooting you’ll notice the new boot screen (sorry the quality isn’t that great but I don’t have this installed on a virtual machine so I had to use my camera):
After your computer fully restarts a window will popup saying that you altered the boot process yada yada yada but just check the box so that you won’t see the message every time you start Windows.

I had completely forgotten to mention this because I have been using it since Beta 2. Hope everyone likes it though.

CyberNet’s Year In Review: October 2006

Vista SP1 Screenshots and Features

Apple Boot Camp 1.0.2 Beta Released

Tutorial For Triple Booting Vista, XP, And Ubuntu

CyberNotes: Find Fun Events in Your Town

Ashley — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:19:07 -0600

This article was written on March 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Do you find yourself doing the same thing weekend after weekend? Maybe you go to the same restaurant or play the same game over and over again? If you’d like to change up your normal weekend routine, you’ll want to checkout Going.com, a local event-based social networking community.

What is Going.com

Going.com is all about helping you find fun things to do around town. You can also post events for others to see. In general, they tend to cater to those in their 20′s, but really, anybody could benefit from their site. Another big part of the site is meeting new people who will be attending the same events as you. Going acts as a way to both meet new people and find new things to do.

Cities They Cover

At this point in time, they only service six different cities which include:

Chicago
New York
Boston
Los Angeles
San Francisco
Miami

As you’ll see once we get explaining all that Going.com offers, it’s really a great service and so hopefully they’ll be expanding to your city soon.

Features

You do not have to sign up for an account to benefit from Going.com. You just won’t have access to all of their features. Here’s a quick run-through on some of their features:

If you find an event that you’re interested in, just mark it as something you’re interested in and they’ll help you keep track of it
Receive a weekly newsletter with updates
Post your private Party or a public event and promote it
Keep track of events via RSS

Searching for an Event

Many young people don’t exactly have a lot of money, so entertainment has to be cheap. When you’re searching for an event, you can modify the search and only view events that are free, under $10, $10-$20, or over $20. This will help you find the perfect event that helps you stay within your budget.

Are you looking to get out on the town at a certain time during the day, maybe between 5PM-8PM? Going allows you to select the time of day that you’ll be going out so that you can find events that are going on during that time. You can choose daytime, 5PM-8PM, 8PM-10PM, or late night.

Not everybody wants to be heading to a club on a Friday night. Events are broken down into different categories so that you can see only music events, only cultural events, etc. There are also editor’s picks which are fun too. Additionally, you can pick a specific date that you’re looking to get out and have fun on, and it will show only events happening on that day.

No matter what it is you’re looking to do and how much money you’re willing to spend, finding an event takes very little effort.

Events I Might Like

Another one of those perks to singing up to be a member is that you can get personalized events. Each time you read about an event, you can check “I like” or “Nope” that you don’t. Based upon this information, Going.com will come up with a list of events that you might like.

My Events

The “My Events” tab is personalized just for you and will help you keep track of your events. It’s a color coded calendar that divides all of your events into four different categories:

Events I’m going to
Events I like
Events I posted
Friends’ events

This way you can easily keep track of what your social schedule will be like. You can also export the calendar to Google Calendar, Outlook, or iCal which is an extra added convenience.

Photos & Groups

Those of you on Facebook or MySpace know how crazed people are with sharing their photos with others. Going wants you to share your photos too. Users can post photos from events that they attended so that other users can browse them. Additionally, users can tag someone in the photo by name. Thanks to privacy settings, you have control over who adds tags to your photos and which photos you can be tagged in.

If you’d like to talk more with those who will be attending the events, you can talk to them in any of the different groups that have been created. You can also create your own groups. Each group has a message board where people can talk and post comments.

Wrapping it Up

Going.com is a great place to go for when you’re wanting something to do and you’re just not sure what’s going on. As mentioned, the service isn’t available in every city out there, so hopefully they’ll be expanding in the future.

Search Public Events In Google Calendar

CyberNotes: Yelp! A Mix of Social Networking and Reviews

Add Google Calendar Events via Google Talk IM (Google Voice Required)

CyberNotes: How to Backup Gmail

Ryan — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:09:20 -0600

This article was written on August 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

There have been plenty of occasions where I have been left wondering if I had lost everything in my Gmail account. If you don’t know about any of those situations that I’m talking about, just view all of the past occurrences that we have written about. People have lost every email in their account numerous times, and how do you know that you’re not going to be next?

Honestly, I don’t think people ever really see the value in backing up their data. In the last few months we’ve had two hard drives completely crash leaving the data unrecoverable. One of the drives was for our website, and it could have been really devastating if we didn’t make nightly backups.

I really do hope you realize that in the blink of an eye your data could be gone, and you should take every precaution available to protect it. That’s why we’re presenting you with several different ways to backup your Gmail account, and some are easy while others can be a little more time consuming.

–Configuring POP Access–

A few of the solutions we reference below require that POP access is enabled in your Gmail account. This is a simple process, but I thought that I would mention it before we dive into anything. Here’s what you need to do to enable POP:

Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
Open the Forwarding and POP tab.
Select Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded).
Click Save Changes.

–Backup Gmail by Forwarding (only future emails)–

This is going to be the easiest thing that you can do, and could actually prove to be very useful. All this entails is forwarding all of your email messages from your current account to another one. I recommend forwarding to a Hotmail or Yahoo! account so that it is completely separate from Google, and then if Gmail isn’t accessible for some reason, you’ll be able to access your old mail.

Here’s what you need to do:

Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
Click Forwarding and POP along the top of the Settings box.
Enter the email address to which you’d like your messages forwarded.
Select the action you’d like your messages to take from the drop-down menu. You can choose to keep Gmail’s copy of the message in your inbox, or you can send it automatically to All Mail or Trash.
Click Save Changes.

If you only want to backup emails from a certain person, or mail that contains a certain word, you can try setting up some filters (video demo) to do the dirty work for you. That way the important stuff will get backed up.

–Backup Gmail with an Offline Application (past emails and future emails)–

The first solution that I’m going to talk about is probably the most common. All you have to do is setup Outlook, Thunderbird, or another email application to download the emails from your account. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

Enable POP access on your Gmail account using the steps outlined in the beginning of this article.
Now all you need to do is follow Google’s instructions on setting up your specific application. If you’re using Outlook 2003 there is a video tutorial available, or if you really know what you’re doing, all you’ll probably need is the port and server information found here.

Now once you get that all setup, your email application will begin downloading all of the email from Gmail. If you have a lot of email in your Gmail account, the process might take a short while. This is because Gmail only allows the download of messages in batches, and from my experience it will download a few hundred at a time.

–Backup Gmail to Another Gmail Account (past emails and future emails)–

This is an idea that you probably haven’t heard about before, but it is something that I’ve recommended to other people who don’t want to use a desktop application for backing up all of their emails. All you have to do is setup another Gmail account, and you’ll use Gmail’s new Mail Fetcher to retrieve all of the messages from your main account.

First enable the POP access for your main Gmail account that you want backed up by following the instructions earlier. Then from your secondary Gmail account configure the Mail Fetcher:

Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
Click Accounts along the top of the Settings box.
In the Get mail from other accounts section, click Add another mail account.
Enter the full email address of the account you’d like to access, then click Next Step.
Enter the email address to which you’d like your messages forwarded.
Now on this page you’ll need to enter the following information (screenshot below):
- Username is your email address including the @gmail.com at the end. You can also use a Google Apps account, and if that’s the case you still need to enter in your full email address.
- The POP server needs to be pop.gmail.com for this to work.
- Set the port number to 995, and then make sure the SSL box is checked below.
Click Add Account.
Choose the option you desire for being able to send mail as that address.

Here is a screenshot of what step 6 looks like (we’re using a Google Apps account that manages our site’s email):

After everything is setup, Gmail will go and retrieve all of your past emails. For some reason, a majority of mine were sent to the spam or trash folders, but I easily moved them around after they were finished downloading. Remember, Gmail allows bulk POP access requests in smaller batches so it might take a little while for all of your emails to get retrieved. I do recommend setting up some filters to organize the mail as it comes in though.

–Other Gmail Backup Solutions–

You may have thought that those are the only ways possible to backup your Gmail account, but that isn’t the case. Where there is a will, there is a way, and with the millions of Gmail users, people are bound to come up with some pretty unique stuff. Here are a few other solutions that I found which you might see being useful:

Backup Gmail using Fetchmail
This guide is brought to you by Lifehacker, and uses the POP access that we gave instructions for above. I wouldn’t exactly say it is for the faint of heart because it involves some command line work!
Backup Gmail using Google Groups
This is kinda like the mail forwarding that we walked you through above, but it’s using Google Groups. You are able to make your group private, so you don’t have to worry about others seeing your mail, and it might be good to have this on another service other than Gmail.

–Overview–

There are a lot of solutions available for backing up your Gmail account, but unfortunately the best one is still not an option. By that I mean Google offering some sort of backup solution. If you would like that to be an option in the future, head on over to the Gmail survey and pick the “Export message to a CD for storage” option.

The bad thing about all of these solutions is that they make it extremely difficult to replicate the label structure that you have given your emails. The best thing that you can probably do is either forward your emails to another Gmail account, or use the Gmail-to-Gmail POP access I discussed. That way you can at least setup filters to be applied to the incoming messages. They may not catch everything perfectly, but it’s better than nothing.

Helpful Tip: Backup Apple Mail or Entourage

Helpful Tip: How to Backup, Export or Import iGoogle

Backup Your Files To An Email Account

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:00:17 -0600

This article was written on October 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Sunday’s Summary

What was going on this week at CyberNet News and Learn Firefox? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

Monday:Windows Explorer Groups and Stacks in Vista
Tuesday:Free Finance Software for Windows & Linux
Wednesday:Share a Firefox Profile Between Ubuntu and Windows
Thursday:Create a LightBox Photo Gallery
Friday:Mac OS X Leopard Launch Day Humor
Saturday: Keep Your Bookmarks Organized Online with Quick Bookmarks

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

CyberNotes: Pie Menu Extension for Firefox (Review)

Ryan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:56:53 -0600

This article was written on August 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

We talked quite a bit yesterday about how pie menus work, and even gave a short video demonstration of them in action. Today I thought that I would walk you through the most productive and usable pie menu system that I have come across. It is in the form of an extension for Firefox, and it’s received many upgrades from the last time that I mentioned it.

The Firefox extension is called easyGestures and it is constantly being updated. If you’ve ever used mouse gestures before, using this will almost come naturally, but it’s something that you can’t give up on right away. You have to get used to the way it works and familiarize yourself with the positioning of the commands before you’ll really start to see a rise in your productivity.

Here are some benefits of using easyGestures:

Less attention needed
Pie menus are based on direction: you don’t have to stare at the screen to know reliably which spot you move and click the mouse. You can mouse ahead through a pie menu, fast and accurate, because it’s the direction, not the distance that matters.
No need to reach the Toolbar
Clicking on a toolbar’s icons requires nearly as much attention as clicking on drop-down menus. It also requires wide up and down mouse movements that can get you cramps to the hand and eye strain in the case of a long or intensive use.
More space devoted to web pages display
Because a pie menu is a popup menu that is not part of the user interface and that can replace the navigation toolbar, you would gain about 5% more space for displaying web pages by hiding your browser’s toolbar and using instead the pie menu.
No memorizing effort
The main problem with regular mouse gestures (without UI) is that people can hardly remember all the gestures. Besides the trivial gestures like back or forward and a few others, they require a mental effort that is not worth doing. That’s not the case with pie menus.
Shorter gestures
Any other gesture than a straight gesture is definitively a longer gesture and thus slower. Pie menus only require straight moves.

–Using easyGestures–

As soon as easyGestures is installed in Firefox it will be ready to use. By default the easyGestures pie menu will be brought up when you middle click in the browser. After the menu is brought up, just drag your mouse in the direction of one of the commands, and then let go of the middle mouse button. The command will then be activated.

You probably won’t know all of the commands right off the bat, and that is something the easyGesture developer thought of. So if you have the pie menu open long enough you should see some text that appears next to each button:

The first thing that I noticed was that middle-clicking and dragging your mouse to the left or to the right always activates the back/forward commands. That matches up to every mouse gesture application that I’ve ever used for browsers, and makes it easy to adopt this extension into your routine.

You might have also noticed the little up arrow at the top of the pie menu. If you drag your mouse towards it, there will be yet another expanding menu (dragging your mouse back down will collapse the menu):

And there’s still more! If you press the Alt key on the keyboard, an Alternate pie menu will appear with even more options:

–Contextual Pie Menus–

The odds are probably pretty good that the commands in the pie menus pictured above won’t apply if you’re clicking on a link or an image. Don’t worry, easyGestures thought of that as well by offering several different contextual pie menus. These can be activated by holding down the Control key on the keyboard and middle-clicking on a link, image, text box, or something you’ve selected.

Note: This can be configured in the Options to not require the Control key to activate the contextual pie menus.

–Options–

Oh man…there are a lot of options! I didn’t even know where to begin listing the things that you can customize, so I just took a bunch of screenshots to show you what can be done. To get to the options just double-click on the icon located in the Status Bar of Firefox.

Note: Click on any of the following screenshots for a fullsize version

–Stats–

I’m sure you will want to know how productive you are with easyGestures, and so it tells you that as well. If you visit the stats section, you’ll find out which commands you are using the most, and which paths your mouse frequently travels. You’ll also find out how addicted you are to the extension with its three-star rating in the upper-right corner.

–Overview–

I would say that this is one of the only true productive uses of a pie menu currently available. It’s extremely customizable, and if you so wish it can even be setup to replace the right-click menu in Firefox. And before you know it, you won’t even be looking at the icons because you’ll have the corresponding gestures memorized!

I think this demonstrates very well how pie menus would make an operating system more usable…especially with a customized menu system for different types of files and different applications. If you didn’t catch the article from yesterday regarding how pie menus work make sure you check it out because I offer a lot of pointers on why they are so great.

easyGestures Homepage

How To Collapse Unused Menus In Firefox

Automatic Context Menu in Firefox

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:47:47 -0600

This article was written on July 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

Sunday’s Summary

What was going on this week at CyberNet News and Learn Firefox? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

Monday: Our Favorite Monday CyberNotes Articles
Tuesday: Our Favorite Tuesday CyberNotes Articles
Wednesday: Our Favorite Wednesday CyberNotes Articles
Thursday: Our Favorite Thursday CyberNotes Articles
Friday: Our Favorite Friday CyberNotes Articles
Saturday: Our Favorite Weekend CyberNotes Articles

Show Go! – Allows you to see the “Go” button in the address bar at all times.

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

NoteScraps Giveaway Winners…

CyberNotes Giveaway: NoteScraps is the Perfect Post-it Note Replacement

Ashley — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:42:55 -0600

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

Microsoft Monday

One of the ways that I keep myself organized is by writing little notes here and there, and making €œto-do€ lists. It’s suited me well, but the problem is that sometimes the notes have important information that I want to hang on to, and so I never throw them out. I end up with a desk and monitor filled with post-it notes, and finding notes when I need them turns into a hideous task. I knew there had to be a better way to manage my little notes, but I just wasn’t sure what.

My problem was solved recently when I was introduced to NoteScraps which does exactly what my post-it notes have done for me all along, except better! NoteScraps is a program for Windows Vista or Windows XP to help you store all of the bits of information that you’d normally write down. The difference being, not only can you take notes, you can search your notes to find the one that you’re looking for.

Features

Each note is automatically time stamped so that you know when you wrote it.
Use shift + windows key + N to open a new note
Use shift + windows key + F to search your notes
Clean, simple interface with no menus
Color-code notes with a choice of 5 different colors

Another nice feature is that you’re able to export all of your notes. All you have to do is go to your My Documents folder, and find the NoteScraps folder. Within that folder you’ll find one document with all of your notes in plain text.

My two favorite features are that you’re able to color-code your notes, and you can search them. Color coding has been extremely helpful because I’ve chosen one color for work related notes, and another color for home related notes.

If you’re using the trial version, you’re limited to 10 notes, and for the majority of the people, that’s enough. If you’d need more than 10 notes open at a time you can purchase NoteScraps for $20.00. It requires .NET Framework 3.0 if you’re using windows XP.

Suggestions

So far over the last few weeks that I’ve been using NoteScraps, I’ve found it to be the perfect replacement for all of my post-it notes. However, there are a few things I’d like to see changed. First, I’d like to see simple formatting like bullets and bold text. There are certain things in my notes that I’d like to have stand out. I’d also like an option to quickly delete a note. As it stands, you need to select all of the text within a note and press delete. An X in the corner would be helpful.

I’d also like to be able to choose the order of my notes. Right now it shows the most recently modified item first. This is a logical way to do it, however, I’d like to be able to select which note goes where.

I realize that the application isn’t intended to be feature intensive. There are applications that are designed with all of the bells and whistles like EverNote which was just recently mentioned in the Forum. However, I think a few small changes like the addition of a delete button and minimal formatting would make NoteScraps even better.

Wrapping it up

NoteScraps is the perfect post-it note replacement, and a great way to keep all of your scraps of information organized in one location. I love that I’m able to color-code each of my notes, and that I’m able to easily search my notes using the find feature.

Remember, you can download the free trial that never expires and you’ll be able to use 10 notes. You can delete notes and create new ones, you just can’t ever exceed 10 at a time. The paid version while a bit high in price at $20.00, gives you unlimited notes. Just download the trial, and then once you have the trial installed, you’ll see the option to Buy Now.

My desk and my monitor are finally free of post-it notes, and now all of my important bits of information have been moved to NoteScraps.

Click here to watch a high resolution movie demonstrating NoteScraps.

Giveaway!

If you think that NoteScraps would be useful, leave a comment below. We’ll select five people at random who will get the full version of NoteScraps valued at $20.00!

This is open to anybody over the age of 18 worldwide with an email address, except void where prohibited.
You MUST include an email address in the email field of the comment (this is not displayed publicly) because we will be passing on the five winning email addresses to the developers so that they can email the license code to you.
Only one entry per person. If more than one entry is submitted, all entries will be void.

You have until 11:59 PM on Tuesday, April 24th to enter. Winners will be announced Wednesday morning on April 25th.

Related Posts:

Recap of Giveaways: Day 2

Recap of Giveaways: Day 3

Less Than Two Hours to Enter CyberNet’s Giveaways!

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:33:08 -0600

This article was written on January 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Sunday’s Summary

What was going on this week at CyberNet News and Learn Firefox? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

Monday:Vista Does Time Machine… Better
Tuesday:Mobile Blogging (Moblogging)
Wednesday:Switch Between Multiple Site Logins
Thursday:Remotely Restart & Shutdown Computers
Friday:Our Top 5 Pranks
Saturday: Listen to Music for Free, No Strings Attached!

URL Fixer – Correct URL typos that you enter into your Firefox address bar.

CyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary