How I do it all
This is a small guide to becoming a geek like me. It is constantly under construction.
If you don’t have this browser already, I’m sorry, you have failed. Off you go!
Just kidding.
I mean, I don’t understand why anyone would settle for another browser. The most wonderful thing about Firefox is, of course, the extensions, which you can use to do many things, among which, block annoying ads (Adblock) and putting a Sleep Timer for your iTunes (FoxyTunes). What’s more, for you security freeks out there, it’s definitely more secure than IE, because there’s no ActiveX 5h1+3.
Who needs a Start Menu? Surely your brain and fingers are more nimble than that.
Launchy allows you to start a program by just typing its name (or just part of it). It saves you the time of looking through a long list of programs and waiting for a submenu to open, before you can get to click on the program icon. Just press Alt-Space (or another hotkey you prefer), type a few letters, and press Enter—no need to move your hand to the mouse, especially if you’re more of the typing type.
I find it really smart and fast. If you want you could also index your MP3 files so that you can play a song by typing its title. Or your Word Documents. Customize it to your needs!
You know, I used to be a firm believer in Winamp, but I guess things have changed since I used an iPod.
Besides the dynamic playlists, a feature which is also present in popular media playes such as Winamp and Windows Media Player, the good thing about iTunes is that I can ‘Uncheck’ songs which I don’t want to hear—a feature which comes in handy when you share a song folder with a brother who has a musical taste which doesn’t quite coincide with yours. And the ‘Update iTunes’ command really saves you the trouble of choosing which MP3s to upload onto your MP3 player (okay, sorry for those without iPods out there).
Holy God, now you can touch up photos, and in style too. No more complicated tools, just buttons, or sliders which you can drag to your own feel until you’re satisfied with your photo. And see how they smoothly fade in and out. What the heck! Who (with digital photos) could live without this?
Cleans the crap out of your ‘puter. No, it won’t be dusting your cooling fans or whatever it is that’s inside your computer, but it will remove old useless files, so you may save some space, and remove various usage histories from programs, which comes in handy for, um, any reason.
The best filesharing program on earth. And why settle for anything else when you can get the PRO version for zilch? But if you want something that works similarly, looks cleaner, and auto-adds new files into your iTunes collection, there’s always Cabos.
If you’re one who does web programming, be it HTML, CSS, or PHP, this thing is it. The most useful feature is the ‘FTP folders’, which allows you to seamlessly edit files on a web server. Saves you the effort of manually uploading the updated file each time, or even figuring out which file has been updated. A must-have for those quick-tweak jobs on already-live web sites.
Stuck in camp with an Internet PC, without your favourite music collection? Don’t fret, there’s Pandora. Pandora allows you to listen to your favourite songs while discovering new music that’s similar to them. Wonderful, isn’t that? And if you like what you’re currently hearing, getting the MP3 file is as easy as navigating to your “Local Settings/Temp” folder and renaming the second last “plugtmp-*” file to “something.mp3″. (Okay, that may have sounded rather cryptic, but you’ll just have to figure it out yourself.) Make Pandora easier to launch by using this Firefox bookmarklet.
So you got these little apps such as Pandora which you want running in the background, but they’re like cluttering your taskbar and giving you a headache. That’s when WinRoll saves your brain cells from dying. WinRoll enables you to minimize any program to the system tray (on the bottom-right corner of your screen), hence saving taskbar space, by middle-clicking the Minimize icon of the program. Handy for programs or windows which doesn’t have the “Minimize to Tray” feature in-built, like your Pandora window.
Need to quickly switch between screen resolutions? This tool is it. Let it run, right click on the icon and switch resolutions instantly—compared to the old method of opening Display Properties first. Handy for web designers testing out layouts on different resolutions.
So, you don’t like the ads in MSN Messenger? And you don’t want people to ‘nudge’ you because you find it terribly annoying? Use Mess Patch to customise your MSN Messenger to suit your preferences.