Quick Post: What the Heck?

I went to the store yesterday and picked up a Brita water filter:  I’ve been drinking a lot of water lately, trying to get up to 8 cups (I used to usually drink 4).  For the installation of the filter, I had to remove the aerator from the tap, the aerator being a little screw-on that makes the water that comes out more of a tap water look than a pouring out look.  I took out the aerator which had a little screen on the top.  Full of little rocks and sand.  What the heck?  There’s freaking rocks in my drinking water?  Granted, the larger (i.e. largish grain of sand) ones are filtered out, but what about, say, the smaller ones?  Like dust or smallish grains of sand?  Blech.

Revo Uninstaller

I may have already written a post on Revo; I can’t remember.  I just had to stress the awesomeness that is Revo.

What Revo does is, when you pick a program, runs it’s built in uninstaller then searches your hard drive for any leftover files.  Today, when I was uninstalling Arora, Revo found 1,951 files left over in my Application Data folder.  1,951.  That’s just… incredible.

It also has an excellent Hunter Mode and some other great tools; check it out.  I seriously recommend it to anyone.

Download for free (Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Vista only, and only 32-bit versions) here.

iTunes loves me

I was working a summer assignment for Honors English, and iTunes played five of my very most favorite songs.  Good stuff.

Wouldn’t it be cool looking

To have a wall totally covered with clocks?  Either analog or digital?  I, personally, think that’d be way cool looking.

Instapaper

Instapaper gives you a little button to put on your bookmarks toolbar when you sign up (just give them a username, that’s it.  Passwords, as far as I can tell, are optional; I put one on mine).  Whenever you go to a site that you think would be interesting to read but you don’t have time or are busy, click the little button and the page is added to your Instapaper site.  To read that page, just go to the Instapaper site (I’d recommend a separate button on your toolbar) and click on the title.

You can also star things, like say if your employer sends you a link while you’re working on something else, you can save it with a star so you won’t miss it.  Or if  you especially like something, or want to send it to someone, or just because you can.

From what I’ve seen, it works on any site with anything on it, as it’s really just making a link to the site you want to save.  Try it out, it’s totally free.

You can get to your Instapaper list from any computer, as long as you remember your username and, if you set one, your password.  As far as I can tell, Instapaper saves your sites indefinitely, although I could be wrong as I haven’t been using it very long.

Instapaper, here.

My Instapaper list:

Arora

Arora is a browser, along the lines of a less feature-saturated Firefox.  I use Firefox and run beta and alpha releases, and hardly ever get a bug, except for two that are relatively common:

- Browser shutdowns, which is fixed by reopening the browser and everything is as it was

- The browser refuses to load, which I fix by using Arora whilst I give Firefox some down time.

Arora looks pretty bland, but has a blazing fast startup time and pretty fast page load time.  Also, one of the built-in bookmarks is xkcd.  That’s awesome.

Also, Arora “runs on Linux, embedded Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Windows, and any platform supported by the Qt Toolkit” (from the Arora homepage)

You can get Arora for free (as in free speech and free beer (from the homepage)) here.

The default startup page

MSI Trackpad scrolls!

I love my little netbook, the MSI Wind, except for three things: 

First, the built-in speakers sound horrible (which can’t be changed without quite a bit of work or potentially not at all)

Second, you can’t vertically or horizontally scroll by sliding your finger on the side of the trackpad, or by using two fingers like on an Apple.

Third, you can’t middle click.

Well.  I recently discovered that you can scroll using the trackpad, just not in the normal fashion.  Tapping just below the upper-right corner scrolls up, and tapping just above the lower-right corner scrolls down.  I’d been lugging around a wireless mouse that’s pretty nice, and I still prefer it to trackpads for accuracy, but at least my trackpad scrolls for times when I’m, say, reading an ebook (like now) and I don’t really need to be accurate, I just need to click and scroll.  w00tingness commences!

If anyone knows how to middle-click on the MSI Wind’s trackpad, please let me know in a comment or at robert.perce@gmail.com.  Thanks.

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Whoa.  I type up blog posts on Windows Live Writer (which is, may I add, an awesome program) and it has a built-in red-squiggly-line-under-misspelled-words function.  However, it seems to think that ‘w00tingness’ is an actual word.  Odd.  Maybe typing it with zeros instead of O’s threw it off.

InterfaceLIFT

InterfaceLIFT is a site with all kinds of cool wallpapers.  It’s got widescreen resolution, fullscreen (standard), HDTV, dual monitor, triple monitor, and mobile device sizes.  It can handle most any size wallpaper, though I couldn’t find one at or to scale of 2048x768.  Still, awesome stuff.  Check it out here.

Little Screwdrivers

I recently picked up a set of  jeweler’s screwdrivers (The really tiny ones).  Good stuff.  I’ve unscrewed speakers and something I can’t recall at the moment with them, where the screws were either too far in or too small for normal screwdrivers to reach.  Mine were pretty cheap ($1.00) but they still work pretty well.  I assume you can get real nice sets for more.

A trick for buying swimming goggles

If you’re at the store, looking for goggles, here’s a trick to tell whether they’ll actually keep water out:  put them on without the strap.  Make sure there’s no hair under them.  If they’re a good shape for your face, they’ll stick at least for five seconds without the strap.  The ones that I have stay on, even without the strap, until I pull them off.  They’ve never failed.

How to ensure good form in push-ups

This is a trick I recently learned to ensure good form while doing pushups.

You’ll need:
- A broom handle or other long, straight object
- A baseball cap
- A friend

Instructions
- Put on the hat
- Get into the push-up position
- Have the friend place the broom handle between your heels so it passes over your buttocks, between your shoulder blades, and onto your head. All four (heels, buttocks, back, head) should be touching the pole.
- Do a push-up. As you go down, your heels, buttocks, back, and head should still be touching the pole. Go down far enough that the brim of the hat lightly touches the ground, then go back up, still keeping your heels, buttocks, back, and head touching the pole. Repeat.

You’ll probably be able to do less pushups, but those that you do do will be more effective then more pushups done incorrectly. Enjoy your pushup-ing fun.

Wallpapers

Here’s a couple dual-screen wallpapers; most are 2048x768 resolution though there are some others.

Have fun!

ViGlance

ViGlance changes the Windows Taskbar to look like the Windows 7 ‘superbar’.  It groups things together into nice little icons:  all the Firefox things in one icon, all the Windows Live Messenger things in another.  Clicking or mousing over an icon yields a smallish popup that shows what’s inside the icon – for me, mousing over the Firefox logo gives me ‘Downloads’ and ‘Gmail’.  You can then click on any of the listed items to switch it to your active window.  Screenshots:

My taskbar, with ViGlance:
 
Excuse the vertical stretching.  I don’t know why it’s showing up that way, and I don’t know how to fix it.  ViGlance does not do this to your taskbar.

Mouseover/Click:

ViGlance can be downloaded here.  Windows only.

NOTE:  The version shown in this post is not the most recent version.  The most recent version includes thumbnails of windows upon mouseover, as far as I can tell from their website.

Quick Firefox interestingness

I discovered today that middle-clicking on an open tab on the tab bar in Firefox closes it.  Middle clicking on a link opens said link in new tap; this I already knew.  It makes you life just that much easier to click anywhere in the tab to close it instead of the little ‘x’.

LClock

First of all, sorry I haven’t posted in so long. I’ll try to be more regular.

LClock replaces your standard tray clock with a nicer looking version, with a calendar that pops up if you click on the time.  Mousing over gives a small popup that tells you the day of the week, the date, and the year.  Here’s some screenshots:

The clock

The small popup

The calendar

LClock can downloaded for free here.  Windows only.