Dec 11
I just “Christmased Up” my iMac here at work and thought I’d share the links of the stuff I found (all free).
First, there’s the awesome OpenGL Snowfall screensaver. It’s very customizable (different or no background colors, images, etc).
Next, X-masTree (direct download link). This puts a nice (and also very customizable) Christmas Tree on your desktop. It can even include a countdown badge for the days until Christmas. It’s so customizable, it even works for people who celebrate Christmas on January 7! Who the heck celebrates Christmas on January 7?!
Third is MacLampsX. This one was too gaudy for my tastes, but fun to play around with for a couple minutes. If it suits you, I won’t judge.
Lastly, I searched Google Images for a few wintry snowscape pictures. This one was my favorite and I set it to my Desktop background (until I get bored with it and decide to change it). We have a picture of that famous bridge from when we were there (but it was summer then).
Dec 10
There used to be a Windows PowerToy that gave you an option in your right-click menu in Windows Explorer to “Open Command Prompt Here.” Basically, you navigate Explorer to a folder deep in your hierarchy somewhere and you could instantly open a command prompt to that folder.
In Vista, they’ve made it both easier and harder. They put the option in there without the need to install a PowerToy. The problem is, you only see it if you hold shift when you right-click the folder. Not acceptable to me. I dug around with Google for a couple minutes and found this article with a few different ways to attack the problem. #5 (hack the registry) was the one I found to work very well and the way I wanted. It even works in Vista64!
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Navigate in your Registry to
and create a key called “Command Prompt” without the quotes.
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Set the default string to whatever text you want to appear in the right-click menu.
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Create a new key within your newly created command prompt named “command,” and set the default string to
You may need to add %SystemRoot%\system32\ before the cmd.exe if the executable can’t be found. (I didn’t need to and, in fact, it didn’t work when I put that in.)
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The changes should take place immediately. Right click a folder and your new menu item should appear.
Of course, the usual warnings go along with this–you can really bork your machine when you’re screwing around in the registry. Be careful and I’m not responsible if you mess your computer up!
Dec 07
It’s been a while since I gushed fanboy-style about something related to Macs and Apple. This should make up for that.
I just finally sprung for the $20 upgrade to Delicious Library 2. Delicious Library has always been one of my favorite apps for the Mac. It was one of those apps that you pull out just to demo to your PC Friends so they can drool and wish they had Macs. In a nutshell, it uses the built-in iSight camera to scan UPCs off your media items and catalog them. It doesn’t stop there, though, it also pulls GOBS of data from online sources about your items (including synopses, ratings–i.e. the “star” kind–used value, and much more. DL2 came out a few months ago, but I just hadn’t bothered to upgrade yet. Today, I decided to scan a few items I’d acquired in the last couple months and said, what the heck, let’s upgrade.
Well, in version two, they added an awesome way to publish your whole library for the world. You can publish via a variety of avenues (I’m using FTP) and it creates a whole “website” for your media catalog! So, don’t laugh too much at my tastes and remember that a lot of this belongs to my wife and my 3 year-old. Also, I didn’t spend any time cleaning up the iTunes stuff–it automatically pulled out a lot of “junk” that’s been hanging around in my iTunes Library for a long time. I’ll get around to cleaning it up eventually. I also need to spend some serious time scanning books since I have a LOT of those to get in my library!
http://www.forwheelers.net/media/
Totally awesome!
