Category: Geek Stuff

I first wrote an article on this site about Firefox extensions on July 2nd, 2007. I wrote an updated article about them on August 30th, 2008.

A lot of time has passed since then, and so I thought I’d revisit my favorite extensions again:

AdBlock Plus – AdBlock Plus is still the premiere ad blocking solution for Firefox. Although some sites have figured out ways around it (and other sites have learned to detect it, and block content to visitors using it), it’s still an absolute requirement for any Firefox install I use.

Coral IE Tab – I’ve long been a fan of the IE Tab extension, which lets you use the Internet Explorer rendering engine within Firefox. But the current version of IE Tab caused newer versions of Firefox to crash on my system, so I found Coral IE Tab, which is an offshoot that not only does everything IE Tab does, but adds a few key features (like allowing AdBlock Plus to work on IE Tabs in Firefox, or swapping cookies between Firefox and IE, so you don’t have to log in to a site again after switching engines… Nice!).

Extended Copy Menu – Copy Plain Text was one of my favorite extensions; as the name suggests, it allows you to copy plain text from web pages, so you can paste unformatted data into programs like Microsoft Word. Sadly, Copy Plain Text isn’t updated often enough to keep up with new builds of Firefox, so you have to tweak it every time a new version of the browser comes out. Or you could just use Extended Copy Menu instead, which not only lets you copy plain text, but also the HTML code underlying a web page.

Continue reading “Firefox Extensions Revisited Revisted”

When I look through the logs of this website, I can’t help but notice that many of you are still using Internet Explorer 6, which was released on August 27, 2001 – almost eight and half years ago! For the love of God… why are you still using IE6? In 2010?

The governments of France, Germany and Austria have advised their citizens to use something else. Google, Adobe and other companies have advised their customers to use something else. And now, Microsoft itself is asking IE 6 users to upgrade to IE 8. You can read for yourself on a Microsoft blog here:

We recommend users of IE6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP. Users of other platforms are at reduced risk.  We also recommend users of Windows XP upgrade to newer versions of Windows.

Perhaps you work for a company that refuses to upgrade from IE 6. If that’s the case, print out this article from noted Windows expert Ed Bott and give it to your boss. Bott suggests that if your IT staff can’t replace IE 6, it’s time to replace your IT staff. It may sound harsh, but it’s true: IE 6 – with its “Swiss Cheese security” – has got to go.

Here’s a new Windows 7 tip that’s been flying around the Internet:

If you want to have a single folder where you can access almost any setting you’d ever need, just create a new folder wherever you’d like and give it the following name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

This will create a folder which contains quick links to every Control Panel option, Windows 7’s “Action Center”, the “Backup and Restore” applet, Autorun settings, desktop gadgets, “Devices and Printers” and more.

I have to kind of laugh at the name, though. It’s not really “God Mode”, especially since you could simply type the name of any of these applets into the search box on the Start Menu. But still, if you’re a tweaker who likes having everything at his or her fingertips, then maybe “God Mode” is for you!

I’ve spent a lot of time on this site bashing Time Warner Cable’s Navigator DVR software, and with good reason. It sucks.

But in the interest of fairness, let me share this tip with you I picked up the other day:

To quickly move to a future date in the Program Guide, simply press the right arrow key and then (quickly) press a number button for the day you want to skip ahead to. For example, if you want to skip ahead 6 days in the guide, just press the right arrow key and then press 6.

It’s kind of neat, and saves keypresses over using the “Day” button once you go over two days.

Microsoft Outlook makes it easy to filter for unread email messages and posts. In fact, the default view in Outlook 2007 is unread messages. However, Outlook makes it a bit more difficult to filter only read messages. There’s no built-in way to have Outlook display only read messages in a folder.

My favorite feature of Outlook 2007 is the built-in RSS reader. I use it to subscribe to at least three dozen different feeds. However, because some posts in some feeds interest me more than others, each feed’s folder oftentimes is a jumble of read and unread posts. De-cluttering the folder by deleting or moving the read posts would certainly make my life easier, but there’s no easy way to do it.

Or is there?

To have Outlook display only read posts in a folder, do the following:

1) If you don’t already have the “Advanced” toolbar displayed, do so by clicking on View > Toolbars > Advanced.

2) Click the “filter” drop-down box and choose “Define Views”:

3) In the window that opens, click “New” and then type a short name for your new filter (I recommend “Read messages”). Leave the “Type of View” at “Table” and then click the “All Mail and Post folders” (unless you only want to use this view on a single folder). Click “OK”.

4) In the next window, click the “Filter” button, then click the “More choices” tab. Check the “only items that are” button and choose “read” from the drop-down box. Click “OK” several times to accept the settings.

5) Click the filter drop-down box and choose “Read Messages” (or whatever name you chose in step 3) to filter only read messages.

If you don’t want to have the Advanced toolbar appearing all the time, go to View > Toolbars and uncheck the Advanced toolbar, then right-click the main toolbar and choose “Customize”. Click on View in the left column and scroll until you see “Current View” and drag it to your main toolbar: presto! You have only the “Current View” applet and none of the other bits of the Advanced toolbar!

One of the niftiest features of Windows 7 is federated search, which allows you to search websites within Windows itself. Just by downloading and installing a “search connector”, you can add Google, Flickr, Twitter and other sites to your computer, so when you type in the search box in Windows Explorer, you can not only search your local computer, you can search websites, too!

It’s kind of hard to tell from the above picture, but this person has added popular site deviantART to his Windows search, and has searched for “Windows wallpaper”.

To add additional search engines to your Windows 7 install, just go to this page and download any of the connectors you’d like. And thanks to the OpenSearch protocol, you can even add your own if you’re good with XML! Read more about it at the linked site.

When Microsoft was developing Windows 7, many of us in the IT field hoped that there would only be one version of the operating system, compared to the mess that was Windows Vista (Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate).

Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. But Microsoft did meet us halfway: aside from netbooks which run Windows 7 Starter, most Americans will be using Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional or Windows 7 Ultimate. And, thanks to a simple hack, you can easily create a “universal DVD” which can install any version of Windows 7 on a computer:

All you need to do is delete a single file – ei.cfg – from any Windows 7 installation CD.

The easiest way to do this is to use an ISO tool like PowerISO to make an image of the installation DVD, then delete the ei.cfg file from the “sources” directory of the image, then burn the edited image file to a blank DVD. When you install Windows 7 on a computer using the edited disc, you will be prompted with the screen above to choose which version of the operating system you want to install.

Note that this hack will not let you get a free upgrade: your license key is tied to the particular version of Windows 7 you’re licensed for, so if you try to install Ultimate using a Home Premium key, you’ll get an error message. So this hack is really for support people who have to install a variety of versions of Windows 7 on people’s computers.

Also, 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 come on separate discs, so you’d need to repeat the process if you need both versions. It would be really cool if you could create a “Ultimate Universal DVD” that had both x86 and x64 versions on it… but that’s above my pay grade.

One of the coolest features of Windows 7 is “XP Mode”, a way to run a virtual Windows XP session in Windows 7.

At its most basic, XP Mode offers “Desktop Mode”, in which a virtual machine opens up and boots into its OS. This is nice, but it’s nothing extraordinary – in fact, users of Virtual PC 2007, VMWare Workstation and Sun’s VirtualBox will probably yawn and wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, it’s not much different than running any of those apps.

Where XP Mode really shines is “Seamless Mode”, in which shortcuts for applications installed on the virtual machine are added to the Windows 7 start menu. When you want to run one of those apps, you don’t have to start the virtual machine in desktop mode and wait for it to boot up – the application runs within a window under Windows 7. Aside from the “(Remote)” tag added to the title bar of the application, you’d have no idea it was even running virtually! Cool, huh? So you can now finally run Office 2007 and a virtualized Office 2003 on the same machine!

Continue reading “Win7: XP Mode”

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