Latest Tips from MakeUseOf.com |  |
- QMMander – Replace Your Windows Explorer With An Open Source Alternative
- Cool Websites and Tools [November 5]
- Manage Multiple Users On One Twitter Account with TweetFunnel
- How To Connect Your Cell Phone To Your PC Through Bluetooth
- Question Of The Day – RSS Full Feeds Or Excerpts?
- 2 Cool Ways To Poke Someone On Facebook
- 3 Tools To Easily Backup Your Flickr Photos
- Easy Steps To Solve Mac Window Management Issues with Afloat
- Recover Your Windows XP Administrator Password With The Installation Disk
| QMMander – Replace Your Windows Explorer With An Open Source Alternative Posted: 06 Nov 2009 04:01 AM PST
But that's not all – no sir re bob! QMMAnder is not a one hit wonder! You can also have two separate listing types going on at the same time. Qmmander is written in C++ and uses Qt, a cross-platform application and GUI framework from Nokia. The Google Code page says that the application is buggy but I have not run into any issues yet. You can have one window preview showing a detail listing so you can sort by file size, while in the right pane you have big icons so you can easily recognize the file icons you are looking for. The software is also portable and can (should) be run from a USB or thumb drive. A person’s Explorer tells a lot about them. If you are using the built in Windows Explorer it shows that you do not like to tweak but if you are using something like this – it shows you think outside the box. That's not just because I am a geek right? Let's see what QMMAnder can do! When you first launch the application you will be seeing double – the same thing on both sides, as you can see below:
Yeah yeah, we all know you can sort by each column by simply clicking on the headers but let's check out the program’s other options. As we said before, you can change each view. Here is an example:
You change the view on each item by selecting a pane and then clicking on one of these buttons in your toolbar:
The buttons are as follows: details, list, little symbols, big symbols, directory tree or split horizontally instead of vertically (respectively). You can also change these from the options menu as you can see below:
You can also swap the left side with the right or vice versa as well as refresh or switch which side is active. Let's check out how the horizontal split looks. This seems like it would be a better view for me:
And that is my view! Wow I love it – the detailed listing on top and the tree view on the bottom. This Windows explorer alternative is very versatile and uses very little memory. What do you guys use for a file browser? I know that Make Use of readers aren't using Explorer – are you? We would love to hear about what you are using in the comments – so leave us a comment! Oh and if you do hit any bugs leave them in the comments as well so we can all bombard the author with them! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Cool Websites and Tools [November 5] Posted: 05 Nov 2009 05:01 PM PST
(1) DeadCellZones – Consumer generated map of locations with cellphone coverage problems. It maps over 100,000 cell phone complaints submitted by customers of major cellphone carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless… etc. The site comes in handy if you want to find out which cellphone carrier provides the best cellphone coverage in your area. Read more: DeadCellZones – Find A Carrier With The Best Cellphone Coverage in Area
(2) AllOurStock – Web resource that host a collection of free stock vector symbols, photos and custom created artwork. All images are free and can be used for commercial or private purposes without any restrictions. You can search for images or browse them by categorie. Read more: AllOurStock – Free Stock Vectors, Images & Custom Artwork (3) ASCIIPaint – New application that lets you create ASCII art online. Unlike recently profiled ASCII art generator, ASCIIPaint lets you do it by drawing. Read more: ASCIIPaint – Draw ASCII Art Online (4) Concert Vault – This site hosts over 3000 live concert recordings of the greatest rock bands such as Beatles, Dylan, the Rolling Stones… etc. It's free to listen after registration, and there are free downloads available too. Read more: Concert Vault – Listen To Live Concert Recordings Online (5) ValueJockey – If you want to sell an item and don't have a slightest idea about it's value head to ValueJockey.com. It is a community driven website where anyone can list things and get price suggestions along with tips for selling. Read more: ValueJockey – Find Out What Things Are Worth
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Manage Multiple Users On One Twitter Account with TweetFunnel Posted: 05 Nov 2009 02:00 PM PST
First off, a company could want multiple users on one Twitter account in order to share from different departments, etc. or to just split the time it would take to run a successful company Twitter account. A ministry may want multiple users on one Twitter account, too, to help communicate with the world about what’s going on. MAYBE a multi-writer blog would want each of the writers to contribute tweets so their Twitter stream remains active. There could be MANY reasons for what I call a “muli-twit” Twitter account. There are several issues that could arise from assigning multiple users on Twitter accounts. A company or organization may have hesitations about relinquishing access to employees. There should be some kind of control over an organization’s brand. You’d probably want specific people or a specific department in control of PR or public relations. It only makes sense that those same people (or that same department) should be in control of what goes out in a company Twitter stream. So, how can we reconcile the need for a “multi-twit” Twitter account and the PR nightmare it could impose? Check out TweetFunnel (free while in beta)!
I like how TweetFunnel works. In fact it reminds me of how a multi-author blog operates. Basically TweetFunnel allows you to have three levels of twits: an Administrator, a publisher, and a contributor. The administrator creates the account and has the abilities to create users and review and publish tweets. The publisher can review and, you guessed it, publish tweets. And then there’s the contributor who only had the ability to write and submit tweets to the administrator or publisher for approval. A publisher or Administrator has several options to choose from when a tweet is submitted by a contributor: approve and post, approve and schedule the tweet to be posted at a later time, hold until later posting or scheduling, or outright reject the tweet.
Let’s take this opportunity to see how this tool works! First, hit the “try out our free beta” button from this page.
Then, fill in the form.
You’re then offered the opportunity to sign into your newly created account.
The obvious next step is to add a Twitter account. You are offered two options — to use Twitter’s authentication method (recommended) or enter your Twitter account user name and password.
Once you add the Twitter account, you are now ready to get things set up. You’ll want to do things like activate the scheduler (it’ll ask for your timezone so timed tweeting will work right) and add bit.ly or bud.url URL shortner accounts (so you can track clicks on links tweeted). Once that’s done, you can go ahead and hit the settings tab at the top right-hand corner of the site. Here you can make changes to your profile, manager users and their roles, and manage Twitter accounts including their credentials and scheduler settings. If your profile and Twitter account is already setup, hit the link to edit users and roles. From here you can either invite a new user or add a new user. When you add a new user, just fill in the fields, choose the role, and choose the Twitter account the user will tweet on.
Once your user is set up, the screen will look like this when they log in.
For the sake of demonstration, I went ahead and added a contributor to my account so I can demonstrate how tweeting and moderating tweets works. When a contributor tweets, here’s what they’ll see.
As an administrator (or publisher if I had one set up), I’d head to Review Queue button to find the tweet awaiting moderation. You are then given the option to post immediately, post later, or to reject the tweet altogether.
As of right now, it seems as if you can designate a specific time for the tweet to be published. You can set at which increments future tweets are published. I’m hoping they’ll eventually allow administrators and publishers to edit tweet times, perhaps the order of future tweets, and if there’s a typo it would be nice to be able to go and fix it before it’s published (it seems once scheduled, there’s no editing possible). Other than those issues, TweetFunnel could be an amiable competitor so some of the other web-based twitter applications such as HootSuite or PeopleBrowsr. Remember, they ARE still in beta so I’m sure there’s still some work for them to do and I’m sure they’d appreciate your feedback! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| How To Connect Your Cell Phone To Your PC Through Bluetooth Posted: 05 Nov 2009 12:00 PM PST
In both of these articles, I described connecting your cell phone to your PC via USB cable. However, there is another way; Bluetooth. This will work in precisely the same was as a USB cable in terms of transferring data but it eliminates the need for a cable (I’m told many budget phones are being shipped without USB cables). You’ll need two things for this to work:
Go to Control Panel under the Start Menu and look for ‘Bluetooth devices’ as pictured in the screenshot. If you’re using Vista, select classic view to display all of the icons. Click on the Bluetooth icon. The window below should open.
Click ‘Add Wireless Device’ as seen in the screenshot. Before scanning for devices – turn on Bluetooth on your cell phone. Menu > Settings> Connections > Bluetooth > Turn On
Now scan for devices on your computer. It should pick up your cell phone. If it doesn’t, make sure Bluetooth is turned on and ensure that your status is set to ‘Visible’ or ‘Detectable’. Your phone must also be within 7 meters of your PC to ensure a connection can be established. Once you have done these checks, search again. When your device is detected, click on the phone’s icon to connect. You may be asked to enter in a security pin. Enter something easy like ‘1234′. You phone will then ask you to enter in said pin. This is not a specific number but rather done just for paring purposes. Once you have done this correctly the connection will be established as though the phone were connected via USB cable. If you disconnect or simply power off your PC, the connection should be saved. That means that when you turn back on your PC (assuming both Bluetooth setting are still activated) the connection should resume itself. Your PC may launch a pop-up in the bottom right hand corner at the task bar asking your permission for the connection. This is for security reasons and depends on your security/firewall settings. Your phone should now be visible under ‘My Computer’ so you can transfer files, etc. Note that Bluetooth can be pretty slow for transferring large files such as videos or establishing an internet connection. Make sure that you turn off the Bluetooth on your phone if you won’t be using it again for some time. It consumes your battery like crazy and is also a security issue. What do you use your phone’s Bluetooth connection for? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Question Of The Day – RSS Full Feeds Or Excerpts? Posted: 05 Nov 2009 11:01 AM PST
When reading RSS feeds, do you prefer to see the full post inside your RSS reader or do you just want to see an excerpt? Why is one better than the other? Let us know in the comments what you prefer! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| 2 Cool Ways To Poke Someone On Facebook Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:00 AM PST
Some people consider it annoying, others consider it as a form of flirting, and others just use it to get their friend to wake up and start posting updates again. This means that at the moment there’s no real accepted “poking etiquette,” and people are pretty much making up their own rules. In simple technical terms, a “poke” is a link that you click on under someone’s profile picture in order to post a message on their Facebook page that you’ve just poked them. That’s really all there is to it – it’s simple. Or is it? Since “poking” is basically the process of posting a message to your friend’s wall to wake them up, flirt or annoy – why couldn’t you do the same thing with a simple message? The fact is – you can. And message “poking” adds a bit of flexibility and fun to the process. How to Poke a FriendExperienced Facebook users can skip over this section, but I’m including it for those of you who are very new to Facebook and you’ve never used the poke feature before. This explanation strictly the Facebook “Poke” feature – not the message approach. First, go to a friend’s profile and take a look under the profile picture.
Underneath their photo is where you’ll find the “Poke <name>” feature. Poking someone is as simple as clicking on that link under their photo. Once you do this, a new window pops up asking you to confirm.
Once you click the “Poke” button – the person will receive a poke notification on their wall and they’ll see that you just poked them. As you can see – there’s no way to tell a person why you just poked them – so it’s up to the other person to read into your motivations, and of course this can lead to misunderstanding and confusion. But then again, isn’t that the fun of a social network? Don’t worry though, this is only the very simplest version of “poking” on Facebook. There are lots of other ways to do it that are a lot more fun. 2 Cool Ways to Poke People on FacebookFor experienced Facebook users, the standard Poke feature is old hat. If you want to take the “poking” approach to get your friend’s attention, you’ll want to install the Facebook Superpoke! application.
The Superpoke! is a much more interactive method you can use to send over the kind of pokes that’ll leave very little room for misunderstanding. For example, go ahead and blow a kiss at the girl you’re trying to date. Send a high five poke to a friend who just aced an exam. Or maybe even dropkick someone for saying something stupid. Once you’ve installed SuperPoke!, all you have to do is go to the person’s profile and just under the status box, you can click on the “more” drop-down arrow. If they have SuperPoke! installed on their profile, you’ll see the option there.
Even if they don’t have it installed – have no fear, you can still Superpoke! a friend – just go back to the Superpoke! app and on the right side you’ll see a box where you can select who to superpoke from your list of friends.
Go ahead and superpoke anyone you want. As you can see, this version of poking lets you add a message to your poke. The odds are that they’ll find it so funny they’ll probably install the app and poke you back. Beware – superpoking is addictive! The second form of poking that some people use is ASCII art pokes. Instead of using any sort of poke feature, you can send someone a message in the form of a poke in ASCII Text.
You can do quite a bit with ASCII art, if you know how. If you’re curious how you can create images with simple ASCII keys, check out Saikat’s article on keyboard techniques to create cool symbols. You can really go crazy with ASCII art (and a lot of people do!) So, what does it mean to you when you poke someone on Facebook? Hopefully, these two new methods to poke your friends has inspired you to prod those friends into becoming a little more active and posting some fresh new updates to their status. Do you know of any other cool ways to poke people in Facebook? Share your own techniques in the comments section below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| 3 Tools To Easily Backup Your Flickr Photos Posted: 05 Nov 2009 08:01 AM PST
But that is not even the best part about Flickr. The best part is the awesome community that the site has and the knowledge that one can gather by just ‘lurking’ around the various photography groups and the forums. Despite all this, one feature that I really wish Flickr would provide on its own is to let users take a backup of their photos from the site itself. While Flickr refuses to give this feature on their site, a number of third party tools have sprung up to fill the void and in this post, we’ll be taking you through 3 such tools. All Flickr applications require you to allow them access to your photos. The application, when launched, will ask for your permission and if you want to try out the application, grant it the required access. You can, of course, revoke the permission later if you’re not interested in using that particular application anymore. FlumpFlump is an Adobe Air based application that is designed to be as simple to use as is possible. Use it only if you intend to make a backup of all the photos in your Flickr account since Flump doesn’t give the user any option to select which photos/sets they want to download.
Flickr Backup
Flickr Backup also gives you an option to burn the backed up pics directly to a CD/DVD using an external application but I didn’t try that option myself. If you only want to make a local copy you can either download the pics to a folder on your computer or create a zip archive. FlickrtouchrThis one is for all you command line enthusiasts. Flickrtoucher is a simple python script and if, like me, you prefer the command line, also the easiest to get going with. Just download the script, flicktouchr.py, create a directory where you want it to store all the downloaded files to and launch the script.
Flickrtouchr will start downloading all the pictures from your account and store them neatly in directories named after the set in which they exist. How do you guys manage your Flickr photos ? Do you keep a backup locally or just let Flickr manage all your pics ? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Easy Steps To Solve Mac Window Management Issues with Afloat Posted: 05 Nov 2009 06:00 AM PST
I too work with many windows opened at one time: mail, browsers and its tabs, text editor, media player, you get the picture. Most of the time I have to get the information from one window and use it on another. This method of working requires my agility to switch back and forth between windows and tabs, and also my wisdom to find the information among the clutters. My best friends during the time of trouble with Mac window management are Alt + Tab (to switch windows), Exposé’s F3 (to show all opened windows) and Control + F3 (to show all opened windows within one application). Sometimes, I use Spaces to separate the “working” windows and the “entertainment” windows to unclutter the workspace a little.  Afloat – take twoThen I stumbled upon Jackson’s old article about Afloat and it really helped me with Mac windows management. But almost a year has past since that article was published and Afloat has been updated with a new Snow Leopard-compatible version and several new features. So I thought it would be nice to have another look at this app from a slightly different perspective. We’ll start with the installation. Unlike common Mac apps that only need to be dragged and dropped to work, Afloat needs SIMBL before it could be put into action.  After the installation, you need to restart any opened applications to be able to use Afloat. The app will add new menus under Window menu in any Cocoa application. Here are two pictures comparing the Window menu before and after the installation of Afloat. 
It’s also been said that Afloat will not work with Carbon apps like Finder and iTunes. But I tried restarting Finder using Command + Alt + Esc and the new menus appear.  Maybe it’s because I use Snow Leopard. After I’ve searched a little bit on the net, I found out that according to Snow Leopard technology page:
Translation: there are not many Carbon apps left (Cocoa apps are 64-bit) and that Afloat will work for almost all the main applications. I don’t know about third party software yet since I haven’t explore too many applications after installing Afloat. Now let’s see how this app could help us in solving our Mac window management problems. The Seven StepsFirst problem: working with several windows. Solution: Instead of flipping through the windows, you could just put the source window always above others. There are few steps to do to achieve this without disturbing the workspace.
Second problem: the window we need is located in a different Space from the window we use. Solution: Instead of turning off Spaces or moving the needed window around Spaces, you could keep the window on all Spaces, by checkin the option as shown in the picture above (number 3). Third problem: it’s difficult to work with a transparent window. Fourth problem: the size and/or the position of the window is not right. Solution: you could just resize and/or drag the position of the window, but you could do it easier by performing Quick Resize using Command + Control key while click and drag using the right mouse button anywhere in the window. You could also do a Quick Drag using Command + Control and left mouse button.  Normally, resizing the window require you to click and drag a specific point at the bottom right of the window, and moving the window could be done only by clicking and dragging the title bar of the window. Fifth problem: you don’t know the location of the file that you are currently working on.  Have you tried Afloat? Do you know other tips on using Afloat? Share using the comments below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Recover Your Windows XP Administrator Password With The Installation Disk Posted: 05 Nov 2009 04:00 AM PST
We will actually be doing a Repair. Once the repair session hits the GUI screen we can launch a command prompt that will let us reset your password, create new accounts or promote another user to be the administrator. Heck we can even make it so the machine logs in as the Administrator automatically! So here’s how you do it. Grab your CD along with its CD key and boot to your media. Once you boot to your CD, it will say, “Press a key to boot to CD”. Go ahead and press any key. Let Windows do its thing and start. We will not format or lose any data if you follow my explicit instructions. I was amazed when I got this to work and also sickened by how insecure workstations can be! If you have a third party SCSI, RAID or SATA adapter you will have to point it at the drivers so it can access your hard drive. If this is you then you know what to do already – F6 and point it to the drivers.
Another few minutes will pass by and Windows setup will say that it is starting Windows. Be forewarned – DO NOT HIT THE R KEY ON THE NEXT SCREEN. We will be hitting Enter to start the installation. On the screen below that says Welcome to Setup make sure you hit the ENTER key and not R. R here will take you to the recovery console – if you do not have the administrators password you will have to start ALL OVER AGAIN! So hit Enter to set up Windows and continue.
The agreement pops up hit the F8 key to continue.
Ah ha! Now on this screen below you will want to highlight your installation of Windows if there is more than one. And hit the R key! Yes, here is where you will hit that key to repair the installation. The process rewrites all the system files and what not.
After you hit that R key the Setup wizard will start to copy the system files from the media to your hard drive/Windows Installation. This took about 4 minutes on my machine.
Windows will now reboot automatically or you can hit ENTER to speed things up a little. When the machine restarts DO NOT BOOT FROM THE CD! DO NOT HIT A KEY TO BOOT FROM YOUR CD! Take the CD out of the drive if you think this is going to be an issue for you.
Once the computer starts back up it will jump into the installer. Here, when you get to about 37 minutes left on the installer it will say Installing Devices on the bottom left hand side of the screen – Hit Shift-F10 at the same time and a command prompt will pop-up! Just like that. Using some basic command line kung fu we type control userpasswords2 and we can do whatever we want to. You can get at anything from this command prompt you have full root/administrator access!
Once you have the user accounts control panel up, you can add, modify or remove users. Promote a user to administrator status or what have you. Remember only use this for good and not evil.
Log in and you are good to go! Do you have another method to get back into your machine that does not require any media? We would love to hear about it in the comments. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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I downloaded this 4.9MB file 
Karl Gechlik over and out. 
I was thinking the other day about 
As many of the regular MakeUseOf readers will know, I tend to do a good few posts about cell phones and cell phone applications such as 
Today’s Question Of The Day is one that was posed by Ryan in our internal email discussion group and we would now like to throw the question out to our readers.
Have you ever asked yourself exactly what does it mean to poke someone on 
Look at your desktop and count how many windows and tabs are open. I bet there are many. We are getting so used to opening many windows at one time that it’s hard to even imagine running a computer with only one window open.
Have you lost your Windows Administrator Password? There are lots of options to recover it nowadays but almost all of them require a third party piece of software. What if I tell you that you can recover your windows administrator password with your install disk? All you need is your install key (hint: this does not need to be the same key that is installed on your machine but the key needs to match the media).
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