MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [February 25th]” plus 9 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [February 25th]
- Become A MakeUseOf Fan On Facebook!
- 3 Little Known Ways To Use Twitter Without Information Overload
- Times Reader – The Perfect Cross Platform NYT Desktop Reader
- 7 Simple Steps To An Awesome Minimalist and Productive Desktop
- How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps
- 5 Cool Things You Can Do With Google Voice
- Hiren’s Boot CD – The All-In-One Boot CD For Every Need
- Notational Velocity – Creating Notes At The Speed Of Light [Mac]
- How To Trigger Wake On LAN Using The MAC Address
| Cool Websites and Tools [February 25th] Posted: 25 Feb 2010 07:31 PM PST Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.
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
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| Become A MakeUseOf Fan On Facebook! Posted: 25 Feb 2010 06:30 PM PST If you enjoy reading MakeUseOf and have a Facebook account, become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook and join in on the fun! Simply click on the “Become a Fan” button on the left to get started! You’ll be rewarded with exclusive previews of future publications, what we refer to as “Sneak Peeks”; and the best posts from the day before, “Yesterday’s Bests”. We also use our fan page to inform you about premium software giveaways and discounts that are not announced on the website. We get a lot of those from software developers and distribute them mainly on Facebook. In addition to that, you’ll have the chance to participate in polls and ask our MakeUseOf writers questions or just tell everyone how much you love reading our site!
So grab some friends and become our fans today! 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
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| 3 Little Known Ways To Use Twitter Without Information Overload Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:30 PM PST
In the hundreds of tweets in your stream, how do you distinguish the signal from the noise? How can you use Twitter without missing the important stuff and not getting stressed out reading each and every tweet? In this article, let us explore 3 little known ways how to use Twitter in a way that will not overwhelm you.
The Twitter TimesThe Twitter Times gives you three newspaper-style views of what's hot on Twitter in real-time:
For the personalized newspaper view, you should sign in with your Twitter account. The first time you use the service, it takes up to an hour to generate your personalized newspaper. Twitter Times will send you an @reply when your newspaper is delivered. For subsequent visits, you can simply enter your username to access your Twitter Times.
The latest stories are shown in the main section of the page, while top news stories from history are displayed in a column on the right. You can click a headline to visit the original site in a new tab of your browser. For many stories, you can click 'Show all text' to see the entire post within the site. For each story in your newspaper, The Twitter Times shows you which friends tweeted it, along with friends of friends. You can ReTweet any story using the retweet button.
Using the Media Sources and Twitter Lists sections, you can get newspaper-style digests of the most popular content being shared on Twitter without drowning in information overload. FeedtraceFeedtrace is a personalized link aggregator service based on Twitter. It shows you the Top 50 links to blog posts, articles, news, pictures, etc. ranked automatically based on popularity of the link, authority of the people linking, and the content you have liked and shared in the past. Sign in to your Twitter account from the top left to access the Feedtrace sidebar. This works as a browsing companion while you check out the Top 50 links being shared on Twitter. You can check the 'only following' box to filter only those links shared by people your follow. If you wish, you can also see the top links from a specific website, for example the New York Times.
When you click on a link, the sidebar minimizes to the left, letting you view the linked page. From within the sidebar, you can ReTweet any of the links. Using the buttons at the top, you can also refresh, lock, or hide the Feedtrace sidebar.
To see what people are saying in the tweets about the link you're visiting, click the Buzz tab on the sidebar. From here, you can also @reply to the person, mark the tweet as a Favorite, or Retweet it. CadmusCadmus filters your stream to find similar tweets and automatically groups them to reduce the noise. It also highlights popular conversations among your Twitter friends so you don't miss them. Once you add your Twitter account to Cadmus, it shows you a sidebar with personalized trending topics and popular content from different time spans. You can view most popular content from the last 6 or 12 hours, last day, or even last week. You can retweet, @reply, or send a new tweet from within Cadmus.
Important tweets are displayed in the main window. You can expand Twitter conversations as shown below, which shows @replies as comments. You can also 'add a comment', which sends an @reply on Twitter.
Related tweets on the same topic are grouped together as 'Related Posts'. You can expand them to see all the tweets of the same topic. Apart from Twitter, you can also add RSS feeds and FriendFeed streams to Cadmus. By intelligently grouping together similar tweets and highlighting the most popular content, Cadmus ensures that you never miss the really important updates from your Twitter friends. You might also want to check out Topikality and ReadTwit, two other services we've covered before on MakeUseOf to help deal with too much information. The Twitter Times, Feedtrace, and Cadmus are simple ways to find great content being shared on Twitter, personalized to your taste. Each of them has a different interface and style. You can choose whichever suits your needs the best and enjoy the best of Twitter without suffering from information overload. If you have any other tips, share with us in the comments! em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| Times Reader – The Perfect Cross Platform NYT Desktop Reader Posted: 25 Feb 2010 03:30 PM PST
The app, which formats content in a manner similar to a newspaper, allows readers to check out the entire day’s paper, watch videos relevant to the day’s news, browse the news by pictures and even do that day’s crossword. I have a $200 netbook instead of a $500 iPad, and seeing as my $200 netbook can run multiple apps at a time and even use flash, I’m not planning on picking up an iPad anytime soon. So what does the New York Times offer me? A program that formats content in a manner similar to a newspaper and allows readers to check out the entire day’s paper, watch videos relevant to the day’s news and even do that day’s crossword. That’s right.
Predating the hyped iPad application, Times Reader 2.0 is a desktop reader for the New York Times. Because it’s built using Adobe Air, it can run on Linux, Mac and Windows computers. Because it’s from the New York Times, it offers a great overview of the day’s news, particularly if you’re from the United States of America. Best of all, because the New York Times wants people to get used to using Times Desktop Reader, they offer the front page, the weekday business page (which features a lot of tech news) and even the famous New York Times Magazine for free. Reading, but better
For me, reading a newspaper with Times Desktop Reader is vastly superior to reading a newspaper on a website. The fonts used in the application are easy on the eyes. Articles are formatted in columns, making them easy to read. Advertising is delegated to a single banner beneath articles—and even then it’s only every other page that features them. Essentially, this program brings everything I love aesthetically about newspapers to my computer. But it’s not just about looks; navigation is easier too. If I’m reading an article, scrolling down a page’s worth of content is as easy as pressing the down button. Skipping the next article means pressing right, and going back to the previous article is done by pressing left. It’s all very intuitive, but you’ll need to try it out. Offline readingWhen you start Times Reader, it automatically downloads 7 days worth of New York Times to your computer. Once it’s done, you can read these entire issues online or off—useful if you take your laptop along for a long flight or a train commute. If you’re running Times Reader on a netbook with a small hard drive, or are just generally concerned about not using up too much hard drive space, you can reduce the number of cached issues in the Settings Panel. Free offeringsAs mentioned above, the New York Times does not offer the entire paper for free through this program. It does offer quite a bit for example, the front page; Business Day; and on Sundays, the entire New York Times Magazine. Additional content you can get for free for the desktop reader includes all the Most Emailed articles, a News in Video section, a News in Pictures section, the eight most recent articles posted online and access to one archived crossword each day (access to the latest requires a subscription).
The crossword feature is fairly ingenious, actually, and even features a hint function. The New York Times Crossword is famous for its difficulty, so if you’re a crossword enthusiast, Times Reader might be worth checking out just for that. But my main point here is to say that the entire newspaper isn’t free. My busy days don’t give me time to read much more than the front page, so the free version works perfectly for me. DownloadWant to check out Times Reader? Go ahead and download it here. You’ll need Adobe Air to run the program, but don’t worry—the link will install Air for you automatically on Linux, Mac or Windows. Like the concept, but wish you could columnize your favorite blog or website in a similar fashion? Check out Jeffry’s recent article on Readefine. ConclusionIf newspapers need to be read on a screen instead of paper, I think the Times Reader represents a good model for doing so. Even if you’re not interesed in the New York Times—either because you’re not from the United States or because you perceive that publication as biased—this program is worth checking out as a proof of concept. I feel that newspapers offering a program this good with which to read their content have a better chance of convincing readers to pay for content than those who would just add a password to their website. What about you? Do you think Times Desktop Reader is a good model for reading a newspaper on your computer, or do you prefer an old-fashioned website? Do you know of any other newspapers offering similar programs? Or do you, as a member of the blogging generation, not remember what newspapers are? Let us know in the comment below! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| 7 Simple Steps To An Awesome Minimalist and Productive Desktop Posted: 25 Feb 2010 01:30 PM PST
The desktop is the first thing you see when you log into your account. Would you prefer to look at a stunningly beautiful desktop rather than a cluttered, ugly, and frustrating screen? This article shows you how to create an awesome minimalist desktop in 7 easy steps. In the end, you’ll find that it’s much more relaxing to have space and a nice view on your desk.
1. Remove Desktop IconsThere are two easy ways to remove all desktop icons for a minimalist desktop:
If you selected the first method, which I would recommend, your desktop will look something like the screenshot below. Empty, except for the Recycle Bin.
2. Hide Recycle BinThis hack works essentially the same under Windows XP and Windows 7. In Windows XP, go to > Start > Run > type gpedit.msc into the text field and > hit OK. In Windows 7, go to > Start and into the search box type > gpedit.msc then press > Enter. In the > Local Group Policy Editor click through to > User Configuration > Administrative Templates. Within the > Desktop folder on the right find the entry > Remove Recycle Bin icon from desktop and double-click it. The properties window for this option will open. Select > enabled to hide the Recycle Bin and > click OK.
You have to log off or reboot your computer for the change to come into effect. 3. Hide The TaskbarAfter hiding all the desktop icons, including the recycle bin; your desktop will look a lot more peaceful. However, there still is this annoying taskbar. To hide it > right-click onto the taskbar and select > Properties. In the properties window check > Auto-hide the taskbar. And this is the perfect desktop:
Alternatively, you can use tools to hide the taskbar to top off your minimalist desktop. Check out my article 6 Tools for Elegant Taskbar Tweaking and 1 to Repair. 4. Organize Shortcuts and DocumentsThe perfect desktop, huh? You probably wonder how you’re going to access your documents and folders now. Easy. You’ll add a pretty dock, which will hold everything you need in a clean and organized manner. RocketDock is one of the most popular dock programs out there. It comes with all icons that are default components of every Windows desktop. You can remove items in the dock by dragging them out, you can change various icon properties, and drag new items into the dock from your folders. Note that documents will be added as shortcuts only.
The dock can be added to either side of the screen and you can let it hide automatically. For more docks, have a look at my article Docks – The 6 Best Friends of your Windows Taskbar. 5. Quickly Access ProgramsNow rather than cluttering your pretty dock with shortcuts, you should keep it down to the bare minimum, i.e. items you need the most. For the rest, you can use a program launcher, which will help you to quickly find and open any program or document on your computer. Launchy is my personal favorite. It’s so simple that there really isn’t much to say about it. You can use it to search programs, files or any bookmarks on your computer. You can even search Google with Launchy.
Shankar introduced Launchy in his post Be more productive with Launchy Keystroke Launcher. More tips and tricks can be found here. Looking for an alternative to Launchy? Jimmy reviewed Executor: A Power Program Launcher for Your Windows PC and Enso Launcher: It Will Make You Feel Like a Hacker. Varun inspected FARR – Launch Your Apps & Find Your Files Quickly. And Will listed Top 7 Unknown Free Launcher Applications for Windows. 6. Beautiful WallpapersNow that your minimalist desktop is perfectly clean and organized, it’s time to look for nice wallpapers. There are many great resources out there, but let me highlight just one. DeviantART is a fantastic resource for high quality and artistic wallpapers. Under > Category select > Customization and > Wallpaper. You can further specify your search and browse all matching artwork.
For more wallpaper resources, check out Karl’s article Best Sites to Download Very High Resolution Wallpapers. Grant compiled Best Sites To Download Good High-Res Wallpapers (Part Two) and I summarized The Best Resources to Pimp Your Wallpaper 7. Automatically Switch WallpapersIf you found more than one wallpaper you like on DeviantART, the good news is, you don’t need to choose; you can have them all. Simply use a tool that will automatically switch between all of your favorite wallpapers. ScrollWall is the tool I personally use. You can add dozens of wallpapers, define how they should be treated (stretched, centered, tiled), and how often the wallpaper should be changed. No fuzz, straight forward, and very easy to set up.
In my article The Best Resources to Pimp Your Wallpaper I also covered Wallpaper Changer and Wallpaper Juggler. Please use this updated link for Wallpaper Juggler. If you’re too lazy to search for wallpapers, but still want regular updates, try John’s Background Switcher, which I introduced in my article Take Flickr Straight to your Desktop with Interactive Wallpaper Updates. You’re on Mac or Linux? Have a look at Damien’s article 5 Wallpaper Changer Apps For Linux or Simon’s piece on Wally – Awesome Wallpaper Rotator for Windows, Mac & Linux. Need more advice for a super clean desktop? Check out my 3 Steps to an Organized Desktop. And that’s it. Now you have a fantastic desktop, no clutter, no distractions, just a beautiful, relaxing view. What do you think? Image credit: mmagallan em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps Posted: 25 Feb 2010 11:30 AM PST
With the tools and steps I will share with you in this article, you too can start lifestreaming on your Wordpress blog! I know there are tools out there (such as StoryTlr) that make this quite simple. My specific needs weren’t easily met by many of them. I wanted my lifestream found directly on my blog.
The right tools for lifestreaming to Wordpress
First of all, you’ll need some plugins for your Wordpress blog. Remember that if you have a current installation of Wordpress, you can install these plugins directly from the “Install Plugins” section of the Admin of your Wordpress blog. I will also link to the plugins’ pages so you can get an idea of what to search for and how to install them.
Secondly, if you want to stream your tweets from Twitter, you may want to filter out the @ replies to cut down on the clutter. Many people just want the original content tweets and choose to skip the conversations going on with other twits. For this, I found a Yahoo Pipe that suite my fancy called Twitter – no @ replies. If you know of a better option, let me know:) Steps to applying your lifestream on your Wordpress blog
1. Install the plugins – Like I said earlier, with the current Wordpress installation, you can now easily install plugins from within the Admin area of your blog. Visit the plugin pages for more information about them and some instructions as to how to use them (SimplePie Core won’t need you to do anything because it is only needed to make SimplePie plugin for Wordpress work). Also, before the next step, please make sure the Exec-PHP plugin is installed or the code you’ll be inserting into the page/post/widget will only laugh at you (my way of saying it won’t work)!
2. Add code and feeds where you want them – I am highlighting this step before the plugin configuration step because we want the stream up and running before we tweak how it looks. The code I used was simple because I just grabbed it from the documentation on the SimplePie website! Here’s the code I copied and pasted (make sure you are in HTML mode and not Visual mode in Wordpress):
Insert your own feed URLs in place of mine! Notice that there is a comma at the end of each line containing the feed. Check out the documentation page for more information but this worked fine for me. Before adding your Twitter feed, decide whether or not you want to filter out the @ replies. If you do, visit this Yahoo Pipes page to get the feed. All you’ll have to do is add your Twitter ID (must be public) and grab the feed it gives you. If you don’t care to filter them out, just visit your Twitter page and grab the feed from there. 3. Configure the SimplePie plugin – SimplePie for Wordpress will need some configuration to make the feed look the way you want it to. To configure the plugin, go to the Settings menu and you should find SimplePie for WP there.
There are several options here including the Layout Template section that dictates how the feed will look on your site. If you’re into it, you can actually modify the templates to your liking but for the sake of simplicity, I just used the “Blog style with enclosures” template because I wanted to dedicate an entire page to my lifestream.
You’ll probably want your multiple feeds to show up in chronological order, the goal being a lifestream and all. Look for “reorder items by date” and make sure “yes” is selected.
You can also choose how many items show up in your stream including how many options from each feed.
Some of these setting depend on how and where you want to use your lifestream on your blog. If you want it in a text widget in the sidebar for instance, you’ll probably want not much more that the content’s title and maybe the date/time to show. If you’re like me and want the stream on a whole page, you can stream more of the content, including pictures and paragraphs. You MAY also want to disable comments if you are creating a page or a post for your lifestream.
Notice the screen shot shows three feed sources I have streamed together in chronological order: my MakeUseOf author feed, my blog feed, and my Posterous feed (which I’m using as a make-shift photo blog). The cool part is it’s up to you! You can pretty much make your stream look any way you want! Do you lifestream your online content? How do YOU do it? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| 5 Cool Things You Can Do With Google Voice Posted: 25 Feb 2010 10:30 AM PST
My initial excitement about Voice quickly faded when I learned that Google Voice will not let you port over your home number yet – although you can use your mobile number, but you’ll be limited to primarily only using the voicemail feature. As I’ve been waiting patiently for Google to offer home number porting (which Google’s help page promises is a feature that’s “coming soon”), I’ve noticed that more cool features keep getting added on to the service, so I thought it’s about time for a list of 5 cool things that you can do with Google Voice.
1. Integrate Google Voice for All Mobile CallsObviously, once you sign up with Google Voice, you’ll want to install the mobile app onto your phone. Google Voice offers integrated mobile apps for all major phones, including Android, Blackberry, iPhone and others. Once you install Voice on your phone, you can check your voicemail, send and receive calls, and check your current account balance (Internet and data plan needed for account connection).
Most importantly, once you’ve installed the Google Voice app, you can receive calls on your mobile phone from your Google number. You can also dial out from your cell phone using the app, and people will see your Google Voice number, not your cell phone number.
Just click on “Call with Google Voice,” and your call will get routed through your Voice account. Why is this useful? Imagine you’re starting a new business and you’d like a unique number that you can route to different phones depending on who’s calling. Create one group of contacts that rings your phone, a second group that rings your mobile, and so on. 2. Listen In to Your VoicemailRemember the days when you had a voice message recorder, and when a caller would start leaving a message, you would also hear the voice from the speaker? With the advent of digital voicemail, that ability to screen calls by listening to the beginning of the message is a disappearing luxury. Well, Google brings it back by integrating ListenIn (TM) service into Google Voice. The way it works is really simple. First, in your Voice account, make sure that under “Call” settings, “Call Presentation” is enabled.
This tells the system that when someone calls you, you’d like to have the option to handle the call in a variety of ways. You can press (1) to immediately accept, (2) to immediately send to voicemail while listening in and pressing (*) if you want to jump into the call. 3. Automatic Transcription of Every VoicemailWhile the bugs aren’t quite all worked out of the system yet, the transcription feature works well enough that you can pretty much understand what the person was saying. In the following text call, I used the “listen in” feature, and from the calling-in phone I left a message that went, “This is a test voicemail for a MakeUseOf article.” You can check your voicemails either online or from your phone.
As you can see, the first half of the sentence was transcribed perfectly. The second had “14″ instead of “for a”, but “Make Use of” is understandable and close enough. “Our call” was an obvious near miss of “article,” however you can see that those two words are grayed out because the system had a hard time recognizing those words. 4. Recording Phone CallsMake sure it’s legal where you live, but another option when you have an incoming call is to press (1) and (4) to accept the call and record it. Yup, record it – which brings me to the next cool Google Voice feature, recording phone calls for interviews, police interrogations, or simply to have a record of the conversation.
There’s no transcription available for recorded conversations, so you’ll need to log into your Voice account to play back the conversation. You can email the file to someone, download it as an MP3 file, or embed it into a website. 5. Customizing Greetings and Other Group SettingsAs I mentioned earlier, one of the coolest features of Voice that makes the system ultra-flexible is the fact that you can customize how Google handles and routes your phone calls. It essentially acts as a personal secretary – a phone switchboard that can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
Under “Settings” and “Groups”, you can create any group that you like, and edit individual settings as shown above. Select what phone (or phones) should ring, select (or record) a special greeting, and you can even disable Call Presentation for a particular group so that the call immediately starts when you pick up, rather than offering you the usual options to forward to voicemail. The real promise of Google Voice is home phone number portability – the potential for doing away with our dependency on the phone company or the cable company for overpriced phone service. Why pay a monthly fee, when you could have your home phone number ported over to Google Voice, and manage how incoming calls are routed (to individual family cellphones, or to work phones) depending on who’s calling? While the voicemail feature is extremely useful and versatile, the potential of home phone portability, which Google promises in the near future, could completely transform the playing field in the telecommunications industry and revolutionize home telephone service as we know it, or it could fall flat on its face and go down as one of Google’s most significant failed initiatives to date. It will be fascinating to see if Google can manage to make this baby fly. em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hiren’s Boot CD – The All-In-One Boot CD For Every Need Posted: 25 Feb 2010 09:30 AM PST
Each of these categories have a number of tools listed under them. To use Hiren’s Boot CD, you have to download and then burn the downloaded ISO file onto a CD. Put the CD in the drive and restart your computer. Make sure that the BIOS settings check for the optical drive before the hard disk for bootable media.
You can now choose to boot from the hard drive, which will boot your computer as if you had not inserted the CD, you can choose Start BootCD to access all the tools included on the CD. You can also run a mini Windows XP mode or run memory diagnostics from this main menu. I will be choosing the “Start BootCD” option to show you around. As soon as you do so, you are presented with the Hiren’s Boot CD menu like so:
Here, you can choose the category of tools you want to use by either entering the numeric code listed, or by using the arrow keys and then hitting enter to select the highlighted category. You are then presented with all the tools in that particular category. Invoke any of them in a similar fashion and you will be able to use them normally just like if you had installed them on your hard drive.
Perform any operation that you might want/need and when you are done and have quit the application, you can simply hit Ctrl + Alt + Del or type reboot and hit Enter to reboot the computer (or type M and then press Enter to return to the main menu). This time, you can choose to boot from the hard drive to see if the changes you just made have taken effect or not. Let’s just look at some of the included tools and the wide possibilities that you can use this CD with. It includes antivirus and antispyware tools like MalwareBytes, Spybot Search & Destroy; that you can use to scan your computer for viruses/spyware. Of course the definitions can become outdated after some time, still the tools can be indispensable if a virus attack has left you with an unbootable computer. Next up in line are the partitioning tools. If you performed such a task before, you might know that partitioning, resizing and formatting are best done if you don’t actually have an operating system running from the hard disk. So HBCD’s partitioning tools are a perfect fit. Similarly you can use the backup tools with ease, fix MBR problems, run diagnostics and get detailed system information without requiring a functional operating system. Heck, you can even browse files and listen to songs using the multimedia tools. You can also create a bootable USB drive with all the awesomeness minus the CD burning part! Here are complete instructions on how to do that. All in all, HBCD is a truly indispensable resource to have around you. It can save you a lot of trouble and hard work when dealing with or troubleshooting computer problems. Do you have any favorite LiveCD you use for such purposes as above? We would love to hear about it. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| Notational Velocity – Creating Notes At The Speed Of Light [Mac] Posted: 25 Feb 2010 08:30 AM PST
And since my handwriting could rival Picasso’s paintings every time I take quick notes; the pen and paper practically become useless. I have to rely on electronic gadgets for taking legible notes. Fortunately, I spend most of my working time in front of my Mac. So it comes down to choosing what app is the best for taking quick notes.
In the blink of an eyeI fell in love with JustNotes ever since I wrote about “Four Free Quick Note Taking Apps For The Mac“. Besides being useful, the interface is just gorgeous. But that didn’t stop me from trying to find better alternatives for taking notes. A reader recommended another quick note-taking application for Mac called Notational Velocity or NV for short. And after trying it for a while, I fell in love all over again.
NV is the perfect application to take not only quick notes but also extensive notes. It’s blazingly fast and it takes very little to no system resources.
Unlike JustNotes, NV doesn’t stay in the menubar. But this is hardly a drawback, because it opens in a blink of an eye. You could just use any launcher to open it. And after it opens up, you could use a shortcut to quickly reveal/hide the app. Setting up the shortcut could be done from the “General” tab in the “Preferences” window.
After clicking the “Set” button, you could assign any unused shortcut there. Just press the desired combination and click “OK“.
Look, Ma. No mouse, no icon, and no need to save!Every first-time NV user will quickly notice that there are no icons in the interface. Just three simple areas: Search area, Title area, and Text area. That’s because NV is designed to work without a mouse. NV comes with the basic instructions on how to use it. But let me recap on the general flow of using NV:
There’s a complete list of available shortcuts for NV in the note titled “Excruciatingly Useful Shortcuts”
But you will never find any shortcut to save notes, because the saving process is done automatically. Share and Sync AwayNV comes with the ability to sync its notes through Simplenote service. Enter your Simplenote login and password in the “Preferences > Notes > Synchronization” window after checking the “Synchronize with Simplenote” box.
At the moment, Simplenote has changed their business model. Any iPhone/iPod Touch/(future) iPad owner can download and use the Simplenote app for free but with ad support. If they want to get rid of the ad, they have to pay a one time fee of US$ 3.99. People who do not own one of those gadgets can also use the service for the same price. But you don’t have to use Simplenote’s service to be able to sync your NV notes to another Mac(s). You could just point the location of NV notes in all of your Macs to a Dropbox folder and all of them will automatically synchronized. To do this, open the “Preferences > Notes” window and choose “Other” from the “Read Notes from Folder” options.
Then choose (or create) a folder within the Dropbox folder as the new location.
If you already have many notes in NV, you would want to copy/move the content of the old folder to the new location. The default old location is in: “Your Home Folder/Library/Application Support/Notational Data” And using the sharing feature from Dropbox, you could easily share the notes folder to anybody that you want. If OnlyThere are few other settings that you can tweak from the Preferences window including changing the font used by the note and applying encryption and password to notes. All of the features make NV a solid application for taking notes. If only the interface is as gorgeous as JustNote, I would gladly ditch other similar apps without thinking twice. Even though functionality comes first, I too – like everybody else – almost always judge the book by the cover. Have you tried Notational Velocity? Do you know other alternatives to take and organise quick notes for Mac? Share using the comment 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
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| How To Trigger Wake On LAN Using The MAC Address Posted: 25 Feb 2010 07:30 AM PST
The computers can be in a totally powered off state (but still connected to the power outlet) and woken up all the way to a simple stand-by mode. This is called Wake On LAN. According to Wikipedia, Wake-on-LAN is an Ethernet computer networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or woken up by a message. The message is usually sent by a simple program executed on another computer on the local area network. Wake-on-LAN is also known as Wake on LAN, WOL, or sometimes WoL. It may also be known as Remote Wake-Up or RWU.
If you are having issues with WOL, check your BIOS setting and make sure if the Ethernet card is a add-on card, it is still connected to the motherboard via a cable.
There are many ways to trigger a Wake On LAN event and we will be exploring how to do Wake on LAN using the Mac Address of the machine in question. The MAC address is a unique address given to your network adapter or NIC. To find your MAC address, you can dig into your network adapter's properties. But to find a remote machine’s MAC address or yours easily, we can use this simple command line application MCGETMAC.EXE. Download that and run it from the command line like so:
You need to go to Start – Run and type CMD then navigate to the directory you stored MCGETMAC.exe and then run it using either of these two syntaxes: MCGETMAC.exe Hostname MCGETMAC.exe IP Address So I could use MCGETMAC.exe 127.0.0.1 to return my local machine’s MAC address or I could use MCGETMAC.exe KarlXP to grab it. Once you have it, store it in a safe place. Next, we will need to download MC-WOL.EXE both of these files are from here. Save that EXE file to the same place you have saved MCGETMAC.exe for ease of use. Now you can go back to your CMD window and type MC-WOL.exe and the MAC address. In my case, I typed MC-WOL.exe 00:0C;F1:F9:6F:F2 and hit Enter. This was my result:
The "Magic Packet" was sent to my remote machine and I was able to wake it up. Now I can include these commands in batch files or scripts and save power and money while I am at it! And for some more good reading, check out this post on 3 ways to shut down your computer over the Internet. Have you ever used the Wake on LAN feature with the mac address? Any luck getting it to work properly? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Related posts
| |||||||||||||||||||||
If you follow more than a hundred people on Twitter, your tweet stream can get overwhelming. On the other hand, you might have already had enough of the sharing overload on social networks and may be keeping away from Twitter altogether. Whatever the case, information overload has become a real cause of concern for many of us. You are not alone.
How newspapers will make money in the 21st century is a legitimate question. As such, the publishing world was quite excited with the prospects for new technology saving an old industry after Apple’s iPad announcment earlier this year, which included the unveiling of a New York Times app with a subscription model.
Is your desktop cluttered with icons? Do you keep searching for shortcuts or documents among the dozens of icons on your desktop? And when was the last time you changed your wallpaper?
Most of us have heard of 
When I first heard about Google Voice, I immediately submitted my email for an invite, and within a few weeks I received one. April first provided a 
Hiren’s Boot CD is an all-in-one bootable CD solution that contains a load of useful tools you can make use of in a variety of situations. I am talking about hard drive failure, virus infections, partitioning, password recovery and data recovery. HBCD (as Hiren’s Boot CD is called) is a God-send in situations like these. It has a multitude of tools divided into a number of categories like partitioning tools, backup, recovery and BIOS/CMOS tools to name a few.
I love taking notes. Or the more accurate term is I need to always take notes. Ideas, to dos, reminders and other noteworthy items always pop up out of the blue and evaporate as fast as they came.
So you want to have your machines go to sleep when they are not working and then be able to remotely connect to them and have them automagically respond? This is cross platform and can potentially work on any computer.
| You are subscribed to email updates from MakeUseOf.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment