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New flybuys Earns Discounts Faster (But They're Not Good Discounts) PureText is a freeware app for Windows which simplifies the cut and paste process by automatically stripping out formatting and images, in order to paste the results in a pure text format.If you tend to copy and paste text from websites or other documents, you may find this little tool quite useful. One of the “joys” of online publishing is writing in a word processing program, then having to paste the document into Notepad to strip out the formatting before dumping the raw text into the CMS for publishing. It’s an incredibly common and incredibly backwards way of doing things. PureText gives you a hotkey to reformat and paste in one step.Once you’ve selected and copied the text you want, you hit the “PT” icon in your system tray, which you can configure to convert the text and paste it into the window you have currently selected. The text will arrive with pictures and rich formatting gone. Note that it doesn’t affect carriage returns or tabs, word wraps or any HTML (so you can’t use it to strip the text out of the source code of a website).But if you copy textfrom an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.For the command line junkies, Version 2.0 of the software also includes command line options.PureText 2.0 is freeware for Windows 95 and later. It can be downloaded here.[via Worker's Edge]
This week I had the opportunity to interview independent journalist-cum-shit stirrer Stephen Mayne – the founder of Crikey, and more recently the Australian social news aggregator Kwoff and the shareholder activist and news website, The Mayne Report.How did a self-confessed technophobe manage to create what he describes as “Australia’s best known ezine” and end up video blogging on YouTube? I sat down with Stephen Mayne to find out.
Mac OS X only: Freeware application Fluid runs your favourite webapps in a dedicated, WebKit-based browser so you can run your most-used webapps just like they’re native Mac apps. If this idea sounds familiar it’s because Mozilla has tackled similar territory with an app they’re calling Prism. The major difference is that Fluid uses the same rendering engine as Safari and gets that native Mac look that’s still lacking from Mozilla apps. And since Prism doesn’t really work with extensions yet, Fluid seems like the best choice if you’re on a Mac. Fluid is freeware (though this beta expires in April, so it may go shareware in the future), Mac OS X only.
FluidThe Productivity Portfolio blog covers how to email your calendar in Outlook 2007 in a format that anyone—even non-Outlook users—can open. Everyone’s got wacky work and life schedules around the holidays, so you may want to dash off your calendar to a co-worker or client before you go. In short, Outlook attaches an .ISC file to the outgoing email, which the recipient can open in iCal, Google Calendar, or any app that supports iCalendar files. Handy. Emailing Calendar Info in Outlook 2007 [Productivity Portfolio]
Google’s new Toolbar 5 beta for Internet Explorer has a couple of very nice features including the ability to save your customised Toolbar settings via your Google account so you can access them from any computer. Google Notebook is now completely integrated – so you don’t need to download a plug-in to be able to clip items from websites and save them with comments in your notebook. When you mouse over the clipping in your notebook, your comments appear like a tooltip.You can also add gadgets to your toolbar to be able to view content from websites (such as YouTube).The Google Operating System had a nice writeup of the new features, along with screenshots. You can download the toolbar here (and watch the Google video guide to the new features) or check out Google’s guide to the new toolbar and features here.
Google Toolbar 5 for IE [Google Operating System]
Got an unstable application that you can’t give up for whatever reason that also freezes up on you regularly? Weblog CyerNet details how to create quick-kill shortcuts for specific applications using either the built-in Windows command line tool taskkill, or a third-party command line tool called taskill (notice one less ‘k’). With the default taskkill, just create a shortcut that runs the following: taskkill /f /im firefox.exe
Where firefox.exe is replaced by the the application you want to force to quit. Lastly, if you’re a *nix user (Mac or Linux), you can use the killall command, so a similar command would look something like killall firefox-bin, though you can dig deeper when killing apps on your Mac if you want.
Shortcuts to End Processes and Programs [CyberNet]Use iTunes? One year ago we ran down our best iTunes power tips to get the most out of your digital tunes.
Two big announcements for Flickr lovers (or is it lovrs?) today: First, previously mentioned Flickr Uploadr 3.0 beta is all grown up and ready for your post-beta consumption. With tonnes of new and improved features like picture re-ordering, the ability to create your sets offline before signing in and uploading, and simultaneous set creation and picture uploading (i.e., you don’t have to wait for uploads to complete before moving onto more pictures), you’ll definitely want to upgrade to 3.0, which is freeware, Windows and Mac OS X only. For real Flickr die-hards rocking a Pro account, Flickr has added one more gem today: Stats. Since Flickr Stats aren’t enabled by default on any account, you’ll want to head to the stats page (linked below) and activate stats for your account. Once you do, you’ll soon be bombarded by graphs and charts displaying your photos’ popularity, how and where people found your pics, and oh so much more… just as soon as Flickr processes your stats, which could take up to a day, according to Flickr. I’m assuming that timeframe depends greatly on the size of your account, because with my personal Flickr account (which doesn’t hold all that many photos) stats took just a few minutes to show up. If you’re a lover of charts, graphs, and Flickr, you’ll likely find a new addiction in Flickr Stats.
Flickr Uploadr 3.0 [via Flickr Blog] Flickr Stats [via Flickr Blog]Mac OS X Leopard only: You already know how to view zip archive contents and even preview files in the Trash using Leopard’s handy Quick Look feature, and now you can look inside folders, too. Using a Folder Quick Look plug-in, instead of just looking at a big old folder icon when you Quick Look a directory, you can get a file listing of what’s inside. Here’s how to get it working.
Google’s released their 2007 Zeitgeist, a compilation of the most popular search terms broken down by category. Coming in at #4 on the how to list? “How to hack.”
