Windows only: Xinorbis is a portable and quite powerful disk analyzer. Graphs, tables, trees, and report generation ensure you know what is going on with your data. After scanning your disks—the results can be viewed individually for each drive or merged together to provide a system overview of all your storage—you can drill down into your data. Data can be sorted and graphed by file type, biggest folders, date of creation, 101 biggest and smallest files, and data distribution by user. Results can be saved with the Report function and compared to future scans. Additionally there is a basic file navigator that places a handy bar beside each folder indicating how much of the drive it takes up. Xinorbis is freeware, Windows only. Thanks SanwariCethegus!
XinorbisDinner’s cooked, the guests are arriving, so you pop open that nice bottle of red and—ugh, what is that? If you’re stuck with a “corked” bottle, here’s how you can minimize the dankness. In a New York Times article on wine’s flavorful reactions to just about everything, out comes a tip from Andrew Waterhouse, a professor of wine chemistry at the University of California, Davis, on dealing with the effects of a tainted cork:
Mr. Waterhouse said that the obnoxious, dank flavor of a “corked” wine, which usually renders it unusable even in cooking, can be removed by pouring the wine into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap.
“It’s kind of messy, but very effective in just a few minutes,” he said. The culprit molecule in infected corks, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, is chemically similar to polyethylene and sticks to the plastic.
I’m not enough of an oenologist to be sure, but for any wine that seems a little off, a bit of oxygen exposure outside the bottle before serving seems to have helped. Got a better wine-saver? Spill it in the comments.
For a Tastier Wine, the Next Trick Involves … [New York Times]
Windows 7 gives users better ways to clear most everything but the desktop—namley Aero Shake and Aero Peek. But if you still cling to “Show Desktop,” however, you can kind of get it back. Pinning a Show Desktop icon to the taskbar in Windows 7 won’t work the way it did in pretty much every earlier version of Windows. While you can still create the “Show Desktop.scf” script, it just won’t pin itself correctly. The Tweaking with Vishal blog offers a kind of work-around that makes use of Windows 7′s utterly transparent toolbars. The short version: Create a folder, place a “Show Desktop.scf” file in there (either your standard Google-found kind or the script available at the bottom link), then right-click your taskbar to create a “New Toolbar” that points to that folder. Turn off the text and titles on that new toolbar, change the icons to large size, and then put your new one-button toolbar where you’d like. The drawback: If you pin it too close to the right of your standard tasks and pinned items, you’ll compress them and require an extra click to get to them. If you don’t mind having your desktop button on the left, though, or have a totally re-tweaked taskbar altogether, you’re good to go. (Lifehacker AU editor adds: for my money, the still-functional Windows key-M shortcut beats all these options for getting to the desktop in a hurry.) How to Get the Good Old “Show Desktop” Feature Back in Windows 7? [Tweaking with Vishal]
Having just finished installing Build 7000 of Windows 7 on my PC this week (being at CES in Vegas got in the way of an earlier setup), one of the first things I tested was the search function — and it didn’t do well. In the most telling example, it totally failed to find text files that matched a given search term, even when that term was part of the file name. Indexing Options (under Control Panel) includes a troubleshooter, but it reported that everything was working fine. Since that clearly wasn’t the case, I chose to rebuild the index (another choice under Indexing Options). That took a few hours, but the results were good, and Windows Search now appears to be working properly. Of course, Windows 7 is still in beta, and your mileage might vary, but if you’re not finding search works well, a rebuild is probably indicated. Ideally, the release candidate will automatically handle this kind of problem without requiring manual intervention, especially for users upgrading from Vista, which does already include search functionality. More »
It’s no great shock to learn that when it comes to interrupting your dinner with an unwanted phone call, telecommunications companies are at the top of the list. According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, 55% of complaints regarding violations of the Do Not Call register relate to phone products and services. And it turns out that the usual “few bad apples” principle applies:
ACMA estimates that 5 per cent of the businesses complained about are responsible for about 70 per cent of the total complaints received
Have you found being on the Do Not Call register has helped cut down telemarketing calls? More »
You’re probably familiar with AutoCorrect, Microsoft’s technology for fixing common errors and letting you create shortcuts for frequently used text, from Word and Excel, but it can also be helpful in Outlook (which uses Word as its editing environment). The Microsoft Outlook Team Blog offers a guide on how to set up AutoCorrect options. Its most useful insight is in how to set up acronym expansions in AutoCorrect that don’t drive you nuts:
Since I might not want the acronym expanded every time I type it I’ve added a symbol at the end of the acronym: “>”. Only acronyms that I’ve defined with that symbol will get automatically expanded. This way I am be able to type DCFS or DCFS>, depending on what I want to happen.
That’s a simple but very handy idea (and a similar concept to our recent suggestion of how to tag work-in-progress writing.) Living in Outlook: Making AutoCorrect Work for You [Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog]
One of the minor annoyances in Skype 4.0 (which will soon be the default release) is that its determination to promote new features like video calls means that it makes some everyday tasks harder. For instance, where double-clicking on a contact name used to automatically start a voice call, now it brings up the contact card and you have to separately click on “Call phone” to make a call. Frankly, it’s an idiotic design, because single-clicking also brings up the contact card. Fortunately, there is a setting to make Skype behave more sensibly. Choose Tools, Options and then select “When I double-click on a contact start a call”.
While it would make far more sense to make this as the default behaviour, at least there’s still a choice.
Firefox 3.0′s history of sites via the AwesomeBar is one of its most useful features, save a small design flaw: the title of the page it retains isn’t always very accurate. For instance, Google Maps generally shows up with the last address you searched, even though accessing the link gets you the entry page rather than search. Similarly, for quite some time my own blog link had a completely inaccurate title in my Firefox history, giving the name of the ISP that failed to find the connection rather than the blog itself. So far, the only solution I’ve found is to delete the whole entry (just highlight and hit the Delete key), but that’s not very sophisticated, and a real nuisance for fiddly addresses you don’t want to re-enter. Is there some hidden method or extension for editing just the page title in your existing history? Share any useful knowledge in the comments. More »
Customising the look and feel of Windows is a cinch with themes—problem is, Microsoft generally offers so few supported themes. That’s changed in Windows 7 Beta: Microsoft is already offering 20 fresh themes. In previous releases of Windows, if you wanted to choose from more than a small handful of “Royale”-named themes, you had to do some legwork so you could install custom themes. With Windows 7, Microsoft may actually offer several legitimate themes so you can adjust the look and feel of Windows to your heart’s content. Granted, these Windows 7 themes aren’t as transformative some of the killer custom themes we’ve featured for patched themes, but these 20 offerings already represent significantly more action in the theme department. Five themes come with Windows 7 Beta out of the box, while the subsequent 15 are all made available as downloads from the Windows 7 Personalise your PC page. According to Life Rocks 2.0, you can find even more hidden themes inside a WindowsGlobalizationMCT folder (if you make a few tweaks first). Each theme comes with a complimentary wallpaper, most of which are landscapes. You can, of course, customise the wallpaper to your liking. Primarily the themes change the colour of the chrome—which itself stays translucent, of course. What do you think of the new Windows 7 themes? Are they enough to keep you from patching and using unauthorized custom themes when the time comes? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
