The WinVistaClub forum walks through a simple registry hack to empty a folder right from the Windows context menu—a time saving tweak for cleaning up your clutter. To apply the registry hack, you can create a new file in Notepad, paste in the contents of this registry hack, save the file with a .reg extension, and then double-click the saved file to enter the information into the registry. Once you’ve completed these steps, the new item will be available on the context menu—no need to reboot.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Delete Folder Contents]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Delete Folder Contents\command] @=”cmd /c \”cd /d %1 && del /s /q *.*”
If you’d rather use the point-and-click method, you can follow the instructions at the linked article—or check out our top 10 right-click tools.
Add “Delete Folder Contents” to Right Click Context Menu [WinVistaClub]Windows XP only: The system theme pack installer from NiwradSoft gives your crayola-inspired Windows XP desktop an impressive Windows 7-ish look—without wasting time hacking system files yourself. Installing the theme pack is as simple as clicking through the installer, though you may want to take your time and choose exactly which components to install—by default the package includes boot screens, logon screens, screensaver, system theme, and a ton of hacked resource files. Once you’ve installed and rebooted, you’ll be greeted with a Windows 7 style desktop, complete with the fish wallpaper from the last beta. NiwradSoft Seven Remix XP is a free download for Windows XP users. If you want to add Windows 7 features to your XP desktop, check out previously mentioned Aero Shake, Aero Snap and Aero Peek utilities—then finish up the Windows 7 transformation with the very useful Windows 7 shortcut keys application.
Seven Remix XP [via Life Rocks 2.0]Our gadget-loving siblings at Gizmodo offer a detailed, straightforward explanation of why more megapixels doesn’t always mean a better camera. These days everything’s cramming more megapixels into their cameras—like Sony Ericsson’s crazy 12-megapixel cameraphone, for example—but that doesn’t mean that the 12-megapixel cameraphone produces results close to what even a 10-megapixel DSLR could do. Obviously, there’s a world of difference between the image quality you’re going to get out each of those. Most of it comes down to the size of the sensor and the pixels. You can fit a much bigger sensor inside of a DSLR than you can inside of a mobile phone, which not only means you can fit more pixels on the sensor, you can fit much bigger ones—imagine bigger buckets to catch the light. Sure enough, the sensors inside of DSLRs are huge compared to the ones in compacts
Check out Gizmodo’s post for the full detailed rundown—including their nice analogy comparing pixels to light-catching buckets, which makes a lot of sense to the uninitiated. If you’re a shutterbug, let’s hear your thoughts in the comments. Giz Explains: Why More Megapixels Isn’t Always More Better [Gizmodo]
Lifehacker reader Brad Lucid completely flipped his cookie cutter cubicle with a small amount of effort and a dramatic colour shift.
How dramatic? Like most cubicles across the land, Brad’s cubicle was a bland affair of generic speckled-grey modular panels. He tacked black fabric over the paneling—easy to do, since the walls of most cubicles are essentially giant bulletin boards—and added two small accent lamps with bold red shades. The black fabric does enough to dampen the overhead lighting, so the lamps have a chance to really add a visual punch to the workspace. Originally supplied with only a laptop, Brad further tweaked his workspace for comfort by bringing an LCD monitor from home and adding an ergonomic keyboard. Where is all the paper? Brad’s a web developer, so he rarely handles actual paper, save for preparing things to go out in the mail.
Most of us have been enjoying custom themes in Gmail ever since they launched last November, but now the real designers among us can manually customise the look and feel of Gmail to our personal tastes. Just fire up Gmail, head to Settings -> Themes, and click on the new Choose your own colours option at the bottom of the themes gallery. You’ll be welcomed with a new popup window from which you can customise the colour of every last aspect of your inbox, from the colour of text (and link text) to the chrome of your labels box and highlighting colours. It’s pretty simple, so you should get the gist pretty quickly. Thanks Jason!
Windows only: Previously reviewed approval/consensus-helper Zapproved is out with an Outlook 2007 plug-in that turns your standard email drafts into approval requests through the Zapproved system. As noted before, Zapproved offers a free account that lets you send up to five proposals per month to multiple recipients for approval. They can be as simple as asking your boss for the go-ahead to expense a chair, or team-wide approval of a logo, and the status of each proposal can be tracked at the Zapproved site. Once you’ve got your account, grab the Outlook add-in and install it. If you don’t have the .NET 3.5 SP 1 Framework installed, it might be a good chunk of minutes (and one restart) until you’re good to go. The add-on also works only for Outlook 2007 at the moment, but the Zapproved team is working on a 2003-compatible edition.
If you’re sharing or collaborating on a Google Spreadshet, you can now set columns to validate data types. Cells can enforce certain data types, require valid URLs or mandatory text, for example. [via Google Blogoscoped]
