Thursday, March 5, 2009
Work
PushMonitOff Links Hot Key Combo To Monitor Power Switch
11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: PushMonitOff is a nifty little stand-alone executable that instantly turns your monitors off with a hot key combination, allowing you to flip them back on when needed. Why would you want to turn off your monitor by keyboard instead of using the the physical monitor button? If you manually turn off the monitor, you can’t awaken the monitors with input from the computer. Once you activate the hot key combo and shut down your monitors with PushMonitorOff, any input from the keyboard or mouse will turn them back on. If you’re sporting multiple monitors, clicking two keys on your keyboard also saves you the reach of flipping two, three, or more buttons to power down without feeling like you’re shutting down a power station. Don’t laugh—when clicking my bank of monitors off, I feel like I should be hearing turbines winding down. The default combination is SHIFT+F1, but can be modified to any combination you like by accessing PushMonitOff settings via the system tray icon. PushMonitOff is a portable and stand-alone freeware application, Windows only. Photo by Lemsipmatt. PushMonitOff [via EliteFreeware] More »
Work
Zoho Writer 2.0 Brings New Looks And Menus To Web Writing
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Zoho, the ever-improving online editing suite, is rolling out Zoho Writer 2.0, comprising of a serious overhaul of the menu and writing interface and features pulled from user requests. Along with the new drop-down menus pictured above, the ubiquitous Zoho sidebar now sports a search feature, multiple document selections by holding Control and clicking, and a few other improvements. The documents themselves get auto-insertion of header and footer fields, word and character counts in the status bar. All in all, Zoho Writer now has a striking resemblance to your average word processor, and a lot of the buttons and options explain themselves a bit better. More »
Organise
Another Take On An Empty Inbox
10:30PM Kevin Purdy | Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo writes for the NYT about his custom-crafted email system mixing elements of Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done-ish action rules. Would his system work for you? More »
Work
PDFVue Edits PDF Text And Images Online
9:15PM Kevin Purdy | Free and fairly full-featured editor PDFVue isn’t the only webapp that can fill out PDF forms online, but it lets anyone add images, sticky notes, links, shapes, and more to forms and documents. You can head to PDFVue and upload your files for editing online, or install a Firefox extension to have the webapp be your automatic PDF handler—not necessarily a speed move, because the webapp has to download and customise anything you were taking a glance at. The editing tools are, however, pretty unique amongst PDFVue’s brethren we’ve sampled before, like PDFMeNot and PDFHammer (what’s with the fear of spacing, PDF app makers?) You get a standard range of colours to create lines, circles, text, and sticky notes with, and can upload images for branding or other purposes. The right-hand Forms tab gives you the ability to create check boxes, bullet lists, and other input data on PDFs that might otherwise seem a text-only affair. It’s doubtful one would make PDFVue your full-time PDF client, but for filling out forms, hacking up a presentation, or otherwise tweaking your read-only docs, it’s not a bad solution. PDFVue [via Webware] More »
Work
Firefox Updates To 3.0.7, Fixes Bugs And Improves Security
5:11PM Adam Pash | Nothing too sexy to report, but Firefox updated tonight to version 3.0.7. Head on over to the release notes for more of the specifics, but basically you’ll get several behind the scenes security and stability fixes as a part of a big old list of bugs that were smashed. If Firefox didn’t already take care of the update for you, Click Help -> Check for updates to get your update on. [Firefox 3.0.7] More »
Design
4:30PM Angus Kidman | Aerial tours are a frequent fixture in the modern tourist itinerary (I can personally recommend doing one over the Grand Canyon), but even though you’ll probably get a window seat, your photos are unlikely to be as spectacular as your memories. Photoshop guru Helen Bradley explains how to bridge the gap, though, in a post covering common fixes for shots taken from planes. Even if you don’t have Photoshop installed, you can grab the concepts used and apply them in your image editing tool of choice.
Photoshop: Fixing photos shot from airplanes [Projectwoman]
More »
Fix Photos Taken Out Of Plane Windows
4:30PM Angus Kidman | Aerial tours are a frequent fixture in the modern tourist itinerary (I can personally recommend doing one over the Grand Canyon), but even though you’ll probably get a window seat, your photos are unlikely to be as spectacular as your memories. Photoshop guru Helen Bradley explains how to bridge the gap, though, in a post covering common fixes for shots taken from planes. Even if you don’t have Photoshop installed, you can grab the concepts used and apply them in your image editing tool of choice.
Photoshop: Fixing photos shot from airplanes [Projectwoman]
More »
Fix
3:00PM Angus Kidman | The recession gets blamed for everything these days, so I’m wondering if it’s also an excuse for new slackness in tech support departments, Back in January, I lodged a support request with SanDisk after the C240 voice recorder I use refused to install on my new PC. None of the online support documents were any help, so I resorted to the company’s online system. It took SanDisk’s support team an entire month before it got back to me, and none of its advice proved any use. But even more galling, it then marked the entire support case as closed within a week, even though I hadn’t contacted anyone to say anything had been fixed. It strikes me that a company which takes a month even to respond doesn’t have much excuse for then closing off correspondence in a much shorter time frame. I’m wondering: is this unusual, or are we going to see even more and more cost-cutting and penny-pinching? Share your tech support nightmares in the comments.
More »
Are Tech Support Departments Getting Worse?
3:00PM Angus Kidman | The recession gets blamed for everything these days, so I’m wondering if it’s also an excuse for new slackness in tech support departments, Back in January, I lodged a support request with SanDisk after the C240 voice recorder I use refused to install on my new PC. None of the online support documents were any help, so I resorted to the company’s online system. It took SanDisk’s support team an entire month before it got back to me, and none of its advice proved any use. But even more galling, it then marked the entire support case as closed within a week, even though I hadn’t contacted anyone to say anything had been fixed. It strikes me that a company which takes a month even to respond doesn’t have much excuse for then closing off correspondence in a much shorter time frame. I’m wondering: is this unusual, or are we going to see even more and more cost-cutting and penny-pinching? Share your tech support nightmares in the comments.
More »
Money
1:08PM Angus Kidman | It’s National Consumer Fraud Awareness Week, which seems like a sound reason to revisit the topic of how to avoid getting fleeced online. Advice on how to avoid getting ripped off often seems obvious — but the continuing success of scams clearly suggests that obvious advice is often ignored. More »
Internet Scams Thrive In Tough Times
1:08PM Angus Kidman | It’s National Consumer Fraud Awareness Week, which seems like a sound reason to revisit the topic of how to avoid getting fleeced online. Advice on how to avoid getting ripped off often seems obvious — but the continuing success of scams clearly suggests that obvious advice is often ignored. More »
Fix
11:00AM Angus Kidman | Microsoft’s limited success with the Windows Media format for selling music (and movies) has largely been due to its willingness to add uber-annoying DRM to keep copyright holders happy. So it’s amusing to see the Big M officially recommending that customers who have used those services work their way around them. Here’s an extract from an email which Microsoft has sent to subscribers of its soon-to-be-defunct UK music store (I once purchased a single song from it for research purposes and hence ended up on the mailing list).
We recommend that you back up any previously downloaded tracks to audio CD using Windows Media Player. This will protect your music collection for future listening.
This approach isn’t new to anyone who has sought to remove DRM from Windows Media files (or from iTunes, for that matter), but it’s nice to see it given the company seal of approval. More »
Microsoft Endorses Burning Music To CD To Kill DRM
11:00AM Angus Kidman | Microsoft’s limited success with the Windows Media format for selling music (and movies) has largely been due to its willingness to add uber-annoying DRM to keep copyright holders happy. So it’s amusing to see the Big M officially recommending that customers who have used those services work their way around them. Here’s an extract from an email which Microsoft has sent to subscribers of its soon-to-be-defunct UK music store (I once purchased a single song from it for research purposes and hence ended up on the mailing list).
We recommend that you back up any previously downloaded tracks to audio CD using Windows Media Player. This will protect your music collection for future listening.
This approach isn’t new to anyone who has sought to remove DRM from Windows Media files (or from iTunes, for that matter), but it’s nice to see it given the company seal of approval. More »
Work
9:00AM Angus Kidman | Employees at Channel Ten have been asked to reduce their working days, Nick Tabakoff reports at The Australian. That kind of cutting-hours-to-save-cutting-jobs strategy is increasingly common these days. On the upside, people get to keep their jobs (and potentially cut back on insane working hours). On the downside, there’ll be less money coming in. Have you been offered reduced working hours — and would you take them if they were offered? Share your reactions in the comments.
Ten asks staff to ‘reduce’ working days [The Australian]
More »
Would You Sign Up For A Shorter Working Week?
9:00AM Angus Kidman | Employees at Channel Ten have been asked to reduce their working days, Nick Tabakoff reports at The Australian. That kind of cutting-hours-to-save-cutting-jobs strategy is increasingly common these days. On the upside, people get to keep their jobs (and potentially cut back on insane working hours). On the downside, there’ll be less money coming in. Have you been offered reduced working hours — and would you take them if they were offered? Share your reactions in the comments.
Ten asks staff to ‘reduce’ working days [The Australian]
More » 