All Things Marked

Easily Create Screenshots with the Windows Snipping Tool

Mark — Mon, 23 May 2011 12:00:42 +0000

Many people find they need to create clean screenshots for various purposes. For example, I do it all the time for this blog. Others may do it for instruction manuals, or just to share something on the screen with someone else. Windows comes with a built-in tool to easily take screenshots. Here’s how you can use this tool, the Windows Snipping Tool.

First, open up the Snipping Tool. Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Snipping Tool

The tool will pop up and have a few different buttons.

The dropdown arrow on the New button will allow you to pick a certain type of capture.

Free-form will let you drag a free-form line around anything
Rectangular will give you a box to re-size
Window will capture the current active window
Full-screen will capture everything on the screen

As an example, here’s a Rectangular snip on my website. Just click, drag the box, and drop.

Now the snip will show in the save box. Here you can save it, email it, copy it, or make a new snip.

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Easily Create Screenshots with the Windows Snipping Tool

Auto Dim Your Screen at Night with F.lux

Mark — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:00:33 +0000

Do you use your computer throughout the day and at night? One thing you may not know is that the brightness of the screen at night can affect how you sleep. To help your body adjust to a more dim environment you can use a free tool called f.lux to auto-dim your screen at night.

First, download f.lux for free. Once you’re finished installing, it will run and determine your location. Based on your location it will know what time it is and it will adjust the brightness of your screen depending on the time of day. The brightness will not drastically change in an instant. The change is gradual over time so your eyes get used to the change as it becomes later in the day.

You can see the brightness level based on the time of the day:

You can also disable it if you need full color:

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Auto Dim Your Screen at Night with F.lux

Create PDFs for Free

Mark — Wed, 18 May 2011 12:00:04 +0000

PDFs are one of the most commonly used file types these days. If you ever need to convert something to a PDF you can use the free CutePDF Writer. It will allow you to print anything to a PDF file.

First, download CutePDF for FREE. When you install it, it will say it requires another tool. Let it download the other tool and install for you. Also remember to NOT allow it to install the Ask Toolbar. Once it is installed, open any document or other file and try to print it. In the print options choose CutePDF Writer and it will allow you to save the file as a PDF.

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Create PDFs for Free

Save SSH Login Profiles with PuTTY

Mark — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:00:39 +0000

If you use PuTTY a lot for your SSH uses, you may find yourself continually typing in the same credentials a lot to log in. This is a handy guide on how to set up profiles for your logins and even call them right from application shortcuts.

First, create a profile be entering in a Host Name and a Saved Session name. Then click Save:

Now close PuTTY and create a standard shortcut to it:

Right-click the shortcut and go to Properties:

In the Properties after the path to putty.exe and after the final double-quote (“), enter in the following: -load “YourProfileNameHere” -l yourUserName -pw yourPassWord

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Save SSH Login Profiles with PuTTY

Run Multiple Versions of Firefox at the Same Time

Mark — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:00:57 +0000

Have you ever had the need to run more than one version of Firefox at the same time? Say you’re a web developer and you want to see a site in Firefox 2, 3, 3.5 all at the same time. Don’t worry, you don’t need another computer or any fancy screenshot website to show you the goods. The key is in easily customized portable apps.

Download Portable Firefox

The key to this trick is to download as many portable versions of Firefox as you need. Download the specific versions of portable Firefox that suit your needs:

Next, install them to a good common spot. I personally install to a Portable Apps folder with the version number in the name, e.g. C:\Portable Apps\Firefox 3.5\

Customize Portable Firefox for simultaneous instances

You should have all of your different versions in a single folder:

Go into a version and open the Other folder:

Open the Source folder:

Copy the FirefoxPortable.ini file:

Paste the file back in the main version folder:

Right-click and edit FirefoxPortable.ini:

By default, AllowMultipleInstances is set to false:

Set it to True and save the file:

You can now run FirefoxPortable.exe while another Firefox is running. If you follow these steps for every portable version you can run any at the same time.

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Run Multiple Versions of Firefox at the Same Time

Use MP3s as Alarms on the Droid Incredible

Mark — Thu, 12 May 2011 01:30:18 +0000

If you have a Droid Incredible, its pretty easy to use your own MP3s for alarms.

Plug-in your phone to your computer with the USB cord
On the phone set the USB connection type to Disk drive
In Computer open up the new hard drive
Create a folder called “alarms”
Put your music that you want as alarms in the new alarms folder

These screenshots may help:

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Use MP3s as Alarms on the Droid Incredible

Associate File Extensions With Specific Languages in Notepad++

Mark — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:55:24 +0000

If you use Notepad++ often, you may notice that it recognizes the type of file you open and provides nice synatx style for the language of the file. For example, it knows .js is a JavaScript file and .css is a CSS file. Each file type has its own unique style settings. There are a lot of these predefined file types, but what if Notepad++ doens’t support a file type you open often? If you want to make a custom file type use the same style of another type, just use the Style Configurator to define your own extensions.

Add Custom User Extensions

In Notepad++ navigate to Settings > Style Configurator…

Choose a language on the left side that you want your own extension to match (i.e. if I want .config files to style like XML then I’d choose XML). In the User ext. field near the bottom, enter in your custom user extension without the dot in front of it (e.g. config for *.config files). Now restart Notepad++ and it will map that new extension to the style you’ve chosen.

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Associate File Extensions With Specific Languages in Notepad++

Enable the Administrator Account on the Vista Login Screen

Mark — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:44:15 +0000

By default, Windows Vista forces you to make your own admin account and use that at the login screen. You can, however, enable the built-in Administrator on the login. This is useful if you like to use that account (not recommended) or if you ever forget your password or get locked out of your own account. You must first be logged in as an admin to enable this so if you’re doing some risky tinkering and want a back-up plan to get back in, maybe enable this account. Just open the command prompt (Start > Run > “cmd” [enter]) and enter in the following line:

net user administrator /active:yes

If you ever feel the need to remove the Administrator account from the login screen, just run this command:

net user administrator /active:no

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Enable the Administrator Account on the Vista Login Screen

Avoid Transferring SVN/CVS Folders in FileZilla

Mark — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:48:42 +0000

If you use FileZilla as an FTP client and you use version control such as SVN or CVS, you may notice that you actually FTP those meta folders (“.svn” and “cvs”) along with your real data files. Those version control folders are not meant to be tranferred over with your real data and it can be a pain to delete all of them on the remote server. Not to mention, depending on who has access to the server, those files can give the user access to the repository and therefore they pose a security risk. FileZilla offers a really nice option to ignore those folder so you no longer even see them nor do you transfer them over with your files.

Directory Listing Filters

The key to fixing this issue is to go to View > Filename filters…

Just check the CVS and SVN directories option and FileZilla will no longer display those.

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Avoid Transferring SVN/CVS Folders in FileZilla

Copy Files at Blazing Speeds with TeraCopy

Mark — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:19:08 +0000

Have you ever had the tedious task of copying a friends music library or moving the entire contents of one hard drive to another? In pretty much any situation where you need to move or copy a lot of data you are burdened with a fair amount of wait time. Using Windows Explorer to move files around is quite a task and doing it on an OS like Vista can really use up your time.

Do yourself a favor and immediately download a copy of free TeraCopy. Get yourself the portable verison so you have this time saver anywhere you go. TeraCopy will move or copy files for you but at a much faster rate than Windows Explorer and it has many other additional features. TeraCopy integrates into the Explorer shell and even has a pause/resume copying feature.

Drag and Drop files to Copy

Choose a Destinaion Location

That’s all there is to it — TeraCopy will copy the files to your destination and show a progress meter.

This post originated at All Things Marked.

Copy Files at Blazing Speeds with TeraCopy