Amidst a tangled web

How to adjust the volume with a keyboard shortcut

2009-10-29T16:31:27Z

This is the first of a series of instructional screencasts I’ll be creating. I was inspired by Mouser’s 30 days of screencasts to create a few of my own.

This one teaches you how to create a global keyboard shortcut to turn the volume up or down, toggle mute, minimize a window, shutdown, restart, log off, make the computer say the text in the clipboard and empty the recycle bin.

Your keyboard may have buttons for this purpose, but these shortcuts are portable to any computer (XP/Vista and Windows 7), including my laptop.

Freeware genius wrote about a few utilities to change the volume, but I prefer AutoHotkey because I already use it for shortcuts and text completion. My resident Autohotkey script uses about 4MB of RAM and adding a few extra shortcuts doesn’t change that. Running a new utility would.

~~I realize the text in the video is a bit hard to read. I’ll work on making it easier to read for future screencasts.~~ The version I uploaded to YouTube was hard to read, but the same video uploaded to Vimeo (which is now below) looks great.

Here’s the AutoHotkey script I used.

; Minimize active window with Ctrl-Alt-m
^!m::WinMinimize,A

; Send command to nircmd
runNircmd(args)
{
  Run %A_WorkingDir%\..\..\utils\nircmd\nircmd.exe %args%
}

; Volume control (turn volume up and down and toggle mute)
^!Up::runNircmd("changesysvolume 5000")
^!Down::runNircmd("changesysvolume -5000")
^!.::runNircmd("mutesysvolume 2")

; Say what's in the clipboard
^!]::runNircmd("speak text ~$clipboard$")

; Power commands
^!+r::runNircmd("initshutdown ""Rebooting in 10 seconds"" 10 reboot")
^!+s::runNircmd("initshutdown ""Shutting down in 10 seconds"" 10")
^!+q::runNircmd("abortshutdown")
^!+l::runNircmd("exitwin logoff")

; Empty the recycle bin
^!+b::runNircmd("emptybin")

How much TV do you watch?

2009-09-24T16:20:31Z

According to the Economist, the average American household watches over 8 hours of TV.

This is one area where we don’t want to be #1.

Is an NFL QB or World-class archer more accurate?

2009-08-11T18:59:08Z

If you had to guess, would you say a world-class archer or an NFL quarterback is more accurate?

My bet was on the archer. As you probably surmised, I was dead wrong. To see just how accurate Drew Brees is, take a look at this video. I made the video jump past the boring intro directly to the good stuff.

(via Smart Football)

Bypass Voicemail Instructions

2009-07-31T16:43:45Z

Like the preflight seatbelt fastening instructions, you don’t need to hear how to leave a voicemail each time you leave one.

I left my wife a voicemail the other day and was frustrated at how long it took to get to the beep where I could leave my 3-second response. I wondered if there was a way to skip by that.

Lifehacker’s uncanny prescience strikes again with instructions on how to skip right to leaving the message.

The executive summary is to hit one star pound (1*#), which covers all major carriers. The link has more details.

Incredible 3D Murals

2009-07-30T04:30:35Z

This article has several other examples of John Pugh’s work. He’s a mural artist who has created an impressive array of realistic-looking murals. He often adds people to the mural to heighten to the 3D effect.

Pugh is quoted as saying, “It seems almost universal that people take delight in being visually tricked.”

He’s right.

Estimation

2009-07-20T18:01:54Z

This made me literally LOL.

Ping Pong Table Door

2009-07-10T00:16:41Z

In the “Why Didn’t I Think of That” category, here’s a novel idea for game rooms or bedrooms, or maybe even kitchens or bathrooms if you’re eccentric.

A door that doubles as a ping pong table.

Man + Baby = Hilarity

2009-06-23T06:23:45Z

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Man Babies has pictures of a man and a baby with swapped heads. From the textual description you might think it’s disturbing and wrong, but man are some of them funny.

Here are a few examples.

(via Techcrunch)

Shortcut to Create a New Folder in XP

2009-06-19T08:00:35Z

Lifehacker posted about a tiny but useful feature of Windows 7 – a keyboard shortcut to create a new folder.

On Windows XP, it’s still missing. In the past I’ve always used a right click with wf. It gets the job done but it uses the mouse, which is slow. Now that Microsoft has given this a more or less official shortcut, I decided to emulate it on XP with AutoHotKey.

It’s extremely simple and after using it I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner.

Here’s the AutoHotKey code to make the magic happen.

^+n::send +{F10}wf

Firefox 3.5 Almost Ready

2009-06-11T17:22:11Z

I’ve been running a portable version of Firefox 3.5 b99 (a preview release) to see what the excitement was about. I was a little disappointed. Aside from a few very minor cosmetic changes, it looks the same as 3.0.x.

I didn’t do a formal speed analysis, but it felt like it loaded pages a little faster, especially Google’s AJAX-heavy sites like Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Maps. RAM consumption was about the same as 3.0.x and there aren’t any immediately obvious new features. The majority of the changes are under the hood, as illustrated by this demo given to the Techcrunch folks. The demo has a great wow-factor, but it doesn’t affect my day to day use of Firefox.

I installed the nightly tester tools in order to install a few add-ons, but the core ones I use (mainly Adblock Plus and XMarks) were already compatible.

After a few days of running 3.5, I’m not inclined to jump onto this release early. The new features aren’t enough to warrant dealing with bugs and instability.