TicTechToc

AutoHotKey: Open a New Command Prompt from Explorer

2010-01-31T09:18:00.020+05:30

This is a small AutoHotKey script that opens a command prompt window at the same location as the folder you are browsing in Windows Explore.

[BONUS: Open the explorer with current directory from command prompt]

Simply hit the Ctrl+Alt+H shortcut key sequence while the explorer or the command prompt is in focus.
Here is the code to register the shortcut:

; Opens a command prompt with the current folder 
; when you press Ctrl+Alt+H in Explorer
; or the command prompt

^!h::
if WinActive("ahk_class CabinetWClass") 
or WinActive("ahk_class ExploreWClass")
{
 ClipSaved := ClipboardAll
 Send !d
 Sleep 10
 Send ^c
 Run, cmd /K "cd /D `"%clipboard%`""
 Clipboard := ClipSaved
 ClipSaved =
 return
}
else if WinActive("ahk_class ConsoleWindowClass") 
{
 Send ^c 
 Sleep 10
 Send explorer .{Enter}
 Sleep 10
 return
}
exit

Inspired by this, with bug fixes.

Convert your folders into Albums for iTunes

2010-01-26T12:58:00.012+05:30

Has it ever annoyed you when you drop a music folder into iTunes and all your files get scattered instead of becoming a single album. If yes, read ahead..

iTunes is incapable of handling music files that are not tagged properly. This annoyed me to the extend that I wrote this small tool that converts your music folder into an album for iTunes.

iFoAl - iTunes Folder to Album Convertor

Here is a screencast (less than a minute) that shows how it works:

Download iFoAl (~1 MB):

You can also peek into the source here:
http://code.google.com/p/shashi-kant-code-dump/source/browse/#svn/trunk/iFoAl

PS: iFoAl might crash if you don't have Microsoft .NET Framework installed. Download it here.

Can I read it later? … Sure

2009-01-26T18:41:00.006+05:30

Today I am going to talk about an incredibly useful Firefox plugin: Read It Later

Ever stumbled over a site and thought - “Ahh.. this seems to be interesting, but maybe I'll read it sometime later”. The simplest thing to do then would be to just go ahead and bookmark it. A downside that I see to this approach is that, you might be working on multiple computers and the next thing you know you don’t even remember which browser it was. (People handling more than one computer at a time will get me).

Read It Later is a wonderful plugin and not only bookmarks your favourite pages but also can be easily synced on multiple computers.

Read It Later allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.

The main features of the plugin:

Save multiple links on a page by turning on save mode (alt + M)

Sort your reading list by date, site, tags, etc

If you want to save the link for later reference, you have an option to save it to any of the popular bookmarking site.

You can also save all opened tabs in Firefox in a single click.

You can read the list from any computer using the RSS feed or viewing it at http://readitlaterlist.com

If all that was not enough, you can even save all these pages for offline viewing in a single click.

This video sums up pretty much everything:

Try out Read it Later -

http://tinyurl.com/6fe87g

Turn Gtalk/Gmail into a simple Expense manager

2008-10-13T23:54:00.001+05:30

It has been really long that I have searched for an Expense Manager. My requirements were never very high. Just a simple place I could easily push my expenditures. And I always ended up using things which had lots and lots of functions or had a really a tiresome process of logging on. I ended up saving it in a text file on my desktop. The cons didn’t take time to show up. I couldn’t access the file at work, anybody poking around on my computer could see it or worst still- a simple disk crash and I would lose it. Now the requirements were clear – it had to be secure, on the web and had to be easily accessible – anytime and anywhere.

To get started, all you need is a Gmail account and Gtalk installed on your computer. The first step is to add yourself on Gtalk. Even though you won’t see yourself online unlike Yahoo Messenger, you can find yourself by typing your id on the Gtalk search box. Now click your name as show below:

Even though is shows that you have not accepted the invitation, you are ready to start. Every message you send here will be echoed back to you on the screen. The important thing here is that all these chat history are saved if you have enabled chat history. [Go here to learn how enable it]
If your chat history is enabled you can see these messages on your Gmail account under the chat link:

Now we are going to use Gmail’s filter options to turn the chat window into an expense manager. Send a message like “EXP: Pizza Hut: Rs 150” on the chat window to yourself. Open the chat history on Gmail to check this out:

Confirming this, we will now create a filter for these chat histories. First click on the “Create Filter” link on the top of that screen. On the next window input the From and To as your own email id. Subject as “Chat with XXX YYY” where XXX YYY is your name in the subject of the chat history [refer picture above]. And enter Has the words field as “EXP:”. [remember EXP: from “EXP: Pizza: Rs 150”]. Click Next Step button and apply a new label and name it as “Expenses”. Click Create Filter button. The above steps in picture:

You are all done ! You can send all your expense accounts through your chat window. Just remember to use those keywords “EXP:” in the messages you send.
To access all your expenses just click on Expenses link under the Labels OR the Geek Way : Search for “label:expenses” :

There you have all your expenses kept safely at one place. And because you have your Gtalk is accessible everywhere, you can slip in those expenses easily without any prying eyes checking them out.

Try this out and do tell me how it worked out for you...

Waste time in a Flash !!

2008-10-05T15:17:00.000+05:30

To tell the truth, I’ve never really been very impressed by flash based browser games. To keep it short and simple, they don’t seem to wet my appetite for the kind of graphics engine they provide or the amount of brain work you put in. They are mostly the play it and forget it kind. But this was about to change...

A few days I came across a link on reddit that said “Click here to waste 2 hours of your day immediately!”. I clicked. And that led me to a site called FantasticContraption.com. It took just one minute through the tutorial and believe me I actually wasted(read: enjoyed) six hours of my day(Thank god, its was a Sunday).

Now this site is an online flash-based physics puzzle. You have a few tools using which you make contraptions and achieve your goal. What amazed me most was the physics engine it was running on. It has taken care of gravity, friction, acceleration.. u name it. Also, you can save your designs and share it with others. You will find a link to the forum on the top of the page. Here you can see all the contraptions people have been building. With every new design, you only see the possibilities are only endless.
Go ahead and check out FantasticContraption
And don’t forget to post your favorite contraptions here..

Gmail for Geeks – Part I

2008-09-24T16:28:00.000+05:30

Gmail – the undisputed “big daddy” of email service provider, within just four years of its release, has captured the email industry like none other. Reason for the enormous success ?? Well .. to start with an excellent spam protection, super customizable options, amazing integration with google-docs and..don’t need an adjective to praise this one – the user-interface.. And me being an avid Gmail supporter, this list might as well be endless.

So, rather than straying on this point, lets see what all you can actually do with Gmail that would make you a power user, a Gmail-Geek.

Tip#1 Now distribute your gmail id everywhere freely

Every time you register on a new site, you have to provide an email id for your registration. And most of the sites do require an authentic one to send over a verification mail. So, like most users we end up giving up our ids and getting spammed big times.

Solution ?? Look no further, Gmail fights back. Gmail has this nice little feature wherein you can simply add a tag to your id and it still remains your id. Ex: Say my.mail@gmail.com is your id and you are registering on site say newsite.com. When registering on this new site, simply punch in your email id as something like my.mail+newsite@gmail.com or my.mail+XXXX@gmail.com where XXXX can be anything you want. Now when a mail from such a site arrives in your inbox, it has the receiver’s address as my.mail+XXXX@gmail.com where XXXX is what you had specified.

Now you can easily filter those messages that arrive now on this address(my.mail+XXXX@gmail.com) by using the “Filter messages like this” link under the Reply menu as shown above. This will take you to the Create Filter step where you can specify the “To” address as my.mail+XXXX@gmail.com and press the Next Step and do whatever you want to do to such messages, ranging from deleting them to archiving them, marking them read or forwarding them to another address, on this dialog-box and click Create Filter. And from now on, all mails to my.mail+XXXX@gmail.com will be treated the way you told Gmail to treat it.

Tip# 2 Log out of all gmail sessions in one click

Sometimes it does happen that you accidently keep your Gmail session logged in somewhere and remember only when you are too far to press the sign out link. Gmail has a nifty little feature that allows to not only logout of all your other concurrent sessions, it also allows you to see the Access Type (Browser, Mobile, etc), IP Address and Date/Time from where you had accessed Gmail previously(sort of history of accesses). You can find this information by clicking on the Details link at the bottom of the Gmail screen, which looks like this:

Here you can find the button to Sign out all other sessions. You can use the information listed here to find out if there has been any unauthorized access to your mail, etc

Tip# 3 One Gmail id = multiple email accounts

Ok, say you have an id – my.email.id@gmail.com Now the thing with Gmail ids is that the dots actually aren’t there. What ?? Yes, that’s right. Those dots that you would have so meticulously placed in your ids(or maybe left out the dots completely), simply aren’t there. So what does that imply ? That would mean, your actual id is myemailid@gmail.com without any dots and those dots can be placed anywhere in your id and it would still remain your id like my.email.i.d@gmail.com and my.emailid@gmail.com are all the same ids. Gmail explains this behavior here

This feature can come handy in filtering mails, just like tip# 1, but that’s only restricted to your imagination.

To be continued..

Would like to hear from you, how you play a geek on Gmail through your comments?

Download Firefox 3 this tuesday

2008-06-12T15:06:00.000+05:30

Good news all you Firefox followers. The wait is over. We will finally have the first release of Firefox 3 (not a beta candidate) this very Tuesday (17^th June, 2008).

UPDATE: Download Firefox 3

Pledge right away to download Firefox3 on tuesday and help set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

Have you got yourself an OpenID yet ?

2008-06-07T22:59:00.000+05:30

Are you tired of creating a new account on every website you use? Do you avoid new websites because they come with yet another username and password?

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. It is a free and opensource technology which is rapidly being adopted by big names like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc

Where do I get an OpenID? You might be in for a surprise to find out that you already own an OpenID. If you use any of the following services, you already have your own OpenID:

Once you have an account on any one of the above listed sites, you have the passport (i.e an OpenID) to hundreds of websites, without having to register again.

How do I use an OpenID?
Lets try to understand this from a small example:
Say you have a blogger account with the blog address: http://blogname.blogspot.com Now say you want to register on new a site (say, www.newSite123.com) , that happens to support OpenID. Just paste your blog address on the space provided for registration (something like this):

Now you will be redirected to your OpenID provider (in this case blogspot.com), where you will be asked for your blogspot's username and password. You will enter your blogspot.com's credentials. And thats it, you are registered on the new site (www.newSite123.com) without a new username or password.

You may now ask: How do I login after registration to this new site without an username? Well OpenID is the answer. You will use the same blog address you used to register, to login to this site again and again.

Just watch out for this logo on the next site you visit to know whether the site is OpenID enabled or not:

So have you got yourself an OpenID yet?
Keep commenting..

Check out GMAIL's new experimental features

2008-06-07T16:57:00.000+05:30

For all those Gmail lovers out there, this is good news. Gmail releases 13 new experimental lab-features! You can avail these features by Lab-enabling you Gmail account. For that go to Gmail>Settings>Lab and select all the new features you want to try out. ( Do check out the new game by gmail ;)

For the full story click here [lifehacker.com]

If these features seem to get annoying, you can always disable them the same way you enabled it. Or, you can use this:http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0 to get gmail free from these features temporarily.

Always keep ICE in your mobile phones

2008-06-01T01:28:00.000+05:30

I must admit this post might not fit very well into the technology ambience of this blog. In fact this might sound as simple as an idea that it might well be tagged as “common sense”. But as Voltaire puts it: “Common sense is not so common”, please do take a moment off to read the remainder of this post as this can turn out to be a life-saver for you.

ICE stands for In Case of Emergency. Shortly after the London blasts, mobile phone users were urged to enter a number in their mobile phone's memory under the name ICE. The number would be of a person who is to be contacted in case there is an emergency, such as an accident, natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Emergency services would be able to find the number quickly and use it to contact a relative or friend.

ICE is the brainchild of Bob Brotchie, an East Anglian Ambulance service paramedic. Having an ICE contact in the mobile phone, Brotchie thought, could speed up the process if such a tragedy occurred again.

How to ICE up your phone:

Step-1
CHOOSE a responsible person to be your In Case of Emergency (ICE) Contact. Record their contact information.

Step-2
INFORM your ICE Contact that you have chosen them as your designated contact and provide them with information that may affect your treatment. Remember MAD or “M” “A” “D”.

Medicines - List all current medications you are taking, including herbal and organic supplements because they can and do interact with some medications.

Allergies - List all known allergies, especially to medications, but also to foods.

Doctors - Include the names and phone numbers of doctors or other medical providers responsible for your regular care.

Step-3

ADD this contact as a new entry, with their phone number, in your mobile phone address book under the heading “ICE”. Example: ICE-Krish or ICE-Dad.
Alternately, a person can list multiple emergency contacts as "ICE1", "ICE2", etc in order of priority whom to contact first.

Also note,

If you are under 18, make sure your ICE partner is a parent or guardian authorized to make decision on your behalf - for example if you need a life or death operation.

In case your preferred contact is deaf, then type ICETEXT then the name of your contact before saving the number.

This will not take even five minutes, but imagine those vital seconds that it can save in times of crisis. Spread the word around and who knows you might be saving a life.

Sources and sites:
http://www.ice4safety.com
http://tinyurl.com/5xosgr
http://www.icesticker.com
http://www.icecontact.com
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/02/07/ep.if.i.die/index.html

Why don’t I get 160 GB on a 160 GB Hard-Disk?

2008-05-30T11:23:00.000+05:30

The hard-disk buy-realize-regret cycle.

Just bought a new 160 GB hard disk. Now I can store everything I ever wished - All the 100+ IMDB movies. No more popping in my burned DVDs for my favourite videos, they’ll all be on my hard disk…

Connected the new disk, and yeah everything works fine just as promised. Great. I should partition the disk. Lets see 80 GB for movies, 40 GB for Music, 20 GB for Softwares and 20 GB for Windows system Drive (Popularly known as C drive).
80 + 40 + 20 + 20 = 160 GB … yeah this seems right.

Opened up the windows-disk-partitioner software, and hey what this!! The drive shows only 149 Gb space. Have I been cheated? Is it a 150 GB hard-disk? Has my windows gone mad?

This must have happened to many of us. Yeah, you probably felt cheated. And if you found out why exactly this happened, you will realize you really were cheated.

And if you ask someone about this problem. 7 out 10 people will tell you that system is using those GBs, or that is used by the File Allocation Table (FAT), or it is shared memory which is not visible from the OS, or something technical. After this, you have only one option – keep quiet and be satisfied with what you have been given.

Well the reason for this mismatch in the promised and the delivered capacity is a “marketing strategy” and nothing that technical as we might have expected. The hard-disk manufacturers have taken the definition of 1 Kilobyte as 1000 Bytes (to their own benefit). And the Operating System vendors take 1 Kilobyte as 1024 Bytes. Now when you bring home a 160GB Hard Disk, what you actually get is 149GB space on the disk! This is true for all storage devices, from hard-disks to CD-ROMs; from pen-drives to floppy disks. You will invariably loose bytes in any case.

You can check out the capacity what you can expect from your disk here:

Real Disk Space Calculator.

Earlier when the drives were on the lower half of gigabytes, this loss was hardly visible. But today when a Terabyte(1024GB) can be packed into a single drive, you shouldn’t be surprised if you find some 30-40 GB of space missing !!

So if a 1024GB hard-disk costs around 15000 bucks. Then bucks/GB would be around 14.65 bucks. And if you get 40GB less space on it, you have paid some odd 600 bucks more !!

I’m least interested in what might have caused this difference in standards but in the end it’s the consumers who suffer. What the consumer wants is consistency not false promises. So disk-manufacturers: “When you say 160GB you deliver exactly that not a byte less because we don’t pay a penny less”.

All this only makes computing even more confusing for the average user and makes him feel as if he has been ripped off the quality and quantity he was promised. It’s high time - hard drive vendors, operating system builders to define what exactly a kilobyte is.

Black is Green ?

2008-05-28T11:28:00.000+05:30

"Black is Green?" Doesn't that sound like some topic for some hi-funda GD (Group Discussion)? No? But that's what I got when I tried looking up for this term on the net. But let me warn you well in advance, I am neither good at pondering on such topics nor do I support the wastage of human neurons for such a cause.

Now, get ready to go on a journey. This journey is about a page, a web-page, which has changed the lives of millions, the life of internet itself.... Useless building up the suspense (I'm not good at that too :P). I'm taking about the world-wide-web famous www.google.com. Some time ago, the page was under an allegation (or should I say more of a social-ecological question) whether they should turn their background from white to black. WHY? Well it seems someone found out that doing so would save a great deal of energy. Pretty impressive find I should say. And what happened next was predictable. A lot of sites spurred up trying to model this find: www.blackle.com, black-google.blogspot.com and www.jabago.com are a few in the list. Blackle even maintains a precise watt-hour counter of how much energy Blackle has actually saved. Nice.

And then the quest for truth started. Someone took the initiative to actually measure the amount of energy required by both versions of google.com. Well the verdict was that sites like blackle did save some energy but only on CRTs but on LCDs they actually showed an increase in power consumption. And with the increasing penetration on LCDs onto our desktops (not to mention laptops) this find actually backfired. Never saw that one coming. And again, what happens next. Google maintains its search page's background as white and a few others spring up to mock the black ones...www.brightle.com :).

All the findings but in the end we did not save power. So, if you really are interested in turning your computer into a power saver some of these might help (and yes, they actually work :)

turn on the power management features. Virtually all computers today have the ability to switch into low-power modes automatically when they're idle; very few computers have this capability enabled! Here's how to do it on computers running Windows XP.

turn off your monitor and computer when you're not using them. No, screensavers doesn’t help.

turn down the brightness on your monitor

So what do you do to save power? Comments welcomed...

Speed up your Firefox experience.

2008-05-27T18:26:00.000+05:30

“Firefox, the web browser is here to stay”. If there is anyone to take up IE’s (for that matter any other web browser’s) cause on this statement, I would be rather glad have that discussion with you. But right now I’m not in a mood to do that. But owing to human’s (and specially technologist’s) adamant and undying nature to digest anything new, I'll redirect you to a few links that might help to change your opinion:

Ok, so you agree that Firefox is simply the best. Well I am just going to give you one more reason to support your loyalty for “the fastest browser in the world”. Now this particular hack works for people having a broadband connection.

Do the following to make your browsing even faster:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Show/Hide Image

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30.
This means it will make 30 requests at once.

Show/Hide Image

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New->Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0"(Zero without quotes). This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

Close your browser and open it again. This should do the trick.

Happy Browsing :)

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2007-07-08T06:08:00.000+05:30

Contact Me

2007-07-08T05:54:00.000+05:30