Fabulous Finds
An ever progressive collection of exciting facts and stuff discovered in everyday computing. The list could contain facts that belong to almost any subject in the near future. But currently, however, I would like to restrict them to computer related ones to avoid maintenance complications.
If you too have come across such a fact and would like to share it with the rest of the world through this
space, just let me know. I shall promptly publish it here.
Wow! What an amazing piece of software and what a concept! I was simply stunned at the simplicity and elegance of this product. RescueTime™ is a web based time management software. The company is a startup and I'm sure will do very well, very soon!
The widget under the section "What do I do?" of my homepage is from this product. The product requires us to install a neat little desktop software. It then tracks usage of various processes and periodically uploads them to the web. Thus, we can view our activity statistics from anywhere!
Expecting them to soon release more themes and customizable versions of these embeddable widgets. My thanks to its co-founder, Tony Wright for this!
I always liked one particular feature of Opera browser and wished badly that it existed in Firefox also. It is the ease with which we can search on Google using the browser address bar itself. Just type "g" followed by your search query in the address bar and hit enter. You will be automatically taken to a Google page containing the results of your search query!
Well, it is very much possible to do the same thing in Firefox. All we need to do is just add a bookmark as shown below, by going to "Organize Bookmarks" and clicking on the "New Bookmark" button.
Type "g" for Keyword and http://www.google.com/search?q=%s for Location as shown in the above screenshot. Other fields are either optional or can be filled with whatever you like.
Once you've configured the bookmark, start searching as shown in the above picture. Simple and extremely handy, isn't it?
I discovered this little feature in Windows sometime last year. Open any application in Windows (any version) and try double clicking on the application icon on the top left corner of the title bar and you've emulated the close button! The red triangle in the following screenshot of the calculator in Windows Vista points to the location.
This tiny hidden feature has been around from quite sometime. Probably it was provided only to increase the redundancy of the normal close (X) button.
Thanks to a friend of mine, I came across this hidden Windows feature. Ever wished you could insert the timestamp into a text document each time it was opened? Don't worry. The feature is already built into most of the Windows versions, including Vista!
Try this. Open Notepad, type .LOG in the very first line and save the file in any name. Close the file. Try opening the same file using Notepad now. Each time you do that, the current timestamp value will be appended to the end of the file. Just too simple, isn't it?
Here's a Microsoft Support link which substantiates this.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260563
