tomputer

I installed two nice utilities yesterday to enhance the functionality of WindowsXP explorer. The first - QTTabBar - adds tabs and groups to explorer. Tabs in explorer are just as useful as tabs in a browser as it prevents having loads of windows cluttering the task bar. Folder groups add the ability to group frequently accessed folders together so they can be opened in tabs with a single click in the same way as tab groups in a browser. As a developer this is really useful as one of the first things I do every day is open the same set of folders for my code, server, database etc. Note the slightly confusing installation procedure of having to first install, then log off/on to windows, and finally having to make the toolbar visible from the “View > Toolbars” menu in any explorer window.

The second utility by the same developer - QTAddressBar - is a new address bar that provides breadcrumb functionality so that each folder in a patch can be clicked to jump straight to that level in the path. You can also traverse the folder tree by clicking the arrow between folder names and using the popup folder tree rather than navigating up the tree and then back down a different branch. This is really a clone of the Vista address bar but is really handy to have in XP.

Both of these utilities play nicely together to provide a much friendlier more productive file explorer.

[via lifehacker]

Tags: productivity, qtaddressbar, qttabbar, utilities, winxp, xp

I’ve finally finished sorting through all the photos from Italy last week. I started out with over 500 and got them down to a slightly more sensible 250ish. Highlights are now up on flickr.

Tags: flickr, Garda, Italy, photographs, photos, pics

I ordered an HTC S710 last week (arrived Friday) on the BT Total Broadband Anywhere package. It’s a Windows Mobile 6 Standard smartphone (no touch screen, but a nice slide-out qwerty keyboard). I’ve used the PocketPC OS before on PDAs but never on a phone and so I had the obvious concerns about running a version of Windows on my main handset. Initially the responsiveness of some of the menus seemed a bit slow and accessing some of the common features like “compose new message” seemed more long-winded than I’ve been used to (I’ve been exclusively a SonyEricsson user for the past few years). After a few days use I’m starting to know my way around the menus though, I’m finding ways to customise the interface with shortcuts and I’ve installed a few new apps to provide the functionality I want.

I plan to post more feedback on the S710, Windows Mobile 6 and any useful software/hints/tips over the coming weeks. If you’re interested, you can view all S710 posts or subscribe to a feed.

Disclosure: Yes, I happen to work for BT, but I’m not directly involved in the Total Broadband Anywhere project and the opinions expressed here are entirely my own. 

Tags: htc, mobile, s710

I originally thought that hidden tracks on albums were just tracks added at the end of the album and not listed on the sleeve notes but after doing a bit of reading it seems the history of why artists put hidden tracks on their albums is, in some cases, quite interesting. For example to avoid controversy (Guns n’ Roses, “Look at your game, girl”, The Spaghetti Incident?) by “hiding” the track or to sneak a track onto an album that might cause legal or copyright violations (Ramones, “Cry Baby Cry“, Loco).

The methods by which tracks were hidden on vinyl records is also more interesting than I realised: I knew about the method of hiding tracks at the end of an album often separated from the “final” track by an extended period of silence (on vinyl this is sometimes visible by a different density of the groove). I wasn’t aware of the “double-groove” method though, which to me is a more genuinely “hidden” track and quite ingenious. Continue Reading »

Tags: double groove, hidden track, music, pre gap

Here’s a recommendation for a piece of softare I’ve been using for a couple of years. Autostitch is a fantastic piece of software for creating panoramic images and the results are nothing short of amazing. I’ve tried several photo-stitching applications in the past: some require lots of manual intervention to approximately align the photos in the correct order, others produce distorted or blurry images. Autostitch has none of these problems, just import a bunch of pictures and it works out which of them are part of the same scene (it will exclude any that don’t fit but it’s quicker if you only select the images you want to join together), it works out which images need to go where, and it then creates a single panoramic image. Another great feature is that it can create 2-dimensional panoramas - most other applications only create 1D panoramas so the camera has to be panned in the x- or y-axis but not both. This is great for creating an image where you can’t get a wide enough shot to include the whole scene -for example when photographing a building on a narrow road where can’t position the camera far enough away to fit it all in. Oh, and did I mention that autostitch is free?

Continue Reading »

Tags: autostitch, photography