Man Cured of HIV4

This is pretty good news, assuming they can learn something from it and devise a better/easier/safer/whatever way to do it.

In other, much less life-saving news: I got Miranda IM up and running, and it is beautiful. I have a small tab on my desktop for it. My contact list appears when I mouse over it. It does everything I liked from MSN, and it does everything I liked from Xfire (including launching games, displaying what you’re playing, and displaying what friends are playing) and it looks better and takes up less room. It took me several frustrating hours, but now I can share my knowledge with others.

And, for the first time in five years, I may uninstall MSN. That’s how good Miranda is. Expect that post alongside my super-duper post tonight. I’ll see if I can find out how to create easy installers for my Rainmeter stuff, and stuff.

3Vigilante Theater

Site-specific browsers4

I haven’t fooled around with this too much, and I also have the issue of having a billion things I want to do on the internet on a regular basis, but this is pretty neat anyway. Maybe you’ll find a use for it. Maybe I’ll find a use for it!

        Here’s what it does: Adds a button under the tools menu for Firefox (the desktop version probably works differently) for you to make a little icon on your desktop, taskbar, etc. that will go directly to the site you’re currently viewing. By default, you get the site - that’s it. No address bar, no navigation buttons, no distractions. So you take your Gmail inbox, you take your calendar or to-do list manager of choice, and you get little icons to open them up. Facebook, maybe tumblr, whatever.

        You get out of bed, check your stuff (inbox, new posts, things to do today, whatever), interact a little (reply to an e-mail, make a quick tumblr post, add an event), go to work, the end.

        Chrome has this feature by default, and Prism is a firefox extension for it. I guess it just depends how you want them to be rendered? Bubbles, for Windows, renders it in IE. If you actually want that. Aside from that, I’m not entirely sure what differences there may be in performance. If you’re using Chrome, the “create application shortcut” option under tools will do that for you. Firefox says “convert website to application.” As far as Bubbles goes, I’m not sure.

        Looking at Bubbles, it has extensions that allow notifications for specific sites. That may put it above Prism and Chrome, because you really only want to check your e-mail when you know there’s something there. At any rate, check ‘em out, do some research if it sounds useful. You expect me to do everything for you?!

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edit: looking at Bubbles some more, it’s pretty ancient, no posts on the site or anything for months - probably best to skip that one, but that leaves the notification issue unresolved

edit2: guess Prism makes its things in a dumb way, so use Chrome’s thing - I don’t think you need to use Chrome at all or anything after you’ve created the application

edit3: Looking at Snarl and Growl to fix the notification issue. Yip allows access to these through Firefox. Research continues.

edit4: Yip seems more or less dead - the download link isn’t working, anyway, and cursory glance at google results didn’t turn up an alternative download. I question the need for these notifications in your browser when you already have Snarl/Growl providing desktop notifications.

Snarl is, from what I can tell, developed for windows - Growl is a port from Mac, and this means it has great iPhone support. If that’s your jam. Both seem to have a number of useful add-ons to support whatever you want them to support, so yeah.

Though this brings us full circle and makes the site-specific browser entirely useless. I mean, it would probably load faster than opening a shortcut in your browser. But when would you use it? *shrug*

Wizmo4

Here’s a neat little thing. Wizmo lets you create shortcuts to do useful stuff like change your system volume and turn off your monitor. This is probably more important to me on my laptop than to any of you folks (because I think all but one of you use a desktop) but you may find a use for it anyway.

And for Glob’s sake, make sure you use the quiet command. Pure Windows 2000 thinking that a program should play a noise every time it does something.

My only gripe with it is that, as an .exe, UAC is all “are you sure you want do what you asked me to do” and I have to say that yes, I am quite sure. Brb trying to find a way to disable that for specific programs. Yeah I missed the “always ask for this file” check box. In fact, in all of the past few months that it has been popping up, I never read it once. Sue me!

edit six months later: Nircmd is a way better program to use

Microsoft OneNote

Through my university, there’s some Microsoft thing where they can give us Microsoft software and other stuff for free, except Microsoft Office which they think we’ll be willing to pay for. So the end result is that I downloaded Windows 7 for free, and that’s great, and then I torrented Microsoft Office on the university wi-fi. At the time I didn’t install Microsoft OneNote (part of the greater Office suite) because I had no idea what it was, then I was at a bus stop yesterday and saw an ad for it. Essentially, it’s supposed to be a “virtual notebook,” allowing you to type wherever you want on the page, draw/write if you have a tablet, paste pictures, whatever.

        I’ve been taking notes in WordPad thus far, just typing as my professor speaks basically, and so far this hasn’t been a problem because I haven’t actually had to read over my notes. I do have a folder for each of my classes, but each has a simple “COMP1005” text file where the class number and date are the only thing to distinguish where and when something happened.

        As a form of self-promotion, I guess, and because it’s meant to be really useful to us, OneNote is offered for free through the school without any of the other Office programs. I guess I would have had an older version with the Office that I torrented, but that’s alright. I got it and installed it, and here’s the surprising part: it seems really damn good. I’ve seen Mac users with a similar program that looks a whole lot snazzier, so likely that’s where they got the idea, but either way: this is an awesome idea.

        Here’s how it’s set up: you create as many “notebooks” as you like (which are a lot like folders, used just for OneNote) displayed along the left side. Inside each notebook are a number of tabs along the top, which could be your to do list or your different classes or what have you. Then inside each tab, you add as many pages as you like, displayed along the far right side. This sounds confusing, but imagine your notebook or binder: you may have one for each class, or each day of classes. If you’re well-organized, you may have separators (tabs) to separate your homework from your notes or something like that. Then each of those tabs has as many pages as you need. Currently, I’ve got two binders: one for my monday/wednesday classes, and one for tuesday/thursday. Then I have separators labelled for my classes in chronological order.

        OneNote, then, managed to replicate that perfectly, with the bonus of to do lists per day. I could also have a universal to do list in a miscellaneous folder, for the long term. Or I could add in a calender. I can do this shit, unlike WordPad or MS Word. I add a new page for each day of classes (under the tab of the class itself) and go on my way. Add a tab for important projects. Tada! Everything in one place.

        Moral of the story is that this is infinitely better than text files or .pdfs or whatever else you might have been using on the computer, and likewise it has many advantages over your physical pen and paper. If you’re allowed to take notes on your computer, this would be wonderful. If you can’t, that’s a shame. At any rate I love this program, and I never thought I’d say that about a Microsoft program. It uses nearly the same amount of memory as MS Word (20k), and about a third more than simple WordPad (15k), so it’s not like it’s a huge memory drain either. I just have to convert the notes I’ve already taken and then we’ll be golden.

        GOLDEN.