I just got my hands on a new Sony Vaio FW, and I’m really interested to know how you guys use the operating system on your laptop. My old one had XP installed, which I threw away, downloaded a fresh copy, and used my serial on that without any problems, and as long as I use the same OS version, I believe that this is completely legal.

However, my new laptop has Vista, of which I downloaded a copy, installed it, and found that my key doesn’t work. While the label on my old laptop just says Windows XP, this one says Windows Vista Home Premium OEMact, so I guess this is the problem. The first question here is, does any of you know how to legally get a working version of Vista which is not full of unneeded things?

The second questions is, do you guys use the OS installs provided by the laptop maker? I find that there is a lot of ‘everythingware” in these systems from tiny vendor specific utilities, to large pre-installed vendor stuff, trial apps like virus scanners, Office products, and just boatloads of stuff I will never-ever need. For basic users, or for people who just don’t care this may be ok, what do you think, do you use your pre-installed OS?

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Tags: laptop, oem, operating system, sony vaio, Windows, windows-vista, windows-xp
Categories: Windows, ask the readers

I use a lot of applications and now that Luanchy is so great I can do this relatively quickly. However, there is another app that allows even simpler launching, and not just for applications, but for folders, text files, anything you need. PS Hot Launch VVL is an applications that lets you bind any application, any folder or file to a hotkey, using that key to launch it any time anywhere.

Residing in your system tray, PS Hot Launch can act as a sort of replacement start menu. You can add applications and files to it as if you were creating a menu structure, and then punch it up by clicking on the icon. Far more useful is the hotkey ability though, which I use mostly for fodler launching. Just add a folder (or anything else), and toward the bottom of the app you can add a hotkey. I use the windows key + alt, and a letter most of the time, this makes sure I don’t conflict with any other hotkeys.

If you use a lot of folders, this applications will be a Godsend! I use quite a lot, since I use Xampp to do web development on my local machine, so i use a lot of directories for websites and such, all of which I can bind to hotkeys. Launching Firefox can also be easier than with Launchy, just press Win+Alt+F for example. That said, Launchy has some benefits of PS Hot Launch, but I use both side by side harmoniously.

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Tags: app launcher, hotkey, launchy, ps hot launch
Categories: Desktop Manager, Tools

Wordpress is a great piece of software, and allows more than you’d think to be done with simple coding. I bet that a lot of people out there would look for a plugin to do this, but your top five categories can very easily be shown using a Wordpress template tag, just a half a line of code.

The tag we need is called “wp_list_categories()” and by default it lists all your categories in alphabetical order. All we need to do is add some arguments to it to modify the default values and we’re done! We need to limit the number of items shown to five, we also want to show the post counts in the categories and we want to order the list by the post count, in descending order.

The “number” argument actually has no default value. The reason for this is that it limits the SQL query directly, so there is no need for it by default. We can add it though to impose a limit, so our first argument will be “number=5″. We also want to show the post counts, so we use “show_count=1″ to enable this (show_count=0 is the default).

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Tags: blog, categories, php, web development, wordpress
Categories: Web Development

The ever so popular Adobe Air platform has given us a lot of useful apps, but few as tastefully done and as handy as this one. zFlick is an application which enables you to search for photos on Flickr, view them, and astonishingly enough, download them via drag and drop.

Once you install the app, you’ll see a stylish search bar, just enter your term and press enter. A really cool loading animation can be seen as the 50 pics pop into place, and when done, you can go through them by clicking any image to show in a bigger view.

Downloading is done by simply drag and dropping a large image, and is instantaneous, since by the time you see the image it is cached, or downloaded to a temporary file anyway. This is a beautiful application to help you browse for images/inspiration, I mean just the app itself is inspirational. However, there are some things that could make the app even better.

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Tags: adobe air, flickr, zflick
Categories: Online Services, Search Engines, software

Twitter is a service which really baffles me. It is an absolute killer idea, but I am still astounded by the volume of traffic it has. I find it very useful for a number of things. It can automate some tasks, you can keep a personal log of things you’ve done, you can use itto manage yourself. I am also using it to communicate with my readers at my new blog, and it can be used really well for websites in general, as a way to keep in touch with readers even when they’re off-site.

However, I really, really don’t care what people are doing right now. The people who I do care about are very limited, I would follow about 3 Twitter users, even then I wouldn’t read all the tweets. Twitter can be cool if you find something funny or interesting on the net, you can send the link to your firends without needing to create an email. However, I really don’t care when someone gets up, when they brush their teeth.

Call me anti-social, but I just can’t see the “addicivity” behind all this. In fact, following a lot of people would clog up my twitter clients, so I would miss a lot of valuable stuff. I am not criticizing you guys who follow hundreds of people, I completely understand that we are different. Regardless, Twitter is an awesome idea and a well-implemented service. So do you like Twitter? What do you use it for?

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Tags: instant messaging, Online Services, twitter, twitter tips
Categories: Online Services, The Web

I didn’t have much use for loading ads after my content, since on most of my sites and those I worked on, they were near the end of the code anyway, but while working on a site today I ran into a problem. There is an ad at the top of the design which tends to load slowly. I have specific requirements that the site should be as fast as possible, so I had to devise a way of loading the ad last. I went through some methods I found online after things off the top of my head didn’t work, but none helped, so I came up with my own code for it.

I am not taking credit for this, so if you did this before me feel free to let us know, but I did arrive at it on my own. The methods you could try is the “defer” attribute, which defers loading to the end of the page load, however, this had no effect at all. You can also try a “window.onload”, but this didn’t help either. With any other function combinations the ad either loaded as usual or did some weird stuff.

In the end, I decided to load the ad at the bottom of the page, right before the “” tag, and then use javascript to “transfer” the contents to where I need it do be, while keeping the source hidden. This is achieved using the “document.getElementById” method, read on to take a look at a specific example.

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Tags: advertising, delay javascript, javascript, loading time
Categories: Revenue Sources, Web Development

We had a look at how you use your medial player not long ago and I’ve taken a look at some of the ones you mentioned  I particularly liked Billy (thanks for the tip Xaro), a no-frills (but also no complications) music player, which does exactly what I want it to do. Play my music without downloading a heap of metadata for it and without taking a chunk out of my RAM.

The download is a tiny 540Kb, and when running with 15 albums added, it takes away less than 5,000K of memory. For the half a megabyte download you do get more than you think, with full global hotkey support for 13 operations, the ability to record internet radio, Lastfm history submission, this is not as shabby or as simple as you might think.

You can also add your media folders and set up some format rules, the ability to launch multiple instances, etc, but despite all these advanced features the best thing about Billy is that it is small, and extremely usable. You won’t be building a fully tagged and organized music database, but if you just want to do some work with set&forget music, tucked away in your system tray, Billy is for you.

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Tags: billy, music player, simple
Categories: Music and Video, Tools