In today’s world of internet connections and everything readily available at the push of a button, do we really need 1Gb of printer drivers? Ok, that goes for Vista, not XP, but XP still has a bunch of camera drivers, printer drivers, scanning devices and a whole lot of things we don’t ever need, since we install drivers ourselves. A nifty little app named nLite can not only help you create your own stripped down copy of XP, but it also enables you to integrate service packs, hotfixes, drivers, etc. right in!

All you need is the nLite application, and a Windows CD. You will need to copy the contents of the CD to your hard drive, where the modifications you select will be made to the folder. Once you are done, you can pack it all up into an iso file, or burn directly to a CD. the CD will be bootable and you can install Windows without any problems whatsoever.

There are heaps and heaps of options in there, and the interface is very helpful, so if you’re not a computer whiz you can still use it. You can select groups of things you definitely need at the beginning, and the application won’t let you remove those. In addition, potential problems are highlighted, and almost every item has a good description, so you can find what is needed and not needed pretty easily.

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Tags: nlite, slipstream, unattended install, vlite
Categories: Tools, Windows

If you use Twitter personally or as an organization, you might want the ability to post tweets for the future, or schedule a number of them. You might not be able to sleep without twittering once an hour, you might be doing an important marketing campaign, whatever the reason, Twuffer is great at what it does, scheduling tweets.

It is a breeze to use, you don’t even have to sign up, you can use your existing Twitter username and password and off you go. You can use it as a regular Twitter client, but you also have the additional option to choose a date and time. Twitter nuts might find the hourly option a bit restricting you can’t specify an exact time, you either tweet at 2am or 3am, nothing in between.

That’s about all there is to it, you can view your queued tweets, modify them, delete them and so on. Although I am not a huge Twitter fan, Twuffer is one of those services we should see more of. It is very well designed (I love the calendar fade/slide effect) and while it gives you more power than the usual Twitter interface, it is just as easy to use.

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Tags: scheduling, twitter, twitter clients
Categories: Online Services

We’ve been learning a lot about you guys in the past weeks, and I think this will be one of my favorite questions, since productive emailing can reward you with a huge time advantage, perhaps you guys have some secret email management skills out there!

Basically what I am asking this time, is do you use POP3, IMAP, or webmail, or maybe even something else? POP is the “oldschool” way of doing thigs. You download the messages from the server, but you are essentially making a copy of your real inbox on the server, the message structure, messages, etc are not changed on the server, no matter what you do in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc).

IMAP is the method of directly accessing your server real-time from a different application. If you delete an email from your client (Outlook, Thunderbird supports IMAP as well) you selete it from your server too, and vice-versa. Webmail is of course directly accessing your server on a nice graphical interface, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail and all the others.

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Tags: Email, imap, pop3, webmail
Categories: Email, ask the readers

If you do any work on your computer, especially if you do some sort of writing, a keystroke counter isn’t just a fun tool for stats, it can be a serious output measurement device. I’ve taken a look at some tools available to do this, and surprisingly there is not too much out there.

Two of the best I found was KeyCounter and KeyCounter (yes, the same name). The feature I like best in the first KeyCounter is that by doble clicking on its tray icon you can see a daily graph of your keystrokes. You can also view your history for each previous day. My problem with it is that it does not give you an easy way of exporting your data. It keeps its data in its own directory in files with the extension of “.day”. This can be opened by notepad if you want and with some macros you could make them exportable in a few formats, but no easy way.

The second KeyCounter however has much nicer features. You can control which keys to monitor, you can chooseo nly letters, only numbers, F1-F12, etc., and any combinations of these.  You can view keystroke counts for each letter separately, and also take a look at the total number. Although there is no built in graphing, you can export to CSV automatically, which you can then plot in Excel, or some other spreadsheet editor.

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Tags: keystroke counter, stats
Categories: Open Source, Tools

If you run a Wordpress blog, you will eventually want to make some modifications to your theme. Perhaps you want to show your tags, not just categories, perhaps you want the date in a different format, you might want to add the URL of the author to each post, there are a lot of things like that which can easily be done with a little knowledge of Wordpress template tags, which are little PHP code snippets, but you don’t have to be a coder to use them.

The great thing about these tags is that they are very well documented “see link above”, and that they are extremely simple to use. You don’t need to know anything about PHP, so let me explain their basic use in common sense language. Wordpress uses a loop, elegantly called “the loop” in “Wordpressian”, which cycles through the posts you have.

If you show 10 posts on your main page, the loop cycles through the latest 10 posts. This means that one the first loop it will pull in the data of your latest post, on the second pass it will look at the second and so on. All the data is pulled, all you need to do is specify what you want to display out of that data, let’s take a look at how.

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Tags: php, template tags, wordpress
Categories: Web Development

First we had a look at how you all use your browser, then how you listen to music and watch videos, now it’s time to find out about instant messaging! With all the IM apps out there you could be using any one, or any combination, from web based, to desktop based, from one service, to multiple services, so how do you keep in touch?

I used to use MSN exclusively in the good old days, but now I mainly use a combination of Skype and Meebo and in some cases,  Digsby. I am not permanently signed on to any network, I do not like distractions, and I either see most of my friends every week, or email them or call them. For clients and firends abroad we also usually use email, or Skype, if any other networks come up, I use Meebo.

However, I like Digsby a lot, since it supports a lot of networks, has email and twitter built in and some nifty added extras which make it the best all round IM client out there in my opinion. Overall though I am a solitary kind of guy, especially when I’m working, so I don’t really need it a lot. Which is your favorite client, how do you use IM networks? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: chat, digsby, im, instant messaging, meebo
Categories: ask the readers

Beginner article coming up, it’s time to get to know the wonderful world of CSS! Cascading Style Sheets, or css, is the standard method of styling a webpage. In fact, you should have no styling in HTML whatsoever. HTML was not designed to be a presentation language, it’s more of a structural-semantic language. In other words, HTML should give your content structurem while CSS should control the actual presentation.

It’s a bit difficult to describe this all in one article, but CSS is actually not that hard to get into. Basically, your HTML code has three types of “hooks”. You probably already know one of them, this is your common, everyday tag. You can also give a unique ID to any element, or a class, which can be applied to any amount of elements. CSS can grab on to these “hooks” (this is not a technical term), and style the element you are refering to.

Let’s take a side-step and look at how to implement CSS first. Right now let’s just use the following syntax inside the file, in the header section (there are many other ways, you can also call CSS from an external file) “<style type=”text/css”> </style>“. You can write your CSS code in between the start and end tag. CSS code is also very simple syntax wise. You have to specify a selector, and then some properties and values. The selector will be one of those “hooks” we looked at, it will let you specify what you want to change the style of. The property will let you specify what property of that element you want to change (text size, color, etc), and the value will specify what you want to change it to. The correct syntax is “selector {property:value; property:value}”
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Tags: css, html
Categories: Web Development