Stick is a nice little freeware application for Windows that is able to add several tabs to the top of the screen each with its own functionality. The tabs are fully customizable and can contain any of the following five functionalities: Notes, Calendar, RSS Feeds, Calculator and Navigator tabs.

The notes tab for example would give you a notepad like application that can be opened and closed by simply clicking on the tab or using a defined hotkey. The other tabs work the same way and it is furthermore possible to create your own tabs if you download the source code of Stick as well.

The real beauty is of course the ability to open and close the tabs when needed which means that they take up little space in closed form but are still accessible when needed. I decided to take a screenshot to illustrate how this could look like when applied to the windows desktop.

continue reading "Add Tabs to your Windows desktop"

The autopatcher team finally managed to update all of their update packages for Microsoft operating systems to July 2007 which means that you can download all patches that Microsoft has released for your operating system and apply them at once instead of using automatic updates or connecting to a Microsoft server at all.

As always core and update packages are available. The core package contains all patches from the beginning to that month while the update packages contain only the updates of a month. If you never used autopatcher before you should start with the core update which is currently to May 2007 and apply the June and July updates afterwards.

This way you can efficiently patch your system. You do get a choice during installation and may uncheck several patches that do not affect your system. To make things easier, here are the links for the XP updates: May 2007 core, June 2007 update, July 2007 update.

continue reading "Autopatcher July 2007 for XP released"

Lets say you got this nice little word document from a friend or colleague and stumble upon a word or words -like obiter dictum - that you do not know. How would you normally look it up ? You either pick up a dictionary or fire up your browser and search on the Internet for a definition of the word. This does not slow you down that much if it is only one word but what if there are more of them ? It could really slow you down unless you find a better way to lookup those words.

A far superior way would be in my opinion to use a software like Transfz which can be accessed through a simply keyboard hotkey from any application or document on your computer. The hotkey opens a menu with several standard sites that you can use to lookup the word. Sites include Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and even Youtube.

It is furthermore possible to add custom sites to the menu which means that you can add your favorite web service to the list as well. Instead of pressing a hotkey to open the menu you can also assign hotkeys to search engines speeding up the process just a bit more that way.

continue reading "Perform Online Searches from any application or document"

I normally do not have to create a lot of thumbnails, maybe one or two per day for my articles but that is it. I use GIMP for the purpose, definitely not the best choice because of the long loading times but good enough for the few that I have to create. Sometimes however I’m in the position to create thumbnails of hundreds of images and there is no way to create them with GIMP because it would take a very long time.

I tend to use a program that was developed just for the purpose of creating lots of thumbnails. The name of the software is EZThumbs and it can be freely downloaded from the developers homepage. The most important feature is of course batch processing which means that you can process hundreds of images at once and select how and where they should be saved on your system.

It is for instance possible to add a prefix or suffix to the thumbnail and save it in the same directory as the original images. All important image formats are supported and EZThumbs offers additional features like filters that might be interesting for some users.

continue reading "How to create a lot of Thumbnails"

A new version of FairUse4WM hit the Internet two days ago which is able to strip the DRM - that is Digital Rights Management - right of music files that use MS DRM IBX components up to version 11.0.6000.6324. So, if you own a Zune, use the Yahoo music service, Urge or several other services you might want to give FairUse4WM a try and get rid of the DRM in the music.

The original post at the Doom9 forum lists several download locations and a short instruction on how to work with the drm stripper.

To actualize fair use rights with the new IBX, first run ‘mirakagi’ which will enter the IBX keys into the FairUse4WM blackbox-keys.txt text file.Next, you should use the attached version of FairUse4WM, 1.3Fix-2. This includes an important fix for a video corruption bug, often seen in scenes affording high compression.

continue reading "FairUse4WM 1.3 works with Vista and Zune"