RSS Feeds are probably the best option if you want to receive information about website updates. They arrive immediately after the webmaster has published the article on the website. There are two ways to process and view those RSS feeds. The first is to use one of the many online services that display news feeds that you add to your profile. I do use Netvibes but there is also Google Reader for that task and hundreds more.

The second option is to use a desktop client to view the feeds and Mindity is the client that I’m reviewing right now. Feeds can be added by pasting a url of a feed into the interface or importing a opml file that most online and offline applications can create. I did import my opml file from Netvibes into Mindity.

Before I was able to do that I had to create an account and verify the email that I specified during setup. The import of 160 RSS feeds took several minutes and nothing was displayed after finishing the operation. I was about to give up when Mindity began updating the feeds and added roughly 1600 news items in a matter of seconds.

continue reading "Personalized Desktop News Feeds"

The question on how to keep an icon from a previous application came up in my article about Imagine, a nice fast image viewer and a reader suggested the Nirsoft software Icons Extract to grab the icon from the old program and put it in a place where you can use it for the new application as well.

Icons Extract offers a very sophisticated way to extract icons from files. You can either scan files, folders or processes that you want to scan for icons. If you know where the icon that you want is located you simply point Icon Extract to that folder or file and the icon will be displayed.

Once the icons are displayed you can save them to your hard drive in ICO and CUR format so that you can change the application’s icon to the one that you just extracted. Four filter can be used to narrow down results. You can search for icons and cursors or only one of them and can specify a specific image size and color depth.

continue reading "Extract Icons from Applications"

When you right-click a CD, DVD or removable drive and select Properties from the menu you find a Autoplay tab there that displays applications for certain media that are put into the drive. An action like playing or opening can be selected or that the user will be prompted every time a media of that type is inserted.

It sometimes happens that entries are still on that list although the application has been uninstalled already. There are other possibilities that have to be fixed. Those are blank entries or entries with a need provider text.

The software Clean Handlers can fix those defect or invalid Autoplay handlers. It can scan for and fix invalid entries in the lists and delete Autoplay handlers that are not needed or no longer valid.

continue reading "Autoplay Cleanup and Removal"

Just when I thought I tried them all I find another promising image viewer called Imagine deeply hidden on the Internet. Imagine is a fast image viewer, it opens and displays images faster than any image viewer that I have tested so far, at least that’s my personal opinion on the matter.

It comes with all the features that I need, it can resize images, change formats, display and create thumbnails, batch convert images and all the standard functions of an image viewer like zooming, fullscreen, color changing and the like. The most popular image formats are supported and many functions and features can be enabled and changed in the options.

My first change for instance was to add the next and previous image navigation to the mouse wheel. You can really configure the software the way you like it. It might take a while to add and remove functions from the toolbars and set all shortcuts the way you want them but once that is done you have the fastest image viewer currently available at your disposal.

continue reading "Imagine a fast image viewer"

I like to convert my DVDs into avi format and put them on my XBOX hard drive or notebook hard drive to store them in a space saving manner. This means as well that I do not have to carry DVDs with me when on the road with my notebook. For that I was searching for a easy and fast method to convert a DVD movie into an avi file using xvid or divx as the codec.

A program suitable is DVDx which is able to convert a DVD movie in just a few steps. Download the software from the source above and make sure that you also got the codecs installed, if you do not have it download the xvid codec from Koepi. Start DVDx after installing the software.

The first step is to load a DVD folder. I use to have the DVD video_ts folders on my hard drive already and just point DVDx to that location. It asks to pick a title from a list of available ones. If there is more than one title in the list select the one that fits the movie length.

continue reading "Convert DVD movie to Avi"