Below are just a few of the applications I simply would hate to do without…  in fact, I wonder how I lived without them in the first place. 

WizMouse

WizMouse empowers your mouse cursor with the functionality it should always have had —It gives you the ability to use your scroll wheel on unfocused, or background windows, so you don’t have to click on a window to be able to scroll through its contents.

MaxTo

MaxTo allows  you to split your screen into different regions so that windows are constrained to appear in these regions only.  It enables you to use your screen-space as efficiently as possible and, dare i say, improves productivity by letting you have all the apps you need open and on-screen at once.

The application was originally freeware, but is now available for purchase on their site.  If you can live with an earlier version, you can download it here.  Just disable the “Check for updates” option.

Taskbar Shuffle

Taskbar Shuffle is a small utility that allows you organise your application taskbar buttons in any order that you like.  You can drag and drop buttons and rearrange them to your heart’s content.  It’s not exactly an essential, but if you like your windows and buttons displayed in a certain order, or are a little OCD about those things, it’s definitely the app to have.

FastStone Capture or PrtScr

FastStone Capture is another app that is great, but is unfortunately now made available as shareware.  However, having said that, I dare say it’s worth buying if you really have a need for it.  It is simply one of the best and most fully featured screen capture applications I’ve ever had the pleasure to use.

It allows you to capture images of windows, objects, rectangular or polygonal regions, or the entire screen and output them to your graphics editor, the clipboard, directly save to a file, email, printer, Word, PowerPoint, or the web via FTP!!
It also gives you the option of captioning, watermarking, and include or leave out the mouse cursor.  On top of that, it comes with a screen magnifier, a screen colour picker, and ruler.  (Funnily enough, I couldn’t capture a screenshot of it’s own menu as shown above.  I had to use the next app.)

If that doesn’t fill your screen capturing needs, perhaps the simpler, yet flashier PrtScr will.

This nifty and beautiful little app allows you to draw on the screen before you capture windows, mouse-drawn regions or the entire screen to the output of your choice.  The beauty of this app isn’t in the number of features that it provides, but how it looks when it does it.  It is simply one of the best looking capture apps I’ve seen.

Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager

\The Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager —or VVDM for short— allows you to have as many virtual desktops as you require (or as your system can safely handle ) and sports a nice quick and effective visual interface from which to swap from one to the other.
VVDM’s features include an on-screen preview/manager interface with full drag & drop, keyboard hotkeys that allow you to swap from one desktop to another quickly and easily, multiple monitor support, per-desktop wallpaper backgrounds, .  On Vista, the interface displays live preview thumbnails of the desktops.

I have some others in mind and have already begun composing a Part II to this post but in the meantime, try these out and let me know what you think.  I’m sure you’ll find them just as useful as I do.

Enjoy. 

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It’s unbelievable that after all this time they should resurface, as I’d given them up as lost forever (although I still have the crashed drive that I hope to somehow be able to restore when I can afford it), and it was all thanks to my little bro’s curiosity and looking through a bunch of CDs I unknowingly left at my dad’s house.

So I’ll be posting up additional icon packs from the Novacons series, and some others. Unfortunately, the photoGraphic Folder icons artwork was not recovered in this batch, but you never know, it might just turn up again.

Stay tuned for the icon packs.

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Continuing in the legacy of the Digi*Cons —a set of smilies designed and created by BebiBulma and I for the Wincustomize website— I present to you a new set based on some of the characters of the fantastic Star Wars series.

Making their new “Digi*Conic” debuts are:

• the infamous Darth Vader ,
• the loveable R2-D2
• along with his comedic side-kick C3-P0 ,
• the ancient and wise Yoda ,
• the fierce Chewbacca ,
• and a lone Stormtrooper .

More may follow in the future… as time allows, but in the meantime these are available for use in the comments below and downloadable for your sites as a pack here.

Enjoy!

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As a result,  I’m scheduled to be online as of the 23^rd of this month. 
I also decided to change providers.  Internode was ok, but iiNet offered a better deal right now.  I’m going to be getting Naked ADSL2 + VoIP so I won’t be paying line rental charges, and all for the same price I was paying with ‘Node.  They also offer a higher off-peak download cap, which is always a good thing.

So until then I’m borrowing my dad’s net when I get the chance and at work during the week.

So that’s it for now.  I’ll try post up some pics of my new home when I get a chance this week, but until then, y’all take care now, y’hear?

Also, feel free to leave your mark on my site and sign my Guestbook. 

Peace out. 

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I’ve put my belongings (including my computers ) into storage while I await the hand-over of keys on the 4^th of March, then the arduous process of actually moving my stuff in and setting up the place.  Of course my PC will be the first thing I set up but I don’t know that I’ll have any net access straight away, at least until the relocating process goes through.
In the meantime I’m sojourning at my dad’s place:  enjoying the cuisine, spending time with my little brothers, and whiling away the few spare hours I get watching Cartoon Network. It’s not too bad at all, but it would probably be a lot more enjoyable if I didn’t have to work.

So, until I move in and get set up properly there may not be any major postings here, though I may still keep up with my twittering as I’m able.
Once I’m in and settled I’ll also post up some pics —maybe even do some before and after shots.  We’ll see.

Until then, take care, keep up with my tweets, and check out the following useful (and fun) web finds after the jump.

MaxTo

MaxTo is a small Windows program that divides your monitors into regions. When you maximize a window, it will no longer fit the entire screen, but only the region it was maximized into. Your windows are neatly organized into the grid you have defined when they are maximized. MaxTo has been described as a tiling window manager.

MaxTo is light-weight, and works on both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. The .NET framework version 2.0 or higher is required (preinstalled on Windows Vista).

WizMouse

WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel.

Obamicon.me

The longest election season in memory is now over, and we wanted to help you unwind and express yourself as we head into the new era.

Make your own “Obamicon” — your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster. Regardless of your candidate of choice in the 2008 election, here’s your chance to sound-off.

Take your picture with a webcam or upload a photo, choose your own message, and submit to the gallery.

AutoPager

The AutoPager Firefox extension automatically loads the next page of a site inline when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content. AutoPager works with a ton of sites, including Lifehacker, of course, Google …….

Unlike other auto paging scripts, this add-on works well with most other add-ons like adblock plus, WOT and most of the greasemonkey scripts.

Peace.

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Apologies for the premature post notification. I still find myself accidentally pressing the Publish button before I’m actually meant to.

Also, as an anecdotal note, I had initially thought to call this post by a different name, but during my research I discovered an application named after the made-up word I had chosen —Twitterrific!— here I was trying to come up with the silliest name I could fathom, only to find it’s taken.  Go figure.

So in order to avoid confusion I’m going with this new one. 

So I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while now.  It’s short message format is easy to follow, keep up with, and use on a daily basis.  I’ve found it to be not only convenient and fun, but useful and on occasion even very informative.

For those who’ve been living under a rock  in ignorance of the popular trends in modern communication, Twitter is:

…a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Overall, it does the job quite well, and as I said before it’s so simple to use that even a child could own and manage an account.

But apart from being a good place for keeping in touch with other people who don’t subscribe to using instant messengers, Twitter is also a good repository for your random thoughts and ideas, useful online finds, and your perhaps sporadic but precious pearls of wisdom. 

Also, you may find it useful to know that a twit is the term used to refer to the owner of a twitter account, and tweet is the term used to refer to a short message posted on Twitter.  With that in mind, read on.

Smart Twittering

If you’re about to get into the Twitter world, you’re going to want to get the best out of the service from the very beginning.  The same is true for a user who has been using it since its inception; you want to make your experience as seamless and efficient as possible.
To that end, and for your convenience, here is a list of tools I think you may find most useful:

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a multi-platform desktop Twitter client.  This means you can post, view and manage your tweets directly from your desktop without having to visit the Twitter website.  You can also view tweets posted by friends and those people you’ve chosen to follow all from the one single application.
This application is built on Adobe’s AIR framework and will require you to install the framework before installing the application, but the TweetDeck installer should take care of everything.

Twhirl

If you don’t like TweetDeck or would prefer another, more compact flavour of desktop Twitter client, then try this little beauty.  This client, also built on AIR, has all the features of TweetDeck, but ups the ante by offering multiple account support, but that’s not where it ends.  Its featureset is rich and packed with quick time-saving functions, all accessible from the small, yet very usable interface.  And for those who are picky about looks, it also boasts the ability to change the colour scheme of the interface. A full list of features is available at a glance from its homepage.
This application is also built on AIR and will run on most, if not all platforms.

TweetBurner

Once you get the hang of tweeting and sharing links, you may want to start tracking the kind of response those links get from your followers.  With TweetBurner you can view statistics on each and every link you share, from how many clicks, to which is most popular.  It’s a useful tool if you share a lot of links and are interested in statistics.
At the time of writing this site is experiencing some technical difficulties which prohibit the viewing of personal pages and tracking newly added links, but hopefully this will be rectified soon.

TweetStats

Once you’ve been twittering for a while, you may want some graphical statistical information about your posting habits.  TweetStats offers this in various categories displayed in neat, easy to understand graphs.  In addition to displaying your own stats, it also allows you to see what other topics are currently popular in the twittersphere.
Not much more need be said on this.

Mr. Tweet

Mr. Tweet helps you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets. He will regularly:

1. Suggest good people and followers you are missing out on
2. Recommend you to enthusiastic users relevant to you
3. Regularly update useful stats of your Twitter usage

I thought of making my own description for this one but I really couldn’t have put it better. 

TwittyTunes

For those of us who use Firefox on a regular basis, this may come in very handy.  TwittyTunes is a Firefox plugin that allows you to quickly share a message about what you’re currently doing from a number of preset messages —from what website you’re currently browsing, to what song you’re listening to
If you want this plugin to be able to post your periodic musical tastes you’ll need to install the FoxyTunes plugin also.  Don’t let that put you off though, FoxyTunes allows you to control your music player (almost all available players) directly from your browser and it’s quite configurable.  It also finds lyrics, covers, videos, artist bios, plust a range of other useful info. A pretty great combo really.

TweetShrink

If you ever find your tweet being just that little bit longer than the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter, head over to TweetShrink, paste it in there and watch it work its magic.  It will replace certain words with numbers (i.e. to = 2), among other word- shortening gymnastics and shave off those extra precious characters.
While it’s not perfect in its execution, it does sometimes help and worth having in your Twitter toolkit.

Twitzer

An alternative to having to shrink your messages to make them fit into Twitter’s restrictive 140 character system is to totally blow that out of the water by using Twitzer.  This Firefox plugin will allow you to messages to Twitter as long as you need them to be.  It does this by using the ShortText.com service to host the entire body of text you input, and feeds Twitter the first 140 characters but keeps a link between what’s on ShortText and what’s on Twitter, allow you to De-Twitzer to view the longer text.  But I’m really just making it sounds more complicated than it really is.
Suffice it to say it’s a great tool if you find you want more space to write what you need.

This is only a small sample of the veritable bevy of other tools out there you may find useful. I’ve chosen only to list those I’ve found to be some of the best.

Further Tips

While the benefits you derive from using it hinge largely upon the types of people you follow, there’s no reason why a user who has yet to find decent twits to follow can’t benefit from it for themselves. It all comes down to how you use it.
Here’s a few useful tips:

Do

• Make a habit of posting your most useful random thoughts and online findings.  You never know when someone else might find them useful.
• Keep in mind that you may have an audience, no matter how small it may be. Keep them interested.
• Make use of URL shortening services when posting links, and give a short description of it in the tweet.
• Check out your followers’ pages and follow them if you’re really interested in what they have to say.

Don’t

• Post too many nonsensical or silly posts. They may be seen useless or spam by your followers and may lead them to stop following you.
• Post links that may contain inappropriate or questionable content; or if you must, mark it as NSFW for those who tweet from work during their lunch breaks.
• Follow every single twit you come across hoping they’ll follow you back.  It’s not really a popularity contest and having thousands of tweets to catch up on doesn’t really help you keep things efficient.

If you have any other useful tips, tricks or suggestions, feel free to list them below.

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Well!!

After a bunch of tinkering and troubleshooting here and there, and looking under the hood, and sticking my hands in places they probably shouldn’t go, it seems I’ve finally fixed the NextGEN Gallery problem…
…somehow. 

I say ‘somehow’ because I’m not exactly sure what finally fixed the problem.  I know that the last thing I tried was disabling all the plugins, then re-activating them all one at a time, as a suggested course of action by a random support thread.  Prior to that I went code-hunting in the various plugin files to see if I could spot anything amiss but didn’t really change much, if anything at all.

In between that I also disabled and installed/activated some plugins as some of the more observant visitors would probably have noticed by now.

I *do* know that the Less (is More) plugin was interfering with the way the Visual/HTML views were displayed in v2.7’s post editor, and once I disabled that the editor worked perfectly.

But anyways, I’m glad it all works properly now.  It means I can concentrate wholly on improving the site and adding more content, instead of hunting down silly bugs.

That’s all for now.

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ERROR…

To cut a long story short, after a little Google and WP Forums sleuthing, I was informed that I must’ve missed uploading a couple of files. So I went through the whole upload process again and voila, all was well again and I proceeded to update the site’s database and get the site back in running order.

Back in the day I used to have a little more help and direction when dealing with WordPress issues, but these days I’m pretty much learning to fly solo. Not an altogether negative experience, but it has it’s learning curve. Besides, I’m pretty cluey and resourceful, and I enjoy the odd puzzle now and then… although, not the frustration that comes with it.

Anyways, I got everything running smoothly again, except my front page preview images were all screwy and low res. So I went to the NextGEN Gallery settings and lo and behold, I had to update the plugin. So I did. After that rigmarole, my preview images don’t show at all. The image links work OK, as they display the ALT text, but the images have gone AWOL, and it seems to be directly related to the NGGallery.
And that’s where I’m at now.

I’ve done some sleuthing and searching for answers but so far have found none, but it seems to be that some sites have problems after the upgrade since I’m not the only one who’s encountered this.
I’ll keep looking around and posting on forums, emailing people and what-not until I get it fixed, I guess.

In the meantime, please bear with me while I get this sorted or find some other alternative.

WPAU

Coincidentally, during my search for answers I came across something that might make future upgrades a little easier. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin..

According to the site this plugin “automatically upgrades your wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.”

It looks to be fairly straight forward and by all accounts seems to do the job so I kinda look forward to trying it out for the next upgrade.

Now I’m off to work….

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This piece has been in the Digital*Impulse vault for a while now but I’ve finally decided to release it publicly.

About The Artwork

Sometime last year I happened upon a great tutorial provided by the folks at PSDTuts and decided I’d try it out and see what I could make out of it.  I started following the tutorial and finally ended up with something that slightly resembled the final image in the tutorial.  Since I was quite happy with the initial results, I decided to continue editing and see how else I could improve it, so I kept tinkering with the idea of diaphanous ribbons and started shaping them with the Warp Transform tool in Photoshop.
After much flubbing about with layers and masks to get the right look I ended up with what you now see.  There’s a couple of small areas which I would have liked to have turned out different but I think it came out OK in the end.

LogonStudio Vista

In addition to the wallpaper, I whipped up a LogonStudio Vista theme using GCTonyHawk7’s fantastic Vista Reflections 3 template. I’m quite pleased with the way it came out as Justin did a great job on the glass effect and making the PSD easy to use provided you have a version of PS that supports Smart Objects and read the instructions Justin has kindly provided. 

So download, comment and enjoy. 

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It’s simply a good round-up of the happenings and events around here since I last posted.

My Civic Duties

First and foremost, I guess the most exciting news is that I bought a car. Yup, I finally got all my hard-earned pennies and cents together and dove into the world of automobile ownership.

Midway through November I had asked Gerry (my bro-in-law) to keep an eye out for me for a good deal on a decent car, since he works at a dealership and knows a great deal about cars. After a couple of decent but overpriced offerings from a couple of his sources, he came through and found a great ‘95 Honda Civic VTi for me at a reasonable price.

It’s a burgundy coloured, gray-trimmed, 1.6, 4 cylinder automatic 4 door sedan fully equipped with power windows/mirrors/steering, driver’s-side airbag, but alas, no CD player. But I’ll end up getting one soon enough.

So I’m finding out about all the joys and wonders of owning a car… like having to fork out precious cash to renew the registration this week, buy accessories, keep up regular maintenance and fuel costs. But I guess that’s all part of the fun.

Pics below.

[singlepic id="152" w="230" h="153" mode="" float="" ]

Overtly PC

The other big news item is my latest new PC. In my search for the latest and greatest performance package at a reasonable price, I’ve gone and gotten the rest of my monies and built a custom PC. Of course, if you’d been keeping up with my previous posts and other pages on my site you’d know that I’d had mentioned most of the parts for it on my wishlist

It’s a Core2Quad Q6600 CPU on a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L motherboard, sporting a Corsair QUAD2X4096-8500C5DF 4GB RAM kit (soon to be 8GB), a Sapphire HD4870X2 2GB video card, Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro sound card, a XigmaTek Red Scorpion S1283 HDT CPU fan, DVD writer, card reader, all running inside an Antec P182 case and powered by the fantastic Zalman ZM850 HP power supply. I currently have it running Windows Vista Ultimate, but will be setting up a separate partition to try out Windows 7 Beta, hopefully after I grab the install CDs from work sometime this week.

As you can see, it’s no lightweight system I’ve built myself, but I built it to last me a few years, and to perform well at that. So far it has been a pleasure to use. Here’s a pic of the final product:

Take a look at the gallery for more pics.

Putting it together was as fun as I can remember with my old systems, which is to say I enjoyed the challenge but could have done without the frustration. Getting everything to fit in the case was a bit of a challenge considering the power supply took more room than the case was really designed for but I managed to get it worked out thanks to a work buddy who came over and helped me hack it one night (thanks Stuart ).

The best part of it all is that even after buying a car and a building a whole new PC, I still seem to have cash left over. There’s something to this whole saving business.

Christmas Fare

Well, Christmas came and went without a hitch really. Had my sister, brother-in-law, my nephew and niece down from Mt. Isa and my younger brother Juan up from Melbourne and we had a several good family gatherings at which much good food and beverages were consumed, not the least of which were alcoholic. :-“

The Christmas Day bounty was great, but certainly not as much as what the kiddies hauled home. As I’ve mentioned before, our family does the Secret Santa thing, where each person only needs to acquire gifts for a random family member drawn out of a hat (not including kiddies, of course) and spend big on them.
I was special enough to receive the Mario Kart for Wii pack which comes with a really nice looking Wii steering wheel, a funky alarm clock that doubles up as a mirror of sorts, a book, and a Wii-‘mote-shaped lollies dispenser.

It was a good haul. I’m currently devouring the book and hardly able to put it down. The lollies I enjoy only now and then, as I’m not such a huge fan as I was in my childhood. I much prefer and enjoy giving them out to my nephews and nieces.
The alarm clock wakes me every morning with functions, sound and tune I’m still trying to get used to. It’s weird after having spent over half my life with the same old alarm clock (which I also can’t bear to part with just yet ).
The game has been the most fun really. We all enjoyed racing and competing against each other throughout the holidays.
That’s why you gotta love a Wii; it’s group gaming abilities can’t be matched by any of the other consoles.

That’s pretty much about it for now. I’m sure a lot more things happened but they’re the major highlights of the last couple of months.

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