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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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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A few days later things started going south. After a few hours of normal use, the CPU use jumped up to 100% and didn’t show any signs of subsiding.

I fiddled around as best I could on a system running at top speed (which ironically slows it down to a crawl), killing processes and frantically trying to ascertain what could possibly be causing such slowdown but alas, I could find no reason or rhyme.
Looking through the Task Manager I could find no process using anywhere near 100% of the CPU so I figured it must have been something else. I even downloaded Process Explorer from Microsoft TechNet, which provides detailed information on processes and other information, but could still find no culprit!

After several days of this kind of behaviour from my computer and hours spent on troubleshooting, I remembered that I upped the refresh rate on the monitor and figured that could be a possible cause.
Turning down the refresh rate helped, but the PC continued to experience slowdowns. I got the bright idea to turn off the dual monitor support and that stopped the CPU drain completely. So I’m left to conclude that the video card on my little beast is dying.

Luckily, a quick review of my Dell warranty plan revealed that I still have over 6 months warranty left! So I emailed them today telling them about my problem. Hopefully, they’ll come around and get it fixed this week so I can do some actual work.

UPDATE: So I called Dell Tech Support today since they hadn’t gotten back to me yet and explained the problem in more detail to the thickly-accented, presumably Indian lady at the other end of a very crackly and degraded line.
After several long alternating periods of explaining and waiting on hold she returned with the news that a technician would be contacting me to arrange an appropriate time to install a new CPU fan on the lappy.

While I found it a little strange at the time that a CPU fan could be to blame, on hindsight it makes some sense but I really hope that’s actually it. She said to make sure the problem was fixed before I let the technician leave, so I’m going to have to try it out for a while with some CPU intensive tasks. I’ll have to see what I can come up with.

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