Stop Spending Your Life Up-and-Down the Start Menu

Do you know that you spend a goodly amount of time trying to find 'that shortcut to that program' in Windows' Start Menu?

Well, you'll love Launchy then. It's a small piece of program expressly designed to streamline your life around and away from the Start Menu.

No more hunting for application shortcuts! Just press Launchy's shortcut key (defaults to Alt-Space, but I changed it to Win-Space), and up pops a skinned box, in which you can type the letters of your shortcut.

For instance, to run QuickPar, all I have to do is press Win-Space, type "qui", and voila! Launchy shows the icon and shortcut name for QuickPar. I only have to press Enter, and QuickPar runs.

Or, if I want to start up FireFox, I can press Win-Space, type "fox" . . . lo and behold! Launchy can even match strings within a shortcut!

Or maybe you want to quickly open a website. I only need to press Win-Space, type "www.google.com", and my default browser opens up www.google.com. And it can do some neat tricks, like instant-search in Google with the helpful 'pipe' ( | ) symbol:

No more hunting for shortcuts; download and install Launchy right now!

Note: The latest Launchy version (1.25) is not compatible with Windows Server 2003. Use the older 1.0 version instead.

Making Money via Blogs?

Yes, I know people said that it is possible. Yes, I've heard about AdSense. In fact, I *have* placed 4 AdSense blocks on my blog.

The question is: Is it profitable?

Not without proper marketing of your blog, it won't.

So, we'll see if this blog generates enough money for me to leave my daytime job

But all is not well on Nirvana.

You see, because of the huuuuuuge amount of obnoxious, in-your-face, bandwidth-consuming (not to mention CPU-hogging) advertisements, many people browsed the web with ads blocked. Either by installing an extension (AdBlock Plus in Firefox), built in facility of the browser (Opera's blocker), or external programs (IE7Pro for IE7, or AdMuncher).

( Note: Internet Explorer 7 is now FREE for all... no more of that pesky Windows Genuine Advantage crap )

Someone (NOT me) said that such users are thieves. Not me. Because I'm 'guilty' of that myself.

However, for my monetary scheme to work, I request to ad-blocking users, please do allow ads coming in from adsense, i.e. allow "adsense.google.com". Besides, remember that AdSense ads are (1) Text-based, so it does not consume a lot of bandwidth, and (2) relevant to whatever contents a web page is presenting.

Another problem is JavaScript blocking. Yes, it is necessary for preventing popups and such. I also do that. But this blog is clean, I guarantee. So please allow JavaScript for "p-hack.blogspot.com" and "google-analytics.com".

Why do I need JavaScript enabled? Simply put: Google's AdSense also detected and considered the amount of visitors coming to this blog. They do it by a simple JavaScript hosted at my site and at google-analytics.com. Allowing both URLs above enables Google to record the number of visitors to my site.

Thank you for your assistance. May your hacked-life always be fruitful.

Over and Out.

Pidgin -- another freeware multichat system

First of all, I have to admit that I'm not really keen on IM-ing. That said, sometimes I just have to do IM, e.g. to talk with tech support located in a different country (ugh). Or perhaps to give some assistance to (former) students.

Problem is, some of them use Yahoo!Messenger, while others use MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger).

I solve the problem of having to install 2 IM clients by using Trillian. The goodness that Trillian was allows me to not only login into Yahoo!Messenger and MSN Messenger at the same time, it also allows me to login using multiple accounts into both. Plus it also supported AIM / ICQ, the previous IM fad.

But lately, Trillian started to act up on me. I found out that if the first attempt to start Trillian always resulted in an error. The second attempt will succeed, though. Beats me what caused it.

But this ... um, 'incident', coupled with the fact that Trillian is kind of resource hungry (it felt sluggish), and also the small emoticons (and incomplete -- some Yahoo! Messenger emoticons are not supported) . . . finally led mo to search for an alternative multi-system chat client (multichat client).

I stumbled upon Pidgin. It's small, fast, light on the resource, and it generally felt far snappier than Trillian. In addition, it supports all Yahoo! Messenger emoticons. Now I no longer have to wonder what my chat partner is trying to convey.

Pidgin seems to be inherently extendible by downloading "plugins" which will add many functionalities. Furthermore, it supports many -- and I do mean *many* -- IM services. Far more than what you can shake a stick at. And unlike Trillian, it supports Google chat. Now that *is* nice.

The only drawback to Pidgin seems that, unlike Trillian, Pidgin does not support multiuser usage. That is, if I double click Pidgin, it will open the chat services that *I* have selected, using my credentials. If someone wants to have their own selection of services and credentials, they must log off Windows and log in as a new user.

No facility for multi-user using single Windows login

Well, since I am the only user of my computer, that drawback is nothing too vital for me. So I guess I will keep using Pidgin.

Try it. I believe the majority of us will surely like it.

Over and Out.

RETURNIL -- FREE alternative to DeepFreeze

---

A screencap of RETURNIL's setting dialog box (click to see a bigger version)

We are all familiar with DeepFreeze. It's the software we use when we want to ensure that *absolutely*nothing* can happen to our painstakingly installed and customized Windows.

Unfortunately, DeepFreeze is payware.

I happened upon a posting in Wilders Security Forums, informing me of something called RETURNIL, made by the eponymous Returnil Virtual Systems. Upon checking up on RETURNIL, I found out that not only it is similar to DeepFreeze, the Personal Edition version also FREEWARE.

Wow, I immediately downloaded and installed RETURNIL on my system. I also did a preliminary (and very rudimentary) test, in which I activated RETURNIL's protection, created a new text file on c:\, and rebooted.

Sure enough, after reboot, the new text file... is no more.

Very Interesting. I will keep using this. I guess this *is* a keeper after all.

Stay tuned for more testing results and/or praises and/or rants about RETURNIL.

Over and Out.