Vista/XP Tip: iRotate a free utility to rotate your computer display

If you have a monitor that that can rotate, then you'll also need your computer to rotate the video output so that you can use different ratios with your monitor. But the problem is that if you don't have the right video drivers, you wont be presented with an option to rotate your screen. Plus, even Vista doesn't have the native capability to rotate the screen unless you install 3rd  party drivers. And for me installing drivers is always a hassle, so I'm glad I stumbled across this little utility that can help you rotate your screen.

It's called iRotate and its a no-nonsense little utility that works on almost all Windows Operating systems out there and allows you to rotate your video output from your graphics cards without a hitch. It utilizes the inbuilt functionality of your card and all you need to do is download it and install it. Plus, its completely free, so there's no reason why you shouldn't use it if you have a monitor that can rotate.

Rotating your monitor can have many benefits. For example, you can read a page with less scrolling. You can scale PDF/HTML ebooks (if you don't have any then you can learn more on how to get e-books of your favourite authors and stories in this post.) much more easily and read it in a paper-like portrait format.

As for why even Vista doesn't have the ability to natively rotate your display is beyond my comprehension. Even OS X tiger had that feature. I wonder why they didn't copy it... because I only stumbled on this tool after a lot of searching. Hopefully it'll be easier for you since you know what to do now.

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The Outlook .Pst File – what is it and how to find it

Everything was going just fine, until one fine day during one of the scheduled defragmentations of my wonderful Windows XP hard drive, I actually paid some attention to what Disk Defragmenter was saying. And it said that it could defragment everything, except 1 file… and guess what that file was? The Outlook.pst file.

Now, for those of you who do not know what this file is, it’s pretty much a file that stores all the e-mails, attachments, contacts (even recently used contacts) and calendar information that Outlook has. Why would Outlook store everything in 1 big file? Probably to make it easier to back-up. But what happens when that file gets so big, it becomes unruly? You need to hunt it down and get rid of it.

Here’s the low down on how to find this beast of a file. First, you’ll have to show hidden files and folders (Open My Documents or any other Explorer Window > Tools > Folder Options > View Tab > Show hidden files and folders > OK) and then navigate to “C:\Documents and Settings\Rishi\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook”.

The coolest way (and the easiest way) to do this is to copy the address above (only copy the stuff between the double quotes) and then press Windows Key + R key and paste the string in. Then change YourUserName to your username and press enter.

Viola. You should see a window like the one below, where the Outlook.pst file will be waiting for you.

Now, in my case, I decided to delete the Outlook.pst file, because all my e-mail is still safe and secure on Gmail’s/Hotmail’s web servers. And because of that I don’t really need the extra copies of all attachments ever emailed to me residing in my hard drive taking up some valuable space. However, in your case it might be different. You might have downloaded all the e-mail from your webmail server to your computer. You might also be storing all your contacts on your hard drive. So in that case, the best thing to do is merely back-up the file once in a while and not worry about it.

After I deleted the file however, Outlook 2003 asked me if I wanted to create a new one. So I did, and now I can start all over again, and hopefully this time it won’t clog up so much.

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Full-screen distraction free writing environments for Windows and Linux

I love the idea of WriteRoom for the Mac, but it's a Mac only application. If you're on Windows or on Linux you'll probably have to use these free alternatives (the non-free alternative being “buy a Mac”). All of them perform the same tasks and have similar interfaces.

Unlike WriteRoom, however, these applications do not have a scrollbar for spell check. They're all black windows with green text and that's pretty much it. Of course, you can change the colour of the background and the text

JDarkroom for Windows and Linux

A simple full-screen text editor

You can download it here.

Darkroom for Windows

From the website:

Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.

Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behaviour. Sure, you can kind of emulate the behaviour by jumping through a bunch of hoops in Word/Writer, but it isn’t the same. Also, you can do something similar in emacs, but who wants to learn a bunch of obscure keyboard shortcuts?

The goal of the project is to capture the essence of WriteRoom, while keeping it simple and just as free.

You can download it here.

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How to spot and stop a telemarketer’s call without any gizmos

If there is one thing I don't like about telephones, it's probably the telemarketers. I just find it really annoying that I always seem to get calls from telemarketers whenever I'm doing something important or sleeping. And they're always trying to sell me something I never really need. But at the same time, I know many people (both in India and Canada) who are telemarketers and most of them do the job because they need the money.

Nonetheless, I think I've figured out a way to avoid calls and confrontations with telemarketers. Maybe this is news only to me, but I've been wrong in the past. So, I think I just publish my thoughts this time.

The thing that sets a marketer apart from normal people is that they don't know your number. Obviously this means that they will have to depend on some kind of computer system for directory from which they can come up with phone numbers. Now, although I've heard cases where my friend had to call people manually, the standard system that telemarketers use almost everywhere is automatic.

The way this works is (from what I hear) there are some companies out there that collect and make a list of phone numbers. The company then forwards the list to companies that are in the business of telemarketing. The telemarketing company then uploads the numbers to calling software. Finally, when a telemarketer is trying to get customers, they use software to dial the numbers.

Although this sounds like a foolproof system, the system actually works against them if you know a little trick. And this is pretty simple. This is how you do it:

1. First pick up your phone (if you happen to have caller ID might be a good idea to check the number first, most telemarketing companies have weird numbers that don't have the local area code)
2. Don't answer the phone for 3 seconds
3. If you don't hear a hello from the other side, it's probably a telemarketer
4. You can then hang up and go back to your work

Why does this work? Because telemarketers almost always wait until they get a reply from you before responding. Humans don't. For example, if your friend is calling you, as soon as he or she realizes that you've picked up the phone they will say hello. So, by waiting for a few seconds you can save a couple of minutes. Of course, you can just hang up when you know it's a telemarketer. But remember, they're just people too just like you and all they're doing is trying to put food on the table.

There are other ways like do not call me lists (I wonder if all of telemarketing companies actually follow the rules, even if they are huge amount of fines involved), or phones that are designed to create weird tones to somehow deter phone call from telemarketers. But that's something I'll probably save for another post, besides they probably don't work as well.

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Download the Microsoft Word 2007 alternative for Free - OpenOffice 3.0

Everybody knows that Microsoft Office is the standard wordprocessing suite used in the world out there. Everyone has it, and every workplace uses it. Naturally, it's best for you to have a copy too. However, if you haven't paid for Microsoft Office (for example if you're running Office 2007 Enterprise edition at home) and you've installed the Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other application form a CD that was labelled with a sharpie, you're probably using a PIRATED Copy of the application.

Whether or not you've installed a pirated copy of the office suite intentionally is not what I'm going to talk about in this post. I realized that it's bad karma to steal things (how would you like it if someone would steal something you made...) but it doesn't always have to be that way.

If you can, buy the software or find a place from which you can get it from free. For example, your University/College might provide you with a free copy of Vista/XP/Office/Visual Studio if they are partners with Microsoft. If you can't afford it, don't steal it.

Why not, you ask? Because there is a completely free alternative to Microsoft Office [YES FREE!] that anyone with an internet connection can download. It works on a Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris... everything (except may be MS-DOS)! It's called OpenOffice (technically it's called OpenOffice.org, but I like to call it OpenOffice) (or Oo for short... especially for Microsoft, it's a big Oo (Oo can also mean uh-oh, if you're not up to snuff with your internet lingo). =), and unless you're living under a rock you've probably heard this name. It's just that you already had Microsoft Office and didn't think you'd need it.

OpenOffice has all the features that Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel have. Except it's called Writer, Impress and Calc. You can import files from MSWord, and export to MSWord. You can do pretty much everything you can with MSWord.

How to Download the Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, for Free

1. Go to the OpenOffice.org Website
2. Download the software (you might want to get Version 3 if it's available for your platform/language)
3. Install it
4. Enjoy your guilt free office suite

This is how the main screen looks on a Mac:

Pretty spiffy huh?

A few caveats though:

OpenOffice does support .doc, .ppt, .xls and even .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx files. However, the formatting (especially little things like headers, footers and images) might not appear properly. Nonetless, if you're downloading things like lecture notes, they'll probably be available in a format like PDF for easy accessibility.

Some additional things like pivot tables might also not work as well as they do in MS Office, but if you use such things, you most likely can afford to buy Microsoft Office anyway. If things don't work as well in OpenOffice, you'll probably have to talk to your colleagues/friends to encourage them to use OpenOffice as well. Also, if you want better formatting, that's even better than the formatting in Microsoft Word and so on, you might want to check out a page layout product to help you make the text "look" good.

You'll still be able to create the stunning tables, the interesting graphs, fascinating presentations and the cool looking documents without the help of Microsoft Word/Microsoft PowerPoint/Excel templates. But you'll never know what it is until you try it out. So please, in the name of Open source goodness, try it out. It's free and chances are, you'll like it.

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Why not supplement text books with ebooks?

I like ebooks. Although they are not tangible, they are great for quick review and light reading. Most importantly, however, they don't break your back. I'm not a weak person, but carrying three 5 pound textbooks around does create problems in the long run. So, I'm wondering, why not just have e-books instead?

I know for a fact that many textbook providers have ebooks of their textbooks, but they seem to be locked away in some far far away chamber so that no one can use them. For example, only recently, my math teacher gave us CDs of a book (in essence an e-book, but they didn't really call me that), but why not allow every teachers to hand out e-books. 

The biggest factor that I'm bringing this up is because of a few reasons.

1. I think that the way things are going right now, more people have access to technology
2. Ebooks can clearly demonstrate much more than just plain old textbooks if you combine them up with videos, links and even little animated pictures
3. Ebooks are cheaper
4. Ebooks last longer than regular books
5. They are MUCH lighter on the back

It's a wonder to see why many school boards and publishers don't resort to making ebooks more widely used. I mean, I've written about how I find a lot of FREE and GREAT ebooks on the internet to read, and so far I've been really happy with them. Why not do the same for regular textbooks.

Just a thought...

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Why do I get a blogger error when I publish a post?

It's been hapenning for the past few weeks. Every time I publish a post, a window pops up and tells me that there has been an error. The post seems to turn out fine, and its published without any problems. Yet, blogger somehow seems to manage to confuse itself everytime.

Speaking of which, reminds me how blogger sometimes feels like Windows now. It has less, improperly developed features to that of other blogging systems like Wordpress and even Typepad. It can barely even format the tags right, and the most scariest of all -- It's owned by Google and Google doesn't seem to be doing much with it right now.

To be honest, I think someone at blogger needs to realize that they've been using the same darn pages for the last 3 years, and I cna barely notice any changes in the design. They do seem to tweak the 'dashboard' page every fortnight though, but it's pretty much useless in terms of improving and enhancing the publishing process. I mean, even Windows Live Writer has more features... surely Blogger must be doing someting wrong.

And then there's the question of support. In the past when I used to try to publish from Safari, it'd tell me that there was no support for Safari. Now, there's no message, and there's still no support for Safari. Assuming that most people who love blogging, or alteast even a small fraction of the bloggers out there would be owning a mac, can't they atleast add some support? Honestly though, talking about all this is making me want to switch to Wordpress.

Back to the errors: Are the errors occurring for anyone else out there? Am I doing something wrong here?

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WriteRoom - An Application for distraction free writing

Here's a great no-nonsense hard core writing application for all you writers out there. It's called WriteRoom and it all it does it help you write stuff. This is how the application looks like. Of course, if you are on Windows, do check out the alternatives that are just as good (but most don't have spellcheck -- mainly because Windows doesn't have spellcheck).

Yes, it looks like an ancient version of command prompt, except with green text. Of course, almost every detail of the application (the text, the background and the font size) is customizable. It even has spellcheck. And it even has a scrollbar for easy scrolling. Something the windows alternatives seem to lack.

It also has more cool features : for example, it saves your text automatically so you don't have to worry about saving it yourself. If you want to save different "versions" of your writing you can do that too. Its pretty cool software, and once you start using it for a while you'll quickly get the hang of it. It makes more sense when you start using it, so just download a copy from the links provided below in this article and start writing with it. You'll quickly realize that you're producing better quality articles, in lesser time and more frequently.

It's simple, minimalistic and most important of all it works! And of course since its a Mac application, it also has other cool features. You can right click, and get the computer to read the text to you. I'm guessing this is only possible if you have Leopard or Tiger, but you might be able to do the same in older versions as well.

WriteRoom is great for writing essays, reports and even blog posts. It's almost like a typewriter. Although it is very in-advanced in terms of the features it has, you don't need to worry about the formatting, text or even text size. Once you set your basic preferences, you're SET! No fiddling with fonts unnecessarily just because you have the chance to and no messing around with needless formatting. You can of course copy the text from WriteRoom and then paste it in Microsoft Word before you decide to print your work an add all the necessary formatting.

So, I realize that WriteRoom is paid software, but there is a way to Download it for FREE. That's right, you can actually download an older version of the application from the HogBay software all for completely free. It does almost everything the new version does, so if you're a poor student like me and can't afford to buy the software you might want to use that alternative.

How to Download WriteRoom for Free

You can download an older version of WriteRoom 1, from the WriteRoom releases page. This version is free, and there is no purchase necessary =). You'll likely have to scroll down and select the "Free and Unsupported Version". Unless you just want to try out the newest version for 30 days.

Nonetless, please buy the software if you feel like it's totally worth it.

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Nine PowerPoint Tips from Seth Godin

If there’s one person you have to listen to when it comes to presentation, I’d say Seth Godin (check out his talk on ‘Sliced Bread’ here) would probably be that person. If I had a choice I’d go for Steve Jobs, but it seems like Steve gets most of his ‘cheers’ in his keynotes from Apple employees sitting at the back of the presentation. Okay, I’m only kidding. But, no, everyone should learn how to give great PowerPoint presentations. I’ve blogged about this before, and I can’t seem to stop blogging about it.

The world as we know it would be a much better place if everyone could do a proper PowerPoint presentation. So please, read Seth Godin’s article on Nine Useful PowerPoint tips.

One interesting thing I’d like point out though is about the fonts point he mentions. Please, please, make the fonts at least BIG enough. And only use custom fonts if you’re going to be presentation on YOUR computer, because the presentation won’t probably work on any other computer, unless you save your presentation as a PDF or something. Also, he should have mentioned that one must never over do the presentation with too many animations, but that’s a point mentioned all too often. Nonetheless, I’ve yet to see a presentation that listens to all this advice out there.

May be someday in the future, PowerPoint will have the ability to zap people (nothing above 400v of course… we don’t want it to be inhumane) if they break any rules?

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Use XSlimmer to reduce size of Mac Applications and save Space

Another great, not gratis (gratis = free) way of saving hard drive space on your Mac is to use XSlimmer. If you’re looking for a free alternative to save some valuable space on your hard drive then you might want to try Monolingual. If you have some money to spare then XSlimmer is a great little application that also does 1 thing – it reduces the size of tremendously bulky Universal Binary applications.

What it does is pretty much this:

Every mac application that is universal binary, has been written for 2 kinds of computers. The computers with old PowerPC processors and the new computers with Intel Processors. Naturally the best way to make an application to work on both computers is to have code that works flawlessly on each type of architecture. But obviously, that takes up space. So what XSlimmer does is gets rid of the code for the PowerPC architecture, if you’re on a Intel system and vice versa for PowerPC users. Naturally, you can slim down the size of the application (any application – including XSlimmer itself =) by almost 50%.

However, it does have price tag of $12.95 (although pretty small) though, so you might want to invest only if you are really low on space and have a lot of applications you can’t part with. Nonetheless it’s a great little application that can save a lot of hair pulling in really needy times

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Windows or Mac Laptop Running Really Slow? Speed it up for free!

I often hear people complaining that their laptops run really slow, whilst their desktops are usually blazing fast. For them, it seems as though there is something wrong with the laptop, because if they have the exact same software installed on both the laptop and the desktop, both with similar hardware configurations, shouldn’t the laptop be just as fast as the desktop? To be honest, most people don’t take into account the various innumerable differences between the two different kind of computers both in terms of software and hardware.

In this post, I shall attempt to explain how you can ‘speed up your laptop’. Most tips apply to all laptop, including macs, however some tips apply to only specific laptop. Please bear in mind though that implementing some of these tips might mean less batter life, so do check beforehand with the ‘how to improve laptop battery life’ article on this website.Here’s how you can make your laptop run really fast.

How to Make All Laptops Run Faster

(doesn’t matter if its windows, mac or linux)

Prevent your laptop from overheating

What you shouldn’t do:

I often see people placing their laptops on their beds, carpets and couches. This is bad! First of not only does it help in heating your laptop to a non-functional state (and sometimes even causes it to crash) it also aids in ruining the fabric on your furniture. When you place your laptop on your couch, for example, the fabric does a good job of blocking any vents that might be (and often are) on the bottom of your laptop. Doing so, prevents the circulation of air in the laptop, causing it to heat up. And of course, if you know a thing or two about computers – they don’t like heat. This is because the processor, which in the first place generates a lot of heat, cannot function if there is excess heat. That’s one of the reasons cell phones done come equipped with 5 GHz processors, yet.

What you should be doing:

If you plan to use your laptop on your lap, do so sparingly – as this too can heat up your laptop. Instead, place it on a table if possible. Although this defies the purpose of being a ‘laptop’, it will help your processor and computer as a whole work more efficiently. If you find that your laptop heats up a lot, especially if it is a couple of years old, you might want to invest in a laptop cooling stand. This will help cool the laptop and ensure its well being, making it run faster. You might want to refrain from using any “homemade” laptop cooling stands like this one.

Doing the above will also prevent any abrupt crashes when using the laptop to do processor intensive tasks.

Use the correct power settings

More often than not, laptops automatically switch to the ‘power saver’ mode when you remove your plug. Especially if you’re using a new operating system like Windows Vista or Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 So, the best thing you can do here is to change those settings. On Windows Vista or Leopard, you’ll have to click on the battery icon on your taskbar (for windows) or menubar (for mac) respectively and choose ‘Maximum/High Performance’ or ‘Better Performance’ in order to let your processor run at full speed and let your computer work faster. A word of caution though: your computer WILL HEAT UP significantly! So keep an eye on the temperature, you don’t want your computer to crash or burn something.

Free up Hard Drive Space'

Freeing up some valuable hard drive space (use the free up hard drive space guide here) will definitely allow your operating system to run faster because it won’t be clogged up as much. On a mac, consider transferring your songs elsewhere or storing them on your MP3 player. You might also want to drag unused applications to your dock. Likewise, you can get rid of unnecessary languages no your mac if you only use 1 primary language with monoligual. Also keep in mind that laptops usually have slower hard drives, so you might want to consider adding some more RAM to your hard drive. TIP: If you’re using Windows Vista and you’re using a laptop that has a all in one media card reader, you might want to use those SD cards for cameras to improve your computer’s responsiveness with Windows Readyboost. It won’t do much, but it will definitely improve your computer’s  You don’t need Windows Readyboost drives to help increase the RAM of your computer.

Operating System ‘Hacks’ for Windows

Please keep in mind that use these hacks on Windows only if you’re desperately in need for some speed. If not, I’d just let windows be the way it is.

 

That’s all for now. There aren’t any other laptop tweaks that I am aware of for now… if you have anything else to share, please let me know!

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10 Registry Hacks to Make Windows Faster, Free!

Okay, so here are some registry hacks that you can use to make windows faster. A word of caution though, I’ve used these hacks and they seem to be fine, and they seem to cause no repercussions whatsoever on Windows XP, but nonetheless if you use your Windows XP machine as your primary machine, I wouldn’t use this on that machine. Nonetheless, Here they are:

How to use these registry Hacks:

Again, if you don’t know how to use these registry hacks, then you probably shouldn’t be using them. Please back up your registry first by reading this article!!! If you’re determined to use then then this is how you do it: (obviously you'd want to back up your computer first.. I take no responsibility if you manage to "bork it" =)

1. Copy the code below. The “code” below contains modifications that you’re going to be implementing into the registry to tweak certain features of the operating system in an effort to make it faster
2. Open a new notepad file (the cool way to open notepad is pressing the Windows key + R key and typing in “Notepad” in the box that pops up and pressing enter… just thought I’d kinda point it out to you)
3. Paste the code
4. Save the file as “Hacks.reg” (type it with quotes in the notepad save as box in your desktop
5. Double click the file to add the keys to your registry
6. Delete the file as required

OK, so here are the registry keys modifications that you’d want to copy:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem] "NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction] "Enable"="Y to enable" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "MenuShowDelay"="100" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "WaitToKillAppTimeout"="1000" "HungAppTimeout"="1000" [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "WaitToKillAppTimeout"="1000" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control] "WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="1000"

So as you can see, modifications are made primarily to the FileSystem, Boot Configs, Shutdown Sequence, Start Menu Delay. Use it wisely!

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Free up hard drive space on your Mac with Monolingual

Okay, may be I’m just slow, but I’ve just found a gem of an app again to free up some hard drive space. It’s called Monolingual, and pretty much all it does is get rid of extra languages on your Mac and frees up some valuable hard drive space. Unlike Disk Cleanup on your PC, which is more of a maintenance application, this simply gets rid of those languages that you can’t read or you’ll probably never use anyway.

I honestly can’t speak any of the languages I currently have on my mac, but still its seemed kinda fun to have them around at first when installing the operating system (well.. upgrading to Leopard actually). But now I’ve realized that it’s pretty much just a big waste of hard drive space. So bye by Afrikaans… all I need is English. Speaking of English, I also just figured out how to use Canadian English as the default Language on a Mac. It’s a pity that your Mac doesn’t do it for you automatically when you choose your region as Canada.

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Why do Canadians always get all the cool tech stuff last?

The last time I checked, Canada was still a part of North America and RIM was a Canadian company. Yet, it seems like the Blackberry Storm will be heading down to the States first, before it becomes easily accessible for Canadian consumers (and hopefully, it won't be going to Rogers... the iPhone fiasco should be enough for a couple of years more to come). Interesting isn't it? I mean, I always believed that Canada was really technologically advanced, especially since the previous census had an option where one could fill out the form online, which was something pretty cool. But now it just seems like I'm all wrong. Even the Sony Experia isn't available in Canada yet.


Is it just me feeling this way, or does no one else care about this? I say, they should create some kind of a new law in order to help bring new technology into Canada. Its pretty wierd to know that people in India right now have cooler (and somewhat cheaper I must add)phones that what I'm using right now.

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