Continue from my previous post of Quick program launching and more at your finger-tip!, launching programs and documents are but just one of the many useful areas of Launchy. You can also use it to do quick google search, perform arithmetic calculation, and even integrate with other programs. Here’s another video to share with you.

 

What I did in this video is to,

1. Perform a quick calculation of 123+456+789. You can see that the result (1368) is shown on the right side as I was typing – isn’t this snappier than bringing up the Windows Calculator?

2. Then I perform Google search for ‘pretty girl’ by just typing the ‘Google’ keyword, press the Tab key, followed by my search keyword, press ENTER, and the Google page immediately pops up on my browser, woot!

3. The third demo shows how I look for files on my computer using the ‘Find’ keyword. This brings up the Windows Search with my search criteria injected and searched!

4. The last demo shows how I actually browse/explore my folders and files directly within the Launchy window!

 

All these and more are at your finger tips, by just pressing the ‘Ctrl-Space’ (configurable) Launchy hotkey!

For integration to the Windows Search, you will first need to download and install the Windows Search feature. Then,

1. go to the Plugins tab in the Launchy setting screen.

2 . Under the Weby plugin, add a new line with the following settings:

    a. Name = ‘Find’

    b. URL = ‘search-ms://’

    c. Query = ‘query=%s&’.

This is how my Start Menu looks like after reinstalling Windows XP just 1 month plus ago. I like to try out programs I gathered from the web, and now it has more than 120 menu items chucked in, so you can probably imagine how it will become down the road – totally useless! Therefore I’ve opt to not use it anymore. To replace it, I am using this nifty little tools called Launchy to launch all my applications (and more). Check out the video below to see just how much faster you can use it to launch your program with just one hotkey, plus a keystroke or two.

 

In the video, I pressed the special Ctrl-Space hotkey (configurable) to bring up the Launchy screen. Then I search for the Microsoft Outlook programs by just typing ‘OU’. All programs with ‘OU’ as part of its name will be listed. I then press ENTER to launch Outlook. Next I start Microsoft Word by typing in ‘Word’. Again, a list of matching program names are short-listed for my selection. The next one is super-fast. I just typed in ‘f’, and Launchy automatically finds Firefox for me, because that’s my most used programs with ‘F’ in front of its name. In other words, Launchy actually make a pretty good guess based on how frequent I’ve used any programs! The last one’s quite handy – you can use Launchy to quickly open up documents you frequently use, and in my case, it’s the office contact list. I no longer need to hunt around my desk to look for that printed copy anymore!

Below are the settings I’ve included in the Catalog screen (besides the default ones which points to the Start Menu folder):

1. *.exe in C:\Program files. This let me search for all EXE files which I’ve installed manually in the Program files folder which doesn’t exist in my Start Menu.

2. *.doc?, *.xls?, and *pdf in ‘My Document\Office’ folder. This will let me search for all my office related documents (for e.g. the contact list). You may have noticed that I put a question mark (?) behind the ‘doc’ which let me include both *.doc and *.docx files. Same applies to the ‘xls?’ file extension.

 

In the next post, I will show you more Launchy’s capabilities. Besides Launchy, Google Desktop also provide the similar functionality, but I don’t prefer its somewhat bloated footprint. There is also another tools called Executor which you may want to check out, but I really like Launchy’s plugin capability, so I’m sticking to it now.

I like those Mac vs. PC ad, and especially like the Microsoft’s fightback ad-campaign and the videos. And now it’s Linux’s turn.

I’m always on the look out for cool and useful stuff to beef up the Windows Taskbar. I like RocketDock, but it’s not good enough to steer me away from the standard Windows XP Taskbar, simply because it doesn’t handle system tray elegantly. Although I don’t use it, but one thing good did came out of it is - Standalone Stack. Check out the video below to see what I mean.

 

 

I’ve put 2 stacks in the QuickLaunch Bar. The first one simply displays all the items in My Documents folder in Grid mode, while the second one stack up thumbnails of one of my sample photos folder. All the items/thumbnails will open up the files when you click on them. In the last Stack icon, I’ve put another Stack shortcut on my desktop to display games for my kids. After clicking on any of the icons in the expanded grid/stack, it will collapse back to the Stack icon automatically – no need to manually close any windows, way cooler than the standard Windows Explorer windows!

Simple steps to set it up:

1. 1. Download and install the Standalone Stack into your computer.
2. 2. Create a shortcut to the StandaloneStack.exe on your desktop, QuickLaunch Bar, etc.
3. 3. Right-click and choose ‘Properties’ to bring up the Property Page of your Standalone Stack shortcut. At the end of the Target field, give this shortcut a unique name, for e.g. ‘MyNewStack’ as shown below. Click OK.

4. Double-click on your new Standalone Stack shortcut icon. The Standalone Stacks Docklet setting page will be shown.

5. Key in/select the path of the folder that you wish to open using this shortcut. The Icon and ‘Sort by’ settings are optional.

6. Choose the Mode (either automatic, Fan (stack) or Grid) mode. The Automatic mode will guess the best setting based on the number of items in the specified folder. Experiment this to give it the best setting.

7. You can have multiple shortcut icon, each with a different name. For e.g. ‘MyNewStsack’, ‘My Documents’, ‘My Favorites’, etc.

8. At any time when you wish to change the settings for that shortcut again, simply press Ctrl or Shift, while click/double-click on the shortcut icon to bring up the Setting page again.

 

Woot! Enjoy it!

 

xkcd - A Webcomic - Real Programmers

If you have a computer like mine, with dozens of things installed , Windows startup time tends to be very slow. My old laptop takes a full 10 minutes to fully boot up with everything loaded. So I just press the Power button every morning, and go get myself a cup of whatever. But think of the frustration I have if I had to come back to my laptop to login before it continues to load those 1001 other files and programs. That’s where a trick for auto-logging on to Windows comes handy. There are few ways to do it, one of the simplest way is to use the Microsoft TweakUI powertoy (click the Tweakui.exe link on the right side of the page). However it does not work 100% if you laptop displays a legal notice/messages upon login, especially when you have joined your company’s network domain. Therefore, I am sharing the sure-fire way here. You will need to modify the Windows Registry.

Here’s the registry settings to be modified:

1. In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon ,

a. Add/edit the String key called ‘AutoAdminLogon’. Enter the value ‘1’ here.

b. Add/edit the String key called ‘DefaultUserName’. Enter your login username here.

c. Add/edit the String key called ‘DefaultDomainName’. Enter your name of the network domain that you logon to here.

d. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticecaption’, edit and clear the text.

e. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticetext’, edit and clear the text.

2. In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system ,

a. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticecaption’, edit and clear the text.

b. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticetext’, edit and clear the text.

That’s it. Now try restart Windows and go get yourself a cup of whatever.

UPDATE 28 Mar 2009
It seems that the above method is still not good enough, especially in a Domain environment, where the domain administrator can tweak a setting to automatically set the legal notice caption upon Windows restart. To overcome this, all you need to do is to disable the 'Remote Registry' in the Windows Service. You may be asking whether it's safe to do that. From my past few months experience, disabling this yields no side-effect at all. In fact, I feel safer with this service disabled. Think about this - why would you want to let someone change your registry setting from somewhere else ?

As a continuation from my previous post, the Ping.fm + MyBlogLog + Y!Messenger setup lets you do some wonderful stuff.

For e.g. I can have a tumblelog where I post funny pictures and non-serious text, and a personal blog where I post my serious personal thoughts. I could setup ping.fm to post to different sites using different default method and categorize the services by their type (either for status update, micro-blog or blogging type). Posting from the ‘pingdotfm’ Y!Messenger contact will post to all services marked with the default method. For e.g. I put my default method to ‘Status Update’, like this:

 

and my Twitter and Plurk services are set as ‘use for Status Update’, like this:

messages will be posted only to these 2 services when I send a Y!M message to ‘pingdotfm’. And if I want to post something to my tumblelog, I would just need to add a ‘@m’ in front of the message, because I have categorize my service under the ‘micro-blogging’ type, like this:

Then my post to the more serious personal blog would just need to be appended with ‘@b’ in front of the message, because I have categorize the service as ‘blogging’, like this:

And here comes the neat part: depending on whether there is a Yahoo! Mobile Service provider in your area, you can SMS to Yahoo! account and get it posted to everywhere thru this method! From my area, I would SMS this message ‘to pingdotfm my testing message’ to 35525 to get it posted to Plurk and Twitter. To post to my tumblelog, I write ‘to pingdotfm @m my tumblelog message’, and same goes to my personal blog, except for this one, I write ‘to pingdotfm @b my personal blog’.

So to expand from the previous post’sm, the flow of data goes like this:

There are of course other ways like through your 3G network, but I’m a poor chap and I don’t stay out often enough to justify 3G connection, so here’s the nice things I do with the net, woot!

I have always like to set some quirky status messages to my Yahoo! Messenger, for good fun.

And then I discovered Plurk where you basically write what people called ‘micro-blogs’, a short 1 or 2 lines messages about basically anything you want.

Then, there’s of course the omni-present twitter, where lots of people are using it to break news, like the recent Mumbai attacks tweets. Although I am not so active in tweeting, but a net junkie like me won’t want to miss out on this one.

Here comes the problem – I’m lazy. I hate duplicating efforts. I want to be able to write one message, and have it posted to my Twitter+Plurk and my Yahoo! Status all at once! There are many tools online that seems to solve part of the problem, like tarpipe and pixlepipe. After much digging, I’ve settled down with Ping.fm, with a little help from Yahoo!’s MyBloglog.

Here’s what to do:

1. 1. Create a Ping.fm account

    1.1. In the list of Social Networks, register your Twitter and Plurk account.

    1.2. In the list of Services/Tools, enable posting for Y!Messenger.

    1.3  You will be requested to add a contact called ‘pingdotfm’ to your Y!Messenger and send an authorization code.

 

2. Get the latest Y!Messenger version 9 and above.

    2.1 After logging in your Y!Messenger, go to the menu Messenger-Privacy Options,  make sure that the ‘Allow Plug-ins to set clickable status messages is enabled.

    2.2 After that, go to the menu Messenger-Manage updates I Broadcast, which will bring you to the Yahoo! Profile page. In the ‘Select who you share your Updates with’ section, check the MyBlogLog option, and choose ‘Anyone’ or ‘My Connections’ option. If you don’t see the MyBlogLog option, click on the ‘Show All Yahoo! Services’ link below this section.

3. Next, go to Yahoo! MyBlogLog website and register an account using your Yahoo! ID.

    3.1 On the left panel called ‘My Sites and Services’, click the ‘Add Service’ link

    3.2 The Services listing page will be shown. Key in your twitter ID in the twitter field. If it ask for password, just do so.

 

You’re all set now. To post a message to all 3 services, just send a message to your new Y!M contact ‘pingdotfm’ as I mentioned in the steps earlier. The message should appear shortly in both Twitter and Plurk. However, it may take a while for the message to propagate to your Y!M status. If it doesn’t, you may want to check your default settings to make sure that your Twitter/Plurk usage ties with the default method.

This 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

must tie with this

 

 

Here’s a diagram on how I think it works. Wonderful piece of services integration.

 

Let’s hope that the two sites won’t go down anytime soon, especially with the recent news of Pownce.com shutting down and devalued Yahoo! stock. Economy is bad…