I rarely promote commercial products in this blog for a variety of reasons. However, every now and then I come across a software product that I am just too excited about to not mention it.

I recently gave GNU/Linux a spin and tested out Ubuntu and Debian. I was quite impressed with both; they’ve come a long way in terms of user-friendliness. I was looking for stability and ease of use more than eye candy, and for the most part, in spite of a considerable learning curve, Ubuntu certainly delivered.

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough.

While Windows 7 suffers from the same performance degradation that all Windows releases post-95 have suffered from, its ease of use is hard to beat. While I respected Ubuntu’s decision to “keep it real” by not including native support for things like Lightscribe or Adobe Flash, after a while it just became a huge pain in the rear to try and find little fixes to help me do the most mundane things that Windows does out of the box.

I went back to Windows rather reluctantly, but that is what I felt I had to do. What I missed most about Ubuntu, aside from its snappy performance and amazing security, was the interface. I really liked Gnome – it was refreshingly customizable. Windows felt, in comparison, quite clunky and restricted.

Having used third party software before to enhance the look of Windows XP – back when I still bothered with XP – I knew that products like WindowsBlinds were relatively heavy on the resources and often were slow to have patches available for when Windows updated itself and changed things around. I particularly remember how SP1 rendered my StyleXP installation entirely unusable. Not fun.

Lucky for me, I came across a software product called WinStep, which provides various desktop and taskbar enhancements. It does not use up much resources at all, and it doesn’t latch itself onto the system itself, so it’s easy to turn on and off on the fly. Not once have I had to restart my system due to an issue with it, which is more than I can say for some skinning products.

WinStep doesn’t really skin the desktop as much as it enhances it. What’s so great about this product for me is that it allows me to add certain functionality to my desktop which I’ve always wanted to have:

I don’t like desktop icons. I prefer to start applications from the quick launch bar, or to a lesser extent, from the start menu. Unfortunately, this means that my quick launch area gets pretty crowded, leaving very little space for open applications on the taskbar. The new Windows 7 taskbar does a great job of grouping active tasks, but on the flip side the way it handles quick launch icons is…retarded. Even in “small” mode the icons take up a lot of space.

WinStep allows me to create a dock in the bottom of the screen and move the Windows taskbar to the top (or vice versa if that’s your flavour). Not only can I select a very cool effect for when I mouse-over the icons (and a bounce when I click on one to launch something – similar to OS X’s dock), set the size of the icons, adjust the labels or even remove them, etc…but I can keep my actual Windows taskbar entirely free of quick launch icons! This frees up a tremendous amount of space for active tasks. My launch icons are still in the bottom of the screen where I am used to seeing them, but the systray and the clock are in the top of the screen like they are in Gnome!

Furthermore, combining the dock’s transparency feature with an awesome theme creates a terrific looking dock. WinStep has refreshed my Windows desktop experience, and made Windows a lot more pleasurable to use. I don’t usually make product recommendations, but this one is just too significant for me to pass up on.

I will be collecting here some nifty tidbits that have helped me make my Ubuntu installation more fun to use. In case of very long console commands, quotations are used to emphasize that the command is one long command, even if the blog template splits it into several lines. Do not include the quotations when typing in the commands, as that will not work.

These tips, commands, and possible links are for reference only; any use of them is entirely up to you, and I assume no liability for any damages you do to your or someone else’s system.

NO SHRINKING BOX ANIMATION ON MINIMIZE
When you minimize a window, a rectangular shrinking box animation is shown by default. It gets annoying after time, but there is a way to disable it:
“gconftool-2 -t bool -s /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources true”

I HAVE INSTALLED ADOBE FLASH PLAYER, BUT STILL HAVE TROUBLE WITH FLASH SITES LIKE YOUTUBE
Use the following three commands in console:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Every now and then I come across a Firefox plug-in that I just have to tell people about. This time it’s one called Read It Later. This nifty add-on allows you to temporarily bookmark a web page with just one-click to a list of sites you want to visit at a later time.

Whenever I would stumble upon some page that did not quite have the information I was looking for, but I wanted very much to come back and look at it later, I would bookmark it. As a result, my list of bookmarks is a bottomless pit. It takes about a minute for me to scroll down the whole length of it, and that’s not even getting started on the folders I have created in it. There are pages upon pages of links I wanted to go and follow later, but never got around to it, because finding that one page later on would have been too overwhelming a task.

Read It Later helps with that by keeping these temporary bookmarks in their own list. Not only does it take just one click to add a page to the list, but it’s just as easy to remove it once you’re done checking it out later.

After installing the add-on, a small check mark will appear on the Firefox address bar, after the URL and the star button that’s used for quickly bookmarking a page. As you happen on a page you know you want to come back to and visit later, but don’t want to add to your bookmarks just yet, you can click on the check mark once. This turns the icon red, and the page you’re on is saved in your Read It Later list.

Once you have time to read those pages you wanted to go back to, you can click on the brown book icon in your browser, which presents a list of those links you’ve saved. You can visit pages by clicking on the link, or you can remove them from the list by clicking the red check mark after each one, either in this drop-down list, or in the address bar as you visit them. It could not be more simple.

What if you are browsing the web at home and see something you want to take a look at once you’re back at your desk at work the next day? You could write down the URL… Or email it to yourself. Better yet, you can sign up for a free account at Read It Later’s list synchronization web site, enabling you to synchronize the Read It Later list on your home computer with that of your work PC. Nice!

Supposedly Read It Later also works on any other browser, as well as the iPhone, but I have no personal experience with those alternatives.

Craigslist has become a very popular site over the years for buying and selling goods and services without having to fork over money for advertising fees. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this same service is being actively used by spammers for harvesting the site’s users’ email addresses. Here’s how it works.

In the first step of the process, an application specifically designed for this purpose is used to automatically retrieve the email addresses from each ad in the selected categories in the selected region. This will result in a list of thousands of email addresses.

I know what you’re thinking: “I always use that scrambling feature that creates a temporary forwarding address for me, so I’m safe.”

Wrong.

While the temporary forwarding address system enables you to keep your personal email account from your ad posts, it does not prevent you from giving your address to the spammers yourself. The second step of the process, you see, is automatically sending you an email which usually consists of just a couple of sentences, typically asking you if the “item” is still available. No phone number is given, so you quickly email them back to let them know it’s still available. Bam – your real email address has been harvested, and massive spamming can begin.

You might think that it would take a lot of effort to send people emails asking whether their items are “still available” or to ask them some other vague questions about their items. Fortunately for the spammers, there are software products which make this process automatic for them. They can use hundreds of Gmail accounts (I’ve seen Gmail a lot in particular) as senders, and the software generates the vague question on its own. Response emails are automatically used to record valid addresses.

My wife recently had to change her email address of 8+ years due to it being harvested through an ad she posted on Craigslist. I use the site every now and then and I never fail to receive these one-liners asking for confirmation, and then when I reply, there’s no response back.

I’m personally going to ignore all emails which do not specify alternate means of contact, i.e. a phone number. And I will mention this as I post the ad, because I have no interest in getting hundreds more spam emails each day about sex pills or fake Rolexes.

Windows 7 has a release date! Now that we are getting so close to an official release, it is prudent to start collecting info on little tips and tweaks that people have come across when testing the beta and the release candidate versions.

1. Fonts can be hidden from programs (to free up memory, among other reasons) by right-clicking on a font in the Fonts folder and selecting Hide.

2. Calculator is more versatile than it used to be. The operating modes include Standard, Scientific, Programmer, and Statistics. Also available are conversion tools (angles, temperature, velocity, volume, etc.) and a date calculation tool. Gas mileage, lease, and mortgage estimate templates are also available. Handy!

3. Win7 finally has native support for burning .ISO files (disc images) onto blank media. Just double-click on your .ISO file and a simple but useful Burn Disc Image app will pop up.

4. By default, empty memory card slots will not show up as drives in My Computer, but you can change this by unchecking the “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder” option in Folder Options.

5. Remember that a lot of the time the fastest way to find a settings dialog or an application is hitting the Windows key and typing the name of the program into the search field, as opposed to browsing through various menu options.

6. Shortcuts pinned to the taskbar can also be quickly launched by pressing down the Windows key and a numeric key that corresponds to the shortcuts position on the taskbar from left to right. For example, if the icons pinned to your taskbar are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, and WinAmp, pressing Windows and 2 will open up Firefox, while pressing Windows and 4 will launch the Media Player.

7. The new taskbar offers many advantages over the old, but the classic Quick Launch can also be enabled. Do the following: right-click on the taskbar, then go Toolbars/New Toolbar. In the folder selection field, enter the following: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch. Turn off the lock taskbar setting. Right-click on the divider. Disable Show Text and Show Title, and set the view to Small Icons. Position the Quick Launch by dragging the divider to rearrange the toolbar.

8. Certain apps, such as MSN Messenger or Steam, are designed to disappear into the system tray and not take up space on your taskbar. Sometimes such applications will unfortunately stick to the taskbar. You can put them in their right place by going to the app’s shortcut’s properties and enabling the program to be run in Windows Vista compatibility mode.

9. One of the best things about Windows 7 – for me – are the jump lists. Windows Explorer’s jump list keeps track of most commonly accessed folders, but you can also pin folders to the jump list for convenient, quick access. Simply locate the desired folder in Windows Explorer, right-click on it and hold down, and drag it over the Windows Explorer icon in the taskbar, and release. It will now show up in the Explorer jump list under the “Pinned” heading. Snazzy!

More to be added later!