I was looking for a way to assign a hotkey to Q-Dir for file management as I will never use it unless it is as easy as running Windows-E. Well I ran across this program which is awesome it allows you to assign any hotkeys you want with the Windows button. It has a very easy to use graphical interface to assign the buttons and you can assign anything. So far I have it setup to run Q-Dir, Firefox, Outlook, and Command Prompt (cygwin) in a single hotkey. It is a huge time saver and picks up where Launchy is lacking.
Category: Software
This is a pretty amazing site and has a bunch of good content and links. This is great for finding fonts, images, CMS tools, and just great links for web designers. This can save a lot of time.
This is just like the Windows Office for $59 only it is for Windows 7. All you need is a valid .edu address. I knew there was a reason that I went to grad school.
I have started using Paint.Net a lot lately to do a lot of my website graphics as it seems to be the easiest to use. Although the only real issue I was having was figuring out to crop an image with rounded corners for headers and whatnot. After searching around the web for a while I found an answer. Below are the steps to create a rounded corner cropping of an image.
- Open the image and add a new layer
- In the new layer draw a rectangle with rounded corners and solid fill (this will be your finished image size)
- Use the Magic Wand to select your new solid rectangle
- Then go to Edit->Invert Selection
- Then delete the inverted selection
- Then delete the new layer
Not the most intuitive way to do it but very effective none the less. Click here to see a more detailed description with screen-shots if you need more explanation.
This is a very simple program that can create small animated GIF images for websites or whatever you need them for. It is a stand alone application and can be installed on a pen drive.
Simple to use just add the images that you want to create the animation with and then create your transitions and then save the .gif file.
Alright so after being up late last night until about midnight I finally found out how to get Mercury Server running for SMTP. This is very helpful when you are testing on your XAMPP server and you are testing your email functionality and want to see the emails that it is sending out. Below are the steps to get things working.
Setup DNS for your NIC
- Go to Start->Network Connections
- Edit the NIC you are using
- Double Click TCP/IP settings
- Manually enter in the DNS servers from your ISP
Disable unneeded Protocols
- Start Mercury from the Control Panel
- Go to CONFIGURATION->PROTOCOL MODULES
- Disable everything except the MERCURYC SMTP RELAY CLIENT and MERCURY SMTP
- Restart Mercury
Make Changes to Core Module
- Go to CONFIGURATION->MERCURY CORE MODULE then the GENERAL tab
- Check to make sure “localhost” is the value of “internet name for this system”
- Disable all but “send copies of all errors to postmaster”
- check tab “Local Domains” make sure Localhost is there
- Close and save
Edit MercuryS SMTP Server
- Open CONFIGURATION -> MERCURY S SMTP SERVER
- Choose general tab and enter name as SMTP
- Make sure port 25 is listed
- Add 127.0.0.1 to “IP interface to use”
- Go to Connection Control and add 127.0.0.1 to the list
- Un-check “do not permit SMTP relaying to non-local mail”
- Close and Save
Edit MercuryC SMTP Client
- Open CONFIGURATION -> MERCURYC SMTP CLIENT
- Enter in external SMTP client (smtp.google.com for example) on port 465 with SSL (or whatever ports are supported)
- Enter your login name and password to that external SMTP server
- Close and Save
Edit PHP.INI file to include from line
- Then go edit your PHP.INI file in XAMPP
- Under [mail function] add the line “sendmail_from = postmaster@localhost”
- Stop and restart Mercury and Apache
Yup 27 steps is why it took me so long to get this thing working! The key is that last step to the PHP.INI file without that you will get an awesome syntax error on all your emails.
I have tried playing around with some different file archiving tools and basically have come back to 7Zip again as it seems to be the most functional and useful one I can find. Plus it is hard to beat the price. Well if you are worried about the way that yours looks (yes I know I am kinda a skinning crazy person) there is a theme manager out there that you can use to stylize your 7zip application. I have attached the latest version as well as the website below:
Latest Version: Theme Manager 1.1
Website: 7 Zip Theme Manager
So I have been using Gimp for a while and wasn’t really happy with it and found it very cumbersome to use especially when I am trying to some very generic photo editing or resizing or whatnot. Well using my LiberKey on my USB drive has pointed me towards using Paint.Net instead. I love it, makes editing super fast and easy and the interface is very easy to use. I would highly suggest using this software it just requires .Net Framework to be installed which isn’t a big deal. I would highly suggest this software for basic image manipulation.
website: GetPaint.net
Well since I am a little partial to using Notepad++ for just about everything these days looks like with a few easy steps you can change the default source editor in Firefox to use Notepad++ It is very simple:
Go to about:config
Search for “view_source.editor.external”
Change this value to “true”
Search for “view_source.editor.path”
Change this to the path of your editor “C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe”
Well if you have ever wanted portable apps on crack this might just be the application for you. With USB keys getting up to 128GB these days trying to find stuff to fill it is about half the fun! Well just ran across this application the other day, it puts Portable Apps to shame and has over 200+ applications that are easily updateable and easy to download new ones. It also allows you to easily add applications that are not part of the general install package.
The ultimate package comes with over 200+ applications and download at about 200MB and unzips to about 600MB. I finally have everything I could ever want on my work laptop without having to worry about actually installing software on it!
