Wow this site may have eliminated the reason for my blog.  This is a site that lets you select the applications you want to install and then downloads all the installers into a single install for easy multiple application setup.  The best part is this is basically all the software that I use to run my computer!  Looks like they are still in a private beta but I was able to get in and test it out, amazing and huge time saver when setting up a family computer which inevitably happens way too often!

Web Site: Volery

UPDATE: now the site is called NiNite

Well looks like Windows is all about getting their software into college students hands for a very reasonable price or for free.  This is their latest reach out to students DreamSpark.  After supplying your .edu address and confirming it you can download any of the software that they have here and use is for free!  This is great and is inline with the Student offering for Windows 7 or for Office 2007

Well I have never been a big fan of Windows explorer, but at the same time never really found a reason to change what it uses by default.  Well I have started using Q-Dir to manage my file directory contents and I find it extremely easy and time saving.  I guess I just got used to opening two explorer windows and dragging across the windows but this seems to be so much easier!  And using the Hotkey tool I found the other day it makes it as easy as a replacement for explorer as ever!

Qdir Website

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.

Qliner Hotkeys Website

Download Hotkeys 2.0.1

So I ended up picking up a new router after bricking my good old WRT54G which I have had for a long time and served me well but kinda left we wanting more.  That is probably why I was pushing a firmware upgrade to the router only to have it fail and brick it.  So after doing a bunch of research as far as what was available at MicroCenter and reading reviews from NewEgg and Amazon I ended up with a D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N.

The main thing I was looking for in a router was stability and supportability I had a few other things in my mind that I figured would be awesome if I could find but were not too big of deal breakers.  One thing that really led me to choose D-Link was their support network and the forums and their emulator of their firmware.  The emulator was nice because it let me test drive the options of the router before buying it, why more companies don’t do that I will never know.  Also you have the ability to easily download old firmware if you need to downgrade after an update.  The forum was a welcome support link for the router but as usual you have to take those with a grain of sand as there seems to be a lot of angry people out there!  Although I did take the biggest advice of the forum and did not upgrade to the latest firmware as it seems to have a lot of issues, and is not something you can remove after installing it.  I figured since 80211N just made gold that there would be another update coming soon anyways.

A nice feature of this router is I have the ability to set up schedules.  So I can open my FTP port for the 1 hour I need it to do my automated website backups.  I can also do some port mapping from incoming external port to another internal port in my network.  I also get some very useful logs and a whole bunch of other buttons and options to change (QoS, DHCP Priority Address, Guest Access, Email new Firmware, Uptime Clock).  I can also enable a second WiFi hotspot with a different security level for guests so I can easily open and close a non-secure wireless access point.  And it has a gigabit switch to boot so that is helpful for all four ports which i have plugged into my PS3, DirecTV, Media Center, and weather station.

It was on sale for $99 at MicroCenter and has turned out to be a very good router.  I have tested it by pumping a ton of data through it via Bit-Torrent and Hulu and downloading 1GB files from FTP all at once without a hiccup (well my cable modem did reboot but don’t think that was the router’s fault).  So this router gets my vote!

UPDATE – I have found some other settings that are particularly useful with this new router.  Looks like you can setup a dynamic DNS account and setup the router to ping the service and update your IP if it changes so you can have a static URL go to your home server.

As far as stability goes this thing seems to be fairly solid, it likes to reboot every once and a great while and does it by itself and just looks like it takes a long time for a page to reload when it happens, so no really effected services.  I have also been making a bunch of changes to the config of the router which require reboot so that kinda screws up my uptime counts.

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.

ForWebDesigners.com

Here are a bunch of free font websites:

• 40 Free High Quality Hand-drawn Fonts
• 15 Fresh High-Quality Free Fonts to Boost Your Site Design
• 30 high-quality free fonts for professional designs
• Amazing 3D Fonts
• 45 Most Wanted Beautiful Free Hand Drawn Fonts
• The Top 100 Best Fonts Of All Time
• 40 Free Unique Cartoon and Comic Fonts
• 20 Creative and Unique Typefaces
• 30 Extremely Elegant Serif Fonts
• 22 Most Used Free Fonts By Professional Designers
• 32 Trashy And Distorted Fonts For Your Next Grungy Design

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.

Microsoft 741

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.

Download Beneton GIF Animator