Taking Control of Windows

As I’ve shown repeatedly in this blog, Windows can be improved in many ways.

There's a nice free program called WinWarden.  (Actually there are lots of great free programs at the same website – worth checking out)

Some things WinWarden does can be done without it.  E.g.:

You can change the shape and size of any window in Windows by clicking the middle of the three icons in the top left-hand corner of any window.

 

in particular THIS one:

And dragging the edges of the window to get the desired size.

With WInWarden you can re-size windows quickly to certain useful sizes.

Right-clicking on the WinWarden icon

 

brings up the following menu:

Hovering the mouse over “Cover” brings up another menu:

I find this very useful whenever I need to compare two documents or copy between them.

Select e.g. “Right Half” for one document and “Left Half” for another

(the menu works for the currently active window) and within a couple of clicks you have a divided screen with one document on each of the two halves of the screen.  (If you prefer “Top Half” and “Bottom Half” – same idea).

Now THIS is new … after having chosen “Right Ha;f” (or “Left Half”) right click on the WinWarden system tray menu again and hit “Remember”.  Now, even if you go to something else in the meantime, when you come back to the relevant document(s) the settings will be as before.

Here’s an example of two files locked into the right and left halves of the screen:

There are other functionality enhancements that come with WinWarden but more on that next time.

Jason

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Making the most out of GMail – Part 1

GMail is a great, easy-to-use free webmail client and it works pretty well.

But it can work even better with a few tweaks.  I will be showing you some of the more important ones.

FIRST of all, you need to enable “Labs”.

Go to “settings” in the top right hand corner and enable the “labs” function.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see an image of a green conical flask on the right of “settings.”

Click on it and “labs” will open up.  The title should read:

“Gmail Labs: our testing ground for experimental features”

Google say that because these features are in Beta they may not work perfectly.

(See ** at the end of the blog for Google’s emergency exit if something goes wrong)

I think however that the simpler features – the ones I have been using - should work fine.  I haven’t had any problems with any of them.

The most useful I have found is “Quick Links” (by Dan P).

Open any email and click on “Add Quick Link” as shown in the picture above. 

A window will then appear showing the actual path for the email – which you will want to change because it looks something like this:

Change the name (in the text box) to something you’ll remember, e.g.:

The link to that email will now appear in the Quick links box on the right hand side:

Whenever you click the link, that specific email, or email stream (it doesn’t take you to a specific email within a stream) that email will open up.

(The quick links appear in chronological NOT alphabetical order)

Whenever you want to delete the link (this doesn't delete the email) just click the “X” to the right of the quick link.

That’s it!

This is probably the most useful lab feature.

Jason

_______________________________

**Google’s emergency advice:

If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you're having trouble getting into your account, there's an escape hatch -- just go tohttps://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0 and Labs will be temporarily disabled.

Keeping your programs up-to-date - the easy way

Trying to keep all your programs up-to-date can seem like an endless task.

The annoyance is amplified by unwanted notifications that your don't have the latest version of some program which is needed to do what you need to do right now, usually when you have no time to mess around downloading or updating programs.

Enter FileHippo.com Update Checker - a program (in Beta although it seems to work fine) which you can have running all the time which sits in your system tray and lets you know when (and how many) updates are available for your programs. I just updated about ten programs to the latest versions. (It also notifies you when new Beta versions are available - you can turn this off if you want).

You can also customize results by right-clicking the system tray icon and selecting (not surprisingly!) "customize results".  This lets you exclude programs from FileHippo's search.  Selections can also be reversed.

Worth downloading I think.

Jason

How to send a free SMS from your PC - USA only!

Once upon a time you could send an email to cell-phone-number@teleflip.com and the message would reach its destination.

But alas that doesn't work anymore.

But there is still a way - albeit slightly more cumbersome - to achieve this result.

By the way if you know a more elegant way to do this please let me know!

All carriers (I think) have a service to receive SMS messages from email. So if you send an email to them all, you will definitely get a few error messages but at least one will reach your desired destination.

There are THREE stages.

1.

Copy this list of all the carriers into a WORD document (or text editor of your choice with the cut and paste function)

Xx@vtext.com, Xx@txt.att.net, Xx@messaging.sprintpcs.com, Xx@tmomail.net, Xx@messaging.nextel.com, Xx@cingularme.com

2.

In the "find and replace" function enter "Xx" as above in the "find" window and the cell phone number you want to reach in the "replace" window.

NOW you have a list of all the carriers with the cell phone number before the "@"

e.g.

Cell.number.you.want@vtext.com, Cell.number.you.want@txt.att.net, Cell.number.you.want@messaging.sprintpcs.com, Cell.number.you.want@tmomail.net, Cell.number.you.want@messaging.nextel.com, Cell.number.you.want@cingularme.com

3.

Paste the list into the "To" line in an email, compose your email (keep it short, its an SMS!) and hit SEND.

This method is fool proof.

Good luck!

Jason

P.S. Google say they will be adding a new feature to Labs which will let you "send SMS text messages right from Gmail."

It was pulled because it wasn't working properly. If it gets rolled out AND I try it and find that it works better than the method I've discussed here, I will update the blog.

P.S. There are companies which claim they can tell you which service provider the number you want to contact uses, but seeing as numbers are no longer tied to carriers - remember you can keep your number when you change carriers - the system can't be perfect. At best it can tell you the ORIGINAL carrier, but that may or may not be the person's CURRENT carrier.

While this list is for the USA only, you can probably make a similar list for any country and then do all the same things.