Pushing Pixels

This is what my desktop looks like right now (Click to embiggen!).

This amazing visual is created through several customization programs. The most noticeable is Rainmeter. This is a customizable desktop widget program. It’s responsible for everything on the left, right and top of the screen as well as the giant clock and weather forecast in the center. Some of the widgets (which Rainmeter calls skins I have installed include

• Battery Life
• FaceBook Feed
• Google Calendar
• Word of the Day
• Network Traffic Monitor
• Weather forecast
• Sunset/Sunrise/Moon Phase
• Disk Monitor
• CPU/Ram Usage
• Windows Update Notifier

There are a bunch of other, small skins spread around like my IP address. This was built using the Enigma Theme (Themes are collections of skins). Each skin is controlled through simple text files. The Rainmeter manager program lets you open individual text files and change their values. You can screw up a skin royally with this, but generally it’s pretty simple to adjust hex values for colors, X and Y coordinates, and enter URLs for email and Facebook.

Along the bottom I use two pay-for solutions called ObjectDock and WindowBlinds, both by Stardock. ObjectDock creates a Mac-style shortcut launcher along the bottom of the screen. It’s pretty customizable with different looks and animations. I have mine set to expand the icons when you mouse-over them. WindowBlinds adds new themes to Windows, but gives you more customization than the defaults you get with your computer. I have a Carbon Fiber theme applied.

ObjectDock and WindowBlinds are both pay-for product. I found that RocketDock is a good, free alternative to ObjectDock. After I took this screen shot, I decided to add a new toolbar to the top of the screen. This one would have 5 programs that I use for my weekly computer clean up: Windows Update, CCleaner, Glary Utilities, Auslogic Disk Defrag and Acronis TrueImage. I run the first four programs to clean up and the last one is for monthly backups. RocketDock (the free one) doesn’t allow you to have multiple docks, but ObjectDock (the pay for one) does. So I just created a new dock and put 5 tiny shortcuts in it.

Overall, I spent about 6 hours lost in customizing and Googling .INI files to get these three programs tuned to perfection. I find they all load very fast. Soluto says that ObjectDock takes 0.7 seconds to load, WindowBlinds takes. 0.1 seconds and Rainmeter takes a full second. So 1.8 seconds of bootup, for a futuristic and functional desktop; I’ll take that.

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You’ve seen a million times all the great free software that’s out there. OpenOffice, Firefox, Avast. You can get all of that at Ninite.com. So, above and beyond what they have, here are some more obscure freeware programs that they don’t have that I couldn’t live without (in no particular order).

10. Soluto – This program monitors everything that runs when your computer starts up. It has a nifty interface divided into 3 categories: Lighten Web Browser, Chop Boot and Heal Crashes. Lighten Web Browser will give you one screen to turn on and off all your plugins for Firefox, Chrome and IE. Heal Crashes will will submit a crash report. It’s kind of useless. By far the most useful is Chop Boot, which will show you the boot time for all the programs that run at start up and allow you to selectively turn them off or delay them. It puts all startup programs into 3 categories: No-Brainer, Potentially Removeable, and Cannot be Removed. I’m still at 3:10 for a cold boot.

9. Filebox eXtender – I really only use this for one of its functions: It adds ‘keep on top’ and ‘roll up’ buttons next to the Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons. The keep on top button is a little pin symbol that will keep a program floating on top of other programs. It makes typing from one window to another much easier. I can also keep Firefox running with a movie while working almost fullscreen with Photoshop. It is sometimes annoying when a program has custom buttons next to the MMC and sometimes the Filebox buttons interfere or overlap. Steam tends to have a complete overlap problem and I have to use File>Close instead of the X.

8. Aquasnap – You know how you can drag a window to the left or right of the screen in Vista and Windows 7 and it will maximize to that half of the screen? Aquasnap takes that even further. You can move things to the top, sides and corners now. It’ll even give you a nice little preview of how much screen real estate the new size will take up. It has a few other features like adjusting window shaking and transparency while moving. Meh.

7.Desktop Media – Simple: it puts a shortcut to removable media on your desktop while they are connected. Just like a Mac. That’s it. You can have a hard icon like in My Computer or a simple shortcut. Either way, it makes accessing your drive about 3 clicks faster.

6. Virtual Clone Drive – Adds a Virtual CD-ROM drive that will load .ISO files. I may just take all my CD’s (which isn’t very many any more) turn them into .ISO files and simply store them on an external drive. And throw away all my CD’s. Easy peasy.

5. Bulk Rename Utility – This was useful for a project where I had several hundred .MP3 files that all needed to be categorized and organized. I could eliminate the useless numbering put on by the encoder and put real names along with proper numbering. The amount of things you can do is simply endless. It has full regular expression control and tons of options. It’s a save-your-butt-once-in-a-while kind of app.

4. LockHunter – Firefox, Acrobat and Explorer constantly lock out a file, usually just to render a preview. Then it’s locked and I can’t move the file or rename it. This program adds a right-click to all files: What Is Locking This File? You can unlock it or delete it. That’s it. Much easier than CTRL+ALT+Delete.

3. SendNow – A new Adobe product that may go to a subscription model soon. It’s just like YouSend it (which is now completly pay-for). It lets you send up to 100 mb files over email. Their stand-alone program or Outlook plugin will upload your gigantic .ZIP file to their server and send the recipient an email with a direct link. This has been great for anyone not running Dropbox, which I find far more useful. But for the occasional client or teacher not up on the latest, this will do nicely.

2. Process Explorer – A (Microsoft!) replacement for the regular CTRL+ALT+Delete Task Manager. This gives you more information about the processes that are running and quick ways to kill them like charts of processor usage over time.

1. Mp3Tag – I do a lot of podcasting. I record all my lectures and class time for the benefit of my students. The server software I use reads the Tags out of each .MP3 file to build a webpage that lists what the lesson was about. This program lets me edit every feature of the MP3 tags. You may be wondering why I don’t use Audacity’s built in MP3 Tag editor. Audacity lets you modify most of the tags, but my recordings are straight to .MP3, with no editing, so I just need direct access to the tags.

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I’m a finalist in the Adobe 2011 Educators Choice Awards in the Higher Education Digital Arts and Media for my video tutorial “Dreamweaver Templates: A 6 page site in 10 minutes“

Click here to vote for me!

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Today I gave a talk about using Acrobat to my fellow professors. The audio will be up later, but for now I’m providing links to the files I used including my notes (PDF, 76kb) and the hand out (PDF, 145 kb).

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18 ways to educate yourself every day (because nerds are sexy) from Malavika’s Blog – Ignore the addition of #19, StumbleUpon; you will never sleep again!

Android users prefer apps to mobile Web: Nielsen by MarketWatch – They’re saying your website also needs to be an app. (BTW, Apple and Windows are both going to have built in app stores soon)

Ad Groups Oppose New Domains, ICANN Chief to Step Down from PCMag - How would you like the webdomain http://facebook.facebook.facebook. It’s you’re for only $185,000. That’s actually WAY cheaper than it’s been; which is the problem. There are going to be a million more dot-somethings in the near future.

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Is bigfoot real? What’s the evidence for UFO’s? Can a crystal really cure my psoriasis? The reality behind urban legends, pseudo-science and paranormal investigations is far more enlightening that simply believing in things that don’t exist.

If your professors say things like ‘critical-thinking’ and ‘problem-solving’, this resource will help you out. Skeptical Inquirer (NOT National Inquirer) is a magazine that applies critical thinking to crack-pot ideas and see what reality has to say about it. Think Mythbuster in magazine form and starting in 1972. Now they are selling 29 years worth of back issues of Skeptical Inquirer for $25 on DVD.

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Pirates, ninjas or zombies? According to Google’s new nGrams:

Google ngram of zomies, ninja and pirates from 1800 in English fiction

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During a workshop on Critical Thinking in the Classroom, all the the teachers came up with a fantastic list of ways to engage students and make them think. These can be applied to any subject. I present them here in no particular order. What other items can be added to the list?

• Carouseling - put up a different question on each wall and groups of students have 5 minutes at each to answer. They may not repeat what others wrote.
• Case Study – A real world article that applies the subject to a problem.
• Debate - Have them take sides and have at it. You might want to do a brief intro on acceptable debate tactics.
• Fish Bowling - A select few students have a guided discussion while the rest of the class listens.
• Jigsaw - Each group is assigned a topic. New groups are formed from one member of each group. They then discuss with each other what they learned in the first group.
• Journaling - Students write down their thoughts on the subject.
• Small Group Problem Solving - Each group has a different problem to tackle.
• Practice Question – New use for old tests
• Role Playing – make them pretend to be characters, cogs in a machine, or parts of a process
• Source Analysis – Look at he source of something we know and examine how credible it is
• Evidence-Based Practice – They must show the evidence that something works/happens/doesn’t work.
• Chalk-Talk – Another word for brainstorming
• Design Challenges – Everyone design a symbol for Fire without color. Make them competitive and vote on the best.
• Design The Exam – They come up with the questions and the answers
• Minute Papers – Write down everything they can in :60
• Board Games – I’m going to use RoboRally to teach programming. I’ve suggested Wealth of Nations could be used for economy.
• Jeopardy/Trivia – Always fun, try finding a PowerPoint Template.
• Student Presentations – Give them the book and 20 minutes. Then they tell the class what they learned.
• Critiques - Art, Designs, Professional Examples, be sure to put in poor examples as well as good ones.
• Reverse Engineer - Give them a working example and tell them to take it apart, label the parts and put it back together working.
• Open Ended Essay - No right answer, you’re looking at their thought process for answering subjective questions.
• MindMapping - Give them all the vocabulary/concepts and they have to map it into the correct hierarchy.

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So what if it’s been like 4 months since I’ve posted. Let’s get back at it! We’re starting off with a vid:

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I’m moving at the end of the month and I’ve put a bunch of stuff up on Western Maryland CraigsList (with pictures).  In case you’re looking for some cheap furniture:

Recliner $20
Steel Kitchen Floor Cabinet $25
Folding Futon $75
Four Dining Room Chairs $100
Dining Room Buffet for Sale $100
3 Drawer Cabinet %50
Collapsable Large Dog Kennel $75
Ceramic Tile $150
Single Chair $20
Auto Pet Divider $35

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