Daily Cup of Tech

As a student and one who doesn’t personally see the point of paying for 200+ channels only to sit and wonder why I’m paying for 200+ channels when I only occasionally find something interesting on the Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Sci-Fi, Discovery, History, A&E and maybe a few others, I was surprised when I found myself interested in Joost. Maybe it’s just because I’m a computer geek that sometimes will dream of writing code (that’s for another story) and the idea of having something besides music or The 5th Element to entertain myself while I work thrills me to no end. It’s not like I have nothing to distract myself what with Fark and the whole HD-DVD key fiasco that went on not too long ago on Digg. The idea of television over the Interwebs is nothing new but it’s exciting to have it in a way that is higher quality from actual network sources and not some server pushing out ripped episodes from parent’s basement. And then I got an invite.

Read the rest of the story…

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/05/16/joost-in-beta-review/trackback/

Here’s a nifty Gmail tip:
There’s always little tips and tricks to gmail and I don’t know of a single person that knows them all. I may have accidentally found another feature (unless someone else found it first). Let’s say you have 20 emails in a row that you want to delete. Clicking 20 times before you can delete them is annoying. Click the first one. Hold shift and click the last one. All the emails between the first and the last ones you just clicked will be selected for you.

A URL Trick:
Do you ever get tired of typing the “http://www.” and “.com” and wish there were an easier way? There is and it works in Firefox, IE, and Opera (and very likely more). Type the name of the website. For Daily Cup Of Tech, it would be “dailycupoftech” and leave off the other stuff. Hold Control and hit enter. The extra gets filled in for you. Depending on the browser you’re using, Shift+Enter and Ctl+Shift+Enter take you to .net and .org domains (respectively). So stop typing those extra 15 keystrokes. Even if you’re a fast typist like me (100+ wpm sometimes), it still saves you a lot of time.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/31/increase-your-gmail-productivity-and-url-tricks/trackback/

I’m currently upgrading to windows vista. All those doing the same or considering it may have run into multiple conflicts (as I have) with software not wanting to be installed, complaining or just simply not installing at all. This handy list from ieXbeta’s Wiki is very useful. It sorts most software products made for the windows platform in to 3 categories;

1 - Works
2 - Has problems, but they can be solved / minor unsolved
3 - Heavy Problems, currently

It is updated continuously (the wonders of a wiki) and is quite comprehensive, I hope it is of some use to you.

Windows Vista RTM Software Compatibility List

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/02/24/windows-vista-software-compatibility-list/trackback/

I was performing a search on Google. The results were over 300,000 for what I thought was a pretty specify query. Thanks to online glossaries, dictionaries, dungeons and dragons as well as World of Warcraft, I was inundated with copious amounts of useless data. In a bid to reduce the number of results, I started adding terms such as “-Wow”, “-warcraft”, “-game”, -”dictionary”, “-is better because” and so forth. That’s when I hit “The Wall.” There is a limit of 32 words for a Google search query. By the time I hit “The Wall,” I had reduced the search results from just over 300,000 to a little under 79,000. Still too many. Frustrated, I gave up sure that I would never find what I was looking for in a reasonable amount of time.

That’s when it hit me. Google has a calculator. It converts miles. For goodness sakes, it’s written by GEEKS! Could it be? Could I have an interesting idea?

I entered a new search query: “-WoW|Warcraft”. To my amazement, it worked. All sites with “warcraft” or “WoW” were filtered out. This told me that it accepts programming values (in programming, “|” typically means “or”). Curious, I entered a new query using regex. For those that don’t know, regex is short for “regular expressions.” Regular expressions are essentially filters that allow you specify what kind of text to look for by specifying a text pattern. An example would be “Bob” versus “bob”.

As an example for you, I generated a search about our favorite website. The search query uses the regex expression: ^dailycupofte$. This expression looks for “dailycupofte” and only that phrase and the results must contain results that begin and end with exactly that phrase. In other words, sites with “dailycupofte” will be returned but not “dailycupoftech”.

This particular example is only the beginning and only a simple display of the power you now have for searching. Here’s a starting point to learn regex.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/02/20/how-to-create-effective-google-searches/trackback/

With the growth and popularity of the flash drive, portable apps seem to be everywhere. Now you can add chatting online to the portable application phenomenon. Originally, IMers had to make do with the online versions of AIM and Yahoo IM which were limited in their scope or were blocked by schools. A later alternative was to go to http://www.meebo.com and login and chat that way. Today, we have one of the grails of Instant Messaging that you can run right from your flash drive: Portable Trillian.

For those that don’t know what Trillian is, it is an all-in-wonder IM service. It combines AIM, YIM, MSN IM, IRC, and ICQ in one neat little app as well as plugin and custom skin support. The team at Trillian Anywhere (http://www.trilliananywhere.com/) have provided step by step instructions on how to make the application portable. I’ve used this myself and it works like a charm. The total amount of space needed is only the amount of space Trillian uses. The site gives instructions on how to perform this with both the Pro and Basic versions.

Still here? Wait are you waiting for? Go and chat on the go.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/02/17/trillian-to-go/trackback/