meddlingBanter

Last year I got to liking to use Windows Explorer in folder view instead of the default task pain view.  The folder view is good for moving files around your hard drive because you can see all your drives/folders on the left side of your screen like the picture below shows.

Lately though I’ve been using the default task pain view, for some reason I’ve found the “tasks” quite useful.  On a normal install of XP I wouldn’t have a problem since the default explorer view is with the task pain, that is unless you open explorer through Start>Programs>Accessories>Windows Explorer, but I doubt many people do that.  For me though I had changed explorer to open up in folder view by default.  Clicking the folder button (highlighted below) each time I wanted to see the task pain view was becoming a pain.

Tonight I decided to switch things back to the way they are by default in explorer.  Problem was I forgot how to do it, but with a little googling I figured it out again.  Here I’ll post how to change explorer from the default task pain view to the folder view since most people would want to do things that way. 

1. Right click on My Documents or My Computer and select explore. This should open with the folder view.
2. You can open My Documents> Tools> Folder Options> File Types tab.
3. Scroll down to the [NONE] Folder and click on it. Click the Advanced button.
4. Under Actions: click on explore and click Set Default button. Click Ok close all explorer windows then reopen My Documents and it should open to folder view. 

Note: If you want to change things back like I did in step 4 click on open instead of explore.

Today is election day here as it is everywhere else in the country right now.  On the way over to the polling station I was listening to NPR talking about different problems some people have trying to vote.  They were talking about how some people are asked to give multiple ID’s when they vote, which is against the law in most places.  All I had to do when I voted was write down my name and address on a piece of paper.  They looked up my name and address in a book and that was it.  A fairly painless process if you ask me.  It’s hard to imagine someone trying to prevent me from voting or anyone else for that matter.

Now I was going to mention how I voted but I’d rather not do that sort of thing here.  Let’s just say I voted mostly Democratic.  Tonight we’ll see how I match up with the rest of the State. 

Somewhere on the internet, probably on digg yesterday evening, I stumbled upon a wonderful program called Lauchy.  Lauchy allows you to open programs(by default, and music, videos etc by configuring it to) by typing in the name, or part of the name.  All you do is hit the shortcut keys ALT + Space to bring up Lauchy and start typing.  By default lauchy looks in your start menu folders for files with .lnk extensions and gives you access to them by just typing in the name.  You can also lauch all things that are related to Windows XP such as My Documents, Control Panel etc.  I’m happy I ran across this program because I was looking for a way to achieve a similar function using using windows PATHs.  That way all my programs would be available to me by typing the name of a program into RUN.  Adding each program folder to the PATH variable in windows would take forever and I had no idea how to write a script to do it for me so I gave up.  Any who, Lauchy is here to stay.

Note: If you decide to use this program, I’m currently using the 1.0 beta and it seems solid so far.

The other day I posted about JediConcentrate from AnAppADay.com. If you read the story on Digg article about that website you know what I’m talking about, but basically the guy has promised to write an application each day for 30 days. A week ago he posted an app called RDPManager. From anappaday: Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight I decided to make a few adjustments to speed up my website, though I’ve not actually taken any speed measurements to see if the speed has actually improved.  I’ve shortened the amount of posts I display on the first page from 10 to 5.  I don’t update all that much so I figure making 5 posts the default would be fine, and that’s less time to load my page.  The second thing I did was to edit some of my posts and use the “more” feature built into Wordpress.  All I had to do was insert the <!–more–> tag into my posts and Wordpress does the rest. If you look at the tool bar in the online editor there is a button which will insert the tag as well.  Last but not least, while looking for a plugin to implement the “more” feature automatically to each post I ran into a plugin which adds some AJAX to each “more” link.  Instead of clicking more and being directed from the main page to the single post view, the page expands revealing the rest of the post.  A feature which makes viewing each post much easier.  The name of the plugin is called Ajaxified Expand NOW and can be found under the Features sections here.