Archive for the “Gadgets” Category

There’s no way to develop a web app and don’t need a chart/pie, even this is for the backend. Google offers this Chart API and it’s fabulous. No need to install anything, just call a web page with your set of parameters. Now they offer maps and I can, for example, to keep track of the countries I visited.

Example:

Europe countries I visited so far

Europe countries I visited so far

People say that one picture worth more than a thousand words. This is true: just change, or offer charts as alternative to your long and boring tables and you’ll see the result.

What have I done here:
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Total Commander – File Manager – I am using it since version 3, ~10 year ago. Simply not replaceable.
wcmdbig

Pidgin – Instant Messaging – Single client for all protocols, including Oracle internal one.

Launchy – Application Launcher – just press ALT+Space and write a few letters from app name to start it

MPlayer – Movie Player – no GUI, just console, very quick, no need to install codecs. Some issues with external monitor.

Firefox – of course, user since version 0.9 Beta

Dropbox – File Sync – simple sync of some folders between laptops or laptop and desktop. As a bonus files are stored online and you get revisions history

Google Mail – Personal Email – lot of space, even bought extra. Can also use it to read other POP3 accounts, all in a single interface.

Google Reader – RSS reader – the best RSS reader

Google Calendar – Calendar – simple to use, simple to share, to sync. Can also use it to read other calendars.

TripIt – Booking Manager – just forward all the travel plans to Tripit and you’ll have your itinerary ready, published as a web calendar, links to online check-in and other usefull stuff.

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I deleted by mistake some unsaved photos from my camera. Even that I never came across with file recovery software, this time I had to.
smartrecovery

After a short google search, I found PC Inspector Smart Recovery who did a brilliant job. Not very fast, but speed was not what I was looking for.
It managed to recover ~200 MB in less than 10 minutes, good enough for a FREE application.

Good luck!

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j0396118I had a very strange situation: 2 machines connected wireless to the same router. One was running like a charm, the other one got an IP from DHCP but no gateway and no networking was available on it.

First I thought it is something hardware. Since I had a dual-boot environment on that machine, I booted in Ubuntu and saw that I had also a gateway there and internet was working seamlessly. So it was all about Windows XP…

After lots of formus read, after reinstalling wireless card driver many times, I finally found a solution here, as
– in Windows XP SP2 some repair options were added through netsh command:
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Most software companies are not offering anymore the old versions on their websites in order to promote their last release and get rid of support issues with old versions. But what if I don’t like the last version or it has something that is not working for me?

Well… seems that somebody thought about this and managed to collect all old versions of 182 programs (so far) and made them public. All licensing terms remain the same.

The link is www.OldVersion.com.

Enjoy!

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Translating something quickly is very easy today, by adding the corresponding bot as buddy in GTalk.

If you just add bots like:

  • en2ro@bot.talk.google.com – English to Romanian
  • en2fr@bot.talk.google.com – English to French
  • ro2fr@bot.talk.google.com – Romanian to French
  • fr2en@bot.talk.google.com – French to English
  • the list includes all the languages supported by Google Translate

then you can chat with these “buddies”, telling something in the first language and they will reply with the translation in the second language, something like this:

(2:50:01 PM) andrei: I just want to test you
(2:50:14 PM) en2ro@bot.talk.google.com: Eu doar vreau să vă încerce

Of course it’s not perfect 🙂 but it’s a very nice feature.

For translating large amounts of text or websites, http://translate.google.com still remain the best choice.

Enjoy!

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If you are a programmer or your girlfriend / wife is a programmer or a designer then I am sure you will highly appreciate this kind of earrings:

earrings

Enjoy!

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Official Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional upgrade for HTC TyTN II is available for download on HTC website.

Windows mobile 6.1 update for HTC TyTN II
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A friend of mine told me some months ago about TripIt.com. I made an account and never tried, but now I will have lot trips during one month and decided to give it a try. I am AMAZED !

Let’s see what we’ve got here:

  • Enter your trip details
  • Forward your trip confirmations received from your travel agent and he will parse this for you
  • Send your confirmation to an email address and get it automatically imported
  • See who else within your network you might meet during a certain trip
  • Direct links to Online check-in where available, check flight status, weather and maps for your destination
  • In the end you will have some statistics like “Days on the road”, “Distance Traveled”, “Cities Visited”

I will definitely use it!

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I just want to give a quick review on two of the new multi-protocol IM clients, clients you can use for Yahoo, Gtalk, MSN, etc, without keeping a separate client for each one of them.

I will start with Pidgin, because it’s my preferred one:
+ easy to install, small installation footprint
+ stable, just few crashes in almost a year of intensive usage
+ lots of protocols know, more than Digsby Read the rest of this entry »

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