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Steve Bass's Weekly Newsletter
TechBite's columnist Steve Bass writes weekly commentary on the technology products he loves, the strategies for getting the most out of them, and the gotchas that can cause computing misery. Plus a couple of weekly laughs.
PC Annoyances and Fixes; Easy BitTorrents; Swoopo Risks
In This Issue
PC Annoyances and Fixes
IE: Stop Remembering My Passwords!
How's Your Notebook's Battery Doing?
My Quick Launch Toolbar Is Missing
Take Control of the Recycle Bin
I'm Squeamish About Swoopo
Techy Tool of the Week: torrent2exe
Time Wasters
More Time Wasters
PC Annoyances and Fixes
I dedicated my book -- PC Annoyances, 2nd Edition: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer -- to Bill Gates. Without him, my book wouldn't be possible or even necessary.
I still get dozens of e-mails each week with gnarly PC annoyances. These are actual problems recently e-mailed to me -- and might be some you've encountered.
IE: Start Remembering My Passwords!
The annoyance: I told Internet Explorer to not "ask to remember passwords"
How can I undo this so my computer will remember passwords?
The Fix: Control Panel, Internet Options, Content tab, choose Autocomplete, and check "User names and passwords on forms." [top]
Stop Internet Explorer from saving passwords.
How's Your Notebook's Battery Doing?
The Annoyance: My notebook's battery indicator is hard to read -- I always have to click it to see how much juice is left. (I think the engineer who designed it never used the notebook unless it was plugged into power.) Have a fix?
The Fix: The in-your-face BattCursor shows you how your battery's doing by turning your cursor into a power gauge. The tool is surprisingly flexible -- you can change the transparency, manage power profiles, and reduce monitor brightness. It's a freebie, but here's the shocker: It works only on Vista and Win7. [top]
Your cursor tells you how
much battery power is available.
My Quick Launch Toolbar Is Missing
The Annoyance: I can't figure out how I did it, but I somehow deleted the Quick Launch toolbar.
The Fix: You might have accidentally deleted the fahrshvindn.dll, a small program responsible for the disappearance of many things on your PC. It's a no-brainer to bring it back. Right-click a free space on the Taskbar and choose Toolbars and then Quick Launch.
This vanishing act might one day happen to your Show Desktop icon. To retrieve it, grab a free tool written by Doug Knox, aptly named Restore Missing Show Desktop Icon to Quick Launch. After you download, unzip, and install the program, run it to recover your shortcut. [top]
Take Control of the Recycle Bin
The Annoyance: My friend stopped by and offered to, and I quote, "make my PC easier to use." He fiddled with a lot of things, including something in the Recycle Bin, Now when I empty the Recycle Bin, I don't get a dialog box that asks if I'm sure I want to delete the files. How do I get it back?
The Fix: The confirmation is annoying, but for some of us, also reassuring. Right-click the Recycle Bin either on the desk- top choose Properties, check the "Display delete confirmation dialog" box, then click OK. And don't let your pal near your PC again, okay? [top]
I'm Squeamish About Swoopo
You want an auction site with thrills, chills, and bargains? I do, for sure. But you won't catch me trying Swoopo. I buzzed through the site, trying to figure out if it's a scam; even after a half hour, I couldn't be sure.
It appears you start by buying bids. Each one costs 60 cents and you buy them in lots -- Swoopo calls them BidPacks. The smallest lot of 40 bids costs $24 and if you're flush, you can buy as many as 1000 bids.
You place a bid and Swoopo immediately resets its counters to 20 seconds so others can also bid. If no one else bids -- and the Swoopo counter reaches zero -- you win.
Sounds oh-so-cool, no? But before you get too excited, read what Ed Oswald said about Swoopo on the Technologizer site:
"...if you lose an auction, you also lose all the bids you placed, and thus have essentially given the site free money for just giving you the privilege to bid on the item.
"Thus once you start bidding, you have a vested financial interest in winning that item. While the winner is likely to get a very good deal, especially on bigger items where the final price is hundreds below retail (even when you add the cost of bidding), those who lost could have spent quite a bit just to bid, and are likely doing so because of the money they need to spend to win." More
Swoopo had a couple of things to say about Ed's piece (see Swoopo Looks to Set the Record Straight); more interesting, and perhaps revealing, are the blog's comments.
Me, I'm going to stick with eBay where the bidding is straightforward and easy to understand. [Thanks Brad Loomis -- good lead.] [top]
Techy Tool of the Week: torrent2exe
If you're tired of battling the complications of typical BitTorrent clients, say the popular Vuze, uTorrent, or Deluge, I have a new tool for you. Find the location of the BitTorrent you want to download and give it to Torrent2exe. The Web tool quickly converts the torrent into an executable; run it (it's named download.exe) and the torrent begins its always-longer-than-you-thought journey into your PC. The executable can run in the background and you can set it to resume the download if you close the tool or reboot your system. [Thanks to Gus Spiel for this terrific lead.]
Don't be concerned if you're on shaky BitTorrent grounds. Most people don't understand what they are and how they're accessed. In a nutshell: Large files -- 800MBs is about average -- are available for download. Fairly often the files contain TV shows or, believe it or not, pirated movies. Instead of the big file residing on one person's PC, or even on a file sharing site such as RapidShare, portions are distributed to hundreds of PCs. A BitTorrent client manages the task of downloading pieces of the file from all the locations, turning it into the one big file. You can get a better idea how all this works by reading A Beginner's Guide to BitTorrent. [top]
Time Wasters
A couple of videos, a viral marketing campaign, amazing photos, and other ways to keep you from deadlines.
I have important advice for photojournalists: Pay Attention When Walking Backwards -- or you may take a tumble.
It's a perfect landing, despite the "we lost a lot of good men out there" comment. (It turns out this video is a viral ad for Microsoft in Germany. Here's how it was done: Unbelievable Waterslide Compositing Walkthrough. [Thanks to Don Peck.]
It's on the Internet, so it's just gotta be real...
In these series of images, you'll learn to never underestimate the determination of a mother...
Pianographique is an artsy-fartsy site where you can type letters on the keyboard to sorta make music. The important thing is it'll waste some of your time, no?
I love watching these Keith Loutit videos. They're weird, strangely toy-like, and just fascinating. He uses tilted lenses and time lapse photography, and in Bathtub IV, blurriness, to "create the illusion of forward movement for the helicopter ocean scenes." Watch The North Wind Blew South and Mardi Gras and the many more he's produced and let me know what you think. [top]
Image of the Week
I hope he doesn't have a case of
beer in the fridge...
More Time Wasters
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_____________________
Steve Bass is the publisher and self-appointed Chief Content Officer at TechBite; he continues to experience the cool feeling of having his own newsletter. Send him your feedback at TechBite. To sign up for TechBite's free Steve Bass Technology newsletter, head for our signup page.
Steve's also the author of "PC Annoyances, 2nd Edition: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer," available on Amazon. You haven't purchased your copy today yet, have you? Don't wait, supplies are limited...
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