Friday, October 13, 2006

Taskbar Shuffle







Finally found a better way to manage the taskbar items . The Taskbar Shuffle v2.0 allows for much better workarounds. You can shuffle simply by drag and drop and a new feature added to this version is that you can close the item with a single middle click (cool yeh).

This tool can be downloaded for free here.

Bringing the Task Manager to the front in the Task Bar





Just found a tweak that can change the ordering of task bar items to some extent, but this is pretty limited in use as it could only bring the Task Manager to front, there is no effect on other items.

In order to accomplish this first of all bring/open the Task Manager ( the usual ctrl-alt-del ) , this would appear at the last part of the task bar as shown in the before part of above figure. Now go to processes tab of Task Manager and kill( or end) the process called explorer.exe which should cause all the taskbar item to disappear ( don’t panic). Now go to application tab of Task Manager and create a new task called “explorer.exe” and the Task Manager item will come to the front of the Task Bar as shown in the After part of above figure.

Well this method does not have much utility, but that’s all I found. Looking to find some better method to rearrange the items according to user preferences and that certainly will have slightest impact on productivity if not sufficient.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The Loop Fall



Even smallest and most common of things have great powers vested in them. For example take this round rope thing in which today I badly got strangled and fell down freely nothing to support me and little blood came out of my elbow, wrist and knee region.

Later, as it was difficult to comprehend that such a trivial , static thing can cause a man (who
had just finished working biceps) to fall, I began looking into its mechanism. To my surprise I found that it is 90% likely that anyone who put his first step in the loop will fall and therefore my fall was not miraculous.

The mechanism works like this -- When one steps into the loop because of a critical height of the loop he tends to drag the later. Now while dragging the loop is lifted slightly into the air , as a result when the second foot comes following it also get stuck. Both foot stuck , you are left nowhere and fall like a tree sliced from the base.

It turned out that for this phenomenon to occur the diameter of the loop shoulb be atleast equal to ones step's length and the height( or thickness) of the loop should be atleast equal to the height of the front of ones shoe.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Live Webpage On Desktop


A little known feature of Windows XP is the display of live web page on the desktop. This feature can be used to display the website of your choice right on the desktop with the content refreshing according to your wish. This active element can be turned on in the "Display Properties" dialog box (Desktop->Right Click->Properties->Desktop->Customize Desktop->Web).To set the current Home Page (in the Internet Explorer) as the active page check "My Current Home Page", or else you can addurl of your choice by clicking "New" button. You can even add an image or an html page of your choice by clicking the "Browse" button or furthur still you can add some cool active content (like Sports Update, News, Satellite Tracker etc) by clicking the "Visit Gallery Button". You are also having the option (in the properties dialog of selected content) of scheduling the active content or to run as an when you click "Synchronize", additionally it can also be specified how deep a link can be downloaded to view offline.