Month: August 2005

Tip of the day: Make a one-click shutdown shortcut

Windows XP includes a command called Shutdown that does much more than its name might suggest. Yes, you can use it to create a shortcut that you can then double-click to turn off your computer instantly. Just create a new shortcut and include this command in it, exactly as typed:

shutdown -s -t 00

The -s switch means “shut down” (you could use -r to shut down and restart). The -t switch defines a waiting time, measured in seconds.

You can also use the command to do other tasks, such as logging off the current user (use the -l switch), or restarting a remote computer on your network (with the -m switch followed by \computername) . Using the -i switch, you can show a graphical user interface (normally, this is a text-based command). You can include the shutdown command as the last line of a batch file or script to restart a computer after performing a maintenance task.

To see the full syntax for the Shutdown command, open a Command Prompt window (Start, Run, type cmd and click OK) and type the command shutdown without any additional switches or arguments.

Hey Dell, bundle this!

John Walkenbach has a few choice words about his new Dell laptop:

I spent about two hours removing all of the excess crap that’s installed on it. I thought I got it all, but when I booted it this morning, I was greeted with an advertisement featuring Scott Cook, from QuickBooks. The three buttons to click were: “See How Simple,” “Watch the Video,” and “Get Started Now.” Nothing that says, “Forget it, you ignorant moron.”

My initial impression is that I paid $1,100 for a box full of software and online service advertising. That computer is just packed with trial versions, and as you go through the set-up screens there’s a sales pitch at every opportunity. The worst is the Norton crap — it’s like a damn virus. It kept popping up, trying to scare me.

I hate this too. I asked some knowledgeable folks in the OEM computer industry once why Dell (and others) do this, and the answer was exactly what you’d expect: Dell and other big OEMs collect a fee from the software developer for every program that gets preinstalled. At 50 cents or a buck per program per PC sold, it adds up to a lot of money. Who cares whether it annoys the customer?

Like J-Walk, I remove all that crap on every computer I buy and on those I purchase and configure for other people. I cannot think of a single program among those trial versions that I have ever ordered, for myself or anyone else. I would pay extra for the privilege of getting a clean, uncluttered system. (And I am really looking forward to having exactly that experience on the new computer I just ordered from Mwave.com.)

Of course, Dell probably doesn’t even know that this practice pisses off their customers, because they don’t listen to feedback from people like J-Walk and me.

Who says geeks can’t write?

The results of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, and the winner is one of us! Yes, as the founders note, grand prize winner Dan McKay is “a 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains … A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.”

The achievement in question is this amazingly bad opening sentence for a novel that (of course) does not exist, which is after all the whole point of the Bulwer-Lytton contest:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

The competition was fierce, based on entries like this one:

It was high noon in the jungles of South India when I began to recognize that if we didn’t find water for our emus soon, it wouldn’t be long before we would be traveling by foot; and with the guerilla warriors fast on our heals, I was starting to regret my decision to use poultry for transportation.

And this one, from the Children’s Literature division:

Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.

And a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they can do this for a living:

Inside his cardboard box, Greg heated a dented can of Spaghetti-O’s over a small fire made from discarded newspapers, then cracked open his last can of shoplifted generic beer to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his embarkation on a career as a freelance writer.

Go read the rest.

Tip of the day: Customize the Places Bar in Office

Yesterday, I explained how to change the five icons that appear in the Places Bar in Windows common dialog boxes. If you use Microsoft Office, you can do a few extra tricks.

First things first: Although the Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on) look similar to those in other Windows programs, they actually come from a completely different DLL file. So when you customize the Windows common dialog boxes, the Office versions remain unchanged.

To tweak the Office versions, open any Office program (Word, for instance) and choose File, Open. Here are three ways you can change these dialog boxes:

  • To change the size of the icons from large to small, right-click anywhere in the Places Bar and choose Large Icons or Small Icons from the shortcut menu.
  • To add a new folder to the Places Bar, select its icon in the main window, then click the Tools menu at the top right corner of the dialog box and choose Add to “My Places.” To remove an icon you added, right-click the icon in the Places Bar and click Remove. (You can’t remove the standard icons – My Documents, My Recent Documents, etc.)
  • To change the order of icons shown in the Places Bar, right-click the icon you want to move and then click Move Up or Move Down on the shortcut menu. You might need to do this several times to get an icon into its proper position.

In Office dialog boxes, you can have as many icons as you want (unlike the Windows versions, which limit you to five icons, in large size only).

Claria claims to be cleaning up its act

From today’s Washington Post:

Internet Ad Pioneer Now Shunning Pop-Ups

A new service Claria Corp. is launching this month will still deliver advertising to the computer desktops of Web surfers. Only this time, they won’t be annoying pop-ups. …

[Claria] began a pilot in May of a new ad network called BehaviorLink that serves banner ads targeted to a user’s interests. With software for it installed, someone reading online news articles on maternity might get pitches for baby products. And while Claria’s pop-up ads sometimes covered up someone else’s Web site, BehaviorLink ads come with the site’s permission. In some cases, Claria buys ad space and resells it at a premium; in others, Claria works out a revenue-sharing arrangement.

The story quotes Ben Edelman, who points out that the new Claria service will still require that the user have a piece of software installed. “The question is how sneaky they are going to be about it.” Ben’s absolutely right. The big question is how the Claria software gets installed. There are too many loopholes in the whole affiliate distribution system, which allow the parent company to claim that “rogue affiliates” are actually doing the bad things. Meanwhile, of course, they benefit financially from those dishonest installations. According to the Post story, Claria made $100 million last year, mostly from pop-ups. When that much money is on the line, there are too many incentives for people to cheat, and without scrupulous third-party verification I refuse to believe that this service will be as clean as Claria promises it will be.

The company claims to have hired privacy consultants and to have cleaned up its act. We’ll see. “They have to be completely aboveboard and take extra steps other companies don’t have to do to gain trust back,” Ari Schwartz, associate director with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Post.

Indeed.

Tip of the day: Customize the Places Bar

In most Windows programs, when you choose Open or Save As from the File menu, you see a common dialog box that includes five icons in a vertical sidebar on the left side. The five choices are pretty logical, as you can see here:

Places_bar_xp

Click any of those links on the left, and you see the contents of that folder in the window on the right, so you can open a file stored there or save a new file in that location.

But what if you never use the My Recent Documents folder? Why not customize the choices in the Places Bar? You can.

To change the five choices in the standard Windows XP Places Bar, use the Tweak UI Powertoy for Windows XP. Click the plus sign to the left of the Common Dialogs category in the left and select the Places Bar option. You can hide the Places Bar completely, or you can customize the five standard places.

Places_bar_tweakui

Click Apply to see your changes and leave Tweak UI open. Click OK to save the changes and close Tweak UI. To remove your customizations, click Show default places.

In tomorrow’s tip, I’ll show you what you can do with the Places Bar in Microsoft Office programs.