The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged windows
Greasemonkey Scripts
Dec 11th
Greasemonkey is a useful extension for Firefox, however this week, I saw that Mitchell McKenna (@MitchellMckenna) mentioned that Chrome now installs Greasemonkey scripts. If you aren’t fully aware of the power of Greasemonkey take a look here (link here).
First off, the best place I’ve found to get GM scripts is userscripts.org, a (mostly) free and open-source community.
- YouTube Auto Buffer & Auto HD & Remove Ads (link here) – this delivers what it’s name promises.
- Gmail Unread Message Count in Favicon (link here) – I’ve used this for YEARS with Gina Trapani (@ginatrapani) ’s Better GMail FireFox extension too, however it works great in Chrome without Better GMail.
- PDF/PPT/TIF view in Google Docs (link here) – This is THE plugin I can’t live without for Windows; I use my laptop as a sidekick to my desktop and don’t want to mess it up with Adobe Reader and files on the hard disk. This script opens PDF links that you click on in Google Docs viewer.
Ninite Application Installer
Oct 25th
This week has been an interesting week: it’s been Windows 7 week! I chose not to write about Windows 7 this week because for most people it’s not big news –I’ve had it for months from MSDN, a lot of those who care have tried the betas, and most “regular” people don’t upgrade their operating systems until they get a new computer. However it’s worth mentioning that there is a great service out there that will be useful for those reinstalling their OSes (recommended as opposed to an in-place upgrade for Windows 7), reinstalling your Vista or XP install, or just got a new computer and need to get all of your applications on your computer. Ninite has a solution for you.
Ninite, a new service that allows you to check-off what software you’d like to batch-install, creates an executable that takes care of downloading and installing the applications you chose from the list that they provide. However there are free and open source programs on this service, you can also get paid software such as Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, which just downloads a trial of it, allowing you to activate it using your purchased product key.
As I said before, this site creates a batch installer mini-program that takes care of downloading and installing your applications. I should clarify that the application you download from this site is small, less than a megabyte (165KB in my case). When this program is executed it does the downloading, meaning that this will not install applications offline such as downloading this on a computer with an internet connection and trying to install applications on a PC without an internet connection won’t work and trying to use this to install applications on a PC with a slow internet connection won’t be beneficial.
Here is how the interface works:
And this is what the installer app looks like in Windows 7:
I give this service top marks for it’s usefulness, uniqueness, ease-of-use, and wide selection of applications. However I’m interested to see if they will offer a way to do offline installs of applications (a lot more useful if performing a lot of installs on a lot of machines).
Parallels EXTREME!!!
Apr 2nd
I just visited Parallels.com and found their new virtualization product, Parallels Workstation Extreme (love the name?)… it seems that this product uses different technologies to allow users to utilize virtual machines to do high-end graphics work such as video and image and auto-cad work… and even cooler, gaming!
It says that this product uses their —-and that it uses
Intel VT-d to dedicate the graphics card(s) and networking hardware to the VM. (I would be interested in hearing how hard this actually is for a developer, way back in the summer of 2006 Steve Gibson of GRC and Spin Rite and of the Security Now podcast had made the comment about how Intel TV technology makes it easier to use a hyper-visor technology and that it would be difficult to patch physical hardware into a VM). This seems like a big step for virtualization, and I’m glad to see it happen so soon: I just hope that it comes to Mac OS X (soon!)
They have a diagram explaining how a physical resource is dedicated to a VM (embedded below), but they don’t point out that the original advertised benefit to virtualization was to consolidate and emulate network cards, etc… but now they’re asking for dedication (??)… Just putting that out there that this is ‘EXTREME’ over kill for (I would say) 80% of Parallels users, but for those who need it, you can sign-up to get more information if you desire here. (I did).
Youtube: Introduction to PowerShell (part 1)
Mar 23rd
This is an interesting product from Microsoft, Powershell. Powershell is a modern command-line environment for Windows. Take a look: you can get Powershell from Microsoft for free.
Almost Youtube Pick: ODTV.me
Jan 12th
For those who are interested in Leo Laporte’s TWiT Shows will know that there is a line up of content only broadcast live: ie you cannot subscribe in iTunes, you can only see them at TWiT Live. For this reason a TWiT Army member has created the website ODTV.me. Fellow viewers record the stream, upload it to this website, and allow others to watch shows such as: Ray Maxwell’s “Maxwell’s House” on color, photography, and such (he was frequently on The Lab With Leo in Canada and Australia). Ryan Shrout’s PC Perspective video show with Leo, Ryan is the founder of PCPer.com, every Thursday Leo and Ryan meet to discus the week in PC hardware news and reviews. You can see these on Thursdays live, or thanks to ODTV.me, anytime you like.
**NOTE you can also download the live-recordings of shows which are published as podcasts.
