If your mouse pointer seems to constantly get in the way while you are typing, you aren’t alone… you click in the middle of some text and start typing to insert more, but the cursor stays in the way. There’s a tiny utility called MouseAway that will solve this problem for you… it’s not new, but it still works on Vista.
An animated picture would be better here, but you click in the middle of some text…
And then when you start typing, MouseAway moves the mouse a short distance away from the cursor:
Quite a useful little utility, and since it barely takes any resident memory it’s not too bad to keep it running all the time.
Short rant: With all of the zillions of small utilities to customize this and that, installing them all at the same time might be a little silly. We just try and find software that can help your particular pet peeves about Windows, so pick and choose wisely for the best experience.
Download MouseAway from geocities.com/mtetrode/
When you start typing into the address bar in Firefox you normally see a popup menu with all the URLs that your browser knows about. But what if you get tired of hitting the down arrow key every time, and would rather have it complete inline as well?
It’s always struck me as odd that system tweakers use the registry editor all the time to fix annoyances in Windows, but nobody has created a tweak to add the registry editor to the control panel… until now.
In the web development world, most of the design isn’t in the page HTML anymore, it’s been moved to the included CSS and Javascript files. The problem is that when you want to take a peek into the code there’s not a really simple way to view those CSS/JS files.
I love when I find a fun online game to play. When the workday is going completely insane and I want to burn the place down (Milton in Office Space) it is helpful to immerse oneself in fantasy. Treasure Of Cutlass Reef allows just such opportunity. This is a cool game where you’re a pirate ship
WinSCP is by far and away the best SCP/SFTP client for Windows users, but the default settings don’t use keepalive, so you get disconnected far too often. I like to leave the client open while I’m doing work, and this causes a serious problem with my workflow.
My good friend Tim asked me the other day: “How do I take a screenshot of an entire web page… am I supposed to just piece two images together?” Thankfully for Tim he has a geek friend to explain a simple way to accomplish this.
Usually the people listed in your Contacts list are regarded as safe by Outlook’s Junk E-mail Filter. Usually being the key word. I ran into an instance today where an interoffice email sent went into the recipients Junk Folder. To correct this I used the following steps.
If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon you are probably still a very productive person. If you want to make your time-wasting sessions slightly more efficient, you can use the keyboard to stumble instead of clicking the Stumble! button.
Hidden away in the Windows directory is a separate utility that can be used to perform certain user administration functions not provided in the normal interface. Instead of typing “control userpasswords2” into the run box, you can just add it as an icon in your Control Panel.
This is a quick tip to speed up the start menu in Vista. I wrote a previous article about helping the user interface more snappy. This tip concentrates on the start menu but will have a similar effect. So if you employ both strategies the UI will run more smoothly. This tip requires a registry
