Add notes to an email - Outlook 2007
We all have reasons to add a note/comment to an email for future reference.
Here’s a trick that you could use to add a note/comment to an email that is only visible to you and doesn’t get attached to the email while replying/forwarding. All this without an expensive plugin.
If you don’t use outlook Categories to categorize your email, then this is for you. I use custom task folders to organize tasks by a project and use folders to organize email. If you have Xobni, you won’t have trouble finding any email.
Picture speaks louder than words.
Open up the email you want to add a comment OR click on the email and click Categorize
Click on Add New Category and type the note with a choice of your color
And that’s all folks.
If you want to get fancy, you can customize your Categorize button to say “Add a note” and change the icon to something that looks like a post-it. The idea is to use unused features of outlook to your advantage.
An Engineer’s iPhone
Having an iPhone 3G since the first day of its release, I felt compelled to give & perhaps get an engineer’s view. All these app’s are free. Now there are several, possibly, very useful apps on store for a price but then again, I won’t be covering those.
From how I see it, I can do most of the complex calculations on my computer. An iphone provides a portable platform for checking things quick. If it comes at a price, might as well open up my laptop.
Calculator
iPhone Advanced Calculator
iPhone’s Simple & Advanced Calculator comes to the rescue of those on the spot bulky calculations any day.
GraphCalc (Plotting 2D Graphs)
Graph Calc
Quite self explanatory. Plots upto four 2D equations superimposed on the graph.
Units
Convert anything and everything to your desired units.
iResist
iResist
Having trouble calculating resistance of that odd looking resister in your pocket or perhaps, you need to find out quick which one to use for a desired resistance. iResist is the app for you.
Other General Apps
Most of you already know about these but worth mentioning to those who are new to the app world:
- Zenbe (Lists)
Create & manage tasks and lists. Sync’s over Zenbe server online.
- Air Sharing / Files
Transfer files from & to your iphone wirelessly. - Evernote
Capture notes through text, audio or photo and sync online to your evernote account. Very useful for capturing graphs, calcs you might have done on paper or on whiteboard.
- WhiteNoise
Ah, not really a productivity app but something makes you productive while doing something else. Provides different sounds for a set timer.
Wisconsin road conditions due to flooding on google maps
WI Dept. of Transportation is updating road conditions on highways on google maps to help travelers and people affected in the disaster areas. This is a great initiative on their part and excellent tool for such purposes. This should help out people looking for a similar map on google.
RUSH TO GOOGLE MAPS WI HIGHWAY ROAD CONDITONS
Orkut adds Status
Someone at Orkut realized the annoyance that many people brought up including me in the past months about misusing orkut display name and introduced the Facebook style status updates to satisfy the appetite of those users. The only downside of this service, for now, is that the update to status doesn’t show up in updates to your friends. Not sure, why anybody would want this but I’ve been told several tweens prefer it.
Hopefully, orkut users will realize this soon and use what things are supposed to be used for.
Mr. Special characters @$#, I hope you’re listening!
Comcast pending disconnect - internet problem
I have Comcast triple play (Cable, Internet & Phone) and have been quite satisfied with the service. I was ready to move out of state and called them to schedule a disconnect on a future date (two weeks away) so I have one less thing to worry about in the actual move. The customer service rep. did an excellent job in scheduling and answering my questions about the remainder of the bill (which is refunded by the way). So, after putting down the phone I was in a bliss thinking that went without a glitch.
Well guess what! What she forgot to mention was that by just “scheduling” a disconnect they actually disconnect your internet right at that moment. They stop your internet authorization for the service. My internet stopped working almost instantly after putting down the phone and took me back to the comcast authorization page. Ofcourse, the same account can’t be authorized twice at the same location. So, I called the tech support again and after an hour of transferring and waiting and transferring I finally was able to cancel the scheduled disconnect and that brought the internet back instantly. Something , perhaps, that they should let their customers know while they are scheduling a disconnect.
So folks out there planning to move and thinking of scheduling your service disconnect, keep this in mind - the internet won’t work! So do it a day or so before you leave.
What’s in a name?
A lot! For starters, your identity. It annoys me like anything when I see “~Angel of your dreams~” OR “Listening to Ga ga…” OR “Happy blah-blah festival” in people’s orkut display name.
A display name is not your daily dose of updates to your friends. It’s your name, a name by which people will identify you and your long lost friends will look for you.
Wasn’t this the whole reason why you joined orkut or your fav. social community website? Oh well!
The other day, I was looking for a school friend and couldn’t find him on orkut searching by any keywords. I knew he had an account on orkut as a friend of mine had mentioned it once. What do I do now? Yes, like most of you do in a similar situation, go through that friend’s friend list and look for a familiar face. And if that person is using another avatar than his/her picture then you’re in for a painful experience. 99% of you will probably quit at this step and will wait for your friend to forward the contact to you. If you don’t have a common friend then you probably assume your long lost friend isn’t on orkut, only to find out later that your friend existed all along and had decided to change their display name.
Argh!!!
If you’re one of the ~Changed my name for coolness~ people, hope you get the message.
[UPDATE:]
Orkut status message introduced.
charamel theme on firefox 2 and thunderbird 2
[UPDATE July 29, 07]: charamel for FF2 & TB2 is back!!!
written prior to his release…
I held on updating firefox and thunderbird from 1.5 to 2 until now just because there wasn’t a compatible version of the charamel theme available for with these versions.
lucx did a commendable work with the charamel theme and IMHO there isn’t one up to its standard yet. We all thank him for his work! Unfortunately he has lost interest in charamel for his own valid reasons and we respect that.
Now the trick to making charamel work with Firefox/Thunderbird 2.0 is pretty simple. Change the max version number in the install.rdf to any reasonable number above 1.6 in the latest installation charamel jar file.
Now you can do this yourself or just download a copy from here. Obviously, there is no guarantee or support that I can offer as this is merely a trick that works with the existing jar file.
Download: Click here
Hats off to you lucx for doing such a great work! We all wish you will regain your interest one day and update your theme. All credits are due to lucx, this is not an update.
Ajax - Overexposure?
With “AJAX” buzzword around, everyone is implementing ajax for every single thing. Most often in places where it’s not supposed to be used. Places where its use is justified and is powerful include To-Do lists, Google Maps,etc.
Alex Bosworth talks about “10 Places You Must Use Ajax” and places where you shouldn’t. Its a fairly good post with good items on the list. A little old post (Dec 05) but useful, for any ajax developer to justify his conscience whether to use ajax or not 
Rush to his blog post
World’s Population
Just came across “TreeMap” - a very innovative way to view World’s Population in a map like interface.
IPB: Wrap links within “code” tags
For those administrators managing an Invision Power Board, it often is a preference to have users post links with “code” tags instead of “url” tags.
Reason for this? Perhaps, you don’t want people tracking the referrer of the url.
There are two ways of doing it:
a) Disable links
b) Wrap links around “code” tags even if users use “url” tags.
Option b) is what I would be delving into. This option lets the user post in any way they like and the links are wrapped with “code” tags.
I have tested this on 2.1.x
For step-by-step tutorial, keep reading.
Read the rest of this entry »
99 useful Run Commands for XP
Click here to see 99 useful Run Commands for XP
eg:
Administrative Tools
control admintools
Computer Management
compmgmt.msc
Folders Properties
control folders
Local Security Settings
secpol.msc
Local Users and Groups
lusrmgr.msc
User Account Management
nusrmgr.cpl
Windows Firewall
firewall.cpl
Get Wikipedia on your Ipod
Transform your Ipod to Iknowitall.
Link: http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Ajax Integration
Ajax is the new technology which is growing exponentially with sites adapting it almost instantly.
A certain Ajax technique can send and receive data to and from a server without requiring the browser to refresh or reload.
Here are some amazing sites implementing the technology:
Word Processor
Bookmarks Online
Kiko. A general purpose online calendar.
To Do List To Do List - with RSS Feed
To Do List with Time Tracker Amazing To do list, highly recommended
Meebo Online messenger AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google IM, ICQ all in one webmessenger. Use it at work 
For more examples and uses check the sites below:
Ajaxian
Tech Crunch
Timepass goodies
process explorer
A must have free utility, by sysinternals, process explorer gives you a list of the open handles and DLLs processes.
Helps handling dll leaks and understanding windows functionality.
Website: process explorer
recording streaming audio
MJ asked me today how to record a streaming audio so I thought this might be a good time to put the info up.
Having tried few free versions that record streaming audio from real player or media player, the one that worked for me is free sound recorder
Before you play the streaming audio, open the software, press the record button and and it’ll start recording the audio.
XP Command line utilities
Following is a list of useful command line utils for xp:
- bootcfg
View your boot loader settings, such as your default OS and selection timeout, as well as your boot entries and load options.- defrag
You probably already guessed that this defrags your hard drive. Type only “defrag” into your command prompt to get a list of possible arguments, such as the drive letter and the type of output.- diskpart
Manages your disk partitions. After you type “diskpart” into your command prompt, your prompt will become “DISKPART.” Type a question mark to get a list of possible arguments. Type exit to leave diskpart.- driverquery
Will get you a nice list of your drivers and their properties.- fsutil
This is a handy command. You can do everything from managing your hardlinks to querying the free space in a volume. Type “fsutil” into your command prompt, and you’ll see a list of options. I choose “fsinfo” from the list, so I type “fsutil fsinfo” into the prompt. Now I get even more options, but I choose drives by typing “fsutil fsinfo drives.” It’s fun, it’s easy, and you’ll get the hang of it. Explore this utility. There are a lot of cool features and hidden twists.- getmac
This gets the MAC (Media Access Control) address.