Andi's Productivity Site

Andi's Productivity Site

Hey, there are all these little things on computers that help us do our tasks quicker (mainly, to get earlier to the next beer...).
If you have a great productivity tool or hint, please contact me (arindler at cmu dot edu). It would be great if we could make this selection bigger!

Burn ISO images in Windows XP
It's great when you finally have pushed yourself so far to install a Linux distribution. Now you have the damned files (*.iso of course), but no burning software to write it to a CD. Not anymore, check out Alex Feinmans's ISO Recorder.

Print to IP Address
You have a network printer (e.g. in a wireless network as on Carnegie Mellon's campus) and want to print directly to the printer without having to authenticate each time you get onto the network. Check out the print to ip address page. Alex has a section in his Linux tutorial on how to set this up on Linux.

Searchable PDF documents that were scanned as images (Acrobat 5.0 Paper Capture plug-in (Windows only)
You are all familiar with getting papers in pdf format that were scanned (e.g., because that's just the way JSTOR does it). Well, there is a little plug-in for Acrobat 5.0 that uses optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the pages into text! And even better, it even keeps all your comments!
Check it out at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/update.html

Convert PDF documents to HTML/Text
Adobe has a service that lets you convert any PDF into HTML (unless the document settings disallow changing the document):
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_simple_form.html

Adobe Acrobat "Convert to Adobe PDF" Plug-in disabled in Microsoft Word
Adobe offers an upgrade (5.05) to its Adobe 5.0 program that lets you convert Microsoft Word documents into pdf documents. The plug-in will convert all links (e.g. table of contents, hyperlinks etc.) into browsable pdf document. Somehow Microsoft disables this plug-in when. Go to -->help --> About Microsoft Word --> Disabled Items and enable the pdfmaker.dot item. The two Adobe pdf buttons should appear again...

Windows XP Powertools
Windows offers a couple of small powertools that make life much easier. My favorite is "Open cmd window here" which lets you open a cmd window on any folder that you right-click. The image resizer works excellent as well.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp

Outlook Addressbook Search
Okkie, you made all these nice contact folders, but when you use the search function or just type the name into the "To:" field of the email, the address doesn't show up? Yeah, yeah, had that all...Rigth-click on the contact folder, click on properties. Then click on the Outlook Address Book tab and check the "Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book". This should solve the issue...

Access Permissions/Ownership Problems in Windows (Access Denied!)
Microsoft introduced some advanced features to share folders or deny access to folders. When I set up a new user account on my computer, I was denied access to some folders on my machine (nice, thanks for protecting my stuff from myself...). A simple way to solve this is to take ownership again. In Windows XP go to the 'Tool" menu of the Explorer. --> folder options --> view and then uncheck the last option 'Use simple file sharing'. This will make an additional tab, ,Security', visible when you right-click on any folder and select 'Properties' in your Explorer. Right-click on the highest folder in your hierarchy (i.g., the 'My documents'), select properties, then security tab. Add your admin acccount to the users. Click on advanced, select your admin account as the owner and check 'Inherit from parent...'. Click ok all way out of the property windows. Then right click again on the same folder, --> properties -->security and delete the old users. Click out of the property window again and you should be all set...

Course Page Mirror Program
As a student, every semester I have to go through the pain of downloading dozens of ppt, pdf, html etc. files from course website (thank god that we have these sites, don't misunderstand me...). As a final project for my OOAD class, Yong Seung Lee,Byoung Park and I wrote a mirroring software that easily lets you download a webpage to your local harddrive. (source code for free use)

Linux Tips
Alex has some valuable insights on how to match and even exceed the functionality of Windows with Linux applications.

Something that's just GREAT and should make many Macintosh users quit bragging about IPhoto, is that in the filemanager, hitting CTRL+I creates an HTML image gallery, like the one we have created for the California trip, with thumbnails, links to originals and everything.

Another trick is that you don't need to click on the top of a window to move it. Holding ALT and dragging it from any part of the window
(internal or border), has the same effect.

ALT+right click (and hold) will resize the window, again from any position within the window (no need to catch the tiny bottom corner).

Similarly, ALT+middle click sends the active window to the background.

Also, simply selecting some text, from any application, and then hitting CTRL-V (paste) on the desktop, asks you for a filename and then automatically creates a text file with the contents of the clipboard,with that name.

more to come...