This is how I customised RUN on my Windows XP PC:

Create a folder called “RUN” (you can name it anything) on drive C:\ (or your fav drive) and place the path C:\RUN in system variables’s path like this:

Start> Settings> control panel> System> Advanced> Environmental variable> System variables> click ‘Path’ and then click ‘edit’ and copy paste the path “C:\RUN” (without quotes) here. (If you have more than one path like C:\RUN\playlists or so then remember to place “;” after each path)

Now, inside the RUN folder you can place any shortcuts to applications you want to launch. For example I created shortcuts (.lnk) of microsoft office apps like excel, word, powerpoint and placed them inside RUN folder. I have shortcuts to my favorite playlists (.pls) too. (I renamed the shortcuts to shorter names). Now, when I feel like listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, all i do is start> run (or use winkey+R to launch run) and type “wall” and pop starts the song.
Now I have my desktop empty and use RUN command for almost everything.

1. Properties: Apart from the type, size, attributes etc it has an option for changing the timestamps “created”, “modified” and “accessed” of several files at once.

2. Version: handy info about file version, company and other related info.

3. Preview: Very useful for previewing most filetypes without actually opening any corresponding application/program. For example you can view and edit your .doc, .xls or .ppt files right from the preview mode without even opening microsoft office apps. You can view videos and listen to songs just like in media player. Lots of features for viewing images too.

4. Rawview: As it says, you can view the file in its raw state (i.e. ASCII and binary mode).

5. Find files: This is easily the most important feature in the info panel. It comes with tons of options and supports fuzziness, boolean, regexp. Its pretty fast and the results are diplayed live which means you can keep the search tab ON and the results will be updated continuously. One of the highlights is you can make templates of your favorite searches and recall them later. Other interesting features include searching files which have particular text term inside them. Additionally, you can save the searches in XY’s catalog.

6. Report: You can make a report of files and folders inside your drive or particular folder and save it in CSV format or any other text format or directly print it.

You can toggle IP using F12, and there are special shortcuts like shift+F12 to maximise IP and alt+F12 to toggle to previous panel size.

See detailed description about info panel in the xywiki

Filters to the rescue. With filters around, you see only the content you want. User can control the way he/she wants to see the files and folders. Imagine you have a folder with several file types, like .pdf, .doc, .txt, .mp3, .wav etc etc. In explorer style you can sort by filetype and see them nicely separated out. But in XYplorer you can go one step ahead. You can color the filetypes to your liking so that you can quickly spot them. By analogy, windows explorer = black/white TV and XYplorer = Color TV. In the above example logically you would color the .mp3 and .wav similarly because they are both audio file extensions and hence easy to spot. You can color virtually anything with XYplorer’s color filter option.

Another way to see what you want is to use the Visual filter. Take the same example as above, now simply click on one of the .pdf file and .doc file and press ctrl+alt+j. This will show only files of extensions .pdf or .doc, isnt that awesome?? Its really a cool tool. It doesnt stop there, you can define more complex filters to view files you like.

Selection filter is similar to visual filter, just that it selects the files and folders which match the filter you define. Both visual and selection filter can be easily inverted by prefixing the filter with ‘!’ symbol. Whats more, it supports wildcard patterns and regular expressions too and dont forget to check out the quick keyboard shortcuts.

see how color filter and selection filter look.

Alphabets are Drives and numbers are the folders and subfolders.

C1,C2,C3,C4,C5 … C10
D1,D2,D3,D4,D5 … D10
E1,E2,E3,E4,E5 … E10

C5 means drive C and 5 folders deep. To go to C1 you have go higher through C4,C3,C2.

Now say you have 3 tabs,
1. C3 is homed tab
2. D2 is locked tab and
3. E4 is Default tab

In tab 1 you can move freely to C3, C4 and C5 and still down without problems. When you have finished browsing you can use home icon to go back to C3 position. If want to go to C2 or C1 you will end up in tab 3 which is the default tab. homed tabs can be called flexible tabs. Ofcourse, the flexibility depends on at what level you home them. If you home the my computer location then its completely flexible.
In tab 2 you cannot move anywhere from the location D2, going deeper or higher will end you up in tab 3 again. So locked tabs can be called stubborn tabs.
In tab 3 you are free to move anywhere else because its not fixed to any location. One can call it open tab.

Right-clicking on the tab gives lots of options which i discussed above plus other options like views and sorting styles and more. Additionally, right-clicking on the icons of the tabs will give you breadcrumbs, from which you can navigate higher or deeper. This gives a way to quickly throw a crumb onto another tab. I am sure you did not get this point.

Take the same example as above, we have Tabs 1, 2 and 3.

Say you are on the location C5 on tab 1. Now you switch location E4 to tab 3 (default tab). Now, right-click on the tab 1 icon without giving it focus (donot left-click). You will get breadcrumbs, C1-C10 and say you click on C7 now. The location E4 on tab 3 will change to C7. You have now successfully duplicated the location and its breadcrumbs onto a new location. This is also called injecting a tab.

You can find more info about tabs here.

Link to XYplorer is http://www.xyplorer.com

I guess it all started when man started to see that taming an animal and using it to his advantage was the best way. When the wheel was invented, there had to be something that pulls it. So, soon man used animals for agriculture, milk, meat, managing sheeps etc etc etc.
And now?? we still use them. Ofcourse, machines have somewhat replaced the transportation part. But still developing countries use animals for agriculture and transport. Ok, now there is no option but to use animals for meat and milk and other diary products. We have soya milk though but milk from animals is still a good choice.

Hey, wait a minute. wasnt this about pets?? Yes, now comes the question. Why do we need pets?? Sometime early in the animal domestication process, man started to have animals around him for fun. From being a financially beneficial commodity animals became friends of humans. Man started to love animals. He gave it food and let it live around him. Animals were loyal, all you needed to do was give it food and it would live with you forever. For eg. dog is considered man’s best friend. Some dogs have shown amazing abilities to even sacrifice itself to save human life.

But in this process of domestication animals became less and less capable of defending themselves from the wild ones. If one were to compare a wild and domesticated dog of similar species the wild one would stand a better chance of surviving on its own. The animals were pampered and deprived of all their defensive skills. A laudable human feat this. Ofcourse, we humans were hunters too but our strength lies in the superior brain and thus we could adapt faster to become gatherers and then forming a society. Animals adapt too and can be trained in a systematic way to help human kind. See for example the sniffer dogs, they can smell bombs, pirated DVDs and more.

I still havent made up my mind if pets are good or bad, but definitely i do feel sad for them. You can see people taking dogs for a walk, when the dog encounters a bitch its natural that it feels attracted. But the owners have a tough time getting the dog away from the bitch. How sad is that!! Ofcourse these days you get castrated dogs and spayed bitches. Ingenius idea, less trouble for the owners. I am a biologist by profession and how i see this situation is, first we take all the defenses away from an animal and render it useless. Then we wont let them mate with the partner it likes but have our own rules to breed it with certain special pedigrees and make it look more attractive, cute and beautiful for satisfactory human consumption. Luckily, certain animals cannot be domesticated that easily. You will never see someone taking a tiger for a walk.

Often vegetarians take a stance that its unfair to kill animals for the sake of food and vegans even dont consume milk because its an animal product, but I wonder if these people are allowed to have pets. Taking the freedom off the pets and locking them home seems more cruel than using animals as food.

I am just trying to put forward my argument. I would be great to have counter-arguments and other comments.

As a matter of fact, this leads me to an interesting feature in XYplorer. The preview panel. If you are someone who quickly wants to have a look at at a bunch of files then preview panel is for you. Take for example this case, you have loads of .doc files and you are looking for something specific in this and you want to quickly go through them. Simply turn the preview panel ON and click on these files and they fire up quickly for you to choose what you want. In fact you can edit something inside these documents and save them. No more opening microsoft word application. Similarly you can preview and edit excel, powerpoint etc. Ofcourse, if you need to work on the documents for hours then its better to have the corresponding app open.

Not just microsoft apps, there are several kinds of files you can preview. My favorite as I told you are not only previewing youtube videos, but also the audio files. One of my pals came upto me and asked if I got this cool song he sent by email. I immediately clicked on this file and hit spacebar, and it played instantly. He was surprised to see that a file manager can play songs and that too this fast. But dont be mistaken, you still the codecs for anything to play. Well, for the guys who use XYplorer regulalrly these are routine things. There is a whole bunch filetypes this file manager can preview, I dont have the courage to put them all.

And finally, for those of you managing image files, XYplorer again is unbeatable. You can simply click and hold the mouse on the thumbnail image and the image comes to life. Its blown-up full size for easy viewing. This feature as I have mentioned in previous post is called Mouse Down Blow Up (MDBU). Its the first of its kind in file managing world. The thumbnails are created at lightning speed and you can have three thumbnail sizes and choose one of them to showup on the list. Yet another tale about an exceptional file manager. Below is the famous MDBU. More next time.

Link:http://www.xyplorer.com/

What assurance do i have that your parenting isnt screwing me up?

The only skills I have the patience to learn are those that have no real application in life.

Aliens now own the earth and I told them girls make good zoo exhibits.

I’m yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by madison avenue and hollywood. Poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you are old and weak.

An integral part of any file manager is the ability to navigate quickly and precisely. Easiest way is to have links set aside in a logical way to the locations you need to go to. This is exactly what a “tree” in XYplorer does like in any other file manager. “Tree” is a nice name because its branches and fruits are somewhat analogous to folders and files. Imagine you are a monkey (I know i am going a bit too far, but hell!! this is my blog), how will you get to your fruit (file) quickly?? you jump from folder to folder and go to the file.

But our computers are much more complicated than a simple tree, there are innumerable folders and subfolders containing tons of different filetypes. In a normal explorer you cannot make the difference between folders except by the names. But in XYplorer one can color folders and subfolders at the tree level which makes navigation extremely quick and precise. Imagine a tree with many kinds of fruits (apple, mango, banana) at different branches, monkey can reach banana only if it follows for eg. yellow branch or apple if it follows for eg. the red branch.

So, with XYplorer one can assign highlight colors (for individual folders) and branch colors (folder and all its subfolders) with which one can easily tell two folders apart. Additionally, you can mark the folders as favorites so that they appear in bold for easy spotting apart from being saved in fav folders. There are additional features like hiding the network (for faster navigation and loading), hiding icons, lines, plusminus etc.

If I tell the monkey about the catalog it would go bananas. So what is catalog?? A catalog is a customised tree (yet another revolutionary feature in XYplorer). You can put your favorite folders and files on this catalog. No more jumping from folder to folder required. All your favorites listed as you like them. In monkey language it means, apples, mangos and bananas are within a comfortable reach. Features like Making categories for easy sorting, renaming items to your taste, coloring the categories and its branches, drag and drop items here, import your favorites folders, files and any list from the list mode, save your searches here in form of new category. Well, It doesnt get any better than that. Have a look at the catalog and the tree here(left of image). More about other cool features soon.

Ever notice how many conversations revolve around TV shows and movies? Our common references are events that never happened and people we’ll never meet! We know more about celebrities and fictional characters than we know about our neighbors!

I dont take chances with a product that prints the date you might expire.

enjoy

OK back to the parrot situation. It starts with the scene when a customer holding a cage enters a pet shop. What then ensues is an argument between the customer and the pet shopkeeper about the parrot. The argument is if the parrot is dead or alive. The shopkeeper tries to convince that the parrot is not dead and only resting. and that it might have gone for a long stroll and might be sleeping. The customer apparently tries to wake up the parrot by talking to it and asking it to wake up. He also mentions that the only reason it was sitting on its perch is because it had been nailed there. and finally he removes the parrot from its cage and shouts into its ears and bangs it on the desk in an attempt to wake it up and pops it into the air to show that it cannot fly.

Then there is a long angry talk about the state of the parrot, which is dead. He uses all kinds of funny words like this parrot is definitely deceased, this parrot is not more, its a stiff bereft of life it rests in peace, if you hadnt nailed it in there it would have pushing up the daisies, it has run down the curtains and vanished in the cloud invisible, its gone to meet its maker, this is an ex-parrot. This long dialogue is the peak of this part and not to be missed. The shopkeeper finally agrees that the parrot is dead and offers a slug in exchange of the parrot as he doesnt have anymore parrots in stock. Well, i would say you have to simply watch it. This sketch apparently shows how far one can go in terms of marketing. Like any other Monty python sketch this one is a gem.

enjoy.