Tim Matheson Blog - Productive Tips and More

Microsoft has a great article on how to conserve your laptops battery supply using hibernate features available in “most” windows installations. I really think this is an overlooked feature available to Microsoft customers. Read the full article

1. Open Power Options in Control Panel. (Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Power Options.)
2. Click the Hibernate tab, select the Enable hibernate support check box, and then click Apply.
3. If the Hibernate tab is unavailable, your computer does not support this feature.

A lot of people are switching to Vista for it’s great features. One of the great features is DreamScene which allows you to play high-definition video as your desktop wallpaper. I am stuck with XP for the time being and won’t be switching to Vista anytime soon. So I began looking around on the internet for an alternative to using videos as wallpaper. I found a quick tutorial on Digg on how to do just that. The best part about this little trick is that it will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista Home, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business Edition and maybe even a few other operating systems. Now I could link to the article and probably should, but that would just cause you to have to reload your browser and it’s really quite simple. So what I am going to do is try to illustrate the basic concept of this trick and also link to the article because there is a more in depth explaination of how to get this up and running. I have mentioned VLC Player in the past and many of it’s great features, but if you haven’t already downloaded your free copy the url is http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. Now to do this all you need to do is install VLC Player, open a video file, and right click and check “wallpaper” and thats it. You now have a beautiful animated background using video from your most recent vacation trip, or maybe your favorite movie. It’s that simple.

Bonus Tip:
More than likely you will not want your video to play just once when you are using it for this purpose. So you will need to tell VLC to loop the video in the playlist interface found under navigation in the toolbar menu. Also you may wish to disable the sound so it doesn’t drive you crazy after playing 99 times over and over. To do this goto audio and select disable. Thats it, you now have the great feature of DreameScene on your non-DreamScene compatible operating system.

Read it on Digg

I love the Windows Vista Aero Flip3D feature, but unfortunately I have to stick with Windows XP for software reasons. TopDesk is a great little tool that will give you the features of Aero Flip3D on Windows XP and more. TopDesk features several different rotate modes, flip styles, color customization, window labels, and more. There is also a feature to quickly show the desktop by placing all your windows at the bottom edge of the screen (F11). You can ALT+Tab to view a vertical view of all open windows.

Keyboard Shorcut tips

• ALT+TAB = Flip, Grid, Spatial (Depending on settings)
• F11 = Minimize your Windows (toggle) works great.
• Tip : Use the mouse wheel to scroll through windows when in tile mode.

Got a favorite piece of software you think would go great with TopDesk? Send me a Tip to tips@timmatheson.com

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Attention keyboard ninjas. If your like me, then you love the Windows command line and all of it’s useful functions. Blogger Rakesh Kumar has 59 excellent Windows dos commands that should get you swinging your keyboard like a true Windows samurai (or at least make you more efficient with it). Whatever the case you will want to check this article out if your a total newbie to the CLI or just a little rusty. I touched a little on the power of the command line tools back in May 2006 with “How to remote shutdown windows with a txt message“.

One of the most efficient and faster way of doing things in Windows XP is to use DOS Commands. Here is a list of most useful DOS Commands used in Windows XP operating System.

Most useful Windows XP DOS commands

CueCats are barcode scanners that were given away by Digital Convergence in the late 1990s. They were designed as a way for consumers to scan barcodes from magazines and other media and be directed to a website with more information on the product or service they scanned. The scans were encrypted to prevent law suits based on the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) of 1998. However they are still useful today as a low cost barcode scanning solution with a little hardware modification and or some free software known as CatNip which bypasses the encryption. The nice thing about these devices is that they type any scan into any field and press enter which makes them perfect for passwords. In this article I am going to show you how to take your modified or unmodified CueCat and use it to login to your computer via passwords encoded into barcode format.

What you will need.

1. A CueCat USB or PS2 will work.
2. A barcode (You can use one from an existing rewards card or make your own here)
3. An account to test it on before using this as your form of authentication.

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