wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to recognize them? Yes, of course. The simpler solution? Put a different name on each drive, but this is very small step. We know that graphical interfaces work better. Why not replace all these ugly grey icons with something ore meaningful (and more pleasant)?

A simple process

The only requirements are:

• Access to Google image search (but you can use another one, of course)
• Use of a simple image editor able to save to “Windows .ICO” file format – I use IrfanView which is very feature-rich, but simple to use and perfectly free (as in free beer).

Step-by-step:

1. Define an image which is representing the drive well,
2. Collect this picture,
3. Set it to the right format,
4. Set it up on the USB drive.

Step by step

Define the image for your icon

I recommend several possible and complementary approaches. Keep in mind that the objective is to easily recognize the USB thumb drives or the disk drives connected to the computer USB port(s). Nota bene: This works with internal hard drives too.

Solution #1: If the USB thumb drive is very recognizable, you can find on the web some good photo representing it nice and well. You can even collect a press release photo form the manufacturer if you have the manufacturer name and the product model. For example, I can look for photos of external hard drives from Western Digital, MyPassport model, red color. Google result is offering a wide choice of good pictures:

AEven if you don’t have the exact name of the thumb drive (not all of Chinese-sourced drives are named properly), it is quite easy to look for a good description like “orange USB drive”. Less precise, somewhat more error-prone, but it works astonishingly well.

Solution #2: With the same Google Image Search, look for a nice photo that would represent the disk contents (or its name). Try looking for “cinema” or “movies” or “old movies” or “1980 movies” for a hard drive you expect will hold your movie collection You will be surprised by the available choice.

Choice reduction

Faced with so many options, I recommend limiting yourself with some specific search filters. (on the Google page, press the “Tools” button and choose the following filters):

1. Only take large size images (you’ll see it is important)
2. Select public domain pictures that you can modify: “Labeled for re-use with modification” (Why steal a photo when you can use one its author wants to share?).
3. Most critical: Chose a very simple, pretty but easily recognizable picture (an icon may be very small).
4. Last recommendation: It is often better to start from an image with a white or very lightly colored background (it “works” better in most cases, as you will see).

Collect the picture

Download the image you found on Google.

Create the icon

After all, an icon is merely a square image brought down to a small size and in special ICO format. the walkthrough is rather simple, you’ll see.

Load the image in IrfanView.

Modify the size of the picture to move to a square ratio (change canvas size). You can do it by either enlarging or reducing the canvas size (choosing the right background color).

The result should be a nice square picture but you may feel that it is rather large for an icon.

As a matter of fact, size does not matter much here. The larger, the better to keep the icon looking good when changing display sizes. Now comes the time to make sure that the size is exactly a multiple of 2 (eg. 2048×2048 pixels). It is not useful to go further than 4096×4096 pixels, but do not go below 1024×1024 pixels. IrfanView will do this easily, from Image>Resize/resample... menu.

Then, you need to save the picture as .ICO file (be sure to use “Save as type” with the “ICO – Windows icon” option).

Setup on the USB drive

This icon (this ICO file) must be saved at the root of the USB thumb drive (in the  D:\ directory), preferably under the autorun.ico name (but we can accommodate any other name like Lynx.ico).

Last, copy or create a text file named autorun.inf with the following contents (also in D:\ directory), :

[autorun]
ICON="autorun.ico"


This small file will allow Windows finding the icon named autorun.ico (or any other name that you previously chose)).

Result

Now, your icons will be perfectly distinguishable. Like here with drawings, pictures, photographs, logos, etc.

Bonus: this is applicable to your company logo. If you give USB thumb drives away, better than putting any photo, install your company logo for a fully personalized thumb drive!

Today, I learned that Bloglines will close its doors and stop completely its services in the coming days (on the 1st of October 2010); I have to switch immediately to a new service.

I started to look into the available options, either an on-line RSS aggregator (Google reader comes immediately to mind), or a Windows-based aggregator on my PC. Dear reader, do you have some recommendations for me?

There are other tools for this, but Print2PDF allows both production on your Windows PC and on-line. You can batch produce PDF files, you can include nearly all the useful little options (like bookmarks, digital certificates, watermarks, etc.) and it does it all like if it was a special printer in Windows, allowing all programs to use it.

photo credit: Ioan Sameli

All this goes quite transparently, but in some cases, you may be willing to influence this for your own purposes and I found two situations that can be easily tweaked with the help of the following tools.

Process Tamer is a tiny (140k) and super efficient utility for Microsoft Windows that runs in your system tray and constantly monitors the CPU usage of other processes. When it sees a process that is overloading your CPU, it reduces the priority of that process temporarily, until its CPU usage returns to a reasonable level. That way, you avoid seeing one program hugging all the CPU to death.

Exactly on the opposite, it may happen that you want to strongly favor the process that is running in front of you. It may be a game, your spreadsheet program or anything else. MZ CPU Accelerator automatically boosts foreground apps without your changing of internal setting.

With these, you are ready to tame your process for sure.

Probably the Best Free Security List in the World

Big thumbnails

Like many people I love the Windows 7 superbar with its ability to keep applications in a single location. But some people want to increase the size of the associated thumbnails. Alt+Tab Tuner is the right tool for this. You can change the size, the borders, everything. But some people will prefer the slightly simpler Taskbar Thumbnail Customizer.

Resource meters

If you are a control freak (at least when it comes to your computer), you like to have a permanent image of the resources used by your activity on Win7. You can always start with the Task Manager and the Resource Monitor (it has been much improved over the past Microsoft offerings). But why not go to a much higher level.

First, I propose a simple solution: GLINT which is offering local and remote monitoring of resources in the simplest of presentations.

Then, if you really want to have a powerful tool, something customizable to a star level, go and fetch RainMeter. It’s a full system to produce a customized desktop including all kinds of meters and some people made it look really great (much better than the usual resource meter, free or not). See an example here:

Mouse gestures

Since I am a great fan of Opera, the free web browser with integrated “mouse gestures” engine (you can control it with mouse moves as much as with clicks in menus), I was interested in getting a good Windows-7-compatible solution to extend this to the full Win7 system.

StrokeIt 0.9.7 Home does exactly this. you install it and you start controlling your PC and many of its applications with just a few mouse strokes or mouse gestures (Click and hold down the right mouse button and then draw the mouse gesture you want performed. Drawing a big C will close the window below the cursor.) Try it! You’ll improve your productivity in ways you did not think possible.

If you feel that you could do the same using your finger on the trackpad of your laptop, just go and grab Scrybe. Really impressive stuff (even if it does not work with mouse yet).

Right-click optimizer

Now that your mouse is operating at full speed you will probably be interested in another performance tool. Let’s look at how you can optimize your right click menu into something really powerful. Right-click Extender 2 will add a few useful options.

Understanding Win7 libraries

Libraries are a very useful feature of Windows 7, but -at first- I thought that it was difficult to grok, probably because it was changing a few of my habits. I appreciated reading a clear explanation in Understanding the Libraries Feature in Windows 7 (from How-to Geek).

Please, feel free to add your own in the comment section.

Thanks to Bruce Byfield of Linux Journal, it is now possible to have a relatively fair comparison of the heavy-weight champion of office suites (Microsoft Office or MS-Office) and the young hyper-active challenger (OpenOffice).

Obviously, OpenOffice advantage is that it is cheaper than Microsoft Office: It’s free.

But what are the other ways to compare both? Bruce goes to great lengths (3 pages) to try and give us a balanced comparison around the overall interface, the MS-Word/OpenOffice Writer word processors, MS-Excel/OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet applications, PowerPoint/OpenOffice Impress presentation tools.

Interestingly, and I believe that this is a credit OpenOffice, the differences are really small and the price (free) of OpenOffice will be heavy in the decision.

OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office

By the way, did I mention that I am a strong advocate of OpenOffice? I have been using it both for personal and professional activities, for 10 years now; And it it keeps improving a very good base into an excellent tool (including the full compatibility with Microsoft files).

My preferred Internet browser, Opera, has now reached a new version v10.50. Not only is it still the same nice, friendly and powerful browser, but it packs interesting new features:

• Faster: I did not try the beta versions so I was surprised: It’s fast, very fast. I am not sure if it warrants the “fastest browser on Earth” title that their promoter want to give it, but it is not often that you feel such acceleration from a mere version upgrade.
• Win7-ready, perfectly integrated in Windows 7: Special menus for the integration into the icon bar, a specialized animated icon, optimized window, etc.
• Private, secured navigation windows upon request.
• The widgets can now be dropped onto the desktop.

Since Opera is compatible not only with Windows, but with Apple, Linux and most mobile phones, this is very good news about to spread around.

photo credit: nDevilTV

The Solid State Disk (SSD) is the new tool for computer performance. You no longer can consider yourself a geek if you did not try these Hard Disk Drives without any moving part because they are made of Flash memory. You will earn the semi-god geek achievement only if you trimmed, optimized, finely tuned, measured your SSD.

But, you can trick your way to the near-heavenly award if you go and check the Bit-Tech guide to trimming: “Why You Need TRIM For Your SSD“. This guide will tell you all that is to know about your SSD and Windows 7.

The program will recognize the shortcut, then automatically replace it with the correct text. Type “win“, see “Windows” appear. Type “HTML” and see a full block of selected HTML code appear (I use such shortcuts to create blocks of HTML code on this site, reducing typing time and avoiding typos).

For this, you need to be supported by a small program. I found two interesting ones :

• AutoHotkey (for Windows) allows to write very simple scripts (examples are provided); I use it everyday (it works perfectly on a Windows 7 installation, by the way).
• Some people would prefer to explore Texter and TextExpander, too.
• If you are on Linux, you will prefer to have a look at AutoKey which is freely inspired by AutoHokey (copying is a form of flattery)

New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

Update: I just learned that Internet Explorer 8 is now becoming the web browser most used in the world. Even if there is a lot of other good competition, Microsoft is still holding its position (from DownloadSquad).

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

Version 1.7 of Cygnus is now available that supports Windows 7 (but drops support for Windows 95, 98 & Me).

As if this was not enough, this version also has the capability to configure IPv6 (if you are already attracted by this solution) or supports multiple installations.

Cygnus v1.7-1.1 new release.

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

There are few things that you can do to significantly improve the speed of your Internet connection. Of course, you can switch to another Internet Service Provider, but it’s a mess. On the opposite, it is easy to have an sub-optimal connection because of the response time of the DNS server of your Internet Provider. This server offers a translation service a domain name (for example, www.roumazeilles.net) into its equivalent numeric IP address (the only one that the web browser really understands and needs).

But all DNS servers are not born equal and if those offered by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) have an advantage (they are nearer to your own computer), they are not always the fastest ones. NameBench gives you the opportunity to easily and automatically check what DNS server is the most efficient (and to compare it with your own current DNS configuration).

In my own personal case, I just reduced DNS times by 50% (no less!) while I thought I had a rather good configuration. As a matter of fact, Neuf Telecom servers are faster that those from Free…

This works on Windows, MacOS as well as GNU/Linux.

By the way, for those of you who may be wondering, Yes! I included the all new Google DNS as one of the tested options and it was far slower than most of the other freely available possibilities.

It’s worth noticing it if you are using Opera. I had a difficult-to-solve issue recently.

While playing with the idea of starting to use IPv6 on my main PC, I tested the waters by validating this option in the network configuration of my Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera is already fully ready for IPv6 but my router box is not. So, the first effect it had is that Opera decided to enforce the use of IPv6 for all web sites that mentioned IPv6 capacity in their DNS (not many of them, but Google and Free.fr my ISP are already in the list). The immediate effect was that Opera tried to connect to them in IPv6 but failed (because the rest of my home configuration is not 100% IPv6). For 99% of all web sites, there was no difference…

It took me several days (and some Googling – using Safari and Chrome) to understand that this is a known issue and to remove the (still) useless IPv6 Windows configuration.

I’ll have to upgrade my router and try again.

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

If you want to grab the maximum CPU power for your PC video game (or any other PC application, by the way), there is a free utility that will ensure that the PC CPU does not spend to much time on anything else: Game Booster. It may be bad for a correctly balanced performance, but some games may appreciate the help.

Nota: This is similar to AMD Fusion Tool, but simpler.