Browsers for minimalists

So lately I’ve been enjoying the look of more webpage, less “stuff”.  With a little tweaking, Safari and Firefox can be set to give you more screen real estate. 

Safari (on the left) is my favorite for this view style.  If you select the view menu and choose to hide the menu bar, toolbar and the bookmarks bar.  Since the new 4.0 beta puts tabs on top, you get maximum viewing space within the window.  To go to a new address, a simple CTRL+L will drop down the toolbar so you can search or enter a site.  After you press enter, it hides again very nicely.

For FireFox, you get just slightly less screen since the tabs are not part of the window title bar, but still very nice.  You can use CTRL+L like Safari to go to a new site, but it doesn’t give you the whole bar, it gives you a separate open dialog box.

Sadly, for all the good improvements in IE8, you cannot seem to hide the location bar at all.  So I didn’t bother with a screen shot.

Shane Par-Due | Candidate for Alderman in Ward 1 of Raytown

Shane Par-Due | Candidate for Alderman in Ward 1 of Raytown

I’m not a very politically active person, but wanted to add to the possible Google & search engine hits for Shane.  If you found this page and are in ward 1 of Raytown you need to meet him.  He’s a God fearing man with a passion for this town.

iTunes, Get Off The Tracks!

As both of my readers know, I have absolutely HATED the fact that iTunes 8 doesn’t give you the same simple check-box to turn off adding track numbers to your filenames.  All previous versions gave this option.

For a very long time, only on a Mac did it seem you had an option to turn this off via some command line tweaks, but it seems those of us still stuck in Windows finally have relief!!  I recently searched again for options and found the following…

1. Hold down the Windows key and press R.

2. Type %appdata% and click OK. (Yes, you could manually navigate there, but why?)

3. Open the Apple Computer folder.

4. Open the iTunes folder.

5. Open the iTunesPrefs.xml file using Wordpad. (Not notepad, Wordpad will be much easier to read the file as it formats it much better.  You can right-click and choose Wordpad from the Open with… dialog.)

6. Scroll down to the User Preferences section. There should be a couple of lines that say:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

7. Below that line, type in the following (I personally copied & pasted):

<key>create-filenames-with-tracknumber</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

8. Save and close the iTunesPrefs.xml file. iTunes will no longer import track numbers on your imported CD’s now.

I would expect you should do all this while iTunes is closed.  I didn’t try while open & expect that could cause issues.

I must give credit to the first site I found this on, Technipages.  My apologies if someone else was the original person to discover the trick.  I’m just glad this nightmare is over.  Apple, if you are listening, please focus on adding features, not removing them.

Dynamic Duo

Copper & Pixie are starting to get along better each day.  Wendy got the best picture today as they looked out the window.  Don’t you want a Papillon now?

Dynamic Template for Live Writer

Ok, if you happen to be using Windows Live Writer (and you should be), you really should look at the Dynamic Template plugin by Joe Cheng (thanks Joe!).

I allows several ways that you can automate text or html that you need to use regularly.  For example, we now use posts in WordPress to post the links for the audio of our weekly church ministry fellowships at KCBT.  Every week the html for the links need to be added to a new post for each class pointing to a file name using the class name and the date (i.e. crossover020809.mp3 as part of a href line).

Thanks to Joe’s plugin, now I just go to my Insert options and choose the dynamic template…

Then choose what class I need it for…

Then the following code drops in:

<a href="http://kcbtmedia.org/media/crossover020809.mp3">Download</a>

There’s a lot of potential in this (more if you know what you are doing more than me).  Great short video examples on Joe’s site showing examples & usage.  Worth checking out!!