by Tiposaurus
Google has a currency conversion feature built in to its search, all you have to do is search for 100 GBP in USD, for example, to convert £100 (UK Pounds Sterling) to US Dollars. If you don't know the acronym for the currency you're converting to then don't worry as you can also do conversions with a search like 100 USD in Czech money, if you were planning a trip to the Czech Republic.
by Tiposaurus
I'm not sure how long this has been there (a while now; I'm imporing this from an old blog of mine), but Google has added a filter on its Advanced Search page which allows you to filter search results by the license that content on a website is released under, which would be useful, for example, if you are looking for content which you can republish on your page.
by Tiposaurus
April 3, 2011 in Tips
What I've always found useful since I started using Windows is to add notepad to the "Send To" menu, which is available when you right click on any file in Windows. This means that if you come across a text file with an extension which is not associated with Notepad then you can open it in Notepad quickly and easily.
To do this on your computer:
by Tiposaurus
April 3, 2011 in Tips, Windows
This tip will show you how to write the output of a command at the Windows command line to a file. It's not hard (infact it's one of the very basics of command line programming).
Start Command Line within Windows by choosing Start->Run then entering 'cmd' and pressing enter.
Suppose you want to capture the output from a directory listing, say c:blah. To get the directory listing to display on the screen you would type the command dir c:blah which may generate the output:
C:\>dir c:\blah
Volume in drive C is Windows
Volume Serial Number is XXXX-YYYYDirectory of c:\blah
07/01/2006 21:08 <DIR> .
07/01/2006 21:08 <DIR> ..
07/01/2006 21:07 <DIR> folder1
07/01/2006 21:07 <DIR> folder2
06/03/2005 11:58 5,442,634 music.mp3
07/01/2006 21:07 17 text1.txt
2 File(s) 5,442,651 bytes
4 Dir(s) 12,453,460,480 bytes free
If you want to capture this listing to the file c:folder.txt then you would append > c:\folder.txt to the original command, ie:
C:\>dir c:\blah > c:\folder.txt
Notice now that nothing appears on the command line window after this and it simply moves on to the next prompt. If we now check the file c:\folder.txt then we see that it has the contents of the directory.
A slight variant of this is to use the greater than symbol, >, twice, ie:
C:\>dir c:\blah >> c:\folder.txt
This will append the output of the dir command to what is already contained in the file c:\folder.txt.
by Tiposaurus
April 2, 2011 in Tips, Windows
To view all the currently running processes in windows from the command line (choose Run then type "cmd"), you can use the command 'tasklist'. The output will look something like this:
C:>tasklist
Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage ===================== ====== ================ ======== ============ System Idle Process 0 Console 0 16 K System 4 Console 0 52 K smss.exe 592 Console 0 108 K csrss.exe 648 Console 0 5,868 K winlogon.exe 680 Console 0 2,632 K services.exe 724 Console 0 2,376 K (...)
by Tiposaurus
April 2, 2011 in Tips, Windows
To terminate a process from the command line of windows, use the taskkill command:
When you know the name of the program to stop:
taskkill /IM notepad.exe
Or when you know the process ID, eg 784:
taskkill /PID 784
For more usage variants, type taskkill /?
Some of this information about what processes are running can be obtained by the tasklist command, e.g. this tells you the Process ID (PID).
by Tiposaurus
Google lets you narrow your search down to within a specific website, or to within a specific TLD (for example .gov).
You can do this by using the site: command in your search, for example:
by Tiposaurus
April 1, 2011 in Tips, Windows
If you want to control your mouse pointer with the keyboard, Windows XP provides a way:
Press Alt+Left Shift+Num Lock all at once and a prompt will appear telling you that you have activated mousekeys, select ok then you can control the mouse with the numpad.
The controls are:
1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9 = move the mouse
5 = mouse button click
+ = double click
insert = hold down mouse button
delete = release mouse button (after holding it down with insert)
/, * or - = select which mouse button the above controls will click (left, both or right respectively)
numlock = disable mousekeys
by Tiposaurus
You can use google to find definitions of words rather than looking them up in an online dictionary.
To do this, search for "define:" followed by the word (without quotes) you want to find the meaning of.
For example: "define:potato".