Text manipulation

• In some text editors (like Notepad++), holding the Alt key while selecting text will select a rectangle of text instead of lines.
• Double-clicking text then dragging your mouse around will select words instead of characters. Not cool enough for you? Triple-click text to select paragraphs.
• Delete entire words instead of letters by holding the Ctrl key while you press the backspace and delete buttons.
• You can also move the cursor from word to word by holding the Ctrl key while you press the arrow keys.
• Holding the shift key while moving the cursor with the arrow keys will select the text the cursor passes over. This can be used in combination with the previous tip.
• Drag and drop selected text to move it from a field to another.

Web browsers

Most web browser shortcuts can be found on in the browsers’ documentation. Here are the links to the most popular ones:

Firefox | Chrome | Internet Explorer | Opera | Safari

Some interesting highlights:

• Ctrl+Click on a link will open it in a new tab. You can also click links with the scroll button to achieve the same effect.
• In most browsers, Ctrl+K will give the focus to the URL bar and Ctrl+L to the search box.
• Ctrl+Shift+T will restore the last closed tab in most browsers.
• Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab will navigate back and forth between open tabs. Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown do the same thing.

Windows

• Ctrl+Shift+Esc shows the task manager. This is especially useful in Windows Vista and Windows 7 since it skips the full-screen menu page you see when you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

iPhone

• To close a buggy application, hold the power button until you see the “Slide to power off” screen, then release it and hold the home button until it disappears.
• To reset the device, hold the home and power buttons for a few seconds.
• Double-tap the top bar in Safari to go back to the top of the page.

The HOSTS file is a quick and painless way to block websites that could harm your computer or show you an alternative meaning to “Lemon Party”. If you haven’t learned about it yet, here’s how it works.

Now let’s say you want to create a shortcut to the file so you can easily add new websites to it.

1. First, create a shortcut to notepad.exe on your desktop (%windir%\system32\notepad.exe in Windows 7).
2. Right-click the shortcut and select Properties
3. If you use Windows Vista or 7, click Advanced…, check Run as an administrator and press Ok. We need administrator rights to edit the HOSTS file.
4. In the Target field, add %windir%\system32\notepad.exe %windir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts to the end of the shortcut. If you did it right, the shortcut path should be the following: %windir%\system32\notepad.exe %windir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

You might want to use an explicit name such as “Edit the hosts file” and place it in your Start menu in order to quickly find it with the Start menu search box.

After a week of testing Windows 7 and almost no mishaps (don’t try zipping a 20GB file!), I decided Windows 7 was worthy of my attention. I slowly started moving my software, parameters and documents to the new platform and I don’t regret it. When going back to Vista to remove stuff, I couldn’t help but notice how much slower it was compared to the new OS.

It’s totally worth a switch!

On a side note, I couldn’t help but notice how inefficient software removal is in Windows. I got so used to simply unchecking checkboxes to remove applications I had forgot how ridiculously retarded it was in Microsoft’s OS. I know it’s stupid, but wouldn’t an operating system with an App Store-like filtering of applications be an awesome thing to see on a full OS? As long as there is a way to circumvent it (oh wait, multiverse…), people wouldn’t mind…

Since I’ve been using Vista, I found a really annoying “bug” with the keyboard. As you are typing something in a program, the keyboard’s language randomly changes to another language. While it’s easy to revert back to the original layout, it’s annoying when it happens over and over again.

What do I do?

Apparently, the keyboard layout changes automatically when you press CTRL+SHIFT. The solution is to disable that action by going in Control Panel then in Regional settings and in Keyboard and languages, remove the second language (the one you don’t use). Once this is done, go in the next tab and turn off the CTRL+SHIFT shortcut. Voilà!

It’s been a month since I burned and installed Ubuntu for the first time. Since then I fell in love with it and don’t plan to stop using it soon. However there are some features that are obviously missing and quite important. Most of them involve file operations, something I found quite crippled on Ubuntu.

On of them that got me quite frustrated is the overwriting/renaming tasks. I have two SD cards for my camera and I had to transfer the pictures from both cards to my Pictures folder. Since pictures have the same name on both cards, I had to rename them prior to moving them. However it’s apparently impossible to rename multiple files at once. I was really deceived and simply rebooted on Vista and did everything from there. Vista now has this neat feature that when you move files with the same name, you are prompted to either overwrite the files, rename the new files or cancel the operation.

The trash sucks too. There is no restore button so you have to copy/paste your way through your problems. Thankfully, you can add a “delete” option to the menu to skip the trash. For some reason, they also decided removable media also had to have the trash system. It’s not such a bad idea, but since the “deleted” files are still on your card (in a Trash??? folder), this hogs all the space on your card, especially when you deal with big files. They should instead ask you if you want to put it to a trash folder on your computer or simply delete it instead.

I also found that the “autorun” for storage cards is quite limited. I’d love to see a menu like on XP/Vista where you can select what to do.

I guess that’s all, from what I noticed. I’m just throwing in my two cents because I doubt I’m the only one being frustrated by these problems. Nonetheless Ubuntu is still excellent and worth a try. I guess you can always use F-Spot to sort your photos too.

Remember when I installed Ubuntu a few weeks ago because Vista fucked up during an update? Well once I restored the system I decided to permanently install Ubuntu along with Vista. Since then I pretty much abandonned Vista except for syncing my Pocket PC and installing applications on it. Do you know why I stopped using Vista? Here’s why!

Booting up Vista is long, very long. In fact, booting Ubuntu from closed to the moment everything is loaded takes under a minute. With Vista, I can enter my password and take a piss and the thing is still loading.

Then you realize Vista is a power whore. You boot Ubuntu and after a few seconds the hard drive is idle and everything is calm. With Vista, even if you don’t touch it for hours, the laptop’s hard drive will still spin endlessly until you power it off.

There’s also the fucking updates. You are asked to install 250mb of important updates everywhere, along with antivirus updates, driver updates and the list goes on. Ubuntu notifies you daily of updates too, except they take a minute to install, won’t require a reset and feature 99% less nights of Googling around to find out the update fucked up everything.

Uninstalling software is much faster on Ubuntu. When I first tried to uninstall something (“something” being the ton of bloatware that came with the laptop), I was wondering how the heck the average person could find the “Programs and functionalities” in the Control Panel. In Ubuntu? Simply click “Add/Remove software” in the applications menu. Also, you don’t have to Google for an hour every week to find a solution to a problem that randomly appeared.

Finally, probably the best thing about Ubuntu is that everything you need to start is there. You have an IM client, Internet browser, organizer and all the rest at hand right after installation. 

There is much more stuff that made my switch definitive, notably the fact everything is free, the virus are not a worry, errors are not clueless messages, incredible community support and the infinite customization.

On the other side, Ubuntu has its load of disadvantages, but as long as you are not a programmer or a gamer, few of them really hamper the experience. Ubuntu is so fast… so simple… you never have to worry about anything!

I will stay on Linux.

The first time I ried Vista, I thought it was awesome. The thing worked so well, it was so beautiful…

But NOW, now everything has crashed for no reason at least once (even the fucking touchpad drivers, many times!), now that even popping the start menu had me restarting the thing, I can say it officially, Vista sucks.

What a great idea that went so horribly wrong.