Dan's Web Spot

"Smart" phones are cool. Phones like the iPhone or BlackBerry let you install both free and paid applications on them that provide some cool or useful (hopefully both) functionality. Let me point out one of the most popular phrases of 2009 (according to a University of Princeton survey): "There's an app for that" -Apple, referring to their iPhone. And cool it is...

Over the past decade, there have been many technological changes, from the prevalence of PDAs to laptops to Netbooks to Smart Phones. Look out, because I don't think things are done evolving quite yet. There are plans for a multi-touch tablet computer revolution. Could we see an end of the computer "mouse" as we know it?

tether for PC

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Bluetooth and the Bluetooth logo are © Bluetooth.com

My Dell Inspiron 9400 originally shipped with Windows XP, but came with a free upgrade to Vista. It also has a built-in Dell TrueMobile 355 Bluetooth + EDR module, so I decided to get a Bluetooth mouse to use with it. One slick advantage of having this built-in Bluetooth adapter is that a Bluetooth mouse can connect to it directly and there is no need to plug in an external USB Bluetooth 'dongle' for the mouse.

My mouse is a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000. Every once in a while, I had to reset the Bluetooth connection to get my mouse to re-connect, or turn the mouse off then back on, but it was never frequent enough to complain about it...

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Problem:

When you try to delete or rename a file/folder in Windows Vista, you may receive an error message that says:

"Item not found. Could not find this item. This is no longer located in [folder]. Verify the item's location and try again."

But the file is there...

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If you're familiar with Power Toys for Windows XP, you know that if you install the Image Resizer Power Toy, resizing images for the web or email can be accomplished by selecting 'Resize Pictures' in right-click context menu. Not so in Vista. For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided not to include such functionality in the context menu, nor was I able to locate a 'Power Toy' for Vista that did this.

I tried out a few free image resizer tools but really didn't like any of them until I found one called Prish Image Resizer, made by a gentleman named Prish. You can find his Windows Live! blog about this tool here. If you'd prefer to download this cool, free tool directly, you can get the Prish Image Resizer here.

Microsoft still needs to work on getting some XP-equilvalent functionality like these XP-only Power Toys provide into Vista as well. My second favorite Power Toy is the TweakUI for Windows XP Power Toy. With this tool, you can adjust many core and even hidden Windows settings, all from one easy-to-use interface. You can adjust menu pop up speed, the icon overlay image on shortcuts, whether or not to prefix 'Shortcut to' on all shortcuts, and even hide user accounts on the Welcome Screen. You can get TweakUI for Windows XP here.

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