The Geek Survival Kit

When you’re a geek like me and you’re forced to survive in the wild (outside of your room), you might not know what to do. Conversations can be awkward, and often lead to you striking up conversations about that shock video you saw last week online. But I find when I’m at school, surviving in the wild is much easier, because I’m surrounded by computers. The only problem is that its not MY computer. With this article, I aim to help you make any computer YOUR computer.

All you need is a USB flashdrive. I use a 1gig LG flash drive, but something as small as 128mb will do. First of all, go to Portable Apps and download the Portable App installer. Install the program onto your flashdrive (it’ll take a while to do this, so go watch 2girls1cup or something :D). Once that’s done, you’ll want to start up the portable version of Firefox. This is where a majority of your survival kit will be going.

If you don’t already have one, head over to google and sign up for an account. With this account you’ll have access to Google mail (gmail), Calendar, docs, and many others. With this account, you get 6GB of online storage. And the best way to use that storage is a little Firefox plugin called GSpace. With GSpace, you can upload/download any file you want via Firefox. That means that if you’re finishing up a class and you’ve got some homework you need to finish up, you can upload the word doc, the images, the audio files, or whatever you need to Google and head home, download/complete the assignment and reupload for download at school. Now you might be saying that you can easily do this with a flash drive. This is true. But if you’re a graphic or web design major (I’m web major), you’ll have MASSIVE files that will very quickly fill up your flashdrive. But with Google + GSpace, you can fill up your 6GB with endless amounts of stuff.

This next one is setting your homepage to http://igoogle.com.  Here you can find little widgets and dock them on the page. Personally, I’ve got Calendar, Gmail, and a few others docked so I can easily view my schedule, email, etc. Also remember to trick out your Firefox. Even though its portable, this version of Firefox can use plugins and themes just like the full version. The only difference is that Firefox auto-clears the browsing history when you remove the flashdrive (this reduces the amount of space needed to store Firefox).

Lastly, make use of the programs on Portable Apps.  There are a ton of smaller versions of popular programs that you can use. There’s graphics editors, text editors, IM clients, and more. Also, you can easily add your own programs that will show up on the Portable Apps menu on the computer. I’ve got some GBA/SNES emulators on mine, alone with a few smaller games (Conquest, Crayon Physics, etc.).

Posted in Google, How To, Life, Technology | 1 Comment »

Top 5 Firefox Addons for Web Designers

One of the greatest things about Mozilla Firefox is the addons. And since a lot of Firefox developers are web designers, there’s a ton of tools made just for web designers. So I present to you my 5 favorite. Which means they’re the best, I guess.

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Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Technology, Web Design, Windows | No Comments »

Windowed Mode

love to play games. So much so that I like to do other things while I play them. For example, while playing World of Warcraft, I often have to read up on something in the WoW Wikipedia or the official site. So instead of minimizing the game, I have it set to windowed mode.

World of Warcraft has really spoiled me, because it has excellent built-in windowed mode support. But most games don’t. The other PC games I play a lot are Sim City 4 and The Sims 2. Neither of which have any built-in support for windowed mode. This is quite annoying for me, because I’m one of those people that likes keeping an eye on their buddylist, inbox, etc. So I googled around to find the answer and now I’ll share it with you. First of all, find the shortcut to the game (or the actual .exe file of the game. Either will do) and right click on the icon. Then click Properties.

On your game there should be a little box with the path to the game in it (labeled as “Target:”). At the end of the path (after the final quote mark), type -window. Then click “OK”. This only works with some games, so you might need to try just -w after the final quote instead of -window. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just look at the above image. It’s the “final product” of this whole thing. Even with one of the two at the end of the path, it still might not work. I have no idea why, but some (maybe most) programs don’t have support for that. So if those don’t work, you can give 3D-Analyze a shot. Amongst other things, it can force games into windowed mode. To do this, unzip the files into a directory and run 3DAnalyze.exe. Then click “SELECT” and find and select the .exe for the game you want to run in windowed mode. NOTE: It HAS to be the .exe. Using the shortcut doesn’t work with this thing. After you’ve selected it, click off “Force Windowed Mode” at the bottom of the “Performance” column. Then click RUN.

This also may or may not work. But hopefully one of the two methods I’ve given will work for you. If not, actually check your game to see if it has it already. It’ll be under the graphics or display setting. I’ll be updated this article as I find new ways to force windowed mode.

Posted in Gaming, How To, Windows | 2 Comments »