My MacBook Air 2010, running OSX Lion, has been very sluggish of late, with typing in a new window often lagging by a second or so. I’ve had plenty of other problems with the unit too, but I think I’ve fixed the lag through a process suggested here:

Thanks xraydoug.

But one of the most annoying features of the software for Windows users is the ridiculous Skype Home popup window that can’t be disabled when running in compact view. There are workarounds but they’re ugly.

Thanks to a guy called Andrew Worcester it is not possible to kill Skype Home through a small system tray app he’s written called, logically enough, Kill Skype Home, or KSH for short.

It does exactly what it’s supposed to:

Download the app.

Install it.

You’ll see a little circle in the system tray.

Right click on it and select "Start with Windows" (assuming you want the app to run automatically on startup.

Restart Windows.

Check Skype Home doesn’t appear.

Make donation to Andrew for his excellent work.

Install DiskUsage to see what’s taking up most space (or go to Settings/Applications/Manage applications/Running and then Menu/Sort by size)

Install App 2 SD to move any app that will work off your phone’s memory to the SD card.

If contacts seem to be taking up the bulk of your space, try the following:

• Go to Settings/Applications/Manage applications/Running
• Open Contacts Storage
• Clear data
• Go to Contacts/Menu/Display options/Choose contacts to display
• Select only those groups to sync that you need on your phone (go to google.com/contacts on your PC to manage your groups. It’s easier)

To keep an eye on how much memory and SD card space you have, install Mini Info

The best way to resolve this is to try rebooting. That fixed it for me, and it should for you.

In other words: If you don’t see new bookmarks in your delicious Firefox sidebar, then you may want to try the below.

Anyway, I couldn’t find anything useful explaining how to do this, so here we go.

Close Firefox.

Go to the Firefox profile directory.

That’s going to be:
Windows Vista/Seven: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
WinXP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Mac OS: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles

Rename ybookmarks.sqlite file to something like ybookmarks.old.

Restart Firefox.

Close the delicious sidebar if it’s open.

Reopen it. You should see your bookmarks appear, and, eventually, all your tags.

But install Google Desktop Search and you’re likely to lose the global shortcut key of Win + F, and there’s no obvious way to get it back.

Here’s how.

1. Open Control Panel.
2. Find Default Programs (you may have to set Control Panel to classic view to find it.)
3. In there, open Set Default Programs.
4. For Windows Search Explorer, click on Set this program as default.
5. Click OK.
6. You’re done.

Source: Forum.

For Singapore owners: For SingTel customers, the Nexus One should auto-connect to their 3G network.  For Starhub and M1 customers, they will need to enter in their APN settings to connect to their 3G network. 

1.  Go to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names.

2. Hit Menu button, create new APN.

3. Enter new APN settings.  See below for the details.

4. Hit Menu button, save settings.

5. Select the new APN name, then hit the home button.  Your 3G connection will shortly appear in the top bar.

If users can’t find the answers they need, they can call the HTC Support line in Singapore at 1-800-238-7788 from 8am-8pm, Monday to Saturday.  HTC is providing local support and repair services for Nexus One.

=============

For Starhub customers:

- name: Starhub Internet

- APN: shwapint

- username: [leave blank]

- password: [leave blank]

For M1 customers:

- name: M1 Internet

- APN: sunsurf 
- username: 65 
- password: user123

And in case it is not working for SingTel customers:

- name: SingTel Internet

- APN: internet 
- username: 65IDEAS (or blank) 
- password: IDEAS (or blank)

• you want to send your attachment direct from the program (Word etc)
• you want to send more than one attachment per email
• you’re used to dragging and dropping attachments

Here’s how to make it easier.

Sending files direct from a Windows application

Affixa is a small program that sits between you and Gmail, turning Gmail into the default email client for mailto: links (links on webpages that launch whatever is your Windows email program).

Affixa is relatively painless to install.

Now , for example, you can send a file straight from Microsoft Word via Gmail.

You can do the same thing right clicking on a file in Windows Explorer (or whatever it’s called in Windows Seven) and then selecting Send to/Mail recipient:

Affixa will alert you when the email is ready:

Sending multiple files via drag and drop

If you’re a drag and drop person, you can add files to Gmail using Affixa’s basket, a small app that sits in the system tray into which you can drag files, or groups of files.

When you’re done collecting the files, hit the email button at the bottom and Affixa adds them to an email:

That email is then put in your Gmail draft folder. (Be patient; this can take a while. Probably too long.)

Another option, if the files are all in the same folder, is to use a Firefox extension called dragdropupload which lets you drag multiple files straight into Gmail (and Facebook and Flickr).

Once the extension is installed, create a new Gmail email message and then drag the selected files into the light blue area around the Subject field.

You’ll know if you’re doing it right when the mouse turns to a thumbnail of the files with the number of files above it in blue:

I find this works more quickly than Affixa. 

The basic version of Affixa is free; a more fully featured version costs £2 a year. The Firefox extension is free, but its author Sankazim welcomes donations via PayPal.

Text

CTRL + R Right align text

CTRL + E Center align text

CTRL + L Left align text

Spacing

CTRL + 1 For single spaced lines

CTRL + 2 For double spaced lines

CTRL + 5 For 1.5 spaced lines

Function keys

F9 Send an email to the contact you’re chatting with

F11 Start a voice chat with the contact

F12 Cancel the current call

Other

ESC Close the current window

ALT + ESC Close all Google Talk windows

WINDOWS + Esc  Open Google Talk if minimized, or behind other windows

Tab/CTRL+Tab/Ctrl+i Cycle through open windows

Shift+Tab Cycle backwards through open windows

Sources

Google Talk keyboard shortcuts

Shortcuts from Customize Talk

I find the icons for websites (favicons, to be precise) very useful for making thoughts stand out:

But sometimes PersonalBrain either doesn’t get them or forgets them, defaulting back to the boring standard icon:

It took me way too long to figure this out, but you can easily refresh the stored icon.

Make the thought you want to refresh the active one.

Open the properties tab or right click on the thought and select Properties and Attachments:

Right click on the link and select Refresh URL icon:

You should see the old icon change to the website’s one:

This is the way it should be done

The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall.

In other words, it should make geographical dicing of the twitter torrent easier.

Geotagging is turned off by default. To turn it on, go to your settings page and look for the location section:

Check the enable geotagging box:

(To delete such data in the future, click on the button below it.)

To see it in action, check out one of the applications that has already built this functionality in. (Twitter lists Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro as among those which have.)

If someone has it enabled, you’ll see it on Seesmic web as a small beacon. Mouse over it and a map will pop up:

I’ve been particularly dense about figuring this out, so, having stumbled upon it, I thought I’d share it with anyone who hasn’t gotten the most out of Evernote—particularly its tagging features. I’m surprised that Evernote doesn’t make more of this. It seems to be buried deep in their documentation, but to me, if I can remember all the parameters, it suddenly makes Evernote a much more powerful beast.

As Mark Stout points out, you can then save a complex search in Evernote and that becomes a filter of its own.

The easiest way to find something is just to type a keyword for it in the search box.

Indonesia

If you want to exclude a word from the results, prefix it with the minus sign:

-indonesia

If you’re looking for any of several words—in other words soeharto OR suharto—you can use the modifier any.
Note there has to be a space between the any: and the first search term. Any: must be after other parameters but before the search terms. All words after any: will be assumed to be part of the any: search:

any: soeharto suharto

Tags

You can also narrow down by tags (note there’s no space between colon and the tag word):

tag:indonesia

If you add tags together, you need to preface each with tag:

tag:interview tag:thailand

If a tag is more than one word, then you need to put it in quotes:

tag:"digital abundance"

If you want to exclude all notes with a certain tag you can:

-tag:china

You can also use wildcards with (or to exclude) tags (wildcards can only appear at the end of words, or alone):

tag:com*

Notebooks

You can specify which notebook or notebooks you want to search in (so you don’t have to click on a specific notebook before you search):

notebook:unifi

The notebook parameter must precede all other parameters. 
If your notebook contains more than one word the words need to be within quotation marks: notebook:”media asia”
It doesn’t seem to be possible to use this modifier to search all notebooks (unless you add them all manually by name.)

Titles

You can limit your search to notes with a word in the title:

intitle:indonesia*

Date

You can limit your search by date. Use the terms:

• created – when the note was created
• updated – when the note was updated

on or after a specific date: created:20091113
on or after a specific time (in this case 9.15 am): created:20091113T091500
or today: created:day
or yesterday: created:-day
or the past 30 days: created:day-30
or this week: created:week
or this month: created:month
or this year: created:year

The minus sign makes all these before this date or period:

Or before a date: created:-20091113
or yesterday: created:day-1
etc

Resource

You can also find notes with or without images, audio or ink notes

notes with at least one image or gif: resource:image/gif
notes with no audio: -resource:audio/*

Sources

(but my mistakes)

Evernote API Overview

The ever-extensible Evernote

Evernote: Using Extended Search Syntax

Here’s how to close down and disable the program so it doesn’t bother you again (assuming you’re not using any of the Skype extras.)

Hit Control-Shift-Esc to bring up the Windows Task Manager.

In the Processes tab, check for skypePM.exe. This is what it should look like:

As you can see, it’s taking up nearly half my CPU.

To force it to close, click on it and hit delete. You’ll get a prompt:

Now you just need to make sure it doesn’t open automatically whenever you launch Skype. To do this, go into Options and select Advanced Settings.

In there, uncheck the box marked Automatically start Extras:

That should do it.

  You might also be interested in this: How to Search in Windows Seven

 The Master List of New Windows 7 Shortcuts – Windows – Lifehacker

Tell iTunes where your folder is (in the Advanced tab of the Preferences window):

Close iTunes.

Find the folder in which your iTunes library is. The library is where a list of your music and other settings is kept—not the music itself.

You’ll usually find the library by pasting this into your Windows Explorer:

Drive:\Users\YourUserName\Music\iTunes

Change the Drive letter and YourUserName to whatever is correct for you.

There’ll you see something like this:

Now do the same thing for your target, i.e. new computer. Open a new Windows Explorer window and paste in the following to the address bar:

Drive:\Users\YourUserName\Music\iTunes

Drive will probably be C.

Now drag the four files from the older folder to the new, replacing the existing files.

Now reopen iTunes and you should find your old playlists etc all there. (If some songs have been removed, or can’t be found in the listed folder you might get some errors.)

Sources:

Re: itunes lost?

(This was written in frustration at the lack of useful guide to making searches in Windows Seven. Some of the text is drawn from this Dummies page. Update: Also I’ve taken some stuff from this excellent article at Windows 7 News.) 

These search parameters help you narrow down what you’re looking for in Windows Seven’s Explorer (to jump to the search box in that program hit F3. From anywhere in Windows Seven hit Windows key ( ) + F) to open a new search window.

How to use filters

These filters can be used in conjunction with, or separate from, text search terms. If you just start typing a term, Windows will start looking for all files (and folders) that include that name in the file name, the folder name, the contents of the file and its metadata (tags and whatnot). Although the idea of searching as you type is a good one, it can be frustrating if you need to correct something you’ve written.

Date

Type date: (or one of the options below) and, while it may take a little while, a drop down menu should appear that will allow you to specify the date of the file you’re looking for.

Date Modified: Search for files based on the date they were last modified.

Date Created: Searches according to when the file was created. You can select the date (or a range of dates) from a mini-calendar that appears.

You can also be less specific and choose: A Long Time Ago, Earlier This Year, Earlier This Month, Last Week, Earlier This Week, or Yesterday.

(See also Date taken below.)

Boolean terms’

You can also filter use some boolean terms like AND, OR and NOT, as well as wildcards:

suharto AND indonesia

suharto NOT indonesia

*harto NOT soeharto (any word ending with ‘harto’ except ‘soeharto’)

“pak harto”

Size

Search for a specific file size by typing its KBs or MBs in the search text box. Or, you can search by various size ranges via the drop-down menu:

Kind

Search for files of a specific type as selected from the drop-down list that appears when you click the Kind option. What’s frustrating with this is that there’s only kind of Document file (i.e., you can’t use this filter to narrow it down to spreadsheets, say, or word documents. For that you need to use Type below.)

Type

Searches based on certain file types by extension, such as .pdf, .jpg, or .docx. (Waiting for the computing filter to run on this one takes a while. I wouldn’t bother.)

I don’t know whether this is true or not, but the syntax needs to include an = after the colon, like this:

type:=.doc

Leaving it out seems to include files of other types in the list:

Name

Searches by filname. You can enter all or part of the filename in the search text box after the Name filter.

When you don’t know all of a filename, you can use the asterisk (*) to stand for one or more wildcard characters in the filename and a question mark (?) to stand for individual wildcard characters.

Tag

This filter lets you search for a file by the tags assigned to it. Enter one or more tags after the Tags filter in the Search text box. If you’re not sure of the tags just wait for the drop down box to appear (it should say something like computing filters… prior to that)

Author

Search for file by a particular author. Enter an author name after the Authors filter in the Search text box or select the name from the drop-down list that appears. (This filter is called Artists when searching audio files. See below for looking for specific songs)

Filters specifically for multimedia files

Pictures

Date taken: Searches for photos by the date they were snapped.

If you have added whatever folders you’re using for your photo (or video)  files to the Pictures (or Video)  Library, then it’s probably easier to look for a photo (or video) by first clicking on Library, and then clicking on the search box, now called Search Pictures (or Search Video).

You’ll notice that the drop down menu now includes search filters relevant to photos (or video):

Music

Length: is another parameter you can use to search for an audio or video file by its relative length. You can enter the exact length or select one of the Length options that appear in the drop-down list.

If you have added whatever folder you’re using for your music files to the Music Library, then it’s probably easier to look for a song or artist by first clicking on Library, and then clicking on the search box (now called Search Music). You’ll notice that the drop down menu now includes search filters relevant to music:

I’ve fixed this dozens of times but can never remember how, so here it is as much for my sake as anyone else who is having the same problems making the text wrap at the edge of the window:

In Word Options, choose Advanced:

Scroll down to Show Document Content about half way down the boringly long list of options:

Select the second option, Show text wrapped within the document window:

Click OK. You’ll now get that white space back:

Set up Thunderbird on your new computer/drive and launch it.

Don’t bother importing anything. But you need to get Thunderbird going to set up the AppData folder. This is where everything gets stored.

Close Thunderbird.

Now find your old Profile folder. The easiest way to do this is to copy the following into your Explorer address bar:

C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming

(clicking on the address bar will change the appearance from

to the more familiar:)

If, like me, you’re moving from one partition on a drive to another, or your old stuff is on an external drive, you may also need to change the drive letter.

Then replace the [User Name] with your old user name (and remove the square brackets.)

This should take you to the following folder:

Go into the Profiles folder and find whatever folder in there has the suffix default:

Now open another Explorer folder (right click on the folder icon in your taskbar and select Windows Explorer:)

Do the same thing as before, pasting in the above text and replacing it with your new Thunderbird location. Find the profile folder. There should be an existing default folder in there.

Now drag the old default profile folder you found above into the new Profile folder. (This should keep a copy of the old profile folder, so long as you’re moving between drives. Otherwise you may want to make a backup copy first.)

You should now have two default folders together in one folder.

Now select the new default folder that Thunderbird has just created, hit F2 and then rename its suffix from default to old:

Now rename your old profile folder to the new profile folder, with the suffix default (you might just want to copy and paste the name by hitting F2 and the selecting the text, hitting Ctrl/c etc):

Now fire up Thunderbird and you should see your old emails, settings, and plugins, all working normally.

If you’re using hosters like Dreamhost you may get a message in Thunderbird if you’re using SSL which says

You have attempted to establish a connection with "www.mydomain.com". However, the security certificate presented belongs to "www.otherdomain.com". It is possible, though unlikely, that someone may be trying to intercept your communication with this web site.

This can be a pain if you’re sending lots of emails because Thunderbird doesn’t offer you a way to disable future messages.

There are two ways around this:

- change the settings of your email server. Here’s the advice at Dreamhost.

- I found that way too complicated as it would mean changing it for each of my domains. So the next option is to install a add-on written by Andrew Lucking, which basically adds a check box to the dialog:

Problem solved.

Sources:

Remember Mismatched Domains

What security settings should I use? (Dreamhost)

Thunderbird’s identify management is a dog’s dinner, in my opinion. One problem with it is that, at least in the present version, there’s a bug preventing you from saving changes from one SMTP server to another. In other words, you’ll think you’ve changed the outgoing server for your email identity, and then find that in  fact you haven’t. Frustration follows.

One solution is to delete the offending identity and start over. I couldn’t figure out how to do that so I just removed the SMTP server that the program was defaulting back to (even if it wasn’t the default, if you follow):

Delete that one and then start over.