You just have to love an online game that knows exactly what it aims to be. And the concept of this game is, well, rather difficult. The Rather Difficult Font Game tests your ability to recognize typefaces by showing you a piece of text and then four font names. Your job is to correctly choose the correct typeface.
As with any multiple-choice test with a limited set of answers, this game becomes rather less difficult as you go, if you're careful to remember what you've already seen. While we're certainly not font experts, by process of elimination we were able to score an 18 out of 30 on our first try.
Like any good time waster, this one can be done relatively quickly, like maybe during your coffee break. And if you are the type of person that feels guilty about the time you spend playing time wasting online games, you can tell yourself that at least with this one you're learning something. Whatever lets you live with yourself, right?
Deleting empty subdirectories seems like something Windows ought to do automatically, but for some reason that function just isn't included as part of the OS. Luckily, you don't need to download a utility to do it; instead, you can create a single line batch file that will do exactly what you're looking for:
for /f "usebackq" %%d in ("dir /ad/b/s | sort /R") do rd "%%d"
Raymond Chen, the venerable Microsoft coder, explains how this works. Basically, it uses a trick to enumerate the directories in reverse order. Since you can't delete a directory that contains data (including other directories) the only way to automate deleting directories is to start at the very bottom of the tree and work your way up.
Speed is all about perception, so any tip that makes a computer feel faster is gold as far as we're concerned. Today's tip is a doozy from Raymond Chen, the venerable Microsoft developer and blogger.
According to Chen, a number of user interface timers in Windows key off of the double-click speed registry setting.
The default double-click speed in Windows is 500ms , or exactly 1/2 of a second. Try dropping that down to 250ms -- about three-quarters of the way towards Fast -- and watch the rest of Windows feel just a bit snappier, since a number of other Windows user interface timings use that setting as a reference. Cool!
Twitter users are increasingly starting to question whether the frequent number of Twitter accounts that are following them are actually people, or simply a form of Twitter spamming. The rule of thumb with that sort of question is usually that if you think something nefarious might be going on, unfortunately, you're probably right.
The next question that invariably comes up is, well, why? What benefit do these purported Twitter spammers get from friending everyone they possibly can? The answer is twofold:
1. There is a large number of very misguided people that seem to believe that the polite thing to do when someone follows you on Twitter is to follow them back. This is a ludicrous behavior. (As a quick aside, if one of the main things we struggle with in our high-speed, data filled lives is trying to keep a sane signal-to-noise ratio, and learning how to filter out the noise, why would we actively choose to follow random people's Twitter updates? What an incredible waste of time.) The thing is, this behavior can be and is exploited. If someone follows 20,000 random Twitter accounts, there is a very good chance that they will get at least 10% of those people following them back. Perfect! Now they have an audience of 2,000 people to spam, for free.
For some reason when a page is loading in Firefox, it doesn't seem to respond to user interaction immediately. For example, say you're loading a very long page (maybe you're using a free Backpack account), and you know that the content you need is half way down the page. By default, Firefox will ignore user interaction in favor of giving all processing power to page rendering.
It may well be that Firefox's engineers made this decision for a very good reason, but what if it bugs you that Firefox ignores you when you know exactly what you want to be doing? Well, it turns out there's a hidden setting in Firefox that will allow you to bend it to your will.
Firefox uses two priority modes when rendering a page: a low-priority mode that often checks for user input, and a high-priority mode that prioritizes page rendering over user input. There is a timer that determines how long Firefox will wait for user input before switching to high-priority rendering mode.
The Geek at How-To-Geek researched this setting, and determined that switching the default value from 750000 to 1000000 is a good balance that allows for a more responsive feeling browser, while still giving an adequate amount of time to the high-priority mode.
To make this change yourself, type about:config into your Firefox address bar, then type content.switch.threshold into the Filter field. You will likely not have any results returned. If the setting already exists, simply switch the value from the default 750000 to 1000000. If it doesn't, right click anywhere in the window and choose New > Integer. Use the following setting:
Key Name: content.switch.threshold
Key Value: 1000000
To reverse this tip, simply right-click on the setting and choose Reset from the context menu.
With Twitter being all the rage these days, it was only a matter of time before a podcast would grow out of new Twitter friendships. And the time has apparently come, since You Look Nice Today is a podcast created by three friends that decided they enjoyed each other's senses of humor so much in their tweets that they ought to start recording their interactions for everyone else to hear.
You Look Nice Today describes itself as a "journal of emotional hygiene". Whatever that means.
The subject matter of You Look Nice Today meanders pretty erratically, but fortunately it's pretty consistently entertaining. Topics range from what each host uses to wash themselves in the shower, to the relative merits of each of the types of nuts in a can of mixed nuts.
The show is squarely aimed at adults (and probably primarily male adults), and It should be noted that despite the innocuous title, You Look Nice Today is decidedly not work-safe. It proudly sports an Explicit tag in iTunes, due to both subject matter and the odd forceful expletive.
The topics are certainly entertaining, but this podcast is really about the personalities. If you're familiar with the concept of "ratholes" from MacBreak Weekly (and how they can sometimes be the most entertaining part of the show), just consider You Look Nice Today as one huge rathole, and you'll be on the right track. Your hosts are @hotdogsladies, @lonelysandwich, and @scottsimpson. This is how they describe themselves in the credits of the show, by their Twitter names rather than their given names, ostensibly due to the fact that the show grew out of their Twitter friendships. Their real names, respectively, are Merlin Mann, Adam Lisagor, and (unsurprisingly) Scott Simpson.
We're grown ups, we know there's offensive content to be found on the internet. But there offensive, and then there's offensive. Consider yourself warned: the content of the video referenced in this post is the second kind.
Most large companies do it, and it's never very good. Secreted away in some production studio, they pour ridiculous amounts of money into it, and end up disappointed with the result.
What are we talking about? Internal motivational videos.
It's probably not all that surprising that if ever there was going to be a worst-of-breed internal motivational sales video, it would come from software juggernaut, Microsoft.
We know, it sounds too good to be true. A plugin that can automatically upgrade your WordPress blog? That's what we thought, too, until we tried it. Successfully. Twice.
The fact that WordPress Automatic Upgrade isn't a default part of WordPress 2.5 is a crying shame! It installs just as you'd expect: you download the zip file, unzip it, upload the resulting folder into your plugins folder and activate it.
Once activated, you have a new entry on your Manage page in your blog's WordPress admin, called Automatic Upgrade. When you activate it, it will walk you through the following eight steps:
Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
Re-activates the plugins.
There is a fully automated mode, but we weren't quite brave enough to try that. Considering that we didn't experience so much as a hiccup on the two blogs that we upgraded to 2.5 using this plugin today (one was at version 2.2.1, and the other at 2.3.0), we're more than happy to stick to the manual mode which involves occasionally clicking the next button and downloading a couple of backup files once they're ready. Plus, it's nice to know what's going on in case there's a failure and you have to recover manually, and the plugin is great about giving verbose explanations as to what is actually going on.
How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.
Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.
Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.
Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.
You'd think it would be hard to do an online time-waster type game about being a ninja. Surprisingly, Ninja Rampage does just that.
The game is incredibly simple; your ninja character really only has a few moves: jump, crouch, walk, and stab with your sword. But for all that, the game still manages to move quickly and is fun. Ninja Rampage plays sort of like a side-scroller, except that each level is one static screen. Your goal is to move from the left side of the screen through the right side without getting killed by guards or booby-traps.
There is no apparent limit to the number of times you can die and try again, which is the right decision for a time waster. It makes it that much harder to stop playing when you know that you can try just one more time to solve a particularly frustrating level.
For a little ninja fun on your lunch break, you could do worse than Ninja Rampage.
Okay, just admit it. You know you want to. We can admit it, so we're sure you can. You want us to do it for you? Alright then, here it is:
You suck at Photoshop.
See, it wasn't so bad, was it?
The truth is, most people suck at Photoshop. But most of us also wish that we sucked a little less at it. Luckily, if your ego can handle it, Donnie Holye has created a hilarious and educational series of Photoshop tutorials titled You Suck at Photoshop.
These videos aren't for the faint of heart. Donnie has been known to use more than the odd bit of profanity, and some of the subject matter might be off-putting to our more sensitive readers. But if you have the fortitude for it, You Suck at Photoshop is an entertaining way to pick up a new Photoshop technique.
If you've ever needed to quickly make an industrial safety sign of some sort, check out Sign Builder 2.0. Using this site, you can create safety signs, ANSI signs, hazardous materials signs, or lockout tags quickly.
Registration is required, but once you have a free account it's a simple matter of choosing the type of sign you need to generate, and adding your text. The site will instantly generate a downloadable PDF file that you can then print out as needed. Obviously the possibilities for creating prank signs with this site are endless, but the practical uses are just as plentiful.
Sometimes you find the coolest things in the strangest of places. We found this site via Matt Cutts (the well-known Google blogger) in an old draft post from 2005 that he finally decided to publish this week. The post outlines how getting legitimate links coming to your site is the best and most effective form of search engine optimization. One of the examples Matt gives is to make sure that your website can do something of value, like creating safety signs.
Spin the Black Circle is an online Flash game that begins somewhat ominously; the first thing you see when starting the game is a disclaimer claiming no responsibility for anything you might do out of frustration when playing the game. While some challenge and therefore a reasonable level of frustration is part of any game, we were a little worried that this game would be too many parts "frustration" and not enough parts "fun". Luckily, although it certainly does live up to the billing in terms of being a challenging and frustrating game, it turns out that it is also very fun.
The concept of the game is fairly straightforward. It takes place inside a large black circle that you control. You can rotate the entire circle either left or right, and it moves at a constant speed. Inside the circle is a ball that is subject to the law of gravity, and the object of the game is to rotate the circle to guide the ball past various hazards to the goal. If you can tolerate the frustrating repetitiveness of some of the harder levels, you'll be rewarded with a sense of accomplishment that is probably totally unfounded. I mean, really - you beat a level in an online game. So what? Somehow that doesn't matter to us though, we're just happy to feel just a little bit better about ourselves after each level we beat.
While many people using Google Apps are already happy users of the "new" version of Gmail (apparently Google doesn't want to call it Gmail 2.0), there are still many users of Google Apps that are stuck on the older version. If you're frustrated at seeing the cool new things you can do in the new Gmail and you're still stuck on the old version, there may be something that you can do.
If you are the administrator for your Google Apps account, or can talk to that person, there is an option under Domain Settings (General tab) in the Control Panel section called "Turn on new application features to my domain before they are rolled out to all Google Apps customers." A week after we checked that box on our Google Apps account, Gmail magically transformed to the new version. Good luck!
While we may have touched on it when we covered the release of the "new" version of Gmail, we thought you (like us) might have forgotten about this great little trick.
Gmail now treats every page like a web page. Okay, that might sound a bit too obvious, so we'll explain. When you open a message, label, or do a search, each of the resulting pages you see will have a dedicated URL. This means that if you bookmark or copy and paste the URL, you can later return to exactly the same view.
Even more useful is the fact that the URL for a search works across different Gmail accounts. So if you have a friend or co-worker that you know has certain information in their email, but can't seem to find it, you can do a search in your own Gmail account, then send your friend the URL for that search and they will have the exact same search criteria applied against their own account.
By the way, if you're having trouble making this work, try accessing your account using the secure method. To do this, just ensure your Gmail URL begins with "https". For some reason we can't seem to make this trick work unless we're using this method.
You just have to love an online game that knows exactly what it aims to be. And the concept of this game is, well, rather difficult. The Rather Difficult Font Game tests your ability to recognize typefaces by showing you a piece of text and then four font names. Your job is to correctly choose the correct typeface. 
Deleting empty subdirectories seems like something Windows ought to do automatically, but for some reason that function just isn't included as part of the OS. Luckily, you don't need to download a utility to do it; instead, you can create a single line batch file that will do exactly what you're looking for:
Speed is all about perception, so any tip that makes a computer feel faster is gold as far as we're concerned. Today's tip is 
For some reason when a page is loading in Firefox, it doesn't seem to respond to user interaction immediately. For example, say you're loading a very long page (maybe you're using a free 
With Twitter being all the rage these days, it was only a matter of time before a podcast would grow out of new Twitter friendships. And the time has apparently come, since 
We know, it sounds too good to be true. A plugin that can automatically upgrade your WordPress blog? That's what we thought, too, until we tried it. Successfully. Twice.
You'd think it would be hard to do an online time-waster type game about being a ninja. Surprisingly, 
Okay, just admit it. You know you want to. We can admit it, so we're sure you can. You want us to do it for you? Alright then, here it is:
If you've ever needed to quickly make an industrial safety sign of some sort, check out 
