If you ever need to open a command prompt window from a Vista right-click menu (example: you sit down to use your computer and a message suddenly pops up -- "open a command prompt window from a right-click menu your computer will blow up"), how would you go about doing it?

The process is simple: hold down the shift key, then right click on a folder icon, in a folder, or the desktop. An "Open Command Window Here" option will appear in the menu as a result of the shift key's ability to, well, shift stuff. Finally, when the command window opens, take a look at the current path: it's whatever you clicked on.

All right, the headline is a little bit of a lie. Some Linux installs are hairier, take longer, and just aren't as soothing as the one we're about to show you. They do all work approximately the same way, however, and that's just fine for us as a point of illustration.

So there we are, looking at the "Download" page of an Ubuntu derived distribution. We decide that we'll download the x86 version of the distro (we'll assume we don't have a 64 bit or PPC system or don't want a 64 bit OS). So we click on the file that ends in .iso, and it starts downloading.

Now what?

Ever wish you had your whole desktop on a flash disk? You know what we mean, you take a spreadsheet up to your 'rents, and you realize that they have no program to actually open your spreadsheet with. Or maybe you hop from computer to computer in several offices, and hate the fact that every computer you work on is just different enough to make it difficult to get things done.

Even if you don't use Linux as a main desktop, it can come in handy in these types of situations. Flash storage is cheap as dirt, and there are a number of small, yet full-bodied distributions that can run off flash drives. Most modern computers can boot from USB mass storage by changing the boot order in the computer's BIOS (if you've never done this, please consult your computer's documentation. It's not particularly difficult, but does vary a bit from computer to computer.)

We're looking at two such distributions over the next couple Switch installments. The two little distributions -- Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux Not -- have been chosen for their flexibility and very different approaches to the same issues. Many distributions can be pared down to fit on flash drives, but these two are optimized for it from the get-go.

The command line. It strikes fear in the hearts of many a new Linux user. They open their terminals reluctantly, and there the prompt sits, with the cursor blinking in rhythm with their racing hearts. What does that blinking cursor want? It's expecting something... It wants something...

All right, so maybe it's not horror movie material.

But it is intimidating for many new users. Navigating the command line might be a mystery to you, or maybe you've read a little about it and wonder: out of all those commands, which ones am I really going to use? Which ones are the most help in a given situation?

Either way, we've got you covered. These are the commands we've found are most useful to new users. They range from basic navigation to commands that are great for troubleshooting.

Your shiny new Linux system has it all -- except that one program you really needed it to install. You get online, you find the program's website, and click 'download'. Except there's not just a link to the program there.

There are four, or five, or more links to the program. Each has a slightly different format, ending with .rpm, .deb, .tgz, or possibly even .ebuild.

Some include x86 in the name, while others say ppc or amd64. What's the difference? What's actually included in these packages?

Packages are pre-compiled programs for your system (the exception being Gentoo's .ebuild). You've got to know a bit about your system to install them.

We know, being responsible is just so, hard. Electronics which run the nifty software we cover and love contain some nasty stuff that's not so friendly for the environment when left to rot in a landfill. So what's a gadget oving geek to do? Recycle.

Our newest little sister, DIY Life, has a great article on the basics of responsibly recycling your old gear. So, clean out that junk drawer and put those useless gadgets where they belong!

By the way, DIY Life posts all sorts of nifty tips, tech related and not so tech related. If you've got a hankerin' to get your tinker on, check 'em out and find some weekend projects.

Want to learn how to choose a video game system or how to take care of a kitten? SuTree can help.

The new site from Israel-based E-learning Knowledge Solutions allows users to submit videos that are posted in various places on the internet, including About.com, Grouper, and Metacafe.

The result is a collection of how-to videos that you can search or browse from a central location. When you find a video you want to watch, you click the image and are taken to the original video source.

The service works well as a repository for DIY and how-to videos, which are often hard to find under the videos of teenagers talking to webcams and people doing silly stuff on sites like YouTube. Currently, SuTree has over 5000 videos indexed, covering topics ranging from parenting to sports.
[via TechCrunch]

PuTTY is tops on the short list of applications I install first on any Windows machine. Over the years I've used PuTTY, I've installed it on a huge number of computers but I've always had one complaint; There isn't a configuration file I can backup or move to a new machine.

Getting all the little comfort settings correct for each SSH connection can be a pain. The third time you set emulation, keys, encryption type, etc. for each machine you regularly access, you lose patience. The fifth time you find yourself re-entering settings you might do what I did, find a better way.

Making your own Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X is nothing new, but making your own Widgets using the Dashcode Developer Beta changes the entire process. Apple has taken the ease of use of Xcode and whittled it down to scale, providing all the tools necessary to quickly and easily develop your own Widgets. In this How To I'll show you how to go about creating a Download Squad RSS widget. Follow along if you like, but by all means feel free to improvise.

This is a very simple How To and is not intended to teach you how to code a Widget from scratch, but to show you how easy it is with Dashcode to create one. If you would like to find out more about developing Dashboard Widgets, check this guide on Apple's site.

Most audio software these days offer either built-in or plugin functionality that will attempt to level the volume of your MP3 files so that you aren't turning the volume up to hear soft songs, then getting blasted by louder ones. So why is it that even after turning that option on, you sometimes notice a significant volume difference between some songs? What's worse is when you're listening to songs from the same album, and the volumes jump around abnormally after applying volume normalization.

The problem is that the vast majority of audio player programs use peak amplitude analysis to determine how "loud" a song is and normalize based on that, rather than doing a more comprehensive analysis of the frequencies that impact how loud the music actually sounds. But even those that do a more comprehensive analysis fail to consider songs within the context of the album they belong to.

Luckily, there's a great little utility called MP3 Gain that does lossless volume analysis and adjustment based on David Robinson's Replay Gain algorithm, as well as allowing for the volume of entire albums to be processed. MP3 Gain has been around for a number of years, and it doesn't appear that it is being actively developed anymore, but since MP3 technology hasn't changed much either that doesn't matter for our purposes.

So, how do you fix an entire library of music? Pretty easy, actually. MP3 Gain offers batch processing options that allow you to process an entire folder at once. But if you collect music albums, you'll want to do those separately. The reason is that MP3Gain offers two modes: Radio and Album. Radio analysis and gain adjustment will adjust all songs to the same maximum decibel level. Album mode analyzes all of the songs in an album, essentially considering them to be one entire song, then adjusts them all to a maximum decibel level, but maintains their relative volume.

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and all you need to know is a little bit about HTML and how to read. If you already have your own website, it is not hard to do. Follow these steps to AJAX up your site in no time:

1. Download script.aculo.us. Click on any of these links to begin downloading the zip, tar.gz, or tar.bz2 version.
   
   
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, preferably somewhere you will find it again. This is key.
   
   
3. Upload the whole thing to your web server, and put it where ever you like, again, it should be somewhere you can find it. Once again, finding it is key. You will need to link to these files from your web page, so putting the files in a sub folder of your home directory (root for you unix junkies) is a good idea.
   
   
4. In the header section of your web pages, you need to put this code:
   

   <script src="ajax/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
   <script src="ajax/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

   As you might notice, the code has to point to your uploaded script.aculo.us files. You would replace the "ajax/" portion with your own path depending on the name of your subfolder.
   
   
5. Next, put the one line of code into your pages or posts where ever you want the effect to take place. Let's say you have a content div element you want to have all the sudden appear in the page, all you do is wire the "SlideDown" effect (one of many in script.aculo.us, download the cheat sheet here) to a button, link, or other clickable element on your page. The code to trigger the SlideDown effect from a link looks like this:
   
   <a href="#" onclick="Effect.SlideDown('content');">SlideDown Now!</a>
   
   Why use an <a> tag? First, it is super simple to code (everyone knows it), and second, users think it is an ordinary link. They will be quite surprised when they find out it isn't normal at all. I call this "hacking old-skool users into using web 2.0 unknowingly" (or something like that).
   
   
6. Anyway...be sure your div tag has the id="content" because that is the name of the element the SlideDown effect will be applied to once you click the "link" we just made. Make sense? Good. NOTE: Something to remember is that your DIV will be shown on the page automatically by default, unless you first hide it, so the visual magic of an effect such as SlideDown can really be displayed. To "hide" our div by default so your content won't appear until you click the link we just made, you will need to add an inline CSS style (or add one in your CSS file, if you have one) so the content div ends up looking like this:
   

   <div id="content" style="display: none;">This is the content.</div>

   You'll notice (I hope) that the underlined code is the part that hides this div by default. When the SlideDown effect is triggered by clicking on the <a> link, it will automatically change the div's display property, so don't worry about having to do that.
   
7. Try it out, and have fun! It should slide down your content, which can be anything you put in that div tag, video, audio, pictures, more javascript, an iframe, whatever, use your imagination. There are tons of different effects you can use, so you should check them out at script.aculo.us's website, since they have great demos and even combination demos for different sets of effects.
   
   Since the script.aculo.us wiki is large and contains a lot of information to consume all at once, I have compiled a basic script.aculo.us effects cheat sheet of sorts for your quick and dirty coding enjoyment. You can download my PDF cheat sheet here.

Have fun AJAXing your site, and once you're done, come back and give us a link to your site so we can see what you've done with the place. I'd love to check out your site with the framework in action. It can do some wicked cool stuff. You can build entire sites out of script.aculo.us including AJAX drop-downs, AJAX page loading, and custom stuff. Let me know how your site turns out with it.

NOTE (to lightbox and TinyMCE users): There are some special instructions on integrating script.aculo.us with both of these other frameworks, since they all use Prototype to some extent. You can find TinyMCE help here (script.aculo.us wiki) and most lightbox frameworks list this info on their support page or forums section of the site. Have fun!

Are you good at writing tutorials? Or maybe you have amassed a collection of tutorials you have written for friends and family? Maybe you're just looking for some inspiration? Enter tutorialicio.us. It's the del.icio.us and digg of the tutorial world. Tutorials are submitted and are voted on by members to rise to the top of tutorial land to be seen on the front page of the site. All of the tutorials are focused on programming and design, from creating a Web 2.0 logo to building a simple search engine with Python and MySQL. Although the database seems small at the moment, tutorialicio.us is focused on a little niche market that loves to show and tell.

Does it really have to be so difficult? I seem to remember the CEO of Motorola waxing poetic early in 2004 about "liquid media," that elusive, end-to-end solution where you buy some content, and you almost effortlessly push said content to any device you own. And then we get the gotchas: as long as it's from Motorola, or as long as it's from iTunes, or as long as it Plays for Sure... Who cares! I want my Family Guy on my wrist watch! Yeah, well until then, luckily we have Engadget to pour on the knowledge. This time it's making your Tivo play all sorts of music from your PC. And not just recorded stuff, but pretty much anything. Sirius radio, Yahoo music, you know, all that DRM'ed nonsense. To top it off, they're bypassing Tivo's lame desktop server app, because it will just die sometimes. Instead, they've rolled up SHOUTcast, Winamp, and Galleon to give you those sweet sounds you've been missing. On your TV. Go figure.