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Daily Clicks

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Gcal.app, a Google Calendar Client for Mac OSX Tiger

I have been using Google Calendar for a while now and absolutely love it. It is a great way for me and my wife to share what appointments we have and what not. Now there is a great program out the for Mac OSX that is basically just a very "minimalistic" web browser that only displays your Google Calendar. It is called Gcal.app and I recommend you grab it now.



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Give Your USB Flash Drives Their Own Icon

This is something I recently came across and I thought it would be an interesting tip to share with you, my reader. You can easily assign any picture you want to be the drive icon in your explorer window. All you need to do is save the picture as a .ico file and create a simple autorun. Save the .ico file as something familiar like driveicon.ico and then open up notepad and create a new text file with the contents:
[autorun]
icon=driveicon.ico

and then rename it to "autorun.inf". Make sure both of these files are in the root drive of your USB stick and you should be good to go. As long as autorun is enabled for the drive the new icon should show up.

Autorun.inf files are also helpful if you want to automatically run programs at start up. All you need to do is add a line to the autorun.inf file. We'll assume you want to autolaunch Portable Firefox.
[autorun]
icon=driveicon.ico
start portableapps\portablefirefox.exe

We leave off the drive at the beginning beacause if you use multiple computers each one may assign a different drive letter to your USB drive. We are also assuming that you have Portable Firefox installed in a directory called "portableapps" in the root of your USB drive. You can do this for any program you would like. Just change the location and the program executable and remember to put new entries on the next line in the inf file.

The Portable Apps site has a whole suite of apps you should check out. It is available on their Portable Apps Suite page.


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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Review: MacBook Invisible Shield

Paulstamatiou.com reviews the Invisible Shield for the MacBook. The Invisible shield is a great product I use for my iPod. My almost one year old black 5G iPod looks practically new because I use the Invisible Shield on it. The Invisible Shield is also offered for many other products including cell phones, gaming systems, laptops, etc... The shield for the Macbook is a little pricey ($55) but for those of you that want to protect your MacBook investment this is the way to go.

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Mac OS X Widget Update Widget

Widget, widget, widget. Can I say it a few more times? I present for your widget pleasure a widget that updates your widgets. This is for all those people that have to be on the bleeding edge with all of their software. You can set this to check daily or weekly to see if there are any new versions of your installed widgets and then it will report to you what widgets need updating. Installing this for myself was a no brainer and I would suggest that you go and grab it yourself from the DashboardWidgets.com website.

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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Parallel's Virtualization Software to be Sold in Stores

We've talked about Parallel's Virtualization software before and now it would seem they are making the smart move and offering their software for sale in Apple stores as well as some others. Until July 15th their software for Windows Virtualization on a Mac cost $49.95 but since has gone up to $79.95. Hopefully this move will push the price back down to something a little more reasonable like the $49.95.

Parallels is a piece of software that allows you to install Windows on a Macintosh. Much of the same experience is experienced with Apple's Bootcamp however no reboot is needed. You can fire up Windows in a "window" whilst still using OS X.

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YouTube and how they are still in business

I read an interesting article about Youtube today. If you've ever been there than you know how they have tons of copyrighted content up on their site. However as described in this article YouTube is actually protected from prosecution due to the DMCA of 1998. Amazing. All this time I thought the DMCA was useless but now it seems to be doing some good. Under the DMCA online service providers are protected from what it's users do while on their network. YouTube is considered jsut that so when you upload the latest episode of Chappelle's Show Comedy Central can't touch YouTube because they are not responsible for what their users do.

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Monday, July 17, 2006

Buy One Get One Free Auntie Anne's Pretzels

Print out this coupon here (pdf format) and it entitles you to one free pretzel when you buy another one. Auntie Anne's has been in business for a while now, since 1989 to be exact, and she makes some of the best pretzels in many different countries. Of course you probably knew all about Auntie Anne's good pretzels which is why you followed the link here. This coupon is good until the end of July so enjoy!



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Sunday, July 16, 2006

Use Windows Media Player to get free music downloads

Do you like free music? Sure you do. MosltySavingMoney.com details how to use Windows Media Player to get free music downloads. Basically what they tell you to do is fire up Windows Media Player. Then you should click on "Guide" and that will load WindowsMedia.com. Do a search for a song that you would like to have. Open it up and while the song plays it is actually downloading it to a temp file on your hard drive. In order to retrieve it open up My computer and in the address field type in "C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. Of course replace Your User Name with your user name. Find the song and then right click and copy. Go to another folder you'd like to keep your music in and paste it into that folder. This is nothing new but I thank them for bringing it back out. I had almost forgotten about getting files out of the temporary internet cache. This is a great way to get free MP3's and free music downloads from the internet but as usual if you are getting something you didn't pay for there may be legal ramifications. Of course if it is sitting on your hard drive and Microsoft gave it to you what are you suppose to do but keep it and put it on your MP3 player.





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