How-To Geek

What geek doesn’t like Bruce Campbell?  This looks like another classic!  What are some of your favorite Bruce flicks?

Whether you are responsible for a server or just a programmer doing development, you’ll often have more than one logfile that you want to track at the same time. There’s a nifty little utility for Linux called MultiTail that allows you to monitor multiple logs in a single window, instead of requiring multiple separate shell windows open.

One of the features that regular users seem to love in Windows Vista is the sidebar’s analog clock. Every time I glance at somebody’s desktop in a coffee shop they are using one. Windows XP users are not left out in the cold with the ClocX desktop clock that works similarly.

Well, I figured I would join The Geek in the social network-sphere (is that a word?) … Anyway, I think it will be a lot of fun meeting our readers and hooking up online. I am not sure how much I will be updating these sites at first, but just bear with me and I will get them rolling as quickly as possible. The main focus of my time right now is the HTG site. Go ahead and add me to your profiles! We hope to get the largest network of computer geeks on the Web!

This morning an email came in from the very friendly reader Gordy, who asked if it was possible to automatically start up Task Manager in minimized mode when booting the machine… so this article is for him, and hopefully it’ll help somebody else as well.

I’ve received a ton of requests from the readers on how to contact me on various social sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg, so I decided to put together a page where you can add me as a friend on your social network of choice.

In a previous article I wrote about minimizing The Ribbon in Office 2007.  This is great for saving space on your screen so you have more area to work.  In that article I mention that you can still pull up The Ribbon for any function you need while working on a document.  Here I am going to show a different take on accomplishing tasks while keeping The Ribbon hidden.  I usually only use the most basic functions, but if I need to add more we always can. 

Our forum moderator Scott is a big fan of theming his system, so when he found this sweet new theme for Firefox he sent it over right away, and I’m sharing it with everybody else.

If you are throwing a party and listening to music or videos using Windows Media Player, you’ll probably not want anybody messing with the rest of your computer while you are off trying to win somebody’s affection.

In the blogging world, it’s important to post articles at roughly the same time each day so you can be consistent for your readers. You already know how to submit a post for a future date in WordPress, but did you know you can specify both a date and time when using Windows Live Writer?

Create a subfolder named “Batch Printsâ€? under “Mailbox – YourNameâ€? in Outlook.

In the blogging world, it’s important to post articles at roughly the same time each day so you can be consistent for your readers. So how do we accomplish this in WordPress?

The last time I was too lazy to write anything turned out to be extremely popular, so I decided to do it again since I’m enjoying a cup of coffee a few thousand miles away.

I’m not a fan of wasted space in user interfaces, so any time I can consolidate down to only useful functionality I’m happy about it. The subject today is how to consolidate the Firefox toolbars down to just the items we actually use, to save space for the 45 tabs I like to have open.

We’ve already covered how to take a quick look at the list of installed drivers using DriverView, but what if you are on a machine that doesn’t already have that software installed? There’s a command line utility that comes bundled with Windows Vista or XP that gives you similar output.

One of the best features in Linux is the way you can control processes from the command line, so if you have an application that locks up your GUI, you can always SSH over from another machine and just kill the offending process.

It’s been nearly a year since the new Yahoo! Messenger for Vista was announced, and we were promised a beautiful application that utilized the new Aero features in Windows Vista. The new client is definitely beautiful, although not necessarily useful or especially functional.

If you are using WordPress as the platform behind your blog or website you probably know that there have been a lot of security holes, not just in the software itself, but also in the plugins as well. In light of these problems, we’ll look at how to prevent hacking attempts by locking down your administration folder.

Update! Our friend Ryan from CyberNet pointed out a bug in the version I posted yesterday, so you’ll want to update your bookmarklet with the fixed version provided below. Sorry for the trouble!

While updating my work computer I came across a pop up that was welcoming to the Microsoft Download Center Beta. I thought it rather odd M$ would throw a pop up at me. I checked out the URL and it seemed legit … so I went with it. Besides … it’s only my work computer … LOL.

If you have a computer with pre-installed Windows 7 or Vista, most likely you’ll notice the manufacturer’s support information when you look in the system properties window. If you’d like to customize this information or use a picture of your own in this space, you can do so easily.

Have you ever remembered the name of a page that you viewed recently but couldn’t remember the full link? Usually you’d end up searching through your browser history or just end up Googling for it again. So how do we power up the address bar search functionality to make this simpler?

We’ve already showed you how to use Gmail’s IMAP support in Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and even KMail, but what about the built-in mail client in Windows Vista… how could we leave that one out?

Gmail’s IMAP support is one of the biggest things to hit the webmail world since, well, Gmail. We’ve already covered how to use imap from Outlook, and now it’s time to show everybody how to use it from the open-source Mozilla Thunderbird email client.

As a website owner I’m constantly checking different browsers at different resolutions to make sure that the site is going to look at least tolerable for everybody. This is especially important for me since I’m really not a very good web designer… so I have to triple check everything.