Note: Jarte comes in “Exe and Portable” versions.

Installation & Startup

One of the nice features present during the installation is the ability to choose which dictionaries that you would like to have added. Notice that even if you installed all of the dictionaries that less than 10 MB of disk space would be required.

Once the installation has finished and Jarte starts for the first time you will be presented with the EULA.

After accepting the EULA this is what Jarte looks like. At that moment it will have a minimalist UI that can be modified/expanded to best suit your needs. The fourteen different “toolbar buttons” that are visible across the top are all drop-down menus that allow you to access the various functions while keeping the UI as uncluttered as you desire.

Jarte in Action

Here is Jarte with all of the UI features active. The left side has a “Tools Sidebar” with switchable panels to give you easy access to the features that you need most. There is also a regular “Menu Toolbar” for those who prefer a more traditional menu system. Notice the “Research & Find Toolbars” that are visible directly beneath the “Tab Bar”.

Here is an example document to give you an idea of what Jarte can do. Jarte is very smooth and easy to work with.

When it is time to save your documents, Jarte can save them in .rtf, .doc, and .txt format.

Conclusion

If you have been looking for a good solid text editor for your computer that is not bloated, then Jarte will be a pleasant and enjoyable surprise.

Links

Download Jarte (version 3.4) – Exe & Portable Versions

There’s no point in writing more, let’s just get right to it…

	Watch Movies in Your Linux Terminal Window The height of pointless geekery is trying to watch movies in your terminal prompt.
	Windows 7 Easter Egg Shows the XP Alt-Tab Prompt Weird, the old-style XP dialog still shows up, if you know how to do it. Pointless, but interesting.
	Secret Items on the Windows 7 Send To Menu That’s right, there’s a whole bunch of extra hidden items, you just need to know how to make them show up.
	Enable More Fonts for the Windows Command Prompt Tired of the command prompt font? Change it with this hack.
	Measure How Far Your Mouse Has Moved Ever wondered just how far you’ve moved your mouse? There’s an easy way to figure that out.
	Hide Data in a Secret Text File Compartment Alternate Data Streams hide data inside of NTFS. It’s built right in, but you need to know how to do it.
	Navigate in the File Open/Save Dialog With the Keyboard Using the mouse is so non-geeky. Just browse to the files you want with the keyboard instead.
	Shrink the XP Volume Control A tiny volume control! Or something like that. Nobody is quite sure why this is built in, but it is.
	Undo an Accidental Move or Delete With a Keyboard Shortcut Oops! Shouldn’t have deleted that file. Just use the keyboard to put it back.
	Find the Secret Messages in Web Site Headers Yeah, we just posted this the other day, but it doesn’t get more geeky than hidden messages in protocol headers.

Enough Random Geekery, On… to the Random Geekery!

That’s right, we’ve rounded up the best of the week over at TinyHacker. Enjoy.

	Play Atari Battlezone – The Best Tank Game Of The 80s
	How To Play Old Games on Windows 7 & Mac & Linux
	StillTasty Tells You When to Throw Out the Milk
	60 Mindblowing Panorama and Vertorama Pictures
	Add 50 Pidgin Plugins With One Download
	Tweak Your nVidia Video Card With Confidence
	All You Wanted To Know About Your CPU….
	Batch Rename Files using File Renamer Basic
	Create Your Own Private Torrent to Share Large Files using uTorrent
	Tweak Windows 7 using Little Tweaker
	Love Greasemonkey? Greasefire Finds All Scripts On Any Page In One Click

Super User Questions and Such

That Super User site just keeps pumping out interesting questions and lots of answers.

• How do I find funny pictures?
• Is there a laptop without crappy OEM software
• Easiest way to send 20GB folder
• Sync Iphone in Windows XP running as Virtualbox guest under Ubuntu 9.10
• How to prevent the advertisements from being placed at the end of my e-mail in hotmail?
• Firefox is listening for incoming connections on two ports. Why?
• Are there windows 7 keyboard shortcuts for Log Off and Standby?
• Should I use an antistatic wrist strap when changing the RAM on my laptop?
• Batch converting PNG to JPG in linux
• Is there a Windows 7 keyboard shortcut to switch the desktop background

The Geek Note

The HTG web server does about 3.7 TeraBytes (yes, you read that right!) of bandwidth, 5 million pageviews, and handles around 200 million total requests per month. That’s a billion requests a year. Even with all that, the average load on the server is only 0.1 most of the time.

I won’t be satisfied until I can think of a reason for a 16-core server.

BoomBot

Boombot is a simple game of using explosives to get your robot to the next level.

The game starts out simply, but there are more than 50 levels to play.

Use the size of your bombs to get the bot over different obstacles.

It starts out easy and progresses to harder challenges. You have to use larger bombs for the harder challengers. You will also have to use some of your explosives to destroy obstacles.

With over 50 levels you will have plenty of time to waste at work!

Play Boombot at the How To Geek Arcade

What Are You Talking About?

The thing you probably don’t realize is that behind the scenes, your web browser sends a request to the web server using the HTTP protocol, which is nothing more than a pre-defined set of commands in text format so the browser and web server can communicate.

…but that’s really boring. Which is why the geeks that run various web sites decided to hide messages in those headers just to see if anybody would notice. And some of them are rather fun.

How to See the Hidden Headers

There’s a number of ways to access these headers, the easiest for real geeks is to pop open the command prompt and use the curl utility, available on Linux, Mac OS X, or even Windows—if you don’t mind downloading an additional utility.

The other way to view them is with the Live HTTP Headers add-on for Firefox. 

If you are using the curl method, you can simply type in the following command (that’s a dash and capital i, not an L)

curl –I sitename.com

For instance, if you type in curl –I slashdot.org, you’ll see that they embed random quotes from Futurama into the headers:

The blogging platform WordPress uses the header for a useful purpose—they recommend contacting them about a job if you’ve been able to locate the headers:

curl –I wordpress.com

My buddy Ross over at SimpleHelp.net expresses his music taste in his header… by now I’m sure you can figure out the command.

Over at the Online Tech Tips site, they’ve got a very important tip for you:

The CybernetNews blog tells us that you should tape your thumbs to your hands. I mean, everyone is doing it!

Mattias Geniar wants everybody to know who rocks. Turns out, it’s him!

The Tux Games site is using subliminal advertising. BUY MORE GAMES!

Add a Hidden Message To Your Own Web Site

For those of you rocking a blog running on an Apache web server, and using a .htaccess file, you can actually add your own secret hidden message to your own HTTP headers.

Just open up your .htaccess file, and add the following line (near the beginning for best effect).

Header set X-Nerd “Something Here”

You can change whatever is after the X- to anything you want, like X-Yay or X-SecretStuff, and you can also put whatever message you want between the quotes—though I would keep it nice and short.

Added Bonus: Pull a Random Futurama Quote from Slashdot

So now we’ve figured out how to see the quotes—with a little more command-line magic you can make a script that pulls a random quote from the Slashdot servers. Yes, this script is pretty useless, but it’s fun!

curl -sI slashdot.org | grep -E “X-(B|L|F)”

There’s lots of other sites with hidden messages in the headers…

Installation

The install process for Stickies does not run quite like other programs. As you can see with the first install window you are immediately placed into the major part of the decisions. Make the selections and/or changes that best suit your preferences.

Just before the installation process begins you will be presented with the following message concerning backups. Click “Yes” to proceed with the installation.

Here is the final install window. You are shown the exact actions that were performed during the install and also have an example note with some helpful information.

Stickies in Action

To get started simply “Right Click” on the “System Tray Icon” and select the action that you would like to perform.

Here are some Stickies Notes posted on our Vista Desktop. You can easily add things such as text, bullets/numbering, pictures (drag and drop), and highlighting.

You can go a step further and add titles to your notes, use an image as a background (drag and drop), and add text on top of the image.

These are the “Right Click Menus” for your Stickies. The first is for the text-based notes and the second is for the image background notes.

Use the following window to manage your Stickies collection.

Options

Stickies has a nice amount of options to help you customize the program just the way that you want it. Choose how you want your Stickies Notes to act and select specific layout/design details for new notes in the “General Tab Area”.

Set up how your Stickies Notes will look in the “Appearance Tab Area”. You can do a really nice job of matching how notes look to blend well with your desktop theme.

Set up networking if desired in the “Network Tab Area”…

Enable the e-mail function for notes in the “Email Tab Area”.

Tie your PDA into Stickies in the “PDA Tab Area”.

Set up the alerts (if desired) that best suit your preferences in the “Alerts Tab Area”.

Want to use hotkeys with Stickies? See what the defaults are for Stickies or set up your own personalized set in the “Hotkeys Tab Area’”.

Choose the search engine lineup, level of logging, and other features that you want active in the “Advanced Tab Area”.

Conclusion

If you have been looking for a good sticky notes program for your desktop, then Stickies is definitely a recommended addition for your Windows system.

Links

Download Stickies (version 7.0-b)

Dual-Monitor Wallpapers & DisplayFusion Winners

Earlier this week, we announced a giveaway for DisplayFusion Pro, and as of now the contest is over and the winners have been chosen. We’ll be sending out emails to each of the 5 of you.

For the rest of you, if you want some awesome widescreen wallpapers that can work for dual screens, check out the DesktopGaming collection—there’s quite a few good ones in ultra-wide resolution, like this one at 2560×1024:

There’s more wallpapers, just head over there and check out the “Browse” link at the top, where you can find wallpaper by resolution and system.

DesktopGaming Wallpapers

Weekly Random TinyHacker

Loads of links. Yay!

	Machinarium is a Beautiful, Artsy Flash Puzzle Game
	EasyVPN is an Interesting VPN Client (Similar to Hamachi)
	Change The Skin In Spybot, Search & Destroy
	Clean Up Clipboard Formatting Easily
	Goodnight Timer Slowly Reduces Volume, Then Shuts Down Your PC
	Backup Your Entire Firefox Profile in One Minute
	Stop Annoying Websites from Moving or Resizing Your Browser Window
	Create Your Own Pixel City
	Make the Firefox Find Box Remember Your Ctrl+F Searches
	Circuit Board Cuff Links Show Off Your Nerd Cred
	Open Doors is a Fun Logic-Based Flash Game
	Paint.NET 3.5 is Completely Redesigned for Windows 7!

Super User Weekly Hottest Questions

…most of which were answered by the geeks over at Super User.

• Can I connect to two networks simultaneously with two ethernet cards?
• Why isn’t hibernation enabled by default?
• Turn off change file extension warning in windows?
• How I can build small site without any web development skills?
• What well known software fails on windows 7
• How do I image my hard drive for backup? Or do I just need to backup the files?
• Launchy vs Deskbar vs…?
• How to record DirectTV HD DVR to a DVD or PC?
• Possible to force all disk activity to RAM?
• Enable multiple audio output on Windows 7
• Vista to Windows 7 – Upgrading or clean installation?

Last Year in Geek

Around 8700 hours ago, we showed you how to:

• Stupid Geek Tricks: Enable More Fonts for the Windows Command Prompt
• Map a Drive Letter to a Folder the Easy Way in Windows
• How to Import Gmail Contacts Into Outlook 2007
• Prevent Windows XP from Creating the Thumbs.db Thumbnail Cache Files
• Create a Report of Installed Hardware and Software with WinAudit

The Weekly Geek Note

I need a nap.

Kinetikz

The goal of Kinetikz is to fire discs so to get the star puck to the target without running out of discs.

It is a physics based game so you need to shoot the pucks carefully.

The levels continue to get more difficult as you progress and you’re provided fewer pucks to complete each level.

They have an easy or hard mode and can unlock the free play mode later on.

Play Kinetikz at the How-To Geek Arcade

The first thing they try to install is Software Informer. Notice they say it’s (recommended) and some might think they need to install this as part of the free program, but you don’t. Make sure you select No on this screen.

What is Software Informer?

It is a utility that is designed to give you information about software installed on your computer when it is out of date. The problem is that it doesn’t do a very good job and gives several false positives about updates. If you want to make sure your software is updated, use an HTG recommended program like Secunia PSI which we have previously covered in this article.

By default it sits in an awkward place on your desktop and in the Notification Area and pops new GOTD downloads. One of the reasons they give to install it is it notifies when GOTD has a new program available… well you don’t need that because there is a new one up everyday at 2am CST.

Another interesting thing I found is that it is a Beta version of the program. It doesn’t tell you that at all, and I know a lot of users don’t want apps still in beta stage on their PC.

The other thing you may not want is the GOTD site added to your bookmarks. This option is checked by default, so make sure to uncheck the boxes if you don’t want them. It appears under the software app install screen and you’ll see it after the free app they’re giving away installs. Notice there is another attempt to install Software Informer here as well.

Conclusion

We’re not anti-GOTD as they sometimes have quality free commercial software. Just be careful not to install the extra junk if you don’t want it. You will be offered Software Informer and the bookmarks every time you download something from them. For more on avoiding junk in your software installs check out our article…Rants: We Hate the Scam of Bundled Crapware.

Hiding Extra Windows

So, you’re using Windows 7 and you’ve got loads of stuff open on your screen. No matter, just press the Win+Home keyboard shortcut…

And all the windows hide except for the one you were using. Useful! But you probably already knew that…

What you didn’t think about is that there’s probably an easier way to use that shortcut key combination. Instead of using Win+Home, I prefer to use the Win+H shortcut combination since it’s easier to use without moving my fingers off the main row.

What we’ll do is create a really simple AutoHotkey script to do just that. You’ll need to make sure AutoHotkey is installed, then create a new .ahk script (you can use the New –> AutoHotkey script item on the context menu).

Next you’ll paste in some boilerplate code:

#InstallKeybdHook
#Persistent
#HotkeyInterval,100
SetKeyDelay, –1

And then here’s the line that actually does the work. When you press Win+H, which in AutoHotkey language is #h, it will use the Send function to push down the Windows key, press the Home key, and then release the Windows key. (of course, your keyboard keys won’t actually move. This isn’t an auto-play piano).

#h::Send,{LWin down}{Home}{LWin up}

Once you’ve created the script you can double-click it, and the shortcut key should start working immediately.

Oh, so you aren’t using Windows 7 yet? Well you can still get Mac’s Hide Others (cmd+opt+H) Keyboard Shortcut for Windows.

Wave Invites? Who Said Wave Invites?

We were given 20 invites to the Google Wave preview, and we offered them up to the readers. Out of a whopping 454 total comments requesting a login, we’ve picked 22 people that we’ll send an invitation to Google Wave.

Fuzzy math! And yes, we are aware that 22 > 20, but reader Xander volunteered to give up 2 of his invites as well, bringing the total to 22. He’s also on Twitter, in case you are wondering what generous soul would do such a thing. Thanks Xander!

Note: Google Wave invitations are being manually approved on Google’s end of things, so be patient.

The Weekly Random Links, Courtesy of Tiny Hacker

This is just a sampling of the random geekery over at Tiny Hacker this week. Want them in your feed reader or inbox each day? Head over to TinyHacker and subscribe.

	Got Carpal Tunnel? Instead of Getting Off the PC, Install an App to Help!
	Tweak the Windows 7 Taskbar Behavior the Easy Way
	BetterPrivacy Clears Out those Hidden Flash Tracking Cookies
	Power Up Your Firefox Tabs the Lightweight Way
	Fun Logic Game: Stuck in a Room With 2 People
	Find and Recover Those Files You Didn’t Mean to Delete
	Share One Mouse and Keyboard with Multiple PCs
	Save Firefox Bookmark Searches to Make Dynamic Folders
	99 freeware programs to trick out your PC
	Turn Task Manager Into a CPU Usage Widget
	Complete Guide to Windows 7 Libraries
	Add CPU and Memory Meters to Your Windows 7 Taskbar

Super User has Super Questions with Super Answers… Super!

More great stuff from Super User, as usual.

• Tips for approaching a hanging computer?
• When is the best time to purchase a new computer?
• Word 2003 .DOC formatting lost in HTML Emails
• Hidden features of Windows command prompt
• Installing Windows 7 (64 bit) on a Mac Pro without Bootcamp?
• How to install snow leopard in VMWare
• Can you store CDs/DVDs in a fireproof safe?
• Is there spyware in most crack/cracked/keygen software?
• Windows 7 “Libraries” – How do you back them up?

Did I use the same joke last week? I vaguely think I did. Oh well.

Last Year in Geek

One year ago, we were being lazy and not posting nearly enough. Here’s a couple of the interesting things that we did post during our non-lazy time.

• Keyboard Ninja: Toggle Hidden Files with a Shortcut Key in Windows
• Add Control Panel to the Desktop Right-Click Menu in Vista
• Easily Determine Windows Uptime in Windows 7, Vista or XP
• Power Up and Manage Your Windows Send To Menu with Send To Toys
• Benchmark Startup Times of Software Applications with AppTimer

The Weekly Geek Note

Server Quest II

The game is aimed at Administrators and IT Professionals but if you think you can do it better try it out.

Choose between two characters, Matt or Alicia where each has their own geeky characteristics.

Decide what kind of geek you are…

The controls are very basic…just the arrow keys and spacebar.

You start out in your IT dungeon office and people come to bug you about things not working. Challenges vary from querying a database to a user’s monitor not working because it isn’t plugged in.

You can walk around to the cubes and talk to the other employees.

Mini games with different challenges come up. In this example, Matt is biking around to grab a bunch of emails that were accidently sent out to an entire contact list.

After you complete a mission, go back to your computer and check your email for another task.

If you work in IT you’ll find a lot of humor and fun in Server Quest II. If you are a worker who thinks they can get things done better than those lazy game playing IT geeks, you’ll have fun with this game as well.

Play Server Quest II