Entries tagged with how to - Channel 10

Direct Folders

sarahintampa — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Don't you wish there was an easy way to add custom locations to the Save/Open dialog box? Well, actually, there is. With Direct Folders, you can quickly find frequently used folders in the Save/Open dialog box. After the program is installed, you can right-click in the white space of the window to access your customized list of folder shortcuts.

Of course, there are other ways to tweak this box too - for example, in Windows XP, a registry hack can let you update the box with your own settings:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar]
"Place0"="e:\\XP Utils"
"Place1"="e:\\research"
"Place2"="e:\\Registry Patches"
"Place3"="e:\\UtilitiesSet 2"
"Place4"="e:\\UtilitiesSet 1"

TweakUI does it too.

In Vista, it's a bit different. The Places bar is now the "Favorite Links" bar, so customizing them involves going into your Links folder: User_Profile\Links

In here, you can customize the Windows Shortcut (.Ink) files according to this document.

Building Your Own Deep Zoom

sarahintampa — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:54:00 GMT

In Silverlight 2, one of the new features is the support for Deep Zoom technology, which allows you to quickly zoom in and out on really large images. If you haven't already done so, you've got to check out our video on this here. Or just visit the Hard Rock Memorabilia site here: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

So now that you've seen it in action, do you want to build your own Deep Zoom? You can with the Deep Zoom Composer, a powertoy that lets you import your own images, arrange them as you'd like, then export them as a Deep Zoom Image or Collection which can then be used with Silverlight's MultiScaleImage control.

To begin, get the powertoy, then thanks to Mike Taulty's blog post, you can follow some easy step-by-step documentation (with images!) on how to work with this software. Scott Hanselman also has some good tips on his blog, ComputerZen.

How to: Move A PC Without Powering Down

Larry — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:00:00 GMT

We all joke about it, the guy with all the passwords in his head gets hit by a bus. So how do you move his computer from one location to another without shutting it down? Well, because you might need to know some day, this is how you do it. You use a product called a HotPlug, which is made by Wiebetech. Built for forensic technicians to physically circumvent Vista's Whole Disk Encryption (Windows+L locks machines people, use it), a HotPlug can also help in other situations, like moving a Frogger machine without unplugging it and losing the high score.

The first step is a dongle called Mouse Jiggler. This keeps a constant mouse movement going so the computer doesn't sleep, screen save, or lock on its own. The next step is plugging the HotPlug into a UPS and routing around the computers power supply (not for the faint of heart). Then you reverse the process when you get to the new location, hopefully before the UPS runs out.