If there’s one thing about Windows that has vexed me since I began using it, it has to be the inability to easily rearrange the order of buttons in the task bar. I always open my programs in the same order: email, file manager, text editor, browser. In the past I always used to have mIRC open too. These four or five applications were always in the same place on the taskbar and it allowed me to not have to think about where I was moving my mouse when switching programs.

But, as Windows programs tend to do occasionally, one of these applications would crash. Or, more recently, Thunderbird would randomly disappear from my taskbar until I would Alt-Tab to it causing it to reappear… in the rightmost spot on the taskbar. Unacceptable!

Enter the greatest (IMO) utility in the history of free windows apps. It’s called Taskbar Shuffle and is 1000x easier to use than any other utility of the same nature that I have ever seen. You can just drag and drop the windows into the exact order you want. Check out the Taskbar Shuffle homepage.

It is completely free, though not open source. Still, it has made my computing experience much more bearable. Perhaps if you’re not into the whole “everything-has-to-be-how-I-want-it” computing experience like I am, it will have less impact. But then that’s your problem, not mine.

My laptop only has 512 MB of memory and I always have a lot of programs open. So, it’s always paging memory to the hard drive and it drives me crazy with how slow it goes! That damn hard drive light is always flashing at me. I had just assumed that my laptop hard drive wasn’t that fast. Well, I just stumbled across this link on Digg and thought I’d give it a try.

I went through all the steps and sure enough, my hard drive was set to PIO mode. How many months have I been cursing this thing because it’s so freakin’ slow? I followed the steps to change the mode back to Ultra DMA and everything worked. Although my drive only goes up to Ultra DMA 5, not Ultra DMA 6, I have already noticed a performance increase.

As always, make a backup of this branch of the registry before you begin working on it. Then give it a try; it worked for me.

http://neodon.blogspot.com/2006/07/little-known-tweak-to-boost-hard-drive.html

This video is a little old but I couldn’t resist posting it because it’s so freaking hilarious. It’s a clip of John Stewart injecting commentary into a Q&A session that Donald Rumsfeld held with some troops. The troops were really grilling him on why their equipment is so shoddy and he did a pretty miserable job of handling their questions.

Watch the video at YouTube.

Unless you’re aware of how this works, it’s possible that your GMail traffic is being sent over the internet in the clear. More worrying is the prospect that your boss or other company officials might be able to monitor your personal email communications at work. If this is something you’re interested in preventing, the solution is simple. Change your GMail bookmark to be https://mail.google.com/ instead of http://mail.google.com/. By doing this, GMail will continue to use the secure connection for your entire session, rather than just for the login page.

http://ffldlife.blogspot.com/2006/07/surf-secure.html

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has a very insightful article about the current round of flag burning legislation being discussed in congress. It’s a short read, definitely worth two minutes of your life.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/06/burning_flags.html