Brian Hartsock's Blog

“A picture is worth 1000 words”

Most blogs that I read integrate media, specifically pictures, into their posts. A video can be avoided. Text can be skimmed. But pictures can’t be overlooked. Good pictures draw you into an article, or website, and add to the story the author is trying to tell you.

Last week, I posted a setup guide for NHaml with nearly 25 screen shots. Surprisingly, I was able to grab all the screenshots, cropped and everything, in about 15 minutes. Using the old school method of Print-Screen + Paint would have taken at least twice as long, and looked half as good.

Paying money for a screenshot utility seems ridiculous, but after playing around with it for a few days, I had to buy Snagit. I only used about 1% of its features, and that 1% is good enough to warrant spending the money. If you want to create media rich blog posts, I would highly recommend it. Even though the example is a little ridiculous, it shows how effortless creating great looking graphics with Snagit.

How many times have you tried to open a file in Windows, only to see it is already in use by some another program? Thus begins the witch hunt of process destruction, until you can open the file.

Process Explorer gets rid of this problem. Just search for a file name, and it tells you which process has a hold of it. This is only a small piece of its functionality, but a huge piece of my sanity. Why doesn’t Windows Ship with all the SysInternals stuff?

Yesterday I found this gem of an article on Amazon’s website. I wish I had known about it sooner.

I got home, and immediately tried it out. After about 1 minute, I was watching an on-demand video on my TV, through my XBox. Before, I thought I had to go through a VGA cable directly from my laptop, which is a pain. This is much better.

The quality isn’t HD; it looks to be about DVD quality. Even still, I think it is enough for me to cancel my satellite subscription and be completely on-demand. I only watch 2 TV shows, and the rest just waste my time. If only Discovery and History channels streamed over the internet, I wouldn’t miss satellite at all.

Also, I think this is the catalyst to get me to ditch my Ubuntu desktop for a Windows machine. Being able to easily have on-demand video is a perk like none other. At long last, I have given up what I so fell in love with a few years ago. I am sure this isn’t are last meeting, goodbye Ubuntu.

Inspired by Hanslemann’s tool list, and realizing that if my hard drive fails I want to have links to all the tools I need, I have started my own tool list. Check it out..

I had the need to compare two different directories on a Windows box and I came across KDiff. It integrates with Explorer and does exactly what I need. Try it.