Gpick is an advanced color picker written in C++ using GTK+ toolkit. This application is an alternative for window’s colorpic. One feature I like about this application is the same feature I found on window’s colorpic which shows a magnifier of the area where you want to capture the color.

I am a great fan and a user of mozilla thunderbird. I have used different mail clients like microsoft outlook, opera mail, zimbra mail client, etc. I tested them all for 2 weeks or more and ended up with thunderbird. One think I like about thunderbird is that you can add new features to it for free through their add-ons. Aside from the add-ons mozilla is active and updates are always there for free.

Part of my work is to provide support to our clients world wide through email or chat. Currently I have 5 emails, 3 gmail accounts are used for work and 2 gmail accounts are for my personal use. I consolidate them all in a mail client which is thunderbird. It’s not an easy thing to do when you are using the browser because its quite confusing when you want to switch from one browser to the other or switch to different accounts when you use Gmail. But with thunderbird, it gives me a lot of help and I can save a lot of time with it. The top 4 add-ons I use to speed up things are:

• AdBlock Plus – Helps me block those ads I don’t want to see and I never want to see.
• Lightning – Helps me organize stuff through a calendar.
• MinimizeToTray Revive – It stays on the tray and prompts an alert when a new email arrives.
• Quicktext – Allows me to create email templates and allows me to add shortcut to it like alt+1, alt+2, alt+3, …

Those are some of the add-ons I use for my thunderbird mail client. I hope it will help you speed up things.

When updating to the latest version of virtualbox which is version 4.0.10 errors will appear when try to startup your virtual machine. This happens when you want USB2.0 support for your virtual machine. To fix the error you need to download the VirtualBox 4.0.10 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack, the file has an extension of .vbox-extpack which is a VirtualBox extension package. The extension pack is usable to all platform, I used the extension on windows 7 ultimate version. The installation process is quite simple, just download the pack and double click it after the download, virtualbox manager will then guide you in the installation.

Yesterday a friend of mine ask if I know how remove his windows 7 WAT so he could explore more with his windows 7 Operating System.  I told him that I have a tool to remove Windows XP Windows Genuine Advantage but I can help him find a tool for it and told him that he’d rather buy a genuine one because we can really never make sure that if we find one it will be permanent but he insisted of using one.  To help everybody who also needs to extend their usage of windows 7 this article is for you.

Way back a year ago this Removing Windows 7 Activator was not available though you can find thousands of article spreading on the net.  Resources that times was so poor and everything needs a thorough searching before coming up to a solution or even leaving the windows 7 Activator problem unsolved.  But now there are a lot of links provided but sad to say that most of the links provided on hotfile, fileserve, etc. have been deleted or the links are directing us to a 404 page.

To help everyone, here is a link where you can download the tool to remove your windows 7 activator.  This worked for my friend using windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.  This should also work on windows 7 32bit.  There are two links, the first link will totally remove the Windows 7 Activator and the second link will give us different choices such as extending usage to number of days or even get a genuine certificate.  You can download both at this links

Downloads:

Removing Windows 7 Activator

Windows 7 Extender

On the last day of our class for the first semester, our instructor gave us an assignment about infix, postfix and prefix.  The assignment was to create a program that converts infix equations to its postfix form and prefix form.  I search around the net and the resources are so few that it took me days to have a sample program in C.  I am not that good in C programming but I can create C++ or C programs.  The code provided here may not be that well optimized and the structures may not be that perfect but it works well.  I used Visual C++ in modifying the program(yes I just modified a program):).  You can download the files here

Pidgin is a free chat client that can handle different chat networks like yahoo, google talk, AIM, AOL and many more all at once.  But one important thing that is not found in pidgin by default is Facebook’s chat.  To be able to add facebook on your pidgin, you just need to do some simple steps.

1.  Download the needed files and extract

2.  Install pidgin-facebookchat-1.68.exe

3.  Copy libjson-glib-1.0.dll on the plugins folder found on the directory where pidgin is installed.  In my case I am using windows 7(C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins)

4.  Restart Pidgin

5.  You can now add facebook on your accounts.

Thank you to the developers of  facebook on pidgin plugin (Eion Robb,Casey Ho and Mark Doliner).  If you have problems please check this official link of installing the plugin. http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

If you already have a validated Windows Media Player then you can use this software.  Those that are not validate can still use this software as long as you won’t update you OS or even your media player.

Media Player on tray is an alternative of what windows has provided windows xp users which can be found on this link.  Most of windows users work while listening to music, especially when you are working in an office.  Some problems that we encounter is that when opening more than 1 application such as adobe photoshop, MS Excel, MS Word and many more, media player is somewhat bothersome to see on the task bar.  Sometimes we even accidentally close media player and tend to re open it again and reselect the music files again.  As a solution I will provide you a portable application which hides your media player on the tray icon, see image below to have an idea what I am talking about:

A -1 application on the task bar is a big help to office workers and a +1 to productivity.  You will be able to save much time and this helps solve the annoyance of media player on the task bar.You should download the media player on tray here.  It can easily be used, just open media player and set things up the open the application and everything is done for you.

I hope this helps you in your daily work.

So many times that I have been needing this software in doing my daily tasks, having my application always on top of the other.  This is very useful especially when you are doing a data entry job, wherein a notepad is always needed on top of an excel file or in an openoffice calc file.  This software very easy to use, all you need to do is open up the software you want to be on top always and just press ctrl + spacebar and thats it, that software will remain on top unless you press ctrl + spacebar again.  If you want the software you can download it here for free, click this link.  As a summary to get the software always on top press ctrl + spacebar and to deactivate press the 2 keys again(ctrl + spacebar).  Hope this also helps you in doing your jobs.

1. Open Regedit by typing Regedit on the search box in windows 7
2. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell
3. Create a new Key(Right click on shell > new > Key) and name it “Open with Scite”
4. Create a new key under the folder “Open with Scite” and name it command
5. On the right pane you can edit default by double clicking it and add the value C:\Program Files\SciTE Source Code Editor\SciTE.exe %1 or you can have the path to where you installed scite and just add %1 to get it working. 
6. Click ok and everything is ready.

Below is what I had after doing the tweak:

Hope this helped you in using scite on widows 7 platform.

I have successfully exported Thunderbird email files on ms outlook 2007 on a Windows XP platform which can also be done in windows vista and windows 7 platform.  There are several steps on how to do it.

1.  First, you need to download and install this software:  IMAPSize
2. Locate your Thunderbird emails, usually it is located in this directory C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Thunderbird  or  you can copy paste the directory and change the user to your account name.  When you are in the application data folder of Thunderbird navigate to the mail folder of the email account you want to convert.  Make sure you make full backup on the mail folder before doing the conversion.
3.  Open IMAPSize software and go to the tools menu and select mbox2eml.
4.  Select the files you want to convert, one example is the inbox.  The inbox file that contains all you emails is the one without the .msf extension.  And this also applies for drafts, sent items and templates. Attachment will be automatically converted and goes with the .eml file

5.  After conversion, open Outlook Express on Vista or Win7 platform you can user Windows Live Mail.  Setup your email account on Outlook express.
6.  Highlight all the emails that was converted by IMAPSize which is in .eml format.  This should should store all the emails in your outlook express account.

6.  For the last part of the process, you can import your outlook express account on MS Outlook 2007.  On the file menu select Import and Export and click next, Select Import form another program or file and click next.  Select Outlook Express 4.x, 5.x, 6.x or windows mail.  This will automatically detect you windows outlook express email accounts and download all the mails.