Windows 98/XP/2000 only: Want to keep better tabs on your drive and partition space without having to right-click or open “My Computer”? Free application Vista Drive Icon replaces the standard hard drive icons with Vista-style models that display how much space is taken up and turn red when nearly full. The program runs in the background, shows up in almost every folder view and uses only a small amount of memory. If you’re seeing red a bit too often, check out Gina’s guide to visualizing your hard drive usage to make clean-up fast and easy. Vista Drive Icon is a free download and runs on Windows versions earlier than Vista.
Category: General
Give gedit the Power of TextMate
TextMate is a super-powered word processor beloved by coders and productivity geeks like Merlin Mann and Matt Haughey and available in a Windows port, but where does that leave Linux users? If they haven’t already fallen under the sway of Vi or Emacs, they can download a few files and plug-ins to give GNOME’s default text editor, gedit, many of the features—including word completion, quick file browsing, and highlighting switches—that Mac users have enjoyed for so long. Some of the plug-ins touted by the handy guide below are installed by default in gedit and just require an enabling click, while others require a bit of unpacking and placement. For writers and coders just getting started, it could make gedit a great learning tool with a gentler learning curve.
Overlay Drawers onto Your Dock’s Stacks
Mac OS X Leopard only: One of the nice things about Stacks—or annoying things, depending on how you look at it—is that the topmost document icon appears on your Dock, instead of an indicator of which folder contains it. To solve this problem, the icon designer at Optica Optima’s offering a set of icons for download that add a drawer-like image to your Stacks. The screenshot above displays the Downloads, Applications, and Documents folders as Stacks sporting the drawer icons. Pretty! To add the icons to your Stacks, just download and unzip the package, and move the appropriate icon to the folder. For more fun along the same lines, here’s how to add custom icons for your Mac hard drives.
Autographed Star Trek Phasers, Communicators to Go On Sale Next Week
A serious Star Trek fan and collector died recently, and an anonymous tipster sent us pictures of the Star Trek memorabilia he left behind. Here’s a heads up to dedicated Trekkies everywhere: These items will be appearing on eBay next week, so check out the gallery on the next page; maybe there’s something you’d care to bid on.
There are prop replica phasers, communicators and a pinball machine in the lot, all in pristine condition, and some are autographed by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Patrick Stewart. There’s no information about pricing, but these precious artifacts probably won’t be cheap.
Wow I would buy them if i could I love startrek!!
Philips and Lite-on announce a $199 Blu-ray drive
All the action in the next-gen format war might be at the front lines of cut-rate players, but the battle rages on across the entire spectrum of devices — which is why we’ve seen the poor $199 DH-401S BD-ROM drive from Philips and Lite-on touted as the answer to those $200 HD-A2s in a couple places. That’s quite a stretch, obviously, but it’s still much cheaper than any other BD-ROM drives we’ve seen. The read-only SATA drive pulls data off BD media at 4X, single layer DVDs at 12X, DVD-DL and DVD±RW at 8x, and CDs at 32X. Giving up write capabilites is obviously limiting, but for those of you building out HTPCs, this bad boy might be just the ticket.
[Thanks, AG23]
Man this is definitely going to be a long format war, I do not know who is going to win!
