Daily DIY

Windows 7’s taskbar is undoubtedly a great addition to Windows, but if you’ve got more than one application window open, you’ve got to either click twice or patiently hover to navigate to an open window. Reader Richard details how he fixed this:

I’ve been frustrated as of late with the Windows 7 taskbar (which led me to try hot-dogging it on the left-hand side as detailed here—by the way GREAT and useful tips in the 331 comments!). The fundamental problem was that you needed two clicks to navigate to your document if you have two instances of a program running. Or you’re stuck with hovering for what feels like an eternity.

At Windows 7 Forums I finally found a nice step in the right direction. Full post is here, but summarized below. In short, this hack causes an applications last active window to activate when you click the taskbar icon, and the next window in the second click, etc. The hover preview still works if you hover to begin with, but if you want the preview after you’ve click on an app’s icon in the taskbar, you can Ctrl+Click to bring it back. The current default settings are the exact opposite (that is, Ctrl+Click cycles through the last active windows of an application).

Launch regedit.exe (Win+R, then paste regedit.exe)
Navigate in the left tree control to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
Go to Edit->New->DWORD (32-bit) Value
Name the value LastActiveClick
Hit enter to assign the value and change it to 1
Restart Explorer and you’re good to go.

To restart Explorer without rebooting, open the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and end the Explorer.exe process. Then create a new task (under “File”) and paste “explorer.exe”.

Thanks Richard!

Ever tried canceling a print job in Windows but feel like it takes ages before anything actually happens? It’s a common annoyance, and one that helpful Reddit user Shikyo explains and remedies.

Photo by The Oatmeal.

In a nutshell, Shikyo explains that Windows is unable to cancel print jobs while the temporary file created for the print job is still being used by Windows. The solution: You’ve got to stop the spoolsv.exe service in the Windows Task Manager, delete any outstanding print jobs in the C:\Windows\system32\spool\printers\ directory, restart the spoolsv.exe service, and then start printing again. That’s a lot of work to do manually, particularly if this is a problem you run into regularly, but luckily the generous Reddit user has also detailed a batch file that’ll do the heavy lifting for you:

Here is the script for a batch file; just copy this to a new text document and save as “clearprintspool.bat”

@echo off
echo Stopping print spooler.
echo.
net stop spooler
echo deleting stuff... where? I'm not sure. Just deleting stuff.
echo.
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
echo Starting print spooler.
echo.
net start spooler

Update: The original batch code posted contained typos capable of doing serious deleting damage. First, our sincerest apologies to anyone who may have lost files as a result—we’ve detailed methods for recovering lost files that you might want to try. We understand that your trust is important, and we are extremely sorry if we’ve made you question the trust you place in us. If you grabbed the originally posted text, please delete it and use the code above instead.

Whenever you want to run through the process, just double-click the batch file you created and it’ll kill the spooler process, delete the temp files, and restart the print spooler for you.

As several users on Reddit point out, this isn’t something you’ll want to do on a print server—at work, for example—because it’ll cancel everyone’s print jobs and not just your own. But if you commonly face this annoyance on your personal printer, the batch file or method described above looks like a nice enough workaround.

Sure, joining Twitter and Facebook seemed like a good idea at the time, but maybe you’ve changed your mind and want your life back. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine erases your persona like you were never there.

Photo by jonsson.

If you’re sick and tired of being beholden to the siren song of constantly updating your social networks, it might be time to get out. Trouble is, you can’t just suddenly stop updating or your friends might harass—or worse, “poke” you—to find out if you’re okay.

Simply deleting your accounts won’t necessarily solve the problem because you’ll still leave little traces of yourself all over the social networking sites that are as easily associated with you as a fingerprint. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine completely eradicates your entire existence from the servers of sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. (Facebook currently blocks the webapp’s IP address, so you’re out of luck there for the time being.)

To use the tool you’ll need to hand over your login credentials for the corresponding webapp (you won’t need them anymore anyway, right) and let the the Suicide Machine do its thing. If you do decide to off yourself, be aware it can’t be undone—so be sure you’re serious.

Are you so over social networking that you’re ready to disappear yourself, or do you want to stick around and enjoy the party a little longer? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Unwanted mailing-list emails arriving in your inbox every morning are annoying, but because most of us are eager to get started on our days, we often quickly archive/delete them rather than taking the extra step of unsubscribing. Here’s a simple solution.

Rather than dealing with and unsubscribing from mailing-list emails when they arrive—which rarely will come when you feel like handling them—deal with them all at once at your convenience with a quick search. From Lifehacker publisher Nick Denton:

Just do a search for “unsubscribe” in Gmail. Either filter, label, and archive the results or go through and individually unsubscribe. Pretty obvious. But it only just came to me.

Now that Gmail offers to automatically unsubscribe you from mailing lists you mark as spam, you could in theory quickly knock down a lot of list email by trusting their spam-and-unsubscribe method, but in our testing it doesn’t do a great job identifying every list email, so you’ll probably be better off going into the email and manually finding the unsubscribe link. Still, if you’ve got five minutes today, you could quickly get rid of most—if not all—of your unwanted mailing list emails with this quick search and a little clicking.

As we look ahead to 2010, we’re hoping it’s the year the web becomes a truly great platform for working and connecting online. Here are five things we’d like to see fixed for that to happen.

Photo by Morten Lund.

Over-aggressive Flash and widgets

One week after your first time ever opening a web browser, you knew how it worked. Text that was differently-colored and turned your cursor into a little pointing hand was a link. Images could also be links, and content and advertising usually have distinct barriers on the page. When sites get annoying, they blur the lines.

Festering squarely at the bottom of the barrel are “search” and “preview” bubbles that automatically pop up when your mouse glances past certain topical words on blogs and news sites. Sometimes they’re double-underlined, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they simply offer a graphical thumbnail of the page you’d travel to if you clicked, and sometimes they promise “explainers” that are nothing but ad-infested, self-linking nightmares. In any case, they break and cheapen the web’s promise as a reasonable, if loosely organized, center for information. It’s akin to walking through a library, glancing at the Young Adult fiction section a few rows over, and then being startled by a sales representative for the Twilight books, leaping up from beneath a counter and screaming “LEARN MORE ABOUT TEAM JACOB!”

That’s just one example from a different corner of the web, but it’s something you can see in a sadly large number of interactive sites. “Share this” buttons that expand to take over text space when you cursor barely taps them, screen-covering slide-outs asking readers to “Subscribe to our newsletter!” or “Take our survey!”, videos that automatically play when you mouse over them (or simply arrive on the page)—they all come from a desire to fudge how interested a reader is in the supplemental stuff around the content. We know our own site isn’t entirely void of sometimes aggressive Flash-based advertising, but on the editorial side just over the business wall, we envision a future in which readers can expect a consistent, calm reading experience on most any site on the web—and browser add-ons like AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock, and their ilk aren’t crucially necessary.

Contact miners

If we think a webapp is a crucial convenience, and one that our friend and family need to get in on, we’ll tell them. I know I’ve pushed a number of grudging friends, and a patient spouse, into Google Voice, Brizz.ly, and Evernote, but I did it when the thought occurred to me, not while signing up.

Too many webapps offer to make it “easy” to “find contacts who are already on X,” and then ask for your Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, or other sign-in credentials. You already know who you want to “connect” with on most sites, but if it’s somehow convenient to pull in everybody from your massive contacts list, and then un-check the folks you don’t need ties to, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth handing over a sensitive password (and then, maybe, immediately change it).

But most eager webapps don’t stop there. For all the contacts that aren’t on XYZNet, they’d like to email all of them, let them know that you’ve joined up, and ask them to connect with you, be your friend, share your reading list, etc. No webapp has any reason to do this. It’s spam, pure and simple, and it preys on those who are too hurried or overwhelmed to look before they click “Next,” and the bulk odds of getting hundreds of people every day to do what their contacts are doing. If you’ve got a good product, it will get noticed, people will use it, and the people who respect those early adopters will follow suit. If you play a numbers game based on little white webapp lies, you’re MySpace.

Webapps without mobile versions

A well-made, thought-out iPhone app is a great thing, and there are great device-specific apps for Android phones, BlackBerry units, and other platforms. But having a mobile site and service that’s fast, functional, and universally accessible is the most powerful tool of all.

Google could, by all means, make a killer Gmail app for the iPhone, and already has an Android app that many users swear is worth the price of admission alone. But nobody knows what the future brings, and having a platform that’s accessible to just about any web-capable phone, while being fast and feature-packed, is the smart investment. Intern Whitson is, for example, planning on getting a Droid phone very soon, which means having to give up on accessing uber-helpful personal finance site Mint.com on the go, since there’s nothing in the way of an Android app, or usable mobile site, at the moment. For every great webapp out there, this will be an endless problem going forward as new mobile browsers—tablets, e-readers, heck, even in-dash car screens—come along, but it’s a straight-forward fix.

Sites that don’t remember, block password saving

Pushing a button that does nothing is a universal route to madness. Likewise, offering “Remember me” check boxes, and denying a browser’s built-in ability to save passwords, is becoming the newest way to make your webapp unliked and, in fact, kind of hated.

Most modern operating systems have a username/password login, and offer encryption controls for applications and data. Firefox, among other browsers, offers a Master Password that prevents unauthorized use of saved passwords. If a webapp thinks it can protect your data by regularly—or, worse, completely randomly—signing you out, it is sorely mistaken. Focus should be put instead on preventing DNS hijackings, improving password recovery protocols, cutting off brute-force password attacks, and similarly back-alley methods. Online banking sites, sure, we can understand the skittishness—but come up with better non-text solutions instead of forcing customers to install extensions for easy JavaScript hacks to fix the problem.

Walled gardens

This is the simplest, but most dire, demand of any application that allows you to—and, in fact, encourages you to—create data, connections, contacts, and more: let us take it all out.

Google’s Data Liberation Front is an initiative by the search firm to force discussion on the topic of data portability. Before you use a webapp, and before a webapp designer starts offering sign-ups, a few questions should be asked:

1. Can I get my data out at all?
2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

And the ideal answers are:

1. Yes.
2. Nothing more than I’m already paying.
3. As little as possible.

Webapps vary greatly on how they adhere to these ideal data provisions. Looking at Gina’s roundup of free tools to back up online accounts, it’s plain to see that there are apps that offer simple, universally useful data (WordPress, Tumblr, most Google apps), apps that offer data if you know where to look (Twitter), and apps that make you hunt down backup solutions that aren’t officially supported (Facebook). As such, many people remain non-committal about working in the web, because it’s hard to say just how long-term some platforms can be, given their closed-off nature.

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What webapp annoyances make you question the web as the place where you’ll work in the future? What would you change about your favorite webapps if you had a team of programmers and a week off to work on it? Let’s hear what’s on your web wishlist in the comments.

Chrome: Some web sites, like personal banking portals, rightfully ask your browser not to remember your password. Others are just weirdly against convenience. The Autocomplete = On extension for Google Chrome forces sites to let you make the auto-password call.

We’ve previously featured a handy Password Saver bookmarklet, which also works with Chrome, as a solution to converting certain web forms away from their password saving protections. If you’d rather not have to hit the button and manually prompt your browser to let you go ahead and save your flipping Flickr password, or discretely remember actually secure sites, Autocomplete = On is a nice little install-and-forget solution for Chrome.

The major concern should be Chrome’s lack of a Master Password feature, a la Firefox’s essential security tool. Anyone with access to Chrome would have access to your auto-password sites, so consider implementing other measures, like stronger system user passwords and encrypted browser data, before getting too familiar with keeping everything inside Chrome.

Autocomplete = On is a free download, and works in Google Chrome builds that accept extensions (Dev version on Windows, beta on Linux).

If you sync your Google contacts between multiple devices or pull from multiple email accounts, you’ve probably got quite a few duplicate entries. Now your Google and Gmail contacts let you kill those dupes en masse with a single button.

Hit up your contacts from Gmail, or head to google.com/contacts, and hit the “Find duplicates” button in the lower-right area. You’ll be provided with the list of contacts with at least 2 entries each, which you can view in expanded form, and then either merge together or kill off. Not that this is some new-fangled tool or an advanced feature, but I know at least a few Google users’ primary annoyances with contacts can be salved, if not cured, with this little button.

If you spend a lot of time in text editors, you almost certainly use something other than Windows’ default Notepad. Weblog Online Tech Tips details how to set an alternative editor as your default to complete your Notepad replacement.

If you aren’t already using a better alternative to Notepad, a gander at our Hive Five Best Text Editors is a good place to start looking for a replacement (we’re particularly partial to Notepad++). Once you’ve got one, Online Tech Tips’ step-by-step guide—which requires customizing and running a batch file the author was kind enough to put together to ease the process—should do the trick.

The post uses a Notepad alternative called Notepad2, but from what we can tell the same replacement technique could work for any alternative you choose—you’ll just need to read through the instructions and make sure you replace Notepad2 references with your text editor of choice. The post also focuses on Windows 7, but the same basic method should in theory work on any recent version of Windows. Just give the instructions a good read-through before you get started to make sure you’ve got everything set up correctly for your system.

Done this before, or got an easier solution for replacing Notepad as the default Windows text editor? Let’s hear it in the comments.

It’s annoying having to maximize an application’s window over and over again when you open it—especially when you know you always want it maximized. This oldie-but-goody shortcut trick will cure what ails you.

To fix it, all you need to do is right-click on the application shortcut and select Properties. Under the Shortcut tab change the Run dropdown to Maximized.

That’s it! Now any time you open that application it will be full screen.

Every post carrying our UltraNewb tag covers very basic topics in an attempt to initiate our less experienced readers (i.e., the newbs) into the wonderful world of techno-goodness. These are the posts you can email to your friends or parents to explain the really simple things. If you’re thinking: “I’ve known how to do this for *years*,” that’s even better! Share your experience with the UltraNewbs out there and/or advance the subject, and make this post an even better resource for our newbs!

Flash videos, like those on Hulu or YouTube, don’t stay full screen if you click outside the video—say, if you’re doing work on a second monitor. Kind of annoying, right? A quick system file swap, however, fixes this problem easily.

Photo by Steve Lacey.

Many dual monitor enthusiasts love to watch movies or television shows on their second monitor, but if those are web-based videos, Flash has to rain on our parade. Sure you can make the Hulu video go full screen on your second monitor, but as soon as you try to work on your other monitor, Flash will lose its full-screen view. Thankfully, blogger/browser patcher d.i.z. has made a one byte change to the Flash plug-in that will keep videos running full screen, even if you click outside them—and he’s made it available for download (sadly, this tweak only works on Windows machines).

All you need to do is grab d.i.z.’s modified npswf32.dll file and replace the one located in C:\Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash\ or C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\ folder on Windows 7 64-bit (though we recommend you backup the original file just in case). After a restart of your browser, all your Flash videos should exhibit the new behavior (i.e., you should be able to multi-task without losing full-screen playback). You can still exit full screen mode by hitting the escape key or using the Flash player’s full screen button, of course.