This may seem like a pretty obvious How To article, but admittedly, I discovered this by accident and sheer boredom. Over the weekend, I was driving around some friends. We were listening to my Zune that I had connected to my car’s sound system with a casette adapter. After a while, my Zune’s battery died and we were left to listen to the radio or stare at each other blankly. To avoid both of these disastrous scenarios I reached inside my dash console and pulled out my Nintendo DS. Eventhough the audio out jack on the DS is proprietary I crossed my fingers and risked both life and limb to see if what I was envisioning would actually work. We plugged the cassette adapter into the DS jack, turned it on and voila - instant DS surround sound. Great for those long road trips, or when you just gotta hear that soundtrack from Contra 4.
The Breakdown:
Step 1: Insert cassette adapter in car stereo.
Step 2: Plug adapter into audio-out of DS.
Step 3: Nintendo DS audio coming from all speakers!
I wonder how this would sound with Elite Beat Agents…
My growing list of RSS feeds is quickly becoming quite difficult to manage. Luckily, I use Firefox. With some simple organizing, I found a pretty simple way to manage and navigate through all my current feeds without ever leaving my browser’s toolbar. With this method of feed reading, you can quickly browse through the days news without even logging into Bloglines.
First open your Firefox browser (note: for this article I will be using version 1.5.0.6) and make sure you have your bookmarks toolbar enabled. (right click on the top toolbar and make sure there is a check mark next to the ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ item.)
Next, create a new category folder on your bookmarks toolbar. Right click on the toolbar –> new folder — > left-click –> choose a name for this folder depending on the feed category you want to have (i.e. Tech, News, Ted Stephens, etc.). Then click ‘OK’. You can repeat this step to add all the categories that you will need.
Once you have enough categories to get you started, go to the ‘Bookmarks’ tab on the top toolbar and select ‘Manage Bookmarks’. Within this window, you can locate your category subfolders and drag them into a master folder that I called ‘Feeds’ (this should also be created within the bookmarks toolbar).
Now find your feeds. The easiest way I have found to do this is to actually go to the sites that I want to subscribe to, left-click on the little orange feed logo on the right side of the address field, and then select the format of the feed you want. A Firefox popup window should appear asking you where you want to place the feed or ‘Live Bookmark’. When you see this, click the small button on the right of the window and navigate to the appropriate category folder for this feed.
When you’re all set, you can easily browse through all your feed headlines in a snap by navigating through the dropdown menus. While I’m not giving up my Bloglines account just yet, I am enjoying the convenience of having all my news within one easily accessed folder.
Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing.
I really love this new design of the computer mouse. The video below is very intriguing and really makes me want to make my own version soon. Depending on just how functional it really is, I could see this blowing past the gyration mouse to be the most innovative mouse advancement in thirty years.
This may be a little elementary to some of the tech savvy readers that frequent stumble across zerosign, but this little tip definitely saved me a headache last night. On any normal web surfing session, my Firefox window is filled with literally dozens of tabs containing sites that, for some reason or another, I desperately need. In the example from last night, I was in the middle of coding a new template for one of my wordpress sites on my new laptop when I suddenly realised that I didn’t have the ColorZilla extension installed yet. After finding the extension and downloading it I then realised that I had to restart Firefox. Ouch…all those tabs, all those sites that I needed. To by bass the chore of bookmarking each site individually, here’s a quick cheat that I used:
In Firefox
- go to Tools–>Options and click on the General tab.
- in the Home Page area simply click “Use Current” then click “OK”
This will set all the current tabs as your home page. You can then close the browser and the next time you open Firefox all the tabs from the previous session will be there waiting.
Certainly not the most elegant trick, but anything to save me time and the annoyance of downloading more needless software is greatly appreciated.
I also use a similar technique to organize my daily reads. There are so many sites I have to visit each day that I classify them into three different tiers. The ‘must read as soon as I’m awake’ sites get set as the homepage using this method. The 2nd tier of ‘read at my earliest convenience’ then get put in my bookmarks toolbar folder for easy access when I have some time. The last tier of sites wind of getting thrown in my Bloglines account to get checked whenever I get around to it. This system works pretty well at keeping me informed of things that absolutely matter, and the things that can wait and hour or two.
