Recently in Tips and Tricks Category

My mother was telling me earlier this week about hearing a claim about mouthwashes like Listerine causing mouth cancer and that she, recommended I chuck away the huge Listerine bottle I bought a couple months before this news came about.

So I did a little reading about the claim:

Historical Pondering

The diluted version of Listerine (which is what we use today) was produced somewhere in the late 1800's and was marketted as a cure for chronic halitosis (or known in simple english as extremely bad breath). Before this - the idea and its applications was used as a surgical antiseptic of medical tools and hygenic methods in the medical industry during the late 19th century.

"Listerine", the diluted antiseptic mouthwash - was named in honour of Dr. Joseph Lister (known as the founder/father of antiseptics). He didn't manufacture the product, it was only named after him for he was well known in the medical field - specializing in antiseptics. The powers of marketing...

After reading this - it becomes a little surprise that it was designed not for the mouth, but for medical instruments to avoid germs and bacteria that causes surgical infections... of course the Listerine for the mouth is diluted to chemical concentrations which are within "safe" levels.

With the new security measures being introduced by FaceBook, one of the undocumented features was that your personal information on FaceBook will be indexed by google search engines... if you do a search on your name in google and click on facebook links found by the search - you'll find out for yourself whether this feature should be off or not. In case you want to keep your facebook privacy from google's prying eyes, here's how to turn it off:

FaceBook's notification feature display notifications made by applications, and also basic services such as birthdays, wall posts and comments - especially after a long period of time, and on my FireFox browser, they are displayed in a list, which accumulates when you've not logged in for quite a while.

Those notifications - when expanded, can sure go past the browser's maximum window height; now if you got a browser problem like what I've been having with my Internet browser, you might not be able to scroll up or down in that list... but if you want to? read on.

My Windows desktop (usually on a day's duration), gets awfully cluttered by loads of icons and files; if its not done by me, it's done by someone else that's using the computer. In short, there's documents, pictures, videos, software archives and zipped archives for email (the list goes on and on...)

Having those icons left there, it slowly becomes a ghastly sight - I usually waste big amounts of time shifting these files to their respected locations in different folders and harddrives... because if I don't do something about it, I'm going to have trouble finding those application shortcuts I'm used to running on a frequent basis. Another problem is when it concerns archiving/burning these files based on categories, it's going to be one hell of a task; sorting them all out if you leave them dumped in one place for too long.

I can think of certain issues I encountered while working on my desktop: The tedious sorting and moving of these files in their respective locations (especially if its smeared all over the desktop), and the retention of the layout you've been sorting out before the jungle of icons and files infested your desktop as it continues to grow.

Windows apparently doesn't have an efficient icon management system and using the sorting functions built-in Windows will have your shortcuts and icons mixed up together... sorting by type helps segregate some icons but nevertheless it isn't "categorized" the way you want it. Frustrating, but there's nothing much to do if you rely on those sorting features.

So how do we solve the problem of having our desktop icons and shortcuts organized better?

I recently upgraded my router's software (firmware) recently using a third party firmware, and knowing some dedicated developers, it seems to be much more stable than the original. However, there was a small issue, the password for WiFi needed to be in hexadecimal (HEX code) instead of the usual normal text (ASCII code) and it required spaces in between... no text conversion options... I guess the developers preferred it that way.

So I went online looking for a lightweight utility that I could fit into my USB thumbdrive that has the least amount of hassle to convert passwords such as this:

damnUneed1234

to outputs exactly like this:

64 61 6D 6E 55 6E 65 65 64 31 32 33 34

yes... I (or shall I say, the router wanted) hexadecimal output seperated with spaces.

On my laptop, I usually organize the moving of large sized files (full-blown graphics) from one drive to another for archival purposes and after doing my searching online with a few downloads and tests, these two freewares are what I use on a regular scale: TeraCopy from CodeSector and SuperCopier from SFXTeam.