Say I want to watch a YouTube video. I would have to summon the iTunes window just to pause the song, then switch back to my web browser to play the video. If I were using foobar2000, I would just need to hit the hotkey to pause the song while I’m still on my web browser, making things faster and less tedious.

You can however compensate the missing feature by using one of these third party utility.

HKTunes

You can do nothing extra with this small utility other than assigning global hotkeys for iTunes. The user interface is definitely not the best, but considering this is a one time job, it doesn’t really matter much.

Instead of typing your desired hotkey, you were to select it from a list of keys.

I’m using HKTunes on my PC, for I wouldn’t want to install other heavier alternatives just to add such simple functionality. It uses just slightly under 4MB of memory.

You have to keep HKTunes opened the whole time you want your hotkeys to work. Pressing your hotkeys will do nothing if the program is closed.

[HKTunes]

iTunes Global Hotkeys Plugin (ighp)

Unlike HKTunes, there is no need to start another program just for the hotkeys to work. ighp is an iTunes plugin, meaning it’ll be part of iTunes and will work outright whenever iTunes is on.

Download the files, place them in iTunes plugin folder (C:\Program Files\iTunes\Plug-ins), launch iTunes, press Ctrl+Shift+P, configure the keys and off you go.

I would have use ighp if it works. Too bad, iTunes will not launch with the plugin installed on my PC. Your milestone might vary though, I’d suggest giving this a try before concluding.

[ighp]

iTunesControl

You can do much more with iTunesControl than just assigning the usual playback global hotkeys—like searching songs from playlist (another feature I miss from foobar2000), song name display and sleep timer.

iTunesControl is still actively supported and developed. In fact, the latest version was released less than a month ago, so you won’t have to worry that it will stop working when you update to a newer version of iTunes.

[iTunesControl]

iTuner

iTuner is another utility that adds several extra functionality to improve your iTunes experience. You can view all its features here, which of course includes global hotkey customization.

[iTuner]

©2011 SheepTech

Setting Global Hotkey on iTunes

1. Install “Set image as wallpaper” Chrome extension

This Chrome extension returns the “Set image as wallpaper” option to your right-click context menu. In the settings, you can decide whether you want a preview to be displayed whenever you set a wallpaper.

If you’re opt for no preview, you can select the default position (stretch, center, tile, fill, fit) of your wallpaper, so that the next time you set a wallpaper, it will come into effect automatically without any prompt.

With a preview however, you can see for yourself how the wallpaper would look like before selecting the position.

Install “Set image as wallpaper” extension for Chrome (Windows only)

2. Setting wallpaper manually without extension

If you are not changing your desktop wallpaper frequent enough to justify yet another new extension installation, you can choose do it in a less convenient way.

1. Right-click on the image you want to set as your wallpaper
2. Select “Save image as…” and save the image
3. Locate the image you’ve just saved
4. Right-click, select “Set as desktop background“

Not very elegant, but still get the job done. It obviously would be painfully tedious if you are setting many different wallpapers to see how they look like before deciding in this way.

Just use another browser for wallpaper browsing

The above two methods don’t sound like a plan to you? Just use another browser whenever you are looking for wallpapers. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox has the option by default to save an image as wallpaper in the right-click context menu.

IE9 Beta is looking quite good comparing to any of its older versions, you might want to give it a try.

©2011 SheepTech

How-To: Set Desktop Wallpaper on Chrome

I was pointed to a tutorial on lifehacker, which was a very practical way to keep earphones, and more importantly making sure they will not be tangled when I wanted to use them later.

Since lifehacker is just providing the tutorial in words, I filmed a video tutorial to better demonstrate the steps, and to proof that the cables will really not be tangled when you unwrap them later.

1. On your right hand, tuck your 3rd and 4th finger and extend your 2nd and 5th finger
2. Hold the earbuds with your 3rd and 4th finger against your palm
3. Wrap the cable around your 2nd and 5th finger in the shape of “8″
4. When you have 6 to 8 inches of cable left, wrap the remaining cable around the center of the “8″ shape
5. Tuck the earphone jack through one of the two loops in the “8″ shape, or through the center wrapping.

The video was captured using only a Nokia N82 under low light condition, so bear with the poor video quality.

©2011 SheepTech

Video: How to prevent earphone wires from getting tangled

Martin suggested the use of Short URL WordPress Plugin to do the job, but I see a better way to do it.

Back to the basic, what was the permalink structure when you first installed WordPress? The ugly permalink structure that looks like this:

http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=123 (123 is the Post-ID)

Most WordPress users would change their permalink structure to a more SEO friendly ones, instead of keeping the ugly permalink structure above.

However, an ugly permalink will not stop working even after the permalink structure is changed. Instead, it will automatically redirect you to the actual blog post with the correct permalink. For example:

http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=881 will redirect to http://www.sheeptech.com/youtube-mutes-video-with-copyrighted-songs

Say I would like to share my blog post on YouTube Muting Videos on Twitter, I’d post it as (http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=881), instead of the full permalink of it or a third party short URL like http://tr.im/8y5j.

How to identify Post-ID?
The ugly permalink structure looks like this: http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=[Post-ID]. You first have to identify the Post-ID of your blog post, before you can use the ugly permalink as a short URL.

To identify the Post-ID of your blog post, just look at the address bar when you are editing or writing a post. The Post-ID would be the number next to “post=“.

The benefits:

• No extra work. The ugly permalink is generated automatically everytime you publish a blog post. No need of a plugin at all.
• The URL will not be broken. Even when you change your permalink struture again, the ugly permalink will still point to the same blog post. If you’re using a plugin to shorten URLs, they might be broken if the plugin went wrong, but the ugly permalink will almost never be broken.
• You can call up the Post ID within your blog template using the <?php the_ID(); ?> tag.

As there is no extra work for this method, I can conveniently add a Twitter button onto all my blog post. This is the line I inserted to single.php:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading: (<?php the_title(); ?>) at http://sheeptech.com/?p=<?php the_ID(); ?>"><img src="http://www.sheeptech.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/twiter_01-w32-h32.png" alt="Tweet This" /></a>


Click on the blue bird at the end of this post for a demo.

©2011 SheepTech

WordPress Ugly Permalink as Short URL for Twitter-ing

4 Easy Steps:

Step 1
Place all the files that you want to change their file extension in the same folder or directory (make sure they have the same extension, all .png for example).

Step 2
Open Notepad and type the following command line:

ren *.abc *.def

.abc is the initial file extension, while .def is the file extension you want to change to. Say you want to change the file extensions of a batch of files, from .png to .gif, use:

ren *.png *.gif

Step 3
After entering the command line, save it as rename.bat to the same folder or directory where the files you wanted to change their file extension is located. Make sure you select “All Files” in the “Save as type”, instead of “Text Documents (*.txt)“.

Step 4
Run (double-click) the rename.bat you’ve saved in Step 3. Voila!

— — — — — —

Using this method to change file extensions will really only change the file extension/file format/file type. It is purely renaming the file extension, not converting the file type.

Note: The number of character of the file extension must be the same before and after rename. But since most of the file extensions are of 3 characters (jpg, png, gif etc.), most probably there shouldn’t be a problem.

(image source)

©2011 SheepTech

Batch Change File Extension

The only downside of this method of batch renaming files is that the number of characters of your file name must be exactly the same, before and after renaming. Meaning if you want to rename abc01.jpg, your new file name must be exactly of 5 characters. If you prefer otherwise, refer to this method.

In this example, I’ll show you how I rename my emoticons set from icon_something.gif to logo_something.gif:

1. Place the series of files you want to rename in a folder

2. Open Notepad, type the following: ren icon_*.gif logo_*.gif

ren stands for rename, while the first file name is before renaming, and the second file name is what you want them to be renamed to.

The asterisk (*) acts as a wild card, meaning it can be anything. Denoting an asterisk in the command line above meaning the particular part of the file name can be anything and no need to be renamed.

In this case, I want to rename all my emoticons, from icon_biggrin to logo_biggrin, from icon_confused to logo_confused.

For ren icon_*.gif logo_*.gif, it simply means rename all files in the folder that has an initial file name of icon_(anything).gif to logo_(anything).gif

3. After typing ren icon_*.gif logo_*.gif in the Notepad, save it as rename.bat to the folder where the files you want to rename is located.

In fact, you can name the file as anything you like, but it must end with a .bat extension. Make sure you select “All Files” in the “Save as type”, instead of “Text Documents (*.txt)“.

4. Double-click/Open the .bat file you have just saved.

5. Voila, it’s done. All my emoticons are now by the file name of logo_(anything).gif

How it actually works?

All the command line would do is replacing each character of the file name to a new one which you’ve specified. It cannot add a new character or deduct a character. In short, you can only use this to rename your files to a new name with the same amount of character.

It’s all about playing around with the wild card (*). Depending on how you want to rename your batch of files, you would manipulate the command line in Step 2. Here’s are 2 examples that may help you to understand better:

Situation 1
Rename DSC001.jpg, DSC002.jpg, DSC003.jpg to ESC001.jpg, ESC002.jpg, ESC003.jpg

Command line to use: ren DSC00*.txt ESC00*.txt

Situation 2
Rename DSC001.jpg, DSC002.jpg, DSC003.jpg to john01.jpg, john02.jpg, john03.jpg

Command line to use: ren DSC0*.jpg john*.jpg

Batch renaming without considering the amount of character

If you prefer to batch rename a series of files to any name you desire, without considering the number of character of the previous file name:

1. Highlight or Select all the files you want to rename.
2. Press F2 or right-click any of them and select “Rename“.
3. Type the new file name you desire and press “Enter”.
4. Voila!

Using this method, your new file names will be numbered. Say you rename 3 files with different names to awesome-pic, your output file names would be awesome-pic, awesome-pic(2) and awesome-pic(3).

©2011 SheepTech

Batch File Rename Without Using Software

One of the most popular reason to disable right-click on a website is to prevent visitors from downloading or stealing their images. But it will no longer work as there are so many other ways to download an image from a website without using the right-click.

These are the 3 methods that would enable you to download any images from a right-click disabled website easily:

Drag & drop image to desktop or browser’s address bar

This is the easiest method of all. Just drag the image you wanted to download to your desktop (or just anywhere else in your local disk) and it will be downloaded automatically. This will work in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Alternatively, you can drag the image to the Firefox’s address bar. Doing this will load the image in the browser and you are now free to right-click on the image and save it.

The drawback is it will not work on linked images and non-draggable images—a website background for example.

Open Page Info in Firefox, download from there

By any chance the drag method do not work, try this one.

1. In Firefox, go to Tools → Page Info.
2. Click on the Media tab.
3. Look for the image you wanted to download in the list.
4. Click the “Save As…” button.

This method eliminates the need of looking into the page’s source code manually, as all images on the webpage will be listed in the “Page Info”, making life easier.

Print screen, crop, save

This would be the last resort. It is not the best way, for you would need to crop the image after capturing the screenshot, and most probably the outcome wouldn’t be perfect. But then the thing is, it would work, definitely.

1. Go to the website where the image you wanted to download is located.
2. Scroll to the location of the image, make sure the screen is showing the image
3. Press on the “Print Screen” button (somewhere above the “Backspace” button). The button label may vary, but it would look something like “Prnt Scrn”
4. Open MS Paint or any image editor
5. Press “Ctrl+V”
6. You will now see the screenshot you have captured a while ago. Crop the image you wanted to download and save it.

While it is easy to get around the right-click trick, note must be taken as it is still illegal to use a copyrighted image without permission.

©2011 SheepTech

How To Download Image on Right-click Disabled Website