I finally found a fix for my Wacom touch screen on my Gateway E155c. I noticed that it stopped working whenever the laptop resumed from sleep or hibernate. To fix this I had to tell vista that it needed to restart the service if it failed. If you are having this problem you can run services.msc from your start bar.

Then scroll down until you find the Wacom Touch Service

Double click on the Wacom Touch Service and go to the Recovery Tab

Change the highlighted areas in the image.

OneNote highlighter and screen grab did its job

One of my friends suggested that I try the FireFTP plugin after I expressed both my love and frustration over CuteFTP and WS_FTP. This plugin is awesome it has the same layout of any popular FTP client as well as the useful features like drag-n-drop and SSL/TLS encryption. It is also totally free.

Download the FireFTP Plugin

Starting today, passport travel rules go into effect requiring all travelers to show their passport to flying to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda and the Caribbean must have their passport with them to be able to return home. You can also show a birth certificate and government issued ID like a drivers license. The requirement only affects air travel.

These rules were suspended early this year due to a backlog in passport applications hindering peoples travel but now the State Department says it has cut the waiting time for a new passport to six weeks for a general application and about three weeks for expedited service.

Starting January 31st, 2008 people traveling back from Canada, Mexico or the Carribean must show a valid passport or birth certificate and other proof of citizenship. By Summer 2008 all travel will be required to show a passport to reenter the country.

I spent about 30 minutes frantically looking where I placed my passport today because I’m going overseas at the end of the year and I couldn’t remember where I stored it.

If the blinking blue standby light on your Samsung 226bw is annoying then you aren’t alone. I find it extremely annoying to go to bed. I went through the documentation, I searched online and there isn’t a way to disable the light without damaging the monitor. The solution I came up with takes all of 5 seconds to do and can be reversed in the same amount of time.

Tape. Use tape, black electrical tape is probably the best choice, masking tape works too. The button still works through the tape and you no longer have to see the blinking blue strobe light up your office. I would avoid using heavy duty tape like duct tape because it will leave a sticky residue behind thats harder to remove.

My lasik experience taught me how to use eye drops. The bad taste of Pred Forte comes from drainage through your tear ducts and then which empty down the back of your throat.

If you close your tear duct and tilt your head back for 2-3 minutes it should be enough to prevent or lessen the bad taste in your mouth. This will help prevent the drops escaping down the tear duct and leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

Your tear duct is located on the edge of your eye next to your nose. Almost no pressure is needed to close your tear duct, the act of placing your finger gently against the side of your nose should be enough to close it. It should feel like a small bulge.

I noticed a few people were coming to my site looking for a way to remove the Trillian splash screen. Well you can do it and it requires a little editing of the configuration file. Open up the trillian.ini file located at:

C:/Program Files/Trillian/users/default/trillian.ini OR
C:/Documents and Settings/windows username/Trillian/trillian profile/trillian.ini

Now edit the line under [Setup] from Show Loading=1 to

Show Loading=0

If you don’t have these lines in your trillian.ini file you might want to upgrade to the latest version. You might also want to use these settings Minimize Buddies=1 and Show Closing=1 as well as removing useless Trillian plugins as it will speed up trillian loading time significantly.

Google has finally added search to the Reader product. I woke up and got this surprise.

Gotta love it. Now all they need to do is add better tasks to Google Calendar so that I can see whats due soon as well as set reminders. I wouldn’t mind better color coding too.

In Windows XP creates a system restore point every 24 hours and whenever you make changes to the system. The problem I was having is that when my available disk space was shrinking the system restore points were getting more and more defragmented. This normally wouldn’t be a problem but for some reason the disk defrag says these restore points are unmovable files. Well I looked for a solution and the most obvious one is to use the disk cleanup wizard to delete the restore points. The only problem I had with this is that the wizard doesn’t delete the latest restore point. This creates a fragmented restore point that fragments the newest restore point. Basically I will always have an unmovable restore point unless I can find a way to delete every single one of them.

I found a way. In the Windows XP Control Panel go to the System Restore tab and check “Turn off System Restore on all drives” and then click OK. This will delete all the system restore points. After you have turned off system restore run the defrag utility and then enable system restore and you have a cleaned up drive.

I’ve known about this for a while but I forgot how to do it and I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t remember how to do it. Hopefully writing this out will make me remember.

Do you know the power of the middle mouse button? It opens and closes tabs and makes browsing the web so much more enjoyable. I was surprised yesterday when I was watching a friend of mine fumble around with his Firefox. For me, everyone should know how to use their mouse and its also something that is missing from internet explorer.

In summary, clicking on a link with the middle mouse button will open the link in a new tab and if you click on the tab with the middle mouse button it will close the tab which is less frustrating that aiming for the little red box. Is your mouse missing a middle button? Ctrl-left click also works.

GMail is the gold standard in file sharing for college students. Every group project I’ve ever worked on since GMail was how everyone shared files between one another. Recently while using Google Reader I thought about my GMail usage and wondered why it doesn’t have any keyboard shortcuts. Well it does and I needed to turn them on.

Settings -> Keyboard Shortcuts on

Granted now you have to learn how to use them. I’ve included a list of GMail keyboard shortcuts that I’ve found. You can read the official list but I think mine is easier to use.

c - compose
/ - search
k - move to newer conversation
j - move to older conversation
n - next message
p - previous message
o or enter - open a conversation
u - return to conversation list
y - archive a conversation
m - mute user, all email from user is automatically archived
x - select conversation
s - star a message or conversation
! - report spam
r - reply to a mail
a - reply to all recepients
f - forward message
esc - escape from input field
ctrl+s - save draft
tab -> enter - send message
y -> o - archive your conversation and move to the next one.
g -> a - show all mail
g -> s - show starred conversations
g -> c - show contacts list.
g -> d - show drafts
g -> i - show inbox