Tag: Software

3 Utilities to Schedule System Shutdown

by
Inf

So, a friend of mine wanted to know if she could shutdown her PC automatically at a certain time. Or after a certain period of time. Well it’s possible. And I’m going to show you 3 utilities to do it, and how to do it from within your OS too, in case you don’t want to download. There are a LOT of shutdown utilities out there, but those below, I have used personally.

1. Shutter

Shutter

Shutter is my favourite shutdown utility due to its simplicity, but also because it comes from the author of the great ReNamer that I have already covered on Geekscribes previously.

Basically, you just choose the event that triggers the action. Events can be: countdown, at a specific time,  a period of low CPU usage, a process stops, battery low, among others. After that, you just set the action to do: sleep or shutdown the computer, mute volume, lock the computer, among others. Then just click Start. I don’t like that “Start” button. In my opinion, it should have been “Schedule”. If you want the action to take place immediately, just click “Now”. Shutter also offers an extensive set of options, like showing a message before an action takes place.

Shutter also includes a Web Interface if you want to do “Now” actions, or run commands remotely. This is a really great feature for those of you with a download/torrent box. Note, this can be a security problem, so be sure to set a good username and password when configuring the web server in Options.

Shutter comes in Installer and Portable formats.

2. PowerOff

PowerOff

PowerOff takes another approach at events and actions. It puts everything on the main window. So you just select your action on the left. On the right, set options, like whether you want a warning before the action executes, or whether to force-close applications. Then set the time. Either immediate, or schedule it to execute at a specific time.

There are extensive scheduling options, like at a time, on a fixed day, or a daily schedule, on a weekly schedule, on a day of month, or after a time period elapses. One thing I’d like is the “After” option to allow me to set minutes, hours etc, instead of just seconds.

PowerOff also includes remote-control features, like Shutter. Interestingly, you can have the command execute on a remote computer, if the latter supports it. I haven’t tested that feature though.

PowerOff is portable, and comes with the source code, if ever you want to mess around with it. It’s coded in C/C++ language.

3. Amp WinOff

Amp WinOFf

Amp WinOff, as you can see from the screenshot above, offers extensive options. You can set the actions to execute at a specific time (1st frame, top-right), or use a countdown (bottom-left frame), or when according to CPU load (top-right frame). You then set which action to take. It’s called “Shutdown mode” in Amp WinOff. You can even schedule days in advance.

While the program offers a many options and is very customizable, I don’t like the terminology used. Why is there a “Use the current time + 1 minute” and then a countdown feature? Also, I doubt “Lock Computer” is a “Shutdown Mode”. Anyway, those don’t really matter once you get familiar with the program. Now, the second thing that is annoying with Amp WinOff is that the website has been down for a while now, and I can’t find a mirror that’s still alive. The shot you’re seeing above is not from the latest version.

If you can find the utility somewhere, good.

4. Directly from your OS

Linux:

Yes, you can execute a sheduled shutdown right from your OS. Let’s start with Linux first. It should work on most major distros, but I only tested on Ubuntu.

Fire up your Terminal/Konsole or whatever it’s called in your distro.

Then the command structure is as this:

shutdown [- shutdown parameters] [ time parameter] [ optional message ]

shutdown parameters: r = reboot, h = halt, c = cancel shutdown (time parameter is then not required)

Some examples:

shutdown -r now    <-- Reboot immediately
shutdown -h 19:00  <-- Shutdown (Halt) the system at 19h
shutdown -h +5 "System will shutdown"   <-- Shutdown the system in 5 mins from now, and tell users why.

Quite easy huh? Just note that while a shutdown is scheduled, new users won’t be allowed to login 5 minutes before the shutdown sequence is initiated, i.e. only 5 mins left before shutdown. This is to be considered for multi-user environments.

Windows:

The command is similar to that of Linux, but different syntax and parameter names. Just open a command prompt (type cmd in the search box in Vista/Win7, or Winkey+R, then type cmd, or directly type the commands below in the search box in Win7)

shutdown [- shutdown parameters] [-t xx in seconds] [-c reason]
shutdown parameters: r = reboot, s = shutdown, a = abort shutdown

Some examples:

shutdown -r       <-- Reboots computer immediately
shutdown -s       <-- Shutdown computer immediately
shutdown -r -t 60 <-- Restart computer in 60 seconds
shutdown -s -t 3600 -c "Computer shutting down" <-- Shutdown in one hour (3600 seconds), and tell user why

You should get a confirmation that the command has been accepted. (E.g. Keys icon in the notification area with a message).

That’s it for this post. If you know other methods for scheduling a system shutdown, or maybe to get your favorite utility listed here, drop us a comment. Thanks!

What is Assisted Living

by
Inf

An assisted living care facility like The Residences at Plainview / senior independent living provides residents with extra support with activities of daily living when and how they need it. Services are provided as needed and at an assisted living level of care. For more information, visit now this website or go to a place like harvesthomeinwoodcrossing.com/living-options/assisted-living/.
.

What is assisted living?

As the term “assisted living” implies, assisted living and community senior living care provide residents with assistance with activities of daily living when and how they need it. Assistance may include a home-based program, a personal assistant or personal aide, personal care assistant or personal aide, nursing or personal care aides, home health aides, respite care aides, assisted living technicians like the ones on oceanhillsseniorliving.com/living-options/independent-living/, community assistants, and home health aides. There are facilities that are well-equipped with mobility devices or equipment such as this stairlift at https://certifiedstairlifts.co.uk/ to meet the needs of seniors.

Visit sites such as fallbrookglenseniorliving.com/our-community/ to get an idea. 

A resident’s services are limited to those that are listed above. Some states have additional programs.

If a resident requests assisted living care, the local family service agency must provide the resident with a notice of assisted living care or offer to assist the resident in getting the services that are most appropriate to his or her individual needs.

State laws may include limits on how long a resident may be assisted living. In some cases, state and federal programs may reimburse certain costs for assisted living services. Check out sites like www.carltonseniorliving.com/living-options/ for additional guidance.

What is assisted living?

Assisted living like this Assisted Living in Los Angeles, CA provides residents with the care they need when they need it most. This care includes assistance with bathing and eating, medical care and medications, transportation, personal care and assistance with social activities. Some assisted living facilities like the ones from https://www.arborpalmsseniorliving.com/ offer programs for seniors who are unable to live independently.

Is assisted living legal?

Assisted living may be legal under many states’ laws and laws of neighboring states. Please contact your local state attorney general office or local housing office for specific information regarding your rights and responsibilities in this situation. Is assisted living affordable? Assisted living may be affordable, but there are some requirements that need to be considered. There are different kinds of assisted living facilities. Some are available in communities such as the ones from Vista at Simi Valley, where they are often owned and operated by the community itself. Others are available in a private setting. They may require certain level of income to be able to offer the services of an assisted living facility. These assisted living facilities may be located in an individual’s own home or other space. As the name implies, they offer medical and/or psychological assistance.

There are also different kinds of nursing homes. The differences in these are primarily in the type of nursing home. Nursing homes usually are not in an individual’s own home. These are generally either assisted living facilities, long-term care nursing homes or institutionalized nursing homes. Some of the facilities may be very different in design and style from one another and may also have different requirements. Some nursing homes, however, are in a nursing home facility that has a community of nursing homes that are located together. This would include the facilities, e.g., memory care community like the Summerfield of Fresno / memory care nursing homes, that are not owned by a private hospital. The nursing homes that are connected to each other are often called a nursing home community. This is a large area that includes a number of nursing homes and may have different layouts for different nursing homes.

The different types of nursing homes often have different amenities. There may be a large parking lot, pool, gym, tennis courts, golf courses, pools, and more. There may also be restaurants or other places where visitors can go to spend time with residents. Many of the residents who live in the community have lived there for a long time. The nursing homes may have different rates, depending on the type of nursing home that is connected to it. You can visit this site to know more.

10 Very Useful Utilities You May Not Know About

by
Inf

Utilities are life-savers. I am usually on the lookout of new ones that give me added functionalities at a low memory cost. Here’s a rundown of 10 very useful utilities I have found. Not all are very light on memory though…

Let’s get started, shall we?

Continue Reading »

3 Features Mobile Phones Should Have But Most Don’t

by
Inf

I don’t consider myself to be a very heavy mobile user. Apart from the usual SMS and receiving calls, I sometimes use the camera, or the included Wifi-capability of my phone to browse a bit around while on the go and use the mystic messenger emails android chat. However, there is a set of features which I sorely miss in my device, and other devices I’ve used. I’ve compiled a list here, and I can only hope some developer stumbles on this page, and decides to implement those. Apart from affordable phone plans, they could still go a long way in making a device much more usable. They are not too difficult to implement I think, so here goes nothing…

Timed Profiles

I think it must be Nokia that came up with this bright idea years ago. Indeed, it’s a very good feature (at least it is for me). I don’t have to remember to set my device to Silent before going to lectures and such. But since it was implemented, the feature has hardly evolved.

Also, accessing this feature is a pain in itself. In Nokia devices, you have to dig through the menus down to Profiles, and there you get the option to activate it.

The only thing you can do is set a profile, then time another to expire at a time. After that, the other profile will activate, and when the time is up, the previous profile will be activated automatically. Easy to understand but not very useful.

What would have been useful is able to repeat the expiry time or even plan the expiry of profiles over the week. Say, General profile will be active from 18h to 23h, Sleep profile will activate from 23h to 07h. And Silent active from 07h to 18h. And that schedule will be applicable only during weekdays, while during weekends, you have another set of times.

But no, for now, you can’t have it in-built. Yet.

Delay SMS Sending

Another feature I sorely miss. It’s not even available on the networks as a service most of the time! Oh, I do agree there are ways to do without, like setting a reminder and have it sent at a particular date and time. This was possible in my old handset, but not now. It’s as if handsets are de-evolving! Now, on my N85, I don’t even have a stopwatch, while the good old 3310 had one!

Anyway, back to the point. What I want is a way to compose a message and save it. Then set it to be sent at a date and time. Sometimes, you need to remind a friend to bring you something, but only on the eve of the day you meet. You have to remember to send that message yourself, even if your device could have done the remembering with more ease.

Again no, it doesn’t exist yet as an in-built facility. Not in any device I know of. It may exist as an addon-application, but it needs to be in-built!

LED to indicate new stuff E.g. Missed Calls or SMS pending

My good old Sony Ericsson had a LED outside that flashed. But the problem is that it flashed just to indicate that the phone was on. Kind of a waste if you ask me. It could have been put to much better use as BlackBerry did.

BlackBerry devices have a small LED light that flashes when you have pending sms, calls or emails. Why don’t all devices have that? Even the high-end ones don’t!

Better yet would have the LED flash different colors for different things missing, maybe in order of priority. SMS pending flashes blue. Missed calls flashes red. But if you had both, the light would still flash red. At least you’d know from afar if you had something waiting, without having to touch the phone, or press a key to know.

If this is not possible, just make the LED flash at different speeds for different things.

But no, for now, I have to content myself with a dumb LED that tells me my phone is on. Very useful indeed!

All those small, but useful applications that were in older devices

Stopwatch? Timer? Alarm? Flashlight? Please, I bought a device that was multiples of the price of those lower-end phones, but still, it didn’t have all the features of those phones in them. I don’t have a stopwatch! I really need a stopwatch sometimes, and I don’t have one. Not in a device that costs nearly $300! What the hell! A device that costs $100 has it!

That is not fair developers! Give us those features back. We deserve them. And most of them are mostly software, so you can’t complain that it’ll take space inside the device as hardware.

There you go. I have completed my list of 3 features I really miss on any handset I’ve used, and really wished they were there. Do you have a feature that you wished was there, but is not? Let us know. 😀

Clean Up Font Clutter with Font Frenzy

by
Inf

I’m the kind of dude that install fonts by the buckets. I like fonts, and I like variety in my creations. Also, some programs that I install tend to place their own fonts on my machine on their own. After a while, this creates a huge mess and your fonts list in your applications grows excessively long. If ever the applications you use have font preview, this makes the matters worse! I’ve had Wordpad and some other programs crashing on me due to some corrupt font, or some font they didn’t like while I was browsing the font list.

Also, apparently, having a ton of fonts installed can bring down the performance of your machine, so before installing that font pack with a zillion fancy fonts in it, you might re-consider. Though I have to say, I never noticed the performance hit myself, despite the 1067 fonts I had installed.

Thus, there comes a time in the life of every font freak, where they must clean up their fonts folder. The problem is that Windows has a set of fonts that it likes and cannot work without. I’ll call these system-critical fonts. If you delete those, you will have a brick of a machine on your hands, and a re-install of the OS could save it, but lot of pains involved. Thus you would want a way to clean up that font folder of yours while keeping the essential fonts, correct?

Here comes Font Frenzy! Font Frenzy is a free software that will allow you to preview what fonts you have installed, but also manage them. By manage, I mean, install new fonts, back up existing fonts and uninstall those you don’t want. All this in a very simple interface.

FontFrenzy

But the most interesting feature of Font Frenzy, something that I have not seen in other font managers, is the ability to “DeFrenzy” your font folder. What this does is uninstall all those non system-critical fonts that you have installed. Before doing that, it’ll prompt you to create a snapshot of your current fonts. I’ll explain what this does later. After that, it’ll “uninstall” all those unnecessary fonts by removing them from the OS’ font folder, and place them somewhere of your own liking. Thus, you have a backup of the fonts, but at the same time, they do not clutter. You can then pick and choose which ones to re-install at a later time.

Now about those snapshots. They are in fact saved states of your font folders. Using snapshots, you can easily add or remove sets of fonts. For example, I have a snapshot where I have “DeFrenzied” my whole font folder, returning my system to its default state. Then, when I need all my fonts back, I just “ReFrenzy” using that snapshot, and get all my fonts back. Likewise, you can have different snapshots for different installed font-sets. E.g. A set with only default+graffiti fonts for example.

Oh, if you still want to clean up the your font mess manually, this list should be helpful to know what NOT to delete.

Summarizing, the good points of Font Frenzy are:

  • Simple interface
  • Ability to remove non-essential or non-default fonts from a system automatically
  • Can restore all removed fonts via snapshots
  • Can manage fonts (install, delete)
  • Can backup fonts to a folder you like (Unload and Store) in FrenzyMan

The cons are:

  • ReFrenzy, DeFrenzy, FrenzyMan… these terms can be confusing to the new user, but you get used to them after a while.
  • DeFrenzy (remove all non-essential fonts) does not remove all non-essentials apparently. It does leave some fonts behind. I don’t know if they can be considered essential, but nevertheless, Font Frenzy does a decent job at cleaning up things.
  • If you check the Fonts folder in Windows, you will see that not all the removed fonts are gone from that folder. I think Font Frenzy just removes some entries from the registry for some fonts, so they look as if they are un-installed.

So I’d say, if you need a simple, but good font manager, give Font Frenzy a try.

Internet Explorer 8 Lolz: Act 2

by
Inf

EDIT: (starts here)

More lies and debunking them! You really have to see those two links.

Among the most interesting ones:

“Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.”

Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s test cases than any other browser.

Can’t Microsoft be prosecuted for spreading lies like that? It’s almost offensive to web-developers!
(ends here)

I recently mentioned that Internet Explorer and Microsoft were afraid of other browsers. Remember that 10k competition thing?

Well, Microsoft has done it yet again! Only this time, it’s a lot more funny and weird. And the amount of lolz just got way higher! See for yourself! And the Digg source.

Line by line comments follow after the shot:

More IE8 Lolz

Now the comments:

  1. Yeah right. IE is more secured than both Chrome and Firefox. I wonder where all those vulnerabilities come from. All those ActiveX nasty stuff. Yeah. IE is indeed secured.
  2. In-Private browsing? Ever heard of Chrome’s Incognito mode? Firefox’s new Privacy mode? Or what we call “the porn mode”? Another set of ticks missing here!
  3. IE is easy to use? Since when? Accelerators? Try SmarterFox. Chrome is fast enough as is!
  4. At least they got some humility to say that Firefox 3 is better. But still, I doubt IE8 is better at standards. Remember that ACID3 test?
  5. Developer Tools? I dunno. Can’t comment. But I know nothing beats Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar combined!
  6. Reliability. Firefox will soon have tab/process management, don’t worry IE. Chrome already has it.
  7. Customizability: Many of the things I want? Right out of the box? Gimme the features of a fully-featured RSS reader directly in IE (Brief?). Or coloured tabs (Colourful Tabs). Or a powerful download manager (DownThemAll). I can even write my own, or customize existing ones! Stop hating Firefox, MS! Give some love to the Fox!
  8. Compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser? For real? And that ACID3 test again? And the non-respect of standards?? Don’t make me laugh! Opera is the best in compatibility imho!
  9. Manageability: What do they mean here? I can’t understand.
  10. Performance: Why isn’t Safari here? I heard it’s the fastest of them all.

Overall, IE is bluffing. But hey, more lolz for us! Who are we to complain? I’d so like to see Firefox 3.5 soon. Hey, why not Firefox 4? Let’s see IE fight that! 😛

Seems TechCrunch is poking some fun at IE8 too!

So long!

In search of the ultimate desktop RSS reader

by
Inf

Yes, you read correctly. I said, desktop RSS reader. I’m old style. I’m classic. Whatever, I still want my feeds on my desktop. For one single reason: it’s so much simpler. Click the icon in the notification area, and voila! I got my news at a click. No need to load Firefox, point to some random URL to a web-based feed reader or whatever. There’s also another reason. I like my data on my computer, not on some server on the Internet. What if tomorrow, the company that manages the web-feed-reader goes out of scene? What happens to my feeds? And if ever they decide to keep usage info on my feeds so as to create spam “targetted advertising”? No thanks. I want full control over what I keep, what I share and what I want others to access. Ok, enough side-tracking. Back to the article, which by the way, is the 100th post on GeekScribes! Click below:

Continue Reading »