A mile wide & an inch deep

Have you ever been confronted to the simple task of printing out a list of every file in a folder, and wondered how you could do that the fast and simple way? Some people would advise you to take a snapshot of your screen, but when you have 200 files in a folder there is no way you could have the whole list on your screen at the same time. Some would tell you to type in some DOS commands, but not everyone is familiar and at ease with command line stuff… So how can you do that?

Well, no more fumbling with My Computer or Windows Explorer, wishing you could print information about all your files. Karen’s Directory Printer is here for you! This free software can print the name of every file on a drive or in a single folder, along with the file’s size, date and time of last modification, and attributes (Read-Only, Hidden, System and Archive)! The list of files can be sorted by name, size, date created, date last modified, or date of last access. You can choose to print the list to your printer, to a text file, or to a space delimited file you can open and work on in Excel or any other spreadsheet software.

WinDirStat is a free open source disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows.

On start up, it reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

•    The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,

•    The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,

•    The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file’s size. The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list. The cushion shading additionally brings out the directory structure.

I had a little but annoying problem when writing sms on my Samsung phone (S7550): I just couldn’t find a way to type some special characters like “ê”, î or “ë”. Mostly useless in English, but unavoidable in French!

I was almost ready to accept that glitch as some strange bug or carelessness from Samsung, until I found where it came from: by default, Samsung phones (mine at least) are configured by default to use some “GSM alphabet”, which apparently doesnt include some accentuated letters. The strange thing is I never had that problem with my old Nokia phone. Anyway, the solution can be found under:

Menu -> Messages -> Settings -> SMS -> Sending preferences -> Alphabet

Choose “UNICODE” or better: “Auto” instead of “GSM alphabet” in the drop down menu and you’re all set!

The problem with the UNICODE option is that it will limit the length of the SMS to 70 characters instead of the normal 160. Using the “Auto” option, your phone will detect if you are using any character not in the default GSM alphabet, and will make the SMS a Unicode SMS accordingly (only 70 characters long). If you don’t use any of those special characters, the SMS will remain a “normal” SMS (160 characters).

Link: GSM alphabet table.

A very nice piece of equipment to carry with you along with your camera: the Gorillapod is a small portable tripod with flexible, wrappable legs that allow you to secure your digital camera or video camera to virtually any surface. Inexpensive and absolutely useful, it comes in several sizes to accomodate any kind of camera, from compact cameras to SLRs and video cameras up to 5 kg.

A free e-book about what is new in HTML5.