Friedbeef’s Tech

I recently switched laptops at work and I just could NOT get used to the annoying fact that my delete button has shifted so far away that its became noticeably difficult to use.

Rather than try to adapt (or sprain my hand), I am using Sharpkeys, which is an excellent piece of freeware which allows you to remap your keyboard so your keyboard *ahem* "works the way it’s supposed to".

Want an extra ‘Alt’ or ‘Shift’ key?  Just remap another key to it.  You can also choose to turn off some keys on your keyboard altogether (like capslock), if you they get in the way.

One thing I like about it is that it’s not a program which sits in the background.  Instead, Sharpkeys has no system footprint as it writes all the changes you want directly to the registry itself. 

Don’t settle - Take control of your keyboard!

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Yes, I may be a Flock user now, but I fully appreciate the fact that Flock wouldn’t exist if not for the kind folks in the Mozilla Foundation which have worked tirelessly on the development of Firefox and have made the source code openly available…  All of which has resulted in superior alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. 

Anyhow, SpreadFirefox.com is organizing a worldwide effort to put Firefox in the limelight by setting a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy.

The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join our community and this effort by pledging today :)

Update 4/July/2008: Success! The world record was ratified by Guinness with a whopping 8,002,530 downloads in 24 hours!

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The issue of sending large files across has always been a hard one to tackle.  We’ve previously talked about uploading to services like Yousendit as viable solutions, but here’s another approach you can take which may be much quicker. 

PatchOnClick allows you to send and receive updates to large files without having to send or receive the whole file each time.

What it does is it helps you to compare two files, and automatically create a patch which only stores the differences between the two files.  For example, if you have a 5mb document and you added in 3 sentences to it, you no longer have to send over the entire 5mb to anyone who wants an updated copy… you just need to send over the patch which will be a few kb in size!

Aside from email limitations, sending and receiving smaller patch files is less burdensome on servers, firewalls, and security programs which scan data as it is sent and received.

While useful, there are a few minor limitations to this service. 

• You need the other side to have a copy of the original document before you can send over the patch (obviously)
• The other side must have PatchOnClick installed to apply the patch to the document

Work around these two simple points though, and you have yourself an incredibly useful freeware as it can work on any file type!

How do send over large files?  Tell us in the comments!

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