Matt Refghi

I mentioned in a previous article that I used to play World of Warcraft, probably a total of seven months over six years. Though I rarely play anymore, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of my more interesting and/or amusing experiences within the game. Before I begin, you should know that in most games, whenever I have the option to play a character that heals others, I take it. It is simply the function I enjoy the most. I like monitoring the health of others, healing them when they’re getting attacked, saving them where they would have normally died. Some games, including World of Warcraft, allow you to resurrect dead players, another mechanic I enjoy. … Read more

Here’s a tip for all Google Chrome users out there. By now, you’ve probably all seen how Chrome treats downloads differently than other browsers. As soon as you download a file, a bar will appear at the bottom of that particular tab, allowing easy access to the file. In doing so, it also saves space by only showing what is immediately relevant for each individual tab. You can use controls in that bar to locate the file in Windows, or even view your full list of downloads. I’ve personally always used the “Show in folder” option, as this brings me exactly to the file, allowing me to move it elsewhere. Usually, I end up moving it to my desktop, as … Read more

When I originally found myself needing to reboot a machine via Remote Desktop, I realized that the shut down option was removed from the Start menu. Instead, I had the option to end my Remote Desktop session, nothing else. CTRL+ALT+DEL understandably didn’t work, as my local machine interpreted the key combination, not the remote machine. Without an obvious solution at the time, I remembered that there was a command line executable that could be used to shut down. The executable worked so well that I put batch file shortcuts on the desktop of the machine, allowing me to either restart or shut down the machine with a simple double-click. Seeing as this proved useful to me, I thought I would … Read more

Before I started working for my current employer, I hadn’t yet discovered how useful differencing tools could be. As I began working regularly with Visual SourceSafe 6 at work, I grew to value the fact that I could check for differences before every file check in. It was a standard for my employer, but to me, it was a process I was getting used to. Eventually, I realized that I needed a stand-alone comparison tool, in case Visual SourceSafe wasn’t around. This eventually lead me to a WinMerge, an open source differencing and merging tool. There are numerous reasons why I like WinMerge. Most of all, I really appreciate the contextual options. With files, I can select any difference within … Read more

Today, I discovered a feature in Google Chrome that had somehow eluded me to this date. If you right-click any tab, several contextual options will be listed. Most of these are fairly standard; however, one stands out from the rest. The “pin tab” option, once selected, will transform the current tab so that only the favicon is visible, not the text. This reduces the size of the tab, but also results in it being moved to the left-most side of the bar, as seen below: When you close Chrome, and re-open it, tabs who have been pinned will load automatically. While you could achieve a similar result by adding numerous websites to your home page list, the tab pinning approach … Read more

Update Nov 22, 2016: I added a video tutorial for this! The written blog post remains available below. Notepad++ is my primary text editor, as it offers a huge amount of features, and yet remains fairly simple to use.  After months of using it heavily both at home and at work, I began to wonder if I could launch multiple instances of it at one time. Given that I have two monitors in either case, I thought it would be interesting to have one Notepad++ window per monitor. The best approach I found makes a new copy of Notepad++ launch every time you use a shortcut. To make this work on your machine, simply do the following: Right-click any Notepad++ shortcut. … Read more

In the past, I often found myself wondering how some of my websites would perform when accessed from a low bandwidth connection. Unfortunately, I had no convenient way to test such a scenario, so I usually just forgot about the idea. I recently found myself in a similar scenario at work, and my searches returned a useful tool, Speed Simulator, by Vikas Patial: Speed simulator is a simple throttling proxy which allows you to see how your site behaves under different connection speeds. It was written by me to test AJAX/Flash loaders and see how much my time took to load. You can simulate various speeds like that of a modem or a ADSL. A pre delay function is also there … Read more

When I write for this blog, I don’t always write a post from start to finish, and publish it immediately. Usually, I have to review it multiple times myself, and in certain cases, I decide I want someone else to take a look at it too. In these cases, I typically send the post to one of my friends first, and I await their feedback. At the end of the day, their input allows me to ensure that my content meets a certain standard of quality. Given the significance of their aid, I felt I needed a way to publically thank them, per post. Faced with that idea, I did what any WordPress user would do – I looked for a … Read more

In my youth, I took to video games like most adolescent males did – the habit continued into my adult life. As I aged, the time investment gradually decreased, but never disappeared. I played all sorts of games, but seemed to prefer first person shooters and strategy games, above all. Despite my gaming experience, there is one first person shooter that I prefer over all the others. As it turns out, I’m not referring to a video game, but instead… the sport known as Paintball: Paintball is a sport first played in 1981 in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, in which players compete, in teams or individually, to eliminate opponents by hitting them with capsules containing paint (referred to as … Read more

In a post titled New Folder Shortcut in Windows, I explained how accelerator keys could speed up the process of creating new folders. The key combination that needs to be pressed depends on which letters are underlined in the Windows menu; however, starting with Vista, Microsoft decided to hide these hints, by default. You can still use the key combinations if you know them, but if you don’t, here’s how to make to the underlined letters always visible in Windows 7: Click Start, and launch the Control Panel. Click Ease of Access. Click Change how your keyboard works. Locate the Make it easier to use keyboard shortcuts section. Enable the Underline keyboard shortcuts and access keys checkbox. Click OK. That’s … Read more