David Vielmetter

Category: Tricks

  • Making perfect Hash Browns

    I like to make a good American style breakfast at least one day of the week and for me, that’s always included a large serving of golden brown crispy hashbrown potatoes. The perfect start to a lazy Sunday reading the newspaper and lounging around the house. After years of dealing with with frozen hash browns…

  • Prevent EVDO from draining your phone battery

    Got a Motorola RAZR that lasts 12 hours or less on a full change? The problem could be spotty EVDO service in your area. When connected to Sprint or Verizon’s equivalent of 3G (aka EVDO), the RAZR will try to establish a network connection repeatedly in areas of spotty service thereby draining its battery very…

  • Select from three Windows7 power plans

    A while ago I voiced my frustration about Microsoft’s choice to display only two of the three standard power plan choices when clicking the battery icon in the notification area. In that initial article I suggested a shareware program called Power Plan Assistant which I actually uninstalled a week later due to some annoying shareware…

  • Cleaning the MAF sensor on a Corolla

    According to some Toyota forums, cleaning Mass Air Flow (MAF) Sensor can fix low idling. At about 85,000 miles my Corolla’s idle speed decreased from 700 to about 500rpm and felt like it was going to stall sometimes after the AC compressor kicked off. Cleaning the MAF sensor seemed to have done the trick and…

  • Add “Edit with VIM” to the OSX Context Menu

    I’ve been using Vim for making quick changes to files in Unix and Windows for years. As a result I am used to right-clicking files with any extension and editing it with Vim from the context menu (or is it contextual menu? I forget). Often times before making changes to a file, I’ll make a…

  • Fixing stubborn DNS errors on SBS 2003

    Windows 2003 Small Business Server (SBS) has wizards for configuring all sorts of settings during the initial server setup. Unfortunately changing those settings without the wizard later can be a hassle. This is the story of an SBS server which was originally setup as a gateway router with two network interfaces (WAN/LAN) only later to…

  • Keep Buzz out of your Gmail inbox

    Google’s Buzz is a great new social feature, but as all of my friends are giving it a whirl my Inbox has become swamped with useless notifications I wish would just buzz the heck off! After fiddling with filters for a minute here’s a temporary way to automatically archive Buzz to its label and keep…

  • Sorting Folders before files in Finder

    I know that the mac works differently (so everyone keeps telling me!) but I’m sorry, that’s not a valid solution to a host of real annoyances. It’s true that I’m a Windows user and that I’ve got Windows habits (think delete key), but listing folders sorted separately from files in a window just seems something…

  • Grabit on the Mac

    Heard about WineBottler for the Mac? It’s open source software that lets you “bottle up” Windows applications and run them on your Intel Mac OS X. Since there aren’t any good or free usenet downloaders available for the Mac (boo), I tried bottling up Grabit from Shemes and it works! Here’s how:

  • Irfanview on MAC with WineBottler

    There are a lot of Windows Apps I miss on my MacBook Pro. One of them is an awesome free Swiss army knife of image manipulation tools called Irfanview. It lets you batch rename/convert/modify entire directories of images and it’s not bad as an image viewer either. Well, here’s how to get it running on…