Chris is right…the Command Prompt Explorer Bar is pretty freakin’ cool.  It gives you handy access to the command prompt from within a File Explorer menu – it even changes directories at the command prompt as you cruise through the folder structure in the GUI.  Wait a second – is this National Command Line Day!?  (see previous post)  One note:  You’ll have to sign up to get this download – but the process was painless, don’t worry.

Generally speaking, I like saving the cool stuff for Lockergnome's channels, but I found a couple of nifty tools today that I just couldn't wait to share with the world. First, a Command Prompt Explorer Bar (via Julien Cheyssial). Second, PhotoFiltre - one of the best free image editors I've ever found (courtesy of alt.comp.freeware). If it weren't for RSS, I wouldn't have discovered either one of 'em. Jason suggested that we start running a top ten "new feeds" list in our newsletters, so expect to see the first one next week. Oh yeah, I also learned about Peter Hirschberg's classics through my news aggregator. Still think I'm crazy? Good.

[C:\PIRILLO.EXE]

If you’re in a jam like KentC, here’s the link to the online docs for the Windows XP command line.  Got any other advice for Kent?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/proddocs/ntcmds.asp

Admittedly I haven’t used MS-DOS in quite a while and sadly even after all of the cool advances in Windows I find myself still needing it.  For example I have to batch scripts I started to work on today.  The first one is supposed to copy all of our digital photographs to all of our other computers.  That is so that using the My Pictures screen saver lets us see all of the photographs we’ve taken over the past five plus years.  The second one is simply supposed to copy all of our files from one PC to another PC.  Using the xcopy /?  I thought that

XCOPY C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\*.* \\dell333\Backup\DellP4\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\*.* /D /E /C 

would copy all of our pictures from the shared My Pictures directory to a PC named Dell333’s shared My Pictures directory.  When run it would (OK should) skip all of those files with the same date and time stamp (/D without addt’l parameters), copy the even those directories who were empty (/E), and continue copying even if an error occurs (/C). Instead I get an “Invalid number of parameters” error.

I think I understand why Unix SysAdmins (who are incredibly adept with scripts) don’t like Windows.  Any one have any ideas?

[Kentc's SOAPbox]

Whoa.  Go for the 720p version first – even if you have a relatively fast machine!  My AMD XP 2500+ with 1GB RAM and a Nvidia Ti4200 w/128MB RAM was no match for the 1080 version.  I even had some jerkiness at the lower one!

 This one is just for Phil and his super-cool Toshiba MCE laptop…  Well, others can go here too, I suppose.

If you have a beefy machine - try out the Windows Media High Definition demos . The video most of us are used to seeing on our TV sets today is called standard definition, whereas high-def video has as many as 1,080 visible lines of detail. High-def video looks sharper and clearer than regular video especially on big-screen displays. It actually comes in two different resolutions, called 1080p and 720p. Most of the talk around high-def has been associated with HDTV. But you can get high-def video today on a capable Windows XP-based PC ... you can be watching movies in amazing quality, up 6 times that of today's DVD!

[Mark Harrison]

[RoudyBob.NET]

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie have been around forever.  It’s very good “geek” humor.  I believe they even had a CD released at one point… 

These videos are funny! Thanks to Chris Anderson for linking to this site.

Behind the scenes at Microsoft.

Every OS Sucks.

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]

 This one is just for Phil and his super-cool Toshiba MCE laptop…  Well, others can go here too, I suppose.

If you have a beefy machine - try out the Windows Media High Definition demos . The video most of us are used to seeing on our TV sets today is called standard definition, whereas high-def video has as many as 1,080 visible lines of detail. High-def video looks sharper and clearer than regular video especially on big-screen displays. It actually comes in two different resolutions, called 1080p and 720p. Most of the talk around high-def has been associated with HDTV. But you can get high-def video today on a capable Windows XP-based PC ... you can be watching movies in amazing quality, up 6 times that of today's DVD!

[Mark Harrison]

Cool Google tricks, courtesy of Mark Frauenfelder.  I especially like the flight number search.  Go ahead and try it… 

Aaron Swartz points out several useful Google lookups:

Area Codes, e.g. 650, bring up maps.

UPC codes, e.g. 073333531084 or 036000250015, bring up some information about the product.

Flight numbers, e.g. usair 50, provide links to flight tracking

Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers, e.g. JH4NA1157MT001832, link to a CARFAX report on what kind of car and its status.

U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers link to package status Link
[Boing Boing Blog]