Category: spriglets

OK, so I have PDFs of several receipts that I need to fax into my health insurance company for flexible spending reimbursement.  The Windows Fax “printer” doesn’t allow me to string together multiple files, so I’m in a pickle.

I don’t have Adobe Acrobat, so I start Googling with “(combine|merge) (pdf|pdfs) -mac -apple -purchase -demo -trial -shareware -acrobat”

I find pdfsam, download & install it, add my PDFs, set the output file, click Run and, bam, a merged PDF.  Sweet.

I tried another option as well — pdftk.  If you’d rather go the commandline route, this’ll work just as good.

Have you ever had a program show in the taskbar as running, but not show anywhere on the screen? (I’ve only had it happen in a dual-screen environment, but I suppose it could happen with a single screen.)

Anyway. Alt-Space is your friend.

Hit Alt-space, choose Move and then use the arrow keys to move the window back to the visible screen.

If you are like me and often have a lot of apps open in Windows, here’s an easy way to get more room in your taskbar. If you’re wondering why my taskbar is dark gray, I’m using the Zune theme for Windows XP.

®= right-click, © = click, © © = double-click

1. ® on an empty place on the taskbar, © Properties

2. © Customize next to the “Hide inactive icons” checkbox

3. Note the Behavior column

4. Next to each “Hide when inactive” entry change it to “Always Hide”

5. © OK twice and you’re done. Voila. Nice, huh?

I have time tracking worksheet that I use at work. It looks something like this:

Task	Total Hours	Friday, 9/7/2007	Saturday, 9/8/2007	…
Status Report	5.25	1.5	0	…
Staff Meeting	12.5	1.5	0	…
…	…	…	…	…

Since I don’t work on Saturday or Sunday, I’d like to hide all columns that have a date that’s a Saturday or Sunday.

Here’s a little VB macro that will do the trick:

h/t Rowan

Just bought a new Dell SK-8135 keyboard off of eBay.  I have one at work and like it a lot.

It has some buttons on it that are sorta configurable — if you don’t mind poking around in the Windows Registry.

Start -> Run -> regedit

Browse to:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AppKey

• 7 =  Browser home button – this will launch the default browser
• 15 = Mail button  – this will launch the default mail app.
• 16 = Music note button – this will launch the application associated with the .cda extension.  I changed this one to .mp3
• 17 = My Computer button
• 8 =  Calculator button

Make your changes, reboot and you’re good to go.

EDIT: This does work in Windows 7

EDIT: 12 Dec 2012 – This also works on other keyboards with media controls…like my new Amazon Basics chiclet keyboard (affiliate link).