I love keyboard shortcuts. Each little shortcut saves you a few seconds and over a year that's a lot less time spent clicking around, choosing from menus and more time being productive. It's all about getting on with the stuff you want to be getting on with, and spending less time/effort just getting there.

So here's a good one. Texter is a little application written by someone at LifeHacker. When you run it it sits in your system tray and replaces predefined sets of characters with longer text. So if you type the same thing several times a day, you can type a few characters and it's automatically replaced by your name as you type. For example, to type Alistair Christie I could just type ac, hit the Enter key and ac is replaced by my name.

If you're a coder you'll probably find this particularly useful as it lets you enter big chunks of code with just a few key presses.

Download Texter from the Download link on the Texter home page.

Important

• Go to the Preferences and turn off Enable Universal Spelling AutoCorrect. It's clearly supposed to work on whole words to correct spelling, but unfortunately it corrects before you've finished writing a word. For example, if you try to write agree, as soon as you get as far as agre it changes the word to agree, which means you end up with agreee. Similarly, if you try to write another you get aanother. This maybe works on some platforms, but on my Vista laptop it's obviously broken. But no matter, Texter is fine without this.
• Replacements don't work everywhere. For example, they don't work in the Run dialog box. From what I've read, this used to work in XP, but doesn't in Vista. Shame, because it would be useful to be able to run a program by just typing a few characters in any application.

If, like me, you like to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than always reaching for the mouse, here are a few keyboard shortcuts you might find useful.

Windows Explorer

Alt + D to select the current path

Alt + down arrow for a list of previously entered paths

Alt + up arrow to go to the parent directory

Internet Explorer

To open Internet Explorer and get to www.itauthor.com:

1. Assuming you have an Internet Explorer icon in your Quick Launch panel, press Windows key + number (e.g. if IE is the third icon in the Quick Launch panel, press Windows key +3).
2. Press Alt + D to select everything in the address bar.
3. Type in itauthor.
4. Press Ctrl + Enter to add www. to the front of what you typed, .com at the end and then search for the URL.

I've never been a Mac believer. In my experience lots of Mac users believe in the superiority of the Mac in the same way as religious zealots believe in the truth of their own particular brand of religion - it's just beyond dispute. The "I'm a Mac" ads play to the Mac crowd. They reinforce the belief of the faithful that PCs are only really good for number crunching and spreadsheets. Those of us watching on a PC know this is not true. However, they're really funny, well made adverts and you've got to admire Apple's nerve.

And, I must admit, there's more than a grain of truth in a few of the ads (e.g. the one with the boxes and the one about the upgrade).

UPDATE (25/7/2008):
I just realised the one about the upgrade wasn't on that video. It's on the one below, right at the end.

I'm still reloading things back onto my home PC after my recent Windows reinstall. It's going to a while yet before it's all back on there. The most recent thing I had to get working again was getting a Remote Desktop session to machines at work.

Setting up Windows Remote Desktop to allow you to use another machine on the same local network is very straightforward. Getting a Remote Desktop connection to a PC on a private external network is a little more tricky. I use PuTTY to SSH to the gateway machine at work.

Part of the PuTTY session is a series tunnels from ports on my local machine to ports on machines on the remote desktop. One of these is a mapping from the localhost port 3389 to port 3389 on a machine at work. Port 3389 is the port used by Remote Desktop, so this tunnel should mean that, once PuTTY has connected me to the external network, I can Remote Desktop to localhost and I will, as if by magic, get the login prompt for the remote machine.

However, having copied back into PuTTY the sessions from my previous Windows installation*, when I connected to the remote machine and then did a Remote Desktop to localhost I got the error message: "The client could not connect. You are already connected to the console of this computer. A new console session cannot be established."

The reason for this, it turns out, is that Remote Desktop knows it shouldn't allow circular connections: from this computer to this computer. So it rejects attempts to connect to 127.0.0.1. Now, as localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1, this gets rejected also.

However, on Windows, all other IP addresses in the 127.x.x.x range also represent the local machine, and Remote Desktop does not block these addresses. So this allows you to map port 3389 on one of these addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.2 or 127.254.254.254) to port 3389 on a remote PC and then you can specify that address in the Remote Desktop login window.

Note: Although the Source port field is clearly intended just for a port number, you can also put an IP address in there, followed by a port number - for example, 127.254.254.254:3389 - and then the remote IP address or hostname, followed by the port number, in the Destination field.

* The PuTTY sessions for each Windows user are stored in the Windows registry in:

HKEY_USERS > [GUID for user] > Software > SimonTatham

Before reinstalling Windows I'd exported the whole registry to a .reg file on my network drive. To put the details into the new registry all I had to do was open up the .reg file in a text editor, save it with a name like putty.reg on the desktop of the target PC, delete everything in the file after the first line up to the start of the HKEY_USERS > [GUID for user] > Software > SimonTatham section and everything after that section, then save it again. Then you just need to right-click the icon on the desktop and choose Merge.

A lot of people still think that you need an iPod to listen to podcasts. Podcasting was lucky to piggyback on the phenomenal success of the iPod and the result was a lot of people listening to podcasts who wouldn't have been if the iPod had never been invented, or if podcasts hadn't been called podcasts. However, the name podcast has also had the downside that lots of people assume podcasts require an iPod. So there are lots of people out there with MP3 players, PDAs and media-playing mobile phones don't realise they could be part of the podcast-listening community.

I've been listening to podcasts since mid-2005 but have never owned an iPod. I started listening by just downloading MP3 files and playing them on my PC on Windows Media Player, then got a PDA and started using that, transferring files over from PC to PDA via ActiveSync (a painfully slow process). I then discovered podcast clients that handled the downloading for you, and settled on Juice as the best of them. Then, after the PDA packed up, I was using a little stick-like MP3 player, again manually transferring files across from the Juice download directory onto the MP3 player.

Finally, last year, I got a company Blackberry Curve, which includes pretty decent music playing software, and I started using that. I used the Sync feature in Windows Media Player to copy files onto the Blackberry. But it was still a little bit of a manual process to have to open Media Player and click Sync > Blackberry. What I wanted was the seamless experience of the iPod and iTunes, where syncing happens without any manually effort other than plugging in your iPod.

The following instructions tell you how to achieve this. It's a bit geeky I admit, but once you've set it up you don't need to do anything but plug in your MP3 player, phone or PDA and it gets loaded up with the latest podcasts you want to listen to. Additionally, it deletes old podcasts for you, so you don't have to do that manually to free up space for new stuff.

The method requires the following (more detail in the instructions below):

• A Windows PC
• An MP3 player of some description that shows up as an external storage device in Windows Explorer (in my case my Blackberry Curve
• Perl installed on the PC
• A couple of Perl scripts written by me (see below)
• A podcast receiver such as Juice
• Microsoft SyncToy

Of the above, you only need to pay for the hardware - all the other items are free downloads. So here are the setup steps.

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