It strikes me that this is a 26x26 grid with a lot of empty spaces (disallowed combinations). So really what you should do is memorise the smaller set of allowed combinations that are more likely to come up. So (for instance) A and O have the largest number of letters that are allowed to follow them - you should…

Haha, that comment made me smile. Thanks a lot! I didn't write it or anything; I just use it. But I'll take you up on that beer (in the unlikely event that I go to SoCal and I remember this thread).

For thinking work, it's got to be something with no words. I'll listen to anything really, but post-rock stuff like Mono, Mogwai or Godspeed is good. If I'm doing boring, easy tasks (or active work - cabling something up in the lab for instance) it's got to be something upbeat and singalongable.

VOTE: A folder full of text files. I can put details in and keep track of what I've done on a task, Completed tasks go in the 'Done' folder, and stuff that needs input from other people goes in 'Waiting For'.

Of course, in the UK our plugs do this anyway :)

@Platypus Man: We use floppies at work. We run a particle accelerator, and it's the only way to get data or screenshots off some of the more basic oscilloscopes. (The more advanced ones, of course, have USB slots and/or Ethernet.) It always seems really weird to be using floppies in the 21st century!

The Bloomize instructions are much clearer than the Instructables ones.

I quite often have the folder that I want to save in open in Windows Explorer. It would be nice if I could just drag links over to that folder. Firefox's default drag-out-of-window behaviour is to create a link though. Anyone know of an extension that implements drag-and-save in this fashion?

It depends. Most of the time I email as it's clearer for me to get my point across. (I am terrible on the phone.) But sometimes you know the other person won't answer their email and they'd basically prefer to work via the phone.

My (work) desktop has a dual-screen with one tall (1050x1680) and one 4:3 (1600x1200). I love this setup - I can choose whether to make windows tall or wide (or both). My laptop is 1280x800. On my desk, I use Input Director to make them seem like one PC. So my total screen real estate is 4.7 megapixels, with varying…

Good call. I usually trust Gmail, but it had put a couple of non-spams in the spam folder. Nothing critical, but I need reminding every so often that it's not perfect.

@strungoutonfreeware: Yeah, Input Director works better for me overall. It feels more polished and there are more options. I'm only using Windows boxes though, so I never need the cross-platform support that Synergy has.

@crdzoba: Tried Input Director? It's Windows-only at the moment, and seems to be better updated than Synergy, and has more options. No file drag, but you can always set up desktop-to-desktop drop boxes on each PC.

Is he really called Merlin? Awesome.

ImageMagick can create mosaics via the command line:

I used to do this with pen and paper. Now I use plain text - but not the way you're thinking. I have a folder called 'Tasks', which has one text file for each to-do item. The filename is descriptive, and the contents are updated when I move the task forward in some way. This way, I can easily see what I've done and…

You can choose your own colours if you like: just modify the URL. For instance, this searches for images with full red, green and blue respectively:

VOTE: SyncBackSE.

Alt-D to get to the address bar. Ctrl-Enter is pretty good. And / for find as you type. Incidentally, this gets overridden in Gmail. Does anyone know how to reset it back to normal?

@InspectorxGadget: I think the MusicTracker bug occurs if you have Unicode characters in your track titles - it crashes Pidgin and then it can't read the config file when it restarts. If you go into your App Data\.purple folder and edit accounts.xml, removing the offending characters, it'll restart correctly. But yes, …