Steven Voyles

If you’re not using VLC as your main media player (or at least as a backup player), you have no idea what you’re missing. VLC may not have all the eye candy of apps like Windows Media Player or iTunes, but I have never thrown a media file at VLC that it couldn’t handle. Until I find one, I’ll keep using it exclusively. Who needs all that bloated software anyway? Having this portable version on a thumb drive or cd means you can take this versatile media master anywhere you go.

The latest release includes several bug fixes and Windows Vista compatibility. Click here for the full list of changes.

VLC Media Player Portable 0.8.6c Released | PortableApps.com – Portable software for USB drives

Lifehacker has a nice article today about removing digital clutter from your life so that you can focus on getting things done. I know I’m bad about installing tons of new programs that I never use again and for trying every new task manager service out there and that’s something I need to work on. To keep my ‘junk drawer’ clean, I just keep temporary files on my desktop. That combined with my natural tendency to keep the desktop completely clear helps prevent me from stockpiling tons of files that I don’t really need.

Top 10 Ways to Digitally Declutter – Lifehacker

If you’re like me and you find yourself using a lot of nested divs to replace tables yet still have control over the layout, you know that it’s easy to make a mess. It seems like I was constantly losing my place among all those divs when I was searching for a closing tag I had forgotten to write or just otherwise needed to find the end of a div. Recently I’ve started giving every div an id and using html comments to mark the end of my divs like so:

<div id='div1'>
    <div id="div2'>
    </div><!-- div2 -->
</div><!-- div1 -->

I realize this example wouldn’t exactly be difficult to read without the commenting, but I’m sure you get the point. When you find yourself scrolling through lines and lines of text and you see three or four closing div tags in close proximity and need to know which one belongs to the div you’re working on, you’ll be glad to see those comment tags there. Since I do the majority of my development in eclipse, I always have the option of collapsing or expanding code blocks to make those large pages easier to handle, but this technique even helps me see through the clutter in an IDE like eclipse and comes in especially handy for those times when I just need to do a quick edit in a text editor.