Lifehacker's recent System Tray Show and Tell got me feeling really self-conscious about the things that show up on my computer's SysTray. While there are several items that I don't mind keeping an eye on there are a couple of Windows processes that I really don't think need constant monitoring. A perfect example of this is the Windows Local Area Connection icon that sits with a perpetual red X because my laptop is hooked up with WiFi.

Why do I need to see this icon if I never use the wired connection?

I did a little playing around and managed to find two ways to hide the icon. One doesn't appear to work all the time so I'll provide both just to be safe.

Removing the Local Area Connection Icon

This works perfectly for the wireless connection icon but on my machine it doesn't seem to work for the wired one. The first, really simple, option is to completely disable the connection. To do this you can double click the icon to open the Network Connections listing. Once this is done just right click the Local Area Connection item and select Disable.

In the long run this isn't really an ideal solution mostly because it involves completely turning off the wired network adapter. To avoid turning it off you can right click the listing and instead select "Properties."

Under the "General" tab look for the two check boxes and de-select them both. This should disable the icon while leaving the adapter activated.

Last Resort: Hide the Local Area Connection Icon

On my machine this didn't work - it did work to hide the Wireless Network Connection icon though. If you hit the same wall I have a work around that might help both here and in general for hiding icons in the SysTray. To get started right click the taskbar and then "Customize" under the "Notification area" heading.

The next section shows a list of all the items that are currently, or have recently, appeared in the System Tray. Under the "Behavior" column you can change the rules for each of the items - just select "Always hide" to keep the icons hidden.

If you're a Lifehacker reader you may already be hip to this great Firefox extension. Better GMail is a collection of Greasemonkey scripts brought together as a standalone extension. While you can certainly install the scripts individually the extension offers a one stop supply which will work even without Greasemonkey.

Among the additions made by the extension are the ability to create folders in GMail (the one thing I really miss about traditional eMail), a status bar showing the current state of your GMail storage, and the ability to incorporate both Google Calendar and Google Reader into the GMail interface.

Head on over to Lifehacker and grab the extension to see what I mean.

In between, and often alongside, most of my leisurely activities I watch a lot of television and movies. When the season finales of Lost, Heroes and The Sopranos finally came along a serious vacuum hit primetime TV. Generally this is the time of year that I up my Netflix subscription an catch up on old movies - this summer I decided to do something a bit extra as well.

About partway through May I downloaded the internet TV aggregator currently known as Democracy but soon to be renamed Miro.  While I won't get into some of the conversations covering the name change I have to say that this program has become a major part of my nightly routine.  Democracy / Miro makes downloading internet TV shows easy and rivals iTunes for anyone hunting for video content that's easy to download.

Right now I use Democracy / Miro to nightly to download several of the shows I stream to my XBox360.  If you haven't used this great software yet give it a try and let me know what you think.

Last week I wrote briefly about the GMark Bookmarklet I hacked together based on Adam Pash's GMailThis. Up until discovering Google Bookmarks I had mostly been using del.icio.us and Firefox for managing my archived links. After last week's trouble with Browser Sync though, I decided to move all my bookmarks online.

Del.icio.us is currently my main bookmark archive and Google Bookmarks has become more of a short term bookmark inbox. This process has been a great success so far.

I was so happy with the GMark bookmarklet that I decided to add a new one to help with bookmarking to del.icio.us as well. I figured I'd share it here for anyone who might be interested.
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Every once in awhile I re-learn something I already knew and am forced to slap myself in the forehead. Earlier today I wrote a short article on creating a print.css file for your website or blog. This is kind of a quick partner post for those folks who are forced to deal with sites that don't offer up a good alternate stylesheet for printing purposes.

As I said - this is something I knew but forgot.

Did you know you can highlight text on a webpage and then only print that text without copying and pasting it? Simply highlight a block of code and then click file->print. About partway down the screen you'll be shown a dialog which gives you the choice of printing the whole document, a range of pages or simply the selection. The "selection" option will only be available if you've already highlighted text.

This is ideal for when you don't want to print a header, a sidebar, comments or even partial blocks of text. It works in both Firefox and IE - I don't know about any other browsers though.