How to add a contact to your Android home screen

Who needs phone favorites when you can just add a one-touch shortcut for your most important contacts, friends, and loved ones to your Android phone’s home screen?

Add a contact shortcut to your Android phone’s home screen for one-touch access to phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, and more.

Good question—and indeed, the ability to pin a contact directly to your home screen is such a no-brainer that I can’t believe it’s still not possible on an iPhone (or not without a third-party app, at least).
Anyway, adding a shortcut for a contact to your Android phone’s home screen is a snap.
Here’s how…

• Open the People app on your Android phone, then browse or search for a specific contact. (Note: these steps may vary depending on the make and model of your Android phone. I tested this tip on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running on Android version 4.2.2.)
• Found the right contact? Tap the name, then tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the screen.
• Tap the “Place on Home Screen” option.


You can add a contact to your Android phone’s home screen in just a few taps.
• Go back to your home screen to find the new shortcut for your contact. Can’t find it? If your main home screen is too cluttered, your contact may be sitting on a secondary screen; just flick left or right to shuffle through them all.
• Tap the shortcut to get a pop-up window with a menu of phone numbers; tap one to make a call, or tap one of the little messaging icons on the right to compose a new text message. You can also tap the Gmail, Google Maps, and web tabs for email addresses, street addresses, and relevant URLs.
• Don’t want a particular contact shortcut on your home screen anymore? Tap and hold it, then drag it up to the “Remove” icon near the top of the screen.

Bonus tip

Want to take all the contact icons on your various home screens and group them together? Just tap, hold, and drag one contact icon on top of another to create a new home-screen folder, then give it a name (like “My Favorites”).

From heresthethingblog.com
How to add a contact to your Android home screen

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How to Add Your Favorite Folder or Program to My Computer in Windows 7 and 8

Would you like to have that favorite folder or program that you use all the time listed in Computer along with all your drives so it is really easy to access? Computer is not a regular folder so you can’t just drop a shortcut there the usual way. But there is a quick way to get a shortcut listed in Computer and here’s how.

Windows 7

1. Open the Start search box
2. Enter:  %appdata%
3. The hidden folder “Roaming” will open
4. Navigate to the subfolder MicrosoftWindowsNetwork Shortcuts
5. Place a shortcut there to the desired folder or program

Windows 8

1. Open the Run box with the keyboard shortcut Winkey+R
2. Enter:  %appdata%
3. The hidden folder “Roaming” will open
4. Navigate to the subfolder MicrosoftWindowsNetwork Shortcuts
5. Place a shortcut there to the desired folder or program

That’s it. Open Computer and you will see your shortcut listed as a Network Location.
source gizmo
How to Add Your Favorite Folder or Program to (My) Computer in Windows 7 and 8

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A new tree add on part III multiple trunks

Version 0.0.5 of my new tree add-on adds functionality to specify a group of starting points facilitating the creation of hedgerows or twinned trees.

multiple trunks

When you want to create a hedgerow or a small copse of trees combining multiple trees might not lead to an acceptable result because branches might cross and the shape is not quite the way you want it to be. Also the amount of work needed to create a hedge of thirty plants can add up. I therefore added the possibility to define any number of starting points by refering to the locations of objects in a group.

Part of the scene setup used the create the example image is shown on the left. 
The empties (represented by the green cone shapes) are all in the same group and their locations are used as starting points.


The parameter settings were as shown on the right.  As usual the code is available as a zip-file on GitHub. More info on how to use the tree add-on can be found in two previous posts: A new tree add-on and A new tree add-on part II: better workflow

Future directions

I noticed that the mesh created by the skin and subsurface modifiers contains not only a huge amount of faces but also contains quite a precentage of vertices (20% or so) that are so close together that they practically overlap. Generating such a mesh takes a considerable amount of time so I think I will try to come up with a skinning method that is suitable for our tree trunks but hopefully somewhat faster.

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