Daily Gyan

VLC Media Player Version 1.0 Released [Daily Download]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:18:00 +0000

The player that plays it all – VLC Media Player got an upgrade today. Version 1.0, code named 'Goldeneye' adds many more reasons to try out VLC, if you haven't done that already.

VLC 1.0 adds support for even more formats - AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, incorporates a number of bug fixes, supports MTP devices in Linux and AirTunes streaming. Some of the other noteworthy features are Live recording, Instant pausing, Frame-by-Frame support, Finer speed controls, Video scaling in fullscreen and Zipped file playback capability.

VLC is a free download available for Windows, Linux and Mac . Have you tried Goldeneye yet? Tell us in the comments.

Download VLC Media Player

12 Great Must-Have Softwares For Your Newly Bought Laptop

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:30:00 +0000

So you bought a new laptop and probably it came preloaded with Windows. Now what?

In today's Daily Feature section, we give you 12 softwares that every new Windows PC should have. All the softwares mentioned here are freewares that you can download and use without spending a penny.

1. PC Decrapifier - Remove All Pre-Installed Trial Version Software

Thanks to certain diabolical agreements made between your laptop manufacturer and software companies, your laptop comes with numerous trial version softwares pre-installed, whose icons will be found littered on the fresh desktop that you boot into. Now would be a good time to kiss goodbye to all those pre-installed bloatwares and install something useful.

It would have been a real pain if you had to manually uninstall all those programs. But thanks to PC Decrapifier that this process is now a two click affair. This little tool can automatically detect and remove a large number of trialwares from your PC without your intervention.

Download PC Decrapifier

2. AVG Free Anti Virus

Now you need to protect your Laptop from viruses, worms and trojan horses. AVG Free is the best free antivirus program out there that gives best protection consuming very little system resources.

Download AVG Free

3. Comodo Personal Firewall

Comodo Personal Firewall is a free firewall program that keeps your PC safe from external network intrusions and prevents malicious programs that slipped into your PC from dialing home.

It has a great user (newbie) friendly user interface, detects a large number of legitimate programs (like Firefox and Internet Explorer) automatically allowing them to access internet without bugging you with questions, detects malicious programs trying to impersonate as legitimate programs, kills them and provide great peace of mind.

Download Comodo Personal Firewall

4. 7z File Archiever

7z is “the best” File archiever/zip/rar utility available. With a blazing fast user interface, bare minimal system requirements and ability to handle almost any compression format that you can throw at it, 7z rules over all other competing non-free products like Winzip and Winrar.

Download 7z

5. Firefox Web Browser

Considered to be the best web browser by many, there are many reasons why you should switch to Firefox immediately right from the beginning.

Download Firefox

6. VLC Media Player

VLC Player is the swiss army knife of media playing. If you, like many, hate hunting for codecs in order to play a video file that your friend just send you, then VLC is for you. VLC can play any popular video/audio format currently in existence without installing anything additional.

Download VLC player

7. Songbird Music Player

If you happened to be a good music fan with gigs of music collections, then songbird is a must for you. Songbird is a great music manager and player. With ability to play a large number of audio formats,smart playlists, ability to edit audio meta data, one-click album art grabber and integration with last.fm, Insound.com and HypeMachine, Songbird is surely bound to become an iTunes killer. It’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner platform and hence like Firefox can be extended via addons and can be themed to your heart’s content.

Download Songbird

8. OpenOffice.org Office Suite

If your computer didn’t come with Microsoft Office installed, you need an office application suite to create documents and presentations. There is no better alternative to Microsoft Office than the free and open source OpenOffice.org office suite.

Download OpenOffice.org

9. Bitmeter Bandwidth Monitor

Bitmeter is an unavoidable tool if you are happen to use a bandwidth capped network connection. It can run in the background, keep a tab on your usage stats and warn you it the figures go above the limit you have set.

Download Bitmeter

10. Power Meter Plus Battery Monitor

Those who have used the Windows default batter monitor can surely vow how badly it suck. Disappointed by the barely usable Windows battery icon, a smart coder named Matt Collinge decided to code his own Battery Monitor. This little utility shows a progress bar in the desktop that is visible only when you are charging or discharging your battery. The transparency of the bar decreases as the battery charge drops and hence the application becomes more visible as your battery approaches lower charge levels. It’s a free download available for all versions of Windows.

Download Power Meter Plus

11. A.L.A.R.M - Protect Laptop From Thieves

The worst nightmare of any new laptop owner is his/her laptop getting stolen. A.L.A.R.M is a pretty intuitive little utility that silently runs in your system tray until you lock your laptop. If someone tries to remove the power cable to steal your laptop, ALARM will play an audio file from the laptop very loudly alerting everyone around until you plug back the power supply. Next time you leave your laptop unattended, remember to turn on A.L.A.R.M.

Download A.L.A.R.M

12. Sumatra PDF Viewer

At some point, you’ll definitely require a PDF viewer. The question is - will you go for the bloated Adobe Reader, the less bloated Foxit reader or the lean, mean and open source Sumatra PDF Viewer.

Sumatra viewer opens PDF files in a blink of an eye, consumes very less memory, uses gmail like keyboard shortcuts and can be run from a thumb drive.

Download Sumatra PDF Viewer

Is your favorite application missing in this list? Tell us in the comments

13 Great Free Text Editors For Programmers & Web Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:07:00 +0000

Two tools that programmers and web workers tend to use most are a text editor and an email client. In today's Daily Feature column, we give you a roundup of 13 text editors that we found to be extremely useful.

Note that all programs mentioned here are free and (most of them are) open source. And almost all programs mentioned here have quite large fan base whose favorite past time is to engage in regular editor wars (especially popular among vim and emacs followers).

[xkcd]

Without further ado, we give the you 13 most popular text editors for programmers and web developers.

1. Notepad++

Notepad++ is a popular free and open source text editor for Windows, often referred as Notepad on steroids.

It supports tabs, syntax highlighting of a gallizion programming languages, code folding, taking code printout in color, side by side text comparison, zooming in and zooming out, macro recording and playback, and many more.

Another great advantage of using notepad++ is that it is highly extensible using plugins. If you find a feature lacking, then most probably someone else already felt similarly a wrote a plugin for that feature. The notepad++ site lists a large number of plugins from where you can download them.

Download Notepad++

2. Programmer's Notepad

Programmer's Notepad is a light weight Notepad replacement that is aimed at programmers and web monkeys.

Feature include syntax highlighting of a large number of programming languages including Python, Ruby, HTML, C, C++ and Java. Go for it if you are impressed by docking toolbars, support for ctags and interactive error finding (clicking on a error takes you to the line that caused it).

Download Programmer's Notepad

3. TotalEdit

TotalEdit is a free for commercial and non commercial use text editor for Windows. It supports all features expected out of a programmer's text editor like syntax coloring, code folding and line numbering

Some of the features that make it stand apart from the crowd are backup and version comparison - you can compare the currently edited file with its previous version from within TotalEdit, a built-in spell checker and its fully portable mode - you can run it off a USB stick.

Download TotalEdit

4. Notepad2

If what you want is a blaring fast text editor that starts instantly at the touch of a mouse and that gets things done as fast as possible, then Notepad2 is for you. Notepad2 is aimed at coders who need a little more oomph than the generic Notepad in Windows.

It supports a number of programming languages. Hit F12, select the scheme and press OK. If you wish to replace the generic Notepad with Notepad2, here are the instructions for Windows XP and for Windows Vista.

Download Notepad2

5. XML Notepad 2007

It is sadistic to force humans to edit XML files. But still, lot of people are unfortunate enough to do this on a regular basis especially java programmers. XML Notepad to your rescue.

XML Notepad has a simple interface with a tree view of tags on left and their values displayed on right. Use this one as it reduces the chances of human errors in generating properly validated XML files.

Download XML Notepad 2007

6. ConTEXT

ConTEXT is a free and recently made open source programmer's text editor.

ConTEXT is very light weight, is simple to use and hardly uses any RAM. It supports a large number of programming languages like C/C++, Delphi/Pascal, Java, Java Script, Visual Basic, Perl/CGI, HTML, CSS, SQL, FoxPro, 80x86 assembler, Python, PHP, Tcl/Tk, XML, Fortran, Foxpro and InnoSetup scripts.

Download ConTEXT

7. jEdit

jEdit is written in Java can can run on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

jEdit is highly configurable and customizable using macros and plugins. It carries all standard and advanced features like syntax highlighting, auto indentation, file management and bookmarks. It provides keyboard shortcuts for almost anything. So go for this if you are a keyboard ninja.

Download jEdit

8. Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit is a text editor from ActiveState - a company famous for its port of Perl, Python and TCL to Windows. Komodo Edit is a free and open source text editor (or should rather be called a mini IDE).

It supports many features that one would find in IDEs like code completion and call tips. It supports CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django template styles. If you are coming from a Vim or Emacs background, you can also set Komodo Edit to emulate Vim or Emacs key bindings.

Download Komodo Edit

9. SourceEdit

SourceEdit will appeal more to the web developer community because of it built-in FTP manager and support for previewing the HTML code in the web browser directly from within SourceEdit. It supports languages like ASP, PHP, Java, C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, Pascal, Perl, Cold Fusion, SQL, HTML, CSS and XML. Web developers will also find its color mixer quite useful. This software is highly customizable. All keyboard shortcuts can be changed to suite your taste. All color coding for any language can be changed and SourceEdit will remember to use that color coding next time you launch a text file of that programming language.

Download SourceEdit

10. PSPad

PSPad is another code editor that would be of interest to web developers because of its built-in FTP client. You can log in to an FTP server, browser files, edit and save them to the server all from within PSPad.

It highlights the matching closing and starting tag when you place your cursor at the middle of a tag. This one also has integrated TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code, conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML. It also comes with a HEX editor and a diff tool.

Download PSPad

11. Crimson Editor

Crimson Editor calls itself the professional source code editor for Windows.

It is lightning fast in loading and can run of a floppy disk. It supports syntax highlighting for HTML, C/C++, Perl, Java, Matlab and LaTeX. Full features of Crimson Editor can be found here .

Download Crimson Editor

12. VIM

When it comes to text editors, there are two holy grails - vim and emacs. Both are really great text editors, but both are complex and hence there is a slightly steep learning curve that you have to climb over before using them.

Vim stands for 'vi improved' denoting that it is an improved version of the earlier used vi editor. Vim can run in a wide variety of platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. The screenshot shown above is of Graphical vim (gvim).
This Wikipedia page would be a good starting place to know about vim. The official vim site and the vim tips wiki page are also of great help to anyone starting out with vim.

Download Vim

13. Emacs

Emacs like vi has a very long history dating back to the 1970s. Emacs was written by hard core programmers intended to be used by hard core programmers - the type of people who would understand stuff like "emacs is an extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor".

The GNU Emacs home page, the emacs tour and this tutorial are great places to start learning emacs.

Download Emacs

Which is your favorite text editor? Know about a better text editor than these ones? Tell us in the comments.

Expression Web SuperPreview From Microsoft Helps You Test Your Web Site In Multiple Browsers

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:48:00 +0000

Web developers know the difficulty. Each change made to the backend code, HTML or CSS files needs to be tested in all popular browsers – a pretty long list containing Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari 3, Safari 4 then IE6, IE7 and IE8.

In today’s Windows Gyan column, we introduce you to a new and great application from Microsoft that enables you to test run your web site in all popular browser rendering engines including all versions of Internet Explorer.

Though ‘Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer’ is a ridiculously long name for such a cool application, this tool really kicks ass. It is a visual debugging tool that allows you to see and compare how your site will look in IE6 and compare it to how it will look in other browsers like IE7, IE8 and other popular browsers .

You can either compare it side by side as shown below:

or you can compare using an onion-skin overlay where you display one on top of another to get a pixel perfect idea of the differences in rendering in two browsers:

[screenshots from istartedsomething blog]

The current beta build of SuperPreview allows you to compare between IE6 and the browser installed in your machine only (either IE7 or IE8). Future builds are said to have capability to render and compare with external browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome. Another feature that is rumored to be in the pipeline is remote rendering where you can compare the rendering with that of a browser running in a completely different OS, like Firefox in Linux or Safari in Mac OSX.

Final version of the product is supposed to be bundled with Expression Web 3, to be released by the end of this year. Till then you can download the beta version from the Microsoft site.

Download Expression Web SuperPreview | Direct download link (250MB)

[via istartedsomething blog]

Send Your Name To Mars In Nasa's Mars Rover

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:04:00 +0000

Nasa is giving you a chance to take your name to Mars in their next Mars Rover expedition.

All you have to do is visit this page and enter your name and country. Your name will then be stored in a microchip and placed in Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011. Once you submit your name, you will get a certificate of your participation.

The Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled to be launched in the fall of 2011 and will study whether the planet can support microbial life.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/

ToddlerTrap - Easiest Way To Disable Mouse & Keyboard For a Short Time

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:52:00 +0000

Windows only: If you want to disable the keyboard and mouse of your computer for some time, there is no easier way than Toddler Trap.

This tiny utility is useful when you want to clean your keyboard or mouse without shutting down the PC or when you don't want your coworkers or children messing with your computer while you are away (though we would suggest locking your computer as a better solution).

On running the ToddlerTrap you will find a window as shown here. All further key press and mouse clicks will be blocked until you close this window.

ToddlerTrap is available as an Auto Hot Key script. In case you don't have Auto Hot Key installed, here is a stand alone exe.

Firefox Gyan: How To Make Your Unread Tabs Easily Noticeable

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:01:00 +0000

We often find ourselves opening a lot of tabs in Firefox using mouse wheel click on the links and then quite soon forget about the opened links. So when Mozilla Links blog posted about a method to quickly find unread tabs in Firefox, we immediately jumped at it.

The Mozilla Links blog tells you how to change the title font in an unread tab to italics. But we found that a simple change in font didn’t quite make any difference to us. So we decided to extend that method and incrementally make minor changes and observe how much easily it caught the eyes. The results are quite outstanding.

First, let’s discuss the original Mozilla Links method:

1. Change the Unread Tab Title Font to Italics.

Find the userChrome.css file in the chrome folder in your Firefox profile directory. If there is no userChrome.css file present in the chrome folder, copy userChrome-example.css and place in the same folder as userChrome.css.

Now add the following line to the end of the file:

#content tab:not([selected]) {font-style: italic !important;}

and restart Firefox. Your change will look like this:

Well, no much difference isn’t it? Let’s see how it will look if the title font is made bold instead of italics.

2. Make the Unread Tab Title Font Bold

Edit the above line and make it:

#content tab:not([selected]) {font-weight: bold !important;}

This is how it’s going to look:

3. Change the Unread Tab Title Font Color

Let’s see how much difference can changing the font color make. Change the above line in userChrome.css to:

#content tab:not([selected]) {font-weight: bold !important;color:red !important;}

Ok, now that’s a noticeable difference.

4. Change the Background Color of an Unread Tab

Let’s change the background color of an unread tab and see how it looks. Let’s also change the title font to Helvetica.

#content tab:not([selected]) {font-weight: bold !important;color:red !important;background-color: #80FF6C !important;font-family: helvetica !important;}

and we get a great result:

Basically, if you know a bit of CSS, you can tweak the userChrome.css file to your heart’s content. Get hacking.

Download Every Default Windows 7 Wallpapers For US, UK and Australian Regions In One Shot

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:31:00 +0000

Windows 7 has different wallpapers for different regions like US, UK and Australia. A standard Windows 7 installation will unlock only the wallpapers (or themes) meant for one region.

To get the wallpapers of every other region, you’ll either have to roll up your sleeves and get muddy in windows settings or you can simply download it all as a rar file here.

These wallpapers have been released by the Vista Magazine Blog with the permission of Microsoft. You can also visit this page and download individual wallpaper.

Download all Windows 7 wallpapers as a rar file

Windows Vista Magazine Blog

Reduce Clutter On Your Windows Desktop With Desktop List View

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:51:00 +0000

Windows only: Windows by default doesn’t allow you to display desktop icons in a list view. There is no right click and display as list option either.

If you are someone (like us) who maintain the desktop as a digital junkyard, it might be quite an eye sore using the default icon view with icons overflowing out of your desktop edges. In today’s Windows Gyan column, we introduce you to a tiny application that’ll display your desktop icons as a list instead of large icons thereby reducing the clutter to a great extend.

Head over to the Desktop List View site and download the self extracting exe or the zip file. Run the ‘desktopListView.exe’ to display your desktop icons in list view. If you didn’t like the view you can revert back to the normal desktop view by running the ‘unload.bat’ file.

This tool doesn’t persist the setting. i.e. you’ll have to execute the ‘desktopListView.exe’ each time you login, if you want the list view to stick around between login sessions. As a workaround you can add a shortcut to this executable to the windows startup folder.

Ubuntus For The Religious Geek

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:03:00 +0000

After Ubuntu Linux proved to be quite a success, there has been a multitude of people who created spin-offs of this distro.

A spin-off is a modification of a Linux distribution. The developers change the Ubuntu branding, add their custom branding, themes and applications and launches it as a brand new Linux distro.

In today's Linux Gyan column, we introduce you to four Ubuntu spin-offs that are aimed at religious folks.

Ubuntu Christian Edition

Ubuntu CE is a remastered Ubuntu aimed at Christians.

In addition to the standard Ubuntu applications, this distro comes with additional softwares aimed at Christians like Xiphos, BibleMemorizer and BibleTime. It also comes with DansGuardian – a prominent web content filtering software along with a GUI tool to easily configure it.

Ubuntu Christian Edition

Ubuntu Muslim Edition

Ubuntu ME is a rebranded Ubuntu distribution that ships a number of software packages (in addition to the standard Ubuntu packages) that help Muslims in their daily religious chores.

Some of the applications that are bundled with this distro are minbar (an Islamic prayer times application), zekr (a Quranic Study Tool), monajat (popups prayers every predetermined time) a Hijra calendar and the DansGuardian web filtering software.

Ubuntu Muslim Edition

Jewbuntu

Much details of this disro aren’t available. The site jewbuntu.org gives details but claims that there is no distro that is released yet. However, another site jewbuntu.com gives links to download the disto.

Jewbuntu.com

Ubuntu Satanic Edition

Ubuntu satanic edition is a remastered Ubuntu that gives a dark and malevolent look to your desktop.

Their is nothing evil about this distro apart from the name (so feel free and eat the apple).

Ubuntu Satanic Edition

We would never dare to stop a post like this without mentioning the ubiquitous Jesux distribution. Jesux is a tongue-in-cheek fictional Linux distribution that aims to be an operating system for Christians (this started much before the Ubuntu Christian edition, so Jesux cannot be a parody of Ubuntu CE). Anyway, head over to Jesux page if you want a good laugh. (Oh, and by the way you spelled Jesux wrong. It’s pronounced “Hay-sooks”).

What do you think of these Linux distributions? Know of any other similar ones? Tell us in the comments.

Internet Explorer 8 Released. [Web Comics Free with the Download Link ]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:10:00 +0000

The latest version of Internet Explorer – IE8 has been released by Microsoft.

This release adds all features that people expects of a modern browser and will enable Microsoft to give a tight competition to Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Google Chrome.

Lifehacker has made a nice roundup of all the IE8 features. Get it here.

Download Link: Download Internet Explorer 8

How did you find IE8? Tell us in the comments

Set Private/Igcognito Mode As Default In Firefox, IE8 and Chrome

How To Remotely Access Linux GUI From Windows PC

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:37:00 +0000

As Linux is becoming more and more popular, today's networks have become a hybrid mesh of Windows and Linux machines.

Often, it becomes quite neccessary to remotely gain GUI access to a Linux box from a Windows PC. In today's Linux Gyan section, we give you various ways to get this done. Though most of the screenshots here are taken in a fedora box, the methods ought to work in any other distro like Ubuntu.

Note: If you just want a command line access and is not interested in GUI, enable ssh in your linux machine. Then use putty from windows machine.

1. Using Cygwin

If you happened to have cygwin already installed in your Windows PC, then this is the method to go. If you are about to install cygwin, then ensure that you install the X server packages.

Now you need to make some modifications in the Linux machine to which you want to login. Specifically, you need to enable XDMCP. For this:

Select System -> Administration -> Login Screen.
Select the Remote tab and set the style as "Same as local"
If you want to login as root, select the Security tab and ensure that the checkbox "Allow remote system administrator login" is checked
Reboot the Linux machine.

Now in the Windows PC, take a cygwin shell and enter the command:

XWin -screen 0 -clipboard -nodecoration -kb -nowinkill -unixkill -query <ipaddress>

Replace <ipaddress> with the ipaddress of your linux machine (use ifconfig command to know your Linux machine's ip address).

2. Using NoMachine NX

NoMachine is an Italian company that developed the NX tool. You need to install the NX server in the Linux machine and run the NX client from Windows. Note that this is not a free software. Some of the parts of the software is released under GPL. NoMachine provides a free edition of their server that you can download here.

Go for this method if you have a slow network. NX's high compression and caching can reduce the bandwidth cost and deliver a faster performance.

3. Use VNC

This is the fastest way to get Linux GUI access from Windows. So use this method if your boss has given you a dead line of 5 minutes to setup remote access to a Linux machine from his Windows PC.

Almost all modern Linux distros come with a vnc server installed by default. Take a terminal and enter vncserver. If run for the first time you'll be asked to set a password. Once VNC server is running, use any VNC client for windows like the UltraVNC to access the Linux machine.

Note that when you start the VNC server, it will churn out something like New 'localhost.localdomain:1 (root)' desktop is localhost.localdomain:1. note the digit that comes after your host name (usually it will be 1).This is your display number to which the VNC server has attached. You need to provide that number in the VNC client as <IPADDRESS>:DISPLAY_NUMBER

Know of any better ways? Share it in the comments.

How To Download Zip, Rar, Tar.gz and 7z files Even When They Are Blocked [Office Gyan]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:24:00 +0000

Corporate offices, schools and colleges often block compressed files like zip, rar, tar.gz and 7z to prevent the spreading of viruses and to prevent users abusing their bandwidth. If you find this restriction quite uncomfortable and illogical, we give you a possible work around here.

Related:
Access Flickr.com Even When it is Blocked
Access Digg Even When it is Blocked
Access Gmail Even When It Is Blocked

WobZIP is a new web application that gives you online decompression of all popular compression formats like zip, rar, .7z etc. The feature that caught our attention is that you can give the url of a compressed file instead of uploading it and later download the contents of that file.

Go to WobZIP, select uncompress from a url. Now paste the url of the compressed file url into the text field and hit enter. WobZIP uncompresses the zip file and gives you a list of files in that archieve that you can download individually.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

WobZIP

The Most Popular Way of Sharing Stuff in Internet is Still Email (Digg is losing its grounds while Facebook is gaining like anything)

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:37:00 +0000

Sharethis is a usefull web service that enables users to share interesting websites with their friends. Bloggers can add sharethis buttons to their web sites thereby making it easier for the readers to share the contents they find in the blog.

There are other similar services like addthis which provide similar functionality, but sharethis is currently the most popular. Periodically sharethis releases information about people's sharing trends, which gives indication of the popularity of different sharing services. This is the chart that sharethis released recently: (Note: this is the latest chart; sharethis had published a chart earlier this month that they have now retracted as it had some errors).

As can be seen, email is still people's most favourite sharing medium leading at 57.1%.

Facebook is at second place with about 21.2% people using it to share stuff. Facebook has raised their market share by 12.62% since last August.

Digg on the other hand has lost 0.92% of users and is currently having a share of 2.1%.

All most all sharing services (including email) have a declining user base with AIM, Facebook and Twitter being an exception.

We believe we could safely predict that Facebook's and Twitter's share is going to rise while all others are going to take a plunge. What do you feel? Tell us in the comments.

TinyURL Generator Creates Shortened URLs in a Snap, Automagically!

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:37:00 +0000

Windows, Linux, Mac (Firefox only): TinyURL Generator is a Firefox addon that once installed makes it really easy to create shortened URLs (using TinyURL.com) of any page you are currently reading.

After installation, it adds a little icon to the right end of Firefox status bar. While browsing any page, click on that icon to generate the shortened URL of that page. The icon will turn into a green tick and your shortened URL will be copied to the clipboard. Hit Ctrl + V and see your new shortened address.

This will be a great addon for regular twitters who use the Twitter’s web interface. As this addon automatically copies the shortened URL into clipboard, all one have to do is hit the icon and paste the URL into your mail client/IM window/browser.

Note that this is an experimental addon and hence will require an account at Mozilla addons to install. For those who do not have an account, we have uploaded the addon to box.net too.

TinyURL Generator | Alternate direct download link (box.net)

Google Earth 5.0 Beta Released, Now Supports Time Travel and Scuba Diving

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:52:00 +0000

Google just released a new beta version of the Google Earth product.

The new release adds historical imagery – a feature that we would have liked to call as ‘time travel’. You can see how a region looked a couple of years early and compare it to how it looks today. GE 5 now also allows you to explore ocean floors. So if you were planning for a vacation in Australia for a lil’ scuba diving , time to cut it down and download Google Earth 5.

For more ooohhhs and aaahhhs, view the video.

Download Google Earth 5 (beta)

Related: Install Google Earth In Linux

5 Web Apps to Find the Net Worth of Your Blog/Site

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:34:00 +0000

About to buy a new blog but doesn’t know whether the price being asked is right? Or did the hard economic down turn forced you to sell off your blog, but you can’t decide what price to quote?

In today’s Daily Web App section, we introduce you to 5 web applications that’ll help you to find an approximate net worth of your site. You may need to revisit this post later. So don’t forget to bookmark this page in delicious.

$timator – This is a real-time website value estimator. It uses a number of different parameters including the monetary value of the domain name, quality of the website code (mark-up and HTML), past sale prices of similar websites and the current financial market status to give a most accurate value of your site (in dollar and Euro).
Stimator
Website Grader – Unlike the Stimator, this one doesn’t give you a value in dollars. Instead it ranks each website after judging many parameters that are mostly SEO related. If you are about to buy a website, use this tool to access how much search engines love that site. This might also helps you to judge the rating of the site compared to that of a competitor site.
Website Grader
Website Outlook – A really simple application without much bells and whistles. Just give it a site address and almost immediately it’ll gives you back its worthiness in dollars. It also shows pretty useful stuff like the Alexa traffic rank, Google page rank, number of back links that the site has its hosting location etc.
Website Outlook
dnScoop – dnScoop is a domain name value estimation tool. It helps you find out how much your domain is worth in dollars by analyzing various factors like the age of your domain name, the validity period of domain name, page rank etc.
dnScoop
Website Valued – This one is a bit different from others as it uses data from compete to calculate the value of your blog.
WebsiteValued

Know of any better service? Let us know in the comments.

SimilarWeb Firefox Extension Helps You Find More Sites Similar to the One You Are Browsing [Firefox Gyan]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:42:00 +0000

Well, the title explains it pretty much completely. SimilarWeb helps you find websites similar to the one you are currently reading.

We have been playing around with this extension for quite some time and feel no surprise that this one was the winner of the Mini Seedcamp competition that was held in Israel.

This extension adds a little sidebar to your Firefox window and shows a list of websites that it thinks is similar to the currently loaded web page. Though we are a bit grumpy on loosing little screen real estate, we have been quite impressed by the accuracy of results that SimilarWeb churns out. You can hide the sidebar and make it appear only when you want it using a button in the tool bar. In the sidebar, you can view the list of similar websites as a number of thumbnails, as a simple list or as very small icons. You can also vote up or down on the suggested websites and because of which we hope that we’ll get even better suggestions in future.

The extension is in the early stages of development and we have noticed a number of minor quirks here and there. Overall, it tends to make Firefox a bit slower and a bit more memory hungry. We would really like to see these rough edges getting straightened in future releases.

IE fellows will have to wait a bit longer as an IE version is under development.

This one is a god send for students, researchers and bloggers. Get it here.

TxtB.in Helps You Twitter More Than 140 Characters [Daily WebApp]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:37:00 +0000

We gyanis really love simple web applications. Applications that does one thing and does it well.

In today’s Daily WebApp, we introduce you to one such application - TxtB.in.

TxtB.in allows you to share text data with anyone in the world in two steps. You enter the text into the text field and hit the save txt button. It then gives you a shortened URL that you can share with your friends to read this text.

Advantages? Many.

No user registration required.
Simple user interface.
No limitation to the text size.
Very short URL to the entered text. Very much suitable for sites like Twitter.
Creates easy to remember URLs. You just need to remember the ending 2 alphabets to point your friend to the page you created (provided that you can remember the starting txtb.in part).

Some features that we would like to see:

Password protection of the created webpage.
Ability to delete a page.
Direct posting to Twitter, FriendFeed etc.

This might become a killer utility tool among Twitter fans. Twitter limits each post to 140 characters. So if you want to create a twitter post having greater than 140 characters, create a page in txtb.in and tweet the newly created shortened URL instead.

Can think of any other uses of this Web App? Tell us in the comments.

TxtB.in

Get Precise Text Selection In Firefox By Enabling the Caret [Firefox Gyan]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:58:00 +0000

One of the most prominent Firefox annoyances often happens when you try to select a portion of text. Most of the time, some unwanted portion of adjacent text also gets selected, making you start the selection process again.

What many do not know is that you can enable Word or Notepad style mouse caret (the vertical blinking mouse cursor) in Firefox, using which more precise selection of text can be done.

Just hit F7 button while in Firefox and it'll ask you whether you want to enable caret mode. Select yes and you get a nice blinking cursor on screen. Using this cursor you can select text the traditional way - click and drag with mouse, arrow keys, Ctrl + arrow keys to highlight words etc.

Set Private/Igcognito Mode As Default In Firefox, IE8 and Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:38:00 +0000

All modern web browsers support what is called private browsing mode or incognito mode, where the browser leaves no trace of your browsing history behind in the computer.

Firefox have stated supporting private mode with the 3.1 beta version about which you can read in detail here.

Google Chrome likes to call this feature as Incognito mode and you can start a new incognito session by using the key combination Ctrl + Shift + N.

IE8 likes to call it InPrivate Browsing and you start a new session just like in Chrome.

Today’s post is for those paranoids who wish to always run their browsers in private mode making their web browsing untraceable at all time.

Make Firefox Always Start In Private Mode

Start Firefox 3.1.
Type in about:config and hit enter. Click I’ll be careful button.
Type in browser.privatebrowsing.autostart into the filter box.
Double click on it to change its value to true.

This sets private mode as the default mode for Firefox.

Make Google Chrome Always Start In Incognito Mode

This involves changing the shortcut that you use to launch Google Chrome. Right click the shortcut and select properties (or read about the easy way of opening the properties dialog).

Append –-incognito to the end of the target, so that it looks like this:

Always use this launcher to start the Google Chrome session.

Set InPrivate Browsing As The Default Mode in IE8

The procedure is similar to the Google Chrome method, where you edit the properties of the shortcut that you use to launch Internet Explorer 8.

Right click the shortcut and select properties. Edit the Target field and append the string –private to it.

Always use this shortcut to start IE8.

How To Sync Your Windows Live Writer Drafts Between Two Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:18:00 +0000

WLW is ‘the tool’ of blogging.

However, if you are a blogger and if you often blog from multiple computers, you might have wished at least once that WLW provided some built-in mechanism to synchronize your drafts between different installations.

It would have been a nice feature if you could start a blog post from your office PC and finish it off from your home laptop, without the hassles of saving and sending the unfinished post to your personal mail id, saving the draft to Google Docs etc. Yes this is indeed possible. Just read along.

Windows Live Writer stores all the drafts in My Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts folder. If you open this folder, you can see a number of .wpost files, named after the title of your draft posts. If somehow you are able to synchronize the Drafts folder between two computers, then you are essentially syncing two installations of Windows Live Writer.

You can use your favorite desktop sync tool to achieve this. We used Syncplicity. Syncplicity has a free version with a storage limit of 2 GB and an excellent Windows client which pretty much did the job for us.

In all the computers that you blog from, install the Syncplicity client. Add the My Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts folder to the list of folders to be synced.

That’s it. Now each time you make a draft post, it will be available across your computers.

Install 64 bit Flash Player Plugin For Firefox In Ubuntu Linux [HowTo]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:17:00 +0000

Adobe has released the much requested flash plugin that runs natively in 64 bit Linux machines.

This means that if you are having a 64 bit processor and a 64 bit Linux distribution, then you don’t have to go the roundabout way of installing a 32 bit flash player with nspluginwrapper anymore, to get things working.

Though the title says Ubuntu, the following steps are applicable for all Linux distributions:

First, remove any flash plugins that you have installed. This includes any 32 bit adobe flash plugin or other open source plugins like Gnash.
Close Firefox and run the following command from a terminal:
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz && ( [ -d ~/.mozilla/plugins ] || mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins ) && tar zxvf libflashplayer*.tar.gz -C ~/.mozilla/plugins
Open firefox. Type about:plugins into the address bar and see the details of the plugin.

Note that the plugin is currently in alpha stage and might be a bit buggy. The adobe flash player 10 FAQ page says that the plugin has been tested on Ubuntu 8 and OpenSUSE 11 with Firefox 3 browser.

Can anyone here post their 64 bit flash plugin experience in other distributions like Fedora, Slackware etc?

How To Clean Up Your Firefox Right Click Context Menu [Firefox Gyan]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:23:00 +0000

The right click context menu of any average Joe Firefox user, tend to accumulate gunk as the number of extensions installed increases.

Almost every extension adds an entry into the contextual menu, due to which the number of entries in the right click menu grows alarmingly huge. Since it is tedious to find a particular menu entry for a long list of entries, many users simply ignore the right click menu and get things done mainly from the tool bar menus.

In today’s Firefox Gyan, we show you how to clean up this right click menu, compact it, make it slim and trim and above all, how to make it much more useful.

Say hello to the Firefox extension Menu Editor – a perfect solution for a messy context menu. This extension allows you to remove and rearrange the entries in the Firefox’s right click context menu. You can simply check off all those menu entries that you do not wish to be displayed and with a bit of experimentation and tweaking, you can produce a simple, clean and uncluttered context menu.

Download Menu Editor

The Highly Secretive Google Share Gadget And How You Can Use It In Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:32:00 +0000

If you have seen any page in Google Knol, like this one, then you would have noticed a Share widget in it. It is based on the Google Share widget, a service which Google doesn't like to talk much about. The home page of the widget doesn’t provide much information and Google doesn’t seem to be too interested in promoting it either.

We did some testing on this share gadget and found it to be highly usable and quite addictive. As a matter of fact, you don’t need to have even a Google account to use this widget which is a great advantage over the similar, competing gadget ShareThis, where you need to register to use it in your blog. Using this share widget, you can add a web page to your Google Shared stuff page, email the entire page or just its link to your friends, and bookmark the page in all social networking sites like delicious, digg, reddit, facebook etc.

The Google share gadget can be added to your blog or website quite easily. Just copy and past the following code where you want the link to appear. It adds a ‘Share this post’ link, which on clicking will display the Google Share Widget page.

<a href="#" onclick="var a=document,b=a.createElement('script'),w=window,g={};g.altWindow=w.open('','_blank','height=370px,width=720px,toolbar=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=no');setTimeout(function(){g.altWindow.focus()},1000);function f(o){try{var d=new google.share.EmailWidget(g);d.display()}catch(e){if(o>20)return;setTimeout(function(){f(o+1)},o<10?1<<o:1000)}};b.src='<a href="http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/js?script=socialsharing%27;a.body.appendChild%28b%29;f%280%29%22">http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/js?script=socialsharing';a.body.appendChild(b);f(0)"</a>>Share this post</a>

To spice up the link, you can use some images like this one, which has become a de-facto symbol for a share gadget. Try it out by clicking the below share gadget.