Actually, it is much more time than I initially expected to reach here, probably because technology related blogs segment is already too crowded. One of the other reasons I think is that blog promotion/marketing and social networking are my weak points for now. But hopefully things will improve over the time. It is still pretty good result I think, considering that at the end of the first month I was still standing at mere 18(despite all my efforts) which was very heart breaking. But now this count has started to increase despite the fact that I was not able to give enough time in last 10-12 days.

Some of you may have noticed that my posting frequency has dropped over a week or so. This is because I have to leave for the Sweden to pursue my PhD studies at KTH( already too late on this) and still there are many pending things for me to do in a short time other than blogging. This trend will likely continue for a week or two but after that things will hopefully settle down and I will be more regular in my posting frequency. BTW, be rest assured that as before I will not rush anything out for the sake of increasing my posting frequency. I will only put forward something if it is worth it or brings some value to the readers(in my opinion) rather than to concentrate on publishing X number of posts in a given week or a day. Rushing new articles out of the window without putting effort before publishing it is not the objective of this site.

Once again, I am extremely thankful to all of you for your support. I hope that you will continue to do so in the future as well, as I continue to dig deeper in to this wonderful world, that we call blogging.

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There are a number of third-party freeware applications available that can serve the purpose for most of the users but some of these applications are standouts, either in terms of features or usability. Today, I am going to recommend you such a utility that offers all the essentials such screen capturing, window capturing, region capturing and also some extra features that are really useful. This application I am referring to is called FastStone Capture. It has the perfect combination of features and ease of use. It is fast and responsive to load and use, has light memory footprint and no feature bloat as almost all the provided features are really useful.

All the screen capturing features can be accessed from the floating toolbar(control panel) or you can control screen capturing functionality using the hotkeys.

Here is a quick look at all the features that are provided:

• A small floating Capture Panel that can be dragged anywhere or minimized to the Windows tray area
• Resource friendly – uses a very small amount of memory, especially when minimized to the Windows tray area
• Global hotkeys to activate the program’s capture capabilities anytime, anywhere
• Efficient tools to capture windows, objects, full screen, rectangle/freehand-selected regions and scrolling areas
• Capture web pages in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera
• Option to specify destination (internal editor, clipboard, file or printer) where the captured image will be sent
• Text/Arrowed line/Highlight/Watermark annotation
• Drop-shadow, torn-edge effects
• Add caption
• Resize, crop, zoom in/out
• Undo/Redo
• Save as BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA and PDF
• Send e-mails
• Screen magnifier, Screen color picker
• Multi-monitor support
• Option to run when Windows starts
• And many more …

This is a highly recommended screen capturing application, and I am using it myself for quite sometime now without experiencing any issue.

Latest version of this application is not free but you can get the last freeware version (5.3) from here.

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There is a great variety of mouse gesturing extensions available for Firefox that you can choose from to suite your needs. Here I am listing the five most useful extensions that will come handy for all the Firefox users that want to control everything with the little magic of a mouse and impress their friends or colleagues with the control they have got over that little input device called a “mouse”. As usual, I will highlight the pros and cons of each of the extensions, but the final decision of course rests with you to pick the one’s that best suite you needs.

1. All-in-One Gestures

This is a very popular choice among Firefox users. Supports standard mouse gestures (inherits code from the Mouse Gesture extension listed below but probably from an older version of it), rocker gestures, mouse wheel gestures, scroll wheel navigation and auto scrolling. It do not supports defining gestures with diagonal mouse movements. Development seems to be ceased on this one for quite some time now.

2. Mouse Gestures

All-in-One Gesture and this one Mouse Gestures are probably the most popular Firefox extensions for gesture support. It is similar in many ways to All-in-One Gestures and this is no surprise because that extension inherits code from Mouse Gestures. However there are two key features here that are missing in the All-in-One Gestures. First is the permission of diagonal mouse movements when defining a mouse gesture and second is the assignment of a custom code snippet action to a newly defined mouse gesture. Second advantage is very important from an extensibility point of view as it will allow to define actions that are not already provided to assign to a mouse gesture.

3. Fire Gestures

This extension is one of my new favorites and why not? because it is  provided by Gomita the person behind the Scrapbook and Tab Scope extensions. This is newest of all the extensions listed here. In many ways it is similar to Mouse Gestures in that you can define regular mouse gestures, Rocker Gestures, Wheel Gestures and Tab Wheel Gestures. Also supports diagonal mouse movements when defining mouse gestures. As with the Mouse Gestures a user can assign custom java script snippet to a mouse gesture. However, one thing that stands out is it’s support of Keypress gestures that allows to execute a gesture while holding a keyboard key (Ctrl, Shift).

For example take a look at an example below as I have Ctrl key pressed and then I have hovered over all the image links that I want to save in the Google image search(note the red trail) , when I will release Ctrl key , the associated action will executed and all the images that I have hovered over will be saved. Of course you can hover over any number of images links (or any other kind of link) that you want to save. There is another similar Keypress gesture provided to open all hovered links in new tabs and is executed in a similar fashion, for that you will have to press the Shift key instead of Ctrl key. Using Keypress gestures to save links is a unique feature, and I have not seen it in any other extension so far. I hope that in the future author will provide further keys to define more Keypress gestures or allow to customize them.

*** Please note that in the above example I am using a tweak that links the thumbnails in the Google Image search directly to the original images. By default image thumbnails are not pointing directly to the original images.

4. Drag de Go

Drag De Go is unique among all the listed extension in the sense that it allows to execute context sensitive Drag&Drop gestures, for example you want to search selected text in the current tab, no problem just drag and drop the mouse in the upward direction(or in any other direction that you have configured in preferences) and search results through Google will open in new tab. In my opinion, D&D gestures are easier to learn, memorize and more intuitive for new users.

Also supports a number of other features such as setting up predefined folders for gestures to save images and text snippets. For example, I have setup a downward D&D mouse gesture to save the current image in a predefined folder and another upward D&D gesture to save the selected text snippet in current Firefox tab to a folder. You can read more details about this extension in one of my previous articles.

5. Easy Gestures

Easy Gestures takes yet another route to provide mouse gesturing support in Firefox, that is in the form of a pie-menu. Pie menu pops up in the current browser tab when a defined button is pressed for example the middle mouse button. To perform a gesture to execute an action just guide the mouse through the visible pie menu and release the mouse when you are at the desired action that you want to perform. Main advantage of these kind of gestures is that no memorization effort on the user side to perform a gesture because of the visual aid.

This is a large extension and supports a wide variety of features. Some of the more important features of the Easy Gestures are listed below:

• 3 main pie menu views extended with 3 extra views, each with a different set of actions fully customizable
• Customizable pie menu layout with many built-in actions
• Possibility to launch external applications and execute scripts
• Direct URL typing within the pie menu in its integrated location bar
• Possibility to open your favorite bookmarks from the pie menu
• Contextual pie menu behavior fully customizable

That’s all folks, if you think that I missed on some important mouse gestures related extension, then let me know. If you are curious, I am personally using the 3rd and 4th from this list in my own Firefox profile.

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One of the things in WLR that always bugged me was the fact that whenever I press Enter when compiling a post it starts a new paragraph by inserting a blank line in between. But there are cases when you just want to start witting on a new-line rather than to start a new paragraph. I have found a tip to force the later behavior by pressing Shift + Enter instead of just Enter. Some of you may already know about it but incase someone don’t know it can prove to be really useful because it can provide a lot of convenience when formatting a post. I am not sure why I was not aware of such a simple thing earlier.

See the difference below as I have pressed Enter after Point1 and Shift + Enter after Point 2.

—————————-

Point number 1 to note.

Point number 2 to note.
Point number 3 to note.

—————————-

Also I have tried it in WordPress built-in editor and it works there as well, so it should work in most other WYSIWYG editors as well such as Microsoft Word.

Source: Windows Live Writer Plugins

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This software I am referring to is called Free FLV Converter and as it’s name implies is available for free. It will allows to download streaming video files from most of the famous video sharing sites. It has a built-in search module that will allow to search and list all the related video files according to your search string. Number of search results can also be adjusted. By default search results are presented in detailed view mode and can be sorted on a number of parameters such as date added, no. of views, video name, duration etc. A thumbnail mode is also provided to have a visual clue of the video files. Some people may actually prefer the thumbnail mode. In any case a video can also be previewed by clicking on the Play button available on the left side. To download the desired files just checkmark them and press the Download button and all the selected video files be added to the download queue in the Turbo downloader tab(second tab).

A very nice thing about this software is that it will allows to set the output format for the downloaded files such as PSP, IPod, AVI so that the downloaded FLV files will be automatically converted to the desired format after downloading. If you don’t want to convert the downloaded files then select No Conversion from the Format drop-down. Other options can also be adjusted here such as output audio,video codec, screen size, aspect ratio etc.

This is a very convenient and useful software particularly if you want to download multiple files and then convert them to a suitable format at once such as to transfer to you IPod or PSP. However note that it is not as general purpose stream downloader as Grab++, for example it will not allow you download streaming audio files, flash files(swf), and rm files. But still for video files downloading from the supported sites it’s convenience can’t be beaten.

You can download Free FLV Converter form Koyote Soft.

Source: gHacks.net

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