As you know the Opera browser lacks the home button and I'm one of the guys that lacks the ability to use shortcuts.  Don't know why but I find going back to my homepage is easier by clicking the home button and they took it away.

So to add it back is an easy job although a bit to my displeasure because it involves pressing shortcut keys.  Below are the steps:

1. Press "Shift + F12" and an appearance window will pop-up.
2. Go to the "Buttons" tab.
3. Choose "browser" in the category field.
4. Find the "Home" icon and drag it to any place along the address bar.

Opera Appearance Window

You'll also be able to rearrange your icons while in this mode.  I like my refresh button on the right side of the address bar instead of the default setting in Opera.  It makes it a lot easier to reach.  Man I'm truly lazy aren't I haha.

I dislike browsers that do not include a dropdown button at the address bar.  Call me old-fashioned but a dropdown button is truly important for me.

I just installed Opera again to make it as a secondary browser for my blogging activities and was quite disappointed to see that the dropdown button was missing.  I don't really type in the address bar and rather use a dropdown button which is easier to reach my frequently visited websites.

Luckily though I didn't abandoned Opera hastily.  After testing a few other browsers, I find Opera is the best browser to centralize my blogging activities.  My main browser is still Firefox by the way but it is mumbled up nowadays haha.

So I did a quick search and found out how to enable the dropdown button again, you can refer the steps below to get the missing address bar dropdown button again:

1. Open up the Opera browser config page "opera:config#Show%20Dropdown%20Button%20In%20Addressfield".
2. Tick the radio box and click on save.

opera dropdown config menu

That's all there is to it.

Is has been nearly one and a half since I've started working as an IT Helpdesk Officer and what's shown in the infographic below are quite true haha.  Need to demand a raise after this LOL!

Source:  http://dailyinfographic.com/why-it-sucks-to-be-the-it-guy-infographic

New Year 2013

Wishing all Techtikus readers a happy, joyous and prosperous new year!

Yesterday I downloaded the Comodo IceDragon browser which is based upon the highly popular Firefox browser.  Comodo claims that it is a more secure and faster browser then Firefox itself.

The browser has a SiteInspector button which allows you to scan the page that you're on for malwares and viruses.  You can also check links whether they're malicious or not by right clicking on the links and choosing the "Scan Link With Site Inspector" option.

Well enough of me promoting the security features of IceDragon, below are the tutorials on how to change the default Yahoo! Search into Google Search.

1.  Type "about:config" at the browsers address bar.  You'll be taken to the warranty page.  Click on the button that says "I'll be careful, I promise!".

2.  Type "Search" at the search bar and you'll see a list of preference settings.  Find a preference name called "keyword.URL".

3.  Double click on it and a value box will pop out.  change the value into "http://www.google.com/search?&q=".

4.  Open a new tab and make a quick search at the address bar.  It should show you Google search results if done correctly.

Humans, we are always on the move.  Always having to be somewhere and during our time commuting to our destinations most of the time we are idling doing nothing.

How about filling up that time learning and educating oneself with excellent lecture and tutorial videos from Educator.com.  The website provides lots of video courses suitable for high school and college level students.

The website caters science courses, mathematics, language studies, music, computer programming and software training.  All the video courses provided here are taught by trainers with excellent credentials and working experience.

What's good about Educator.com is that students can learn in a stress free environment.  They can use Educator.com as supplements to the subjects that they learn in school and gain invaluable from the excellent instructors here at the website.  Access is available 24/7 and they can learn at their own pace and comfort.

With smartphones and the power of the Internet conquering everyone's pocket nowadays, consuming multimedia content have become a lot easier.  Educator.com notices this trend and successfully made learning available anytime and anywhere all over the world with an affordable monthly or yearly subscription.

For teachers and lecturers who want to deliver their knowledge and skills to a broader range of students they can apply to be an instructor at Educator.com.  Your love for knowledge can be shared across eager students across the continents who are thirsty to learn and improve themselves.

You'll have the power to change other peoples lives with the knowledge that you deliver and help them create a brighter future for themselves and their family through this platform.  Furthermore you'll be compensated with a generous share of sales generated from your courses.

Microsoft has recently released a new iteration of their browser, the Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7 on the 13th of November 2012.  The new browser is available for download now for all Windows 7 users.

The new IE10 keeps up the improvement that was made with IE9.  The interface design is sleek and clean.

This is certainly good for Windows 7 users as the new Internet Explorer features an improve security feature with its SmartScreen filter feature.  Internet Explorer 10 has also adopted the "Do Not Track" technology which is turned on by default.  This feature prevents advertisers from tracking your surfing activities and serving you targeted ads.

In terms of speed, users who have installed IE10 are giving it praises and some even claiming it to be faster than Google's Chrome browser.  That is certainly a good review for IE10.

Good news for web developers as support for HTML 5 and CSS3 has also greatly improved with this new version of Internet Explorer.

Personally speaking since IE9 came out I've started using Internet Explorer again from time to time.  If Internet Explorer comes with a Password Manager that Firefox has it would be tempting for me to start using Internet Explorer fully again.

One thing though that I would like to highlight is that I wish Internet Explorer releases are to be made more frequent instead of only releasing it only when a new Microsoft Windows OS is released.  Web standards are evolving and all the advancement made to Internet Explorer would go down the drain if they don't keep up.  Don't let another IE6 tragedy happen again, please

So are you thinking of migrating to Windows 8 yet? Surely it has a nice colourful interface and if you have a touch capable screen for your PC, you can experience Windows 8 to its full extent.

I can't upgrade to Windows 8 yet as my current hardware isn't good enough to run Windows 8.  For those can and want to migrate to Windows 8 you can get to know and learn the basics of Windows 8 by going to through the free Windows 8 online tutorial provided by Lynda.com.

The online training provides videos for the basic knowledge to get you up and running when using Windows 8.  You'll learn how to migrate your current Windows 7 to Windows 8 or do a clean installation, explore the new redesigned user interface and loads more.

The online training videos are separated into several parts and totaling up to 5 hours of training.  There's no rush to learn it all at one go.  The training videos are excellent and the instructor explains in good plain English.

If you are ready to jump into Windows 8 then don't forget to watch the training videos and get a head start from the rest.

Last but not least, Windows 8 is awesome!

Recently I've attended quite a lot of weddings whether be it my friends or my fiancee's friend.  Tonnes of photos have been taken during the event and it's really taking up my hard drive space.

Not only that, some of them also have recently asked me to e-mail them the pictures.

The problem is that I usually set the camera of my Samsung Note to 8MP and that means for one picture the size would be around 2MB to 3MB. It would be a nightmare for me to e-mail them the pictures.

Why don't I use online storage such as LiveDrive, Dropbox or Box? The answer is simple really.  Most of them are technologically challenged.

So I ended up googling up open source softwares which I could use to compress the wedding pictures and landed on Caesium.  It looks like that it has a nice interface and quite inviting to use.

After downloading Caesium immediately I dragged and dropped the pictures I want to compress and set the compression level up to 80%.  The batch processing of the images went on smoothly without a hitch and still the compressed picture quality is still good when compared to the original photos.

All that's left is to archive the pictures and e-mail them.

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.

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I sincerely do hope that they know how to extract the archive files!

I.Love.League.Of.Legends.

Furthermore it's the only current popular game that I can play in my 6 year old laptop.  It's a Compaq V3000 by the way.

Back to the topic at hand.  Garena League of Legends Facebook page announced that they will be giving out free Judgement Kayle skin if they reach 100K likes by the end of November.

Please do help to like their Facebook page if you are addicted to LoL as I am.  Kayle is my second most played champion.  I love how flexible the character is.  Having that skin would be awesome.

This is how Judgement Kayle looks like:

Sexy ain't it.

Help reach 100K likes would ya .

https://www.facebook.com/LoLGarena?ref=ts&fref=ts