Daily Gyan

Hawkscope - Single Click Access To Any File Through System Tray Icon [Productivity Improvement]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:33:00 +0000

Windows, Linux, Mac: Hawkscope is a Java based free and open source tool that adds a little icon to your system taskbar, clicking on which opens a pop-up menu using which you can browse your hard disk contents and open them.

For the keyboard junkies, there is an option to set a key combination that'll open up this pop-up menu. You can set folders as your favorite ones for much faster quick access. You can also blacklist certain folders so that they are not included in the pop-up menu listing.

The application is quite extensible via plugins. Currently, there are plugins to search of Google, check Gmail and (obviously) a plugin to post to Twitter.

Download Hawkscope

Snapper – An Easy to Use Firefox Extension to Take Website Screenshots

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Firefox (Windows, Linux, Mac): Snapper is a new Firefox extensions that can capture web pages as images. After installing Snapper, you’ll get a fish icon in your status bar. Clicking on this icon causes the fish to open it’s mouth! Now you are in capture mode. Click and drag around the portion that you want to save as image and a file save dialog pops up asking you the location to save the image.

Snapper makes it too simple. Watch this screencast.

Snapper Mozilla Addons Page

Prevent NoScript From Displaying the Updates Home Page Every Time it is Updated

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:02:00 +0000

We really love NoScript Firefox extension. In our quest to explore even the dark and unknown realms of the internet to gather news for our beloved readers, noscript has been a faithful companion, protecting us from many malicious Javascript coders out there.

But still, we shake our heads in despair when NoScript opens its welcome page each time it updates itself. And with the extension author releasing a new version before and after his meal everyday, we are seeing this page too often these days.

So we were glad when we found this section hidden in the FAQ section of NoScript:

Q: I don't like NoScript redirecting the browser on its release notes page every time I upgrade it. Is there any way to prevent this?

A: First time you install NoScript and every time you upgrade it to a newer major version, Firefox opens an additional tab containing the NoScript welcome page, where you can read the release notes, the latest announcements and an introduction to the most important NoScript features (plus a link to this very FAQ...) If you feel you don't need such heads up, you can disable this feature by clicking the NoScript icon, selecting Options and unchecking "Display the release notes on update" in the "Notifications" tab.

That's it. There is an option in the Options dialog, just for this.
For the geeks out there, you can also do this by going into the about:config window and changing the value of


noscript.firstRunRedirection

to false.

NotMyIp - Best Free Proxy Tool Out There [Daily Download]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:26:00 +0000

Windows only: There may be many reasons why people have always felt a need to hide their actual IP addresses. The intentions may not be always malicious. It may be to protect privacy, for overcoming censorships, to browse anonymously, to bypass Rapidshare download limit, circumvent the Megaupload country slot limit etc.

So people use proxy servers. When one use a proxy server, the outside world would see the address of the proxy server and not the user's actual IP address.

NotMyIp is an application that makes it dead simple to mask one's IP address. This is a freeware version of the popular premium product - Anonymity Gateway. NotMyIp doesn't require any manual configurations. It automatically configures all installed browsers like Firefox, IE, Opera and Google Chrome to use high quality US proxies. This takes the pain away from the user as he longer need to search for free proxies in the internet and configure the browsers manually.

Not My Ip is a free for non-commercial use tool, available for Windows only.

Download NotMyIp

Install Latest Version of Firefox in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope the Easy Way With Ubuntuzilla

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:58:00 +0000

Linux only: It usually takes some time for a new Firefox release to hit the official Ubuntu repositories after Mozilla releases it.

For the impatient out there, we present Ubuntuzilla. Ubuntuzilla is a python script that allows one to install the latest Mozilla products like Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey in a Ubuntu Linux machine. It can automatically download the latest Firefox and install it, integrate the already existing Firefox extensions with the new Firefox version and add/update menu entries in Applications -> Internet. It can also periodically checks for updated version of Firefox, Thunderbird or SeaMonkey and automatically download and install it.

Download the deb file appropriate for your system from Ubuntuzilla downloads page and install it (Installation instructions). Now, close all running Firefox instances and run ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p firefox from a command prompt to start Firefox installation. Answer a few questions that the installer asks and you are good to go.

Ubuntuzilla is a free download for Ubuntu and Ubuntu derived Linux distributions.

Download Ubuntuzilla

Good Read:

Set Your Latest Twitter Tweet as Your Forum Avatar Or Email Signature Image with TwitImg

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:05:00 +0000

TwitImg is a brand new web application that allows you to convert your most recent tweet into an image. You can see my latest tweet displayed as an image above.
TwitImg doesn't force you to use any javascript. That means, you can directly use the provided image url anywhere (like your favourite forum as your avatar or signature).

Visit TwitImg

Firefox 3.5.1 Released. Fixes Critical Vulnerability & Slow Startup Issue In Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:44:00 +0000

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.1 version that fixes a critical vulnerability that affected the TraceMonkey javascript engine.

This version is also said to solve the extremely slow startup many had faced in Firefox 3.5 Windows version. [Related link: The Firefox 3.5 fiasco]

If you have Firefox 3.5 already installed, Firefox would be updating itself in the next 24 hours. You can also force start an update by going to Help -> Check for Updates.

Readers who had disabled the TraceMonkey engine as a temporary work around should remember to change the value of "javascript.options.jit.content" back to True.

Critical Security Vulnerability Discovered In Firefox 3.5

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:59:00 +0000

A critical security vulnerability affecting the latest Firefox 3.5 release has been identified by Mozilla. This vulnerability is caused by the TraceMonkey Javascript engine and allows malicious websites to execute code in your PC.

To get protected from this vulnerability, disable the TraceMonkey optimizer by following these steps.

Type about:config into the Firefox address bar and hit enter.
Hit “I’ll be careful, I promise” button.
Type in “javascript.options.jit.content” into the Filter bar. Double click on it to change its value to False.

Doing this may affect the browsers performance on Javascript intensive websites like Gmail. However, it is advised to disable TraceMonkey until Mozilla releases a patch for this vulnerability.

[via]

Check Whether Your Computer Can Run Windows 7 With Microsoft’s Upgrade Advisor

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:39:00 +0000

Windows Vista was a bit greedy when it came to minimal system requirements to run it. Windows 7 is supposed to change that. According to Microsoft, Windows 7 will be able to run on most humble of system configurations without affecting the user experience.

Now, if you are someone with an old PC and are wondering whether you will be able to run Windows 7 on it, Microsoft has released a tool just for you.

This tool named “Windows 7 upgrade advisor beta” will scan your system and let you know whether you’ll be able to run Windows 7 in it or not. We ran Upgrade Advisor on a pretty old Windows XP machine and have captured the screenshots here.

This is the screen that you’ll get on running Upgrade Advisor:

Click Start Check to begin the system scan:

When the check is over, you’ll be presented with a nice report on what all will work and what will not. For eg: Upgrade Advisor found that the PC we tested was a bit low on Hard Disk space and the current graphics card will not be able to support the Windows Aero user interface. It also listed the softwares that will be problematic once you switch over to Windows 7.

In case you want to save this report for future use, just hit the Save Report button and it will be saved as an HTML page.

Download Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor beta

How To Search Google & Bing Simultaneously [Web Apps]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:02:00 +0000

Bing is becoming the new Google. Who would have guessed that the yet-another-search-engine-attempt-from-microsoft-to-beat-google would really turn successful?

Well, it surely seems that Microsoft has finally worked its magic this time as Bing has become the 13th most visited site on the web. According to Compete, Bing’s traffic has overtaken that of other prominent sites like Digg, Twitter and CNN.

Now, for those people who would like to switch to Bing, but finds Google to be unavoidable, we present you two new web services that allows you to search both Google and Bing together in a shot.

1. AskBoth.com

AskBoth.com is a new Web 2.0 search engine that combines the results from Google and Bing and displays them side by side. Note that entire Bing page or Google page is not displayed, but just the results are displayed here.

2. Bing-Vs-Google.com

Bing-Vs-Google.com is another similar site. The difference is that it displays the actual Google and Bing page itself side by side and you can scroll down both the sides using a single scroll bar. Pretty neat if you want to compare Google and Bing for a particular keyword.

By the way, can you spot something fishy on comparing the two screenshots?

Get Windows 7 Superbar in Windows XP & Vista with ViGlance [Daily Download]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:13:00 +0000

Windows: Official Windows 7 release is still a couple of months away and if you are eager to try out the awesome superbar of Windows 7 that everybody keeps talking about, without installing the beta version of Windows 7, try ViGlance.

ViGlance brings the Windows 7 superbar features to Windows XP and Vista. Once installed and run, you’ll find your taskbar more cleaner, organized and usable. All windows of same process are grouped together. Taskbar items are shows as large 48X48 icons instead of the earlier 16X16 icons displayed in XP and Vista. Users of Windows XP will find the change from the bulky start menu button to the stylish small start orb quite refreshing. The start orb is now enhanced with a smooth rollout transition effect which is quite a change from the Vista orb. The information about taskbar entries are shown as a sliding animation as you mouse over the taskbar icons.

ViGlance is a free download for Windows XP. Vista and Windows 7.

Download ViGlance

Good Read:

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

Reduce Clutter On Your Windows Desktop With Desktop List View

Google Chrome OS and How the Web Went Nuts Over It

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:54:00 +0000

Official Google blog broke the news to the world last Tuesday — Google will be releasing an Operating System soon. And it would be based on their popular product Chrome browser.

The news spread like wild fire. Many seemed to be in a hurry to jump into conclusions. Many predicted that this move would be the first nail in the Microsoft coffin. Linux enthusiast seemed to be in a bit of a dilemma. Should they rejoice that the new OS is having a Linux kernel or should they worry over the fact that Google Chrome OS would be eating into the market share of their favorite Linux distribution?

In today’s Daily Feature, we take you through a fantastic ride through all the stuff that happened in 5 days of Google breaking the news.

July 7th 2009

It all began with Google officially releasing information about a new venture — Google Chrome OS. This is what the blog said:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

So Google proposes to take their Chrome browser, add a Linux kernel into it and release it by 2010. This OS will run on netbooks and is supposed to give the users a better experience than the current one.

TechCrunch was one of the first blogs to comment. In a post named Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome, they say:

But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that?

So basically, MG Siegler of TechCruch thinks that this is going to be a big blow for Microsoft. However, he ends the post saying that all is not lost for Microsoft:

But there is a wild card in all of this still for Microsoft: Windows 7. While Windows XP is 8 years old, and Windows Vista is just generally considered to be a bad OS for netbooks, Windows 7 could offer a good netbook experience. And Microsoft had better hope so, or its claim that 96% of netbooks run Windows is going to be very different in a year.

The Technologizer site came up with Eleven Questions About Google’s Chrome OS in which they ask some pretty strong questions.

Google isn’t revealing much in the way of specifics, other than that the OS is an open-source project based on its Chrome browser with a Linux kernel, and that it’s working with multiple hardware manufacturers to bring it to x86- and ARM-based netbooks in the second half of next year. It says the goal is to build an OS that boots in seconds and runs Web apps really well.

Like many big Google announcements (such as the unleashing of Chrome itself last September) this one prompts more questions than it answers.

They ask some questions that are in every common mans mind like — Why Chrome and Not Android? Just how Web-based can an OS be? Will consumers buy a Google netbook? Just how serious is Google about this?

July 8th 2009

On this day, Mashable brought out an interesting article – Chrome OS: But Will it Run Photoshop? In this article, the author Stan Schroeder argues why it won’t be an easy ride for Google Chrome OS.

Let’s look at some problems Google will inevitably face. Details aside, Microsoft’s domination of the OS market is due to two reasons:

1. It’s very hard to get all the hardware makers to create drivers (or create them yourself) for your OS.

2. It’s very hard to get all the software makers to create versions of their software that’ll work on your OS.

When it comes to software, there’s the ancient “Photoshop argument,” which can be summed up in this way: if you’re a long time Windows user, chances are you’ve got a favorite piece of software that won’t run on Linux. It can be a game, or it can be Photoshop (and no, GIMP is not that good), it can be something else, but there will always be something missing. I can live with that. I’ve always got at least three working computers at home; I can run many different OSs if necessary; many users don’t have the time or the will to do that. They want to have one computer that runs all of their stuff, period. Yes, I know Chrome OS is all about web apps. But not all apps can be web apps just yet; between the apps already supported on Linux, and all the wonderful web apps available out there, will it be enough for the average user? We’ll have to wait and see.

Windows 7 will come out before Google Chrome OS will; if it performs up to users’ expectations, it’ll be harder for Google to push through. By the time Chrome OS supports enough hardware and software to be deemed really usable by a significant portion of users, Microsoft will have a lot of time to fix things.

Wired featured Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook, where they mention how the Chrome OS will revolutionize the cost, speed, compatibility, portability and applications of the current netbook market.

Zdnet said No thanks Google, we've got Ubuntu:

The growing dominance of Ubuntu (at least on the desktop, the server room seems to have been won by Red Hat) has delivered the Linux community a serious advantage in its ongoing war against the incumbent Windows and Apple platforms because of its ability to give software developers a single platform to concentrate on, and polish to a degree not seen previously.

In this context, Google's decision to create its own Linux distribution and splinter the Linux community decisively once again can only be seen as foolhardy and self-obsessive.

Fake Steve Jobs, in his hilarious blog wrote the article Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective:

First of all, nobody seems to appreciate how goddamn hard it is to make an operating system. You don't just wake up one day and fall out of bed and make one. Not even the smarty pants kiddies at Google can do that. These things take years. Decades, even. Ours started out 20 years ago, at NeXT. You could say it goes back to 1977, with the BSD guys. Heck, you could even say it goes back to 1969 with Dennis Thompson and Lionel Ritchie. Even Windows is -- what? Twenty years old? Something like that. For that matter, look at Linux. Correct me if I'm wrong -- and I'm sure you fucking freetards will find something to correct -- but I think Linus Tordalv started working on Linux back in 1991 when he was a high school student in his native Denmark. That's nearly twenty years ago, and the shit still doesn't run right. Point is, whatever Google might release in the second half of next year, it will just be a starting point. It won't come close to what we've got.

The All Things Digital blog featured Chrome OS, Huh? Will It Be Based on a Google Analytics Kernel? an article which looks into the privacy related issues posed by the Google chrome OS.

“Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. “It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.”

TechCrunch had a post giving details on the device manufacturers that have partnered with Google to roll out the Chrome OS.

Yesterday Google said they were already working with device manufacturers to roll out Chrome OS devices late next year. Today they announced at least some of those partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments.

Acer and ASUS are the no. 1 and no. 2 netbook manufacturers worldwide. HP and Lenovo are also large netbook manufacturers. Freescale, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are chip companies that Google is likely working with to ensure a good user experience.

The Google's OS Security Claims Called 'idiotic' post published in Yahoo Tech news was a great read.

Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer at BT, scoffed at Google's promise. "It's an idiotic claim," Schneier wrote in an e-mail. "It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible -- not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible -- to create an operating system that is immune to viruses."

Redesigning an operating system from scratch, "[taking] security into account all the way up and down," could make for a more secure OS than ones that have been developed so far, Schneier said. But that's different from Google's promise that users won't have to deal with viruses or malware, he added.

July 9th 2009

The most interesting post of the day was Register slapping TechCrunch hard with TechCrunch dubs Linux a 'big ol’ bag of drivers'

The pundits are losing their shit all over again, which is fairly impressive, because multiple Googasms from a single product are very rare. Last year, I highlighted the glorious incompetence of writers who fancy themselves tech journalists. Much in the way that everybody who saw Sideways is now an expert on wine, the tragedy of blogging is that anybody with a laptop and a Gmail account is an expert on technology. So now that Chrome will actually be a full-fledged operating system, let's see what the experts have to say.

The canonical example of failure in tech journalism is TechCrunch, a blog that once declared Google's MapReduce to be a system that "reduced the links found on the web into a map that search algorithms could run over." Yes, this will do nicely. TechCrunch embodies all that is wrong with blogging as journalism: shoddy fact checking, writing that would fail a high school English class, and a pre-adolescent in-the-brain-out-the-mouth reporting style

As Mike Arrington says: "The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way."

Indeed. That's probably why desktop Linux machines with Firefox have already taken such a foothold in the consumer market.

Oh, wait.

Another interesting thing was a couple of fake Chrome OS screenshots that were published: THE FIRST PICS OF THE CHROME OS BETA FOR DEVS!!!

July 10th 2009

John Gruber in his Daring Fireball blog raises a few interesting points. A few snippets from the post Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context:

it’s not weird that Chrome was announced. But what is weird is how it was announced. And, despite the title of the weblog post in which the announcement was made — “Introducing the Google Chrome OS” — nothing has actually been introduced. There aren’t even any screenshots, let alone a demo or any specific technical information. With an expected ship date of “the second half of 2010”, it’s a textbook example of vaporware.

I don’t get the timing. Why announce it now, when it clearly isn’t close to ready? Why not at I/O, Google’s developer conference six weeks ago? Or why not wait until it’s ready to release to developers? I like facts, demos, and best of all, shipping products. I don’t like vague promises.

Martin of gHacks.net posts about Why Google Chrome OS Will Have No Huge Impact

Some Microsoft Thoughts on Chrome OS published on Marketing Pilgrim blog gives details about interview with Abu-Hadba, Microsoft’s VP of Developer and Platform Evangelism.

Some of his remarks about Chrome consisted of entertaining bluster: “I love competition.” But he also had thoughts about why Google is trying to muscle into the operating system business. And no, he said, it’s not because Google wants to make computing simpler and faster (as Google executives claim), nor is it part of a grand plan to undo Microsoft’s dominance .

“Most of what Google does is defensive,” Abu-Hadba said.

Abu-Hadba said it’s not about operating systems at all; instead, Google is trying to distract competitors from attacking its cash cow, search. He argued that whenever Google enters a new market, like releasing mobile operating system Android, it’s trying to force competitors to focus on existing products, rather than challenging Google in search. And the company may actually feel threatened for the first time in years.

July 11th 2009

Mashable is back with another interesting post: The Google Revenue Equation, and Why Google’s Building Chrome OS.

Google generated about $21 billion in revenue last year. The vast majority of that revenue, well over 95%, comes from advertising via its search engine and its AdSense program, which places ads on millions of websites, including Mashable.

You probably already knew that, though. The key to understanding why Google is building an OS based off Chrome though isn’t about how it generates revenue, it’s about where. The answer’s simple: anywhere on the web.

As long as you’re on the web, Google wins. So we need to stop framing the Google-Microsoft battle in the context of “Chrome OS vs. Windows,” because Google will not win a straight up battle. And guess what? That’s not Google’s goal. We need to frame it in the larger context of the Google Revenue Equation and how much time we spend on the web.

Chrome OS is just another step in getting us online, both directly and indirectly. If you view the battle with this in mind, then you realize that Google will almost certainly succeed. Google will have won once again.

So that’s it guys. 5 days of Google Chrome OS juice combined in one post. What do you thing of this new OS? Tell us in the comments.

Mac4Lin Makes Your Ubuntu Linux Look Like a Mac OS X [Linux Gyan]

noreply@blogger.com (Anoop Engineer) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Linux only: Mac4Lin is a bundle of icons, themes and wallpapers that can transform the look of your normal Gnome desktop to look exactly like a Mac.

In his blog, Tanveer gives us a nice little tutorial on how to install Mac4Lin and tweak your Ubuntu to make it look like a Mac OS X Leopard. The steps consist of downloading the Mac4Lin package and installing it, installing the AWN theme, installing the OS X cursors and fonts and changing the Firefox theme to a Safari theme.

Transform Ubuntu into OS X

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.