By default Gmail uses just Http protocol to transfer data. While it may not be an issue if you are just a casual email user, for people whom security is the primary concern, http may not be good enough.

Fortunately, Gmail offers Https, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, as an option. Https is a standard encryption protocol which is commonly used in online banking services to protect data while in transit.

Forcing Gmail to use Https is easy. On your Gmail, go to Settings and on the General tab, right at the bottom, look for Browser connection. Enable the Always use https option and click Save Changes.

Henceforth, Gmail will always use https to send and receive your mail.

If you like to read a lot of stuff on the web, but find that the cluttered web pages makes it hard to read, then Readability is for you.

Readability is a tool that removes the clutter around what you’re reading, leaving a clean page with just the article you are reading.  Just go to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ and drag the Readability bookmarklet onto your browsers bookmark toolbar. Whenever you are on a web page worth reading, simply click the bookmarklet to enable Readability. Simple.

There are just a few settings like style, size and margin that you can make. Make sure you select your options before adding the bookmarklet to your browser. If you want to change the settings, just remove the older bookmarklet and add a new one with created with the new settings.

Sometimes you come across videos that have been shot at an angle. This mostly happens with videos that have been shot with mobile phones. You find that the video is turned to one side at 90 deg and to watch it on your computer monitor you need to tilt your head. Watch the video for more than a minute, and you can end up with ….well a pain in the neck.

There is an easy solution. Just make sure you are using VLC Media Player.

VLC Media Player allows you to rotate any video by 360 degrees even as it plays. Here’s how.

1. On the VLC player, click on the icon that looks like a graphic equalizer to open the Extended Settings. You can also open it through the menu Tools > Extended Settings.

2. Go to the Video Effects tab and within that go to the Geometry tab.

3. Enable the Rotate checkbox. Now you can click & drag on the rotation dial to rotate the video to whatever angle you want.

Trying to decide what font to use can sometimes be a pain, especially when you have several fonts installed on your computer and if you are just cycling through your options one at a time.

FlippingTypical.com makes it all very easy. Flippingtypical detects what fonts are installed on your machine and displays them all using any text you choose.

You can even switch them to bold by pressing Ctrl+b or italicise them with Ctrl+i. Clicking on a font will swap it with the font displayed on the top of the page.

So, the next time you want to choose a font, just head on to flippingtypical.com

Ever wished you could customize the programs on your Windows taskbar, like you can do with the tabs in Firefox?

Taskbar Shuffle makes it possible. Taskbar Shuffle is a tiny little free utility which once installed lets you drag and drop programs on your taskbar for quick reorganization. You can also have it automatically group similar program icons together under one umbrella button, or set it to group similar apps live side-by-side but never hidden.

Users can also use Taskbar Shuffle to set a middle-click close program feature for the mouse, and even the system tray function key, default to Control, can be altered to one of five others.

So if you want to do away with the chaotic placement of minimized programs on your taskbar, get Taskbar Shuffle.

Mozilla has confirmed that it will release the next major version of Firefox on Tuesday, June 30.

Firefox 3.5 is the first major revision of the popular open-source browser since version 3 landed a little over a year ago, in June of 2008. Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users.

Firefox 3.5 will also include support for the most widely-used elements of HTML 5, the set of next-generation web standards that allows for offline data access, enhanced web graphics and multimedia playback without plug-ins.

Here is a glimpse of the new features in Firefox 3.5:

• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geo-location.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Firefox 3.5 is currently in the post-beta release candidate (RC2) stage. You can grab a preview release here, if you can’t wait until Tuesday for the final release.

One of the cool feature in Windows Vista is the ability to get a thumbnail preview of open windows by just mousing over the tabs on the taskbar. It sure does helps you to quickly find the window/application you want when you have several such tabs on the taskbar.

But if you are running XP, you can still get a similar feature added.  Visual Task Tips is a free utility (for non-commercial use) that provides a preview of the windows when you mouse over the minimized titles on the taskbar, just like in Vista.

So if you want an easier way to manage your open programs, check out VisualTaskTips.com.

So you are an avid user of twitter. You have subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds. But what if someone like say, your mom or dad asks: What is twitter? or, What is this RSS thing exactly? or, what is World Wide Web.

It sure can be difficult to explain concepts like these to the uninformed. If you get too technical explaining things, it is bound to go over their head. So what do you do?

Simple. Just point them to http://www.commoncraft.com.

At Commoncraft.com, host Leele Fever explains several concepts like twitter, www, rss, wikis and more in plain English using simple animations which even your grandmother can understand. The narrations and the animations are both informative and enjoyable to watch.

You will not only find videos on techie stuff, but also videos on things like saving, borrowing & investing money and even the election process, all explained in plain English.

Just check out this video titled Wikis in Plain English.

If you are using Vista and have a secondary display monitor attached to your laptop, you might have encountered this issue. What happens is, once your computer goes to sleep and then you wake it up, you are not able to see the mouse pointer in the secondary monitor though if you move it to the laptop monitor, it is visible. Once this happens, the only way to get back the pointer is to restart Vista. A real pain.

Apparently, the issue appears only in computers with certain nVIDIA display cards. Not really sure whether the problem is with Vista or with the nVIDIA driver for Vista. Whatever be the reason, there doesn’t appear to be a fix for it.

However, there is an easy way to work around the problem.

Here is what you need to do.

• Open up the Control Panel and go to the Mouse settings.
• In the Mouse Properties window that pops up, go to the Pointer Options tab.
• Under Visibility, enable the Display pointer trails.

• Drag the slider to the extreme left so that the trails are the shortest. At this level the trails are virtually imperceptible unless you move the mouse very rapidly.

This somehow eliminates the pointer disappearance problem. Now, your mouse pointer should be visible on your secondary screen even after your computer goes to sleep and comes back.

If you are looking for ways to cut down on your computer energy usage and reduce your electricity bill, here are a few tips you should definitely try out. Frankly, most of us would already be aware of many of the tips that I have listed here. Nevertheless, very few of us actually put them into practice. If anything, this list could be a reminder to you on how you can cut down on your computer’s running cost.

Many computer users do not bother with this at all thinking that computer uses much less energy compared to air conditioning units. But, considering the millions of computers used worldwide, even a little energy saved by each would make a big difference.

Here’s what you can do.

1. Shut down your computer when not in use. Do not let it run all the time. You will no harm your computer by switching it on and off as needed. Computers are designed to be that way.

2. Let it sleep after periods of inactivity.

3. Switch the monitor off when you won’t be using it for several hours.

4. Ditch your screensavers. Screensavers keep your CPU awake and hard drive active and make your computer use more energy. Screensavers especially photo screensavers may require the extra use of a graphics card, which means you’ll have the hard drive, graphic card and monitor all in use at once.

5. Utilize your computer’s power management features and modify power options. Here you can set the amount of time you want your computer to wait before entering energy savings mode.

6. Go for LCD monitors whenever possible. LCD monitors use about one-third of the electricity consumption of the traditional CRT monitors.

7. Close applications that are not in use.

8. Set the screen brightness at the lowest comfortable level.

9. If you do decide to purchase a new computer, make sure that you choose a computer and monitor that are Energy Star compliant. Energy Star compliant computers are said to be energy-efficient. If you need to use a computer all the time, try using a laptop instead of a desktop PC. In general, laptops are greener than desktops because they have been designed with power sensitivity in mind.

10. Unplug the chord off the wall after using your computer. Just because your computer is shut down doesn’t mean it is not using energy. Many pieces of electronics use some power even when they are turned off.