You also have the option to limit Google search results to fresh pages only (like show pages created since last month) without using the "Advance Search Page".

To start with, users are presented with a "Search Options" link that brings up a list of relevant options in the right sidebar. All screenshots are more or less self-explanatory.

1. Show pages created in the past month. (also see - ego surfing with Google)

2. Show Search Snippets with Longer Text - this may also be a blessing for screen scrappers who make websites using content from Google Search pages.

3. Show Dates & Places in Search Results Snippets - If Google can recognize any content in the web page that looks like a date or a place, it will be show in the search pages while the regular content is shown in light color.

4. Show both Images & Text from Web Pages - This may a good option when search for images galleries on Google. You can do something in Google Image Search using the site: operator but here, the text snippets and images appear side by side.

Related: Is Your Website Banned or Penalized in Google

New Google Search Interface Looks More Useful - See Screenshots - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

The following screencast animations shows how to exchange the position of Firefox Location Bar with the search box as in the screen capture above.

Idea by Cameron. Do check this guide on how to prevent Firefox 3 from showing bookmarks in the address bar.

Interchange the Position of Firefox Address Bar & Google Search Box - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

The desktop edition of Google Talk comes in two flavors - the standard client and the labs edition. The trick is that you can install both these clients along side each other and even run them simultaneously using different Google Accounts as in the screenshot.

Here I am running Google Talk standard desktop client using my Gmail login while I have logged into the GTalk Labs edition using my Google Apps login. Both clients run simultaneously on the desktop without any problems. If this fails to interest you, try the Digsby option.

Related: Is Google Talk Blocked

Run Two Google Talk Clients Simultaneously on your Desktop - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

You may use the good-old Print Screen key or any of the professional screen capture tools to grab your desktop but the basic requirement remains same - the output image should be sharp and that the file size be well within a reasonable limit.

Now PNG, JPG and GIF are the three most popular image formats for sharing screen captures on the web. Of course there’s another format called BMP but people rarely use that for obvious reasons.

Text & Clipart - If you are capturing text (like a block of source code or Google search pages or a navigation menu), always use GIF or the PNG format - the screenshots are clear and file size remains pretty low.

Regular Desktop Windows - If you need to screen capture a regular window on your screen, dialog boxes, Windows Explorer, DOS command prompt window, Google Maps or even splash screens - use the PNG format.

The advantage with PNG is that it preserves all the colors and yield a much sharper output when compared with JPG. See this Photoshop splash screen for a comparison between JPEG and PNG quality.

Videos & Photographs - If you doing a still image screenshot of a video (YouTube Flash video player), Google Earth, video games, Flash animations, desktop wallpapers or photographs (like Flickr) - always go with JPG instead of PNG because the image file size would be smaller without much degradation in the quality.

To give you example, this Wall Strip video on YouTube would take around 92kb when saved in PNG format but that would fall to 20kb if we changed the format from PNG to JPG. Surprisingly, there isn’t any remarkable difference in quality.

Update: We still got five licenses of SnagIt 9 to giveaway.

JPG, PNG or GIF: How to Choose an Image Format for Screenshots - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

As the flood gates opened, I tried acquiring some "fairly obvious" domain names like call.me, mail.me, contact.me but as one would expect, none of them were available.

Just when I was about to conclude this "unsuccessful quest," a search revealed that ping.me was available with GoDaddy. That was an Aha! moment - I quickly grabbed that domain, made the payment via PayPal and retired to bed pretty excited.

Maybe I would use ping.me to build a blog ping service on the lines of Ping-O-Matic or maybe something else but then this morning, the following email dashed all hopes.

So I Thought of Developing a Ping-O-Matic Clone Last Night But.. - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

In an effort to woo the education community in India, Apple has launched a rare promotion where college students, faculty or staff members of select educational institutions in India can buy Apple MacBook & MacBook Pro laptops for a discount.

Following are the prices of Apple Macbook & MacBook Pro laptops for students before and after discount according to an email from Apple. The offer is not valid on Apple MacBook Air though.

The offer expires on August 30, 2008. To know if you are eligible for the discount (which roughly amounts to 12% of the retail price), just search for the name of your educational institute in the following list.

The email further says - "To avail this offer, call 1800-425-4646 (MTNL/BSNL Lines) or 080-2574-4646 (from all phones) or SMS ‘SALES’ to 54646" - Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have an online store in India yet.

Students in India Can Buy Apple MacBook Laptops at a Discount - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Well, you may stop hunting blogs and web forums for solutions and contact Microsoft directly over phone, email or web chat as they now offer free and unlimited tech support to all Windows Vista customers worldwide who are using Vista Service Pack 1.

The offer is valid worldwide until March 18, 2009.

To get started, go here and pick your country. Here are direct links to Microsoft toll-free phone numbers in India, United States, UK, Australia, Singapore and France.

The offer may not be used with pirated copies of Windows Vista as you would require the 20 digit Product ID for filing a support. Right click My Computer and choose Properties. The Product ID is mentioned under "Windows Activation" - thanks Abhishek.

Related: Will my software work with Vista?

Microsoft Offers Free Tech Support to All Windows Vista Customers - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

*You can do something similar on Google Search through Customize Google.

To illustrate, this is the default look of any news cluster on Techmeme. You see a short snippet from the main story and then a list of blog sites that are discussing that story.

Now with preferences, you can add links to major blog search engines like Ask Bloglines, Sphere, Google Blog Search, Technorati and IceRocket next to each of the main story as shown in the second screenshot.

This will help you quickly discover other interesting blogs that too are discussing the same topic but never made it to Techmeme.

The Preferences option, located at the top right corner on the Techmeme home page, also lets you view titles of secondary stories in expanded mode.

Also: Techmeme Time Lapse Video | Add Techmeme Search in IE & Firefox

Add Links to Other Blog Search Engines In Techmeme - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Not everyone in the room may be carrying a laptop to participate in web polls but they are very likely to have mobile phones that can send text messages.

Once you set up a poll using SMS Poll, your audience can vote by send an SMS from their cell phone to a local number. Alternatively, they can vote online using the computer or through the mobile browser of their phone.

The results of the poll can be displayed in real-time as a live chart in PowerPoint or in an Excel sheet. The charts get updated automatically as new votes are received.

SMS Poll is currently available in UK and Australia but support for New Zealand, India, and Canada would be added by September according to founder Anil Sabharwal.

For people in US, Poll Everywhere offers a very similar service where people can vote by simple texting their response to a US specific short code.

Both SMS Poll and Poll Everywhere allow up to 30 SMS votes for free (perfect for small gatherings or one-time events) though you can always upgrade to a paid version if you have a large audience.

SMS Poll: Conduct Live Polls via SMS Text Messages - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

For instance, you could run the Upgrade Advisor on an XP computer to know if that old machine can afford to run Vista. The problem is that you can check Vista compatibility of only installed software or hardware that’s already attached to the computer.

How do you know if that printer & scanner lying in the basement would work with Vista. Or will that old copy of Photoshop install successfully on your new Windows Vista computer?

Rather than hunting for this information on web forums and manufacturer websites, check the all-new Compatibility Center - a central database of hardware devices & software programs along with their current Vista compatibility status.

You could check compatibility of mobile phones and digital cameras with Windows Vista. Some screenshots.

In case a product is not compatible with Windows Vista (like Photoshop 7), there’s a link to the developer’s website (in this case, Adobe) for getting further information. Overall, a pretty useful tool.

How Reliable is Windows Vista on your PC

Identify Software Programs & Hardware Devices That Work (or Don’t Work) with Windows Vista - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Here’s a simple method that may ring a bell - it uses a torn USB cable for camouflage. Most would pass it as a good-for-nothing cable though internally, it acts as a perfect safe-house for your USB stick.

All you need is a USB drive, some adhesive, a sharp knife and an old USB "A-B" cable (that will house the drive). Then jump to Windell Oskay for detailed instructions.

Related: Never Forget Removing a USB Drive

How to Hide a USB Flash Drive inside a Torn USB Cable - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

The format is supported on IE, Opera, Microsoft Word, OneNote, etc. and comes handy if you need to attach an entire web page as an email attachment.

Now your favorite browser Firefox 3 cannot export web pages to MHT format by default but there’s an excellent add-in called UnMHT that makes MHT support in Firefox better an IE and Opera.

With Un-MHT, you can read any MHT files in Firefox just like any other HTML or text page.

Other than viewing MHT files, this add-in adds a "Save all tabs as MHT" feature that lets you save the current window or all open websites as separate MHT files in one go taking the file name from title of the web pages.

Considering that Windows Desktop Search can index content stored in .mht files, this may prove very useful if you need to save your work and close the browser.

Related: Display MHT Files in Firefox

Firefox Tip: Save Multiple Web Pages as MHT Files In One Go! - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Amazon S3

Now some people assume that Amazon S3 is a storage service meant primarily for web start-ups who store data in-the-cloud but that’s not correct because just about anyone (home users included) can benefit from S3.

For instance, you may backup your large music collection or even your entire computer hard-drive on S3. Similarly, bloggers can use Amazon S3 to store web images without worrying too much about their bandwidth bills.

If you never had a chance to explore Amazon S3 before, read the following guide that makes S3 simple even for non-geeks. It has all the information and tools you would need to quickly get started with Amazon S3.

The Basic Requirements:

To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll need an Amazon account (yes, it’s free; you pay only if you buy something from them) and an Amazon AWS S3 account.

Now go to AWS Access Key Identifiers and generate a unique Access Key ID + Secret Access Key pair that is required for using Amazon S3.

Upload & Manage Files on Amazon S3

Now that you have all the basic things in place, it’s time to explore tools uploading and managing files on Amazon S3.

Amazon S3Fox - Perhaps the simplest of all, this Firefox add-on provides an FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3. This is recommended if you are uploading a small batch of files as S3Fox may have issues with long queues.

S3 Backup (Windows) - This is a free and simple tool for uploading or downloading files from S3 - just pick a file or a folder on the local hard drive to put it to S3. You can even set batch file attributes to bunch of files or folders.

Transmit (Mac): Transmit for Mac is a popular FTP client for Mac OS X that sells for around $30 but the tool may be worth every penny - it lets you upload, download and manage your online Amazon S3 storage like a native Mac app.

Jungle Disk - This is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and there’s also a portable version for your USB computer.  Jungle Disk will set you back by $20 per license but that includes all three platforms and they also provide a web interface to manage your files on S3.

Jungle Disk has a useful “Automatic Backup” features that will backup files and folders from your local hard drive onto Amazon S3 automatically. Thus it can be used as a decent alternative to online backup services like Mozy, Carbonite, etc.

Note: There really isn’t a thing called ‘folders’ per se on the S3 but that is the topic of another day. For now, just assume that you can create ‘folders’ and have files inside them.

WordPress plugin - This comes handy if you to stores files on Amazon S3 rather than using the default “uploads folder” of WordPress.

Once the WordPress S3 plugin is installed and activated, you’ll see an extra icon (storage cylinder) in your “Add Media” Bar. This will allow you to upload files to your Amazon S3 account and can be used inside the Wordpress interface.

Read Part II - Amazon S3 Buckets Described in Plain English

Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service - Everything You Wanted to Know - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

If you are looking to create a personal website or blog, consider getting a .me domain instead of .com or .name because .me not just sounds better, the chances of getting a domain name of your choice are also relatively high.

GoDaddy will open registrations on Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 8:00:00 AM PDT - the registration fee for .me domains is around $20 per year with a minimum two year period.

This embed has a complete list of premium domains that are already reserved and may be available later as an auction but won’t be available tomorrow for regular registration (use F3 to search).

Related: Buying Web Domain Names (tips & precautions).

Domain names can be up to 63 characters, with a minimum of three characters, can contain only Latin alphabet letters (a to z), digits (0 to 9), and single hyphens. Domain names cannot begin or end with hyphens.

Register .me Web Domain Names with GoDaddy "in a few hours" - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

WordPress 2.6 has copied borrowed the best feature of Tumblr - their quick post bookmarklet that auto-detects photos and videos on a web page and enables you to quickly repost these items on your own WordPress blog.

The other useful features in WordPress 2.6 are Image captions, Google Gears support and Wikipedia style document revisions which come quite handy if you are working with multiple authors on the same post or want to revert to a previous version.

Matt has a detailed list of changes made in WordPress 2.6 though there aren’t any bug fixes or security related updates so am not sure if this qualifies as a must-have upgrade. You can download WordPress 2.6 here.

‘Press It’ Bookmarklet in WordPress 2.6 Makes Tumblelogging Easy - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal