Google Chrome brings new shine to browser market

Google Chrome brings new shine to browser market

It’s no secret that near everything Google touches turns to gold, but as of yesterday the company has plans to embed an entirely different metal on your desktop – Chrome.
Google Chrome is a new Internet browser that has been designed from the ground up to simplify the user interface and, perhaps more importantly, streamline and speed-up the multitude of processing that happens behind the scenes when you visit a Web site.
As would be expected from a modern browser, all the bits we’re used to are there – tabbed browsing, bookmarks, a bookmark bar. However, unlike Firefox and the more recent versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome’s tabs operate in isolated “sandboxes”.
These “sandboxes” prevent one tab from bringing the whole browser down, and provide improved protection from malicious sites by using some intelligent access control.
The most exciting and lauded feature of Chrome though is a bit that most users have likely never considered and will likely never actively notice – Chrome utilizes the most powerful JavaScript engine to date, V8, making it geared to process not just modern Web apps, but the stuff that’s yet to come.

Developers Note

Web designers and developers will be happy to note that Chrome isn’t a whole new game when it comes to browser compatibility. Chrome uses Apple’s Webkit rendering engine, so if your design worked in Safari, it’ll look smashing in Chrome.
Additionally, Chrome comes standard with a decent element inspector. It’s not Firebug, but it does a a pretty decent job out of the box.

I know, I know – I love Firefox too, and though Firefox 3 has brought with it a lot of improvements, my money’s on Chrome becoming the defacto browser of choice among average users and net junkies alike.
My reasoning is thus – Google’s damn smart. I mean, they’re really smart. This is the company that not only indexes the entire Internet, but they’ve also mapped virtually the entire planet. Mozilla, while cool, is going to have a tough time competing with that – and Microsoft Internet Explorer? Well, about the ONLY thing that browser has going for it is a monopolisitic entrenchment that survives on user apathy.
Plus, unlike IE but much like Firefox, it is completely open-source, which means people are welcome, – encouraged even, to take the code and improve it – without a doubt the reason why Firefox and Mozilla rock.
I’ve been using Chrome all day and, if you haven’t guessed, absolutely love it. Here are the few things I like:

• Slick tab addition and deletion – adding tabs in any other browser is going to feel clunky and brash after you’ve used Chrome.
• Tab pull-outs – you can easily pull off your tab, making it a new window, and vice versa, you can slap an independent browser window into a tab.
• New tab quick links – rather than have a blank screen greeting you when you open a new tab, Google Chrome displays a collection of screenshots of sites you frequently visit, rightly assuming you’re likely to be going to one of them.
• Omnibox Address/Search bar – the “Omnibox” is Google Chrome’s intelligent address bar. It allows you to input an address or a search term (your choice of search engine) and offers smart auto-complete.
• Pop-up control – all pop-ups are “blocked” by default, with a notice allowing you to open them or not.
• Incognito window – If you’re looking for a bit of browsing privacy, Chrome allows you to easily open up an “Incognito tab” which isn’t recorded in the browsers history – you know, for when you are looking at porn buying your wife a surprise gift.

However, not everything is yet perfect in Chromeville. The biggest downside Google will need to combat if they want to sway the relatively newborn masses of Firefox users is the absense of extensions/add-ons. There is currently no ability to add extensions (outside of plugins like Flash, Java, etc.), so if you are stuck on some Firefox add-ons, you’ll need to be patient and see if abilities are added after the browser comes out of beta.
And yeah, it’s beta – so it’s still technically being tested. As mentioned, I’ve been running it all day without a glitch, but fellow Twitterholics have reported some problems – whether they’re Chrome related or system related is unknown.
Additionally, Google Chrome is not yet available for Mac or Linux users – for the time being it is strictly Windows-based. However, I’m certain we can expect Mac and Linux versions in the near future.
If you’d like to dive a bit deeper into how Chrome works and why it’s being touted as “a revolutionary new browser”, check out this easy to follow comic. You can download and try Chrome for yourself without uninstalling your current browser(s). Oh, and be sure to check out Matt Cutts’ answers to common Google Chrome objections.

Let us know what you think.

Romancing the Seven Wonders: Great Pyramids

Romancing the Seven Wonders: Great Pyramids [FINAL]| 132 mb
Before the Old Kingdom, in the fourth year of the reign of King Amenhotep IV, Queen Nefertiti enjoyed unprecedented power, equal only to the Pharaoh himself. However, in the fourteenth year of the King’s reign, all record of Queen Nefertiti vanished … until now. Brianna Hastings has been trapped in an ancient tomb, and only her sister can save her in Romancing the Seven Wonders Great Pyramid, a Hidden Object game.

Time Dreamer [FINAL]

Travel back in time with Time Dreamer in this fun and exciting Hidden Object game! Help our hero travel to the past and save his father, and even the world! Use this special ability for good as you attempt to make the future a worthwhile world to live in! Explore gorgeous scenes and find Hidden Objects to progress through your journey and succeed.

Emma and the Inventor [FINAL]

Emma and the Inventor [FINAL]| 474 MB
Save Emma’s grandfather who has accidentally trapped himself in a mysterious void in Emma and the Inventor! After completing his greatest invention ever, Grandfather Jenkin’s mysterious machine sends him to an alternate dimension and explodes, scattering the pieces all over his home. Now it’s up to Emma to put the machine back together and create fuel for it in this beautiful Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game!

Using Active Screen Corners in Mac OS X

Using Active Screen Corners in Mac OS X

Like with any operating system, you likely don’t utilize all the features that you potentially could. Heck, some of the features, you probably didn’t even know they existed. Or maybe you just didn’t bother to enable them.
That’s likely the case with Mac OS X’s Active Corners feature, which is a neat little tool that helps you do many different tasks just a little bit quicker.
Go to System Preferences, then Expose and Spaces. You’ll see Active Screen Corner options on the top of the page.

In a nutshell, what this feature allows you to do, is to activate any of the following Mac OS X processes simply by moving your mouse to any of the screens far corners:

• All Windows
• Application Windows
• Desktop
• Dashboard
• Spaces
• Start Screensaver
• Disable Screensaver
• Sleep Display
• -

The most practical of these I find is “enable sleep display.” Whenever I step away from my Macbook (which isn’t often!), I just drag the mouse to the bottom corner, thus kicking her into sleep mode — and saving me a little battery power.
If you use the spaces feature, Active Corners is a must as well.
Enjoy!

Treasures of Montezuma 3 [FINAL]

Treasures of Montezuma 3 [FINAL] | 125,52mb
Match tokens to unlock incredible riches in The Treasures of Montezuma 3! As you brave the dangers of a forgotten jungle, you discover an ancient palace containing dozens of locked treasure chests. To release a lock, you must score a certain number of points by matching tokens and collecting the gems they contain. Since you have only one minute to score as many points as possible, you must learn to use power-ups to quickly collect gems and earn more time.The Treasures of Montezuma 3 features two addictive game modes: Casual and Timed. Casual mode allows you to match tokens at your leisure, while the Timed mode offers an intense, fast-paced match-three challenge. Whichever mode you choose, you'll enjoy spectacular visual effects and explosive audio as you invent unique strategies for upgrading the power-ups and solve dozens of mind-bending mini-puzzles between stages. With 160 levels to beat, you could be in the jungle for months!

Put Up Shelves On Yor Mac, with Finder Backgrounds

Put Up Shelves On Yor Mac, with Finder Backgrounds

A couple of months ago, one clever designer had a neat creative idea: create a background image of shelving to use in the Finder window of his Mac. It creates the impression that your folders or apps are ‘sitting’ on the shelves, which is very cute. A few other designers got inspired, and now I can find a total of 12 great ‘shelves’ for your Mac, from five different sources.
The idea plays to the strengths of the Mac, with it’s huge and detailed icons. In any Finder window the icon can go as large as 128 x 128 pixels (note that the 512 pixels size for icons is reserved only for in the ‘CoverFlow’ view, and only in Leopard), and most of the shelves require you set your icons as 128 x 128 (or, for two of the shelves, 64 x 64) so that the icons ‘sit’ exactly on the shelf, and the icon’s name appears on the thick part of the shelves, as you can see here:

Titles appear on edge of

Before I review all the shelves and give you this links, here’s a quick tutorial on how to set the shelves: right-click within a Finder window and select ‘Show view options’. A small options window appears. Under ‘Background:’ select ‘Picture’ and then pick the shelves image that you’ve downloaded. Lastly, you just need to adjust ‘Icon Size’ and ‘Grid Spacing’ so that it matches this:

Use these icons settings with most shelves

How awesome is that? So, here’s where you can snag all the shelves that individual designers have made so far; all of them are free. Hit the links to the artist’s page to download them:
1. Five very funky shelves with themed backgrounds which are: Dark Metal, Leather Brown, Starry Night, Cinema, and Blue. Looks great inside either ‘Applications’ or indeed any folder that has some customized icons. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.
2. Wooden Shelves with wooden panelling and spotlights that will look especially good for the ‘Applications’ folder. For 64×64 pixel-size icons.
3. Studio wood-and-metal shelves looks particularly gorgeous and was designed specifically for the ‘Movies’ folder so as your movies and TV shows will be appear to be arranged on your shelf. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.
4. Two “iShelf” versions in graphite or white are super smooth and can be used as a background inside any folder. The white version works best with colourful and high-contrast icons. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.
5. Dark 3D Shelves contrast a wooden shelf against a very dark background, with some perspective on the left-hand side to make it look as though the shelves are fixed to a wall. For 64×64 pixel-size icons.
Those five links give you 12 great shelves to use within Finder on your Mac, created by excellent designers from all over the world, who offer them up for free for the pleasure-of-use of fellow Mac users. Enjoy!

Hidden Mysteries: Notre Dame [FINAL]

Hidden Mysteries: Notre Dame [FINAL]| 96.5 MB
The Crown of Thorns, the most precious and revered relic in the Notre Dame Cathedral, has disappeared. As chief investigator assigned by the Préfecture de Police, it’s up to you to track down the priceless artifact. Use your Hidden Object talents to crack the case in Hidden Mysteries: Notre Dame and save the Crown of Thorns before it’s too late.

4 free online personal finance tools

4 free online personal finance tools

I’ve recently dug in and decided to add some method to the madness that is my finances.
Perhaps not unlike many of you, I’m quite clueless when it comes to financial planning. It, in the same way as exercise, is one of those things I know I should do, I put large amounts of effort into thinking about doing, but never actually get off my ass and do it.
Well, no more. I’m power walking my dog twice a day and am going to contemplate my stock portfolio, or lack thereof, the entire trip!
To balance my virtual checkbook (I’ve not had an actual checkbook in nearly a decade) I decided to turn to the wonderful Web 2.0 world and see if it had a solution for me. Here are four free services I found and my notes on each.
A couple things first – (a) I’m Canadian, so being able to add Canadian banks is a must. (b) I use Paypal quite a lot and so used that as a bit of a litmus test for the various services.

Geezeo (www.geezeo.com)

Summary: Of the four, I liked Geezeo (pronounced G-Z-O) the most. It seemed to offer the best combination of practical features with superfluous tools.

• Allows for auto-updating of transactions from most US and Canadian banks, but doesn’t seem to offer connectivity outside of those two countries. However, you can upload an OFX file to import transaction histories and manually create accounts.
• Because manual account creation is limited to the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) format, currently it can’t handle Paypal accounts, or any account that doesn’t export OFX format. Part of the blame goes to Paypal for not exporting to this format, and part goes to Quicken-creators Intuit for charging a licensing fee to financial institutions that use it – this is a big con for me as tracking Paypal is essential.
• Geezeo’s budgeting tools look nice and are straight-forward.
• Allows mobile access to your account.
• Offers a system to create goals (both unique or community generated) and track progress by assigning the goal to an account or tag (ie. if “savings” equals or is higher than $6000, “3-month cushion goal” is reached). However, despite adding several goals, I couldn’t get them to display or access them after creation. Rather than having a page listing all your goals, the “My Goals” link oddly brings you to a sidebar module on the program’s dashboard. Promising in concept, but falls short in actually working.
• Inline editing of transactions for quick adding of tags, categories, amounts, etc.

A Geezeo tour video with painfully mixed “background” music can be found here – if you’re able to hear half of what the screencast says over the music, you’re doing better than me.

Wesabe (www.wesabe.com)

Summary: Wesabe is similar to Geezeo in a lot of ways. Both focus heavily on offering social networking features such as “groups” and “tips”.

• No auto-update from bank. To create an account you must download the transaction history from your bank and then upload it to Wesabe. Supports OFX, QFX, QIF, OFC file formats.
• Slick graphs and charts show you where your money is coming from and going to right from the dashboard.
• Doesn’t allow you to add individual transactions to your checking/saving accounts. Manual insertion of transactions is limited to “Cash Account” mode.
• “Goals” system a bit clunky and confusing. I couldn’t get my goals to connect to tags and I couldn’t find a way to show the goal’s progress over multiple months.
• No intuitive budgeting tools.
• Inline editing of transactions for quick adding of tags, categories, amounts, etc.

Check out a video tour of Wesabe’s features.

Mint (www.mint.com)

Summary: Mint.com was the site that originally kicked off my exploration of free online personal finance tools. I stumbled upon Mint while getting some financial advice at The Motely Fool. Sadly Mint is only available to users of US-based financial institutions with no way to manually create accounts with downloaded financial data. The site looks sharp though, and if the tour is anything to judge by, when Mint finally does burst out of Île de America they’ll have a user in me.

Yodlee (www.yodlee.com)

Summary: My least favourite of the group. Whereas the others have focused on creating Web 2.0 Web app features (perhaps overly so), Yodlee’s Moneycenter looks very much like an online banking interface – which, fittingly, is the company’s core business.

• Registration is stupid – no information is given about the program or its features. I had no choice but to sign up, just to find out if it was actually remotely the service I was looking for. And though registration allows you to choose one of a long list of countries, you MUST enter a valid US state and zip code. Clever, huh.
• For what its worth, despite all the sites going to great lengths to tout their tight security measures, Yodlee really makes the user “feel” secure. Multiple security checks illustrate the site’s all business.
• The site will automatically download financial information from a number of accounts – including my Canadian accounts and Paypal – however, I had nothing but problems with the results of the downloads. It would only download the current month’s transactions from my financial institution and only downloaded outgoing money from Paypal – additionally, wrongly indicating that I had a zero balance. This effectively ended my review of the site.

Conclusions

From my points above I feel that the sites have a little bit further to go before they replace their desktop counterparts. Online financial management is a service that virtually everyone can use – it’s not limited to if you like digital photography, blogging, sharing videos – so that the sites haven’t matured further than they have is a bit surprising, and I have to admit, a bit disappointing.
That said, they all (with the exception of Yodlee) show a lot of potential and will definitely be worth watching as they improve their features.
One thing that the sites will need to be careful to balance is the over-implementation of “web 2.0 features” such as “groups” “friends” etc. These are definitely interesting and appealing features, and I’m sure it’s them that are bringing in the venture capital and keeping the lights on. However, when it comes to personal finance services, basic intuitive features that allow the inexperienced (like myself) to quickly understand their money are key – way key.
While writing this I came across the following comment on the Consumerist. Just FYI:

Speech Recognition Chess in Mac OSX: A Deaf Leopard

Speech Recognition Chess in Mac OSX: A Deaf Leopard

Speech Recognition Chess in Mac OSX: A Deaf LeopardWhile I really like speech capabilities in Mac OSX, I have to say I’m a little disappointed with the speech recognition.
I got very excited when I thought about the prospects of eating macaroni and chess on the sofa and yelling chess notation at my Macbook. I know, I know… Who wouldn’t? But after testing out the speech recognition just now, it looks that’s not going to happen. Here’s a clip of one game that I just couldn’t finish:
No self-respecting chess player is going to sit through an entire game of that. It’s just agonizing… But that said, Leopard’s speech recognition is as good as any I’ve seen, and I expect good things from Apple in the future.
My tip here: Don’t even bother. At least, not yet.
Further info on Mac OSX Speech Recognition:
Make your Mac’s Speech Recognition Work for you

Mac OSX Leopard: How to switch between languages

Using the keyboard, that is. Default shortcuts for switching the input language is set to Command + Space. But because Spotlight is set to the default shortcuts such as Command + Space, which leaves the language togglin "hotkey essentialyl disabled. We have to go to System Preferences and change it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlUKw8p_BzY&feature=player_embedded 

Full Hard Drive? Try Spacemonger

Full Hard Drive? Try Spacemonger

Trying to clean up a bloated hard drive can be a tedious task. How do you know which files or which applications are taking up the most space? Are there massive video files or photo stashes hidden away deep in some obscure folder that you’ve forgotten about?
Well, Spacemonger is neato little app (just a 100kb download) which looks at your hard drive and then renders a graphical representation of its contents. Files, folders, and apps which take up the most space are represented by bigger squares.
As a result you can easily determine where the trash is, and then proceed with throwing it out.
Download Spacemonger for Windows here.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll see once you run it:

Quick Big Mac Diet – De-localize Your Apps

As much as one might like to be a polyglot, freely conversing in a number of the world’s gorgeous languages, most of us are steadfastly mono- or bi-lingual.
Many applications on your Mac, however, come bundled with an array of ‘localizations’ so that one release of a company’s app can suit the needs of practically all of their global users. But that represents a waste of valuable disk space for 99.9% of people who use their apps in just one language, and will never need to run iTunes, or Skype, in anything but their native tongue.
Thus, most apps on your Mac have nestled inside them a number of language localization files that you can notice by the designation “.lproj”. Even if you opted not to install other languages when you first installed Tiger or Leopard, many 3rd party apps will have a number of “.lproj” files, which do nothing but use up space and make your apps needlessly hefty.
If you’re curious to see these files, just right-click on an application, and select “Show Package Contents”. Then click on “Contents”, and next on “Resources”, and in here you will find all the language localizations mixed in with other bits which make up the app’s building blocks.
All you actually need are the main localizations that you currently use. So, for English-speakers, you could safely trash all the “.lproj” files within your apps except for the “English.lproj” one, and your app would be unharmed, and your Mac would lose quite a bit of weight, so to speak. The saving is likely to be somewhere from 2 to 4 gigabytes.
Slim down
To automate and ease this process across all your original and 3rd party apps, the open-source Monolingual will do the job. That light-weight app can not only remove unnecessary languages files within apps, but also remove – if you so wish – other language’s input methods, and even older architectures, such as the ‘Power PC’ framework. That seems somewhat excessive, so I’ll stick with the idea of removing the languages inside apps. This is done within Monolingual by checking the boxes next to a language’s name to remove that “.lproj” file wherever it is found.
Personally, I just unchecked the “English” option – and all national variations of English – to ensure that my apps remained in my native tongue. The first time I ran Monolingual, it took over 30 minutes to clean up within every app, which slowed my Macbook rather, so it would be wise to run this at a quiet time.
Image: Simply check the unwanted languages with Monolingual, then ‘Remove’ them
The space saving for me, on a year-old install of Tiger – now 10.4.11 – was a significant 4 gigabytes, which is space well worth saving with my meagre 80GB hard-drive. I googled to check that it works on Leopard, with commenters on various tech forums confirming that it does, and declaring savings of 3 gigs or more on quite recent installs of Apple’s latest OS.
Monolingual can then be run at intervals of the user’s discretion – it will take a mere few minutes to do it’s magic on later runs – to sort of ‘tidy up’ and keep your Mac’s drive freer for more essential things.

List of the best open source software applications

List of the best open source software applications

 

by Asa • Oct 25th, 2008 • Category: Featured Articles, Misc

There’s nothing new about the term “open source” as it relates to software – it’s been around for more than a decade now. However, as being a tad tech-suave has settled into the collective consciousness, the reliance on commercial software solutions is dropping daily.
Whereas the connotation initially was that open source projects were buggy and unstable (I mean, how could anything being worked on for free not be?), and commercial software was solid and trusted – over the last 10 years these ideas have changed – if not virtually reversed.
Though there is an “official definition” of what open source is; simply put, open source is any software or webware which has been released with its code available for review, modification, adaptation and improvement. Oh yeah, and it’s usually free.
Here is a list of what I feel to be the best or most notable open source applications:

Browsers / Mail / Office Suite

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser, which is the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Firefox is a standards-compliant browser which uses the Gecko layout engine. It includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system. Its strongest feature, however, is that it can be infinitely expanded through countless additional add-ons created by third-party developers.
OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages (as of v3, it can even read MS Office’s Docx format). It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
Mozilla Thunderbird: Like it’s browser cousin, Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. A full featured e-mail client, it easily replaces Microsoft’s Outlook Express, and through the use of add-ons, is quickly gaining ground on the power of MS Office’s Outlook
(see how to add full appointment/calendar functions to Thunderbird).
Google Chrome: Though quite new, Google’s open source entrance into the Internet browser market shows quite a bit of potential. It is lacking some of the slick add-ons that Firefox features, but it’s isolated sandbox and ground-up modern build make it a fast and secure alternative that is destined for great things down the road.

Multimedia / Audio / Video

Miro: Miro is a free open source application for watching channels of internet video (aka video podcasts and video rss). Miro is easy to use and offers full-screen viewing abilities. You simply “subscribe” to the video (or audio) podcast you want to watch and Miro will then automatically download the latest videos for skipless and stutter-free viewing. You can tell Miro to automatically download the newest videos, only download the ones you wish, and if you’re short on hard drive space you can specify how long the downloaded videos stay on your system before being cleaned up.
VLC Media Player: VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols – basically it can pretty much play whatever you throw at it. Additionally, it is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads.
Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use cross-platform audio editor and recorder. You can use Audacity to record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording; and more. With the proliferation of home recording and podcasting, Audacity is a program that should be in everyone’s toolbox.
Songbird: Though still under “active” development, Songbird is a promising open source music player. Features included (or to be included) are library management, multi-language support, media importing, album art display, meta data management, customizable UI and automatic updates. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a project to be watched.
MediaCoder: MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding.
HandBrake: HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter. Basically, it’ll rip any DVD (or DVD-like) source into an MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM. It also supports the ripping of subtitles (burned into the video).

Graphics / Design

GIMP: GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program that can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. Like it’s commercial counter-part, Photoshop, it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.
Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.), and it’s streamlined interface makes it easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.
Paint.net: An alternative to GIMP – or commercial apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It offers support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
Blender: Blender is a full-featured open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. I don’t know the first thing about 3D modeling, but one look at the Blender Gallery and it’s easy to tell this is an impressively powerful free program.

OS / Utilities / Misc

Ubuntu: Deriving its name from the Zulu word for “humanity”, Ubuntu is a free, open source, operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Generally considered the most popular Linux distribution, and there are a lot of them, Ubuntu does pretty much everything your OS should – what can we say, it’s an OS, not inherently interesting. It’s decently pretty, damn simple to install and use, and has an extremely active community of users/developers.
Pidgin: Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. It supports [deep breath]: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr. About the only big IM it doesn’t cover is Skype, because Skype’s protocol isn’t open.
Filezilla: If you have reason to connect to a server via FTP, FileZilla is the FTP program of choice. The FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It also supports drag and drop transfers, resumption of upload/download, configurable speed limits, keep-alive scripting and automatic upgrades.
7zip: A fantastic replacement to Windows’ default ZIP archiver, 7-Zip is open source software that offers a 2-10% compression increase over PKZip or WinZip. It also packs and unpacks 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR files; while also supporting the ability to unpack RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS files. Additionally it fully integrates with Windows and offers localizations for 69 languages.

How to search Delicious bookmarks with Chrome

Last year shortly after Chrome was released I posted a quick tip on how to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome. This was a neccessity, as at that writing Chrome didn’t have a method to migrate the awesome Delicious-Firefox plugin. Well, it’s about 10 months later, and still no plugin support — though some exciting stuff seems just around the corner.
The downside to the bookmarklet method in our last tip is that it doesn’t offer a quick way to search all your bookmarks – tagging and adding bookmarks is essential, but finding them again is sort of the hallmark of a good bookmarking methadology, no?

Thanks to Tip Trick Mod reader MacAnthony here’s an interm solution for quickly searching Delicious bookmarks in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, right-click the browser’s address bar and select “Edit search engines…” (see right)
2. Click the “Add” button and fill in the three fields:
   • Name: ie. Delicious — this is just for organizational purposes.
   • Keyword: ie. delicious — this is the trigger that you’ll type in your address bar to tell Chrome to search your Delicious bookmarks.
   • URL: This should be http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s, where you replace your_delicious_username with, drumroll please, your Delicious username.
3. Click “OK” and then “Close” and give ‘er a whirl.

After you’ve created the new Delicious-Chrome search, try it out by clicking on your address bar and typing “delicious” followed by your search term — upon hitting enter you should be taken to a Delicious page displaying all your bookmarks related to your search.
Speed Tip: Instead of using the rather cumbersome “delicious” as your keyword for the new search engine, put in something shorter — ie the letter “b” for “bookmark”. Now instead of having to type out “delicious [search_term]” to trigger the search, you can simply type “b [search_term]” instead.
Speed Tip #2: To make things even faster for searching, try using some keyboard shortcuts to access the Chrome address bar.

• CTRL-T opens a new tab and highlights the contents of the address bar. As you’ll most likely want to create a new tab for your search results anyway, this is my recommended option.
• CTRL-L / ALT-D / F6 will all bring your cursor up to the address bar and highlight the contents — in case you don’t wish to leave the tab you’re on.

Final Note: I recommend using the Latest Beta Version of Chrome. At the time of writing, it contains a lot of usability fixes that the standard release does not contain, and while these will undoubtedly make their way into the stable release eventually, why wait? Despite its “beta” tag, the beta version in my experience is just as stable as the standard release.
UPDATE: Sept 13/09 – Since publishing this tip it appears Delicious has changed the formatting of their search URL. As such, I’ve updated the URL structure in #2 to the following: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s

* Web
    * Mac
    * PC
    * Other
    * Mobile
    Linux *
Why is the "preview" is the best album of the Photo Resizer for Mac • January 1, 2010 Category • Steven: Featured Articles, Mac, Tips
Preview app, the OS XApple own application image viewer, Preview, there are many other tricks in his bag - and one of them is that it really is the best album of the Photo Resizer to Mac. Plus, it's free, and you've got to install OS X.
. This skill is the size of a little overlooked because it is a bit buried in the menu bar under "Tools" But I use is, I found it to be flexible and helpful - as shareware applications exceeded EasyBatchPhoto and a lackluster freeware applications like the photo or visit iZoom.
Before starting with the size of the preview, however, be aware that the preview replace existing files, so it's back-up ready in case you are not satisfied. So here's how to get Preview.app the size of a pack of pictures ...
1. Open the image you want to modify in the Preview application. 2. This is important to choose a photo, so that the image in the sidebar is highlighted in blue, make the "Select All" (hit: Command / Apple), so that all thumbnails are highlighted in blue. 3. In the menu, go to "Tools" then "Resize ..." (See picture below):
Lot size photo Preview
4. Image dimensions are now open, and you can now choose how you across all your photos. I usually do, I will be too high 3648 x 2432 image down to more manageable 2400 x 1600, which also reduces the file size by almost half without any noticeable loss of quality. (See picture below):
Resize the image proportions
5. Once you've selected the correct dimensions, click "OK" on the box size of the image. 6. Wait until the image size, which shows a progress bar. This may take several minutes for very large files, or hundreds of photos. 7. Almost done ... But wait, because the new images have not been added yet. Click on "File" is on the menu bar and click "Save All". A progress bar shows the images are recorded. (See picture below):
Save all the images, and therefore the size has been completed
... Ta-da!
OK, everything is ready. The only condition is that the pictures of landscape and portrait and images must be conducted separately, which may be a little pain.
Yeah, I saw Preview app can save money and obtain images of the size without losing quality, which saves time added on, and the status of hard disk space. 

What Makes A Great Startup Employee? [“You Are Replaceable If What You Do Is Replicable”]

“I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.” – said Abraham Lincoln.

[Editorial Notes: Guest article by Santosh Panda, founder of Ayojak. Santosh shares a very important/key ingredient to become a great ‘product engineer’].

In professional life, no matter what you do, you are replaceable if what you do is replicable. This is more evident in software product development companies as access to rock star engineers (i.e. those who are simply incredible at what they do) is key for success. Hence a software product development company will always replace those who can be replicated. This replace & replicate must have been same even in agriculture age or industrial age (think Ford assembly line).

There is a distinct difference of replicating what you do vs. replicating how you do. Replicating ‘How you do’ is difficult and the more difficult it is, the higher is your irreplaceability quotient.

This thought came while running a startup, I find many people walk-in, work over the years and suddenly find that they are replaceable – it confuses them, irritates them, makes them feel that company is not understanding their value. However this is natural /bound to happen if you have stopped adding value to what you do and you fail bring your own differentiation to it.

Lets take an example, during a software product development start, a set of process, framework and learning process gets established and each engineer gets it going as per the defined protocol. Over the time, only certain engineers think differently, add/suggest a different process/framework/methodology and 90% others simply follow what has been written/established on day one. Now these 90% claim they didn’t have time, they thought ‘doing as per rule’ is the way to go forward. However irony is whatever this 90% engineers did, all their knowledge is captured, product has been established and there is no differentiation in their thought/action, hence they are replicable & replaceable. They are not going to go to next stage of product development life cycle for that specific product.

Only those key people who kept on modifying their approach, questioned ‘why we do the way we do‘, debated about different ways, forced some of their small initiative to be added by demonstrating advantages – these type of engineers are less replaceable.

Here is my own analysis that I use for evaluating during interviews/assessment for finding a product engineer. If you score 3 ‘yes’, you are replaceable as a software product engineer. oops..

1. Are you using same programming language for last several years?

2. Are you using one framework for your product development for years without even checking what’s coming on in the framework roadmap ?

3. Do you think more number of years of experience in product development means more expertise?

4. Are you only a developer who writes code but who doesn’t know what a User Interface usability is?

5. Do you think writing more number of lines of code means lot of work?

7. Do you only read/visit Infoq.com or stackoverflow.com and hardly visit tech-business blogs like Techcrunch, Pluggd.in, Mashable etc?

8. Do you think coding is fun but system administration/vi editor/server setup has no value?

9. You don’t find time to write blogs, talk tech things in your company/city?

10. Do you think if there is no complexity in software development (hi-fi patterns for the sake of), then it won’t be a great product ?

Based on observation, talking to friends, other startups, and communities, I think there are less software product engineers in India vs software service engineers a.k.a ‘software outsourcing engineer’.

What’s your opinion?

[Reproduced from Santosh’s blog]

[Image credit: blackmetalbanjos/Flickr]

View the original article here

Report: State of Internet Connectivity in India [Decline in Average Connection Speed]

Akamai’s report on the State of the Internet reveals some pretty interesting facts about the penetration, adoption and evolution of internet services in world. Internet adoption and usage in a country is an important statistic to gauge the state of ICT ( Information and Communication Technology in a country ). While China, India’s no. 1 competitor in terms of growing markets is ranked higher on most of the scales used in the report, the statistics for India are not so impressive. Here’s a look at what the study has concluded about the state of the internet in India and how it compares with China.

Average Measured Connection Speed

India ranks 143 globally with an average connectivity speed of 0.8 Mbps in Q3 of 2010. India’s connectivity speeds took a hit with an overall decline and reflects in the negative QoQ ( quarter on quarter ) change. India’s QoQ change of Internet speed is -6.9%. The year on year change ( this quarter compared to this quarter last year) also took a downturn showing the decline in average connectivity speeds in India. The YoY change is recorded at -9.1%.

China comparatively did better with the QoQ change negative but relatively smaller compared to India. China is ranked globally at 129. the QoQ change was -1.5% but the YoY change was 9.3%.

Average peak connection speed is average of the maximum measured speed at city level. India ranks 135 globally in terms of global average peak connection speed globally. The average peak connection speed measured in India was 5.1 Mbps in Q4 of ‘10. While the QoQ was -0.4%, the YoY change was calculated as 13%.

China’s average peak connection speed was measured at 3.1Mbps. The YoY change for China is a whopping 48%.

India ranks 80th globally for high broadband connectivity with 0.4% connections measured to have a speed in excess of 5Mbps. India’s comparison to itself in its previous quarter and previous year suggest a big decline in high broadband connectivity. The QoQ change is calculated at -18% and the YoY is -30%.

China ranks 85th worldwide and the QoQ was -14% while the YoY change was 13%.

Japan ranks 1st globally when it comes to high broadband connectivity.

Broadband connectivity measures the increase in number of broadband connections. India ranks 129th in the report globally. The adoption of broadband internet has been rather disappointing. India has only 4.5% internet connections above 2Mbps. The QoQ change and YoY change too were unimpressive at -17% and -24% respectively.

Slow adoption of broadband services in India will hamper businesses that depend on high internet broadband consumption , like digital media providers and such.

China however did well with 8% internet connections measured over 2Mbps. The QoQ change was calculated at 5% and the YoY change an impressive 36%.

India has a high rate of narrowband consumption according to the report. India ranks 43 globally with 35% of its internet connections below 256Kbps. the QoQ change was calculated at 5.9% while the YoY change, a strong 39%. This suggests that although the internet connectivity speeds are not high, internet adoption is growing.

China can boast that only about 9.6% of its connection speeds are below 256Kbps.

While the report focuses on Internet connectivity, it does not provide any stats regarding India’s mobile Internet connectivity. India’s mobile connectivity is growing faster than any other country in the world and is expected to continue this growth trend. The recent roll out of 3G services in the country will be complete by the end of Q3 of 2011, so expect upward movement in this list.

This report (link) should look very different next year if the ISP in India provide mobile broadband services at affordable price.

What’s your opinion?

View the original article here