PC Tonic » Ashutosh Mishra

Use Firefox On Your Netbook, Without Pulling Your Hair Out

Ashutosh Mishra — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:50:41 +0000

Chrome is just a ridiculously better browser than Firefox at the moment (and is likely to stay so), but there are a couple of reasons that make me go back to Firefox every so often.

Firefox Sync. Chrome has its own sync feature that’s shaping up to be really good, but it is yet to get password sync, which is what I really want from a syncing app. And no, don’t point me to the LastPass or Xmarks extensions – they’re both extremely crappy on Chrome, thanks to all the lockdowns issued upon extensions by Google.
AdBlock Plus. I’ve stopped using ad blockers (hey, I’m a content publisher too!), but ~~sometimes~~ a lot of times I stumble across a website that has more ads than a daily Oriya newspaper. Chrome has ad blockers too, but yet again, they suck. Browsing with Adblock Plus turned on is a pristine feeling, although I try to refrain myself from using it too much.
Flexibility. Firefox screams flexibility at your face. Even if it has anything that you don’t like, there are like a dozen ways to have it fixed. The interface is designed to be modified to your liking.There is about:config. With Chrome, you’re more or less stuck with what you get. There’s almost nothing not to like about Chrome, but then there is so little in there in the first place.
Loyalty. I’m a loyal Firefox fan. I’ve been using Firefox since July, 2006 – just a month after I started using the Internet. As with most other open source projects, Firefox feels fresh and lively. Chrome, despite being based on Chromium, somehow doesn’t feel open.

So yeah, I use Firefox now and then. But thanks to Mozilla’s ass-like attitude in recent times, Firefox has been spectacularly falling behind other browsers when it comes to performance. Yeah, there’s that webpage rendering thing that everyone is crazy about. I’m not talking about that. Frankly speaking, I can barely see how faster Chrome or Opera is compared to Firefox – it’s a matter of few hundred milliseconds after all.

What I’m talking about is the speed of the software – how well it runs on your machine. Firefox has always been a slow browser, but lately it feels even slower as it has practically achieved no speed improvements, while its rivals have been trimming down like they are on some super-effective diet.

On a Windows 7 netbook, every browser – Safari and IE 8 included – is usable except Firefox. Give it more than five tabs and a couple of add-ons, and it gives your Atom processor a frightening seizure.

As long as Chrome’s shortcomings aren’t addressed, I need Firefox. At first, that didn’t seem possible on my new netbook. So I set down to tweak some settings and make the damn browser without getting paralyzed way too often. Surprisingly, I was successful! Firefox 4 beta 2 on my netbook still doesn’t match Chrome, but it’s much, much better than how it worked before.

Here’s how I tweaked my Firefox on my netbook. It also happens to be my biggest and most tenacious post ever (probably barring this). If you’re a netbook owner and Firefox fan, you may want to read it.

The Ultimate Guide To Making Firefox Run Smoothly on Netbooks [Guiding Tech]

Twimbow Is A Colourful New Web App to Manage Twitter

Ashutosh Mishra — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:01:44 +0000

Twimbow is a new web app in town, that lets you manage your Twitter profile in a new way. Lets see what it’s got in store to compete with well established rivals like Seesmic Web, HootSuite, and Brizzly.

For a start, Twimbow is colourful. With the exception of Brizzly, most Twitter clients (desktop or web) are usually monotonously coloured and look boring. Not with Twimbow. This webapp is illuminated with all sorts of colours that make it stand out from the crowd. And colour doesn’t end just with the interface – you can actually add a #colour hashtag at the end of your tweet and Twimbow will show that tweet in that colour (obviously, this is not supported in any other client, and the fun kind of wears off after a while). Despite that, it could be a killer feature for casual Twitter users who are overwhelmed by the jam packed web clients of today.

The default interface of Twimbow has got 3 columns which, at the time of writing, do no look like they can be modified. The first one is the ‘Personal Buzz’ – which is just entirely different from what you’ve seen on any Twitter client so far. This column shows everything that has to do with you – starting with your tweets, retweets, mentions, replies, DMs, favourites, and whatever else – all of which is distinguished by, gasp!, colour codes. This is obviously a very new approach to separating your activities from your contacts’ activities on Twitter, although it’s not without its caveats. While Personal Buzz can be really helpful, it can quickly turn into a hodge podge of complete Twitter craziness if you do/receive any of this in excess – tweets, replies, DMs etc. Twimbow seems to be doing some sort of background filtering to keep this column relatively clean, but it still tends to get messy at times.

The second column, Home Buzz, is about everything else – the tweets, from people you follow, that are unrelated to you. At this moment, this column doesn’t automatically refresh itself, and you’ve to keep clicking on the top to show newer updates (not unlike the Twitter web interface). This column also allows you to filter users by the lists you’ve created, which is really handy if you ask me.

The final column is simply a search stream on everything about Twimbow. There’s seemingly no way of removing it at the moment, but then it peacefully stays out of your way and also offers you an useful insight into what early adopters have to say about the service, if you’re interested.

There’s also a neat Monitor tool at the bottom that lets you keep you updated on anything, or anyone, on Twitter.

Twimbow is still in pre-alpha, meaning it’s still very very new, and it’d be rude to be demanding every feature out of the box right now. But there are still a few things I’d like to see rather sooner than later,

An ‘options’ dialog. Somewhere. Anywhere. As a self-proclaimed geek, I’m obsessed with the settings of any program that I use. If I can’t find one, I get mad. Twimbow is still circulating among a few pre-alpha testers, so that may be the reason for the lack of options, but they should get to implementing one soon.
Ability to upload images. Almost every other Twitter webapp does it now, and it’s actually a feature that people are gonna use.
Ability to customize width of the columns. Not every computer screen is the same, and things can look too big or too small on non-standard resolutions.
Twimbow uses fade-in pop-ups to show dialog boxes to update your status or to see user profiles. I don’t like those all that much. The hovercards and normal text boxes on Seesmic Web are tons better.

Of course, everyone is going to have his or her own demands, but I feel like Twimbow should have these features straight off the bat. Right now, it’s doing great for something that’s in as early stage as pre-alpha.

I’ve seen lots of people sign up for Twitter and then abandon it, as they fail to understand what the hell to do in here. For them (and everyone else as well!), Twimbow is a nice way to keep the Twiverse colorful and engaging, while still being simple and fast at the same time. As for me, I’m gonna stick to Seesmic Web for now because I just seem to like it that much better.

If you want to try Twimbow right now (and you should), comment with your Twitter handle below (something like, Hey I am @sharapova and I’d like a Twimbow invite!) and the @Twimbow team will automatically send you an invitation through Twitter. Else, you can simply @filos (who is one of the ones behind this project) and request for an invite.

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Bonus

Try the #rainbow hashtag on Twimbow.
Twimbow supports desktop notifications on Chrome, just like the new Seesmic Web. Also, it runs the smoothest on Chrome.

Create a Swivel View of Your Photos in Picasa Web Albums [GT Posts]

Ashutosh Mishra — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:32:29 +0000

…Generally speaking, creating an actual 360 degree view effect requires you to snap photos of the same object from numerous closely spaced angles, arrange them all together in proper order and queue them in a fast slideshow mode. And if you do happen to have a bunch of such photos lying around, you still need to be able to cook up some javascript work to be able to swivel through those photos.
Thankfully, Picasa Web makes the process of adding swivel effect a smooth one. It not only has the feature baked in, but also makes using it really easy…

How to Get a 360 Degree ( Swivel ) View Of Your Photos in Picasa Web Albums [Guiding Tech]

Bring Mac OS X Style Font Rendering to Windows with GDI++

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:07:22 +0000

Even though I’ve never used Apple’s famed desktop OS, there’s one thing about Mac OS X that has always made love it – the font rendering. A lot of people don’t get what’s with all the fuss about fonts, but for me it’s always been the little things that matter.

Ever since ClearType was introduced a few years into Windows XP, font rendering on Windows has undergone a huge facelift. ClearType is quite cripsy and sharp, but that’s exactly what I don’t like about it. The fonts look like thin swords cutting through a piece of fabric that is your PC screen. Compare that to the font rendering on OS X, which is like this creamy blending thing that creates more impact on your eyes and…..okay I’ve no idea how to describe it, so let me just say it looks tons better! Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two -

[source: lifehacker; click on image to view in full size]

Notice the difference?

Yes? Welcome to the camp! I don’t know which of the two you like, but for me it’s easily OS X.
No? It’s probably awesome you can’t make out the difference because then you won’t have to like one or the other!

Anyway, for those of you who do like the OS X rendering but are using Windows instead, there’s an easy way to get the former on your PC!

Enter GDI++. This tiny app, when activated, kills Windows’ ClearType font rendering and uses its own OS X-style rendering, which is based off the original gdi++.dll project.

To get started, download the GDI zip file from the link provided at the end of this post, extract the folder anywhere on your PC, and double-click the gditray.exe file to start the utility.

If the rendering doesn’t change immediately, right click on the gditray icon on your system tray, make sure ‘Enable’ is enabled, and click on ‘Apply Now’. Now, sit back and enjoy the magic!

If you want to make it start automatically with Windows, make a shortcut of the gditray.exe file and put it in the Startup folder.

Should you want your ClearType back, simply exit the gditray.exe file and everything will be back to normal.

Do note that GDI++ doesn’t work everywhere. For example, I can’t get it to work on Google Chrome and uTorrent, two of my favorite apps, for the love of it. The, err, chrome of Chrome gets rendered in gdi++, but not the webpages. Firefox has no problems.

Also, if you don’t run the gditray.exe file as administrator (right click > Run as administrator), it’ll naturally fail to render areas that require administrative privilege.

Overall though, I’m pretty impressed with GDI++. It does what it says, and it does that really well. Previously, the only way for me to enjoy the OS X style rendering was by using Apple’s Safari browser, which is otherwise a very clunky software on Windows. However with GDI++, I can enjoy the rendering system wide without taxing my processor in any manner (the gditray.exe process uses only about 1-3 MB of memory while running and almost zero CPU usage). Really, small things like this go a long way in making me a happier soul!

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Download GDI++ – Make Windows fonts look as smooth as Mac OS X fonts (look out for ‘Download GDI++’ in step 1).

All credit for me discovering GDI++ goes to the awesome Lifehacker readers, with the app itself being covered at LH way back in March, 2009! Read the entire comment thread on Lifehacker here.

Gracefully Save IRCTC Train Tickets To A PDF File (Or, Print Virtually Any File To PDF With DoPDF)

Ashutosh Mishra — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:07:57 +0000

Booking train tickets through IRCTC is a rage these days, with everyone and their dads being aware of the relatively simply procedure. The e-ticket format is obviously the preferred choice, as you can print the ticket yourself without having to wait for IRCTC to deliver it to you.

However, a lot of places don’t have printers. My hostel, for one, doesn’t. This is where all the mouth-clasping abilities of my not-so-tech-savvy friends kick in. The obvious problem is how to save the damn page, and carry it in a USB stick to the student store. Some will simply Ctrl + S it as a .htm file, which is quite convenient but looks extraordinarily disgusting. Others tend to follow their own routes, most of which can be best described by this:

[xkcd]

I take the more normal (for us!) route and print the page directly to a beautiful little PDF file that shows the ticket exactly as it should be seen.

It is almost painful to watch my friends struggle innovate while trying to pin down a stupid webpage to their USB drives, and hence this post.

Guys, all you’ve to do is install this free utility called doPDF, and print those web tickets as PDF files in future. doPDF adds a virtual printer to your system, which works like any regular printer, but prints to PDF instead. Once installed, you can click on that ‘Print ERS (English / Hindi)’ button on your e-ticket, and select the doPDF printer in the Print dialog box (actually, make it the default printer during installation so you won’t be bothered again!), and…voila! your ticket is now a freakin’ PDF! Carry it in your pen drives to the student store, print your proper looking tickets, and get your sticks all filled with crazy malware because the store guy won’t bother scanning his damn computer. Yo mama!

2 Reasons Why You Might Want To Ditch MS Security Essentials, And Why Shouldn’t

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:02:59 +0000

Combined with a capable firewall, Microsoft Security Essentials is currently the best and most hassle-free solution available for Windows. If you don’t agree with me, one of us is a monkeynut.

However, it has a few quirks (two, to be specific) that may drive you to using another security tool (a cracked Kaspersky or Norton, maybe?). So we’ll see what these two quirks are, and why you should rather ignore them and keep using this awesome tool.

#1 Revoltingly long first update

Microsoft Security Essentials takes a ridiculous amount of time to update for the first time (just after you install it). On a slow connection, it can be as long as an hour or more! Since future updates are all automatic and silent, this is likely the only time you’re gonna notice the update, and naturally you feel pissed off. You people assume it’s always gonna take that long to update (which would be outrageous), and uninstall it without thinking twice. This is not true. The subsequent updates are small and fast as any other antimalware program. So why the gigantic first update? Lets see.

You must have noticed that the MSE installer is surprisingly small (about 8 MB) as compared to other antimalware tools. However, this is because the installer simply installs the core MSE program. Absolutely nothing that’ll protect your computer – the scanner, real-time engine and the malware definitions – come with this installer. After MSE is installed, it downloads and adds these components during the first update. Hence the huge, long update. The solution is just to be patient the first time.

Also, you can simply minimize or close the MSE window when its updating without stopping the update itself, and let it do its job.

#2 Revoltingly long time to remove malware

If you’ve ever been in a situation where MSE detects anything over 10 infections on an external drive or something, you must be knowing it takes just too much time to wipe those out. Most other antimalware that I’ve used suspend/quarantine/kill malware in a matter of seconds. But MSE will often take more than just a few minutes to get the task done. Sometimes it can take upto 20 minutes, or might pretend to just plain hang (while it clearly hasn’t). This can lead you to falsely assume that MSE can’t remove malware effectively.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about it. For now. Remember that MSE is still very young (not even a year old, to be exact) and the upcoming version 2 might very well take care of this issue. For the time being, just put MSE in the background, leave it to do its job, and get back to your own work. Be assured that it will remove the malware it detects, no matter how long.

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MSE is a really, really good security product that doesn’t deserve to be ditched for these minor quirks. If you’re currently paying for your PC security, you should seriously stop now and get MSE instead. Lifehacker tries to explain why.

My First Ever Hardware Review : The Samsung N150 Netbook

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:22:20 +0000

I love gadgets. I didn’t have one until yesterday. Okay, I do have an HP laptop and an LG dumbphone since two years, but neither is the kind of stuff I’d call a gadget.

Yesterday, I got my first ever gadget gadget – a Samsung N150 netbook! I’m a big fan of netbooks – they’re tiny, light, and they won’t toast your crotches, like my Pavilion has frantically tried to do ever since I bought it. India being a poor country, you’d expect netbooks to be wildly popular and available everywhere. Nope. They are available, but for a I-want-this-model-only freak like me, this is not the place you go shopping for netbooks.

After reading tons of online reviews, checking out the design and battery life of various models, and asking 279 real world people about a good netbook (everyone was like, WTH is a net-thing!), I zeroed in upon the Asus EEE-PC 1005P. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and me brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. My next choice was the Toshiba NB305, which is very popular with netbook critics for superb build quality and all. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and my brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. My third choice was the Samsung N210, which promises EEE-PC like 11 hours of battery life. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and my brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. Choice no. 4 was the Samsung N150. It was not to be found anywhere I It was found, and shipped to me!

So here I am, on my first ever netbook, writing my first ever review of the first ever cool gadget I’ve ever owned. I hope not to doze you off this post.

Specs

One reason why I was not so keen on the N150 was because the specs mentioned by Samsung were not quite up there with the other three models. It had a 160GB hard drive, no Bluetooth, only 8.5 hours of claimed battery life, etc. However the model I’ve received (still labelled as N150), has spicier specs, namely

2 GB memory, instead of just 1 GB
a 250 GB hard drive, that gets an impressive 5.8 Windows experience rating
Bluetooth (not that I use it much, but still useful for some quick file transfers with my dumbphone)
The Samsung battery life enhancer software, which allows your netbook to sleep using very little power

Software wise, there’s the disgusting Windows 7 Starter with a boatload of crap tools (and McAfee, for crying out loud!) which I’ve removed already. I’m also fancying a move to Jolicloud or Ubuntu Netbook Edition. So, all this software talk can be put to rest for now.

Heat

Heat was one of major issues with my HP Pavilion laptop (The CPU would get to 95C temperature, and the casing over 70C). That’s all but gone with this netbook. It just doesn’t get hot! The vent of the left side admittedly gets a bit warm, which is quite expected and not uncomfortable at all.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard is quite comfortable. It’s small for my huge hands, but I type with two fingers (still!) so that’s not much of a problem for me.

The touchpad is quite another story. It’s as big as a fifth of my palm, and it’s weird! Maybe it’ll be better after I peel the sticker off it, but it just feels so tiny and stupid. Those multitouch gestures are quite fun, but my two fingers are huge enough to cover the entire touchpad and cause undesirable clicks and all. I think Samsung could’ve moved the keyboard a little bit up and made the touchpad larger.

Display

Matte finish for the win! Seriously! With my HP laptop it was always frustrating to see my face on the screen all the time, unless I was in some super dark room doing super secret stuff. That’s totally gone, and I can even use this netbook on the balcony in broad daylight. I love non-glossy screens.

Battery

All of the other three models I was looking for would apparently last for 7 or more hours. This one doesn’t. I’ve been using it off and on since yesterday night, and so far it’s been running for about 5:15 hours on roughly 85% of the battery charge. Usually it should last 6 hours or more with the ‘Samsung Optimized’ or ‘Power saver’ power plans and normal usage, but for me it’ll probably max out at 5:30 hours as I plug in my EVDO modem to access the internet all the time. Still, anything above five hours is huge. My previous laptop lasted 2 hours on battery when it was new, and now it barely stays over six minutes.

Price

It cost roughly Rs. 18,000, which is quite cheap in my opinion. However, once again the ASUS 1005P is cheaper at Rs.17,500 and yet has longer battery life. Samsung’s hardware and design is quite better than that of ASUS, so that little extra cost shouldn’t hurt that much.

Everything else

That’s all I had to say in my review. If you want to read an actual Samsung N150 review, you’ll find it here.

Lets wrap it up

So here’s my view of the Samsung N150 in short -

PROS

Tiny and lightweight (applies to all similar netbooks)
Sturdy build; feels good in your hands
Non-glossy display
Nice keyboard
Enough USB and other ports, decent webcam, and all those petty hardware things
Doesn’t get hot
Fully supported by Jolicloud, and nearly fully supported by Ubuntu Netbook

CONS

Battery life could be better, especially as the rivals (and even Samsung N210) provide 7+ hours of battery life
Touchpad. Oh my God.
The Intel Pinetrail Atom processor. (applies to all similar netbooks)
Windows 7 Starter and all the added crapware

I’m very strict, so I’ll give the Samsung N150 a 7 out of 10, which should be taken as really good. Of course, I wish I had tried other netbooks so I could compare them all, but I haven’t and you’ll need to rush to Laptop Magazine and similar other websites if you’re looking for comparing stuff. And never come back for hardware reviews before August, 2012, because there won’t be one. Have a good day.

How to Combine Multiple Bookmarklets and Reduce Browser Toolbar Clutter [GT Posts]

Ashutosh Mishra — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:32:57 +0000

Now that I’m writing for Guiding Tech, I feel like I should post snippets of my published articles on PC Tonic. Here’s the latest one, and it’s about Bookmarklet Combiner – a web app that lets you combine multiple bookmarklets into one.

… bookmarklets share the same problem as regular bookmarks – they can grow into a wild, unsorted bunch very quickly. Sure you can put them in a ‘bookmarklets’ folder, but if you’ve got anything over 10, finding the right one for any particular webpage will make you pull your hair apart.
This is where is web app Bookmarklet Combiner comes in handy…

Read the full post on GT, and let us know of your view on the app.

WTH is Happening!

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:10:04 +0000

by Micky.!

It has become almost customary for me to update PC Tonic every couple of months, so keeping the tradition alive, here’s the latest update for the four of you still subscribed to this blog.

This time, I want to tell you guys that I’ve started writing for tech blog Guiding Tech (aka GT). I’m currently rocking a dusty old desktop from my high school days, so I’m very much part-time over there, but I plan to write more frequently in the coming months.

Obviously, the question you’re gonna ask is, what happens to PC Tonic? Well, PC Tonic dies. I’m going to stab it repeatedly on its ass while it’s sleeping, until it bleeds to death, then I’ll digg a hole and bury it to rot forever. Hopefully, that’ll prevent anyone from ever stumbling upon its corpse.

Okay, that was a complete lie. PC Tonic is very close to my heart, and it’ll live on. Once again, I’m saying that I’ll try to keep PC Tonic updated, but you guys probably already know what that usually indicates (hint: another hiatus!).

Now more about Guiding Tech. I’ve always liked this clean little blog (with the ‘little’ having everything to do with its age, and nothing to do with its size). The posts are always top notch, the layout is very pleasing, and it doesn’t have two dozen ads on every page. I have stopped using ad blockers of late, and it’s painful to see how downright ugly and unreadable a lot of blogs have become. Ads are necessary, and we all have them on our blogs, but there’s a line to be drawn. When you land on a page where you struggle to find the actual content, you know the line has been crossed. GT doesn’t cross that line, and I applaud @abhijeetmk, the GT admin, for that.

Anyway, I’m a GT intern at the moment. I’m learning stuff over there (have you noticed more paragraphs!), and I even wrote a post about my favorite μTorrent. Go read it, subscribe to GT and get all the awesome articles written by other authors out there.

PC Tonic will continue to exist, while I keep searching for that magic switch which will turn this also-ran into the awesomest blog. Evah.

Ah, dreams – so beautiful, aren’t they! But it’s the real world we live in, so I better get back to it and think of my next posts for GT and PC Tonic. Have a great time folks!

Ditch The Search Box In Firefox For The Address Bar [Firefox Starter Tips]

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 23 May 2010 17:26:02 +0000

Despite being a handy feature, the search box in Firefox is mostly unnecessary as most of its features can be accessed from the address bar. In this article, we’ll see how to remove the search box, and replicate its functionality in the address bar (also called Awesome Bar in Firefox). Before removing the search box, you should however save a list of your frequently used search engines, as detailed in a previous post.

Step 1 – Create Keywords

Before taking out the search box, we’ll use one feature to create different keywords for different search engines that you’ve got in Firefox. from the dropdown menu of the search box, select ‘Manage Search Engines…’ . You’ll able to see all your installed search engines in the new window that appears.

Now it’s time to create the keywords. Select any search engine, click on Edit Keyword and assign a suitable keyword to it. The shorter the keyword, the better (we’ll get to the reason later). For example, the best keyword for Google will be ‘g’, that for Wikipedia will be ‘w’, and so on. Of course if there are two search engines starting with the same alphabet, you’ve got to assign a two-letter keyword to one of them. Once you’re done click OK.

Step 2 – Remove The Search Box

There’s no more need to keep the search box. Let’s proceed to remove it from Firefox’s UI! Go to View > Toolbars > Customize, simply drag the search box into the Customize Toolbar window. I couldn’t find a good way to show this; here’s the best I’ve got :

Hopefully you get the idea! Once you click on Done, the search box will be gone from Firefox’s chrome[1]. Hurrah! You can always bring it back by reversing what you did above.

Step 3 – Use Your Address Bar As Your Search Box

Your search box is gone, and all you’re left with the obnoxiously big address bar. Lets put it to use. To use the search box, you had to select the required search engine, click inside the box (or press Ctrl-K), and type your query. Instead of doing that, now you’ve got to enter the keyword for the required search engine followed by a whitespace and your query, in your address bar. Keeping the keywords short requires you to type lesser characters, and hence saves time. For example, if you want to search YouTube for videos of Lady Gaga, type this and hit Enter :

y lady gaga

Of course, if you provided a different keyword for YouTube, you should use that instead. Similarly, say you want to look for the Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia; your search query would be this :

w large hadron collider

You get the idea! The search box is no longer required, and your address bar becomes a lot more like the one in Google Chrome.

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#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.

1. Chrome refers to the user interface of any software. Every element that is present in Firefox’s user interface, together constitutes its ‘chrome’. Don’t confuse it with the other Chrome, which is actually a browser from Google. Google Chrome also has a chrome (its own user interface)! I know, it’s crazy but that’s the way it is.

Sync Subtitles With The Video In VLC

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 23 May 2010 07:30:00 +0000

I can’t stress the usefulness of subtitles enough, especially when you’re watching a movie in a foreign language. I was watching Heavenly Forest, a Japanese romantic drama, a few days back. The movie was wonderful, but I wouldn’t have understood anything had it not been for those English subtitles. I even tend to use English subtitles while watching English movies, because you guys talk so fast (Americans) or so weird (British) that it’s hard for me to grasp!

Handy as they are, subtitles can turn extremely irritating if they’re out of sync with the video. They distract you, and you end up understanding even less than what you’d have without the subs. Thankfully, if you’re using VLC player to watch the videos, you can make use of a nifty feature in the program to sync the subtitle with the video! Do note that it’ll only temporarily sync the subtitles with the video, and the sync will be gone the next time you watch the video.

Anyway, lets get started with how to implement it. I’m assuming that you’ve already loaded the video and subtitle files into VLC (you can just drag them both into its interface). Now, carefully take a look at the video and the subs, and see whether the subs are lagging behind or running ahead of the video. If you’re watching a foreign movie, it may seem like a very difficult job, but just try a little hard and you should be able to make this out. For example, if you see a girl screaming and running around wildly, and the subs show “Help me! Help me!” 3 seconds after that scene, this means that the titles are 3 seconds behind the movie.

Once you’ve figured out the lag / lead of the subtitle, it’s time to sync it with the video. In VLC, navigate to Tools > Track Synchronization, where you’ll find the Subtitles/Video section. Now comes the important part – syncing the subtitle. If the subtitle is lagging behind the video, you’ve to provide a negative value to ‘Advance of subtitles over video’. Say the subs display 3 seconds after the video, the value you got to enter is –3.000 s. Note that you can adjust the sync time to upto a thousandth of a second, although adjusting to the tenths does the job in all cases. Similarly if the subtitle is ahead of the video, enter the required positive number of seconds. Hit the Refresh button at the top right corner of the window, and you should see the change immediately.

There’s another option called ‘Speed of the subtitles’ in there. Normally, the subtitles should run for the same time as that of the video. However in rare cases, if you do come across a subtitle that wraps up faster (or slower) than the video, you can make use of that particular option. If the subtitle advances too slowly (starts with proper sync, but then increasingly lags behind), increase the “fps” (frames per second) value to something above 1.0, the value depending upon the relative speed of the subtitle. Similarly for fast subtitles, decrease the fps value so that they’ll keep in pace with the video and won’t run ahead faster.

As I said, both these features are only temporary and last as long as the video is open in VLC. If you want a permanent solution, you should instead look for perfectly syncing subtitles. Sublight is one useful tool that’ll help you get them. Sublight even has a built-in syncing tool that’ll permanently sync de-synced subtitles with their respective videos.

Of course, if for any reason you cannot, or do not want to, use Sublight, VLC’s swift little trick has always got you covered.

Microsoft Has A Download Manager. It’s Total Crap.

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 22 May 2010 07:35:12 +0000

There were times when everything made by Microsoft (save Windows and Office, of course) was crappy. Geeks couldn’t wait to install tons of additional software on their new Windows XP machines the moment they switched them on. And then, Microsoft woke up. From each of the dozen Windows Live offerings to the Bing search engine to the incredible Security Essentials to the redesigned Paint (hell yeah!), Microsoft has been churning out one fantastic product after another of late. Today I can shamelessly claim to be using a lot of Microsoft tools besides their flagship Windows OS and Office suite.

Turns out Microsoft has a free download manager as well. We could all do with a good download manager these days. Usually you’ve a wide variety of choices available for doing anyone particular task in Windows, meaning you’re very likely to stumble upon a software that does your job without hassle. Unfortunately, that’s presently not the case with download managers. Free Download Manager, my personal favourite, has been abandoned by its developers and is being haphazardly developed by the community (which, despite being very praiseworthy, isn’t the best way to carry forward the project). Download Accelerator Plus (free version), the most popular choice out there, is bloated with ads and crap. Orbit is a useful little tool, except that its English interface is not in English. FlashGet is again very popular, but with a very wonky interface and horrible lack of options. There’s DownThemAll! for Firefox, which is, well, Firefox-only. All modern browsers (minus IE have download managers, but none of them has a download ‘accelerator’, which is a big reason people use dedicated managers after all.

Amongst all this chaos when I heard that Microsoft has a download manager of its own, I completely went nuts with joy. It was the ‘Security Essentials’ feeling all over again – Microsoft was finally stepping in to address some issues that third party developers couldn’t! However, after using the manager for about 14 seconds, I can tell you this – it’s PATHETIC. It has nothing! Sure, you can ‘copy and paste URIs starting with a http://’ . Yup. That’s it. The damn thing won’t even plug into your browsers (IE 8 included), save the lack advanced features for later.

With Microsoft Download Manager, all you have to do (and all you can do) is paste a hotlink to any file on the Internet, and the file will be downloaded for you. Seriously, you shouldn’t waste any more time reading this article or thinking about the product. It might get better in the future – I sure do hope it does – but for now it’s a huge no-no.

===========================

P.S. I’m not linking to the software. You may ~~Google~~ bing it and download it, but keep in mind that it’s totally not worth your time.

Source – NirmalTV.com

What Are Userscripts, And How Can I Use Them?

Ashutosh Mishra — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:16:54 +0000

by dreamglow pumpkincat210

Web applications often lack the flexibility provided by their desktop counterparts. Although they’re designed to provide a unified and pleasing experience to most users, they don’t have those configuring options that would otherwise allow you to tweak the app to suit your needs.

Let’s take Facebook for example. The largest social networking site in the world is best accessed from its web interface because of all the features it provides, but there remain a few quirks that you really can’t do much about. Photos can’t be rotated. There is no threading in comments. You can’t apply themes or even custom colors to your profile. These and more, depending on how you use Facebook (or any other web app). So how to address these issues? Simple, just install a userscript, and watch along as the problem magically vanishes!

Userscripts are tiny bits of code written in JavaScript that add useful functionality to your web apps. You can think of them as a cosmetic makeover of the web apps that you use. Userscripts are browser-specific and website-specific; a particular script, if installed and supported by your browser, will work only for a particular website (or a group of websites). Unlike regular extensions, user scripts won’t slow your browser down.

How To Install A User Script?

As I said above, you need to install a userscript on your browser for it to work. Now, of all modern browsers, only Google Chrome and Opera support these scripts out of the box, although you can bring the functionality to other browsers with simple add-ons. To install a script in Chrome, all you have to do is download it. Chrome treats these scripts as regular extensions, and will install them as one, which you can then manage from the Extensions page. Getting user scripts on Opera isn’t as straightforward as that on Chrome, but it’s not much difficult either. You can learn how to make Opera use the scripts from this doc.

A vanilla Firefox install doesn’t support user scripts. However, there’s nothing to worry as the awesome Greasemonkey add-on brings the functionality to the open source browser. In fact, Greasemonkey for Firefox is so popular that most user scripts are usually designed to be fully compatible with it.

Internet Explorer can be made to allow userscripts with the previously mentioned IE7Pro add-on (it works with IE 8 despite the name).

The last of the major browsers, Safari, plays very badly with userscripts. There is no way to install scripts in the Windows version, while Mac users may try their luck here.

Where Do I Find User Scripts?

UserScripts.org is the largest source of user scripts available online. All scripts are free to download and use. They’re specifically designed for Greasemonkey, though most will run just fine on Chrome and Opera, if not all. IE users using IE7Pro can try IEScripts.org instead.

Caution

Userscripts are relatively simple to create (for programmers, at least!), hence you’ll literally find thousands of them doing practically the same thing. Finding that exact script for your particular need will need some tinkering around. Whether you’re looking in UserScripts or IE Scripts, make sure that you search with accurate parameters to get the best results. Lets say you’re looking for a script that’ll change Facebook’s colour from the monotonous blue to something else; for this you should search for something like ‘facebook colour’ or ‘change facebook colour’. From the results that will be displayed, look for one that has high ratings and has been downloaded more number of times than the other scripts displayed, and install it.

Again, owing to the ease with which they can be created, there’s a good chance you’ll come across scripts that contain malware. So never install them from unknown sources. UserScripts is huge (and safe), and you’ll almost always stumble across whatever you’re looking for.

Some Useful Userscripts

There are thousands of amazing userscripts available, and it’s not possible on my part to list even a part of them. However, here are three of my absolute favourites. All of these work flawlessly on Firefox (with Greasemonkey) and Chrome, and I’ve no idea about Opera (they should work!).

Greased Lightbox

If you’ve ever searched for images on Google (and you certainly have!), you know how frustrating it is to get to the actual image which you can save to your computer. Enter Greased Lightbox. With this userscript installed, the images, when clicked, will instead appear on a fancy ‘lightbox’ overlay. The images can be scrolled back and forth, and even viewed in a slideshow.

[That’s Lady Gaga without makeup!]

Grease Lightbox works on Google Images, Wikipedia, MySpace, DeviantArt, FFFFound!, flickr, and Blogger. Neat!

YouTube Video Download

Well, this userscript is the easiest way to quickly download any YouTube video. Install it, and you’ll find the amazing Download button below your YouTube video. Click on it, and you’ve options to download the video in any of the available formats!

FFixer

This adds a ton of stuff to Facebook, and is quite likely to fix any issues that you’ve got with the interface. I don’t use Facebook a lot (though this is changing fast!), but I can assure you that you’ll be a happier soul using Facebook after installing this.

I’ll definitely be covering many more userscripts in future, but that’s it for now. Enjoy the web your way with userscripts!

Add Search Engines [Firefox Starter Tips]

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 16 May 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Firefox, like all other modern browsers, has this nifty search box from where you can search for stuff from different search engines and websites. Some of the usually available options (in the English version) are Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay etc. While these are usually the websites you’re gonna go looking for anything, they don’t cover everything that you’d be looking for. Maybe you want to search YouTube for a video. Or, maybe you want to look through Scribd for a free book or project. Going to those websites and searching for stuff is a lot more hassle than doing it directly from the search box.

Thankfully, Firefox lets you to easily add search engines from various websites to its search box. For example, to add YouTube search, all you’ve to do is visit youtube.com. Now click the downward pointing arrow on the search box, and then on Add “YouTube Video Search”.

Booyeah! You can now search YouTube directly from Firefox without visiting the website again.

This works for a lot of aggregating sites, like Scribd, Grooveshark, Torrentz, Dailymotion, Hulu, Flickr and so on. Just visit a website and check the search box if the website search can be added to Firefox. Do note that you need to have Firefox 3 or later for the feature to work. The latest Firefox version is 3.6, which you should be running anyway. Download it from here.

In a future post, we shall see how to create keywords for the different search engines that we added, so that we can just totally remove the search box and use the address bar instead.

#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.

Prevent Your Secondary Email Accounts From Being Deactivated By Using Digsby

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 09 May 2010 14:30:00 +0000

by Fletcher Prince

A lot of people, myself included, have this habit of creating multiple email accounts, and then abandoning one or more of them. This leads to removal of those inactive accounts by the email provider after a stipulated time (usually six to twelve months).

One wouldn’t normally expect this to be a cause for concern. Except that, it is. This behaviour is being exploited by hackers these days (read this & this) to gain access to their primary email address, contact details, complete chat logs, transaction information, and God knows what else. And so here’s the deal – never ignore your secondary email account/s.

But how? By nature we tend to avoid anything that doesn’t seem important enough. Your secondary account is not quite important (that’s why it’s secondary), so it’s natural you will either forget or not want to check it out every so often.

However, you can make the awesome Digsby to keep checking your mail inboxes at regular intervals, and hence prevent them from being deactivated. For those who haven’t heard of it, Digsby is a free Windows utility that can manage all your IM (Gtalk, AIM, Live Messenger, Y! Messenger, and more), email, and social accounts together. If you’ve not tried it out yet, go give it a ride (make sure you get the crap-free version).

Once you install Digsby and create an account, it’s time to add your email addresses to it. From the menu bar, go to Digsby > My Accounts, and click on Add Email Account. Select your email provider, and enter your account details. If your secondary account doesn’t receive a lot of mails, you can increase the time interval after which Digsby will check for new mail. Click Save, and then Done. Keep running Digsby every now and then (don’t forget to do that!), and it’ll make sure your secondary account stays active.

Why can’t I just delete my secondary email address?

It’s even more dangerous. If you read the email exploit article that I linked to above, you’ll know that the exploit is possible only when your secondary account is deleted and then taken up by some other person. While signing up for your primary email account, you must have provided your secondary email account. Hence any problem in your primary account will usually be mailed to the secondary account.

Why Digsby?

Sure, Digsby is not the only social client out there. Trillian and Pidgin also offer IM and email capabilities. However I prefer Digsby because of the way it separates your email account from your IM account. Both Trillian and Pidgin integrate the two – if you add an account, it will serve both as IM and email without choice (you can opt out of email, but not the former). It’s highly unlikely that you chat with people using your secondary account, so Trillian and Pidgin are both redundant in this respect. Moreover, Digsby allows you to do all sorts of stuff with your email right from its interface.

Email addresses contain some of the most sensitive information about yourself and your contacts, and hence you must take all steps to make sure that they don’t get deactivated or hacked.

Miss AlZip? You Can Get The Upcoming Version For Free

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:30:00 +0000

AlZip was one of my favourite file archiving tools, until its developers decided to stop distributing it for free. While it supports a ton of archiving formats (ZIP, RAR, ACE, 7Z, TAR – you name it, chances are AlZip can tackle it), the winning factor of AlZip has always been its incredible cuteness and ease of use. I mean, just look at these icons!

Anyway, here’s a good news for me and everyone else who had to look elsewhere after AlZip went shareware – to ‘celebrate’ the release of beta 1 of AlZip 8, the developers have decided to mail a license key of the final version to anyone who signs up for the giveaway. Simply enter your email address in this page, and you’ll receive your key as soon as version 8 hits the market.

Kudos to the AlTools developers for such a simple and awesome giveaway of AlZip.

AlZip Free [via Raymond.cc]

Change The Start Orb in Windows 7

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 08 May 2010 06:28:36 +0000

The Start orb in Windows 7 looks pretty cool, in my opinion. However, should you find it ugly and repulsive, you can easily swap it for something else with the Windows 7 Start Button Changer. Download and run the portable app as administrator (right click > Run as Administrator) to get the window shown below :

In the Open dialog that’ll launch, navigate to the place where you extracted the contents of the zip file and select any of the 10 sets available.

You can find more at DeviantArt, or even create your own set!

The original Start orb can be replaced anytime with the click of a button.

Windows 7 Start Button Changer [The Windows Club]

HP Computer Owners : Swap Cyberlink YouCam for HP MediaSmart Webcam

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:43:04 +0000

Those of you who have purchased an HP Pavilion / TouchSmart computer, in the last couple years, must be familiar with the Cyberlink YouCam (version 2) software that is installed by default in those models. YouCam is, in my opinion, a darn good webcam tool. However it’s not free and ever since version 3 of YouCam was released, all v2 users have been getting nag screens to upgrade.

This is definitely not what you’d call a pleasant user experience, and therefore HP has proceeded to fix the issue. By partnering with Cyberlink, HP has released MediaSmart Webcam, which closely resembles YouCam but is completely free to use on HP laptops, desktops, and touch screen PCs. To get MediaSmart, you can wait for HP Update (which should be installed on your computer unless you manually removed it) to deliver it to you. Or, you can Google your computer model, proceed to the HP page for the model, select your OS (you should preferably be running Vista or 7), and choose MediaSmart Webcam from the list of downloads available. Here’s the required page for my laptop model running 32-bit Windows 7 – dv5-1006ax.

Running the downloaded file will automatically remove YouCam and install MediaSmart on your laptop, which can then be accessed from the Start menu.

MediaSmart will run only on HP hardware, though owners of other models can try and get gobsmacked in the face.

P.S. If you’re planning to purchase an HP Pavilion laptop in near future, here’s my advice – DON’T.

Tame Moody Files With Unlocker

Ashutosh Mishra — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:13:59 +0000

Everyone has had those times when you’re trying to delete (or rename, or move) a simple file or folder from your computer, and spectacularly failing at doing so. If you’re on Windows Vista / 7, you might end up with a dialog like this -

This error message is somewhat informative (though all dialogs on Vista / 7 aren’t so enlightening!). It tells you which program is currently using the file that you’re trying to remove, and that you need to close it to progress.

However, Windows XP users aren’t so fortunate. Here’s the error message that you guys get -

[Source : Bleeping Computer]

Needless to say, it creates more problems rather than solving the one you’re already facing.

“Another person or program using my files!? Have I been hacked or what? :O” You’re driven to panic, and you call your technician guy, who charges a ridiculous amount to get rid of that file and to assure that you’re indeed safe.

Well, take my advice and don’t run for your technician the next time. Download and install a tiny utility called Unlocker instead. It’s completely free. Once it’s installed, right click on that file / folder and select Unlocker.

Unlocker will look for the program (process) that’s locked down your file, and show it to you.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can kill the process, or simply unlock the file from the process. If a file is being accessed by more than one processes at a time, use the Unlock All button. Once the file is free from the process, do whatever you want from the options provided – delete, rename, move, or copy.

Unlocker is a simple, yet very effective tool while dealing with locked files. If you’re looking to remove rogue programs that simply won’t budge, have a look at Revo Uninstaller – which is like Unlocker for installed applications.

Unlocker
Rating : 4.5 / 5

Security Concerns

Unlocker comes bundled with a harmless eBay shortcut along with it. Installing this shortcut is completely optional, and you can opt out during the installation, if you want to. However, a few security products like Microsoft’s Security Essentials and McAfee flag this eBay item as ‘severe’ malware. So if your antivirus warns you while you’re installing Unlocker, simply allow it to remove the eBay icon. Unlocker will continue to work without any problems, and you won’t receive any more alerts. Still, I’d definitely like the security companies to remove this bogus alert through an update.

Immunet Adds a Layer of Protection To Your Social Web

Ashutosh Mishra — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:28:40 +0000

With the social networks Twitter and Facebook growing like wildfire, especially the latter, it’s inevitable that the bad guys will target them to spread malware across the Internet. Hackers misuse the social hubs’ ability to create chain reactions to spread their malware with minimum effort. Here’s how – they somehow discover and hack an account with a poor password (a lot of people use really stupid passwords). Now that the account is compromised, they use it as a centre and send some malicious code, hidden beneath a cute looking dog or some scary warning, to each of the account’s friends. A couple of recipients fall for this trick and their accounts are immediately compromised. This goes on, and soon the hackers have their own virtual botnet of malware retching accounts.

Immunet aims to counter these growing attacks from social networks by pulling in realtime updates from the large community of other Immunet users. It works pretty much the same way as the previously mentioned Panda Cloud Antivirus, albeit with one remarkable difference – Immunet can be used both as a primary or secondary antivirus. That is, you can use Immunet as your only antivirus, and you can also use it along with your current antivirus. Immunet, unlike other antivirus tools, doesn’t conflict with rival products.

Using Immunet as a secondary antivirus has its own benefits. Lets say your primary antivirus catches a virus on your computer, but Immunet doesn’t. However Immunet, being compatible with the antivirus, will immediately log that virus in its own database, which will then be delivered to all other Immunet users. Neat!

As with Panda, you need an account to get started (you can use your Facebook account). It’s pretty light on system resources, and I’d recommend you to use it side-by-side with your current antivirus, as it’s still very beta and not quite a full blown security solution.