Over the weekend, our broadband lines got snapped due to windy rains in Mangalore. I was unable to publish any posts or reply any emails which you might have sent during this period of time. I’m sincerely sorry for the inconvenience. Normal posting schedule will continue from today onwards.
Here in India, telephone companies suck big time! It’s common for the over head telephone cables to break up and go unrepaired for days, or even weeks.
Read it Later is a handy Firefox add-on, which we’ve covered earlier. Basically, it’s pretty similar to the bookmarking feature, but it’s meant only for those one-time interesting pages. You can save pages of interest to read it later. The developer has released a new version of the add-on, which makes it compatible with Firefox 3 and adds several new features as well.
Read it Later for Firefox 3 tightly integrates with Firefox 3’s address bar. Just next to the ‘one-click bookmarking’ star in the address bar, Read it Later adds a checkmark. Clicking on the checkmark will save or remove the page from your reading list.
Another nifty feature to be included in this version of Read It Later is the ability to sync your list with multiple computers. For instance, you can sync your office reading list with your home computer using the unique feed ID and password given to your list. This way, your read list is no more tied down to your home or office computer. What’s more? Read below the fold:
Offline Reading: If you want to access your reading list, while you are away from active internet connection, Read It Later can prefetch those pages and save it for offline reading.
RSS Feed: Your reading list is accessible from any RSS reader (like Google Reader, FeedDemon or even a mobile phone). You can also use your personalized RSS feed to share your reading list with others.
Click to Save Mode: While running through tons of links in delicious, digg or any other social media site, you can toggle the ‘click to save’ mode by pressing Alt + M (customizable). Any link clicked, while this mode is active, will be straight away added to your reading list.
Every now and then, you might end up in sticky situations where you accidentally delete files which are not meant to be deleted. This is where tools like UndeleteMyFiles come in handy. The software does exactly what the name suggests, but unlike other file recovery softwares available out there, UndeleteMyFiles has a unique preview feature which can restore files to temp directory and open it in the default viewer, so that you can check out the files which should be brought back to your hard disk.
UndeleteMyFiles has three modes: File Recovery, Media Recovery and Mail Recovery. Media Recovery helps you to undelete media files, whereas mail recovery can retrieve accidentally deleted Outlook emails.
We knew it was coming, and it’s here! Canonical has released the mobile optimized version of Ubuntu for developers. Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) is actually a stripped down version of Ubuntu operating system for desktop, which is optimized to run on smaller screens of mobile devices.
MIDs are mobile devices, which are more like normal computer, but smaller in size than ultraportable computer. Open source, Ubuntu MID is designed for screens ranging 4.8-inch to 7-inch, and it will feature large icons with touchscreen interface for easy, stylus-less navigation.
This is a developer preview, so it’s not ready for the prime time yet. However, Canonical seems to very positive about the new mobile operating system. They’ll be releasing new version of the OS in every six-month cycle, just like how they do for the desktop versionBookmark Previews is a Firefox extension, which generates thumbnail previews for all your Firefox bookmarks and lets you browse through your bookmarks in Apple-ish Cover Flow interface.
Basically, this extension adds two views to your bookmark manager: Thumbnail view (Cover Flow style) and Album view. Whenever you add a bookmark or visit any of your bookmarked pages, it snaps a screenshot and preserves it. When you first install this extension, it’ll create thumbnails for your bookmarks in background.
I have around 280 bookmarks in my browser, and I found this extension to be harmful for my browser’s performance. I’m not totally sure, if this is due to the number of bookmarks I’m having, or due to some other reason. Nonetheless, it’s pretty cool, if not very useable.
Yahoo! Mail has started offering email accounts under two new domain names – YMail.com and RocketMail.com. Yahoo! Mail being the grand daddy of all free webmail services (with over 266 million users worldwide) started way back in 2007. Hence finding a suitable email address without some extras in it is pretty impossible. Nearly
Back in 2007, when Yahoo! acquired Four11 Corp (RocketMail) for $80 million, they offered free email address under the Yahoo domain to avoid confusion and build brand. Existing RocketMail users were allowed to keep their addresses, but Yahoo didn’t allow any new sign-ups under that domain name.
RocketMail.com and YMail.com will have all the same features of Yahoo! domain, which includes unlimited storage. If you couldn’t find the right email handle with Yahoo last time, maybe this is the time to grab your favorite address, while it’s still available.
Usually, when we download software from a trusted developer like Mozilla, we are convinced that it contains no viruses or trojans to harm our computers. Surprisingly, that’s not true for Vietnamese language pack for Firefox downloaded after February 18, 2008.
The language pack itself does not carry the virus; instead it has been modified by a virus to remotely load malicious scripts. It’s primarily meant to display advertising, but it could be used for other malicious attacks as well. The virus is a script, so it can potentially harm all operating system. Most antivirus applications will detect the virus as HTML.Xorer.
The add-on has been download around 16000 times since November 2007, but its unknown how many of those downloads came after February 18th. Normally, Mozilla checks for infections when an add-on is uploaded to their site. No subsequent virus scans are performed. Hopefully, Mozilla will take precautions to prevent this from happening in future. The whole issue makes me feel a little insecure about installing add-on for my browser.
We’ve heard all sorts of sleep walking stories, including this one, but 24-year-old Jessica Castillo of Italy, Texas has a weird sleep related disorder – “sleep texting”. According to this article, Jessica found messages sent to her boyfriend in her outbox which said “Baby u there? Need to tell something …” then some haphazard letters and numbers. This was followed by a second similar message which also ended with some gibberish words, but Jessica had absolutely no knowledge about those in the morning.
You are probably wondering if sleep texting was actually a sleeping disorder or just a cover-up by some people for unintentionally send text messages. Heck, even I felt the same! PsychCentral has answers from an expert in American Academy of Sleep Medicine, who believes that texting is so deeply ingrained in younger generations that sleep texting is absolutely possible.
On the other hand, Scott Fromherz from the Westside Sleep Center in Oregon disagrees. He says “The ’sleep texter’ may have actually been awake, but had not formed new memories for the event. Thus, a person might wake up in the middle of the night, text someone, go back to sleep and have no recollection of the activity the next morning.”
Considering that teens spend a lot of time texting each other, I think it’s quite possible that the process of drafting a text message is engraved in our muscle memory. Atleast, this isn’t as grave as having sleep sex.
Back when Gmail was first launched, I was fond of their minimalistic WebMail interface. It has been four years now, and the storage has been tripled, but the interface still remains untouched. Some of us are finding Gmail’s look-and-feel to be boring. Fortunately, Evgueni Naverniouk has created a style sheet called Gmail Redesigned, which gives Gmail a dark makeover.
Gmail Redesigned does cosmetic changes to nearly element of Gmail, including the GTalk chat box, and the settings page.
To install this style, you’ll first need to have Stylish add-on installed in FireFox. Once that’s done, go to userstyles.org and click on "Load into Stylish" button. That’s it!
Gmail Redesigned would be a killer, if it could work along with Remember The Milk extension. Luckily, the author has plans to implement that in future. [Via: CyberNet]
The second Release Candidate of Firefox3 was made available for developer testing and community feedback. If you are already running Firefox 3 RC1, then don’t expect to see any new features because RC2 is all about bug fixes and other under the hood performance tweaks.
Firefox 3 RC2 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac in over 45 languages. If you are already running Firefox 3 RC1, then go to Help > Check for Updates and upgrade to RC2, else just get it from here.
Hopefully, this is the last release candidate before the final release, which is expected to happen at some time later this month.
