By indyan on October 12, 2008
User Account Control or UAC is one of the most annoying new features in Windows Vista (7 Steps to Delete a Shortcut! – give me a break). Microsoft has promised to tone it down in Windows 7, but you don’t need to wait for Windows 7 to make UAC more bearable.
Norton has released a free utility called Norton UAC Tool that replaces Windows Vista’s standard UAC prompt. The most significant change that Norton has made is adding the “Don’t ask me again” option. This allows you to add day-to-day harmless actions to the whitelist and makes UAC significantly less annoying. Besides this the Norton UAC Tool also displays a modified version of the UAC prompts – which I find to be more informative.
Continue reading “Make Vista’s User Account Control Less Annoying with Norton”
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By indyan on October 10, 2008
After a long break (in fact very long) I am back with another edition of Opera Bytes.
Yesterday Jon Hicks formally joined Opera Software as a Senior Designer. He was a part of the team that developed the ubiquitous Firefox logo (it was created by Hicks based on a concept by Daniel Burka). He has been previously critical of Opera’s Mac Interface and especially Opera’s Icon.
Neither browser has an updated icon (a new FF icon is awaiting approval!), but Opera in particular really needs to. The shadow is the first thing that strikes you as being wrong, not just the lack of transparency, but the fact that it has highlights in it! I really fancy having a go at updating the Opera icon.
With him officially being a part of Team Opera, I certainly hope that Opera will finally get a better icon in Peregrine. He will be also be working on Opera Mini, Mobile and Widgets.
In related news Opera expanded it’s Desktop Developement team recently and now Opera Desktop will be developed from Poland and Sweden. Opera seems to be on a rapid hiring mode. And why not? Their Q2 2008 profits are up approximately 10 times, Opera mini has grown 351% since last year (in terms of number of users) and number of weekly Opera users has increased by 25% since 9.5 was launched. Opera 9.6 released a couple of days ago has already surpassed a million downloads. Keep it up Opera!
Opera community member Dustin Wilson has come up with a way to Tweet directly from Opera’s address bar. Also dont forget to check out the new and updated Opera Twitter Widget. And btw, my twitter id is indyan.
Details about Opera’s next built (v10 – codenamed Peregrine) are still scarce, but Olli did confirm that it would have inline spell checking. I also expect it to have an update manager among other things. You can view my full wishlist here and my initial blogpost covering Peregrine here.
Nintendo DSi – the successor to handheld gaming console Nintendo DS will also feature Opera Browser. It’s not clear though if it will come pre-loaded or will be made available later.
That’s all for now. Will be back soon with another edition of Opera Bytes.
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By indyan on October 8, 2008
After multiple Release Candidates and a Beta build, Opera 9.6 has finally arrived. The main changes are –
Opera Link : Now you can synchronize Custom search engines and typed history along with bookmarks, notes, personal bar and Speed Dial in Opera Link. I wish they would add RSS feed list, toolbar.ini and menu.ini to the list.
Opera Scroll Marker : Scroll Marker is a new feature that indicates the the previous position of the bottom of the screen after you scroll, this making it easier to continue reading. Now you no longer have to hunt for the line you were reading before scrolling. However this feature is turned off by default. Click here and set Enable Scroll Marker to 1 (show when reaching the bottom or top of the page) or 2 (always show when scrolling) (via Tamil’s blog)
Feed Preview : Now Opera Displays a formatted preview of a RSS/Atomfeed before asking you to subscribe.
Opera Mail : Opera Mail has received a host of updates. Follow/Ignore threads and contacts allows you to dismiss unimportant messages and the Go To Thread option allows you to directly view the important messages. Opera Mail now features a Low Bandwidth Mode. When enabled Opera will only synchronise new messages for IMAP and will only fetch the first 100 lines of a message unless requested for POP.
Continue reading “Opera 9.6 – It’s Here”
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By indyan on October 7, 2008
Opera Software (India) is organizing a meet-up of Opera fans in Delhi on the evening of Oct 9 from 7 to 9 PM. If you are in Delhi or NCR and would like to come to the event, then please RSVP by sending a mail to shwetankd [at] opera.com. There is no age restriction, and all Opera fans are welcome. For the people who come, there might be some other special surprises as well. Besides other employees from Opera, Opera’s CEO Jon von Tetzchner will also be present.
The event details are as follows:
Venue: “Ruby Tuesday”, 14-15 Community Center, PVR Anupam Complex, Saket.
Time: 7 to 9 PM
Date: Thursday, October 9
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By indyan on August 29, 2008
Google has launched it’s MapMaker service for India and 57 other countries ( full list available here ). Google MapMaker was completely developed by Google India. It is aimed to improve the quality of maps for those regions of the world where maps data is sparse.
MapMaker will allow users to contribute, share and edit various data like borders and regions(states, cities etc.), roads, railways, waterways and various points of interest.
Continue reading “Google Launches MapMaker For India and 57 Other Countries”
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By indyan on August 24, 2008
Pixelpipe is a new service that enables you to mass distribute media. The concept itself is not new. Ping.fm did it for text (microblogging and status updates) and Hey!Spread and TubeMogul did it for videos. But Pixelpipe allows you distribute all forms of media across the web – Images, Videos as well as Audio Clippings. Indian readers will be interested in knowing that Pixelpipe also has an office in India (New Delhi) headed by Pixelpipe’s architect Jacob Jay.
Pixelpipe currently supports 32 Video/Image hosting services including Adobe Share, Box.net, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Imageshack, Imeem, Phanfare, Photobucket, Picasa, Smugmug, Vimeo, Webshots, Youtube and Zooomr in addition to supporting popular blogging services like Blogger, Live Journal, Typepad, Tumblr and WordPress. You can also upload to your selfhosted blog or ftp account. One notable omission is Orkut – which is surprising considering that Pixelpipe has an office in India (where orkut is by far the most popular social networking destination). Many popular video sharing services are also missing, but the as far as image hosting services are concerned Pixelpipe’s list of supported services is exhaustive.
Continue reading “Pixelpipe – Simultaneously Upload Your Media to 30+ Websites”
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By indyan on July 25, 2008
The Windows 7 FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is Windows 7?
Windows 7 is the successor to Windows Vista.
When will it be released?
Microsoft is aiming for a Jan 2010 release. But, it’s too early to tell for sure. If all is well, then it may even be released in time for 2009 Christmas. Otherwise, its also possible that it will be delayed like Windows Vista.
What happened to Vienna? Wasn’t it supposed to be the succesor to Windows 7?
Originally Windows Vista was supposed to be a minor update to Windows Xp and Vienna (formerly codenamed Blackcomb) – it’s succesor was supposed to be a major update. Another build, codenamed Fiji was supposed to be released between Vista and Vienna. But Windows Vista evolved into a major update and got delayed severely. So out went plans for an interim release between Vista and Vienna.
Last year Steven Sinofsky took over the reigns of the Windows Developement team from Jim Allchin. Not being a fan of the fancy random codenames Microsoft had being using during the Allchin era, Sinofsky got rid of them and decided to call the next build of Windows simply Windows 7. So Windows 7 is Vienna.
Will it run on my current PC/Notebook?
Continue reading “Everything You Wanted To Know About Windows 7”
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By indyan on July 20, 2008
I just read this over at Thinkdigit forums. The story goes something like this :
Apparently people who purchased Rainbow Six Vegas 2 from Direct2Drive were facing problems while applying the official 1.02 patch and D2D didn’t seem interested in fixing the issue soon. Generously enough Ubisoft decided to go ahead and solve the problem in v1.03 of their patch. So what did they do? The just integrated the “RELOADED” no-cd crack into their patch!!
Continue reading “Ubisoft caught Pirating the Pirates”
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By indyan on July 3, 2008
Last.fm – the social music website has been testing a new revamped interface for quite some time. Until now it was limited only to beta testers. Yesterday, they started rolling out the new interface to a normal last.fm members. After, playing around with it for more than a day I must say, I am impressed.
The interface has been revamped. It’s cleaner and better organised thatn before. But to me it just looks a bit too bland and simplistic. The Top Artists and Top Tracks chart is now tabbed and only displays the top 10 results by default. You can choose to see charts for Last 7 days/3 months/6 months/12 months/all time. The best thing is that all the charts are updated in real time! The reccomendation engine seems to have improved, and now every artist’s page features a list of similar artists.
Continue reading “Last.fm Beta – My Impressions”
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By indyan on July 1, 2008
Comment spam is something every blogger has to endure on a daily basis. The default antispam plugin – Akismet, does a decent job of filtering, but it’s known to get it wrong. And to manually dig out the legitimate comments from hundreds of spam comments is no mean task. Recently, I reviewed two better alternatives to Akismet. However, even with Defensio and Typepad Antispam the aforementioned problems remain. As a result most bloggers are forced to implement multiple antispam techniques. The most popular ones being –
Challenge-response tests : These tests attempt to distinguish a human from a bot by analyzing their response to a server generated question. The most popular implementation is captcha, which asks the user to retype a sequence of letters displayed in an image. While this may help you in reducing the number of spam comments, it will also aggravate your readers and discourage them from commenting. Due to this more bloggers are switching to less annoying challenge-response tests like Challenge
Even with these newer plugins the main problem remains – the commenter is made to put in extra effort. Not only that, a significantly large number of spam comments manage to get through these challenge-response tests.
Continue reading “Wp-Spamfree – Banish Comment Spam”
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