Tech Ravings

A blogspot/blogger blog whether hosted on a .blogspot domain or own domain, does not provide navigation option flexibility as offered by wordpress self-hosted blogs. In blogger, “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” links are used for post navigation which occupies its place by default. However, there is a way to change this traditional style of “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” style of page navigation with wordpress style of numbered page navigation. Below is a figure illustrating what sort of navigation I meant.

We can change traditional blogger navigation to the above mentioned kind of navigation by using a CSS and Javascript hack written by Mohamed Rias.

A tiny yet powerful tool named as Check Flash 1.08 is available if you ever get in need of checking your flash drive’s health and performance. Check Flash 1.08 can also be utilized as a tool to perform maintenance operations on your flash drives. The utility has a very user-friendly platform where a single window is available to provide all the test-related settings while presenting the drive map, logs and verification progress and is thus very easy using.

You can connect most of the newer digital cameras to your PC through FireWire or USB cable. But for the most of the old analog ones, you need some extra effort. This will be there if your video camera does not have PC compatible ports. However, here are the simple and easy to follow steps that can be used to connect your Analog camera to your PC using a device that can convert analog signals of your analog camera to digital signals.

For making your FireFox browser load webpages faster, compressing DLLs and executables is an easy solution. To get the DLL and executables compression done for you, you should use UPX. UPX is free and can be downloaded from SourceForge’s website by clicking here. Once you have downloaded the UPX file, you should proceed as follows to speed up your FireFox browser.

MP4 or MPEG-4 formats are a great trouble if you get your songs in that format and you have a media player that can play only MP3 formats. I have often struggled to find a good and compatible software to get my MP4 or MPEG-4 format songs converted to MP3. Yesterday, I searched the web for the purpose and tested many softwares and utility to do so. I went almost through every software and utility mentioned on the 1, 2 and 3 page of google search query for “convert MP4 to mp3″. After trying a bunch of such softwares I found the best.

Indonesia, Turkey and Thailand are some of the countries that have banned YouTube before. There are some videos that have been blocked by YouTube to avoid disputes arising out of some inappropriate content of the video that might affect the country audience. Global distribution rights are another cause of some YouTube videos getting blocked for people of some countries. If you try to access such videos, you will find the following notice – “This video is not available in your country” or something alike.

However, there is a little trick to get access to the videos you would like to watch but is restricted in your country. The trick is very simple and doesn’t require any software or tools as such.

Youtube.com users can now opt for higher resolution videos when they are watching it over the website but they can not do so if they are watching a video embedded in a website or a blog. The webmaster embedding the video should embed high resolution and high quality code to allow its viewers to see the video in high resolution. So far, Youtube.com does not provide any option for embedding videos in high quality. However, there is a little hack (ethical hack) to stream embedded videos from high quality source.

If you have been seeing the same plain and dull blue-white layout of GMail for long, you must be tired and bored by it. Google knows that its users are tired of the white and blue interface and needs a change and so it offers 31 different styles and color of themes to please your eyes. However, if those 31 themes are also not appealing to your taste, you may customize the themes with your own color schemes. Yes, it is true. Google now allows it users to select their own custom color scheme for their GMail inbox themes to meet their taste.

Some people, including me, are in habit of taking notes on their desktop for easy remembrance of links, contacts, etc. For people like me and else, who are in habit of taking desktop notes, ShirusuPad will be helpful. ShirusuPad is a user friendly and easy to use desktop application that can help you take notes of anything like your favorite URL(s), your contacts, addresses, etc. Another cool addition in this application is that unlike other such applications, the URL(s) get highlighted and you can just click on them to go to your noted webpage via your default web browser.

Installing of software is easy. You just need to insert the program CD or double click the downloaded .exe file to setup the program. However, uninstalling software may sometime get your brain off when trying to remove a program that is not listed in “add or remove program” control panel option.

Here is a step by step and pretty easy way to uninstall a program that is not listed in “add/remove programs” control panel option. I am thankful to Kasif for sharing this tip.