Shankar Ganesh

… You don’t know them probably I guess.

CTRL + R Right align text

CTRL + E Center align text

CTRL + L Left align text

CTRL + Tab Cycle through open windows

CTRL + 1 For single spaced lines

CTRL + 2 For double spaced lines

CTRL + 5 For 1.5 spaced lines

F9 Send an email to the contact you’re chatting with

F11 Start a voice chat with the contact

F12 Cancel the call

ESC Close the current window

ALT + ESC Close all Google Talk windows

Internet Explorer, by default, shows the title of a webpage followed by the string ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer’. Like this:

How about customizing it?

Here’s how:

• Open the Registry Editor by navigating to Start >> Run, typing regedit.exe and hitting Enter
• Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMain
• Double click Window Title and change it to what you want Internet Explorer’s title to be. If Window Title doesn’t exist, create it by right clicking, selecting New >> String Value

Here’s the title modified to hold the text ‘MyBrowser’ instead of the default one – ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer’

I’ve tried it with IE 6 and it works, and I’m not sure as to whether it will work with IE 7.

Disclaimer: Make sure you have a backup of your registry before you try this out. Do it at your own risk, it may harm your system.

Recycle Bin – I’ve always thought I can give a better name to it.

And if you’ve wanted to do the same, why not you go ahead and rename it?

• Go to Start >> Run
• Type regedit.exe and hit enter to open the Registry Editor
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows
  ShellNoRoamMUICache
• You’ll find probably something like this: @C:WINDOWSsystem32SHELL32.dll,-8964

Change it’s value to what you want the Recycle Bin’s name to be.

Disclaimer: Modifying the Registry may harm your system. Make sure you have a backup. Do it at your own risk.

Another batch of links…

• How to add and change the default IE Search engine – LyteByte
• How to convert 3GP Videos to other formats – Nirmal
• How to get traffic from Image Search engines – News Blog
• Posting Frequency: Regular vs Sparse posting – Technical Blog
• How to get rid of the COM Surrogate error in Vista – Madhur
• How to create Web 2.0 Buttons online? – Techie Buzz
• Icon resources for styling bulleted lists – Vivien
• Motorola RAZR 2 Slim Mobile Phone with Haptics technology – Techlivez
• How to delete your eBay Account? – Gili

Hope you’ll enjoy reading them

Video clips that you watch over the internet on many sites like Youtube and others are encoded and delivered in a compressed .FLV format, which might be unplayable directly on your computer or on your movie players.

There are many tools available on the internet that let you convert .FLV files in .MPEG and other such video formats, but let me mention two most useful converters that will let you convert .FLV into other video formats:

Riva FLV Encoder

This is one of the best softwares that lets you convert .FLV files to .MPEG, .AVI, .WMV, and Quicktime formats. Select the file, and get it converted. It’s as easy as that. Here’s a feature list:

• Riva FLV Encoder supports conversion of .FLV files into four formats: .MPEG, .AVI, Quicktime, .WMV
• Image capture possible
• Drag and drop interface that lets you drop files into the encoder and convert them easily
• Cropping feature
• Multi-language support – English, French, and German
• Inbuilt FLV Player

Vixy – Online FLV Converter

If you have no worries about your bandwidth, this is the best option. Just type in the URL where the .FLV file is located, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abcd, select the format from the drop down list, and click Start. You’re done. Instantly download the converted file after a few moments.

Currently Vixy supports .AVI, .MOV (MPEG), 3GP (for mobile phones), .MP4 for your iPod, PSP etc. You can also get only the audio in MP3 format.

That’s it. Those were just the two most widely used tools that’ll help you convert .FLV compressed video files. There are many more, but these are the most widely used, if I’m right. Hope you’ll find them useful

Earlier, Yahoo! announced that they will be bringing major changes to MyBlogLog, a social networking portal that was acquired by them earlier, to get rid of spammers and other offensive stuff.

And they’ve begun with a little step…

Did you login to your MyBlogLog page today? If so, you should have seen something new on your profile page like this:

The MyBlogLog Blog has an long introductory note on this feature. So here’s what’s new:

From now on, people on [tag]MyBlogLog[/tag] can tag you when they visit your profile pages. For example, someone can tag me as a “blogger” by using the “Add tag” option visible on my profile page.

Your will be able to see the tags that other people used on you. If you hover over a tag, you’ll find who’s tagged you with that tag. You can delete a particular tag used on you by using the red button that appears when you hover over the tag.

People can also tag the blogs you own with this new tagging system. If you want to get rid of this tagging feature, you can use the option available under settings.

Find anybody spamming around? You can tag the person as schmoe (Social Media Optimizer ). Even if a user who’s been tagged schmoe by others deletes the tag, the MyBlogLog team will still be able to identify them and will investigate their behaviour around MyBlogLog.

You can also tag a person as a Hot Member, and if a person gets tagged frequently as a hot member, he’ll get featured.

Wading through tags is possible. To find people and blogs tagged as, for example, design, you can use the URL http://mybloglog.com/buzz/tags/design to find out. Cool.

MyBlogLog

Do you think this will keep spammers off the bay on MyBlogLog? Share your views in the comments.

If you know what’s Ubuntu, you must have probably seen this kind of a picture on most Ubuntu branded stuff:

Today such a picture looked different on the Ubuntu Homepage, with a modification:

The guy with the blue T-Shirt just got a Dell logo impression there.

Cool. You might have known that Dell will ship PCs bundled with Ubuntu. Seems Ubuntu is getting popular day by day.

Image Sources: 1, 2

CommentPower is a new Web 2.0 service that you can integrate with your blog and use it to enhance comments. Currently, the service is in Private Beta, but hopefully, it will be out soon for everyone to use.

Upon installing and activating the plugin on your blog, you get options that’ll help you and your readers rate comments. Ratings are stored in a centralized server, and the comment author is rewarded for his or her comments. Comment Authors are identified by their email address.

I liked this part: It’s AJAX paged, and the usability factor is high. You can sort comments based on user ratings – good comments first or last.

Good commentators can be recognized and this may add up to their reputation.

WordPress users can get a plugin, so integration is easy.

CommentPower Seems promising. You can sign up to be a beta tester here.

What do you think, readers?

Fission is a cool new funky Firefox addon that displays a progress bar inside your browser’s address bar.

It basically combines Firefox’s address bar and Progress bar like this:

(click the image for a bigger view)

You could change the colour of the progress bar, and align it to the right/left using the options available. Plus, you could also set a background image to your address bar.

Get the extension here.

Most of you use Adobe Reader for reading PDF documents on your PC. But it’s a PC slowmaker. Earlier my PC used to crash whenever I used to open a huge PDF document on Adobe reader. Why not you try some alternatives to Adobe Reader?

Foxit Reader (Download Link)

Foxit Reader is the best available alternative to Adobe Reader. It’s extremely slick, less hungry on system resources and has features comparable to Adobe PDF Reader. Here’s its features list:

• Instant Loading: No annoying splashes, loads very quickly
• Annotation tool that helps you to add notes to parts of a PDF Document
• Fill forms easily on your PDF from your PC
• Multi-language support
• Printing feature enhanced in latest version
• Text converter: Convert an entire PDF File to text format
• Latest version has Javascript support
• Download size just around 1.5 MB!
• Portable version is available

Foxit Reader Homepage, Download Link

Sumatra PDF Viewer (Download Link)

This is another minimalistic tool that helps you view PDF files without any hassles. It’s just a stand alone EXE file: that means you can carry it around on your portable device. It’s also open source.

• It’s a simple tool, and has only the very essential features.
• Zooming, and a bit of shortcuts for navigation

That’s Sumatra. Get it here.

Which is your favourite? Or do you still prefer to use Adobe Reader? Share your views with us in the comments