Google Turns 9!!!

How To Show Your Name in Windows Taskbar

Though there are thousands of Windows XP tips and tricks but some of them are very easy to implement and at the same time very fun to do. Today I have a sweet Windows XP trick for you that will give your Windows a personal touch and will also let you show off your name branding in front of your non-geek friends. Basically this trick will let you display a name of your choice (preferably your own name) in the Windows Taskbar just beside the digital time clock.

Show Your Name in Taskbar near Digital Time

Follow the steps and see the sweet magic

1. Open Start Menu and then open Control Panel
2. Double click Regional and Language Options
3. Click Customize (besides English U.S drop down menu)
4. Go to Time tab and change AM/PM symbols to the name of your choice

and you are done. Now that was fast and easy wasn’t it? Enjoy. Here is what I came up with

Block Unwanted Scraps in Orkut Scrapbook

Orkut was always looked down upon when compared to other social networking websites due to its low privacy features and security holes which could get your Orkut account hacked or even cause you to lose some very personal information but the recent addition of a new feature to the Orkut system shall now ensure that Orkut will be safe enough to compete with other social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

How To Block Unwanted Scraps on Orkut

“Friends and Friends Only Scraps” (Thats what I call it) is a new feature that has been recently added to the Orkut system and will ensure that you get scraps only from the people you trust i.e. friends and family etc. This will block all unwanted scraps in your scrapbook from people who usually used to spam you or irritate you for no reason. The new great feature will make sure that you don’t get links to any malicious scripts and websites and will also prevent unknown people from writing something abusive or unethical on your scrapbook.

Follow the simple little steps to set up the “Friends and Friends Only Scraps” Feature

1. Open Orkut Privacy Settings
2. See the third row which says “allow scraps to be written by”
3. In the drop down menu select “Friends”
4. Save changes and You are done

Happy Orkutting!!!

How to Capture Screenshots from Windows Media Player

Yesterday I tried to use the extremely useful screen capture by ‘Print Screen Key’ to try to capture a wmv running file on my Windows media player 11. But whenever I tried to use the print screen, a blank image was captured from the windows media player. So grabing a screenshot from Window Media Player is not so easy as it seems.

Then I thought maybe the running video was posing a problem with capturing a frame. So I paused the movie and tried the print screen technique. But still got a blank screen.

Then I tried to capture paused and running movies in full screen (Full screen shortcut – using Alt+Enter). But again no luck.

So I decided to tweak some advanced options of Window media player.

So here is the free and simple way to capture Images from Windows Media Player

• Open Window Media Player
• Then go to Tools | Options
• In Options, select the Performance Tab
• Way below you click on the Advanced Button
• Uncheck “Use Overlays’
• Click Ok
• And you are ready.

Now run your movie in any size or screen resolution. Use the standard ‘Print Screen Key’ Method and you have captured a snapshot from your favourite movie on windows media player without using any special multimedia software. Enjoy!

Four Hundred Million Firefox Downloads

On November 9th, 2004, you all started a movement. Spread Firefox, supported by tens of thousands of contributors, took just 99 days to deliver 25 million downloads of Firefox to a world of people desperate for a better Web — a Web that didn’t overwhelm them with pop-ups, a Web that didn’t infect their systems with viruses and spyware, a Web that was fun again, simply put, a Web that worked.

In less than six months, you all doubled that number to 50 million downloads, turned open source into a household word and reasserted the supremacy of choice and simplicity.

Read complete story at SpreadFirefox 

First Look at Microsoft’s Tafiti search engine

Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft’s Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen: the left pane is for entering search queries and switching between image, RSS, Web, and News, the middle pane contains the search results, and the right pane is used to “dock” results using drag-and-drop for looking at later.

To run the Tafiti web application, you must first download and install Silverlight. Silverlight runs on Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher. A Linux version of Silverlight is being worked on by Mono developer Miguel de Icaza but is not yet available.

The installation is a one-time-only affair, with the default setting to update Silverlight automatically in the background when new releases come out—a good thing since the Silverlight frameworks themselves are still in beta. Once installed, a browser restart is required, and then the Tafiti site will run. Tafiti runs on Internet Explorer 6 or 7, Firefox 2.x, and Safari 2.x, but it will not work on Opera or the new Safari 3 beta. I had some problems with Tafiti not rendering search results on Firefox 2.0.0.6, but others have reported no difficulties.