Year: 2012

Although Mac OS X natively supports zip format and has an excellent search and indexing tool in Spotlight, you cannot search within zip files using Spotlight. However, Spotlight can be extended with plugins, and we can use Ziplight plugin to search within zip files. Installing Ziplight is slightly different from normal programs, as you are […]

Yahoo Messenger is one of the more popular instant messenger clients around. While it is often blamed for bloat and advertisements, it still has a large number of users. Like Skype and Google Chrome, downloading the Yahoo Messenger file does not give you the entire program. It is only a small setup file that then […]

Firefox 3’s default behaviour is to do an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on Google, which fetches the top result for the terms you entered, on Google. While this might seem helpful initially, Google’s lack of accuracy (or rather the lack of accuracy for top terms) in some results can get into your nerves. If a […]

Google Chrome is a web browser project by Google. Speed, stability and security are of paramount concern to Chrome’s developers. Chrome’s market share has been increasing. In fact, my review of Google Chrome was one of the earliest on the web – I noted that it has excellent speed, but lacks several features. Some of […]

The hosts file is used to map domains to IP addresses (at a primary level, above DNS servers). When a URL is requested, the system checks for a mapping on the hosts file first and gets the corresponding IP address. Only when it does not find an entry does it resolve the IP with the […]

Thesis is a WordPress framework optimized for SEO, and has tons of customization options. You can edit many aspects of the theme from within the Thesis theme options panel.Not an existing Thesis user? Buy Thesis now – it is the best WordPress theme framework you could have. But then, there are times you may want […]

Photoshop has a Save for Web feature by default, without installing any plugin. However, you need to install a GIMP plugin called Save for Web to get the same functionality. Save for Web allows you to optimize images for web, by reducing file sizes greatly. Installing plugins in GIMP takes only a few simple steps, […]

Mac OS X has had system alerts with Growl, a Mac-exclusive app until recently. However, with Ubuntu getting native system alert system, and Windows users can now install Growl for Windows for system notifications. Growl is a a beta software as of now, and hence may have some quirks. There were a few memory corruption […]

Valuable time and effort of customers are wasted as hundreds of telemarketing firms call up or send SMS messages to your mobile phones to promote their products. Such calls are irritating, to say the least. There are ways to opt out of all such marketing gimmicks by signing up to the Do Not Disturb and […]

No Script is an addon that improves the security of Firefox by allowing only trusted scripts (from a whitelist) to execute. This is particularly helpful when browsing bank websites, ecommerce sites etc. I use Chrome for daily purposes, and typically NoScript in Firefox only for all my online transactions that involve disclosing personal data like […]