Usually, when you buy any hardware the drivers come along with it on a disc. If you lose the driver disc you can always download the necessary drivers from the manufacturer's website. But what do you do when you are not sure of the manufacturer of the hardware? This is quite a possible situation and blogger Vinod Chandramouli provides an excellent trick to deal with it.

Every device has a Vendor and Device id associated with it. If you can find this ID, you can find the manufacturer. In Windows it's easy to find the vendor and device id.

1. Open Device Manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager)
2. The hardware whose drivers are missing will appear as Unknown device, so it's easier to locate the device.
3. Right click on the unknown device and click on Properties.
4. Under the Properties window click on Details tab and select Device Instance Id from the drop down box.
5. You should see a code similar to this
   
   PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27DC&SUBSYS_30868086
   &REV_01\4&1E46F438&0&40F0
   


6. The portion of the code highlighted in RED is the Vendor ID and the portion highlighted in GREEN is the Device ID. In this example:
   
   Vendor ID = 8086
   Device ID = 27DC
   


7. Once you have obtained both the IDs, proceed to PCI Database. There you can either search for the vendor from the vendor ID or directly get information about the device along with the vendor name by searching with the device ID.

Great isn't it? Now you will never have to go hunting for correct drivers.

GMail uses AJAX in it's interface due to which it takes a considerably long time to open your inbox, compared to other webmail services, even over fast Internet connection. This becomes painful for people on dial-up connection. Sometimes an ISP can have a problem and pages can take long to open. It gets worse when Gmail's own server is under load. That's exactly what's happening with me today. Gmail is refusing to open. When this happens, you can access Gmail by any of the following methods.

1. Basic HTML: As I said, Google Mail uses AJAX for it's interface which is the primary cause for the delay. You can speed up the process by switching to the basic HTML view which is ten times faster than the standard Gmail interface. To use the basic HTML view use this URL

http://mail.google.com/mail/h/
OR
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ (Secure SSL link)

2. Gmail for Mobile: A pretty basic interface optimized for viewing in PDAs and cell phones. Not something you wouldn't like to use often, but at least it opens.

There are several links for accessing Gmail on mobiles

http://m.gmail.com
http://mail.google.com/mail/x/
https://mail.google.com/mail/x/ (Secure SSL link)

Looking for house plans? Are you fed up with your local architect's uninspiring designs? Then you should look at House Plans and More. Yes, that's the name of the site and it's certainly quite a mouthful!

House Plans and More makes looking for home plans so much easier. There are hundreds (probably thousands) of different plans to choose from, and they are very convenient to search. It lets you specify the minimum and maximum values of the square feet within which you are looking for, the number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms you want. You can also fill in your budget, in the "estimated cost to build". The advanced search reveals plenty of more search criteria like number of floors, houses with courtyards and porches, split bedroom, side-entry garage or rear-entry garage and many more. In short, for every little dream you have about your future house, there is a search option available. To make the search results even more meaningful, you can specify which is the most important feature for you - the size, the number of rooms or the cost.

You can also search houses by type - coastal houses, cottage type, European type, New England type, Victorian type, Log house and so on.

And what about the plans? Boy! they are really beautiful. I have actually spent a long time looking at the houses!

The plan details for each floor, front view, rear view etc are available. These can be bought in various forms like Reproducible Master or a CAD package. The plans include foundation plans that specify the thickness of the walls, column location and all other technical parameters necessary in construction. Plumbing and electrical plans are also included.

Apart from house plans, you get construction designs and ideas for small backyard projects like a house for your dog, bird houses, easy chairs, picnic tables, fences, sheds, barns etc. This site is certainly a rich resource for house plans and designs as well as aspiring architects.

Are you a blogger? Then here is a chance for you to win some real goodies. Blog Tech Suave is holding a small competition for bloggers which he calls the "Aspiring Blogger Contest". Unlike other contests, this contest allows you to choose the prize you want when you enter the contest. According to the blog, since not everyone will be after the same prize the odds of winning for every participants is high. I think he has got a point there.

As for the prizes, they are really useful, specially if you are a blogger. After all, this contest is for the "aspiring bloggers". He is giving away four premium Wordpress themes - the Elite Wordpress Premium theme (2 copies), the Revolution Wordpress Theme (2 copies), the Mimbo Pro Wordpress theme (2 copies), the Video Flick theme (1 copy) and the TV Elements theme (1 copy). A total of eight premium Wordpress themes. There is more. You get 1 Year Web Hosting from Reel Suave, a few copies of ebooks, ad spots on his blog and some more. The total value of all the prizes is over $1000.

To take part in the contest you have to either subscribe to his blog, or add his blog to Technorati favorite and some other ways of entering the contest, all involving your taking part in some activity that is related to Tech Suave or the associated blogs. There are tickets to be won for doing any of the above things. The more number of tickets you win, the better are your chances of winning.

The contest will run throughout June and winners will be announced on July.

Blogger has rolled out some really big new features for it's popular blogging platform. Most of these additions should have been added a long ago, really. But I guess, Google has it's own way and own time of doing things. Anyway, here is quick synopsis of the latest features of blogger. As always, all these features are currently available only on blogger in draft. In other words, they are still in beta.

1. New post editor: The post editor is completely revamped. The first thing that you will notice are the improved looks of the buttons. But looks are secondary. We are after features and the new editor has lots of improved features. Firstly, images are handled better than done by the earlier editor. You can now add an image into your post exactly at the insertion point instead of at the top of the post. You can easily resize or remove an image with the image size “bubble.” Click on the image to bring up the bubble, and resize the image instantly.

The Edit HTML has also seen lots of improvement. Read more.

2. Embedded Comment Form: OMG! Finally Google has listened to the requests. The comment form will be now embedded on the bottom of the blog post instead of putting it on a separate page. You will have to change the code of your template to make this work. I will be testing this soon.

3. Star Ratings: With star ratings readers can now rate blog posts from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer. Read more on how to use this feature.

4. Import and Export Blogs: Blogger now allows you to import and export blogs either for easy backup are moving them into an entirely new blog. I'm not sure whether it allows you to import a Wordpress blog into blogger. We will just have to wait and see.

Apart from these major changes, there are numerous other small updates, features and fixes. This is certainly going to be one major boost to blogger.

[via Blooger in Draft]

The Human Calendar is a calendar made up of... well, humans. I have never seen such a calendar before. Why don't you take a look yourself?

This calendar is also available in a widget form. You get a code which you insert into your blog, website, Google homepage or Myspace. It looks like this:

The calendar will update automatically so that it always shows the current date. I like it. I might even put it up here in this blog :^)

Visit The Human Calendar next month to get July's calendar. Also see the human clock, Vertical and Horizontal Strip Calendar and Thumb calendar.

Phonevite is an exciting service that enables you to send phone messages to multiple persons, all at once. The ability to schedule calls makes it a much more useful service then just a mass party invitation sender. Phonevite can be used in a variety of different ways. You can schedule Phonevite to send reminders to yourself for important events like appointments, birthdays and even parties that you were invited to attend!

Phonevite is available in two forms - a free plan and a premium plan. The free plan allows you to broadcast phone messages to 25 persons at once while the premium plan allows you to call 2000 people, for a $0.05 per call. The Free plan can be used without even creating an account. Just enter your own phone number, along with a list of the numbers you’d like to call. A moment later your phone rings and the system prompts you for the message you’d like to send to your friends.

To avoid misuse by prank callers, the system requires you to place the call initially with a valid phone number and not from your PC. Also recipients can choose to opt-out of any future calls from Phonenvite.

Phonenvite is only available for US numbers.

Often you come across webpages that incorporate pop-ups that launch when you hover your mouse on top of a hyperlink. These pop-ups may contain definitions, tips or just ads. AppScott has written about a cool technique of adding such a pop-up to Word documents.

To create pop-ups in Word 2007, follow these steps

• Highlight the phrase to be defined and copy it to the clipboard
• Click the Insert tab
• Click Bookmark in the ribbon
• Paste the phrase in as the bookmark name, replacing any spaces with underscores
• Click Add
• Click Hyperlink in the ribbon
• In the Hyperlink dialog click the Bookmark button
• Select the bookmark you just created and click OK
• Click the Screen Tip button and enter your definition.
• Click OK

Now when the reader hovers the mouse over the underlined phrase the screen tip will appear. The phrase "Ctrl+click to follow link" will also appear, but by linking the phrase to the bookmark we've ensured nothing bad will happen if the reader does Ctrl+Click.

After Vista Customization Pack, Vista Transformation Pack, Vistamizer, and Vista Inspirat, the latest to join the group is Vistapack XP and 2000. Vistapack XP and 2000 is a little different from other transformation packs. Packs like Vistamizer, and Vista Inspirat replaces the system files with new files that gives Windows XP the Vista look. Vistapack XP and 2000 does not use new system files, rather it modifies the old system files using Resource Hacker to change icons, bitmaps and some dialogs, to make it look like the Windows Vista. The program keeps a backup of the earlier files so that you can always revert back to the old look.

Vistapack XP and 2000, as the name suggests, works with both Windows XP and 2000.

Adding some decorations to an image like a simple border or gloss makes the gallery visually appealing. Such effects are generally done using applications like Photoshop, which needs time and effort and not to mention, the skills. But using JavaScript and CSS you can produce the same effects without having to spend time editing the images. Who needs Photoshop when we can do create designs like these?

1. Web Designer Wall has created a Decorative Gallery pack consisting of over 20 amazing styles, from a simple image icon to a rounded corner to a masked layer. See the demos (demo1, demo2, demo3) of some of the effects that can be applied.

2. Instant.js is a JavaScript that adds a border and tilt to the images

3. Mapper.js adds automatic area highlighting to image maps on your webpages

4. Reflex.js adds a reflection to the image.

5. Glossy.js adds a beautiful glossy 3D effect to buttons and images.

Is your system tray too crowded with icons? If yes, then you can save some space by moving the clock from the system tray on the right to the start button. Why do you need to have the word "start" on the start button anyway? Put this space to better use by making it to display the system time using a small utility called StartClock.

Unfortunately, this program works with only Windows XP and only if it is using one of the three default themes plus the classic look. Any skinning application like custom themes or WindowBlinds will render this program useless. Worse, the developer has stopped working on the program but he has left the source code for anybody who might want to continue it. It's sad that it works only with the default themes. Otherwise, it was a pretty useful tool.

If you liked a particular YouTube video so much that you want to view it again an again without bothering to click on the Replay button every time, then there is a Greasemonkey script to do that for you.

Loopy for YouTube, adds a small button below the video that allows you to play the video in an infinite loop. Of course, you can turn it off!

To play a YouTube video embedded in a page, in a loop, append the video URL with the loop parameter &loop=1. Example

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1

There are a few more parameters available that customizes the look of the player to your liking. View the complete list.

[via Google Operating System]

Generally, search engines are accessible only through the browser. But why? Why can't we search for a word we found in a Word document? Why can't we directly go to a web address found on a text file? These are some of the handicaps of desktop applications that will disappear once you start using Transfz.

Transfz contains multiple tools within it. The most prominent among them is the universal search agent. Transfz allows you to search for any keyword on popular online search engines from virtually anywhere. Just highlight the word you want to search and press Ctrl+D (can be changed) to launch the Global Menu. From there you can select on which search engine you want to search. The default search engines that come along with the program includes Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, Amazon, IMDB, Torrentz ..... etc. Other search engines like Flickr, StumbleUpon, MySpace and a host of others can be downloaded and installed. You can even add your own custom search engines to Transfz. Once you click on a search engine, the default browser will be launched and the search results displayed like usual search operations.

You can assign hotkeys to these search engines so that you can launch the search directly, bypassing the Global Menu. For instance, if you assign Ctrl+G for Google, then just selecting a word on any application and pressing Ctrl+G will directly perform a search for the word in Google. Brilliant!

Transfz can do more.

• There is a bunch of text manipulation utilities that can perform such actions like convert a selected text to lowercase or uppercase, capitalize the first letter, count number of words and characters in the selected text, insert date and time, search and replace and a few more.
• Transfz has a clipboard manager that remembers the last 5-30 entries of copied text. Select any text and click on a previously copied text from the clipboard to automatically replace the selected text.
• Using the OpenURL option you can select a plain text URL and open it directly in your browser.

There are several other micro applications or extensions that can be installed to add more functions.

• The Textmagnifier extension magnifies whatever text is currently selected
• OnTopToggler can toggle any window forced "ontop" of the other windows on screen
• Twitter can post directly to your Twitter account
• Remove Carriage Returns extension removes line breaks - tired of manually fixing text that has been copied from email? This one to the rescue!
• AddToNotepad sends and appends data to any open Notepad window, perfect for quick research.

In short, Transfz is a brilliant little application and you are really going to enjoy using it.

Download Transfz

Related: JiveQ integrates search with every Windows application

When you share any web page containing an article or news with other people online, often you might want to draw their attention to some particular lines or quotes in that article. Maybe you are interested with only those particular lines on that page. In that case, you send them an email or a message along with the link telling them to read "the eighth line through fifteenth of paragraph four". Or instead you can use Awesome Highlighter.

Awesome Highlighter is very clever online service that allows you to highlight texts on a page and then send the page to others with the highlight turned on. First, enter the URL of the page you want to highlight and then click Highlight Page.

The page will then load with a bar on top that contains some tools for highlighting. Select the text and then click Done. Awesome Highlighter will then generate a short URL which you can share with others online. You can also select multiple parts of the page before clicking on Done. There is however a limit of 2000 characters which is the maximum number of characters you can select.

The sharing URL when viewed in a browser will load the original page along with your highlights and Awesome Highlighter's bar on top with links to the original page. See this example. There is also an Add Note button but for some reason it is not working.

Awesome Highlighter does not require any registering to use this service.

If you are having a hard time keeping people away from your computer whenever you have to leave your desk for a few minutes, then you can make your message clear by putting up this hilarious screensaver.

Mouse gestures is cool. But the main problem with it is remembering the gestures! Mouse gestures were supposed to make page navigation easier but without any visual guide, it needs too much effort to actually use it. So easyGestures brings a visual pie menu that pops up inside the browser when you click the mouse and then let you perform various actions at the tip of the mouse pointer. The result is: easier mouse gestures that require no memorizing.

SideSlide is a portable, unobtrusive dock for the desktop. Like many Dock applications, SideSlide holds various utilities like an RSS news feeds, shortcuts to files, folders and URLs you frequently visit, a command line for quickly executing various commands, add multiple notes, add multiple, sizable, pictures, a schedule reminders, save web snippets and more.

Ashampoo WinOptimizer is an easy-to-use suite consisting of various tools for maintaining and optimizing your Windows computer.

Go-OO is a free open source office suite based on the popular open source product OpenOffice.Org. Work on Go-OO was started last year with the purpose of including new features and fixes that do not get easily integrated in the OO.o-build. Go-OO offers several improvements over OpenOffice like support for:

Look at your task manager now. How much CPU are you using? Probably less than 5%. Most of the time the computers that are used at homes and in offices are woefully underutilized. On the other hand, some research works trying to find solutions to real world problems are facing an acute shortage of computers. These research projects produce such enormous quantities of data that they often lack the computing power required to analyze them. Instead of wasting CPU cycles, how wonderful it would be if we could allow our computers to be used in these research? Such an arrangement is made possible by what is know as distributed computing, and such distributed computing projects has been around for quite a number of years with millions of people already taking part in it.

Last week Opera 9.5 finally came out of beta after nearly 8 months. It was the most awaited release after the tremendous performance and feature improvements shown by it's beta releases. Among the number of new additions made to the latest version I have singled out these three that I consider indispensable.

CSS can be a very powerful tool in the hands of a web developer. Some CSS techniques can do wonderful things to your site. Here I have shown 3 nifty tricks that you can do with background images.

Nowadays, most people use large monitors and widescreen has become the preferred aspect ratio for both television and monitors. Unless you are watching a movie, which is most likely to be widescreen, there are just too much empty space on a widescreen monitor. One way to put this unused space to productive use is to use a sidebar. Now there are a couple of sidebar applications out there. Google desktop has one and Windows Vista already comes with the sidebar installed. But these sidebars doesn't have the same usefulness as this freeware application called Desktop Sidebar.

Retrievr provides a cool and funny way of searching Flickr. You don't have to type in your keywords, rather sketch them on a small drawing pad. You can also search by uploading pictures from your computer. Previously, I had written about such a search engine called TinEye. But Retrievr is different. It doesn't look for exact matches, rather it searches for similar shape and color. Retrievr seems to give more importance to color than the shape of the sketch, though occasionally it does return some fairly accurate results.

During the days of yore, radios were pretty much the only form of entertainment available before television, movies and of course the Internet took over. Radio provided every form of entertainment like plays of mystery, comedy, drama, soaps apart from news and music. Those old radio programs are now replaced my music, music and more music periodically interrupted by those irritating radio Djs with their nonsensical and idiotic talks.

Old Radio World will bring, quite ironically, a breath of fresh air with old radio programs of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Stories of Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Flash Gordon, plays like Les Miserables, western dramas, vintage commercials and even World War II news broadcasts. The audio files are available in the MP3 format for download. It's pity, the old Indian Vividh Bharati programs aren't there.

Dizzler is a free streaming music and video player for your desktop. Dizzler is also available as a widget that can be embedded in your website, blog, MySpace etc and then your playlist shared with others. Dizzler gives you access to over 3 million free full length songs, of remarkable quality, as well as videos from YouTube, Internet radio and flash games. 

In order to play music on Dizzler you will have to register and get a Dizzler account. Then you can login via the desktop player, the player widget you embedded on your site or through Dizzler's site.

Once you are logged in, you can search for literally any music you want. You can browse through the most popular searches on Dizzler, or just create a playlist of random songs. Perhaps the best addition is the Internet radio. You can browse through radio stations by genre, county or state. Then there are videos, which are basically YouTube videos and also flash games. Saving the songs to the hard disk is easy, though it isn't an option in Dizzler. Just use a download manager that monitors the the clipboard and URL for downloadable files. I use DAP. As soon as I click on a song in the desktop player it automatically captures the URL and asks me whether I want to download it. This isn't working with the embedded widget on a website though.

Dizzler adds a social touch to the media player by allowing users to share playlist with others. The Who's Online button let's you find others who are currently logged in.

Dizzler makes are great streaming media player and also a great search engine to find and download songs.

Mango, though a rather strange name for a program, provides a neat solution for managing our favorite web applications. Mango converts web applications or simply websites into an executable file that runs directly on the desktop on it's own window independent of the browser installed on your system. An executable file of a website means that to open this site, it neither requires to have Mango installed on the computer nor even a browser. You can convert your favorite sites into EXE files, carry them with you on a pen drive and access them from any computer with an internet connection. What's more? You can even lock these executable files with a password so that no one else can access these sites.

The web applications are configurable, like you can add your own icons or add a splash screen to the file and even create customizable menus, according to Mango's website, though I'm unable to figure out how to create menus.

The idea was good, but lack of some basic features can make it frustratingly difficult to use. For instance, there is no back button and no address bar. So if you click on a page there is no way of returning back to the previous page unless there is a link on the site like Home or previous etc. The developer needs to work out these problems. Let's wait and see what new features the next release brings in.

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GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Extraordinaire) is a survey of the inner part of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we reside. GLIMPSE provides us a view of the Milky Way in a way you have never seen it before. It's like Google Earth for the Milky Way. The images that GLIMPSE use come from instrument on board the Spitzer Space Telescope, one of NASA’s four “Great Observatories”. The telescope was pointed to 111,000 different positions in the sky and snapshots were taken in four different infrared wavelengths, creating a total of 444,000 images. The MIPSGAL survey followed up using the MIPS instrument with another 400,000 images at three longer infrared wavelengths. From all this data two images have been created that you can explore on GLIMPSE: the IRAC image, and the IRAC/MIPS image. If printed, each would be about 180 feet long! The GLIMPSE is actually a 180 feet long image of the Milky Way, the largest ever!

The surveys from which these images come has 100 times the sensitivity and over 10 times the resolution of previous surveys, allowing us to see stars and dusty objects throughout most of the Galaxy for the first time. The clarity of these images are awesome.

You can view the image with both the IRAC (Infrared Array Camera) on Spitzer, or the MIPS (Multiband Imaging Photometer.) This is done by moving a slider at the bottom-left which changes the wavelength of the image revealing various structures in the galaxy which are otherwise invisible.

The "map" of the Milky Way is marked at important locations like a nebula, or a supernova. The images are so detailed you could almost see the individual stars.

You can download this 180 feet long, 5 billion pixel image if you want. The image is available for download in 16 blocks.

Celebrations are often accompanied by fireworks. Whether it's New Year's eve or World Cup final or something personal like a wedding or birthday. Why should then, your website not have any? Before you continue this article, I want you to first have a glimpse of the effect in this demo.

Impressive, isn't it? This firework was created using Fireworks.js coded by Scott Schiller. Visit Fireworks.js and look at the various effects that you can generate by moving the sliders and clicking on Fire. Download the JavaScript and after you have finished playing with the sliders, return back here for the tutorial.

Alright, so here is how to implement it on your website.

Extract the contents of the zip file. Inside there are several folders and files, but we will require only three. Upload the following files to your server -

images/particles.gif
script/fireworks.js
style/fireworks.css

There is also a sound manager, but we will omit that.

Now include the following lines before the </head> tag on your page.

Now inside the <body> of the page, include the following lines:

Now comes the actual part of calling the JavaScript function that will create the fireworks. The syntax of the function is such:

createFirework (Radius, Particles, Circles, burstType, startX, startY, burstX, burstY, Randomize explosion pattern, Obey window boundaries)

Radius is the radius of the explosion (value 1-100)
Particles is the number of particles per explosion (value 1-200)
Circles is the number of concentric circles in the explosion (value 1-8)
BurstType indicates the primary color of the explosion (value 1-7)
StartX is the originating X axis of the explosion
StartY is the originating Y axis of the explosion
BurstX is the detonation X axis
BurstY is the detonation Y axis

By adjusting the values of this variables, you can create different patterns. Some examples are already included in the zip file you downloaded.

A sample function code looks like this:

To launch fireworks automatically when the page loads, use this code

To launch fireworks when clicked on a link, use this code

Have fun!

What is the best feature in any modern browser? You must have already guessed it. Yes, it's definitely the tabs. Tabbed browsing became so popular that now we have tabbed explorer and tabbed notepads. Then WinTabber went a step ahead and added tabs to all applications. Well, WinTabber doesn't actually add tabs to the application, rather it runs application in tabs inside the WinTabber window thus keeping the taskbar items organized and clean.

WinTabber's window itself contains nothing. You have to load applications into it. For this you start the programs as usual from the start menu. Then click on File>NewTab in WinTabber and select the opened windows you want to load. Once you click OK, these applications will be removed from the taskbar as well as the desktop and transferred into WinTabber's window, and lined up in tabs, just like in a browser. Each application now runs in their own tab within WinTabber. You can open as many WinTabber windows as your taskbar can hold. Each WinTabber window will hold various application in tabs. Programs can be released from WinTabber whenever needed. The extra space occupied by the tab bar and the menu bar at the top reduces the viewable area of the monitor by a couple of pixels, but that shouldn't be a problem on large monitors. Besides, the bars can be disabled from showing.

WinTabber running Media Player, Explorer, Firefox, GTalk and Opera in tabs.

One problem with WinTabber is programs with multiple windows aren't displayed correctly inside WinTabber's window. For example, Adobe Photoshop had multiple floating windows which hung on top of other applications and caused obstruction when I tried to move it into WinTabber. Similar problems were caused by Winamp which has multiple blocks each one for equalizers, playlist etc. But there is no real need to run Winamp in tabs, so this isn't a big issue. The one application, however, that I find extremely happy to use with WinTabber is MS Word. Give this program a try, you might love it.

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Replace Windows explorer's address bar with Explorer Breadcrumbs

You must have already seen it, Google's new favicon. It became the talk of the whole Internet. However, not many people are too happy with the change, including me. I liked the old favicon, colorful and with a capital G, as with Google. Google starts with a capital G, it's not google (even Windows Live Writer has underlined it with a red wriggling line). The new icon is so bland. If you hate Google's blue icon like me, then there is a way to get back the old one.

This will work only if you are using Firefox, because the solution to Google's favicon "issue" is by way of using a userscript. The Google's Old Favicon userscript was created the same day Google changed it's favicon, 30th of March 2008. You will need the Greasmonkey script installed to use this userscript.

Before and after:

Often when you type, the mouse cursor gets in your way and obscures your text. This tiny application called MouseAway was created for solving this problem. MouseAway checks if your mouse pointer is near your keyboard pointer. If it is too close, MouseAway will move the mouse pointer away so that you can see where you are typing. See the animation below.

MouseAway is extremely light and takes just 40KB when running.

[via LifeHacker]

The Minimap extension gives you a suite of in-built maps and mapping tools for your web browser. With Minimap you don't have to go to Google Maps any more. You get Google as well as Yahoo and Live Local directions, right on your browser just by dragging and dropping addresses into the sidebar! Simply highlight an address on a webpage and drag the text over to MMS and you’ll instantly get a map. Store a default home address and you can get directions with one

You can search the map as you would on the main map page, as well as get the latitude/longitude of a location and even generate code to embed a map on your site or e-mail a link.

MMS can also preview KML files before opening them in Google Earth and find places reviewed at Platial and Tagzania. Other nice searches include looking on Upcoming for nearby events, as well as Amazon for books about a location and Ebay for tickets and the like. The easiest way to access all these features is the right-click a location in the MMS list and chose the desired option.

Download Mini Map Sidebar

[via Wired]

Driver Magician is a software that provides an easy solution for device drivers backup, restoration, update and removal. It identifies all the hardware in the system, extracts their associated drivers from the hard disk and backs them up to a location of your choice. Then when you format and reinstall/upgrade your operating system, you can restore all the "saved" drivers just as if you had the original driver diskettes in your hands.

Vector images are made up of many individual, scalable objects. These objects are points, lines, and curves defined by mathematical equations rather than pixels, so they always render at the highest quality. The biggest advantage of vector images is they are scalable, which means that you can enlarge a vector image several times and never lose the quality. Bitmap or raster images on the other hand, become pixelated when zoomed and individual pixels become visible. This does not happen with vector images because vector images construct an image from mathematical equations. The downside of vector images however, is that it has to be relatively simple. A photograph consisting of millions of different colors and shades is impossible to convert into vector while maintaining the same clarity. Vector images however has a distinctive look and feel.

Do you have too many favorite websites? Are you unable to decide which one to set as homepage? Don't worry, What Page has a peculiar solution to your problem.

Making models with paper was something we all used to do and enjoy as a kid. Paper folding is quite an art and most of us didn't get any far than the paper boat and the paper plane. But there are hundreds of different objects that you can make by folding paper, without using a scissor or glue. The art of paper folding dates back to the 6th century in China. During the same century it was carried to Japan where it began to be know as Origami. It was only during the 1960's the art of origami began to spread out. Origami is now an international art and there are dozens of websites dedicated to it.