Instant Fundas

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. Open Device Manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager) The hardware whose drivers are missing will appear as Unknown device , so it's easier to locate the device. Right click on the unknown device and click on Properties . Under the Properties window click on Details tab and select Device Instance Id from the drop down box. You should see a code similar to this PCI\VEN_ 8086 &DEV_ 27DC ...

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 happ...

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 ]

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 how...

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 bas...

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 ]

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.