If you have a widescreen monitor I’m sure you’ve wondered at some point how you can maximize the extra virtual real estate that it provides. If you’re like me then you’d consider getting TreeStyle Tab extension for Firefox.
The free extension lets you move your tab list from the left or right of the screen. Actually, you can even place it at the top or the bottom if you choose. This customization allows you to take advantage of space and giving you a personalized way of surfing using tabs.
I won’t lie. It’s a little disorienting at first, and I found myself still mousing to the top of my Firefox window from time to time, but it’s definitely a nice change now that I’m used to it. As an added bonus, stretching the tab bar to fill more of the blank space mean seeing more informative – or at least longer – titles than you would with the Liliputian default tabs.
Right-clicking the tabs allows to to expand and collapse all tab trees, and you can, of course, still drag-and-drop your tabs to re-order them.
I prefer the simplicity of TreeStyle, but if you’re looking for a more feature-rich solution you may want to try Tabextensions 3. It’s got a few more tricks up it’s sleeve, like thumbnail previews and performing actions on multiple tabs.
Tags: Firefox, Mozilla
Categories: Applications
As more and more people seek to get their hands on free music, more control has been put in place due to the huge amount of profits lost due to piracy. The problem is global and has become one of the most debated issues of today’s technology circles. Though most technology used in the piracy trade has roots in consumer electronics, they are always surely derived from some form of computer piracy which is used to obtain them from their sources. From illegal file sharing like P2P sites to illegally copied DVD’s and CD’s, they are all result of the utter failure of DRM software which was used to control them in the past.
They were either too obtrusive (denying full enjoyment of the product through huge overhead requirements) or too wasteful of resources (computer memory and processor power that nothing else can be done). The other side is that people always want a sense of control over their world as with hackers (who own and operate P2P sites and promote piracy all over the world) void of the constraints of laws and technology. It seems as if the battle for control between business and personal wants would always necessitate the cat and mouse game between people who want it and people who want to earn from it (music and video).
Proponents of free everything over the internet have been finding it harder and harder to share and copy files over the internet due to new and stiffer penalties imposed on those who are caught doing so. The new and improved anti-piracy laws carry stiff penalties and users risk even getting their internet service cut-off by providers should they be found and caught repetitively doing so. The next arena where conflict would arise would be the fact that the new search and discovery laws are indeed invasive for law enforcement are allowed to seize and conduct search on all if not most of suspected devices that may hold pirated materials. Proposals that would allow law enforcement to search wireless enabled devices without you even knowing about it is alarming for along with any possible pirated stuff, all the contents of your gadgets and gizmos can be copied along with it. There is a thin line between search/discovery and privacy that it is heavily debated over and over again to ensure that all basis are covered.
Any flaws in laws are quickly discovered and overcome by piracy advocates to allow them to continue with their illegal activities. Hopefully, stiffer laws and higher penalties would dissuade piracy allowing better control over media where DRM has utterly failed. Some media firms have even resorted to handing out free tracks and other freebies to get more to buy the legal stuff and they have also lowered subscription rates to online services allowing as low as $0.50 cents. Many other marketing strategies have been taken to dissuade and turn previously illegal users to turn legal but there are still millions of illegal users who use illegal songs downloaded from web sites and other sources. In my country, a trip to some malls can have you loaded with tons of illegally copied cds and dvds for a fraction of the cost of the originals even with regular police action.
Categories: Freeware, Random Thoughts
It was announced that the preview of Camino 2.0 has been released.
Camino is an emerging star in the Mac environment. It is a browser that is increasingly being preferred by a growing number of users over Firefox and Safari. Camino uses Gecko like Firefox but its emphasis is on speed rather than extensibility.
One of Camino 2.0′s new features is the tab overview mode that shows the thumbnails of the tabs active on the browser. This makes managing a huge number of tabs easier. The browser history now also shows a list of recently closed pages.
Tags: browser, Camino
Categories: Applications
People who love to download stuff on the internet are usually faced with a common problem. They usually run out of hard drive space without them knowing it.
that’s why Tray Disk Free is such a great app to have. This application is only 29k and a windows only software. What it does after installation is to go resident in your system and monitor all of the drives in a system. It only consumes a megabyte of RAM.
By clicking the tray icon, you’ll see the main window pop up. The taskbar button allows you to see a full display of all the free space on your hard drive as well as the percentage of total drive space.
Tray Disk has the ability to support command line arguments that allow you to specify which drives to monitor, the display bar color as well as the number of seconds before it updates again. You can actually open multiple instances of the application so you can monitor multiple drives at the same time.
You can download Tray Disk Free on this link. This app is for Windows only. A reminder to Windows vista owners. You will have to put the MSVBVM50.dll on the same folder as the executable of Tray Disk.
Tags: Hard Drive, Tray Disk Free
Categories: Applications
