The Firefox 3 Location Bar which is also known as the Awesome Bar displays different kinds of data. One user complaint is that one cannot visually distinguish the data. The user Ben created a style to display different colors depending on the type of data that is displayed in a line. Basically tags are displayed in light yellow, bookmarks in blue and history items in light green after installing that user style in Firefox.

This does work pretty well in conjunction with the Cybersearch add-on by Ryan from Cybernetnews that displays search results on a white background. All in all you got three or four background colors instead of just one which is great for distinguishing results on the first glance.

The easiest way to install this style is by installing the Stylish add-on first and then that new user style.

continue reading "Display Colored URLs in Firefox 3 Awesome Bar"

USB Image Tool is a lightweight portable software that can create backups of USB devices. It detects pretty much every USB device that I’m connecting to an USB port including my Apple iPod Nano. It did however not detect my mobile phone that I connected to the computer as a test.

The main interface consists of three buttons for the restore, backup and rescan functions. The rescan button is helpful if an USB device is not automatically recognized by the application which is the case when a card is changed in a card reader.

The data of the USB device is stored in a compressed format on the hard disk of the computer from where it can be burned to disk for safekeeping. The software does not only come with an option to backup USB devices to create USB images but also to restore them. It would be possible to backup the data of your iPod and later restore that image again. I’m not sure but it could work to replicate the data on another device of the same kind.

continue reading "Backup and Restore USB Images"

If you’re a fan of skinning your apps you probably already know all about user styles for web pages. There’s a great plugin for Firefox that enables you to change the look of webpages using css called Stylish. Once you have it, you can download (or create) user styles and change the look of any website with the push of a button.

If you want an awesome style for your Google Calendar take a look at the sleek design by Globes Designs innovatively called Google Calendar Redesigned. If you like a darker theme with a bit more contrast this is definitely for you. User styles are not always implemented well with choppy bits everywhere, but this design is totally beautiful.

You will be glad to know they have a Gmail design as well (in fact this spurred the calendar design) called Gmail Redesigned. This is essentially the same thing for your favorite email client, so you can have the same design throughout these two Google services. I you know any more cool user styles please let us know, I’d love to take a look at some!

continue reading "Redesign your Google Calendar with a custom skin"

It’s Olympic year and this time we’re heading to Beijing to watch the best athletes in the world battle it out for glory. If you’re lucky enough to actually be going to Beijing for the Olympics, then you’re sure to enjoy yourself. However, if you’re like me, you have to make do with trying to watch it online.

NBC holds the rights to the Games and they’ve gone the online way by tying up with software TVTonic. The tie-up offers users the chance to download videos of Olympic events for free. In addition, you can also watch each event online with TVTonic 12 hours after it finishes, which is fine when you’re halfway around the world and are sleeping during the live event.

continue reading "Watch the Olympics with TVTonic"

Have you been watching videos lately on Youtube ? A judge ordered Google to hand over all video history data of the website to Viacom which is suing Google since 2007 for publishing copyrighted clips on Youtube. History data includes IPs and possible usernames of users who watched videos on Youtube and third party websites which probably includes every single human being on this planet.

Additionally Google will have to turn in every video that they took down from the website after it was published there. The logs have to be handed over on a set of four Terabyte hard drives but it is very likely that Google will appeal the decision.

It’s interesting to note that Viacom “also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema.” (according to Wired)

continue reading "Judge orders Google to hand over Youtube User Data to Viacom"