Web review

This feature of Windows 7 (its correct name is “Aero Peek“) is often hated by users that want to be free moving the mouse anywhere in the screen, without that anything happens.
The new “show desktop” corner in the right is a really good idea and I use it everyday, but I also prefer to click on it – when I want to minimize everything: it’s really rare that I want only to take a little… preview of what is going on my desktop.

Disabling only the “mouse over” version is really simple: just click with the right mouse button on the Windows Taskbar and choose “properties”, then uncheck the option “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop“. That’s all! Now you can click on the show desktop button, but hovering it will do nothing.

The Internet’s got a new talent: that damn hole in the Gulf of Mexico that is spilling roughly 200.000 gallons of oil a day into the ocean. For the moment, every attempt from BP to stop it has failed; in compensation, they had no problems with the installation of a camera that broadcast from deep underwater a live video feed of the oil spill.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

(Sorry, the original video feed is only in Windows Media format, if you have problems I suggest to search on a live video site like Ustream, to find an alternative source)

It could sounds ironic, but the main feature I miss from Windows Seven – when I’m using a PC with Windows XP – it’s that little button on the bottom-right corner of the screen. It has the same functionality of the old “Show desktop” button on XP, but its position allows me to “launch” the mouse in that direction, without any precision, and click it to get all windows hidden.

Of course, someone released a tiny (and free) utility to backport this feature to 9 years ago, on Windows XP
It doesn’t need to be installed, just download and start it (and maybe put it into the “startup” section of your Start Menu)!

http://ceiiular.deviantart.com/art/Show-Desktop-133022210

I was looking for a complete solution to keep the office PC with my laptop in sync: SugarSync does more: it offers a free 2.5Gb storage space to synchronize an unlimited number of folders between two computers; in addiction, they gives you a mobile application – available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry – to access your file also in mobility.

You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website

Waze is born from a simple and smart idea: connecting cars together, to automatically create a new “social network” that detects and gives alerts about traffic conditions, police traps and accidents.

You’ve only to install the Waze client, free and available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile, starting it everytime you’re driving your car. It will anonymously record your track  to inform other drivers about traffic (Waze collects speed informations from all the phones and it creates statistical alerts). You can also send “human” messages to the community, reporting speed cams or dangerous events on the road.

In addiction of this, Waze is a “normal” car navigation system, with a “not-so-normal” feature: also the maps are drawed and updated by the community! When you drive with Waze running on your phone, it records every your move and it sends it to Waze servers, where the centralized system merges this data with the existing maps. When several phones record a difference (because, for example, of a change of a road) this part of the map is updated.

People from United States are luckier than Europeans, because USA government gives maps of the territory for free, so there’s a complete base to start with. Anyway it’s also possible to start from scratch: we just started to draw maps here in Italy, and major cities like Rome or Milan are already half-mapped. Let’s call Waze the Wikipedia of streets

www.waze.com

Digiarty Software informed me that they began an interesting giveaway for their new DVD Authoring software: you can download WinX DVD Author and get a free unlimited license, until the end of the month. Next, the cost will be USD 29.95.

WinX DVD Author is able to create DVD-Video directly from a variety of formats (AVI, ASF, MPEG, MKV, MP4, MOV, RM, RMVB, XIVD, DVIX, H264, OGG, Quicktime, FLV, etc).
You can also add a custom menu and choose between several type of supports (DVD, DVD-DL, DVD+RW, etc.). The software is multilanguage (English, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish are only a part of supported languages).

The special giveaway offer is here:
http://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/oct09.htm

I already talked about my problems with the SCX-4200 printer, with Samsung drivers for Linux and Ubuntu 8.10. Now I discovered that the newer model I bought, the SCX-4300, has a disagreeable system to check the level of the ink in the toner, with a chip mounted on original toners from Samsung.
When the level is near to the end, the printer gives error and stops. In other words, it disallow you to use all the ink; in addiction of this, you can’t use compatible toners because they doesn’t have the chip, so the printer doesn’t restart even after you replace it.

Gabriele Piscitelli published the complete procedure to enter the service mode of your Samsung SCX-4300 printer, flash it and reset the ink counter. I translated the tutorial in english and I want to share it with you. read full post »

While we are waiting for BLUntrl, a very promising application that is partecipating to the Windows 7 “Code 7 Contest”, I want to put highlight an interesting little utility: ScreenBright (aka “ScreenWhite”) is able to control your monitor brightness, contrast and color balance, directly from Windows.
ScreenWhite is really basic, but it represent one of the few Windows applications that can communicate directly with the hardware of your monitor throught DDC/CI. A lot of monitors have uncomfortable commands, so it can be useful if you want to quickly change the brightness of your screen, several times a day.

A lot of Google Chrome users are experiencing problems with page scrolling in Windows, that is too fast with several devices (mouses and touchpads). It seems that there isn’t any “official” fix for this behaviour, but you can resolve this with a little freeware utility, KatMouse.

Just download it from the author’s site and install it. First of all, you’ve to open the Wheel Button tab and choose “None of the buttons” from the list (this feature isn’t useful and it can give you usability problems in Windows). Then, switch to “Classes” tab and start Google Chrome: drag and drop the KatMouse “target” icon to the main section of Chrome windows (the one where web sites are rendered); you’ll see a new item named “Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND” in the KatMouse list: double click it and choose “Custom scroll”, then set it to “1″ and confirm with OK.

That’s it!

Don’t be evil is the famous Google slogan. Since some time, it seems that something is changing: last week they contacted Cyanogen, the author of the most famous “unofficial” firmware for Android phones, telling him to stop the distribution of these releases; the problem comes from the fact that Android code is open source, but Google applications that are shipped with it (Google Talk, YouTube, Android Market…) are not.

This contradiction bring the impossibility to build a fully working ROM (if the developer can’t release a firmware with Android Market, final users can’t even download the other Google Apps!). Cyanogen has confirmed his intention to respect Google copyright, so he will continue to develop new firmware without any proprietary component, but the final solution is still incomplete. Let’s wait to see if this story will have a happy ending.

see also:

CyanogenMod home page: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

“A Note on Google Apps for Android“, from the Google official Android developers blog.