You have to see this video to believe it. According to TEXYT, a company called Silverbrook Research recently unveiled "astounding videos of desktop, photo and wide-format printers that print pages and photos 5 to 10 times faster than products from current printer market leaders HP, Canon, , a company called SilverbrookEpson and Lexmark."
Should I have put an ! at the end of that title? I thought it called for one, but I'm leery of sounding like an idiot. Anyway, let's set that aside and talk about text editors. Some of you out there will never need one. Many of you will and do. Text editors are the applications used to edit text, but only a certain type of text: Coding text. Like html, .ini and .log files. Of course simple text editors can also be used for more or less interesting text, but other applications are better suited for those purposes.
Google Pack makes it easy to setup and protect your PC, and now we've added two new applications to make your PC even safer: Symantec's Norton Security Scan, which detects and removes viruses, and PC Tools' Spyware Doctor Starter Edition, a top-rated anti-spyware utility. Both are free and include automatic protection updates with no paid subscription required.
We've also substantially updated our screensaver. Now you can turn your computer into a digital picture frame that displays pictures from photo feeds—continuously updated streams of photos from the web. Many of your favorite photo-sharing sites support them already, so it's easy to keep in touch with your friends and family this way.
If you don't know what emoticons are, you may know them as "smiley faces." They are those little faces we insert into our emails or IMs that help the recipients know how we are feeling. They enable us, for instance, to write as if we are burning with a ferocious wrath (which we are), but soften the flames with a cute smiley. Or whatever expression you want to convey. Emoticons began with simple combinations of keystrokes that stood for an emotion, like :-) for happy, or >:-( for angry, or *-[+}} for existential angst. Pretty soon, technology advanced to the point where we could insert more realistic faces, little round yellow things that looked like the faces of little yellow people.
Lifehacker's Rick Broida puts together a great article on choosing the best start page for your browser. You know, it's the page that comes up when you first open your browser in the morning (or whenever you open it, it doesn't matter...). You want (if you are a rational person) a page that has everything you want to look at to start your browsing day. News the way you like it, weather, sports, feeds, email, etc., all arranged to suit your tastes. There are basically 5 big dogs in this hunt: Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Windows Live and Yahoo. Each allows you to personalize a start page with the elements you want and some nifty gadgets to boot.
(Sensitive readers, please substitute "Making the Web Work for You" for the title of this post.)
For Yahoo! Widgets 4 that is. Some very nice new features make this a great update to an already excellent product. Widgets are objects with various types of functionality that sit on your desktop and pull information from the Internet without you having to search with your browser for it. Everything from weather to games, from calenders and to-do lists to sports scores, are available among thousands of widgets, and new ones are being created every day. The new Widget engine adds a nice new dock to help you organize your widgets. Check it out here.
Are you a would-be blogger? You'd blog, except for the fact that you don't want the heavy lifting that goes with blogging...mainly the obligation to post something extraordinarily witty on a daily basis, as well as the imagined or real learning curve associated with designing your blogging web site. Perhaps you've started a personal blog but waved the white flag somewhere down the road for essentially the same reasons.
Thanks to Lifehacker for these tips: If you aren't using a personalized Google home page, you might orta. Google has a cornucopia of gadgets available that together can make your Google home page the be-all and end-all of web pages. I was just now convinced to make it my default page for my Firefox installation.
