Combine the Address & Search Bars in Firefox
Mar/100
The Search Bar in Firefox is very useful for finding additional information or images while browsing but the UI space it takes up can be frustrating at times. Now you can reclaim that UI space and still have access to all that searching goodness with the Foobar extension.
Note: This is about the Foobar Firefox extension and not to be confused with Foobar2000 the open source music player.
Before
If you have the “Search Bar” displayed there is no doubt that it is taking up valuable space in your browser’s UI. What you need is the ability to reclaim that UI space and still have the same access to your search capability as before…no more sacrificing one for a gain with the other.
After
As soon as you have installed the extension you can see that the top part of your browser will look much sleeker without the “Search Bar” to clutter it up. The “Search Engine Icon” will now be visible inside of your “Address Bar” as seen here.
You will be able to access the same “Search Engine Menu” as before by clicking on the “Search Engine Icon”.
There are two display modes for search results (setting available in the “Options”). The first one shown here is “Simple Mode” where all results are in a condensed format. Notice that not only are there search suggestions but also “Bookmarks & History” listings as well. You can literally get the best of both when conducting a search.
Note: The number of entries for search suggestions and bookmark/history listings can be adjusted higher or lower in the “Options”.
The second one is “Rich Mode” where the results are shown with more details. Choose the “mode” that best suits your personal style.
For our first example you can see the results when we conducted a quick search on “Windows 7” (using the first of the three offerings shown from Bing).
Our second example was a search for “Flowers” using our Photobucket search engine. Once again nice results opened in a new tab for us.
Options
The options are easy to go through. It is really nice to be able to choose the number of results that you want displayed and the format that you want them shown in.
Note: Changing the “Suggestion popup style” will require a browser restart to take effect.
Conclusion
If you love using the “Search Bar” in Firefox but want to reclaim the UI space then you will definitely want to add this extension to your browser. The ability to customize the number of results and choose the formatting make this extension even better.
Links
Download the Foobar extension (Mozilla Add-ons)
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Combine the Address & Search Bars in Firefox
ESRB outs ‘Lips: I (Heart) the 80s’
Mar/100
For those of you looking to put your ’80s singing chops to the test, it would appear that iNiS will be offering you just that chance if a recent ESRB listing for a fourth installment in the Lips series is to be believed. “Lips: I (Heart) the 80s” was recently spotted by IGN over on the ratings website, sporting a description that reveals at least two tracks from the 1980s-centric title — The Police’s “Roxanne” and Rick James’ “Super Freak.”
The game is also said to feature “depictions of men and women in revealing outfits performing provocative choreography — for example, women in negligees, black bras, panties dancing inside a classroom; large amounts of exposed cleavage, some grinding dance moves; and background images of storefronts/signs reading ‘25 cent Peepshows,’ ‘Live Sex Theatre,’ and ‘Topless Girls Dancing.’” Gosh golly! Regardless, with the recent release of Lips: Party Classics and today’s ESRB listing, we have to imagine the official announce of Lips: I (Heart) the 80s is just around the corner. We’ll be prepping our boom boxes with plenty of Public Enemy until then.
[Via IGN]
ESRB outs ‘Lips: I (Heart) the 80s’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Manage Your Twitter Account from the Sidebar in Firefox
Mar/100
Are you a Twitter addict and need an easy way to manage your account in Firefox? Now you can access Twitter in your Sidebar or as a separate window with the TwitKit+ extension for Firefox.
Accessing TwitKit+
There are three ways that you can access TwitKit+ after installing the extension. The first is by adding the “Toolbar Button” to your browser’s UI.
The second and third methods are through the “View & Tools Menus”.
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TwitKit+ in Action
When you open TwitKit+ for the first time you will see Twitter’s “Public Tweet Stream”. To get started login into your account.
Note: If you do not care for the “brown theme” you can select a different one in “Preferences”.
Here is a closer look at the top area and the commands available. Notice the “blue arrow symbol” in the upper left corner…very useful if you want to separate TwitKit+ from your main browser window for a bit.
- Secure Mode, Undock, Preferences, Login/Logout
- Google Search, Twitter Search, Copy Selection To Status Box, Shorten Selected URL
- Public, User, Friends, Followers, @ Messages, Direct Messages, Profile
Note: To use Google or Twitter search enter your term in the “Status Area” and click on the appropriate service icon.
Here is the regular timeline for our account…the “clickable tab buttons” make everything easy to view and work with. You can perform actions such as replying, retweeting, marking as a favorite, etc. using the set of “management buttons” at the bottom of each tweet.
To add a new tweet to your timeline enter your text and press “Enter”.
A look at the “Following List” for our account. Having a more defined and separate “view categories” set makes this better than directly accessing the Twitter website.
Preferences
The preferences can be quickly sorted out…choose how often the timeline is updated, name display, favorite URL shortening service, theme, and font size.
Note: The default connection setting is for “Secure Access”.
Conclusion
TwitKit+ makes a nice addition to Firefox for anyone who loves keeping up with Twitter throughout the day. There when you want it and out of your way the rest of the time.
Links
Download the TwitKit+ extension (Mozilla Add-ons)
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Manage Your Twitter Account from the Sidebar in Firefox
Clues to Antarctica space blast
Mar/100
New research has revealed that a giant space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago. In an event similar to the Tunguska event …
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Clues to Antarctica space blast
This Wednesday: P.B. Winterbottom searches for pie on Xbox Live
Feb/100
We couldn’t be more excited for this week’s XBLA release. No, it’s not because we can’t wait to try out the whimsical, time-bending platforming of The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (800
/$10) … well, there’s that too. But really, we’re just excited that after Wednesday, we probably won’t have to type The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom too many more times.
Scoff all you want, but have you tried typing it? It’s exhausting! It’s long, there’s punctuation, there’s capitalization, it’s just a nightmare all around. We typed it twice in this post as a goof and we still regret it.
This Wednesday: P.B. Winterbottom searches for pie on Xbox Live originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This Wednesday: P.B. Winterbottom searches for pie on Xbox Live
How to Schedule Disk Cleanup in Windows 7 & Vista
Feb/100
It’s always a good idea to run regular maintenance tasks like Disk Cleanup on your Windows machine to help keep it running smoothly. Today we take a look at how to schedule a basic Disk Cleanup task, and how to use command line switches for a more advanced setup.
Schedule Disk Cleanup Basic
Windows includes some handy tools to help keep your machine operating smoothly. One such tool is Disk Cleanup that can remove temp and old files to help you reclaim some hard drive space. You might want to set it up to run weekly or monthly depending on what works best for you. To schedule Disk Cleanup to run on a regular basis we need to schedule a task. For this example we’re using Windows 7, but the steps are essentially the same in Vista as well.
Click on the Start Menu and enter task scheduler into the search box and hit Enter.
The Task Scheduler opens and you’ll want to click on Action then select Create Basic Task.
The Create Basic Task Wizard comes up and from here type in a name for the task and a description then click Next.
Now select how often you want Disk Cleanup to run…Weekly, Daily, Monthly, One Time…etc. There is not right or wrong answer to how often you run it. It’s completely up to you and you might want to try out some different schedules. In this example we’re going to select weekly.
Since we set it up to run weekly we need to schedule it when to start, how often it reoccurs, and which day of the week to run it.
Next under Action select Start a program…
?
In the Program/script field type in cleanmgr.exe
Or you can hit browse and select Disk Cleanup which is in C:Windows|system32cleanmgr.exe
Under Program/script you’ll see the path to Disk Cleanup as C:Windowssystem32cleanmgr.exe
Then you’re shown a summary of the scheduled task and if everything looks correct click on Finish.
For this basic setting we scheduled it for a time when we know the computer will be in use. When it’s time for the Scheduled Task to occur it will pop up and you can run it by selecting the drive to clean up.
Disk Cleanup starts its calculations…
Now the results and you can choose the files to delete.
Advanced Command Line Switches
While the above method is effective, you may not want to interact with the Disk Cleanup utility at all. Running a couple of command line switches will allow you to select what to have cleaned up and run everything automatically. To open the Command Prompt type cmd into the search box in the Start Menu and hit Enter.
With the Command Prompt open type in the following:
cleanmgr.exe /sageset:1
That will open the Disk Cleanup Settings dialog box where you can select the items you want Disk Cleanup to delete. You’ll notice there are a lot more options here than when you go through the GUI to cleanup files.
After selecting the files you want to be deleted in Disk Cleanup Settings click Ok to close out of the screen. The /sageset:1 command creates a registry key that saves the settings you entered.
Now go in and create your Scheduled Task like we showed previously, but this time you’ll want to add in /sagerun:1 into the Add argument field.
Now when Disk Cleanup runs it’ll retrieve those saved settings you created with /sageset:1 and you won’t need to interact with Disk Cleanup at all. It will run automatically and clean up the files you selected in Disk cleanup Settings.
Task Scheduler Error
When you launch Task Manager in Windows 7 you might get the following error message. It tells you to hit refresh but the error keeps coming back. It doesn’t seem to negatively affect anything you schedule, but it’s quite annoying.
?
From the research I’ve done on this error, there are a handful of different solutions that have worked for different people. On our system, the Disk Defrag Schedule was turned off, so we turned it back on and resolved the issue. On a separate Windows 7 system the Disk Defrag Schedule was already on (which it is by default) and turning it off cured the error. On another machine I had to turn it off then back on to fix the error message.??
Since this “rub your head and pat your belly” approach worked we didn’t try any other possible fixes. If you find it doesn’t work or have found another solution let us know in the comments.
Conclusion
If you use the advanced switches to run Disk Cleanup it actually offers a lot more choices. In the /sageset:1 switch, “1” is just an arbitrary number. You can enter any number you want, but make sure /sagerun:”x” corresponds to the number you used in /sageset:”x”. So you can customize the switches for different types of files you want to clean in Disk Cleanup Settings.
For example, maybe you only want to clean Temp Internet files during a cleanup session, then you could do /sageset:1 and /sagerun:1 for that. Then if you want to clean up all files you could use /sageset:10 and /sagerun:10 for that. The switches give you more flexibility in the types of files that are deleted during the Disk Cleanup session. Whichever method you use, or if you just want to run it manually, running Disk Cleanup will keep your drive free of unwanted files.
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Gain Access to a Search Box in Google Chrome
Feb/100
Do you miss having a search box in Chrome and would like to get one back? Then join us as we take a look at the Search Box extension.
Search Box Extension
Once installation is complete you will see your new “Magnifying Glass Toolbar Button” and a message concerning managing your extensions.
There are three ways to access the options. The first is by right clicking on the “Toolbar Button”.
The second is through the “Chrome Extensions Page”.
The third (and easiest) is in the drop-down window. Here you can see the default setup/look for Search Box.
When you go into the options you will be presented with a default list of search engines. Two of the searches engines start out as disabled but can be enabled with just the click of a mouse. Notice that you can edit the existing search engines and add new ones…you can really personalize Search Box to best suit your needs.
Here is what our search engines list and drop-down window looked like when we finished customizing our engine set.
Search Box in Action
We started off our testing with a search for “Windows 7” using Bing Singapore.
Note: Each time we reopened the drop-down search window Google displayed as the default search engine but we were able to select and use any engine that we desired.
As soon as we clicked on the “Search Button” a new tab was automatically opened with a list of search results as shown here.
For our next test we decided to search for “Windows 7” using the YouTube Search Engine.
Once again we had a new tab open up with a nice set of results for our search term. Very nice…
Our search on YouTube did result in one odd behavior…while we had the YouTube “search page” (and linked YouTube pages opened from it) focused the drop-down window displayed the search URL as shown here. The drop-down search box displayed as normal for any non YouTube pages we focused to the front.
Conclusion
While the Search Box extension may have a small “quirk or two” at the moment we were still well pleased with how it operated. If you have missed the search boxes available in other browsers this is definitely an extension worth trying out.
Links
Download the Search Box extension (Google Chrome Extensions)
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Mass Effect ‘Redemption’ issues flying off retailer shelves
Feb/100
If there’s one thing we can say the Mass Effect series has going for it (besides impressive graphics, interesting combat, and complex characters), it’s the great story. We may not be the types to invest in literature based on our favorite gaming franchises, but the first two issues of the Mass Effect comic — a series titled “Redemption” — may actually convince us otherwise. Heck, they’ve already turned lots of other folks; the first issue sold out in under three weeks and the second issue took just six days, according to CBR News.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that Redemption explores the actions of our favorite Asari while she searches for answers on Shepard before the story continues in Mass Effect 2 – can we help it if we miss her a bit? Okay, okay, we miss her a whole lot. Where have you gone, Liara?! We just wanna talk, baby!
[Via Big Download]
Mass Effect ‘Redemption’ issues flying off retailer shelves originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Is Atlantis buried in Spain ?
Feb/100
Archaeologists are searching for an ancient civilization in Spain that could help pinpoint the lost city of Atlantis. The Tartessian civilization deve…
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Is Atlantis buried in Spain ?
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Hands-on: The Path of Go (XBLA)
Mar/100
Ready to frustrate yourself forever? Learn the game of Go. It’s an ancient Chinese game that’s over four thousand years old, and games can last up to 16 hours in tournaments. Sounds just perfect for an adaptation into the frenetic world of video games, right?! Well, your wish is granted. The Path of Go or How We Came Up With A Proprietary Name For The Public Domain Game of Go is being developed in-house by Microsoft at the likewise excitingly named Microsoft Research Cambridge division.
We played the game briefly at GDC, and it’s actually very robust. It includes a tutorial where your avatar has some faux back and forth dialogue with an ancient Go master, in which he really does teach you the game. I tried reading an old instruction manual for a set of Go I found at a thrift shop once, and was so confused by terms like “ko” and proper stone placement that I just re-thrifted the set. Now, I’m ready to take on Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and kick his ass.
Additionally, the game features single player or two player both locally and through Xbox Live, multiple backgrounds, and full 3D environments where you can control the camera. There’s also an actual story mode in here, where you learn the nuances of the game in “beat the situation” scenarios while heading down a path. The … wait for it … Path of Go.
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