Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but on Wednesday Opera revealed a new “speed dial” feature that is currently available in their latest weekly release (thanks to XPGeek in our forum for pointing this out!). It’s actually been two-weeks since Opera announced that they were going to offer a unique feature in the next release, but they didn’t want to say what it was. After reading about the Speed Dial feature I felt like I had to give it a try because it sounded really nice.

The whole point of Opera Speed Dial is to make visiting your favorite 9 websites as easy as possible. Instead of opening a blank tab Opera will always show your Speed Dial sites along with corresponding thumbnails (pictured above). That way you can always see what is going on with your favorite sites.

Once you startup the latest weekly build of the browser you need to create a new tab to adjust your Speed Dial sites. Then you can click on any of the blank numbers and select a website from the list of your most frequently visited, or if it’s not listed you can manually enter in a URL. If that still isn’t easy enough for you then maybe you’ll want to drag an open tab onto a Speed Dial slot, which also happens to work.

After you get all of the slots filled that you want to, there are some things you should know that can help you out. First, you can remove any of the thumbnails by right-clicking on them and selecting “Delete” or by pressing the “X” in the upper-right corner. The next thing that you’ll probably find useful is refreshing the thumbnails, and you can refresh all of them by pressing Ctrl+R when viewing the Speed Dial page (you’ll see all of the pages as they load which is super cool). A specific Speed Dial site can be reloaded by right-clicking on the thumbnail and selecting the “Refresh” option.

Opera Speed Dial isn’t just about the thumbnails though, just like a phone you can instantly access your phone numbers thanks to the speed dial feature. To do this in Opera you can press Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 to open the corresponding site. I really like having keyboard shortcuts for my favorite sites.

One last thing that I wanted to mention about the new feature is that the search box located above your Speed Dial sites is used the same way as the search box located in the browser. It does not search the content of the sites that are in your Speed Dial list, but is there merely because the most common thing people do when creating a new tab is perform a search. Since Opera has teamed up with Yahoo! on this feature the search box is set to their search service by default, but it can always be changed in the search settings:

While I’m really impressed with this feature, I think the Opera team can take it one step further. They should let users right-click on a folder of bookmarks and have all of those bookmarks shown as thumbnails in a tab similar to Speed Dial. I would also like to see a feature implemented where Opera actually monitors the content of specified Speed Dial sites to notify you when a site has been updated, and then highlighting that thumbnail in the Speed Dial site. Those are the two ideas that initially popped into my head that would make it even more useful for me, but I’m sure most people will like the feature just the way it is.

Don’t be surprised if a Firefox extension emerges that does the same kind of thing.

Download the latest weekly release of Opera

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 16, 2010 by CyberNet.

We released the CyberSearch 2.0.5 Firefox extension this week which includes numerous bug fixes and support for Firefox 3.7 nightly builds, and the Snapback functionality is once again working the way I intended it to. Now when you click the Snapback button in the Address Bar it not only repopulates your search query, but also displays the drop down of the results immediately.

The main thing, however, I want to point out is our greatly enhanced “search this site” functionality. Judging by the feedback I received over the past few months I can now say that one of the most common uses for CyberSearch is to find information on the site your currently viewing. I talked with some friends, ran some ideas by them, and came up with what feels like the perfect solution.

Imagine you’re on a site like the New York Times. Previously if you wanted to search the site you’d have to put your “keyword” at the beginning of the URL, and then move to the end of the URL, type a space, and put in your search terms. Searching the New York Times for “Bill Gates” would mean your Address Bar looked something like this (note that “>” is the default keyword, but can be customized):

>http://www.nytimes.com/ bill gates

Don’t get me wrong, that will still work, but it can now be done in much fewer steps. With CyberSearch 2.0.5 all you have to do is jump up to your Address Bar, and type your keyword followed by your search terms. CyberSearch will automatically recognize that you’re wanting to search the current site, and will show results accordingly. The same New York Times example can now be accomplished by entering this into your Address Bar:

>bill gates

There is still some benefit to knowing the syntax in the first example though. If you’re on, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s site you can still search the New York Times by using any of the following:

>nytimes.com bill gates
>www.nytimes.com bill gates
>http://www.nytimes.com/ bill gates

Any of those will limit search results from the New York Times regardless of the site you’re currently viewing. CyberSearch 2.0.5 will basically assume that you want to search the current site if a URL is not provided.

Keep your feedback coming! And a big thanks to Peter and Edward who worked with me to resolve a Tab Mix Plus compatibility issue.

CyberSearch 2.0.5 Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

We’ve talked about Secunia’s online software inspector before. It doesn’t require that you download any application, and it operates completely through your browser. The purpose of using it is to find out-dated software on your computer. You may not see much of a threat in running an older version of an application, but your computer can be left vulnerable to attacks when it comes to things like web browsers or instant messengers.

A report by Secunia back in May stated that 28% of the applications being used are out-dated. With more than 33% of users running an old version of QuickTime, Secunia said "all it takes is one unpatched Quicktime vulnerability and a provocative video title to compromise a lot of visitors."

A new tool by Secunia called the Personal Software Inspector (PSI) hopes to make it easier for Windows users to know when there are new versions of their applications available. PSI is currently in a Beta state, but it is a free downloadable application that a user installs instead of being web-based like before. It examines the files on your computer (mostly EXE, DLL, and OCX files), and collects version information from them to be sent to Secunia’s File Signatures engine to make a comparison.

The great thing about this tool is that it sits in your System Tray constantly monitoring for more insecure software installations. If one is found it will give you the instructions needed so that you can upgrade to the latest version.

It’s important to know that this does not check for malicious software or whether your computer has already been compromised…it is just checking to see if you’re running the latest version of more than 4,200 applications.

Here are the benefits of using Secunia PSI:

• The Secunia PSI will be available free of charge
• Calculates your unique Secunia System Score
• Automatically scans your computer
• Enables you to update Insecure/End-of-Life software
• Provides Direct Download Links to security updates & patches
• Detects and advises on more than 4,200 applications
• Direct correlation between thousands of Secunia Advisories and your specific system and software
• Secure SSL encrypted connection to Secunia

I decided to try this out for myself on a computer I knew was running an out-dated version of Firefox (it’s my server which I don’t use for anything other than backups). I wanted to see what it would do, and what upgrade option it would offer me. It actually found that Internet Explorer 7 was out-dated as well as the version of the .NET Framework I was running. Firefox was the only one that offered a direct download link (clicking on it pulled up my default browser and initiated the download immediately), but the .NET Framework offered a link where I could receive more information:

Overall, I’m really impressed with this application and I think it has earned its place on all of my computers. It’s nice that Secunia is developing such an extensive application that is capable of monitoring more than 4,000 different programs for updates. I believe that it is the first of its kind to do this on such a large scale, and hopefully people will begin using it.

Download Secunia Personal Software Inspector
Thanks for the tip ’s’!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 22, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Earlier this week the first Beta release of Defraggler 2.0 was posted, which is a pretty big milestone for the software. This defragmentation utility is freely available, and this update serves as the first major milestone in nearly three years (Defraggler 1.0 Beta debuted back in November 2007). Interestingly enough the list of new features isn’t all that long, but when you’re talking about a Windows defragmenter program a lot of what you’ll want to see are things that happen behind-the-scenes.

The list of new features include:

• Offering complete offline defrag during the boot process with full OS support
• UI has been improved with a new Drive Map and customizations
• Rearchitected the internal defrag processes to make it faster and more efficient

While that list is short the last bullet encompasses a pretty big overhaul, and I see the boot-time defragmenting as a nice feature since it can be set as a one-time thing or at every boot. If you choose to use that option your machine will defrag before you even login to your system, which may mean that it will be able to reorganize some of the files on your system that would have otherwise been unmovable.

I look forward to them polishing this up a bit more, but in my brief tests this Beta worked well. Keep in mind that they don’t have this packaged as a portable release yet like they offer for their latest stable version, which may mean that some of you will want to hold off a bit if you were wanting to throw this on a USB drive.

Defraggler 2.0 Beta Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 17, 2008 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

Win; Mac; Linux
VLC is one of the most well-known media players out there, and it’s been almost 4 years since they’ve released a major new version. VLC 0.9.0 is on the horizon, and it packs in 2 years of development… so you can expect some great things. There’s just one gotcha: Windows 98/ME and Mac OS X 10.3.9 are no longer supported operating systems.

So what’s new in this release? One of the biggest things would have to be the revamped interface seen in the screenshot above. The preferences have been drastically overhauled, and are now broken up into “simple” and advanced settings. That way new users aren’t overwhelmed by the number of things that can be configured.

Beauty is only skin deep though, and that’s why there’s much more than the flashy new interface that’s worth a look:

• Improved playlist support: Shoutcast TV listings, Audioscrobbler/Last.FM support (in supported countries), album art, and more
• Better tag support
• Supports most types of subtitles
• New and enhanced filters
• Improved mouse gestures
• Full support for meta data editing (ID3v2, Ogg/Vorbis, AAC, APEv1/2)
• and more…

If you’re looking for the Last.FM support you’ll have to dig through the options (Tools -> Preferences). You’ll need to be in the “advanced” view by filling in the All bubble located in the lower-left corner. Then navigate to Interface -> Control Interfaces -> Audioscrobbler. From there you can enter in your Last.FM username and password. Then click on the Control Interfaces section, and check the “Submission of played songs to Last.FM” box. VLC will share your listening habits with Last.FM from there on out.

You can grab a pre-release version of VLC 0.9.0 (Windows installer), or you can wait for it to reach final form. From what I can tell this is shaping up to be a nice release.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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