You’ve probably seen the advertisements for Windows 7 and the tiling windows feature. Believe it or not the very first tiling window manager was Siemens’s RTL (created in 1988). After that came a UNIX version called tAP (The Andrew Project) for the X Windowing System. Fast-forward to now and Microsoft claims to have innovated a [...]
Change Display Screen Brightness With DimScreen
Adjusting the display screen brightness to the current environment has several benefits. The most important ones are a better display quality in that environment, say a dimmed screen at night to avoid to bright screens, and the positive impact a dimmed screen has on the battery of mobile devices. Most laptops come with programs that [...]
Windows Live Sync To Be Rebranded In Windows Live Mesh
Microsoft made an announcement back in June that the two programs Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh Beta would be brought together as Windows Live Sync Beta as part of Windows Live Essentials beta. The main goals of the project were to offer Windows Live Sync users with options to synchronize files to PCs and [...]
Chromium Debuts Labs Feature, Chrome Next
Procedures determine how new features are added to Chromium and the Google browser. They are usually integrated in Chromium first, make their way to the dev build of Google Chrome, then the beta and finally, after some time, into the stable release builds. Features are sometimes not tested enough to be made available directly in [...]
Windows 7 Starter And Home Basic Personalization Panel
Microsoft has released different editions of the Windows 7 operating system, all with distinct capabilities and restrictions. Especially the Windows 7 Starter and Home Basic editions have been limited in this regard, with the result that core operating system features are not supported by them. It is for instance not possible to change the desktop [...]
Youtube Movies Section Expanded
Last year Youtube started to expand their offerings of user uploaded video clips to include shows and movies. The offer back then was limited, especially movie wise. Today Youtube announced the availability of Youtube movies, a free movies category on the video hosting site that currently offers 400 free full-length movies. Youtube Movies sports hundreds [...]
Windows Logon Notifier
Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 support login notifications that are displayed to users who are logging in. These notifications are configured in secpol.msc, which is not available in all editions and versions of the Windows operating system. Windows Logon Notifier has been created with users of unsupported editions, and users who prefer a direct [...]
Kontact: How does it compare to the competition?
With all of this talk about KDE 4.5 lately, I thought I should take a moment to mention a tool that hasn’t had much (or any) talk here on Ghacks. That tool is Kontact. But what is Kontact? Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that includes more tools than your standard suite, has a lot [...]
VTrace Offers Whois, DNS Lookup, Trace And More
It is sometimes important to gather information about a specific web host. A simple example is a traceroute that can be used to get information about a connection to a specific host. Most operating systems come with a basic set of networking tools that display those information. But the standard tools of the operating system [...]