Opera uses the entire screen to show contents of a page and doesn’t waste a single pixel on the screen for displaying anything else. This is definitely great for stretching the space available for viewing a particular website but might get less practical when you decide to spend the rest of your surfing life in fullscreen rather than normal mode with all toolbars and stuff around the page itself or if you at least intend to make better use of the fullscreen feature.

I’ve always thought highly of surfing in fullscreen which is in some way more comfortable. Besides, using Windows’ cool-switch feature ensures ease of switching to other apps w/o any problems. However, there had always been a drawback making me put this feature aside a bit. The thing is that Opera with enabled tabbed browsing won’t display the tabs panel when in fullscreen mode, making it quite confusing and more difficult to keep order in websites you have open in all those tabs and control the amount of active tabs. Fortunately, there’s a rather simple way to resolve this problem.

You can easily force Opera to display various bars in fullscreen by editing the action taking place after pressing the F11 key. To do this, you’ll have to open the Advanced tab in Preferences window (Ctrl+F12) and continue to the Shortcuts menu. Here, you can edit the default keyboard layout. In the editing dialog, paste the string “Platform Windows-Unix-MCE, F11″ into the search field and double-click on the right side of the appropriate line. Now you can add a short statement to achieve desired result:

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Tags: opera, opera browsing, opera fullscreen, opera-tips, web browser
Categories: Browsing, opera

I had been overlooking some minor inconveniences related to file transfers in Opera which were from time to time sort of negatively interfering with the efficiency of my work in this marvelous browser. It was only recently that I finally decided to devote it a few minutes and managed to get rid of the last one of all these tiny trouble-causers.

Now I’m sharing the little knowledge I’ve gathered with all Opera-mates.

Issue #1: How to view my transfers in a regular tab, instead of an illegible overview sqeezing in the toggle sidebar.

Solution #1: Go to the Appearance dialog (Shift+F12) > Buttons tab and select Panels to see a small square button with two arrows pointing to the right (> >). Now toggle-open the sidebar, choose Transfers here and drag & drop that lil square button between the label Transfers and the close button (x). From now on, enlarge any sidebar panel, including Transfers, into a nice wide tab by simply hitting the 2-arrow button.
Solution #2: Use Opera’s built-in hotkey Ctrl+Alt+T (editable in Preferences) to quickly access Transfers in a tab.

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Tags: opera, opera help, opera transfers, opera troubleshooting, opera-tips
Categories: Browsing, opera

Are you a fan of “Bridge to Terabithia” movie? Are you fond of IT stuff? Both? Then check this out. None? Then check it out too, you might come to like it anyway.

I loved that movie when I saw it and I still do. It even made me ignore my lack of talent and draw (yes, on a real paper, using my very own clumsy hands!) a picture, which is fairly untypical of me and hardly ever found in my regular schedule. Having had my own computer out of order for some time now, I had lots of time to spend on a homework we got in school – writing an English essay that would resemble a classic fairy-tale.

I meant it to be inspired by the movie from the very beginning but still wanted to make it somehow original. Then I got a few ideas on how to adapt the basic story to the IT environment and internet culture and thought that those ideas weren’t that bad after all. After one whole afternoon spent on writing (again, on a real paper instead of word processor canvas), I came up with something that may not be exactly called “art” but I still liked it myself and wanted to share it with the web community. Though, I do recommend watching the movie first, if possible.. no, I’m not adding a torrent link here.

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Tags: bridge to terabithia, Entertainment, fun, geeks
Categories: Entertainment, Funny

A friend of mine asked me recently if I knew that it was possible to view real-time air traffic in Google Earth. I had to admit that I never heard about this before, the only thing that came close to it was the website where users could listen to live air traffic communications. He send me the link to the website which offered this service and told me that he was currently tracking a flight of a friend who was vising New Zealand.

I obviously had to download had to download Google Earth to test this application but after that everything went on smoothly. Users have four options which are all accessible from the main page. The first is to load an hourly snapshot of all active flights (over the United States) into Google Earth, the second to load the latest flight incidents into the software, the third to view the live inbound traffic of a selected airport and the last to track a specific flight of an airline that is available.

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Tags: air traffic, air traffic monitor, google-earth
Categories: Cool, Entertainment, Online Services

If you are a fan of dark-room type apps and editors which provide much more comfort in comparison with the regular ones in terms of eye strain as well as more intuitive controls, you don’t wanna pass this one. Since the first port of the original Mac OS’s darkroom type editor was created, several other progs and online services with similar features have appeared. I personally like BigHugeLabs’ Writer, an online text editor which I’ve been using for some time. The little (dis)advantage of this is of course it’s online basis. Looking for something “solid” I’ve come across some editors of this type, however, their requirements usually included either JRE or .NET framework installed which is not exactly portable-friendly in terms of being squeezed into a few kbytes and with minimal system requirements.

Some time ago I downloaded a freeware editor just to see what it has to offer and I was really surprised by its capabilities when I finally got to giving it a try. This light-weight yet powerful editor is called Q10 and it’s available as a free download on the website of Baara e-studio. As a portable application fitted into smallish 350 kB with a number of neat features and dark-room nature it beats any competition I’ve heard of. Another nice thing is that it always launches in full-screen and actually doesn’t even have any menu thanks to keyboard shortcuts by which it is controlled. To display these, one must press F1 key. I’m better saying that right away coz it took me a little while to find out.. :)

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Tags: dark-room editor, darkroom, editor, q10
Categories: Online Services

Spam is a pain and we all got used to the necessity of fighting it every single day spending our valuable time on deleting junk mails and undergoing additional security measures like captchas and many others. Is there any way to transform daily wasted time and effort spent on these measures for good purposes instead of regarding them as a necessary evil? You bet there is.

In a form of an online service, reCAPTCHA offers exactly that. After signing up for the service, you’ll be able to place a captcha module on your website and avoid automated abuse while helping to read and store books of the past. With this special type of captcha engine, users are besides writing an already known word correctly into the widget’s field also required to recognize an additional word gathered by digitizing books which the OCR system wasn’t able to recognize due to various defects in characters.

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Tags: antispam, captcha, comment spam, digitize books, spam
Categories: Online Services, The Web

Assuming you have some kind of headset or at least a cheap mike with speakers in the worst case, I bet you’ve already tried using some voice-over-IP services and you may have liked it except its being rather inflexible, heavy and maybe even complicated to set up.

In that case, you might appreciate the possibility to immediately start a conversation with anyone without needing to install a Skype-type application on your computer and registering for an account it requires you to have. Additionally, if typing contests aren’t your favorite sort of competition and you spend a lot of time writing text messages via regular messengers, this could be a good way of saving a bit of it.

The only thing you need to get connected via voice is a light-weight, no-install application named PicoPhone. Squeezed in negligible 55 kB, this simple-interfaced utility enables you to establish a connection with another party or receive a call by just letting it run in background while it carefully listens to incoming calls on a default or another specified port.

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Tags: communication, picophone, software, voip. skype, Windows
Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows, software