You may have gone through some stressful and exhausting periods lately when arranging everything for nice and quiet x-mas time, trying to find just the right presents for your friends and family and so on. Now you probably want to rest a little bit and enjoy the days off as much as possible. You might appreciate some kind of stimulant that would help you loosen the tension and concentration accumulated in your mind and body..
DIY: Easy CPU probe
We always try to lower our CPU usage as much as possible for a normal use. Still, there are situations like testing purposes when we may want our CPU to be 100% busy to test its behavior. This is usually tightly related to overclocking and probing the CPU cooling system capability along with it. Of course you can always use benchmarking applications to give your system some harsh time but it’s not necessary when you know how to increase CPU load all the way up to 100% easily in a few seconds. Note that this has only been tested on single-core computers, it prolly won’t work with multi-core CPUs.
Automatically download sequentially designated files
Ever wanted to download multiple podcasts / videocasts or similar files that are for example attached to RSS feeds without having to download each of them manually from the website? Having bought a new mp3 player, I needed to download multiple episodes of my favorite podcast English as a Second Language links to which I have been collecting for some time but didn’t have much free time to listen to them. It would be insane to have to follow each link to the website and then manually download the podcasts one after one, repeating this procedure several hundred times…
Opera’s progress bar in detail
After installation Opera’s default settings show the progress bar which displays information about how the current page is loading in its simplest form – as a small rectangular bar that only appears when a loading process is active. This bar however is not revealing enough information for advanced users who are interested in what exactly is going on when a website refuses to load.
Free icons and symbols resource
Icons overall are very special in a certain way because a good icon or symbol must display some kind of information in usually a very tiny space. Therefore it’s not so easy to create an icon that would express something in form of a comprehensible symbol and it can consume some time to make or find a specific symbol or icon.
Document viewers: one to rule ‘em all
Now seriously. Have you ever received a document (a clean one) with an extension you never heard of and didn’t even know what application you were supposed to use to open it? That’s not a problem any more due to applications and online services that can understand varied file formats and display the contents of those files for you. Of course, you can’t edit such files with viewers because their only purpose is to display the contents of the document. But hey, better that nothing, ain’t it…
Become a master of fonts
Stuffing your system with tons of fancy fonts may not be the best idea because, as you probably know, the number of installed fonts can rapidly change the speed at which your system loads. Your system may have become slower without you even knowing it because many applications do install their own fonts that they (do not) need which adds to the size of your fonts folder.
Make use of Opera’s chameleonic features
As a proud Opera user, you probably let your browser identify itself as Opera browser by default. Although most websites do work and display more or less properly in Opera, there are still many of them which don’t comply with the standards and contain many non-standardized code segments (usually working in IE only) thus confusing the standards-based browsers which leads to improper appearance of the site in the end.
Solution for bug hunters
Not long ago, my system popped out a dialog saying “Error” in the title and offering two ways to go in form of two buttons below it – Yes and No. I was trying hard for a while to find out about the right answer but I never really did find it because I did not know what the error was all about. I suppose I’ve saved the world by choosing the right answer, the world didn’t blow up after all… And now seriously :)