Have you heard of Digsby yet? If not, it’s about time you do. Digsby is a multi-network chat client. Doesn’t sound like that big a deal? Use Pidgin or Miranda already? Well Digsby has a couple more cards up its sleeve, along with your Chat accounts Digsby also aggregates social network accounts and email. At the moment the list of supported services isn’t huge but you will be able to talk on AIM, Jabbar, Gtalk, Yahoo, ICQ and MSN. You can use just about any email account including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail. Supported social networks at this point are MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

It’s still a beta product but significant changes have been made over the last few months including new features, optimisation and bug fixes. It’s not perfect but it’s very usable. If you’re a fan of MSN for all the ‘nudge’ and ‘wink’ type features then this isn’t for you. If you like the sparse chat style of Gtalk then this is, at the moment Digsby is pretty simple when it comes to chat features.

One great thing about Digsby is that you can chat to people on Facebook Chat through the client, a unique feature for Digsby till a few weeks ago when some other clients began to get it as well. Another great thing about Digsby is the ability to combine contacts different accounts all into one by merging and creating a alias, makes it much easier keeping track of people.It’s also very customizable and you can get various skins and change the layout around to how you like. By creating a Digsby account you can synchronize it across multiple locations and computers and keep all your settings. A very promising application and worth checking out!

The Firefox 3 Location Bar which is also known as the Awesome Bar displays different kinds of data. One user complaint is that one cannot visually distinguish the data. The user -=Ben=- created a style to display different colors depending on the type of data that is displayed in a line. Basically tags are displayed in light yellow, bookmarks in blue and history items in light green after installing that user style in Firefox.

This does work pretty well in conjunction with the Cybersearch add-on by Ryan from Cybernetnews that displays search results on a white background. All in all you got three or four background colors instead of just one which is great for distinguishing results on the first glance.

The easiest way to install this style is by installing the Stylish add-on first and then that new user style.

continue reading "Display Colored URLs in Firefox 3 Awesome Bar"

USB Image Tool is a lightweight portable software that can create backups of USB devices. It detects pretty much every USB device that I’m connecting to an USB port including my Apple iPod Nano. It did however not detect my mobile phone that I connected to the computer as a test.

The main interface consists of three buttons for the restore, backup and rescan functions. The rescan button is helpful if an USB device is not automatically recognized by the application which is the case when a card is changed in a card reader.

The data of the USB device is stored in a compressed format on the hard disk of the computer from where it can be burned to disk for safekeeping. The software does not only come with an option to backup USB devices to create USB images but also to restore them. It would be possible to backup the data of your iPod and later restore that image again. I’m not sure but it could work to replicate the data on another device of the same kind.

continue reading "Backup and Restore USB Images"

If you’re a fan of skinning your apps you probably already know all about user styles for web pages. There’s a great plugin for Firefox that enables you to change the look of webpages using css called Stylish. Once you have it, you can download (or create) user styles and change the look of any website with the push of a button.

If you want an awesome style for your Google Calendar take a look at the sleek design by Globes Designs innovatively called Google Calendar Redesigned. If you like a darker theme with a bit more contrast this is definitely for you. User styles are not always implemented well with choppy bits everywhere, but this design is totally beautiful.

You will be glad to know they have a Gmail design as well (in fact this spurred the calendar design) called Gmail Redesigned. This is essentially the same thing for your favorite email client, so you can have the same design throughout these two Google services. I you know any more cool user styles please let us know, I’d love to take a look at some!

continue reading "Redesign your Google Calendar with a custom skin"

It’s Olympic year and this time we’re heading to Beijing to watch the best athletes in the world battle it out for glory. If you’re lucky enough to actually be going to Beijing for the Olympics, then you’re sure to enjoy yourself. However, if you’re like me, you have to make do with trying to watch it online.

NBC holds the rights to the Games and they’ve gone the online way by tying up with software TVTonic. The tie-up offers users the chance to download videos of Olympic events for free. In addition, you can also watch each event online with TVTonic 12 hours after it finishes, which is fine when you’re halfway around the world and are sleeping during the live event.

continue reading "Watch the Olympics with TVTonic"