05 July 2013

Party Planning Made Easy: 12 Of The Best Resources



featured-cake

As summer rolls in (and out again, for the famous week long British summer), the time for garden parties is upon us. You’ve set a theme and instructed everyone to come in costume, but as the host your job is the hardest: food, decorations, perhaps activities and games. So here, my fellow party planners, are (at least) 12 sites that should be your first stop for inspirational ideas to help you pull off that perfect party.

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Download Windows XP For Free and Legally, Straight From Microsoft



vintagecomputer

As the years progress and Microsoft moves on from Windows 7 into Windows 8 and beyond, it's certainly starting to feel like Windows XP is just an artifact of the past. But is it? There may be situations when you need to use XP again or you might want to take a stroll down memory lane. Well, Microsoft offers VirtualBox, a free Virtual Machine featuring a free version of Windows XP, which runs within your current OS. You can use this system for testing or running older programs that only work in Windows XP.

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YouTube's Video Pages Will Load Faster



A few weeks ago, a reader noticed an interesting YouTube experiment that displayed a red progress bar when loading video pages. It was obvious that video pages were loaded dynamically using AJAX.



Gizmodo posted an article last week about this experiment. It turns out that YouTube will soon launch this new interface.



"Currently, when you click on a YouTube video, first the watch page loads (the webpage that the video sits on). Then the JavaScript that controls that page is downloaded, then the video player, and then the video itself starts downloading." In the new interface, everything is downloaded simultaneously. When you click a new video, YouTube only loads the new page and then the video. It's no longer necessary to download the video player and the JavaScript/CSS files.






Another change is that YouTube preloads the page and the first part of the video you're likely to watch next before you even click it, so that the video loads almost instantly. This works because the Flash player now uses adaptive streaming and downloads videos in slices. The first slice of the next video you're likely to watch is prefetched. This works well for playlists and search results (YouTube prefetches the first result), but also for video pages, where YouTube shows suggestions.

How I Make Software Demos using Animated GIFs



Aniamted GIFs are a good alternative to screencast videos since they are easy to produce, can be hosted anywhere and people love sharing them on social sites.



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Digital Inspiration @labnol This story, How I Make Software Demos using Animated GIFs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/07/2013 under Gif, Screencasting, Software.



3 Windows 98 Bugs Worth Revisiting



Windows 98

Is it just nostalgia that keeps me attached to this OS, or was Windows 98 actually worth remembering? This operating system released 15 years ago had its ups and downs. Critics have been pretty harsh on the recent versions of Windows. Vista took it the hardest, but there are a lot of you who don’t seem to be the biggest fans of Windows 8 either. Maybe we should take a trip back in time and remember just how bad certain parts of Windows 98 were. Love it or hate it, you were in for some pretty big problems.

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6 Ways To Reclaim Your Email Inbox



Reclaim Inbox Intro

Is there anything else that’s as useful, prevalent, and frustrating as an email inbox? It’s been around forever and we keep using it, and as long as we keep using it, people like me will keep writing about it. You probably think it'd be easier to tame a lion than tame your inbox, but there are tools that will make you think twice. There are built-in features for some email services that will do most of the heavy organizational work for you.

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New York City Gets Its Own .nyc Domain Name [Updates]



nycstatue

The Internet domain regulation organization ICANN has recently approved .nyc as the official top level domain for New York City. This decision makes New York City the first city in the world to be granted approval for its own domain, with London and Paris close behind.

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4 Good Ways To Disguise Yourself Online



disguise2

Why would it ever be necessary to disguise yourself online? Isn't such behavior only for the likes of hackers, spies, and lowlifes? Well, not exactly. It isn't always easy to fully disguise yourself in a way that is untraceable, but using the tools described in this article, you should be able to pull it off in fairly short order.

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