Is Slackware, The Oldest Remaining Linux Distribution, Right For You?

Linux has been around since 1991, but the most famous distros – from Ubuntu to Fedora to Mint – were born in the mid-2000′s. Slackware, by contrast, dates back to 1992. You read that correctly: 1992. Slackware remains the oldest actively maintained distro, and to this day remains true to its (non-user friendly) roots. Think it’s something you might be interested in trying out? Keep reading. History Debian might be the oldest popular distribution that a large number of Linux users directly and indirectly use, but Slackware is ultimately the oldest one still in existence. The project started in 1992,...

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Force YouTube to Use the HTML5 Player

YouTube's HTML5 player is great, but it's not enabled for all the videos. Even if you go to youtube.com/html5 and join the HTML5 trial, you'll find a lot of videos that use the Flash player. "Some videos with ads are not yet supported (they will play in the Flash player)," mentions the site.



There's a simple Greasemonkey script that forces YouTube to use the HTML5 player for almost all the videos you watch at youtube.com. You need to install Greasemonkey if you use Firefox or Tampermonkey if you use Chrome, then click the "Install" button here.



The script works better in Firefox. If you install the script in Chrome, it will disable the new Ajax interface, but everything else seems to work well.

Here's a video you can use to test the script. Please note that the script doesn't work for embedded videos.

Google+ Improves RAW To JPEG Photo Conversion With Support For 70 Cameras

Google+ now gives photographers more latitude with RAW to JPEG conversions by adding RAW support for 70 camera makes. Google+ has always been a favorite destination for photographers with the feature to store full-size photo uploads. This change helps them to upload large-sized RAW images for backup without converting them to JPEG. But Google+ converts them to JPEG for faster image load times when someone wants to view them. Editing the JPEG is also faster. Google+ does not support RAW post-processing, but the ability to upload RAW file formats and keep them backed up from a cross-section of cameras is...

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How To Open Disk Management In Windows 8.1

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Disk Management utility that ships with Windows 8.1 is primarily used to create and format hard disk partitions. In addition to that, you can use the Disk Management to shrink and extend partition size, change the drive letter of partitions, assign drive letter to partitions, and create, attach, & detach VHDs (virtual hard disks). Just […]

Card-Style Interface for Google Mobile Search

As previously anticipated, Google's mobile site has a new layout that uses cards, just like Google Now, Google Maps, Google+ and an increasingly long list of Google services and apps.



"A new look and feel for Google Search and ads on your phones and tablets. It's cleaner and simpler, optimized for touch, with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you're looking for," informs Google's search blog.

Ads stand out a lot more and, depending on your phone's resolution and screen size, you might not even see a regular search result without scrolling down. Google shows up to 2 ads at the top of the page and no longer uses a different background color. There's just a small "Ad" label next to the URL.

Sections are clearly separated and the information density is lower. There's more white space and bigger text for page titles.

Google's 15th Birthday Doodle

This year, Google's birthday doodle is interactive: it's a game that asks you to get as many candies as you can. The game uses HTML5 and it also works on smartphones and tablets. You can share your score on Google+ and generate URLs that remember your high score.

Here's a video that shows the game, just in case you don't see the doodle yet (you can also visit Google Australia):

Filter and Compare Knowledge Graph Results

Google's Knowledge Graph feature gets smarter every day. You've probably noticed the carousel that's displayed when you search for things like [dog breeds], [asian rivers], [swedish bands], [science fiction books], [surrealist painters]. For some queries, you'll now see a drop-down that lets you select other similar categories. If you search for [surrealist painters], you'll see a long list of genres: abstract, cubist, impressionist, rococo, romantic.

Until now, Knowledge Graph displayed information about a single entity. Now you can compare 2 things. For example, you can search for [orange vs tangerine] and find out that oranges contain two times more vitamin C than tangerines.

"You can try this for some other things you might be curious about, such as dog breeds (compare pekingese vs. chihuahua) or celestial objects (compare earth vs. neptune) — and we'll keep adding more," informs Google.



It looks like Google brings back some of the features from an old Labs project called Google Squared and makes them more usable.

Yahoo Moves Ahead On The Revival Road With The New Yahoo Maps

The last few months has seen Yahoo grabbing news headlines with a flurry of product re-designs and revamps. The latest – Yahoo Maps. A refreshed Yahoo Maps for the desktop comes to U.S. users. The new Yahoo Maps comes with a slew of new features and more interactivity, but missing an equivalent mobile app so far. The refreshing new design makes it more consistent with the design tweaks on other Yahoo properties. Key new features include pedestrian and public transit routes. Map users can enter an origin and destination point, and track the route as either a pedestrian, a driver...

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7 Ways To Make A Google Map Using Google Spreadsheet Data

If you maintain a lot of data in Google Spreadsheet, you’ve probably at least once thought, “Hey, I should be able to get all those locations and quickly plot them in a Google Map”. Well, you can of course. But doing this is not quite as obvious as you might expect. With Google writing both the spreadsheet and the map-making software, there should be several easy ways to do this. You’d expect to see a File > Export as Map option or a File > Download as KML. But no, there’s nothing like that. What you soon realise is there...

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Be Your Own Travel Guide: 7 Tips To Travel Smarter With Google Maps

Going on a trip can be such a stressful experience. There are hotel reservations to make, restaurant reservations to place, activities to plan out, and tickets to buy. What if you forget something, or you discover that the place you wanted to visit for your dream vacation falls far short of being anything anyone would describe as a dream? I do recall a time when people planned out road trips using paper maps. In fact, I still have memories of my dad staying up late the night before a trip, and tracing out the whole route in pencil on a...

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MetroSidebar: Beautiful Tiled Sidebar For Windows 7/8.1

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It’s a well-known fact that Microsoft has dropped desktop gadgets from Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions due to security reasons, and has been offering a tool to completely remove sidebar or desktop gadgets from Windows 7 as well. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 users who aren’t concerned about the security can download and install […]

Evernote’s New Web Clipper Is The Ultimate Content Saving Tool

Evernote’s Web Clipper isn’t new, especially if you’re an avid user of Evernote. But if you haven’t heard, or perhaps didn’t like the Evernote clipper in the past, this is the right time to look into it again, as they’ve completely redone its look and added new features that make it better. Sometimes “upgrades” aren’t really upgrades, and instead just add bloat to an application or extension, but that’s not the case with the upgrades Evernote made to their Web Clipper recently. To put it simply, it’s magnificent. Also, before this big upgrade, they also made a smaller, but very...

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Android Is Watching: 8 Ways A Typical Smartphone Is Monitoring You

Android automatically backs up your Wi-Fi passwords to your Google account, where they’re synced to your future Android devices. This is a convenient feature that saves you from entering Wi-Fi passwords over and over, but it means that Google likely knows all your Wi-Fi passwords. And, given recent revelations about PRISM and the NSA’s ability to demand data from Google without a warrant, the NSA likely has access to all of them. But Wi-Fi passwords aren’t the only thing that Google — and therefore the US government and other governments around the world — can get from your phone. Google...

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How To Recover Windows 7/8.1 Product Key Without Using Third-Party Tools

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There are times when you may want to recover your Windows product key from a working Windows installation, whether to back up the product key before beginning to install a newer version of Windows, or to reinstall existing version of Windows operating system. The standard or the popular way of retrieving Windows product key is […]

How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress

This step-by-step tutorial describes how you can easily move your blogspot blog from Blogger to WordPress while maintaining all your search traffic and Google juice.

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This story, How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 26/09/2013 under Blogger, WordPress, Internet

Google+ Celebrates 15 Years of Google

Mr. Jingles, the Google+ notification mascot, celebrates Google's 15th birthday. Just click the bell icon, read all your notifications or click "mark all as read" to see it.

Mr. Jingles also changed its profile photo with a pixelated image: "A little change of pace in my profile photo for #throwbackthursday.". The file name is self-explanatory: "1998-jangles-avatar.png".

Google's 1998 Easter Egg

Search Google for [Google in 1998] and you'll see a search results page from 1998, the year when Google was incorporated as a privately held company. It's an Easter Egg that reminds you how much Google has evolved, while preserving a simple user interface.



The old search results includes the original Google logo that had an exclamation mark just like Yahoo!, GoogleScout - another name for the feature that returns similar pages, a drop-down that lets you pick the number of results per page, search within results, the size of the cached pages and a list of links to other search engines. All the search results link to the Wayback Machine, since most of them no longer exist.

Google's birthday is in September, but the date has changed over the years. "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake," mentioned a Google page. Google has usually celebrated its birthday on September 27 and this year is special: Google is 15 years old. Happy birthday, Google!



{ via Search Engine Land }

How To Always Show Address Bar and Tabs In Internet Explorer 11

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The Modern version of Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) that ships with Windows 8.1 doesn’t display address bar and tabs with default settings. One needs to right-click anywhere on the screen or swipe-up from the bottom-edge of the touch-screen to see address bar and tabs. Users who are running Windows 8.1 on a large screen might […]

A Google Experiment Asks Users to Rank Results

Google has its own search quality raters, but it doesn't hurt asking regular users to improve search results. A recent Google experiment highlights 2 search results and asks users which one is better.

Users don't have the read the search quality guidelines first, they only need to visit the 2 pages and tell Google which one they prefer. There are 4 choices: the first result, the second result, both results are equally good, neither result is good enough.



{ Thanks, Marcus. }

Learnist For Android Tries To Make Munching RSS Feeds Into An Educational Experience

Learning is an admirable goal. We all strive to better ourselves, and gaining new knowledge is one of the best ways to do so. Traditionally, learning meant hitting the books — sitting down for an extended period of time with a few authoritative resources, gradually working your way through a curriculum and (hopefully) ending up with a new skill or a clearer understanding of whatever it is you’re trying to figure out. That was the past, though — today, this traditional view of learning feels almost quaint. In today’s brave new world, when you need to know something, you just...

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