YouTube's Tape Mode Easter Egg

YouTube's player added a "tape mode" button for many videos to celebrate "the 57th birthday of the first commercially available video recorder". The tape mode uses some VHS-like effects that add noise, distortion, pixel blocks, video compression artifacts. If you press the "pause" button, you'll see a shaking effect that simulates what happened when a VHS tape was paused.

To try this feature, you can add "&vhs=1" to the URL of a YouTube video, like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2XmymhCdHU&vhs=1.



{ Thanks, Sterling. }

TouchPal, A Better Touch Keyboard For Windows 8

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Computer users who’re running Windows 8 on a non-touch machine probably might not have discovered the new touch keyboard included in the newest version of Windows. The new touch keyboard, specially designed for touchscreens, comes with decent set of features and works pretty well too. The all new touch keyboard in Windows 8 shows text [...]

Wordpress users be alert now

The founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg has published a security alert on his site today.

There's a massive botnet that is searching for WordPress installations which use admin as their login username.



The botnet is using over 90,000 I.P addresses so it can constantly retry and login using different password combinations until it works out your password.

Find out out to prevent your site from being hacked

Google's Inactive Account Manager

Google has recently added a feature that lets you decide what happens when you no longer use your account. It's called Inactive Account Manager and the goal was to offer a feature that tells Google "what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account".



You need to set a timeout period (3/6/9/12 months), add your phone number and contact details for up to 10 trusted friends or family members (email addresses and phone numbers), then decide if you want to share Google Takeout for services like Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube with those people and delete your account once it's inactive. Google will alert you one month before the timeout period expires.

It's a feature that seems to be useful if you want Google to automatically delete your account when you're no longer alive and share some data with the people you trust. Unfortunately, not all the Google Takeout data is easy to use. YouTube videos, Picasa photos, Drive files and Gmail's contact files are easy to open, but the data from Google+, Blogger, Reader is more difficult to read. When you set up this feature, you can pick the services you want.



You can also use the Inactive Account Manager just to notify friends and family members that you no longer use that account or to send an automated response to all incoming Gmail messages once your account becomes inactive.

Google Mobile Search Tests Sub-sitelinks

Google's mobile search site experiments with a different interface for sitelinks. The updated version hides the snippets for sitelinks and lets you expand lists of sub-sitelinks. Instead of only listing the most important sections of a site, Google's new features also shows some popular subsections.



"The links shown below some of Google's search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for," explains Google.



Here's the new interface:

... and here's what happens when you expand a sitelink:

This is the regular mobile UI:

Google mentioned a similar feature for the desktop site last year: "this improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet." I haven't noticed this feature and it doesn't seem to be available in the desktop interface.

Turn Your Email, SMS Inbox, Or Anything Into A Scoreboard With IFTTT And ESPN

Keep up with your favorites sports team, however you like. The new ESPN channel for If This Then That (ifttt) means you can easily set up SMS, email and even phone notifications for your favorite teams. You could even automate Twitter to send up updates every time your favorite teams scores, if you want – the only limit is your own imagination.

You remember If This Then That, which allows you to combine any two web apps by designing simple rules. All you need is a trigger – in this case, sports scores and events – and an Action – that is, where you’d like that sports score or event to go. Dozens of triggers mean you can use ifttt’s ESPN trigger to get sports updates just about anywhere. You can set up whatever notifications you like : every time a game involving your favorite team begins or ends, or even when news breaks about that team. You can set up as many notifications as you want, too – just keep creating rules.

This is the natural extension of an experiment ESPN and IFTTT offered during the Olympics last year, expect now the Disney-owned TV sports station is offering online updates from a variety of different leagues – from North America’s NFL (American football), MLB (baseball), NBA (basketball) and NHL (hockey) to the top European soccer (football) leagues, the ESPN trigger for ifttt allows you to stay up-to-date however you like.

Creating The Ultimate Sports Recipe

If you’re reading this you’re probably already familiar with ifttt, but if not simply head to ifttt.com and sign up for an account. Register as many “channels” as you can, because the more channels you have the more possible combinations you can complete.

Let’s focus on ESPN, though. This channel can only be used as a “trigger” – that is, as the event that causes an action to happen. Create a new recipe and you’ll be presented with the standard ifttt formula:

Click “this”, then click the ESPN channel. You may need to agree to terms first, but once you do you’ll be presented with potential triggers:

Your choices are:

• Breaking top news


• Breaking news for sport


• Breaking news for team


• New game start


• New in-game update


• New final score

Pick whatever sort of news you’re interested in getting updates for, and then – depending on which trigger you choose – you’ll be able to choose a league and (possibly) a team. The sports/leagues offered are:

• NFL


• MLB


• NBA


• WNBA


• NHL


• College Football


• Men’s College Basketball


• Women’s College Basketball


• MLS


• Barclays Premier League


• Spanish Primera Division


• German Bundesliga


• Italia Serie A

Your trigger created, you now must set up an Action (the “that” part of “if this then that”).

You’ll be presented with a wide variety, but some will work better than others. If all you really want is to be notified when something critical happens in one of your sports, simply select email or SMS and you’ll be able to set up a custom text message. Here’s how that looks for final score, via SMS:

By default you’ll see the “Alert Body”, which is the news ESPN is sending you, alongside the “Alert URL”, which presumably links back to ESPN. Remove whatever you don’t want, and know that you can add the name of the team and the time of publication for the information you were sent.

The process is basically the same for other Actions, and you can get really creative with this if you want. For example: you could set up a document in your Dropbox to always include the latest scores:

What could you do with a text file like that? You tell me. You could set it up to display on your desktop using Conky or Geektool, or simply have a text document you can check anytime you want to know the score. It’s totally up to you.

You get the idea: be creative and there’s no end of places you could conceivably see sports scores. Heck,

Questions

This does raise a few questions. Would ESPN shut down a Twitter account that does nothing but tweet up-to-the-moment scores using IFTTT? I suppose not, so long as the links to ESPN are maintained, but only time will tell for sure. Let us know your predictions in the comments below – personally, I hope this service simply keeps working as is.

And while you’re commenting, please: let us know what kind of crazy brilliant recipes you’ve created using the new ESPN trigger. Links are much appreciated.

And of course, if you’d rather not roll your own notifications like this, you could just install ESPN’s Sportscenter or Yahoo’s Sportacular on your Android or iOS device for instant sports updates. But if you’re looking for something more universal – not to mention more customizable – ifttt is the way to go.

Oh, and be sure to check out our other ifttt articles for more tips and tricks!

Image Credit: Hockey net and scoreboard by J.D.S. via Shutterstock

The post Turn Your Email, SMS Inbox, Or Anything Into A Scoreboard With IFTTT And ESPN appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Bing Adds Pinterest Integration, Letting You Pin Images Directly From Search Results [Updates]

The Bing vs. Google race has just become tighter with the launch of Bing’s new Pinterest integration. The new feature adds a handy “Pin it” button to every image result on Bing, making it possible to pin it to your Pinterest boards without needing to go to the actual website, or even open the full-size version of the image.

With this new feature, Microsoft aims to make Pinterest pinning as effortless as possible: not bookmarklets, no extra clicks. Simply find the image you want, pin it directly from the search results, and Bing will automatically include the right links and attributions to the original, high-resolution source, without you needing to look for it yourself.

“Last fall, we hosted a group of lifestyle and design bloggers at the Bing headquarters to better understand their search and social media habits“, says Microsoft about the birth of Pinterest integration, “What we discovered is a community that does more than its fair share of image searches, with much of it tied to Pinterest.”

To take advantage of the new Pinterest integration, Bing search has to be set to United States. This is easy to do through the cog icon on the top right corner. After clicking the cog, scroll down to “Location”, and click on “change your country/region”. Choose “United States” from the list, and you’re all set. Next time you search for images on Bing, you’ll find the “Pin it” button below the image for quick pinning.

Bing’s Image search has been playing catch-up to Google for quite a while, and now offers a slick interface that’s rather similar to Google’s new Image Search interface. You can filter your image search by color, type of image, layout, and people (how people appear in the images), but not by size or even time – a feature which was only recently added to Bing search and is only available in regular search at this time.

Is this a useful integration? Will it be enough to make you switch to Bing?

Source: Bing Blog

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Lost Office 2010 or 2013 CD/DVD? Legally Download Office From Microsoft

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Majority of computer users have installed one or other version of Microsoft Office productivity suite on their computers. While there are plenty of alternatives around to Office, none of them come close to Office when it comes to ease of use, let alone the features. Users who purchased Office CD/DVD from Microsoft or an authorized [...]

Reduce Data Usage in Chrome for Android

The latest release of Chrome Beta for Android added an interface for the data compression proxy. You no longer have to enable a flag, just open Chrome's menu, go to the settings, select "Bandwidth management", "Reduce data usage" and enable the feature.

You can start visiting your favorite sites and check back the "Bandwidth management" to see some stats. For more detailed stats, type chrome://net-internals in the omnibox and select the "Bandwidth" section in the left sidebar.

My total savings percentage is 33.5%, so the compression rate is 100%-33.5%=66.5%. Some people complained that it's too low compared to Opera Mini's 90% compression rate, but Opera Mini is not a browser. It's just a thin client app and all the rendering and JavaScript processing is performed on Opera's servers, so Opera Mini only needs a simplified OBML file. You should compare Chrome's data compression proxy to Opera Turbo, a feature available in the Opera Mobile browser. "In November 2009, the average compression rate for Opera Turbo was 63.6%," according to an Opera report [PDF], while in February 2010 the average compression rate was 59%. It's worth pointing out that Opera shows the compression rate (highpercentage%), not the savings percentage (100% -highpercentage%=lowpercentage%).

New Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

Here are some new Gmail keyboard shortcuts:



* d - open a compose window in a new tab (Shift+c opens it in a new window)



* , - moves the cursor to the first button in your Gmail toolbar



* { - archives the current conversation and moves to the older one



* } - archives the current conversation and moves to the next one.



There are some subtle differences between [ ("Removes the current view's label from your conversation and moves to the older one") and { ("Archives the current conversation and moves to the older one") or between ] and }. Their effect is identical when you read conversations from your inbox. If you open a conversation from any other label, [ will remove that label from the conversation, while { will remove the conversation from the inbox.



The Gmail shortcuts page has been recently changed and these are the new shortcuts I've noticed.

Google Tests a New Homepage Footer

Google tests a new interface for the homepage's footer. It includes a cookie disclaimer required by a European Union directive and a settings menu similar to one that's available on Google's search results pages.



"Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies," informs Google and links to this page. Many sites have annoying cookie warnings and I'm sure that most people ignore them, so the EU directive was a bad idea.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

A Bogus DMCA Takedown Request

Google has recently sent an email which informed me that "Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to 'draft' status."



Apparently, this is the infringing post: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/lyrics-for-youtube-music-videos.html (Google Cache). It's a post about a Greasemonkey script that allowed you to show music lyrics in the YouTube interface.

I was curios to read the DMCA complaint, but Google doesn't send it. Instead, it uploads the document to ChillingEffects and suggests to use this page to find it. Unfortunately, the ChillingEffects search feature doesn't work, so you have to use Google's site operator to search for [site:chillingeffects.org domainname.com].



I've managed to find the DMCA notice: "The URL listed below is one of nearly 20 song lyrics sites who have attempted to post lyrics for the song titled 'Alden Howell' by the artist Inspection 12. The lyrics posted on this and other sites are not accurate and the artist has not given them permission to post lyrical content. Inspection 12 has been making efforts to contact these websites directly in order to have the content removed. We are attempting to have this URL and others like it to be excluded from google search results for the name 'Alden Howell'."



Unfortunately for Inspection 12, that blog post doesn't include their lyrics. In fact, it only includes a screenshot with lyrics from a much more popular punk band.

Gmail Shortcuts That Are Enabled by Default

Gmail is the only Google service that disables keyboard shortcuts by default. They're for power users and some people could accidentally trigger them, especially when you consider that most Gmail shortcuts don't use modifiers.



Google has recently added some new shortcuts that are enabled by default. The old shortcuts are still disabled by default, but you can quickly enable them by pressing ? in Gmail and clicking "Enable" next to "The following keyboard shortcuts are currently disabled".



Here are are the shortcuts that are enabled by default (you can't disable them):



- arrow keys: you can use the up/down arrows to navigate in a list of conversations and press Enter to select one of them. Gmail automatically loads the previous/next page of conversations. Use the left arrow key and then the up/down arrow keys to move your cursor to a different label or the compose button.



- n/p: if you open a conversation with multiple messages, use the n/p keys to go to the next or previous message. Press Enter to load that message if it's collapsed.



- Ctrl+Enter: use this shortcut in the compose window to send a message.



- Shift+Esc: focus the main window.



- Esc: focus the latest chat or compose window.



- Ctrl+. or Ctrl+,: move the cursor to the next/previous chat or compose window, or to the main window.



- Ctrl+Shift+c: add Cc recipients in the compose window.



- Ctrl+Shift+b: add Bcc recipients in the compose window.



- Ctrl+Shift+f: change the From email address in the compose window.



- A long list of shortcuts for formatting text when you compose a message. Some of them were already available in the old compose interface.



Obviously, Mac users should replace Ctrl with ⌘.