PicLens - stylish 3D picture browser for firefox

Firefox users cannot miss out on this great addon called PicLens or Cooliris. This addon made by Cooliris is a fullscreen 3D picture browser for many popular sites.
The addon installs a small 'Launch PicLens' button on the toolbar, when browsing pictures on supported sites the button gets highlighted. Clicking the button will open up a fullscreen window allowing to browse and search for pictures as seen below.

     

Currently PicLens supports searching pictures from Google, Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, deviantART, Photobucket, and smugmug. With YouTube you can watch and browse through videos too without the need to open a separate tab or window.
A new feature allows users to share photos with friends by email just by drag-n-drop.
The addon also supports browsing pictures from social networking sites such as Facebook's picture album. But the addon does not support browsing pictures in Orkut yet.

The latest PicLens version is 1.8.0 and can be downloaded from here. The addon is availabe for both windows and Mac users, with support for Internet Explorer too.

Facebook overtakes Myspace

Facebook has overtaken Myspace to be the No.1 social networking site in terms of number of visitors. Facebook had 132 million unique visitors in the month of June compared to Myspace's 117.5 million.

Facebook was also the fastest growing social networking site with 153% growth compared to just 3% for myspace in the last year. Other sites such as Hi5, Friendster and Orkut had 100%, 50% and 41% growth respectively.

"Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year," ComScore executive Jack Flanagan said in a statement from the company. "By increasing the site's relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago."

Googling in Blackle does not save energy

Blackle.com is a search site powered by google's search engine, the only difference being that Google's background color is white while Blackle's is black. This site was made black to save energy and their motto is "Saving energy one search at a time". But according to Google's Official blog, they say that Black does not help save energy.

According to Blackle, the site helps saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen."

The site claims that its black color has helped saved about 766 KiloWatt hours of energy so far. But this post at Google blog says "our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market) displaying black may actually increase energy usage."

Well Blackle was nice to come up with a way to try and save energy. The best that we can do with monitors is to turn them off when we don't use and avoid using screensavers for too long.

Firefox Adblock and Imeem flash player problem

The Imeem player does not load in Firefox when used with Adblock plugin. The Imeem player is a flash player and requires the Adobe Flash player plugin to be installed to be able to run.

After trying several fixes, installing and reinstalling the Adobe Flash player, I found that there is some issue with Adblock and Flash player. With Adblock enabled many flash sites fail to load, seems to be some bug with Adblock addon.

Right now the only solution I can find is to disable the Adblock addon.

Measure your net speed online

The internet speed is not always same and changes very often throughout the day. Often times we would like to measure our internet speed and see how fast it is.

Speedtest.net is a nice site made in flash which allows internet users to measure their download and upload speed from their computer to anywhere in the world.


Since different parts of the world have varying network speed at a given time we need to measure our speed to a particular location. Select the city to which you would like to measure your speed. The tool then starts by measuring the latency (round-trip time) and then continues to measure the download and upload speeds.

After the tests complete, results are displayed as shown below with links that can also be shared with others.


I currently use 1 Mbps broadband connection and my speed of 831 kbps measured to Singapore seems good as I am getting 83% of my download bandwidth. And about 80% of upload bandwidth.

Google's Olympic 2008 page

The 2008 Olympics competition starts today and for all the sports fan out there Google has created an Olympics page here. The page contains a cool widget for you to track the olympic games which shows the medal standing, events and news. A must have for all the Olympic followers out there who use iGoogle. The site also allows to track the event locations via Google maps.

And for more information about the games, the official site is located here. Enjoy tracking your games online, anyone with links to other interesting widgets/apps for olympics please share by commenting.

Plurk - New micro-blog service

I came across Plurk.com a new micro-blogging service which is gaining some popularity. Plurk is similar to twitter.com as both are micro-blogs allowing users to type in only a limited number of characters.

Plurk allows 140 characters to be typed at once and gives some smileys to add to your message. The site then displays a nice time line of all your 'plurks' with the most recent ones on the left and the others on the right which can be scroll by mouse dragging.

The site gives points to active users, these points are called Karma. It provides widgets to add to your site which shows your recent plurks. The site also allows mobile users to text message their plurks to the site.

Use Internet Explorer inside Firefox with IE Tab

One of my favorite Firefox extension - IE Tab allows opening Internet Explorer (IE) only sites without the need for running IE separately. The addon uses the IE engine and displays sites right within firefox.

Using the addon is simple, the status bar contains an icon which displays the firefox icon, clicking it changes it to IE's icon and the current site in the tab reloads using IE's engine and everything works as it would work in IE but the other firefox functions and addons cannot be used at the same time. A link can also be opened in IE's engine by right-cliking and selecting "View Page in IE Tab"

There are also options which allows customization of context menu, creating filters to open sites in IE engine automatically.

IE Tab can be downloaded from Mozilla's site here. The addon is compatible with the latest Firefox version 3

Use gmail id with Windows Live Messenger

You don't need a hotmail id to use Windows Live Messenger (MSN). With Windows Live you can create a new ID with any email address.

I stopped using hotmail a long time back, gmail was the next best thing to happen to email after hotmail more than 10 years back. But Microsoft's messenger is still the most widely used and cannot be compared to the simple featureless Google Talk. And many like me would have stopped using hotmail completely and keep their hotmail only for using MSN.

To use your Gmail id with MSN go here and register for a Windows Live ID, confirm your email (beware I found my confirmation email in Gmail's spam folder).
Once confirmed you can use your @gmail.com id and sign in to MSN messenger, add all your friends and get chatting.