Feedstitch combines multiple RSS feeds into one.
Checking multiple sites for updated information is a hassle. FeedStitch combines not just multiple RSS feeds, but data feeds from popular social networking services to make keeping an eye on things easy. After signing up for a free account (or using your Twitter, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, or open ID login) you can start entering in RSS feeds and the usernames of Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, GitHub, and Tumblr you want to keep an eye on. You can then group various feeds and usernames into subsets, creating a new RSS feed or JSON file to track just the items you have specified. FeedStitch [via MakeUseOf]
Firefox 3.5: Set Gmail as the Default Email Client
If you use Gmail as your primary email client, Firefox 3.5 makes it easy to associate any mailto links that you might encounter to us Gmail as the default email client. While this has been possible with previous versions, you don’t need to jump through any hoops or use any add-ons with Firefox 3.5.
1. Open Firefox.
2. Go to the menu, click Tools and select Options.
3. Click the Applications tab.
4. Scroll down to the mailto Content type.
5. Select the associated Action dropdown and select Use Gmail.
Technorati Tags: Firefox
Mozilla wants to give you a free MacBook Pro for your killer add-on!
Take the Extend Firefox 3.5 challenge, for example. If you can come up with a creative, innovative, or just plain cool, you could just win yourself a MacBook Pro – or one of several other kick-ass prizes.
Create your own GMail themes.
First we had GMail themes. Now Google allows you to make Gmail as ugly or pretty as you want – by choosing your own colors.
Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Themes, and click “Choose your own colors”. This opens a window where you can configure a template with instant preview. Hit Save & Close, and Gmail will appear in your custom colors.
Tackle slowdown with a killer resume and a sure plan
Whether you’re suddenly unemployed or just looking to change up, starting out in a new career is daunting. Take a look at this advice on how to write—and plan—your way into a new field.
10 Easy Steps To Advanced Photography Skills
If you love photography, tinkering with your camera or just love watching great photographs – you must read this fascinating article from Smashing Magazine.
How to download Videos from IMEEM
IMEEM has a collection of great videos. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to download them because IMEEM has incorporated an Anti-Leech technology which makes conventional downloads difficult. But there are ways to download videos using the following hack.
Step 1 : Download VideoCacheView – If the video file is stored in your browser’s cache, this utility can help you to extract the video file from the cache and save it for watching it in the future. It automatically scans the entire cache of Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based Web browsers (Including Firefox) and finds all video files that are currently stored in it. It allows you to easily copy the cached video files into another folder for playing/watching them in the future. If you have a movie player that is configured to play flv files, it also allows you to play the video directly from your browser’s cache.
Even with all the Anti-Leech technology in place, IMEEM can not stop the browser from caching the videos and thats where our little hack will come into picture.
Step 2 : Play the Videos (or several videos in Tabs) and let them complete (this is important) and don’t close the browser (this is also very important because browser cache might get cleared on closing)
Step 3 : Open VideoCacheView. It will show all the videos in the browser cache. (Check Screenshot)
Step 4 : Select the files you want to save and click on SAVE icon to save the FLV file.
Repair your computer from the USB.
Technibble, the Australian site for aspiring computer techies, recently released the second version of its popular Computer Repair Utility Kit, a collection of 57 hand picked tools to help you diagnose and repair your Windows machine.
While all of the utilities are freely available online, this all-in-one kit saves you the trouble of searching for and downloading them individually. Most of the applications don’t require installation and the kit can be run directly from your thumb drive.
Yahoo to Enable Custom Semantic Search Engines
Yahoo is bringing together two of its most interesting projects today, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey, its semantic indexing and search result enhancement service. There were a number of different parts of the announcement – but the core of the story is simple. Developers will now be able to build their own search engines using the Yahoo! index and search processing infrastructure via BOSS and include the semantic markup added to pages in both results parsing and the display of those results. There’s considerable potential here for some really dazzling results.
Bespin – coding in the cloud.
The Cloud. We save our data to it, create documents in it, collaborate in it. But coding in the cloud? That has remained a decidedly desktop-centric pursuit. Now, even that may be changing thanks toBespin,
a new prototype from Mozilla Labs. Flaunting thoughtful functionality and bearing an appropriately geeky name, Bespin aims to become your dream HTML editor – from within the cloud.
Yahoo Go – Why nobody knows about it ?
I have always wondered why Yahoo products don’t get the response and appreciation they deserve while Google always steal the show with their relatively mediocre (feature restricted) products.
Look at the number of Yahoo services. Most of them have very less visibility as compared to their Google counterpart. ReadWriteWeb posted an interesting article about what Yahoo should do to survive. But what pains me the most is the less attention given to some excellent services offered by Yahoo.
Let me list some excellent Yahoo products that deserve more appreciation than they have got so far.
1. Yahoo Go : Yahoo! Go is a slick mobile application designed for Yahoo users. Access Yahoo! Mail, Flickr photos, Local Maps & Business Listings, Web Search, News, Weather and favorite feeds from your mobile. This little mobile application provides everything under Yahoo. Its awesome interface and usability amazes me. There is no other application which provides so many important services. Quite frankly, I had not heard of Yahoo Go! till a few days back. There was too much, almost unnecessary, noise about a mediocre and utterly useless application Google Latitude. Its very difficult to separate substance from the noise.
2. Yahoo Pipes : Many services were inspired (and got more publicity) from this fascinating innovation from Yahoo! The main problem with Pipes is that its very complicated for an absolute beginner. Look at how Yahoo describes it…”Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web…grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats…” – this definitely makes very little sense to a grandmother. Still, the service and its interface is really easy to use and can produce excellent mash-ups.
and we have Yahoo! answers, Yahoo! maps, Yahoo! news, Yahoo! groups, 360 (is it dead already ?), GeoCities (old school, never upgraded to catch Web 2.0’s attention), Buzz (?), Widgets (did not leverage the Konfabulator’s userbase – too heavy for desktop widgets)…the list can seriously go on and on.
So what is wrong with Yahoo! services ? very little.
a. Too much advertising, clutter, etc to hide the interface. Too much noise in the interface.
b. Too much color. Google is successful with stark white background and RGB interface. Seriously, purple buttons is so 1992.
c. Timing. Yahoo! launches their services along with Google.
d. Yahoo! is not a cult like Google. Yahoo! has not got hold of the silicon valley cult-creators.
There is nothing wrong with Yahoo! services. They are excellent and works like a charm. Just that Yahoo! needs to capture global imagination.
5 Ways To Bypass Torrent Connection Blocking
Must Read – 5 Ways To Bypass Torrent Connection Blocking [MakeUseOf]
This is an excellent article talking about how to bypass the bandwidth throttling on torrent downloads.
Supercharge your IM.
IM is thought of as a chatting medium. But there are several services to super-charge your plain vanilla IM to a great productivity tool.
Setup an answering machine
An answering machine for your IM network will automatically respond to messages when you are offline. You can hack out a bot and have it running, monitoring the incoming messages and replying appropriately or you can simply sign into your account and set response messages.
Answer.im allows you to do just that. You are not even required to register. Log in with the IM credentials of the account you want set up answering for, set the status that will be shown to the users and then type the autoresponse text that will be sent back to the users in case someone happens to ping you while you are offline.
Create IM hyperlinks
IM hyperlinks allow people to quickly send you a message when they click on the link. All you have to do is format the “href” attribute of the <a> tag according to the IM network you want to add the link for. Check out this article for details.
Read RSS feeds
Try out ZapTXT and IMfeeds which allow you to get RSS updates within your chat client.
Finally, Imified is without a doubt going to be the best buddy in your buddy list! Imified allows you to access web services, manage to do lists, ping domains and much more all from within your IM client.
Sync Google calendar with Google Sync
Google has just release a new tool called Google Sync, a service that syncs your contacts and Calendar wirelessly to your iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Mobile phone.
Google Sync uses a Microsoft Exchange server to keep all of your contact and calendar data in sync over the air. If you’ve added a new calendar appointment from your desktop, Google Sync will push the update to your phone. Likewise, changes you make from your phone are automatically synced to your Google account in the cloud.
Google Sync Beta for your mobile phone [via Official Google Mobile Blog]
Sync Google calendar with Google Sync
Google has just release a new tool called Google Sync, a service that syncs your contacts and Calendar wirelessly to your iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Mobile phone.
Google Sync uses a Microsoft Exchange server to keep all of your contact and calendar data in sync over the air. If you’ve added a new calendar appointment from your desktop, Google Sync will push the update to your phone. Likewise, changes you make from your phone are automatically synced to your Google account in the cloud.
Google Sync Beta for your mobile phone [via Official Google Mobile Blog]
Meebo adds Facebook and Myspace chat.
Meebo is a web-based chat client that lets you keep up with your AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger contacts. Now Meebo has rolled out support for two more chat clients: Facebook and MySpace.
Meebo provides a way to chat with contacts using 9 different IM clients now, and you can do it all from a single web page. So you don’t need to leave Facebook, Gmail, or MySpace open all day if all you care about is the chat features. And more importantly, since Meebo is web-based, you can use the service from any computer without stopping to install software. [via CNET]
Goodbye Firefox 2.
As expected, Mozilla has pulled the plug on Firefox 2. There will be no more security updates, and no more support for the web browser. When users download and install the latest update for Firefox 2, they’re greeted with a message suggesting they upgrade to Firefox 3 which is generally both faster and more secure than Firefox 2. 
Of course, some people don’t like the way Firefox 3 handles bookmarks or tabs, which could make them reluctant to upgrade. But I’d recommend upgrading for the security enhancements alone. You can always search for Firefox add-ons that enhance the bookmark manager or tab positions.
[via Mashable]
Remember the Task Puts Remember the Milk in a Stand-Alone Window
Remember the Task simply puts web task manager Remember the Milk’s familiar gadget interface into a stand-alone Adobe AIR window, but maybe that’s just what you need.
RTM’s stripped-down, vertically-aligned rectangle is the same you’ll see in its Gmail and iGoogle gadgets, as well as a Vista Sidebar widget and desktop embeds. But since Remember the Task is its own desktop window, you can minimize it to your tray, keep it on your second monitor, or simply have it available by hitting Alt-Tab.
Remember the Task is a free download for all systems, requires the Adobe AIR platform to install and run.
Remember the Task [Adobe AIR Marketplace – via Lifehacker]
Microsoft issues patch for latest IE vulnerability
Microsoft is acting to address concerns regarding the vulnerability that has been widely reported on since it was revealed last week. According to BetaNews there still haven’t been any reported incidents involving the exploit. Even though the vulnerability’s existence has yet to be confirmed, Microsoft has responded quickly and has prepared a patch for release today at 10:00am PST. There are also webcasts scheduled for December 17th and 18th to answer customer concerns regarding the out-of-band update.
For more information about the specifics of the vulnerability, read Microsoft’s December 12th TechNet post. The post also details five different workarounds (which should be unnecessary once the patch is released). It’s likely that Microsoft will also update the original security advisory with a link to the patch once it has been made available.
Update: downloads are available here – choose the link that matches your Windows OS.
[ via BetaNews ]
UnChrome Anonymizes Your Google Chrome Installation
UnChrome helps you browse anonymously by removing the unique ID from Google Chrome that Google as
sociates with your Chrome installation. Chrome Privacy Guard does a similar thing.
UnChrome [via Download Squad]
