Move the Progress Bar to the Tabs in Firefox

Do you like having the Progress Bar to monitor webpage loading but prefer to keep the Status Bar hidden? Now you can easily move the Progress Bar to your tabs with the Tab Progress Bar extension.

BeforeHere is the “Progress Bar” showing in the “Status Bar” while a webpage is loading…nice if you like having the “Status Bar” displayed. But what if you prefer to have the “Status Bar” hidden? 

After Once you have installed the extension, the “Progress Bar” will display on any tabs that are currently loading leaving you free to completely hide the “Status Bar” if you desire. Note: There are no options to have to worry with for this extension…just install and go.

ConclusionIf you are looking for a way to move Status Bar functionality to your tabs, then the Tab Progress Bar extension will make a nice addition to your Firefox Browser. If you want to hide the Status Bar until you need it, check out our article on how to Auto-Hide the Status Bar in Firefox. Links Download the Tab Progress Bar extension (Mozilla Add-ons)

Top 5 Sites For Free Sound Effects Downloads

Whether you’re working with things like video, music, animation, games, or any other media, sound is critical. The use of sound effects can make or break a project, but sometimes finding that right, good-quality piece of audio can be difficult.

Before you open up your wallet for expensive software or try to make your own sound effects, you may easily be able to find free sound effects on the Web. There are plenty of great resources available online. Best of all, it doesn’t have to cost you anything!

Have your headphones ready? Here’s the top 5 websites for free sound effects downloads.

Flash Kit

Flash Kit’s Sound FX page is one of the best places to download free sound effects. The site has over 7,000 royalty-free tracks available for download.

You can search the collection manually or browse various categories, like nature or transportation, for the sound you’re looking for.

If you come across a desirable sound effect, all of its information, including length, quality, and size, are available and you can easily preview the track before downloading. All tracks are downloadable as WAV, MP3, or Flashtrak files.

Feel free to also contribute to the archive yourself by submitting your own original sounds.

Soungle

While Soungle may look and feel like just an audio search engine, it really isn’t. The website is touted as a mega online library and it only searches its impressive growing database of sound effects.

Soungle keeps everything easy and straightforward. Search results simply include a preview, description, clip information, and if you like the sound effect, just download it. It’s as easy as that.

Soundboard

Soundboard has a massive supply of thousands of sound effects to choose from. You can either search the collection by keyword or explore the slew of soundboards, with everything from airplanes to circus animal sound effects.

Once on a soundboard page, you can listen to the playlist and download whichever tracks you like. All sound effects are MP3 files.

SoundBible

Offering thousands of sound bites and effects, SoundBible is the encyclopedia of free sound clips. The site divides its content into free sound effects or royalty-free sounds.

All the sounds are plainly listed with a preview listen button and what license each falls under. Royalty-free sounds consist of Creative Commons and public domain works.

Freesound Project

The Freesound Project is a repository of Creative Commons licensed audio samples. It’s a huge collaborative database of just sounds, so you’re bound to find what you need.

You can search through all the content by keyword or browse the popular tags. Of course, you can always contribute to the database by adding your audio samples released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

Do you have a favorite website for downloading free sound effects? Let me know in the comments.

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Find Lost Space On Your Hard Disk With Space Sniffer

Do you know what is on your system? I mean do you really really know what is occupying your hard drive’s space?

Do you know where your 200GB is on free space? What’s that? You only have 72MB free? What is using all that lost hard drive space? What do you mean you don’t know?

It looks like you are in need of a virtual canine application called Space Sniffer… Get it? Like a dog.

Umm well, the software is MUCH better than my joke – I assure you. No, really!

Go ahead and grab the download from here. It is a 1.1MB file. Once you get that file downloaded, go ahead and extract the executable file from the zip file. It is called SpaceSniffer.exe and it is completely portable!
Once you get the file out and run it you will see a screen that looks like this:

On that first screen, select the drive you want to analyze or sniff for lost hard drive space. I selected my C:\ drive. And hit Start. That starts the action and you will see a moving representation of your selected drive as it sorts out what is on your drive. You will see something similar to this as it runs:

If you click on any of the drive portions, you can “Zoom In” like so (even while you are still scanning). I double-clicked on the desktop portion occupying 5.4GB of data and saw this:

It is pretty damn cool to see the directories or drives broken down like this. My drive did take some time to complete. In the area of 15 minutes. But I was using the system as I went for normal day to day activities. Then it was complete.

Now let’s take a look at your options. You can see them by hitting Edit – Options. Then, you can see each of the four tabs below:

The first tab denotes if you should show free space, show unknown space, sort item and the minimum size of an element (this is the smallest items), proportions of items against each other and initial detail level. Mess around with them and see what works for you.

Hmm dynamic zoom as a effect? Let’s enable it and see what happens. After enabling this feature it, shows the effect of “Zooming in”. It’s cool but not very useful. It did not use as much memory as I expected.

Scan alternate data steams? This had me stumped so I checked my friend Google and read this:

Just after that I heard about an Alternate Data Stream (ADS) scanner named LADS. When I ran it on one of my drives I was shocked to find that I had over 17,000 hidden objects that ETrust had apparently placed there as part of it’s virus scanning procedure. They’re “Alternate Data Streams”, and one was associated with every file on my NTFS partitions. [http://www.2kevin.net/datastreams.html]

That sparked my interest enough for me to check the box and re-run my scan.

My new scan showed free space but no Alternate Data Streams – but I will scan my servers tonight and let you guys know via the comments how it went later on.

The last option in the preferences is the colors of items placed on your map. Tweak them to your heart’s desire and let us know how it works out in the comments!

Do you use a similar free program to find lost hard drive space? We would love to hear how you keep your hard drives in check! Voice it out in the comments.

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How To Upgrade From XP To Windows 7 In 4 Easy Steps

Windows 7 will be released today. We have already given plenty of love to Windows 7. If you are still using Windows XP and want to switch directly to Windows 7, you might get disheartened knowing that there is no direct path to upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7.  However, with a bit of planning and with appropriate tools, you can move from XP to Windows 7 with minimal of fuss. If that is what you are looking for, this is the guide for you. Let’s set the ball rolling straight away.

Step 1: The checks

First off, you would want to make sure your existing hardware can support Windows 7. Windows XP has been out for a long time and your hardware might not support the newer and comparatively more demanding versions of Windows like Windows 7. These are the official system requirements:

• 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

You can use the Windows 7 Upgrade advisor to see if your computer will run Windows 7. Once you are sure that you are good to go, hop up to the next step.

Step 2: Backup and Migration

It is always a good idea to have backup of your important files and settings that you worked so hard to create. We have shown you various applications to backup your files and settings in the past. If you would rather not install any new software, a simple copy and paste would suffice for the time being. Just make sure to include everything you might need. While you might have set up your folders differently according to your taste, here are some key locations that you should check out and decide if you would like to back them up:

• My Documents
• My Music
• My Pictures
• (If you have more than one user account on your computer, make sure to back up their files as well)
• Your projects folders and files, if it is your work computer
• Browser bookmarks, saved passwords, etc.
• Other program data under %AppData% (This doesn’t always work. It is better if you use respective applications to export settings)

Another option you can use to quickly backup and transfer your settings is the Windows Easy Transfer tool that you can find on the Windows 7 DVD. Browse to the folder named support and then to migwiz on your Windows 7 DVD and launch migsetup.exe. This will launch the Windows Easy Transfer tool.

Choose how you would like to transfer the settings:

and then select what to transfer:

and Windows Easy Transfer will do the rest and give you a file you can store, on say a flash drive to transfer the settings to new installation later.

Step 3: Drivers

Next up are the drivers. It is always a good idea to search your computer manufacturer’s website to see if they have newer drivers for Windows 7. Older drivers may not always work, or may not work as intended. This is especially true for drivers made for Windows XP. I was able to use an XP display driver with Windows 7 beta but it didn’t work when Windows 7 RC came out. You might have more luck with Vista drivers on Windows 7, but nothing is guaranteed. So if you are trying to get older drivers to work, you better be prepared to play around after installation.

Step 4: Install

Finally, you are ready to install Windows 7. Pop in the DVD and restart your computer. Boot from the DVD and follow the prompts to install Windows 7.

Choose Custom (Advanced install) when given the choice:

Then choose the system drive (which was your C: on Windows XP) as the partition you would like to set up Windows 7.

Wait for the installation to complete, and boot into Windows 7 once you are done.

Installed, now what?

Already here? Way to go. Now that you have Windows installed there are few additional steps you should take before you are ready to go. First off, make sure you install an antivirus before you start browsing the web or transferring files using USB drives. MS Security Essentials, AVG, Avast and Antivir are good free choices. You might want to look into commercial ones if you want something better. ESET and Kaspersky are good choices over there (Oops! Did I start a flame war?).

Install your favorite applications now. This would be a good time to get the latest versions if you have been postponing pending software updates. Looking for some software recommendations? Check out the Mark pack.

Oh and don’t forget to restore the settings you backed up earlier. If you went the copy-paste route, its time to do some more copy-paste. If you used Windows Easy Transfer instead, click on Start button and type Windows Easy transfer, launch the application and let it know that this is your new computer, then browse to the location you stored those settings to and let it do the rest.

Hope this helps you plan your upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. Once you are done, use the comments area and tell us know how it went and if Windows 7 is worth the price tag!

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10 Keyboard Techniques To Create Cool Symbols

All of us use the keyboard to create symbols daily. Look at the thumbnail. That’s a simple symbol created with just four keys.

Symbols existed even before the alphabets. Over the years they have been part of folklore, myths and legends. Some have stayed on as indelible marks. Some, like the swastika, are better forgotten. Symbols have remained potent. If you doubt their visual power, then look no further than logos. People shell out millions for a three-pointed star on a sleek hood or a prancing horse. Puzzled? The first one is the Mercedes logo and the latter is Ferrari’s.

In this post I will take a look at some symbols or images that we can reproduce using just the keyboard. The superset of creating images using letters/symbols on the keyboard goes by the name of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) art. You need two things to draw ASCII art anywhere online…a keyboard and lots of patience.

How Do We Create Cool Symbols Using The Keys On Our Keyboard?

Text art/ ASCII art can be drawn using any text editor, online or offline. The simplest is Notepad on Windows or TextEdit for Mac. More advanced word processors have features which are more adept at selection and alignment functions like Overtype and Insert.

Can text art be learned and are there any special techniques to create cool figures?

The answer to the first is yes, it’s fairly easy to learn. There are some basics of course that need to be kept in mind. The rest as they say is practice.

Some basic techniques for keyboard symbols are :

1. Use a fixed width (Courier, Monaco, and Fixedsys) font, to draw your symbols because every type of computer has them. Also called as a monospaced font, they are fonts whose letters each occupy the same amount of space and thus they are also easier to align with one another.
2. Experts speak about noticing the difference between serif (with a short line at the end of the character) and sans serif (without the line at the end) fonts for text art. The display may differ from one computer to the next depending on the default type of font. One advice usually is to use the vertical bar (|) instead of the capital I (I) to draw vertical lines with the sans serif font.
3. Draw in the Overtype mode on your word processor. This makes it easier to put in another character without re-aligning the neighboring ones.
4. Use the Space key instead of the Tab key.
5. Draw a rough sketch of the figure on paper and then put in place keyboard symbols and letters that bests approximate the angles and curves of your figure. For instance, o or @ for eyes, “ for hair etc. The most common symbols used in ASCII art are: / \ | – _ ( )
   
6. Start small with simple symbols or figures. Example – a rose or a face.

   

7. Begin from a simple area of the figure which has a shape that’s easy to type in.
8. Go for close approximation rather than pinpoint accuracy…after all, accuracy is more suited for line art.
9. Correct your mistakes early because leaving them for later will mar the precision and placement of symbols.
10. Free your imagination!

5 Websites for ASCII Art Lovers

The ideas for the ASCII figures mentioned in this post have been collected from the web. Here, I would like to particularly mention a few sites where you can go and see the visual impact created using just keyboard symbols and a text editor. Looking at them will give you an idea of the techniques involved.

Chris.com’s ASCII Art Collection

A treasure trove of ASCII art collected by Christopher Johnson from the corners of the net. Check out the categories on the left frame. The Halloween, Batman and the space ship Enterprise come from this complete collection. If you want to see what’s possible then this is the resource for you.

The site also has quite a few detailed tutorials on how to start off with ASCII art. Read all of them for a complete education on how to draw with letters and keyboard symbols.

ASCII Picture Collections

A roll call of text artists arranged alphabetically. I have taken the image of the house from the works of Yvonne Adams.

The ASCII Art Dictionary

A resource created by Andreas Freise listing all his creations. He has also sorted his gallery according to the sizes of the figures – Big, Small, and Micro.

ASCII World

A lot of ASCII art arranged in categories. You can also send them to recipients through a direct email from the site.

Asciimation

I included this for the love of Star Wars. Checkout the ASCII Star Wars Movie. Just shows you that ASCII art can be really cool.

The thing about this art form is that you don’t need special skills or special tools. An eye for detail may help though. What’s more important is a will…to make mistakes, rub it away and start over again. So, open your text program, bring up your favorite image and start tapping away.

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