After installation, Instant Beautiful Browsing can be easily accessed from a desktop shortcut just like any other application. It takes over your computer screen and replaces the stock Windows 7 interface with the beautiful Metro UI. The application has Metro tiles set by default for Weather, Clock, Browser, Gmail, Shop, Music etc. Click a tile to access the attached application. You can also edit the tiles yourself to add and remove new applications.

For instance, click Clock or Weather to view the Metro clock in both analog and digital time formats or the current Weather of your location.

The Shop tile lets you change your user status, pin sites to Pinner, view your Google Docs, add and apply themes from Theme Center, etc.

Please note that Instant Beautiful Browsing is under development and some of the tiles and options might be buggy at the moment. Meanwhile, you can also check out how to get Windows 8 style Metro start screen in Windows 7 using Metro7.

Download Instant Beautiful Browsing

Increase SGS2 battery life

How to increase Samsung Galaxy S2 battery life?

Reduce display brightness
Samsung Galaxy S2 Super AMOLED Plus is the biggest battery life eater of all. By disable Automatic brightness and set it to the lowest level will improve battery life a lot.

Remove unused widget
The more widget you have, the more battery life will be eaten especially those widgets that use data connection and auto sync based on schedule. Therefore, only keep those widgets that you really need.

Poor signal decrease battery life
Phone will use more power to increase signal strength. Always make sure that your phone has a good signal reception. Switch to 2G if 3G connection signal is poor at your area.

Turn off 3G data connection, use Wi-Fi
Always gets connected with Wi-Fi when available. 3G data connection eats more battery compare to Wi-Fi connection. Turn off both of them when not needed.

Disable / reduce auto-sync
Data connection eats battery life. Disable or reduce background scheduled auto-sync applications like Gmail, Twitter. And reduce the frequency of auto-sync will also help to improve battery life too.

Turn off Bluetooth, GPS
If you don’t use Bluetooth or GPS, turn them off. Only turn on them when needed.

Turn off motion sensor
If you don’t use Samsung Galaxy S2 Motion features like turn over, tilt, panning and double tap, turn them off. Or just enable those you are using only.

Turn off new Samsung Apps notification
For those who don’t use Samsung applications like me, you can turn off new Samsung Apps notification. (Settings – Application – Samsung Apps – Off).

Use solid black static wallpaper
Samsung Galaxy S2 Super AMOLED Plus uses less power on solid black wallpaper because (almost) no backlight is output. And try not to use beautiful live wallpaper. Why? Lovely animation costs you ~ CPU power == battery life.

Fully close application that not use
SGS2 is a great multitasking machine. But by letting lot of applications running at background actually increase battery usage because they still require CPU processing. So fully close those applications that not needed.

Undervolt and underclock CPU
Besides display, SGS2 CPU is the second biggest battery life eater. If you don’t need 1.2GHz processing power, underclock and undervolt it with SetCPU for Root Users.

Freeze unused bundle applications
You can freeze Samsung bundle software like Social Hub, Email, Maps if you don’t need them with Bloat Freezer or Titanium Backup Pro. Why? They are running as service even you are not using them at all.

Use latest leaked official firmware
Android OS is using too much battery? It’s time for you to upgrade to latest leaked official firmware. Latest firmware fixed bugs and improve performance. I am using XXKG5 firmware now and battery life is better than stock XWKF1 firmware. ~ How to install firmware on Samsung Galaxy S2 with Odin?

Use custom firmware
Custom firmware has lot of optimizations, tweaks to improve performance, battery life and user experience. Do try it if you can. ~ Top Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread Firmware for Samsung Galaxy S2

Any other tips and tweaks to improve battery life that I missed out? Let me know… 

Windows: Pulse is a free program that downloads and cycles through wallpapers based on any keyword you give it.

We’ve featured a few ways to mass download wallpapers before, but if you have more specific tastes, Pulse will sit in your system tray and automatically cycle through wallpapers by keyword, like “cosmos” or “landscape.”

Right now, it’s in beta, and only uses one site—rewalls.com—as its source, but eventually it’ll support more wallpaper sites. It works better for certain search terms than others (for example, “space” returns a strange mishmash of results, while “cosmos” returns a very specific set of wallpapers), so keep trying if you aren’t getting the results you want. It’s also worth mentioning that rewalls.com is a Russian site, so there may be some loss in translation. A good way to start searching is to translate rewalls.com into English and look at the tags on the right hand side of the page—those should return some good results.

Pulse is a free download for Windows only.

Pulse <- Click here for Download

Figuring out the smartest places to store your stuff is time well spent—mostly because it results in time you don’t spend cleaning. Here’s are 10 smart storage solutions for your excess cords, shoes, spices, and all kinds of computer stuff.

Photo via Instructables.

10. Make Your Shoes Float

Formal shoes, work boots, summer wear, running shoes, the spare brown pair—even those with minimal fashion sense can end up with lots of these suckers. You could pick up one of many hanging/sliding shoe storage solutions, but we dig both the look and convenience of this DIY “floating” shoe rack. For a slight upgrade, This version goes one better, hiding the hanging hardware entirely out of sight. (Original posts:one, two).

9. Keep Your Cats and Their Necessities Hidden

Cats are great, generally low-maintenance creatures, but the stuff they need and like does take up some space. Avoid sacrificing a room or closet to mother nature’s needs with some litter box modifications. The ideas for turning big cupboards,entryway shelves, andunder-sink spaces all come from IKEA modifications, but other furniture builds and storage bins can be adapted, too. As for providing some space for Whiskers McMeowerton when he’s not taking care of business, you can convert a bookcase into a cat tree, or fulfill every cat’s cardboard fantasy by converting a box into a kitty chaise lounge. (Original posts: furniture, entryway, under-sink, cat tree, cat chaise).

8. Get Your Bike Off the Floor

Biking is a lot more fuel-efficient than driving, but keeping a bike assembled in your home isn’t space-efficent. Avoid paying for pricey bike mounts with some DIY offerings, like afew tension cables, a very cheap, board-based version, a modification of an IKEA storage pole, and that pole’s carpet-friendly cousin. (Original posts:DIY, revisited, IKEA, carpet-friendly).

7. Make Your Filing Cabinet Actually Useful

If your filing cabinet serves more function as unintended shelf space than an actual filing destination, it probably needs some work. Gina showed us her extreme filing cabinet makeover, touching on the physical changes she made to make paper shuffling more convenient. Jason gave us a tour-de-force of his filing system workflow, which gave order and purpose to his old documents and made him actually want to file things away. Photo by Matthew Cornell.

6. Declutter Your Spices and Make Them Accessible

Having spices you can read, see the fill level of, and easily access saves you time while cooking, and money on unnecessary purchases, as suggested by the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Then there are the magnetic spice racks, which hang your dried goods both under a shelfand on the wall. Then, for those with quite a few spices to grab, there are the minimalist, all-access shelves that most anyone can make themselves. (Original posts: DIY spice jars,magnetic under-shelf, magnetic wall, minimalist).

5. Stash Your Headphones Without Tangled Wires

Headphones, of both the big-can and inner-ear variety, get tangled and never quite tuck away neatly. Not without some crafty assistance, anyways. Try installing a coat hook under your desk for a hidden-but-available hiding place. For your earbuds, first learn the “devil’s horns” wrapping method(R.I.P., Dio), then keep them together and close by with an old vinyl badge clip, or other makeshift wrappers.

4. Stash Your Peripherals When Not in Use

USB headsets, USB cables, and other sometimes necessary gear will creep its way into your workspace if there’s nowhere to put it all. MAKE points us to a DIY iMac monitor shelf, utilizing the space betwen a flatscreen monitor and a wall to tuck away items so they’re within reach but out of sight. There’s also acommercial version, if you don’t like building your own mini-shelves. This Slashdot thread contains the thoughts of some very hardcore peripheral geeks on tidying up their wares (think velcro ties, not plastic zips), and our featured workspaces have provided some inspiration before, like thesehollowed out shelves, or this IKEA cabinet-turned-workspace. (Original posts: monitor shelf,IKEA cabinet).

3. Store Stuff Vertically with DIY Shelving

If your home or apartment didn’t come with great shelving, don’t give up on it. Whether it’s books, gear, or just general stuff that needs a new home, you can give it space with“Hungarian” square shelves (as demonstrated in this workspace), more simply-made DIY shelving, or compression bookcases that don’t require any wall drilling. Lots more ideas and inspiration can be found at our full shelving collection. (Original posts:Hungarian, DIY, compression).

2. Tuck Your Cords Away

We’ve covered far too many cord management tricks, techniques, and one-offs to cover inside one list item, but here’s an attempt. Adam and Gina have both detailed their own comprehensive cord clean-ups, and we’ve posted a notably cordless dorm workspace. Gina previously rounded up 10 cable control tips, and our full cord management tag page is getting regularly updated. Don’t let your cords litter your space and distract your mind—bend them to your will.

1. Hide Your Cables in Plain Sight

If you can’t find a space or a compartment to tuck your cords into, do the next best thing—consider creatively arranging them in plain sight. If design and sketching isn’t your forte, you don’t have to get quite so fancy—something like agreen cable “flower stem”, or an equivalent cable-as-hanging-platform idea, can fly just as well. If it’s a short distance and a flat space, and you’re willing to spend a little bit on style, we’ve dug the idea of FlatWire, too. (Original posts: creative display, flower stem, FlatWire).

Google Chrome’s application shortcuts turn any web site into a separate item on your Windows 7 taskbar, but unfortunately many sites have low-res icons that make your taskbar ugly. Here’s the simple trick to make your taskbar beautiful again.

Once you’ve pinned a shortcut to your taskbar, you can still modify the shortcut properties by right-clicking on the taskbar button, and then right-clicking again on the name of the shortcut. From there, you can access the real Properties menu for the shortcut. Of course, if you haven’t pinned the shortcut to your taskbar, you can access the same Properties menu from the shortcut in the Start Menu.

Click the Change Icon button, and then browse to find a new high quality icon on your system—this can be one of the built-in Windows icons, but for best results you can find a better icon on a site like IconFinder. Make sure to grab the highest quality one you can find, download it as an .ICO file, and save that file in a safe location on your system—I put mine into my Dropbox folder.

Once you’re done, you might notice that it sometimes takes a minute for the change to take effect, but sometimes closing and re-opening the application helps speed the process along.

I’ve personally used this technique to use different icons for different sessions to the same web site, or just to improve the quality of the icon, like the Remember the Milk icon shown in the screenshot above, which you can download from here.

Do you pin web applications to your taskbar? What icons did you use to customize your own shortcuts? Share your favorites with your fellow readers in the comments.

It cleans the following :

• Internet Explorer:
  Temporary files, history, cookies, Autocomplete form history, index.dat.
• Mozilla:Temporary files, history, cookies, download history, form history.
• Registry Cleaner:Advanced features to remove unused and old entries, including File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons, Invalid Shortcuts and more… also comes with a comprehensive backup feature.
• Third party Applications:Removes temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) from many apps including Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, Microsoft Office, Nero, Adobe Acrobat, WinRAR, WinAce, WinZip and many more…

Download From here

• To remove them just enter into there profiles click more on Left side of orkut profile and click Remove Friends Tab.And you are done ,:)

Hope You will not face any problem in Using this new feature for removing friend from your friend list.

Everyone and their dog (yes, there are a few dogs out there with their own blogs) have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren’t taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines. While blogs can be business related (another blog about mesothelioma anyone?) they can also be personal where you talk about the great ham sandwich you had for lunch today or the crappy service you had at that trendy restaurant last night.

But whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers (after all, you want to keep those readers coming back) and the search engines. Unfortunately, optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be monetizable.However, optimizing a blog is a bit different than your standard website search engine optimization (SEO), particularly because most blogs run off standard blog platforms, or worse, run as a hosted blog on someone else’s domain name. And there are design issues that can be unique to blogs which can impact your rankings.

When you optimize your blog for the user experience, you make it easy for users to return and engage in your blog without dealing with any of the hassles that can cause them to abandon other sites or blog entries. Repeat visitors are the cream of your blog, so by following these tips you have given them the tools they need to return as well as the user experience that makes them want to come back.

Fortunately, if you are on the case to make your blog rank well while not hindering your visitor’s experience on your site, there are definitely things you can check – and fix – to prevent any indexing issues from occurring, and ensuring your blog a happy and healthy existence in the search engines.

So here is advice on how you can optimize that blog of yours for both users and search engines without alienating one or the other.

1) Dump The Default Template – Looks Count!
I cringe when I see a blog using the “out of the box�? WordPress or MovableType template. Hire a designer to create a unique look for your blog, or at the very least, take advantage of some of the free templates available and customize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade.

2) Just Say No To Bad Color Schemes
While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite, consider what your readers will be expecting. That color scheme might work perfectly on a teenage gossip site, but would look extremely out of place as the corporate blog for a men’s suit company. Likewise, gamers would think nothing of a black background on an Xbox 360 blog, but it would look horrendous on a parenting or pregnancy site. So while you should experiment with colors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind user experience and their expectations.

3) RSS Me!
Make sure you have RSS available. Many hosted blogging solutions don’t have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Don’t tuck them away at the very bottom of your index page after your most recent 20 entries, or hide them on a separate “About Us�? page. Place all those handy subscribe links in your sidebar, which is exactly where people will look for them. If you use Feedburner currently, have a look at their new MyBrand option which allows you to host your own feeds for a seamless user experience.

4) Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons
Yes, when people want to subscribe to a blog, they will often look for that orange RSS logo as well as the logos of the standard aggregators such as Bloglines. So it is worth the time to add the most popular ones to your blog so visitors can easily do their one-click subscriptions to your feed without it require much effort on their part. If you make it hard to subscribe, most just won’t bother. FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button.

5) Offer Posts Via Email
Some people just don’t get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.

6) Decide On Full Or Partial Feeds
Do you offer full feeds or partial feeds? This is a personal preference, and is often dependent on what market space you are blogging in. One option is to offer two feeds, one being an ad-supported full feed, with an RSS ad included, and the other being an ad-free snippet copy of the feed, where readers won’t see ads but will have to actually view your blog in order to read your full entry. But this will often come down to personal preference, and the preferences of your readers.

7) Write Compelling Snippets/Descriptions
If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, be sure to make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. This will get you many more readers to your entries than just using the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.

8 ) Pay Attention to How You Write.
One of my favorite bloggers has the unfortunate habit of writing detailed long entries… without a single paragraph break and with the double whammy of also writing with a font size smaller than usual. If I look up for a moment, it is hard to find my place again in her 1000 word entries. As a result, I don’t read it as often as I would like to, simply because reading it is such a painful experience.

9) Spelling Counts
Spelling is also worth mentioning. Add one of the many spell checkers to your internet browser and run a quick spell check before you publish your entry. Every word doesn’t have to be perfect, and I am certainly guilty myself of letting on occasional typo slip through unnoticed. But I also get annoyed when I am reading typo after typo after typo in an entry. And yes, if it happens enough, I will unsubscribe out of sheer frustration.

10) Fontography Counts
Make the font easy to read. Some bloggers think it is cool to have their handwriting turned into a customized font, or use a trendy font that would be better suited to a scrapbook layout. But not everyone has those wild and weird fonts installed, which means that those people will see a standard font such as Times New Roman, and it can really kill the look of your blog. So instead design the text of your blog entries to use a standard font in a standard size.

11) Don’t Forget Navigation
Is this blog part of a larger site, such as a corporate blog on a site for a major company? Don’t just link to the main page of the blog. Syndicate your recent headlines in the sidebar to encourage visitors on the main site to check out the blog too.

12) How Fast is Your Host?
Another one of my favorite blogs has such a slow response time when I click from the snippet in my RSS to the full blog entry that I only actually end up waiting around for it to load about 10% of the time. Don’t lose readers because your hosting company thinks 30 seconds is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to load up a page.

13) Avoid Widget Overload!
Yes, there are definitely some cool widgets you can add to your blog, such as MyBlogLog or a Flickr photo box tied to your photo gallery. But be aware that having a large number of javascripts can slow down your site. So don’t sacrifice timely loading time for nice-but-not-all-that-necessary widgets.

14) Have Descriptive Titles
Some blog software actually makes your entry titles seem pretty repetitious in the search engine result pages, and can result in a lower click through than you might have had otherwise with highly optimized titles. If your title’s say something like “Jason’s Tech Industry Rants & Ramblings Blog >> New Xbox 360 title announced for April release�? you should change it to “New Xbox 360 title announced for April release�?. Unless you are well known as an authority blog in that market, the blog name is simply wasting crucial space at the beginning of the title tag and causing the rest of the entry title to end up getting truncated in the search results. And make sure your titles actually enhance the entry and don’t leave the reader wondering what on earth the blog entry could be about. Ensuring you have great titles when you have a small readership and are depending on search engines to send you readers is one of the first steps you should take to optimize your blog.

15) Look at your Cascading Style Sheets.
Most blogs use a tremendous amount of CSS to create that custom look. And while most of the “out of the box�? designs that come standard with the installed template include all CSS in an external file, there definitely are some blog designers who will put their CSS on the individual template pages rather than placing it all in an external CSS file. And when you don’t place CSS in an external file, it can clutter up your pages and result in the most important part of the page – the entry text – being much further down in the HTML code when it has to go after the masses of CSS coding lines.

16) Post Often
The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other bots will stop by on a more regular basis. If you only post once in a blue moon, expect that it might take a while for Google to stop by and see that you actually have updated again. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.

17) Spread the Link Love
If you are blogging about a story, link up the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence (if they weren’t already) when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future.

18) Be Aware of Your Anchor Text
When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here�?, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Jason’s scoop on the new Widget Xbox 360 game�?.

19) Create Unique Stories
Bloggers love to link to other bloggers. When you write original blog entries, rather than just rehashing something someone else has already said, you increase the odds that someone will find yours interesting enough to link to and talk about. And a reader of that blogger’s blog might read the entry and decide to write something about what you said as well, meaning yet another link as well. And if you are fortunate, it will go viral, meaning suddenly it seems like every blogger in your market space is talking about what you wrote. Rinse and repeat as often as possible for maximum exposure and link juice.

20) Use a Related Posts Plugin
Not only does this make sense to keep readers around for other articles on your site that are related to your current post, but it also allows you to deeplink from a current page on your blog to older entries. Often, older entries get buried several pages deep on an archive page, and this allows you to showcase entries written months or years previously and give those “oldies but goodies�? an extra little kick in the search engines. There are several related post plugins available depending on which blog platform you use.

21) Ping Other Sites
When you add a new blog entry, you might want to ping site such as Technorati and FeedBurner to let them know you have a brand new blog entry on your site. You can also now ping Google’s Blog Search as well for faster indexing in their blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com. Automatic pinging is an option in the control panel of most blog platforms including WordPress and MovableType. And Ping-o-Matic offers a service that allows you to quickly pick and chose what to ping.

22) Buy Your Own Domain Name
Don’t always think your free blog hosting company will be around forever. What will you do if you build up a loyal readership then one day you discover yourblogname.examplebloghost.com no longer works because examplebloghost.com has gone out of business? You want to make sure the search engines have a URL they will always find your blog at, rather than have to worry about them re-indexing your previously well-ranked blog on am entirely new domain… that is if you are lucky enough to get your blog posts from your free hosting company. Both Google’s Blogger & WordPress allow you to use their hosted blog service while displaying it on your own domain instead of their own branded one.

23) Manage Your Trackback & Comment Spam
You don’t want Google or Yahoo to find masses of spammy links on your site to all manner of less-than-quality sites submitted to your blog by a blog spammer. Use one of the many tools on the market for your blog platform to manage both comment and trackback spam.

24) Use a Good URL Structure
Don’t use “permalinks�? such as www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123 . Instead, use www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here. Most blogging platforms allow you to change from the standard numbered permalinks to this style of search engine friendly ones. And just in case the blog platform you use has funky dynamic URLs for each entry, you will want to ensure that the bots can crawl them easily or use a mod rewrite to create a good structure such as in the example.

25) Use Great Categories
When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, and article on the television show Grey’s Anatomy could go under “Grey’s Anatomy” and “ABC”. Avoid the temptation to add it to ten different categories though, such as including “drama,” “hospital,” “interns” and “Seattle” because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Grey’s Anatomy, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Grey’s Anatomy because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry.

While some bloggers insist that search engine rankings will come naturally to those who wait, who really wants to wait for Google? A blogger can run into several unique challenges when it comes to optimizing for search engines, and it makes sense to get the jump on it now than simply hoping that if you write it, the bots will come. It is far easier to ensure you have a well optimized blog now than trying to figure out what the issue is 6 months down the road when only your blog’s index page is found in Google!

Happy Blogging !!!!

If you are enabling an add-on or installing/changing the theme in your firefox the effect will be seen only after the Firefox is restarted make you wish if there was a Restart Button like you get when you Install a Add-on.
And if you were working on many tabs, invariably you loose all the tab information and because you can’t restore a session if you accept to close tabs
Here is a simple solution that make you wonder why didn’t the Firefox think of this ?

A simple Firefox add-on called Restarter ! Now if you need to change a theme on your Firefox or need to enable or disable a firefox add-on / extention all you need to do is Click on Restart Firefox from File Menu.

» Get Restarter Add-on

You will be prompted to agree to close the open tabs, All you tabs will be restored once firefox restarted.