How To View How Much Memory Each Google Chrome Tab is Taking

The good and bad thing about Google Chrome is that it separates each tab in the browser as a separate process in Windows. This is great for isolating crashes which can bring down a tab without losing the rest of the open tabs, but looking at the task manager, you can’t really tell which tab is using all the memory as below:

There is a relatively easy way to find out memory usage of Chrome within your browser. In order to view this, follow the steps below:

Step 1

Go to a New Tab in Chrome

Step 2

Type the following in the URL bar and hit enter:  about:memory

You will see the following window:

Here you can see cool things like:

• How much memory each running browser is taking on your machine (this includes that IE browser that you need for software that absolutely needs it).
• How much memory each Chrome tab is taking
• How much memory each plugin and extension is taking.

It also differentiates between physical and virtual memory

Now isn’t that awesome?

Step 3 (optional)

I actually added this “page” as a bookmark in Chrome to put on my bookmarks bar, so that I can see the memory usage via a single click.

Note

You can also get to this page by going to the Chrome Task Manager (hit Shift-Escape while in Chrome) and clicking the funky looking “stats for nerds” link at the bottom of the resulting window.

Comment below if you like and want more of these quick tips! Until then, I’m outta here!

How to Add a Custom Background to Google (like Bing)

The main search page for Google has always tried to have a minimalistic design. However, recently, Google seems to have taken a page out of Bing’s playbook and now offers a way for users to customise the background of their Google main search page.

In order to make best use of this, you need to be logged into your Gmail/Google account.

Once logged in, there is an option on the bottom left hand corner of the screen to “Change Background Image”.

This allows the user to change the background with a picture from their Picasa Web Albums, or uploaded from their computer or from a public gallery.

In order to use your own pictures, the minimum image size is 800×600. The image is scaled as the window is resized.

The results are still displayed against a white background. It is a bit flaky and doesn’t “feel” like Google. But hey, if anyone wants to, here is it :)

Office Web Apps – Alternative to Google Docs

Up till now, Google Doc’s has been a free service that gives the user an ability to create, maintain and store various documents online. It had functionality to allow the user to upload and read Microsoft Office documents as well.

Microsoft has now struck back by releasing free online versions of its Office Suite and giving the users an alternative to Google Docs.

Called Office Web Apps, this suite is a cut down version of the desktop applications and allows for document viewing, sharing and light editing.

The consumer version of the tools are free and store the documents on Live SkyDrive. The corporate versions can get self hosted versions of the applications using Sharepoint.

Being online applications means that the applications will work regardless of the operating system and have been tested in Windows, Mac’s and Linux based machines through various internet browsers.

If you have Office 2010 installed, then Office Web Apps takes advantage of offline and online editing and can present a richer experience for users.

Office Web Apps are also supported via mobile browsers and allows the user to view documents saved onto their Live SkyDrive account directly on their mobiles.

Read below on how to use Office Web Apps.

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How to Store Files Larger than 50megs on Live SkyDrive

Currently Live SkyDrive has a limitation of a maximum file size of 50megs per file. This is intentional to avoid abuse of the free 25gigs of space that it offers its users.

Users can use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to get around this limitation through the use of Chunking.

Chunking is a process where Gladinet breaks up a large file into multiple smaller ones (similar to multi-part zips) and uploads this to the SkyDrive account. Read below for advantages, disadvantages and how to enable this technology in Gladinet.

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Live Skydrive – How To Set Up as Network Drive via Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.1

Now that the latest version of Gladinet Cloud Desktop is out, my previous guide is now quite outdated.

Here is an updated guide on how to install, and configure Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 to map your cloud storage as a network drive.

Windows Live SkyDrive is a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent storage mechanism, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

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Windows Live Writer Updated (And How to Install on Windows 2003)

The newest version of one of the more popular blogging applications, Windows Live Writer  is now out.

Version 14.0.8117.416 is part of the new Wave 3 suite of the Live Essentials package.

Most Windows platforms are supported, however the installer still complains when trying to run via Windows 2003 Server.

I’ve extracted the MSI package for Writer and placed it on my Live SkyDrive in case you need to install it for Windows Server 2003. Read below for instructions and download links.

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How to Capture an Entire Web Page Screenshot in Firefox

There are many screen capture applications out there and my current favorite happens to be Jing to capture, annotate and share screenshots. One thing it doesn’t do is capture entire web pages including non-visible parts (most web pages have as much content below the fold as it does above nowadays).

My favorite way to capture entire web pages as screenshots are now through a couple of Firefox add-ons, FireShot and Screengrab. Read on for more details on these add-ons.

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How to Spot a WoW Phishing Email in Gmail

An increasing number of phishing emails are getting sent out asking people to verify their World of Warcraft credentials. The sad thing is that more people are falling for this every day resulting in forum posts like this:

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Insert Related Posts from WordPress Plugin for Windows Live Writer

Related Posts for WordPress is a Live Writer plugin that I wrote to allow me to have control over inserting related posts from my WordPress blog directly from within Windows Live Writer.

Although there are plugins available directly for WordPress that allows for this to happen within the WordPress Dashboard, I hate the online editor and use Windows Live Writer exclusively. As such, I wanted to created Related Posts links within the posts without having to apply lots of intelligence around tags, categories etc.

It is quite easy to use and will add directly into the post wherever the cursor is.

Once configured, it can retrieve all the posts from your hosted WordPress blog and allow you to select one or more posts and inserts into the post.

It has the following features:

• Ability to store your blog details and settings
• Encloses the related links in DIV—>UL—>LI html links
• Allows for CSS class labeling of the DIV, UL and LI Links, so that you can control the look and feel of the links
• Gives an un-styled preview of the links to show you at a glance which links have been chosen and will be inserted into the post.
• Allows to insertion of “target=_blank” in the a links to allow the links to be opened in a new window if required.

To see installation and usage details, see below

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How to Make Your WordPress Site Private

For users who like to have a private (or restricted) WordPress site, there are several plugins that can restrict access to only registered users. However, I’ve had to search extensively for a solution that worked well with the current version of WordPress (v2.9.2).

In the end, after doing all the searching and finding information all over the place, the closest i got was to take an existing plugin that used to work with earlier versions and change a couple of things in it.

Because I did not wish to step on anyone’s toes, I’ve detailed two ways of achieving this:

1. By taking the original plugin and making changes to it via the WordPress Dashboard
2. By downloading a modified version of the original plugin and following the original authors instructions using this new script instead of his original one.

Both methods are detailed below.

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