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 :)

Now that the latest version of Gladinet Cloud Desktop is out, my previous guide is now quite outdated.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

Prerequisites

In order to mount SkyDrive using Gladinet Cloud Desktop, you must have an existing Live SkyDrive account. If you don’t have one, you can follow the following guide to create one first: Live SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

Step 1

The first step would be to download Gladinet onto your machine and install it. There are two versions available on the website (http://www.gladinet.com): a Free Starter one and a Professional Edition. The Professional Edition is on a limited introductory offer, but as it costs money, I will use the free version You can download either of them on the following page: Gladinet Editions Download Page.

It comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions, so download the one that is suitable to your operating system.

Step 2 – Install the Application

Once downloaded, start the install process by clicking on the .msi file. Hit Next and agree to the license agreement. Hit Next again

Ensure that Start WebClient service and Register Gladinet Cloud Desktop to Windows Firewall are ticked and hit Next.

Choose a location to install the application to (I selected the defaulted) and click Next.

Click Next again and the install process will start. You may get an authorisation request from Windows which you will need to agree to in order to continue.

Once the install is complete, ensure that Launch Gladinet Cloud Desktop is ticked and hit Close.

Step 3 – Configuration

Gladinet 2.1 comes with a new configuration wizard. We will be installing the application as a free application. There is a professional version available. However, for everyday purposes, the free version should suffice.

Click Next (or if you have purchased a license, then this is the place to enter it).

I would recommend registering with Gladinet to receive future updates and news. This step is optional. If you don’t wish to receive emails from Gladinet, then simply click Next.

This is the main screen that we need to configure. You can add as many services as you like here. I prefer to start with Windows SkyDrive and add others as I go along.

For the purposes of this post, tick the Windows Live SkyDrive and click Next.

Leave all values as is. The only one you may wish to change (as I’ve done above) is to change the location of the cache. My c: drive is quite small, so I changed it to another drive by clicking the Change.. link.

Once happy hit Finish to complete the configuration.

Step 4 – Mounting Drives

When the configuration is complete, there will be two visible changes to your desktop:

There will now be a small notification icon on your mini task bar. Click on it will present the following menu:

In addition to this, there will also now be a new “drive” set up on your computer under the drive letter Z.

Open the Z drive by either clicking on it via My Computer, or clicking on the taskbar icon and selecting My Gladinet Drive (Z:)

Double Click on Windows Live SkyDrive.gvm

Simply enter your Windows Live Id and Password here and hit Next. Hit Finish to complete the mount operation.

Gladinet will then proceed to complete the configuration. If this is the first time you are setting up SkyDrive, a “Loading Online Storage Plugin” dialog box will appear.

Click on Yes to allow it to complete.

The creation process can take up to a minute to complete. Once complete, the following dialog box will be shown:

This is where you can specify your backup configuration. As this can be done later too (and I’ll write a post on this subject later), for now hit Cancel.

Your explorer window should now show Windows Live SkyDrive as a folder on your Z drive:

Double clicking on it will show you the contents of your drive just like any other folder on your local machine.

You can copy and move files to and from your SkyDrive account just like any other folder. Because the storage is cloud based, every time you transfer files to and from, it gets scheduled in Gladinet’s task manager and the transfer happens in the background.

Creating new folders using Gladinet defaults the permissions on the folders to you only (ie, not public).

Adding other Cloud Storage Types

This is as simple as going to your Gladinet Drive and clicking on “Click to mount [cloud storage].gvd”

Choose the Storage Provider from the long list of storage options and proceed through the very user friendly wizard to complete the configuration.

Using this method, I now have one place to access and manage my Google Docs, Picasa

Conclusions

As a simple drag and drop access to your online storage, it does what’s asked of it. It gave me a network drive that allowed me to access my online data stores and i can easily upload and download documents to and from my drives.

Currently, its one of the best ways to really make use of SkyDrive without having to go through a web explorer.

You can continue to explore Gladinet on your own by right clicking its mini-icon and checking out the various options.

You may also wish to read our guide on other storage and collaboration solutions. Click the following post to have a look (opens in a new window):

11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing and Collaboration

Relevant Links

• Introduction to Live SkyDrive – how to log on and use SkyDrive
• Gladinet Home Page
• Gladinet Blog
• Gladinet Edition Comparisons – between Starter, Professional and Premium editions.

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.

Fireshot Add-on for FireFox (and Internet Explorer)

This is a comprehensive add-on with a free and a pro version that not only captures screens but allows the user to annotate, and edit the screenshot before making it available for copying to clipboard or saving. It also has an upload to web function that uploads the image to the web and makes the link available for use.

After installing Fireshot, a button is made available beside the search bar on the top toolbars that activates the screen grabbing functionality. This opens up a new window with the editor available and presents the user with the screenshot and options.

Note, the first time you click the Fireshot button on the toolbar, you will get a choice to also add it into Internet Explorer.

Above is a screenshot of a longer then a screen web page with some of the features from the free version of Fireshot shown. It has basic image editing filters that you can make to any selection that includes Greyscale, Blurring, Inverting colors, Outer Glow, Crop and Fill that gives the user a lot of flexibility to really make a screenshot pop.

You can get the free version from here: http://bit.ly/FireshotAddonPage 

Screengrab Add-on for Firefox

A much simpler version that provides simple capture methods without the editing components. This application is also an excellent way to capture entire web pages or parts as screen grabs.

When installed it presents a button at the bottom right of your Firefox window that you can left-click to see its options.

It allows for saving or copying (to the clipboard):

• The entire Webpage or Frame
• The Visible portion only
• A Selection (the window will go pink and you use your mouse to select the area)
• The window itself

A simple application and one that works well. Very popular if you want effectively a single click method to screen capture your sites.

You can get Screengrab from here: http://bit.ly/ScreengrabAddonPage

Related Posts

In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

To install SkyDrive Explorer, go to http://www.skydriveexplorer.com and click on the Free Download menu.

Step 1

Download the setup via the download link and run through the steps to install the application:

When you hit Finish, the installer will close. At this point in time, there is no “executable file” that you need to run to start the application itself.

Step 2

Open up your “My Computer” and you’ll see the SkyDrive Explorer under the list of your “Other” drives:

Step 3

The first time you double-click on the icon, the following dialog box will show:

Put in your Live user details and hit Sign In

Step 4

Once authorized, your windows explorer will now show the contents of your SkyDrive account:

And that is pretty much it! Again, you can treat this just like any other windows folder and/or drive on your computer. The advantage of this drive is that it is stored on the cloud and so available wherever you go.

Warning

SkyDrive Explorer communicates with your SkyDrive account by HTML Web page parsing, which means that should Windows Live decide to change their content format, this application may not work any more. However, I’m sure that the SkyDrive Explorer folks will update regularly should any of their functionality gets disabled due to Live SkyDrive changes.

A while ago, I looked at a screen capture tool that I used for quite some time called Cropper. I’ve recently been introduced to an alternative that has replaced all my screen capture requirements and is now my primary tool for capturing screenshots and screen casts.

Having been around for a few years, TechSmith has improved Jing’s capabilities as a viable screen capture application and has resulted in a user-friendly and robust application.

This is one of the few applications where I do not feel the need to write extensively about the product due to its excellent website. I would advise my readers to go there for more information as it is quite comprehensive in explaining how to use Jing.

The only thing I would suggest here is that Jing by default has a set of buttons so when you have finished capturing a screen, it can “save to disk”, “capture to clipboard” or “upload to screencast.com”. I personally do not like the “upload to screencast.com” button as its too easy to hit and I’m frequently capturing screens that are commercially sensitive…

In order to get around this, Jing offers a means to configure your buttons. When you have captured a screen, you will be taken to an editing window:

Click on the rightmost button (spanner) to configure your buttons and remove the “Upload to screencast.com” button”. This way, the only actions you can do is to either Save it or Copy to Clipboard.

Jing comes in both a free version and a “pro” version. For everyday use, the free version is perfect. It sits unobtrusively on the top of your screen ready to be clicked on whenever you need a new capture.

There seems to be a dedicated and fun bunch of people behind Jing and it shows on their blog which has some excellent tips on getting the best out of their software.

I know there are quite a few screen capture applications out there, but I’ve found Jing to have met my needs perfectly at the moment. They would make the product even better to allow for round frames instead of just rectangular ones but I’m not one to complain when its free and does pretty much everything I want :)

Relevant Links

• Jing Home Page
• Getting Started with Jing Help Site
• Jing Blog (worth a read :) )

While ITunes as an application makes it easy to move music from your computer to your iPod or iPhone, Apple has made it intentionally difficult to move the other way back.

There are many reasons why you may wish to copy the contents of your iPhone across to your PC. I recently installed Windows 7 on my main machine and am now facing the possibility of having my music collection wiped and restarting from fresh. This is a daunting task as I always keep my music library as tidy as possible so that I can locate and play my music quickly and easily.

Thankfully, there are many third party products out there that can back up your music collection straight from your iPod/iPhone to your PC. I ended up using SharePod because it was simple to use, uncomplicated and best of all FREE.

In order to back up all or selected songs, follow the steps below:

Step 1

Download the application from here: http://www.getsharepod.com/download/

Click on Download and save the application into a folder on your machine. Extract the contents into a folder.

Step 2

Plug in your iPhone via USB and double click on SharePod.exe to start the application.

Note: If you do not have your IPhone connected to the machine when you start SharePod, you will get a dialog box as below:

In this case, hit OK to exit the application, plug your IPhone in and restart the application.

Step 3

When the application starts, it will scan your IPhone and display all the songs on it.

Step 4

Select the songs you want to back up (Select all songs if you want to back up all the songs) and click on Copy to PC on the main toolbar. You will get a dialog box as below:

If you want to import the music automatically into ITunes as well, then ensure the “Import my music to ITunes” is checked. However, if you do that, ENSURE ITUNES IS NOT RUNNING.

The dialog box is divided into two sections. The top section has a browse location as to where the tracks will be saved. The bottom section has 4 presets as to how SharePod will name the track files. The last option on the bottom right is if you are not happy with the presets and want to do some custom naming.

Step 5

Once you are happy with your selection, hit OK and the copy will begin immediately.

Once all the tracks have completed copying, you can find them on your machine. The copy process can take a while if you have selected a lot of songs. For the example below, I selected only a few to show the process.

If you have selected to import the songs into your ITunes, you can also find them there too:

That’s pretty much how to copy individual songs onto your PC. If you select Backup iPod, it will back up all your songs as well as your Playlists to your PC and/or ITunes.

SharePod has an excellent site that details more instructions on getting the best out of the application as well as a comprehensive help and forum section. You can do a lot more with this application including exporting photos and copying tracks back into the IPod. However, my needs were just to move my ITunes library from my Vista machine to my new Windows 7 machine and for this task, it was excellent!

I would recommend this product to anyone who needs a simple copying application that is free to use. It hasn’t got the frills of some of the commercial applications out there, but serves its purpose well.

In addition to the application itself, SharePod also has a .Net library that is available to all developers who wishes to use it as a wrapper to create their own applications. I’ve already downloaded SharePodLib and am looking forward to seeing what I can do with it!

I don’t know about you, but I find the mouse over ad’s on Windows Live Messenger extremely annoying. Every time I accidently move the mouse over the ad, it keeps popping up forcing me to move my mouse all the way to the top to close it.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

Step 1

Open up Notepad, and select File..Open. In the resulting window, navigate to \Windows\System32\Drivers\etc

Ensure that Files of Type is set to “All Files”

Step 2

Select the file called “hosts” and click on Open. This will open the hosts file and it should look something similar to below:

Step 3

You may have more than one line in the list of IP addresses. Add this line to the list:

127.0.0.1      rad.msn.com

Ensure there is a TAB between the IP Address and the URL.

Step 4

Save the file and close it.

Step 5

Restart Windows Live Messenger and check to ensure that the images are now gone. The ad’s should now be replaced by a blank white space. The space will still be there, but at least, now we no longer have that annoying flash advert that pops up and kills what would be an otherwise love user experience :)

Hope that helps someone out there :)

From time to time, all bloggers like to tune their blog via a new theme or style sheet etc. Windows Live Writer has an excellent functionality to allow a blogger to preview what their post will look like before they publish their article. This is done by clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer.

When a blog is set up first in Windows Live Writer, the theme and style sheet is automatically downloaded from the blog to provide this preview functionality.

If the theme or style sheet is changed, you will need to manually refresh in Windows Live Writer to get the latest version to ensure that the preview remains accurate. Its a few simple steps to do this…

Open Windows Live Writer and select your blog from the Blogs menu. If you haven’t configured Windows Live Writer yet, feel free to go here to for a refresher: How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs.

Once you have selected the blog you wish to refresh, select Blogs..Edit Blog Settings from the menu bar:

Click on the Editing menu and you’ll see a button to Refresh Theme. Click that. A small dialog box will appear that shows the progress:

Once this is complete, the theme should be refreshed and clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer should show the latest version of your website with your new article in it.

Note: The application may ask you if it can post a dummy article to your blog to allow it to retrieve the theme correctly. This post is deleted immediately afterwards, so feel free to allow it to do so.

Windows Live Writer is currently one of the most popular applications for blogging. It is an easy to use application that allows anyone to quickly post articles to their blogs in a WYSIWYG fashion. With live previews, its possible to see exactly how your post will look like before you publish the article.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

Step 1

NOTE: This may not be required for blogs hosted on wordpress.com. This is typically only required for self-hosted WordPress blogs. In this case, go to Step 2.

Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard, and under Settings.. Writing, ensure that the following item is checked:

Turning on XML-RPC will allow Windows Live Writer to connect to your WordPress blog. Scroll down and hit “Save Changes” to commit the changes.

Step 2

Start Windows Live Writer, go to the Blogs menu and click on “Add Blog Account…”

Choose “Other Blog Service” and hit Next

Step 3

Enter your web address of your blog, your admin username and password and hit next. If you like you can select “Remember my password”

Step 4

Windows Live Writer will now connect to the blog, analyze and set up the application.

During the analysis process, you may get a dialog box as below:

Hit Yes to this as this will ensure that you can get an accurate preview of your posts in Windows Live Writer.

Once it has completed setting up the application, it will display the following information:

Choose a name that can identify your blog and hit Finish.

Conclusion

That should be it. You can connect to several blogs at the same time in Windows Live Writer. To switch from one blog to another, its as simple as selecting the relevant blog from the Blogs menu in the menu bar.

I’ll set up some more posts later on how to get the best use out of Windows Live Writer. If there is anything in particular that you wish to know, please leave a comment and let us know :)

Relevant Links

• Download Windows Live Writer page: http://download.live.com/writer
• Installing Windows Live Writer on Windows Server 2003

If you try and install iTunes 8.2 or above on Windows Server 2003, you will most likely get an issue during the install where it complains during installation of one of the components (namely, Apple Mobile Device Support). The error looks like “Apple mobile device support requires that your computer is running Windows XP SP2 or newer”.

iTunes will complete its install, but when you plug in your iPhone or iPod, it will not get recognized and as such, won’t allow you to synch.

If you are having difficulty getting your IPhone or IPod recognized by Windows Server 2003, try the following:

Step 1

Download iTunes Setup as usual from the Apple site. Don’t install it at the moment. If you have already installed it, then don’t worry. Follow the rest of the steps through as normal.

Step 2

Open the following location in your web browser:
http://bit.ly/ItunesForWin2k3

That is my personal SkyDrive account and has two files in it. One is the MSI file for the Apple Mobile Device Support for iTunes 8.2 and the other is an .mst file (I found the MST file on the web – thanks to whoever set it up!). Download both of these into a folder on your PC. In my case below, I’ve created a folder on my c drive called ITunes and downloaded both files there:

Step 3

Open a command prompt window and type the following (with an enter after each line):

cd c:\itunes
msiexec /i AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi TRANSFORMS=w2k3.mst

When you hit enter on the second line, it should start the install process. This will install the Apple Mobile Device Support service on Windows 2003 Server.

Step 4

The last step is now to install ITunes as normal. If you had already installed iTunes, you can re-run the set up and select Repair to re-install the application.

Once complete, you should be able to start iTunes and when you plug in your iPod or iPhone, it should get discovered and displayed in your iTunes

That should be it :) I know the instructions are quite sparse. I’d love to hear any comments you may have around this. If you need me to elaborate on any step further, please let me know.