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!

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 :)

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.

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

Installation Details

This release is still in beta stage and hence is not available via the Live Plugins center. As such, the installation files are not in MSI format.

Additionally, this is created using .net 3.5 and the Live center only allows .net 2.0 compiled binaries at the moment.

In order to install, you need to download the following zip file:

Plugin Dll’s – two DLL’s are contained within this archive, one is the plugin code itself and the other is a helper library to allow Live Writer to communicate with WordPress via MetaWeblog API.

Unzip these DLL’s directly into your Live Writer plugin folder (usually found in C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins)

Note: there isn’t an icon available for the plugin yet, so it may throw an error when you start Live Writer.

Restart Live Writer to enable the plugin. You will see the new plugin under the list of your installed Plugins.

When you first click the plugin link, you need to set up the configuration. Click the Settings… button

Enter your Blog details here. This will be used to connect to your WordPress blog to retrieve a list of the posted articles.

The HTML formatting options allows you to place class tags on the containing DIV, UL and LI tags. Leaving them blank will allow them to inherit the default settings set up in the blogs stylesheet.

How to Use Related Posts Plugin for Windows Live Writer

Step 1: Assuming the Settings is completed, hit Retrieve Posts to get a list of all the posts in the blog. This can take some time if there number of posts in the blog is quite high:

Step 2: Simply scroll through the list and tick whichever posts that needs to be included as a related post, and click Choose Posts…

A preview of the relevant links will be shown. The user can make changes to the selected items and re-click Choose Posts… to fine tune the selection.

Step 3: Click on “Insert into Post” to close the window and copy the HTML to wherever the cursor is in Windows Live Writer.

Here is the html that made the following related posts content:

Notes

This doesn’t put a heading on the content. It just puts in an unordered list of the links.

My thanks to Scott (http://scottisafool.spaces.live.com/) for inspiration and making his code available to all to read, digest and create their own plugins.

Disclaimer

This plugin is a very simple plugin and doesn’t do naughty things like steal passwords etc. It comes as is and is not covered by any warranty. Feel free to use is and recommend any improvements or report any bugs you may find. This was written over a period of a few days only, so the code can do with a bit of a tidy up.

I will eventually upload this to the Live plugins center but until then, I’m looking forward to hearing any feedback (good or bad!)

Related Links

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.

Step 1

In the Dashboard, ensure that the Membership tick box under the General Setting is unchecked:

Step 2

Go download Angusman’s plugin and follow his instructions to download and install this plugin. Once you have installed it, do not activate it yet as we’ll be making a small change to it to support the latest version of WordPress

Step 3

Back in your Dashboard, go to your Manage Plugins page and locate Angusman’s plugin. Click on Edit to edit his plugin

Step 4

When you get to the editing page, you’ll see the code for the plugin. Highlight the following code lines as below and delete them

Replace the deleted lines with the following

if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) {

So the code will look like the following now – please be careful here and ensure the line is inserted in the correct position. Refer to the image below if you are not sure:

The line you will insert will be directly below the comment that starts with “//Checks if a user…”

Click on Update File to save the file. You will get a “File Edited Successfully” message at the top once it has saved.

Step 5

Click on the Plugins link again in the Dashboard left menu to be taken back to the list of Plugins and Activate the Plugin.

Everything should be working now as described on the original plugin author’s site.

Alternative Method

I’ve got a “fixed” version of the file available here as a download if anyone is feeling squeamish about changing code themselves. All credit goes to the original author and the only difference would be to download the file from the link below and follow the rest of the instructions from the original site.

Download link: http://www.newbtech.com/Files/ac_authenticator.zip

Lastly, note that this will make your blog private to registered users only. This includes RSS feed links. However, this will not protect individual images on your posts if the user knows the exact URL of the images.

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!

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 :)

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.

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

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.