Fun Stuffs

When it comes to purchasing software for further upgrades, people start to think about how Microsoft did it. There will be a new version for upgrade every year, and if you don't upgrade, you feel like you are being left behind in the race.

In a business model, software companies pile more features each time on every upgrade. This resulted in a chunk of source codes that do not run well and on top of that, a bloated operating system that eats into your hard disk size capacity. Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista are such typical examples.

This year, Apple released a new operating system - Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, was already a great operating system that is virus-free, nag-free and not copy-protected. The new version has a great hit - its price is only US$30!

(read on to find out more about Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard...)

What happens when you accidentally send out an email that you do not intend to, and only live to regret because your fingers reaction is too slow compared to the digital speed that transmits from your PC to the recipient. The damage is done, it's too late to regret.

However, GMail has a feature that delays the sending out of email messages for a few seconds, giving you time to recall emails.

(Configure your GMail to include this Undo Send feature...)

Digital music files today are classified into 2 main categories; lossly and lossless, after they are converted from CD quality music. Before we move further, let's explore the actual definitions of lossless and lossy.

(find out more about audio file formats...)

As much as we all love Google Mail, also known as GMail, there was one small disadvantage; that is, GMail account is inaccessible once user was disconnected from the Internet.

However, that has changed now. GMail is providing users with Offline Mode that allows users to access emails that have already been sent or received. In addition, users can also compose new email messages in draft mode and save them to be sent later once users connect to the Internet.

(How to Configure Offline Mode for GMail...)

Just found something nice about Mac OS X. If you are a user of Mac OS X (Pather and Leopard OS version), then you can try this during your free time - play Tetris in Terminal. This is how to get started:

1. Go to Applications > Utilities folder > click on Open Terminal.
2. Type "emacs" and wait for the screen to load.
3. Press "Esc" and type "x".
4. Finally, type "tetris" in lowercase characters.

The above steps will bring up the Tetris game in Windows. Simply use the arrow keys to control the falling blocks. Have fun!

Google Mail (aka GMail) has introduced a new feature in the widely-popular web-based mail application - Gmail Theme. The first thing that came into my mind is that it is likely to slow down the application, but to my surprise, it is as fast as before.

(find out how Google Mail did it...)

With the recent introduction of Google Chrome, it has, once again, sparked a strong browser war competition against all the browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera and some others, such as Netscape.

However, today we are not going to join in the crowd and compare the speeds between all the browsers, rather we are going to provide a simple and quick tip to optimise and speed up Mozilla Firefox.

(Learn more about speeding up Firefox here...)

After running the Falling Snow Effect using JavaScript for the last couple of days, I realised that it has been taking up considerable CPU resources on the client side.

As it slows down the page loading of the site, it was removed instantly. If you are interested in the script, feel free to drop me a message.

The original script writer is Altan.

(Get the Falling Snow Effect code...)