For some really strange reason, Google Instant (and the interactive Google Doodles) are not available on the Opera browser. The Google Instant search simply doesn’t happen while you’re on any version of Opera. So, if you are an Opera user and have been wondering how to get it working, maybe we can help:

1) While you are on Google’s homepage, ‘Right click’ > ‘Edit site preferences…’.

2) In the window that appears, choose ‘Network’ tab and then in ‘Browser identification’, select ‘Identify as Firefox’. Click OK.

That’s it. You’re done. Google Instant will work as beautifully as in other browsers. Just to make it clear, this is just a temporary fix from our side because the actual problem lies with Google. After Google stops discriminating Opera you can change the setting back to ‘Identify as Opera’.

I use Thunderbird as my offline email client and it’s been a really smooth ride since more than a year. But recently I ran an update [3.1.2] and restarted my PC only to find myself not able to connect to Gmail [using IMAP] on Thunderbird 3.1.2. Turns out the issue lies with Google’s servers. They have been changed. I don’t know whether this affects every offline email client (well, it should) but here’s a quick workaround to fix the problem.

» In Thunderbird, open Tools > Account Settings… > [your Gmail account] > Server settings. Change the Server name to ‘imap.gmail.com‘ (previously the server was imap.googlemail.com).

» Then in the left pane, click ‘Outgoing Server (SMTP)’ edit the server name to ‘smtp.gmail.com’. Click OK.

» Now try to reconnect again. It will work.

Windows Live Essentials Beta [Build 15.3.2804.607] is now available for download. I downloaded the Beta only to find myself stuck with a weird problem with the uninstall of the previous version of Windows Live Essentials. I tried to uninstall the previous version but the ‘Uninstall Wizard’ failed to launch. The previous installation had messed up and the uninstall couldn’t initiate. Moreover, you can’t over-ride the previous version of Live Essentials with the new installer. It throws a message, something like, ‘The following programs are already installed’. Fortunately, after hours of searching on the internet, I found a way to completely uninstall and remove all traces of the previous ‘Windows Live Essentials’ installation. If you are facing a similar problem, the following steps might help:

1) First, download and install the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.  This little kid removes traces of previous installation of any program installed on your computer.

2) Once installed, launch it by clicking → ‘All Programs’ → ‘Windows Install Clean Up’.

3) In the window that appears, select the entries that has the words ‘Windows Live’ in it. Click Remove.

4) Once done, restart your PC (IMPORTANT). Then run Windows Update, just in case an important update is required to be installed prior to fresh Windows Live Essentials installation.

5) Finally, install Windows Live Essentials. This time it should go well.

Opera has this really nice feature to handle .torrent files itself with its integrated BitTorrent protocol solver. Turns out, most of the torrent users already have a client software like uTorrent for downloading torrents. So the BitTorrent feature in Opera not only becomes useless, it also gets quite irritating when downloading torrent files. What happens is, when ever you click on a .torrent file link, Opera tries to open the torrent in its own torrent client. To avoid this, you first need to save the .torrent file on your computer and then run it using your favorite torrent client software.

As a workaround for this little problem, you can disable Opera’s BitTorrent feature altogether.

1) In Opera’s address bar, type in ‘opera:config’ and press enter. This will open the Preferences Editor.

2) Now roll open the third option that says ‘BitTorrent’ and un-check ‘Enable’ checkbox. Click ‘Save’. 

That’s it. Now whenever you click on a .torrent file link, it will open in your torrent client and not in Opera.

Beginner Tip

Today I had a discussion with my friend about a troubleshooting session in which he wanted to change icons of some the folders. He wanted to use the native new Windows 7 icons which he could not find the new icons in its default location. Although he figured out after a while, I thought of sharing this small info.

So if you want to use the new 256×256 Windows 7 icon library, you might not get it in the default shell32.dll. Here’s what you need to do:

» Select the folder. ‘Right click’ on it > ‘Properties’.

» In the properties window, click the ‘Customize’ tab.

» Here, click the ‘Change Icon…’ button.

» In the window that appears, you will find that the icons here are very old (from Windows 2000 and XP era). You just need to replace the location to C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll (where C: is the Windows installation drive)

Replace ‘shell32.dll’ with ‘imageres.dll’ and you will be able to use new 256 x 256 Windows 7 icons. imageres.dll is the new icon library.

» Select your desired icon and click ‘OK’.

Enjoy new 256 x 256 icons !

Beginner Quick-tip

Confirmation dialog boxes in Windows are like the best thing after sliced bread just because they give you a ‘second chance’. However, if you are smart enough and consider yourself as the ‘one who can do no wrong’, you might want to turn off confirmation dialog boxes that appear when you delete a file/folder. So here’s how you can save an extra click.

1) Right click on ‘Recycle Bin’ and select ‘Properties’.

2) In the window that appears, un-check ‘Display delete confirmation dialog’.

That’s it. No more annoying confirmation dialog boxes. Now you can go on a deleting spree.

Opened up Gmail this morning only to find one small feature been quietly slipped down into it – The auto-complete list that pops up on email search. I frequently use email search and haven’t seen this feature before. So I am guessing it must have been there for not more than a couple of days.

Apart from the ‘expected’ listing of contacts and labels as you type, it even shows useful search criteria and operators which are relatively unknown to many users.

Some of the useful operators / search criteria that you can use:

» is – Use ‘is: read’, ‘is: unread’ or ‘is: starred’ to search for read, unread and starred messages respectively.

» has – Use this operator to find attachments, photos, videos, documents, calendar events, etc. For eg. ‘has: photos’ will display all emails that has photos in it.

» before, after – Use ‘before: yyyy/mm/dd’ and ‘after: yyyy/mm/dd’ to search emails received/sent before and after the specified date respectively. For eg. ‘before 2010/01/01’ will enlist all emails received/sent before 1st January 2010.

For the complete list of operators, click here.

We’ve all known that Internet Explorer is the last one to support any new web browser feature. And while Firefox and Google Chrome are showing support to HTML5, Internet Explorer is busy playing in the sun. However, a genius dude called Christian Adams decided to roll up sleeves and provide a plugin for IE to support HTML5 <audio> and <video> tags.

Christian says that the plugin is currently in the ‘Technical Preview’ stage and supports only basic playback. Features like seeking, controls and HTML5 interfaces are yet to be incorporated.

The following video (courtesy Christian Adams) shows HTML5 plugin in action. If you can’t see the video, your browser might not be supporting HTML5.

This plugin comes bundled with new version of Xiph.Org Ogg Codecs which you can download from the link below. While installing, make sure you check mark the option ‘HTML 5 <video> tag for Internet Explorer’. “Also, to enable <video> tag for Internet Explorer you need to add xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/video" attribute”, Christian says.

Download Xiph.Org Ogg Codecs

As a security measure, there are times when you need to stop access to certain programs to other users. In Windows, using the Local Group Policy Editor, you can specify which all programs you want to prevent from running. This is very useful if you are administering an Internet lab in school and colleges or running an Internet café. Here’s the work around:

1) Press + R to open the ‘Run’ dialog box. Type ‘gpedit.msc’ and click ‘OK’.

2) The Local Group Policy Editor window will open. In the left pane, navigate to ‘User Configuration’ > ‘Administrative Templates’ > ‘System’. Now in the right pane, double-click ‘Don’t run specified Windows applications’.

3) In the window that appears, click the ‘Enabled’ radio-button and then click ‘Show…’ button under ‘Options’.

4) In the ‘Show contents’ window, specify the executable file (.exe) of the programs you wish to prevent from being executed. Finally, click ‘OK’.

You’re done! The programs specified here won’t run until you ‘Disable’ the setting in step 3) or you remove the program’s .exe from the ‘Show Contents’ window.

While watching movies with subtitles it is very important to have same framerates for both – the movie file and the subtitle file. Although it does not apply to hardcoded subtitles, unsynced framerates is one of the most common annoyances when we use an explicit subtitle file to overlay on the video. Here, the change of delay to a positive/negative value simply doesn’t work. You need to sync up their framerates and not the timing of the subtitles.

Problems due to unsynchronized framerates:

Suppose if you have a video with framerate 25.000 and subtitles with framerate 23.976, then the subtitles will slowly lag in time as the video continues.  The only solution is to change the subtitle framerate so as to sync it with the framerate of the video.

Here is a nice utility that comes to the rescue – Subtitle Framerate Changer. Now I don’t need to say what it does right? Just enter the path to your SRT file (subtitle file) with ‘bad’ framerate, specify the new framerate and click ‘Convert’.

The results are really good. I have tested this utility with different videos and subtitles with different framerates and I’ve found it very good. The only glitch is that it only accepts SRT files. But that won’t be much of a problem I guess!

Download Subtitle Framerate Changer / 212 KB