Friday is a day when I try to steer off my usual tech ramblings and look at some fun things. I am going highlight a few things that caught my attention this week and hopefully of some interest to you.

Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks for AT&T Customers

AT&T is partnering with Startbucks to offer free Wi-Fi to their DSL customers at any of the zillion err.. about 7000 Starbucks locations in the US. Being a AT&T DSL subscriber, this is sweet news for me! I think it’s planned to be in effect sometime this spring. Ashley of CyberNet News reports that Starbucks ditched a 6-year partnership with T-Mobile to go with AT&T. Does iPhone wielding coffee drinkers flocking Starbucks have anything to do with it?

Get Digsby Private Beta Invite Code

Digsby is a multi-system instant messaging client for Windows and is making the rounds in the blogosphere this past week. Webware is offering a private beta download with the code CNET here. I haven’t had a chance to try this yet but I am already having fun with the SamePlace Firefox Extension.

Find out how much Uncle Sam is sending you this May (and a free e-book)

JD of Get Rich Slowly, an awesome personal finance blog, talks about and links to a calculator to find out how much of a tax rebate we can expect from Uncle Sam this May. I started making plans for that money even when the bill hadn’t been signed into law.

While we are talking finance, you can grab a free e-book, Women & Money by Suze Orman for free at Oprah’s site. The link doesn’t seem to have been pulled but you can still download it from here. My wife says this is much more interesting though.

Darth Vader Hot Air Balloon

Wow.. Start Wars fans have done it again and have one-upped their previous achievements. Check out this awesome hot air balloon and read the details of it at /Film. There is even a video of it in action. Check it out.

World Press Photo Award Winners of 2007

Photographs can capture time and emotions so vividly and WorldPress Photo Awards have announced their winners for 2007. Check out the awesome pictures taken from around the world here. The images at that site are small and are much better here at Google Blogoscoped if you just want to look at the pictures.

I am looking forward to a relaxing weekend with a couple of home projects to get done.

Have a great weekend!

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

I delve a little bit into web development and WordPress theme customization as you can see right here. One tool I find indispensable is the Firebug Firefox extension. I can view/edit and play with live HTML/CSS code for any web page and see the possible results live for the tweak I am doing.

You can browse through the DOM tree of a webpage with Firebug. It also helps me to look up HTML & CSS code for various parts of a website using the ‘Inspect’ tool. This works great for troubleshooting or developing and viewing sites in a Firefox browser.

For those odd occasions when there is a problem in just Internet Explorer, I have always been at a loss of not having a tool like Firebug.

Until, I came across Developer Toolbar for IE developed by Microsoft recently. Even though this tool has been around for a while, it must be a well kept secret or I must have just gotten my head out of the sand.

I found it useful to troubleshoot some IE-only CSS bugs on some themes my wife and I were customizing. Let’s look at a few things this toolbar will you give after installation:

IE Developer Toolbar Quick Facts

• An easy access button to toggle the toolbar to view or hide
• Lets you view DOM for the current page in a tree view - similar to Firefox’s DOM Inspector
• Selecting an element in tree lets you view attribute and the current styles for the element
• You can disable images, javascripts and css
• Style Tracer - helps you find exactly where and which style sheet, a rule is effecting a particular element.
• Offers a View Source that lets you view source of the original page, currently rendered page or just the selected element. I like the way it shows the current styles associated with elements right in the view source.
• An Outline option outlines DIVs, images, tables, table cells, etc.
• A Validator tool cal validate HTML, CSS, Feed & Links in a webpage
• I like the Find & Cache options as well.

If you have used Firebug or Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, a lot of these features will be very familiar to you.

Download IE Developer Toolbar

Even if you are not a web developer, if you occasionally tweak HTML & CSS for your website/blog, I highly recommend getting used to a tool such as this one. I use it as a learning tool to see how someone has coded something or used CSS to style an element that I find interesting when I am surfing the web.

Plus, I can make changes to fonts or any CSS code for my blog in Firebug without and have a preview without having to modify any code in the server.

What kind of tool do you use for your web development needs?

I recently reviewed Enso Launcher - a free program launcher at TechieBuzz and have started using it in my laptop religiously and I am amazed at the productivity it brings with it. Enso caught my attention when it was made free recently and it was $40 before then. It is often compared to Mac’s QuickSilver application although it has its major differences.

As I am using Enso Launcher more, I like to have a quick list of commands that I use regularly at least in the first few weeks. After a few weeks, I should remember most of them without looking just like I use shortcut keyboard commands for a lot of my regulars like Gmail, Google Reader, Firefox, etc.

Enso Launcher Commands

Enso Laucher commands are run by holding down the ‘Caps Lock’, typing one the following commands and releasing the ‘Caps Lock’ to run the command. Enso auto-fills as you type so you are always just typing a few letters before it knows what you are after saving you a lot of keystrokes.

• open - to open anything in your Windows Start Menu
  Example: open notepad
• open with - to open any selected text (file or url) in any application
  Example: select a tect like ‘http://www.shankrila.com’ and type ‘open with explorer’ to open in a browser
• go - to switch to a tab in your browser (I still prefer the Ctrl-Tab shortcut in Firefox)
• learn as open - to add your own custom shortcuts to file or website
• unlearn open - to delete a shortcut you created or a default Enso command
• maximize - to maximize a window without going for the mouse
• undo maximize - to shrink a maximized window to original size
• minimize - to minimize a window
• command list - to get to the list of commands quickly - memorize this and the rest will be at your fingertips.

If you prefer using your mouse or touchpad to do things in your computer, Enso Launcher is probably not for you. For a person like me who hates to use the touchpad in a laptop, Enso just makes it so much easier and intuitive to get to various things in the computer with a few simple commands.

As intended, it helps me from getting distracted by simple things like finding an application from my Start Menu but retain my concentration in the task at hand.

I believe I will squeeze the most benefit out of it after probably a month with practice but I am already liking not to have to go to my touchpad to navigate but just use the keyboard shortcuts and commands.

I have my greatest respect to those who are diligent in writing posts everyday for their blogs. I have so far stuck to a schedule that works for me which 4-5 posts a week and sometimes more. I absolutely love blogging but I do that in spare time after work and in weekends.

I have tried to schedule posts but that just doesn’t work for my style. I like to post things that are on my mind that day as I think that lets me have a conversation about it not just in the post but in the comments as well with you.

It has its obvious disadvantages too with the blog getting neglected when ‘daily life’ interferes. In a blog where ‘technology meets daily life’ (ShanKri-la’ ), I’m sure you’d understand that as a reader.

We had some of our good friends over past weekend and my wife and I were busy playing hosts. Here are some of the posts that caught my attention in the past few weeeks and I wanted to share them with you in this week’s roundup:

• The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done - RT of Untwisted Vortex
  I have been reading RT’s blog ever since I saw his comments in my buddy Matt’s blog ejabs.com. He has a very personal blog and that is one of the reasons he has a great community around it.
  RT wrote a post on a personal difficulty he was facing with his wife’s illness and he was completely taken by a storm of genuine goodwil from the blogosphere. You can read all about it in this post and also check out various bloggers who helped spread the word. I wish I was able to post this in time to help spread the word myself. RT, in an attempt to pay back, writes about how the road to success is paved with stones of failure.
• How to Show Bidvertiser Feed Ads to Current Subscribers - Step-By-Step Guide - IngaOz of NiggyBuzz
  Bidvertiser is a popular alternative to Google Adsense and they have now started offering advertisements for your RSS feed. IngaOz shos you how you can add Bidvertiser ads to your RSS feed in simple steps.
• A Few Good Domains For Sale - Kyle of SlickMania
  My good friend Kyle of Kyle’s Cove has rebranded his site to SlickMania.com (RSS). Make sure you get his new RSS feed and check out his redesign effort as well.
  Kyle is one of the most friendly and helpful bloggers out there. He has opened up his domain portfolio for those interested in getting some good domain names that are for sale.
• New Gmail for the iPhone - Official Gmail Blog
  iPhone users with Gmail accounts just got a sweet treat from the Gmail team. Gmail on iPhone now sports a new interface with 2 slick features added. New mail pre-fetching is going to make getting to new emails faster. Also, when you want to get to a contact, now auto-complete works making it easier to get to the contacts with a few letters.
• Make Your DVDs View on Demand and Save Space, Too! - Tim of Daily Cup of Tech
  Tim of DCOT shows how you can use some cheap hardware and free software to build a on demand movie library from your DVD collection.
• Enso - A Humane Program Launcher - My post at TechieBuzz
  I have been using Launchy so far and I liked it. When I came across Enso Launcher, I almost wrote this post with a title ‘Is Enso Launcher a Launchy Killer?’. Then I realized that Launchy is popular because it is simple to use by everybody and Enso Launcher will become the tool of choice for those unafraid of doing things differently and learning new things. If you start using Enso Launcher, be warned of the mind-boggling productivity at your (Windows) computer you are going to start reaping from using it.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup of some great posts from the blogs I read.

You have probably heard about Joost, one of the popular Internet TV clients that made the rounds in the blogosphere for a while. I hardly hear about it anymore.

Joost was proprietary and had about 250 channels. Did you know that there is an open source alternative that has about 2500 unrestricted channels? Yes, I said 2500!

Miro is the open source version that is free and can turn your computer into an Internet TV. It is loaded with numerous features and a built-in bittorrent client that touts faster downloads. Let’s check out some of the impressive features that make up this hard to ignore piece of open source software!

Read More

One gripe I have about the US cell phone companies is the exorbitant amount of money one gets charged if we ever go over the monthly minutes allowance.

I usually watch my minutes well and hardly ever go over my allocation. But, all it takes is once a year for a misstep and the overage bill could be as much as the monthly charge and if you were roaming or out of the country it could be a very fat figure.

WatchMyCell is a little freeware that is designed to run in your Windows computer and watch your cellphone balance minutes.

WatchMyCell Quick Facts

• Watches your balance minutes and sends an email or SMS alert if you are close to your limit
• Auto-starts and lets you configure the alerts
• Checks your minutes every 3 hours
• All information are sent by 1024 bit encrypted connection
• None of this information is stored ever in a website and all this information resides in your computer
• Works with AT&T/Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, Spint/Nextel.
• It is totally FREE!

I am not sure if you need a utility just for the sake of watching your cell phone minutes. But, in this busy life it is all too easy to lose track of your balance minutes and it might be worth your while to have this running atleast more towards the end of the month.

I am not sure how many of the cell phone carriers offer an alert when a subscriber is about to reach their minutes for the month. I am not surprised that most don’t because they make a big chunk of their money from the overage charges.

WatchMyCell

Download WatchMyCell

[via MakeUseOf]

Newsgator is the company behind the popular RSS feed readers FeedDemon for Windows & NetNewsWire for Mac. With freeware being so popular these days, Newsgator was successful in selling paid versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire so far.

Now, they have announced these 2 excellent feed readers FREE for all to download and use. In fact, these 2 programs have just gotten some major feature enhancements.

Newsgator products come with sync facility with their internet-based servers. This means that your FeedDemon in your laptop and NetNewsWire in your iMac will be in sync all the time. Plus, the free web based version Newsgator Online will be in sync as well.

FeedDemon Quick Facts

• Newspaper format in neat tabs & News bins for future reference
• Synchronization with all RSS suite products
• Find what’s popular with other Newsgator users as well as who is linking to the news items you read
• Watch embedded video in the newspaper view
• Panic button - mark everything as read when you come back after a break
• Watches - Watch for keywords as they are downloaded
• Search outside of your subscriptions and create a dynamic channel with the results
• Download podcasts automatically and copy them to your iPod or other media player.
• iPhone support at http://m.newsgator.com

I used my portable GreatNews desktop reader for the longest time before getting addicted to the online Google Reader. And my main reason was that I missed having the ability to read feeds when I didn’t have my USB drive with me in a browser.

I have decided to give FeedDemon a whirl just like I give everything else a try. Importing my Google reader XMl file was painless. I haven’t tried their online counterpart yet but I doubt if it will come close to Google Reader, my current favorite RSS reader of choice. I might eat my own words after I try it, but you will know if I do.

What is your feed reader of choice? With the ability to have your desktop and online RSS reader in sync, would you give a desktop reader a chance?

Download FeedDemon 2.6 for Windows