I used to hate those millions of Farmville and Mafia war’s feed on my Facebook feed. I blocked them, they got added to the blocked app list. But trust me when you actually start playing these you have hard time surviving without those feeds. Now when I want to enable them i find no option to do it. Facebook changed its interface recently just after the “birthday”. Everytime Facebook changes its look, its like “you better devote some time to find all those misplaced areas”. I did that. I found where the applications can be added to the feed again.

The trick is to move to “Top news” first. The most used “most recent” page doesn’t let you do it.

• Go to Top News link on the top of your feeds.
• Now navigate to the end of the page and find “Edit Options”
• Go to the “applications” tab in the floating box.
• Click on the “add to news feed” button. You are done.

The catch here is that you’d kill yourself from frustration after not finding any such options under the “Most Recent” page. True that you never go to the “Top News” page. But for this you’ll have to go. There is no other way on the present Facebook interface to unhide applications from your news feed.

P.S. You also find blocked pages there.

Start pages are always a mess in web browsers. Firefox put up a design contest for users to design a perfect start page recently. Be it Chrome’s most used pages or Firefox’s default Google search page. Well, Chome does the work to a pretty good extent not to mention opera’s and safari’s speed dial pages. But it is totally a different experience when you have the start page on the cloud that is perfectly customized according to your needs. All those web services on your home page for you to access at a click. Doesn’t that seem perfect.
Symbaloo - Start simple, is a simple interface that basically focuses to refine your first contact with the internet everyday. The symbaloo pages houses draggable boxes that link to your favorite web services like feeds, mail, radio, search, translate and what not. If even that doesn’t make you scream enough. You have free places where you can add your own boxes that link to a service specified by you. Now that’s too much YOU.

To set it as a start page. Just click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Set as startpage“. The following light box a the center of the screen gives you the instructions. OR simply drag the link http://www.symbaloo.com to the home in firefox.

I’ve been playing quite a bit of AOE2 of late; and one recurrent problem while running the (now dated, but still going strong) game on Windows 7 (or Vista) has been an issue with map colors. The colors on the map look muddled, grainy and ugly on 7 and Vista, kind of as if they have been inverted. After a bit of research into the issue, I finally arrived at a working solution.

No, updating the graphics driver or Direct X does not work. First, what you need to do is navigate to the ‘age2_x1.exe’ or whichever exe file is associated with the game for you, right click on it, go to the ‘Compatibility’ tab and select ‘Run in compatibility mode for Windows XP (SP2), ‘Disable Visual Themes’, ‘Disable Desktop Composition’ and ‘Disable Display Scaling on High DPI Settings’. This might just do the trick, if you’re lucky. But if you’re not, like me (which is quite a high possibility), read on.

For some people, minimizing the game just after it starts up and then maximizing it again sets the colors straight. But it didn’t for me; what worked for me instead was to open up Process Explorer with Ctrl+Alt+Del after starting the game up, ending the process ‘explorer.exe’ and switching back to the game with Alt+Tab. This did the trick, and should work for most people.

This solution can also be automated without the need for having to go through the process of terminating explorer.exe before starting the game and rerunning it each time the game ends; this can be done by creating a batch file with the instructions fed to it. To do so, create a new notepad file with the following content:

taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
EMPIRES2.EXE
Start explorer.exe

{if you have the regular AOE2, or)

taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
age2_x1.exe
Start explorer.exe

{for AOE2 Expansion}

Then save it as a batch file, say ‘AOE_fixed.bat’ and then copy it to the folder where the EMPIRES2.exe or age2_x1.exe file exists. Then you may create a shortcut for the batch file on the desktop or elsewhere and then double click on it to launch the game whenever you want. Cheers

Original post at: http://smnitb.blogspot.com/2010/02/running-aoe2-smoothly-on-windows-7vista.html

The open source community Codeplex has got a portable and light weight application that reads out text. So it is basically a very useful and light weight application that can be used to read text aloud through a robotic voice. Its called Clipspeak. Some interesting features are:

1. Record the audio to MP3 (turn text to MP3 OR ebooks to audio books)

2. Copy paste text to be spoken. Stop ongoing speech.

3. Change voice parameters.

[Download]

Are you concerned about your website taking long load times. This could be your internet connection or really a fault with your website. To find out Pingdom tools is the best place. It analyzes your load speed on a standard internet connections. Anything less than 12 seconds is fine. If you have something more than that, it could be a reason to worry.

Pingdom tools gives you a list of objects in a particular order (default in the order they load) and their load times. This helps you find the area of fault. A graph generated is something like this:

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