Google Cloud Print enables any application (web, desktop, mobile) on any device to print to any printer.

Applications submit print jobs to the service via the web-based common print dialog or API offered by the service. Google Cloud Print then sends the print job to the selected printer which the user has previously registered with the service. A new class of cloud-aware printers connects directly to the service and offers the best user experience. Legacy printers connect to the service via a proxy.

An interesting spinoff of the CloudPrint concept is that leveraging OpenID (Google adopted OpenID some time ago) a user could potentially go to any printer at any location and use their Gmail account, Facebook account or Flickr account to send a print job.  The potential is quite staggering.

There are obvious security considerations but since the printers need to be registered with the Google CloudPrint service to work, you are enabling this functionality at your discretion and undoubtedly ACL’s will be built into the solution.

You can read more at;

http://code.google.com/apis/cloudprint/

But before we move on, our goal is to review the site, identify potential areas that need improvement, create a plan to bring you quality content, and ensure that we have continuity plan. We have also a few related projects on the roadmap, which we will be announcing later on, as they become live.

See you soon.

GoITExpert.com Editors

This release puts pressure on existing browsers for Mac OS X, Mozilla, Safari and Opera to implement their own versions of the Google Gears application space in order to compete with Google.

Also a simultaneous release of Linux version of Chrome is a welcome sign of Google focusing on all operating systems, rather than sticking to the most used and popular ones.

Even though still in beta, Chrome promises to become a fresh and innovative way to use the Internet on Mac OS X.

Get it Here

The Live Preview Delay determines how long you must hover over a thumbnail preview before you the preview of the windows contents are shown.

Here is how you can customize the Live Preview hover delay:

Click on the Start Button, type in regedit and hit Enter.

Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right click on Advanced and select New DWORD and name the new value “ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime“.

Right click on ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime and select Modify.

Switch to Decimal base and enter in your new number in milliseconds. 1000 = 1 second. Anything larger than 0 is a valid value. 

 Once changed click OK and restart your computer.

You will notice the change in response time.

AVG is a smaller application, so it does not bloat your system with features that you will never use.  I am yet to ever need the Lotus Email function in my Symantec products….but I did pay for it! AVG offers neat, effective protection which stays silently minimized in your system tray and only activates when needed to protect your system.

This is precisely one of the best things about AVG Anti-Virus. It works completely in the background, without the need of half the system resources and of course, without constantly bothering you with warning windows or update messages. You can just go on with your work and you won’t even notice you have an antivirus application up and running.  The default install has slightly more verbose language than I like, but you can edit the settings and disable these notifications.

AVG Anti-Virus features real time system protection against viruses and spyware, an email scanner, special plug-ins for Office and a browser toolbar that lets you browse the web safe and sound. Please note that installing the AVG Toolbar with Yahoo! obviously installs the Yahoo! toolbar.  You can opt to not install it if you choose.

The whole package should be enough to ensure you’re not infected with any virus. Also, the program integrates seamlessly with Windows Explorer, thus allowing you to scan files from context menus by right clicking. AVG Anti-Virus’s database is automatically updated on a daily basis so you are always protected even from the most recently discovered threats.   You can obviously change the settings as to how frequently the database is updated.  From what I have seen, the database is very comprehensive and provides more than adequate protection.  The program supports scheduled scans as well so for those that are super paranoid, you can have it run every night, or every week without having to sit there.

AVG is offered in English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Brazilian (Portugese) and works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and many Linux flavours.  We’ll have more articles on that later.

Special Offer

Get AVG Anti-Virus 9.0 – 2 years for the price of 1! today.

Such a bold statement might stir some emotional response, however, I will standby by my comment and further discuss this issue.

In the previous years, we have all seen our fare share of Operating System releases, including two new Versions of Windows, a hunderd or so releases of different Linux Distributions and flavours. All of these releases focused on adding more neat features to the os, updating the ways we use computers, etc. OS X was not in the least bit behind this rush. First six releases were all about adding new features, improving user experience and guess what, adding more features.

The 10.5 release of OS X was all about new features, stacks, preview, finder features, Time Machine, etc. If the Mac users were happy with 10.4 Tiger, then the Leopard brought them into heaven. And if you ask some of these folk, using OS X was like heaven.

Meanwhile the friends at Microsoft were busy copying and yet again screwing up their copy of OS X. What copy you may ask, well the taskbar attempt in Vista was a poor version of OS X’s Dock. Previewing windows didn’t work as well as they would want and other things they they copied in order to make Vista the best user experience better. Well, it didn’t not work and Windows 7 is coming to prove that Microsoft still has some people intelligent enough to design an OS that is easy and enjoyable to use.

So both camps were busy getting their respective releases out the door, except that Apple, already ahead in the race, decided to actually approve the user experience by reworking the internals of the operating system, rather then packing it full of untested, and full of problems features. Snow Leopard, named accutelly to reflect its relationship with the 10.5 Leopard release, was presented as a trully better user experience.

New features included [From Wikipedia]:

• An improvement to Stacks which now allows viewing a subfolder without launching Finder.
• Contextual menus which come out of Dock icons now have more options and have a new look, with a semi-transparent charcoal background and white type.
• The ever popular Exposé gets a new facelift and now ca display all windows, arranged in the grid pattern, for a single program by left clicking and holding its icon in the dock.
• Windows can now be minimized directly onto their application’s icon in the dock.
• Faster PDF and JPEG icon refreshes.
• Artificial intelligence algorithms used for selecting of columned text in PDF documents.
• Faster startup, shutdown, installation, Time Machine backup and connection establishment.
• Smaller OS footprint on disk, freeing 7 GB or more.
• Printer drivers are now downloaded/installed only as needed, rather than installing all drivers and wasting disk space. The default install only contains those drivers needed for existing printers and a small subset of popular printers.
• When searching for a network, the AirPort menu-bar animates until it finds a network.
• Prefixes for bytes are now used in strictly decimal meaning when describing disk space, such that an indicated file size of 1 MB corresponds to 1,000,000 bytes, as commonly used by hard disk manufacturers.
• Better use of Processor power, including the new system core built to take advantage of the 64 bit Core 2 Duo processors.

Focused on user experience, these improvements have been presented to provide a better, stable, more responsive operating system. Snow Leopards stands on its own as the best OS update to have come out of any os developer.

Windows 7 includes five themes that will help you customize Windows to fit your taste.  If you are tired of the default themes there are a few sites where you can download more. Check out these sites:

• The Official Microsoft Windows 7 Personalization site
• iThinkDiff.com’s Windows 7 Themes
• IntoWindows Windows 7 Themes 
• Mike Swanson’s Themes
• Windows 7 Box Logo Themes

UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD. You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file if you’ve already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn’t on the list.

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista, or Linux. If you are having trouble with the Linux version, try the Windows version, it usually works better.
• A broadband internet connection to download the distribution’s .iso file (unless you’re using pre-downloaded files)

Features

UNetbootin can create a bootable Live USB drive, or it can make a “frugal install” on your local hard disk if you don’t have a USB drive. It can load distributions by automatically downloading their ISO (CD image) files, or by using existing ISO files, floppy/hard disk images, or kernel/initrd files, for installing other distributions.

unetbootin

The current version has built-in support for automatically downloading and loading the following distributions, though installing other distributions is also supported:

• Ubuntu (and official derivatives)
  • 6.06 LTS
  • 6.10
  • 7.04
  • 7.10
  • 8.04 LTS
  • 8.10
  • 9.04
  • Daily CD Images
• Debian
  • Stable/Etch
  • Testing/Lenny
  • Unstable/Sid
• Linux Mint
  • 3.1
  • 4.0
  • 5-r1
  • 6
• openSUSE
  • 10.2
  • 10.3
  • 11.0
  • 11.1
  • Factory
• Arch Linux
  • 2007.08
• Damn Small Linux
  • 4.4
• SliTaz
  • Stable
  • Cooking
• Puppy Linux
  • 4.00
• gNewSense
  • deltah-2.1
• FreeBSD
  • 6.3
  • 7.0
• NetBSD
  • 4.0

• Fedora
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • Rawhide
• PCLinuxOS
  • 2007
  • 2008
• Sabayon Linux
  • 4-LiteMCE
• Gentoo
  • 2007.0
  • 2008.0
• MEPIS
  • SimplyMEPIS 8
  • AntiX 8
• Zenwalk
  • 5.2
• Slax
  • 6
• Dreamlinux
  • 3.2
• Elive
  • Development
• CentOS
  • 4
  • 5
• Mandriva
  • 2007.1
  • 2008.0
  • 2008.1
• FaunOS
  • 0.5.4
• Frugalware Linux
  • Stable
  • Testing
  • Current
• xPUD
  • 0.8.9

UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities, including:

• Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
• SystemRescueCD, a system repair, backup and recovery tool.
• Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
• Dr.Web Antivirus, F-Secure Rescue CD, and Kaspersky Rescue Disk, which remove malware from Windows installs.
• Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.
• Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
• NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.
• Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
• Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
• FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.

Installation & Screenshots

If you are using Windows, run the file, select a distribution (which will download for you automatically), floppy/hard disk image (an image that you have already downloaded from www.ubuntu.com let’s say), or kernel/initrd to load, select a target drive (USB Drive or Hard Disk), then reboot once and you are done.

If using Linux, make the file executable (using either the command

chmod +x ./unetbootin-linux

or going to Properties->Permissions and checking “Execute”), then start the application, you will be prompted for your password to grant the application administrative rights, then the main dialog will appear, where you select a distribution and install target (USB Drive or Hard Disk), then reboot when prompted.

After rebooting, if you created a Live USB drive by selecting “USB Drive” as your install target, press the appropriate button (usually F1, F2, F12, ESC, or backspace) while your computer is starting up to get to your BIOS boot menu and select USB drive as the startup target; otherwise if there’s no boot selection option, go to the BIOS setup menu and change the startup order to boot USB by default. Otherwise, if you did a “frugal install” by selecting “Hard Disk” as your install target, select the UNetbootin entry from the Windows Boot Menu as the system boots up.

Installing Other Distributions Using UNetbootin

Download and run UNetbootin, then supply it with the appropriate ISO (CD image) file, floppy/hard disk image, or kernel and initrd files when prompted (see screenshot). Check your distribution’s download page to find the appropriate file; if in doubt use the ISO file.

If you’re loading an ISO file or floppy/hard disk image, that’s all that’s required (just press “OK” to start installing); otherwise if you’re manually specifying kernel and initrd files and you’d like to specify special booting options, check the distribution’s boot configuration files (usually after the “kernel” line in either isolinux.cfg, syslinux.cfg, menu.lst, or grub.conf) and supply them on the “Option” line.

And this is how you can install linux from usb. After completing this tutorial you will be able to boot and run linux from a USB drive.

People have been wasting their time troubleshooting plugins and extensions but usually this leads nowhere as the real issue is that during installation the actxprxy.dll file did not install properly during the upgrade.  This is because of a bug in the code, that if the dll was loaded it could not be overwritten.  If you have a similar problem with IE8, fixing the issue is as simple as a running one command.

Just open up an administrative level command prompt and type in regsvr32 actxprxy.dll and hit Enter.

Reboot your computer and your tab issue should be resolved.

1. Click on the Start Button, type in gpedit.msc and hit Enter.
2. Once the Local Group Policy Editor has loaded navigate through User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar, and locate Add Search Internet link to Start Menu near the top.
   
3. Right click on Add Search Internet link to Start Menu and select Edit.
4. On the edit screen select Enabled and click OK.
   
5. Close the Local Group Policy Editor.  You should now see the link restored on the Start Menu.