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Under the hood, a quick look at browser engines

For the better part of the last 10 years, browsing the Internet for most meant using Internet Explorer. However, the recent release of Google Chrome as well as the continued popularity of Firefox, Safari and Opera have given users unprecedented choice in what software to use. But, most users don't know much about the engines and technology that actually powers their particular web browser. Without an engine, all you'd see when you visited Neowin.net, or any other website, would be the raw HTML, CSS, and javascript that our developers use to create the site. Sure, you'd also be able to find the content hidden deep within all those tags and instructions, but not in a pleasing format and without any multimedia enhancements. The browser's engine is what takes all of that code and renders the information for you, on the fly. Today, most of the Internet is rendered by four main browser engines. Trident, Gecko, WebKit and Presto. Neowin takes you under the hood and gives you a...

Click Turn Off to install important updates?

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Why? Why? Why do you have to Turn off to install updates?   This is the same behaviour with Vista. I don't get it. Why can't you install updates and restart?

Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1

Time to reinstall both backup and main OS. I have a few things to correct with this installation. Last time I noticed the HDD sequence in BIOS wasn't proper. Somehow the MUSIC drive has become HDD0 so the boot folder of Vista is there now. This is the order it will be after today. WD7500JB - BACKUP ST3500 - WINDOWS/DOCS ST5750 - SERVER WD3000JB - MUSIC The reordering is going to invalidate the currently installed OSes. So reinstallation of OS is a must unless I waste time on how to get them back. The BACKUP will have Windows XP SP3. Program Files and Documents and Settings folders will be in BACKUP also as Applications and Users. I will not install Vista yet.   Installing Nero 8 Lite now to burn the Windows XP SP3 CD.

A Little Motivation

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I was linked to this wonderful wallpaper one day by my good friend Revenant. Here are two versions before I lose them: Widescreen and Fullscreen. 1920x1200   1600x1200

Album Artist view in iTunes Browser

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Browsing music in Genre | Artist | Album view using iTunes browser is a real pain sometimes because there are albums with multiple different artists. When this happens iTunes would display all those artists in the Artist column so you cannot view the whole album under one artist.   For example, the Paul van Dyk - In Between album with the following track list 1-01 Haunted - Paul van Dyk feat. Lo-Fi Sugar 1-02 White Lies - Paul van Dyk feat. Jessica Sutta 1-03 Sabotage - Paul van Dyk 1-04 Complicated - Paul van Dyk feat. Ashley Tomberlin 1-05 Get Back - Paul van Dyk & Alex M.O.R.P.H. feat. Ashley Tomberlin 1-06 Far Away - Paul van Dyk & Giuseppe Ottaviani 1-07 Another Sunday - Paul van Dyk 1-08 Talk in Grey - Paul van Dyk feat. Ryan Merchant 1-09 In Circles - Paul van Dyk & Alex M.O.R.P.H. 1-10 In Between - Paul van Dyk 1-11 Stormy Skies - Paul van Dyk feat. Wayne Jackson 1-12 Détournement - Paul van Dyk 1-13 New York City - Paul van Dyk, Starkillers & Austin Leeds f...

InstallShield shortcuts not working in Vista start menu

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Reinstalling Vista was a thought when I had this problem happening with Vista start menu. None of the InstallShield shortcuts in Start Menu would work. When I click on them nothing happens. Common examples were all Office products. Googling the description of the problem led me to this forum thread: http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14341 where installing ShellExView was a suggested solution to enable/disable non-Microsoft context menus.  I did just that and even without rebooting, I found the culprit: ShellUploader. It is a context menu app coded in C# to upload image files to ImageShack. The program hasn't been updated for 2 years.

Apple passes WalMart, now #1 music retailer in US

Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to the NPD MusicWatch Survey. read more | digg story

Tagging Classic Music albums with Mp3tag for iTunes and Last.fm

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I realized a lot of people having trouble with tagging Classic music. Initially, I got into Classical music to take up this challenge but now I am hooked into it because of its nice sophisticated melodies. There has to be a very straight forward way of tagging music. The ID3v2 specification provides us frames for the following tags that can be used to organize classical music:   Artist AlbumArtist Conductor OriginalArtist Composer Album Name   My goal is to devise a plan to fit all of these tags into Classical music appropriately, so that the Classic music composers will appear in Last.fm statistics music will be organized and displayed well in iTunes   The primary focus is given to how the music is organized. This means tagging conventions for track names is not one of the primary concerns in this article. First we familiarise ourselves with the ID3v2 frames for the tags above.   TPE1 The 'Lead artist/L...

Digsby Launches- One App to Manage IM + Email + Social Network

Digsby is the first application that lets you manage all your existing IM, email and social network accounts from one easy to use application. it supports 15 services and integrates them into a clean user interface read more | digg story

Mozart - The Symphonies (Hogwood) [1997/MP3/V0(VBR)/Log]

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Blogged with the Flock Browser

Satellite Dishes

It seems that despite you own your house and your land, you cannot simply buy and install a satellite dish at your will. The Canning council paper mentions the following:   If you are thinking of installing a satellite dish, please ensure you contact the City before making any final decisions on the type of dish or where you want it installed. It is advisable to speak with the City's Planning staff to find out if the process before you purchase or make arrangements for installation. It may save you heartache in the future! Planning staff can be contacted by ringing the City of Canning on 9231 0606 and asking for a Planning offer.   I am thinking why the heck would I have to. It is not like I am installing it on the road.   del.icio.us Tags: satellite , canning , council , rules , dishes , number , call

iTSfv - Hands down the best iTunes addon you could ever ask

iTunes Store file validator is an open source add-in for iTunes for automatic genre tagging from Last.fm, exporting iTunes Store artwork, downloading Lyrics from LyricsWiki, Synchrocleaning iTunes Music Library, recovering playedCount from Last.fm, automatic rating according played pattern, creating statistics for your music library, and many more. read more | digg story

iTunes to MediaMonkey to iTunes

I gave MediaMonkey 3 a shot today, after a successful trial in VMware Workstation last night. The reason I tried MM3 was, it being the first media player I heard that can automatically rename files and move them immediately after renaming tags. This behavior is not enabled by default however. I added the my proper iTunes managed 19910 tracks to MM3 and noticed tracks getting moved. For example a song belonged to AC/DC artist folder moved into a AC-DC artist folder tracks getting renamed (variant 1). For example 1-03 Secrets.mp3 renamed to 03 Secrets.mp3. I realized MM3 did not by default use the DiscCount tag to rename files. tracks getting renamed (variant 2). For example "07 What is Love_.mp3" which has the Name tag as "What is Love?" renamed to just "07 What is Love.mp3". iTunes used underscore for illegal characters but MM3 just did not include them at all. All this damage was done without me even enabling Automatically organize files. ...

Shell Uploader

ShellUploader is a Windows utility that adds the ability to upload files via the right click context menu. read more | digg story

JetAudio (Thinstalled)

JetAudio can be thinstalled however for limited functionality. Anusha didn't have like at all with JetAudio in Windows Vista x64. Issues: Videos will not play.   Need to try: Installing XviD and AC3Filter and then post-scanning.

Windows Live Writer (Thinstalled)

This post is made using Windows Live Writer that is Thinstalled. Issues: None

Windows Live Writer (Thinstalled)

This post is made using Windows Live Writer that is Thinstalled. No Issues.

Anusha's Techno Portal: Why did Vista designers take us to last decade?

Anusha's Techno Portal: Why did Vista designers take us to last decade?

iTSfv has multiple faces

During the last few days some significant core changes as to how iTSfv loads were done. This was transparent for the general user. According to the current implementation, iTSfv goes to a WMPfv mode if it detects Windows Vista Media Center and no iTunes is detected. If neither Vista Media Center nor iTunes is detected then iTSfv will go to a File Validator mode. I was originally thinking of having one big cool GUI for both iTunes and WMP but later decided for the sake of making things modular, splitting the work into two GUI forms. So now when I work on WMPfv and see any buggy code in iTSfv I can go back and actually fix it because I am kind of rewriting things from scratch. If I was using the same iTSfv GUI then I wouldn't have spotted it. So far WMPfv implements Synchroclean and Updating UrlToCover from existing Album Art. Functionality should be added to load Windows Media Player library to XmlTracks, extracting Cover to the folders required. So when the user validates she ca...

iTSfv Explorer enhancements

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Enhancement #1 iTunes Users with "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" setting disabled, can use iTSfv to add new music to the library to a specified folder in the folder structure they like to have. For example, if you have Default Music folder location set to be F:Music in iTSfv Options > Explorer and you have music folder structure set to %Genre%%AlbumArtist% - (%Year%) %Album% then when you add / drag new music (e.g. Artist: Infected Mushroom, Album;  Vicious Delicious) to iTSfv it will first copy the files to F:MusicPsy-TranceInfected Mushroom - (2007) Vicious Delicious folder and start adding to iTunes Status Bar in the screenshot below demonstrates a similar instance: The options required to archive this are below:   Enhancement #2 iTSfv can also automatically add newly found music to iTunes. For this option to work you will need to enable Folder Watch.