Today, let me show you how to easily prevent this from happening. Oh this depends on which browser you are using.

Internet Explorer

Click on the drop down arrow next to the Printer icon on the toolbar. Select the Page Setup menu item.

In the Page Setup window, you should see the “Headers and Footers” setting which specifies what are to be printed in the headers and footers. The codes “&u&b&d” will eventually print the URL of the page, as well as the printing date. You can simply delete off the codes such as “&u&b&d” which is in the footer section to have a blank footer.

You can of course modify the codes to print out different stuff in the headers and footers. Here is a list of the codes:

• &w - Window Title
• &u - Page URL
• &d - Date in short format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &D - Date in long format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &t - Time in regular format as shown on the clock (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &T - Time in 24-hour format
• &p - Current page number
• &P - Total number of pages
• &b - right align the next text. (following &b)
• &b&b: Centered text (between &b&b)
• && - A single ampersand (&)

There you are, pretty straight forward and easy for Internet Explorer. Now, how about Mozilla Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox

On the File menu, click on Page Setup. Then in the popup window select the Margins & Header/Footer tab.

Here you should see that it’s very easy to change the margins, and of course the header and footer options. All the options are in the 6 drop down selection lists, no messy codes to play with as in the IE browser. If you want to get rid of the URL, just select blank in the drop down list.

There you are, some quick tips for Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. Don’t ask me how to do this in other browsers such as Opera, because I haven’t played with them that much yet.

A blog is a diary or journal on the Internet where the writer or more known as the “blogger” will write his/her views on a wide variety of subjects such as politics, news, pop culture, computers, food and drinks, and even observations on the world or simply provide links to useful websites. These mostly personal journals on the Internet have taken the web by storm. They are usually frequently updated and written in a personal tone. Different bloggers adopt different themes, sort of like a newspaper columnist but with no specialized training.

If the above quick explanation is still too difficult to digest, what about a very plain English explanation of what are blogs in video format?

Thanks to the folks from CommonCraft, the video is really nicely done. It explains the blog concept in easy to understand drawings. The drawings are cute. Even if you are a problogger you will still enjoy the cute drawings in the video.

Enjoy.

1. Orbit Downloader - Orbit Downloader is similar to Free Studio below except that it only saves the videos in FLV (flash video) format.
2. Free Studio - One of my favorite Freeware around. It can convert almost anything into mp4 format. Of course, it can only download videos from Youtube.

Now, simply follow the following steps to download and convert a video into MP4 format.

1. Download The Tools! - Do I really need to explain this? Download the tools you’ll need, which are those I told you above.
2. Visit Your Favorite Video Site - For this tutorial, I decided to use Myspace videos since I found this funny and yet vulgar Spongebob parody on the site called “Grandma’s Kisses”.

   

3. Start Orbit Downloader - Start Orbit Downloader from your desktop if you have not already done so.
4. Start Grab++ feature - For this, you’ll need to look at the system tray which is located at the bottom right of your screen, where the date and time is located. You should see the orbit downloader icon in there. Right click on it, and select “Grab ++” (if you don’t see it in the system tray, then click on the “show hidden icons” arrow).

   

5. Download the video file - We’re getting close to the part where you can actually download the FLV video file! Once you have started the “Grab++” feature, select “videos” in the Grab++ display menu. You’re video file should be the file with the biggest amount of MB (megabytes). Select it and press the download button. Save the file to a directory you usually save your video files. For the tutorial, I saved it under my downloads folder.

   

6. Wait - Wait until your file has been completely downloaded.

   

7. Almost There! - Once your file has been completely downloaded, start Free Studio. Select Flash from the main menu and then select “convert flash video to iPod format”. Select your file from the directory you saved it to earlier, and press OK.

   

8. Wait again - Wait until Free Studio is finished converting the file.

Once you have the video converted, you can of course easily import the video into iPod or iPhone and play away! Have fun!

There you are, a few simple steps on how to convert a video file from FLV format to MP4.

Loadtime
Let’s start off with something simple. In the first test, I tested to see how long each program takes to load. Frostwire started off strong with a load time of 5 seconds. So what about Limewire? Limewire took an extra second to load, meaning that Frostwire was slightly faster than Limewire.

Looks

Frostwire looks

It’s no beauty contest, they’re both the same. None of them look that different from the other. They both have the same tabs (well, Limewire has more tabs than Frostwire), and has that same basic structure. The only difference between the two is the color scheme. Frostwire’s color scheme uses blue and white, while Limewire uses green and white. Really, there’s no clear cut competition in terms of looks.

Limewire looks

Search Results
One of our test was the search engine test. One method I did to see which one was better was test their search results. Since Limewire and Frostwire all contain pirated stuff, we instead used “kittens” for our search. When I typed “kittens” for an image search for Frostwire (btw, I was looking for kittens the animal, and people had all of these crazy “kitten” images), it showed the search result a lot faster than Limewire. Although Limewire’s search speed was slower than Frostwire, it had a lot more search results than Frostwire. By searching “kittens”, it showed 44 search results for “kittens”, while Frostwire showed 26. In the end, despite Limewire’s turtle search results, it clearly beats Frostwire in terms of the number of search results.

Download Speed
My last test was the download speed test. I tested the download speed of both contenders by downloading an episode of my favorite web series “Arby n Chief”. To keep it fair, I downloaded the same video for both Frostwire and Limewire. When I clicked the download link for both bit torrent downloaders, Frostwire savagely beat Limewire’s download time by 25 seconds (Frostwire downloaded the file in 15 seconds flat!)! Words could not describe how shocked I was when this outcome resulted. Clearly Frostwire had a faster download time than Limewire.

Extra Features

Frostwire chat

The only extra feature Frostwire has that Limewire doesn’t is the community chat feature (e.g. chatroom). Everything else is identical.

So who won?
Although it wasn’t a clear cut competition, Frostwire is probably the better bit torrent downloader compared to Limewire. Despite the fact that Frostwire does not have a larger number of search results and looks almost identical to Limewire, its download speed, chat room feature and load time is the number reason why you should go with this bit-torrent downloader.

Firefox 3 has been discussed not too long ago, you can read it here. Looks like here in Kongtechnology.com, we are a Firefox lover! Well, personally, I love Firefox for its ease of use, customization, and speed. It definitely beats Internet Explorer. As for Safari and Opera, it’s a matter of preference. The three are on an equal ground I reckon, only difference is that there are features specific to one browser, for example, Speed Dial on Opera. Yet, my choice would still be Mozilla’s Firefox.

Along with the new Firefox 3, I’ve decided to write a practical guide to enhance your experience with Firefox. These tips and tutorials will help you browse far more efficient, faster (and not from browser speed point of view only), and not to mention the multitasking factor. With these few tips, you’ll get used to browsing multiple sites, while still running a stable browser.

Firefox Post Installation
After the initial installation of Firefox, let’s make a few tweaks. This is my personal preference though. It’s up to you whether you want to follow it or not, these steps are completely optional.

First go to Edit - Preferences. Go to Privacy tab, then under History, change the saved history page to a lower number. I changed mine to 7 days. This is to help shave some unnecessary space used by Firefox.

I also choose to disabled the “Remember what I’ve downloaded” option, for the similar reason.

That’s about it. Not much huh? Piece a cake! Of course, for a complete tweaking, there are heaps of advanced tweaking guide available. However, if you don’t feel to comfortable, then these small tweaks should do. Firefox will perform brilliantly with or without the tweaks.

Plugins Parade
Now let’s install some plugins. What are plugins? These are “extra” components that could add more features to Firefox. There are a wide range of plugins available out there, from a simple bookmarks plugins, to a more complex plugins used by web developers and programmers. However, since this article is aimed for a day-to-day user, I choose only to include the basic ones, the ones I find pretty useful for daily needs. Let’s hit it then.

• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

  

  The first plugin I choose would definitely be Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a nifty plugin that lets you synchronize your bookmarks across different computers. All you need is to install Foxmarks on the other computer as well, and it will automatically update the bookmark with the one you stored in the server. Let’s say you were at work, and you found a good website for reference, you could bookmark it, sync Foxmarks, and when you got home tonight, the bookmark at home has been updated with the link you’ve included at work. Definitely handy and a must have plugin.

• Down Them All

  

  This one is useful when you want to download heaps of item on a page. Say you come across a page with 50 pics of your favorite artist, instead of right-click each and every one of them, you could just right-click once, choose to “Down Them All” and filter the downloads by file extensions (eg: JPEGs, GIFs, etc) and download them all. A real handy one for those of you who surf for pictures a lot.

• Download Status Bar

  

  I don’t like Firefox’s default download manager. It opens up a new window, and it won’t tell you how many percentage your download has gone when there are multiple downloads. Download Status Bar does exactly what it says. It lets the download bar go onto the status bar (bottom of the browser) and it will show you graphically how far your download has gone. Plus, there’s no need of pop-up download manager window. Hooray! What’s more is that whenever you close your browser, it will switch your downloads automatically to the default pop-up window, so you don’t have to cancel your downloads.

• Orbit Downloader

  

  Here’s an optional one. It’s not actually a Firefox plugin, but it can integrate itself with Firefox. I use this plugin mainly for downloading flv movies (YouTube, or similar video sites) and of course, Flash based media. Great for downloading Flash games to be played offline using a standalone Flash player.

Holy crap Batman! That’s FAST!
Browsing using Firefox is about speed. Not only the browser itself, but operational as well. These shortcuts will help your browsing efficiencies: faster, and cooler (once you get used to it, you could “accidentally” demonstrate to your friends how you browse so fast).

• Ctrl - T: Opens up a new tab. Useful for multiple browsing session. Be careful not to slip and open too many tabs though.
• Ctrl - W: Close the chosen tab. Can be used to quickly close whatever tab you are looking at if your Boss suddenly come (Haha!)
• Ctrl - Shift - T: Re-open the last closed tab. Useful to re-open the tab you close above.
• Ctrl - F: Open up a “Search on this page” form. I use this to search the term / words I was looking for on a page.
• Ctrl - Tab: Move between opened tabs.
• Ctrl - Left Click on a link: Open up that link on a new tab (and keep focus on the current tab)

These are basically the main shortcuts I am using on Firefox. Not much, but each of them has been proven useful and sufficient for day-to-day use. If you do have any other shortcuts though, feel free to drop them in the comments section.

So there you go, some tips and info for those of you who hasn’t been using Firefox to the full potential. For those of you who are thinking of switching to Firefox, Kitkat’s right, it’s the time to make the switch. Firefox 3 definitely has some brand new features. Watch and subscribe to Kongtechnology for more reviews and tips on Firefox 3. Browse fast, browse smart. (Psst.. Don’t forget to download Firefox 3!)

As of yet no application has successfully bridged the gap between power and performance and connectivity and synchronization. Office Live makes some attempt at this but I personally find it far too slow and buggy to use. The biggest downside for Office Live is that most end users simply don’t need the high end features that it provides. I love the new Office Interface, but when will I ever use mail merge or functions like it?

For many of us we just need simple tools, and I’ll show you the best online services currently available which you can use in conjunction with, or as a replacement for Microsoft Office.

1. Google Docs

   Word Processor | Presentations | Spreadsheets

   

   I think Google Docs is an amazing service, I love the fact that in many ways it really isn’t an Office alternative and doesn’t try to be. You’ll see the other services here are trying to provide a complete Office replacement in terms of features and power but Google has just created a service which just provides the features most users will need and makes it incredibly simple to share and collaborate with other users.

   In fact in many cases I just Docs it as a glorified note-taker, but who cares? It’s free, fast and perfect for working on documents with someone else. It also supports Office file formats as well as Open Documents and can import and export to the desktop.

   You’ll need a Gmail account, an Open ID (includes Yahoo ID) in order to use Google Docs, but since most people should have either a Gmail account or Yahoo address already this shouldn’t be a problem. If not, you’ll just have to register for one, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, right?

   Features are added regularly based upon user feedback. I have found myself using it more and more lately as I move between places like work, home and university and need to quickly keep documents accessible from all locations.

   If you worry about not being able to access your files when not connected to the Internet then you can use Google Gears to access Docs from the desktop when you are offline. The official Gear site supports Firefox and Internet Explorer, but you will need to go here to get a modified plugin for Flock.

   Daniel did a great article recently where he shows how you can use CSS to style your documents, Google Docs doesn’t have many formatting options so it might be worthwhile to give this a go.

2. Zoho

   Word Processor | Presentations | Spreadsheets | Collaboration | Financial | Management | Recruiting | Wiki | Web Applications

   

   Zoho has just about every office application you’ll ever need (over a dozen), and along with Google Docs has become one of the most popular online office suites. In fact recently the decision was made to allow anyone with a Google account to access Zoho. It may seem a strange decision considering the two could be competitors but as I said before, the two have somewhat different focuses. Zoho as a Office replacement, Google Docs can be used in conjunction.

   Most of the services are free, but some features such as the Zoho Payments and the CRM, payment is required after a certain number of projects have been completed.

3. Acrobat.com

   Word Processor | PDF creator| Collaboration | File Manager

   

   Adobe has its own set of free web applications at Acrobat.com which provide some very useful tools for office productivity. The tools include Buzzword, a word processor, ConnectNow for collaboration, Create PDF, Share Files and My Files, the document manager.

   Essentially Acrobat.com isn’t actually a complete office suite as it doesn’t have a presentation or spreadsheet programs, however if you would like a well designed, fully featured online word processor and PDF creator then Adobe Buzzword is absolutely perfect.

4. ThinkFree Online

   Word Processor | Presentations | Spreadsheets

   

   I hate one thing about Thinkfree. It has a sidebar of ads extending down the right hand side of the page. It may seem like no biggie considering we are constantly bombarded by advertising every day we step out of bed, but to me some things shouldn’t be intruded upon and I hate to see advertising right up there alongside my documents.

   That aside the service itself is great, and really pushes the boundaries of what a web based service can be expected to do. In fact look at the screen-shot alone you would be surprised to know this is in fact entirely a web based application.

   Built upon Ajax and mimicking the Office user interface, ThinkFree provides the capabilities of group editing and collaboration and the publishing of documents directly to webpages and blogs. However, unless you upgrade to the premium version, you cannot access documents offline although you can still use the import and export features.

   The premium version also provides synchronization functions, removes the advertising, and increases the 1 gigabyte storage allowance.

There you are. The four most famous and widely used online office suites. Which one do you think is the best, or is your favorite?

However what’s more common is perhaps you are installing WordPress in a sub-folder of an existing website, and after blogging for a while, you are thinking “Hey, how can I list my blog posts on my homepage?”

It’s really easy actually because WordPress has made life so much easier for us. In order to use any functions in WordPress (such as display latest blog posts, display latest comments, etc), you simply need to include the file “wp-blog-header.php”. For example, to display my latest 10 blog posts in my Flash Games page, I simply put the following few lines of code:

<?php
define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);
query_posts(’showposts=10′);
?>

<ul>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a><br />
<?php comments_popup_link(__(’Comments (0)’), __(’Comments (1)’), __(’Comments (%)’), ‘grey’); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>

<?php endif; ?>
</ul>

Apart from display the latest 10 posts, it also displays the number of comments each post has.

OK, the codes above may look a little gibberish, but the important thing is by including the file “wp-blog-header.php”, you will have access to all the WordPress functions in an instant!

Wonderful isn’t it? With this you can easily integrate WordPress into your existing website and make the website easier to update by making use of WordPress CMS capability.

Other than showing your video on Ustream itself, you can embed it on blogs, websites, and social-networking profiles. Let me show you how…

Firstly, sign up at Ustream.tv, it’s absolutely free and fast. Once that’s done, login and click on My Shows. Next, type in a name for your show and click on the “Broadcast Now” button. After a short while, you will be asked to grant permission to Ustream.tv to access the camera and microphone. Of course, grant the permission by clicking on the “Allow” button.

A window pops up. Click on “Start Broadcast” to start what else but the broadcasting! Check out my broadcast screenshot below… well that’s a Transformer imitation I am showing!

To share the live video,… or you simply want to amaze other bloggers reading your blog… You can use one of the many codes on your bog. Just copy and paste! You can embed the video directly into most major social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, LiveJournal, iGoogle, Friendster, Xanga, and many more. It’s so much fun!

This is really great, isn’t it? Especially true for those who carry a camera around with them all the time. Don’t use your webcam with your friends only, make full use of your webcam, show us your live video of yourself… show us what you are doing - blogging, reading, watching TV, sleeping, eating, in the bathroom,…

When you have more USB devices running, using the Safely Remove Hardware applet that comes with Windows will become very slow and troublesome. Not to mention finding and locating that small icon in the system tray…

Now, all that is going to change with USB Disk Ejector, a nifty little freeware that lets you quickly remove USB devices which include thumdrives, flash drives, scanners, external hard drives, printers, and etc, by either the drive letter or name, or from the name of the program the USB device is using.

The USB Disk Ejector’s GUI is very functional and user friendly.

You simply have to launch it and then double-click on the USB device you would like to eject. Fast and easy!

Other than that, you can also use this free utility from the command line. It will work silently, so there won’t be any popups to deal with. You can pass in the /? parameter to the utility to show a quick help dialog.

See, it’s really easy. For example, to eject the USB device that is mounted as my F: drive, I would simply use the following command line:

usb_disk_eject /removeletter F

This might be a problem if you have a lot of USB devices and the drive letters change a lot. But, luckily this free utility offers partial name matching by utilizing asterisk to the beginning of the device name. For example, I can eject the same device above by using the full name:

usb_disk_eject /removename “Memorex TRAVELDRIVE 005B”

Or simply using the partial name:

usb_disk_eject /removename “*Memorex”

Nice? Let me tell you that you can make it nicer… or quicker in fact by creating a shortcut to this eject command. That will make the eject process much fun, isn’t it?

USB Disk Ejector is a tiny but useful freeware which has been tested on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Go download it today, I am sure you won’t regret it!

While I was setting the sharing folder up, I took screenshots because I guess it will make a good entry on this blog.

The whole process is pretty straight forward. Firstly, create a folder on one of the computer which acts like a file server. Then, right click on the newly created folder, select Properties, and check the option “Share this folder on the network”. So far so good, the folder is now shared on the network and should be accessible from other computers.

Now, to make the folder slightly more secure we want to set a password for the Guest account, which of course must be enabled. Microsoft makes it hard for newbies to do this because by default there is no option to set a password for the Guest account!

To set a password to the Guest account on Windows XP, you need to do this:

Click Start > Run > Enter cmd and click OK.

In the DOS window type the following and press Enter.

Net user guest password

Go to Control Panel > User Accounts. Click on the Guest account and now you can change the password!

Alternatively, you can set the password straight away in the DOS window by entering the following command:

Net user guest *

and press the Enter key. After that, enter your password two times for confirmation.

Now, you can access the shared folder from another computer through the local network, the system will prompt for you to login. Simply enter “Guest” as the ID, and then supply the password you have just set.

Happy!