Volumouse allows you to customize the settings as to when the wheel will be used for changing the volume. For instance, you can configure Volumouse to use your mouse wheel for volume control when the Alt key is held down, or when the left mouse button is down and so on.

I find that enabling the ‘when the mouse cursor is over the taskbar’ option is the most convenient for me as I can control the volume with a single hand.

When the conditions that you define are not satisfied, your mouse wheel will be used for the regular scrolling tasks, exactly as before.

Download Volumouse

There are several websites on the web that host video contents. But when it comes to video tutorials I would recommend 5min.com. All the videos on 5min are under, well, 5 minutes. 5min believes that any solution can be visually explained in no more than 5 minutes. While this may not be true in every case, this definitely is the case with most problems. So, the videos being short and to the point, you can learn things quickly. 5min’s basic philosophy is that everybody is an expert in something and has something to teach others, so why not share that knowledge for the better of the whole? You can find thousands of videos on a variety of categories like arts, business, fashion, tech, health, sports, food and many more.

There is also something unique about the video player in 5min. 5min calls it the smart player and is designed specially for tutorial videos. The player has options to zoom into a particular area of the video, you can play the video in slow motion and even advance the video frame by frame. These features are certainly helpful when you want to focus on a particular part of the demonstration. Check out the following video introduction of 5min.com.

It was only a few days back that I first laid my hands on a 8GB Microsoft Zune. This is my first post relating Zune. As I use it more, I may write more post on it. Ok, here we go. While playing a video or a podcast, Zune has this ‘Resume’ option, which lets you to continue playing a file from where you stopped last. Unfortunately, in Zune, this feature is enabled only for Videos and Podcast.

Now, say, you have an audio file (mp3 or wma) which is not actually a podcast but runs for about an hour. It would make sense to have the resume option available when playing it. But if you try to just place the file in the podcast folder, Zune may not take it up as a podcast. Instead, it would include it as a music file, without the resume option.

The solution is simple enough. It appears that Zune classifies audio files as music or podcast based on a particular meta tag of the file, viz., Genre. To be categorised as a podcast, the genre must be ‘podcast’.

So just change the genre tag in your audio file to ‘podcast’. You can do this easily using any tag editor software. Mp3tag is a free tag editor that you could use for the task. Once you change the genre to podcast, you should be able to include the files in the podcast category and the resume option would be available to you.

FlickrSlidr lets you do just that.

FlickSlidr allows you to easily embed flickr slideshows on your website or blog.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Just enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group you would like to embed. Then select a few options like the height, width etc and press Create Slideshow. That’s it. Just embed the generated html code in your blog and your slideshow is ready. Viewers can pause or run the slideshow and can also change the speed.

If you are a music buff and constantly search for song lyrics, you will love this plugin.

Lyricsplugin is an add-on to view lyrics in WinAmp or Windows Media Player automatically as you play a song. I tried it out and was really pleased with its performance. As soon as the song starts playing, the lyrics are displayed almost instantaneously.

Also, if a particular lyric is not found, you can add it yourself.

Download Lyrics Plugin

This is where Eyespot can help. This free online service can be used to store your videos so that they can be accessed by others, but the site has another impressive trick up its sleeve. Set yourself up with a free account and you can not only upload your videos, images and music, you can also use the powerful Mixer component to splice together your own video creations complete with custom soundtracks, special effects and title screens.

If video clips include unwanted footage, it can be easily cut using the Trimmer tool and completed clips can then be arranged on a simple timeline and re-ordered to your heart’s content. For an added professional touch, transitions can be added between scenes. In a matter of minutes you will find that it is possible to create something of a masterpiece, regardless of whether or not you have tried you hand at video editing before. There is even a wide range of free footage available for you to work with if you don’t have any of yours.

Visit Eyespot.com

But if you are using Windows XP, then there is built-in utility that isn’t known to many, that you can use to resize large number of images quickly. You will find this utility inside the Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box. Here is how to do it:

1. Press [Windows]E to launch Windows Explorer.
2. Make sure the Tasks pane is visible. (Click the Folders button if the Tree pane is showing instead of the Task pane.)
3. Open the folder containing the images you want to resize. Select the images you want to resize.
4. Under the File And Folder Task list, select the E-Mail The Selected Items command.
5. In Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box, click the Show More Options link to expand the dialog box.
   
6. Select a radio button next to one of the available sizes and click OK. (The available sizes are 640×480, 800×600 & 1024×768). A new mail message window containing the resized digital pictures as attachments will appear.
   Note: If this is the first time you are using this option to send a mail, then Windows will ask you for some information like your name, email address, your POP3 server etc before you can proceed. You can choose to fill in some dummy info if you are not actually going to send mail.
7. On the menu, click File and select the Save Attachments command, and save all the attachments to a different folder.
8. Close the mail message window and click No in the Save Changes dialog box.

You are limited to choosing between only 3 different sizes, but that is because these three sizes are the most common standard sizes. If you want some other size, then you are better off using a third party software.

So, how do we do it? The easiest solution is to use a player that supports capture, like the VLC Media Player. When you are playing a video in VLC player, just click Video > Capture to capture a video frame.

But suppose you are forced to work with Windows Media Player, you can still manage to capture by modifying the settings. In Windows Media Player, go to Tools>Options>Performance>Advanced and uncheck the ‘Use Overlays‘ option and press ok.

The above method should work with other video players too, if you can find out how to disable overlays. Disabling overlays reduces the image quality. So, do remember to enable it once you have captured your screen.

Woonz is basically a search engine, specifically for searching audio files for download. You can search by artist, band name or track name, if it is music you are searching, or you could search for any audio file using keywords. No files are cached or stored on Woonz servers, all data comes from various sources on the internet.

However, there is an interesting warning on the homepage which reads:
Do not download copyrighted material without permission. Woonz is a search engine designed for LEGAL entertainment purposes only. This search engine is in no way intended for illegal downloads.

But the fact is that once you search for a particular music file and click on the download button, what you get is a redirect page and then the file starts to download. You have no idea from where the file is being downloaded. So there is not much to let the user know whether the download is legitimate or not unless of course he/she is already aware that the file he/she is trying to download could be copyrighted.

Lets’ see how to do this.

1. First open a folder of digital photo files whose names you want to change.
2. Click Edit and then click Select All. You could also use ‘Ctrl+A’.
3. Right click on the first digital photo file in the list and then click Rename. The name of the first digital photo file is highlighted and ready to be edited.
4. Type the name you want to use to identify all the digital photo files in the folder. Choose a name that allows you to identify a photo from this folder at a later date.
5. Press Enter on your keyboard to rename all the digital photo files in the folder and add sequential numbering to the file names.

It’s really very fast and convenient.

Suppose you want the sequence to start from a particular number, while renaming the first image, add the number in brackets. For example, if you name the first image birthday (51).jpg, then the other photos will be automatically named birthday (52).jpg, birthday (53).jpg…..etc. Needless to say, you can use this technique for any kinds of files, not just photos.

Recommended reading: How to mass/batch rename files.