Ever wished you could customize the programs on your Windows taskbar, like you can do with the tabs in Firefox?

Taskbar Shuffle makes it possible. Taskbar Shuffle is a tiny little free utility which once installed lets you drag and drop programs on your taskbar for quick reorganization. You can also have it automatically group similar program icons together under one umbrella button, or set it to group similar apps live side-by-side but never hidden.

Users can also use Taskbar Shuffle to set a middle-click close program feature for the mouse, and even the system tray function key, default to Control, can be altered to one of five others.

So if you want to do away with the chaotic placement of minimized programs on your taskbar, get Taskbar Shuffle.

Mozilla has confirmed that it will release the next major version of Firefox on Tuesday, June 30.

Firefox 3.5 is the first major revision of the popular open-source browser since version 3 landed a little over a year ago, in June of 2008. Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users.

Firefox 3.5 will also include support for the most widely-used elements of HTML 5, the set of next-generation web standards that allows for offline data access, enhanced web graphics and multimedia playback without plug-ins.

Here is a glimpse of the new features in Firefox 3.5:

• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geo-location.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Firefox 3.5 is currently in the post-beta release candidate (RC2) stage. You can grab a preview release here, if you can’t wait until Tuesday for the final release.

One of the cool feature in Windows Vista is the ability to get a thumbnail preview of open windows by just mousing over the tabs on the taskbar. It sure does helps you to quickly find the window/application you want when you have several such tabs on the taskbar.

But if you are running XP, you can still get a similar feature added.  Visual Task Tips is a free utility (for non-commercial use) that provides a preview of the windows when you mouse over the minimized titles on the taskbar, just like in Vista.

So if you want an easier way to manage your open programs, check out VisualTaskTips.com.

So you are an avid user of twitter. You have subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds. But what if someone like say, your mom or dad asks: What is twitter? or, What is this RSS thing exactly? or, what is World Wide Web.

It sure can be difficult to explain concepts like these to the uninformed. If you get too technical explaining things, it is bound to go over their head. So what do you do?

Simple. Just point them to http://www.commoncraft.com.

At Commoncraft.com, host Leele Fever explains several concepts like twitter, www, rss, wikis and more in plain English using simple animations which even your grandmother can understand. The narrations and the animations are both informative and enjoyable to watch.

You will not only find videos on techie stuff, but also videos on things like saving, borrowing & investing money and even the election process, all explained in plain English.

Just check out this video titled Wikis in Plain English.

If you are using Vista and have a secondary display monitor attached to your laptop, you might have encountered this issue. What happens is, once your computer goes to sleep and then you wake it up, you are not able to see the mouse pointer in the secondary monitor though if you move it to the laptop monitor, it is visible. Once this happens, the only way to get back the pointer is to restart Vista. A real pain.

Apparently, the issue appears only in computers with certain nVIDIA display cards. Not really sure whether the problem is with Vista or with the nVIDIA driver for Vista. Whatever be the reason, there doesn’t appear to be a fix for it.

However, there is an easy way to work around the problem.

Here is what you need to do.

• Open up the Control Panel and go to the Mouse settings.
• In the Mouse Properties window that pops up, go to the Pointer Options tab.
• Under Visibility, enable the Display pointer trails.

• Drag the slider to the extreme left so that the trails are the shortest. At this level the trails are virtually imperceptible unless you move the mouse very rapidly.

This somehow eliminates the pointer disappearance problem. Now, your mouse pointer should be visible on your secondary screen even after your computer goes to sleep and comes back.

If you are looking for ways to cut down on your computer energy usage and reduce your electricity bill, here are a few tips you should definitely try out. Frankly, most of us would already be aware of many of the tips that I have listed here. Nevertheless, very few of us actually put them into practice. If anything, this list could be a reminder to you on how you can cut down on your computer’s running cost.

Many computer users do not bother with this at all thinking that computer uses much less energy compared to air conditioning units. But, considering the millions of computers used worldwide, even a little energy saved by each would make a big difference.

Here’s what you can do.

1. Shut down your computer when not in use. Do not let it run all the time. You will no harm your computer by switching it on and off as needed. Computers are designed to be that way.

2. Let it sleep after periods of inactivity.

3. Switch the monitor off when you won’t be using it for several hours.

4. Ditch your screensavers. Screensavers keep your CPU awake and hard drive active and make your computer use more energy. Screensavers especially photo screensavers may require the extra use of a graphics card, which means you’ll have the hard drive, graphic card and monitor all in use at once.

5. Utilize your computer’s power management features and modify power options. Here you can set the amount of time you want your computer to wait before entering energy savings mode.

6. Go for LCD monitors whenever possible. LCD monitors use about one-third of the electricity consumption of the traditional CRT monitors.

7. Close applications that are not in use.

8. Set the screen brightness at the lowest comfortable level.

9. If you do decide to purchase a new computer, make sure that you choose a computer and monitor that are Energy Star compliant. Energy Star compliant computers are said to be energy-efficient. If you need to use a computer all the time, try using a laptop instead of a desktop PC. In general, laptops are greener than desktops because they have been designed with power sensitivity in mind.

10. Unplug the chord off the wall after using your computer. Just because your computer is shut down doesn’t mean it is not using energy. Many pieces of electronics use some power even when they are turned off.

If you frequently work with multiple open windows, you would have noticed that you can’t scroll a window unless the window is active and for that you need to first click on that window. This can get really annoying if you have to do this quite frequently.

Fortunately there is WizMouse to your rescue. WizMouse is a free utility which once installed lets you scroll windows just by placing your mouse over the window and turning your mouse scroll wheel. You don’t have to actually click on the window to bring it into focus. So, you can scroll the contents of a window which is actually below the window that you are working on, without losing focus.

WizMouse can also optionally enable the mouse wheel in applications that don’t support it. It does this by translating mouse wheel commands into scroll bar commands that all applications can understand and process.

WizMouse, is one of those little apps, which you never knew you needed but once you get used to it, you won’t know how you lived without it.

Get WizMouse.

Firefox 3 comes with a cool built-in spelling checker. If you’ve ever used, say, Google Docs ro posted a message in an online forum, you’ve probably seen it at work in the form of a red line under each misspelled work. You could right-click the word to see spelling suggestions along with the usual context-menu options).

It’s a great feature, but with a shortcoming. It doesn’t work in Web forms. But with a simple tweak to the about:config, you can get the spelling checker to work in forms too.

Open Firefox, type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter. In the Filter field, type spellcheck. Right-click layout.spellcheckDefault, and click Modify. Change the value from 1 to 2 and restart Firefox. The spelling checker should now work in most online forms.

If you’ve ever right-clicked an application icon in Vista, you’ve probably seen the context-menu option ‘Pin to Start Menu’. It’s designed to make frequently used programs more easily accessible.

But such an option is not available for folders. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same kind of quick access to all the folders you use everyday? Fortunately, there is a way to pin folders to Start men, and it is quite easy too. Just follow the below steps.

1. Right-click a folder to be pinned and choose Create Shortcut.

2. Click and drag that shortcut to the Start button, waiting a second or two for the menu to appear.

3. While holding the mouse button down, drag the folder to any spot near the top of the menu (above the grey line, which delineates pinned programs from frequently used ones).

4. Drop the older and you’re done.

Easy, wasn’t it. Just make sure you don’t add too many folders, or you’ll start to overload the Start menu and diminish it’s convenience. Five or six pinned applications or folders would probably be fine.

If you want, right-click the newly pinned folder and choose Rename to edit out the “Shortcut” suffix.

Google Maps is a great place to find vastly detailed street maps. But it is basically an online tool and Google doesn’t offer a way to save a map.

You could use the Print option to save the map as a pdf file but the limitation is that you would be able to print only what is visible on the screen. That means, if you want to cover a larger area, you would have to zoom out far, losing out on the details. And, if you zoom in to a comfortable level to view the details, you would lose out on the size of the map.

This tutorial will teach you how to capture a map as large as you want.

Tools Required:

• Firefox Browser.
• ScreenGrab extension for Firefox : It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.
• Notepad.

Let’s Start:

1.  Open up Firefox and install the Screengrab extension.

2.  Go to http://maps.google.com/ and open a map of the location you want.

3.  Zoom to a level that would be right for whatever purpose you are finally going to use the map for. Just don’t bother about the size of the map now. We will deal with that later.

4.  On the top right hand side of the map you would find a link called…..’Link’. Click on it. In the little pop-up that appears, click on ‘Customize and preview embedded map’.

5.  A new pop-up window opens up where you can customize the size of the map. Select the ‘Custom’ option and enter the width and height (in pixels) that you want your final map to be. For example, you could change the values to 5000×4000. The preview map will change to reflect the new size.

6.  Once you are satisfied with the size of the map, copy the html code that appears below the preview map.

7.  Open Notepad and paste the above code. Name the file anything you want but make sure you save it with the extension .html. For example, you can call the file mymap.html.

(Tip: In the Save dialog box enter the name as “mymap.html” including the quotes to force Notepad to save the file with the extension .html and not .txt)

8.  Open the html file you created in step 7 in Firefox. You would see your map displayed in the same size you selected in step 5. Of course, much of the map would probably be beyond the screen and you may have to scroll horizontally and vertically to view the hidden area.

9.  Now that we have the map of our desired size, all we need to do now is to capture and save the map as an image file. Here is where the ScreenGrab extension for Firefox comes in handy. Assuming that you have already installed ScreenGrab, you would find the ScreenGrab icon at the bottom right corner of Firefox. Click on the icon and choose Save>Complete Page/Frame. After a moment, a save dialog appears. Save the image as a PNG or JPG file.

That’s it. Your large size map is ready.

The above trick can be most useful for grabbing maps for use with your GPS enabled mobile phones . Of course, you would need to calibrate the image file before use with the GPS device.