Replace add with art by using a free firefox addon

Are you tired of viewing annoying ads on websites? Yeah me too. I find that just plain text ads (like the kind on this blog) are okay as long as they don't block up too much space or distract you from seeing the "real" websites. But sometimes, a lot of websites just tend to go overboard with the annoying type of ads - banners and animated ads.

For such cases, Firefox has a great add-on called Add-Art that instead of just blocking out the ad replaces it with art! Check out the demo:

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

This is one step better than normal extensions such as adblock plus that merely block the advertisements. Plus, sometimes, the creators of a website reserve some space for an ad (through CSS) and so when you visit such websites with Ad-block plus, you'll end up with a white rectangles all over the place. For instance you can see a big white square in the Nytimes.com page below.



Update: Hah, with extensions like Adblock plus, I forgot that this website displays advertisements too! I guess if you don't want to see advertisements on this website or any others, you can get yourself an adblock extension. I for one appreciate the measly revenue I get from Google's advertisements.

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5 reasons I dislike Windows Live Hotmail

I have nothing against Hotmail. Except may be the fact that I’m kinda being forced to send mail to it because everybody else has already started using it. This makes it something bad from a sender’s point of view. Here are a few reasons why I dislike windows live hotmail:

The very first reasons why you should switch is because it offers only 2MB or storage space. Although it does offer mail in HTML, 2MB I think is too low. Don’t believe me? Click on screenshot below to enlarge.

Okay, so it might not be true that hotmail offers 2MB of e-mail storage… they just apparently need to update their description tag on Google (or perhaps it’s Google’s sense of humour?) Because as it turns out, Yahoo and Live.com each have different descriptions of the website.

Nevertheless, here are some more reasons for which I dislike Hotmail with a passion:

1. It only allows 10 MB e-mail attachments! What?!?! Most e-mail providers out there have atleast 20 MB attachment limits. This means that I can send a 20MB attachment (like I often do) to a person using Gmail or Yahoo Mail – but I can’t send it to a person using Hotmail/Windows Live Mail. How annoying is that?
2. No Mac/Linux Mail App Support. – Unfortunately, Windows Live Hotmail and even Hotmail are inaccessible from Mail.app or Entourage or even Thunderbird on a Mac. Why? Because Microsoft wants people to use Windows Live Mail. No seriously. That’s the only reason I can think of for not having some kind of POP/SMTP Structure to allow people with a Mac/Linux OS to use hotmail with an e-mail client of their choice, Yes, I realize that there are ways to run hotmail on a mac with Apple Mail, but they’re too inefficient.
3. Annoying vertical banner advertising that takes up too much space and is just plain annoying. Enough said.
   
4. It’s slower than other webmail applications out there – especially on platforms other than a Windows PC. For some reason whenever I try to open a mail message, it seems like it’s way too tardy to be even considered as good as Hotmail. Plus, using folders is so slow that it’s almost inefficient.
5. Embedded advertisements inside e-mails! Wow, this is just great. First, they stick you with annoying banner ads, and then they even add messages to advertise their services inside e-mails sent from hotmail.

Honestly, if Hotmail would like to compete with other service providers then they’d better improve their standards.

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Ubuntu Audio Does Not Work - Static Sound Instead

Have you ever experienced the static sound on Ubuntu when you should have been hearing something (perhaps the start up sound or something) from your speakers? Well, you might think that your sound card has stopped working or something, but as it turns out.. there's a quick way to get your audio back to normal.

It's not that your sound isn't working... it's just "muted" (although I wonder why it makes the static sound instead of being completely quiet...).

To get your sound back here's what you need to do:

1. Double click on the speaker icon in the menubar
2. Alternatively, you can press Alt+F2 and type in: gnome-volume-control and click 'Run'
   
   

Then on the volume control window, choose the appropriate device where it says "Device:" and just turn your "PCM" volume all the way up... if this slider is all the way at the bottom you'll just get static from the speakers instead of sound.


Hope this helps others out there who experience the same audio "stuttering" problem.

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