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Make Firefox run faster

Mihov.com — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:09:24 +0000

Here are some tricks and tweaks that can help you make Firefox run faster or at leas give you a feeling that it runs faster. You’ll have to change some of the settings in about:config section of the settings. To open them, just enter about:config into the address bar and continue.

Decrease page render time delay: nglayout.initialpaint.delay change from default 250 to 0.

Increase the number of simultaneous requests by changing network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining from default false to true and by changing network.http.pipelining.maxrequests from default 4 to 8.

Increase the cache by changing browser.cache.memory.capacity to a higher value, for example 61440.

Move cache to disk when the browser is minimized by changing config.trim_on_minimize to true.

If the settings don’t exist, you have to create them by right clicking on the about:config pane and selecting New -> and then Logical value or Integer to create the setting. After changing the settings try and restart Firefox to test the difference.

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Best free software products for 2012

Mihov.com — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 11:53:11 +0000

This time we’re giving you the best software titles that are free as freeware or open source and available for download from the internet. We’ve put them in several categories so you’ll find the title you need sooner.

Office

Text, spreadsheets and presentations: LibreOffice (former OpenOffice.org) can be a replacement for Microsoft Word
Browser: Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome
Mail client: Mozilla Thunderbird can be a replacement for Outlook
Publishing: Serif PagePlus Starter Edition or Scribus can be replacements for Adobe

Tools

PDF creation: DoPDF can be a replacement for Adobe
PDF and scanning: Scan2PDF
Archiving: 7Zip can be a replacement for WinZip
File management: FreeCommander, Explorer XP or A43 can be replacements for Total Commander or File Explorer
Disk cleaning: CCleaner or WinUtilitis Free
Disk defragmentation: Smart Defrag or Auslogics Disk Defrag
Computer info: PC Wizard

Security

Antivirus: avast! Free Antivirus
Malware: Spybot – Search and Destroy
Ads Blocker: Adblock Plus

Network

Remote desktop: TeamViewer can be a replacement for Remote Desktop
Wireless: inSSIDer2

Multimedia

Image Viewer: Irfanview
Image Editing: GIMP or Paint.NET can be replacements for Photo Shop
Audio editing: Audacity
Video player: BS Player or VLC media player can be replacements for Mediaplayer
Video editing: VirtualDub or Live Movie Maker
Video download: Freemake Video Downloader
Video and audio codecs: K-Lite Codec Pack
Conversion: Quick Media Converter Version HD

Some of the tasks can be done online or even on mobile. A good example of that are text, spreadsheets and presentations in an free online app Google Docs.

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free online archive software

Happy New Year 2012!

Mihov.com — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:07:48 +0000

We wish a lot of happiness, health and success in 2012 to all our readers. Happy New Year!

New Magic Project releases

Mihov.com — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:33:17 +0000

Just before the end of the year 2011 Magic Project Software has released two updates to their software, Magic Calendar Maker and Magic Matching Color.

Magic Calendar Maker version 3.3 is a small shareware utility to help create one month printed or electronic calendars. It’s super easy to use: all the user needs to do is select the month and year for which he wants the calendar (you can even skip this step if you’re interested in the calendar for current month). A HTML or PDF calendar is created, saved to disk, and can be edited or printed from there.

Magic Matching Color version 1.3 was released today and it’s designed to help designers pick matching colors. In reality it’s aiming towards non-designers since it’s goal is help users to pick colors that match (designers usually know how to do this). It creates six colors that match and can start from a random color or a color of your choice.

Both programs are shareware and offer great price/performance index. You should try them out for free – trial period is 30 days for each of them.

Sheet name in downloaded PDF in Google Docs

Mihov.com — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:47:33 +0000

In the recent update of Google Docs there is a new feature that I can’t find a good use for: when I print (download) the Spreadsheet in PDF, the file name now contains the name of the sheet as well as the name of the document. Until now the downloaded PDF contained only the name of the spreadsheet which was better for my use.

I hope they will make it an option.

On a related note, Spreadsheets still can’t remember print settings of a document – when the user closes the spreadsheet and opens it again, all print settings (i.e. selection, paper size or layout) are lost and have to be re-set again.

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Wrong letters (bad character set) in Gmail since redesign – solved

Mihov.com — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:18:35 +0000

Have you also noticed that the mails sent from your Gmail account (or Gmail for Apps) is not the same after the big design change? Usually some special local characters are missing or are displayed incorectly, for exmpale for Slovenian ‘?’, ‘š’, and ‘ž’, for Czech similar ‘š’ and others, for Polish ‘?’, ”?’ or ‘?’ and others. These characters used to be dislayed normally before the design change.

You have probably tried to revert the design back to the previous one, but the errors still occur.

The reason for this is that with the new design the setting for the default character encoding in sent mails changed. I don’t know the reason for this, but I think it must be a bug.

The solution is simple: When logged in to your Gmail account, click the icon for Settings in top right screen corner (there are two, and any of them will do) and click “Settings” or “Mail settings”. In “General” tab find this setting “Outgoing message encoding:” and select “Use Unicode (UTF-8) encoding for outgoing messages”. This should fix the wrong characters in Gmail.

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Make your Samsung Galaxy i7500 faster – by downgrading!

Mihov.com — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:25:37 +0000

As you might all well know by now, I am a (proud?) owner of Samsung Galaxy i7500. Yes, the first Samsung Galaxy that I bought almost two years ago and was then a top notch phone. Not for long – it had Android 1.5 and Samsung had forgotten about it very soon. After less than half year there were new versions of Android out that enabled users to install many more and advanced apps, which were not available for 1.5.

Thanks to hackers like Drakaz who also owned this phone, there were unofficial releases of Android 1.6 for this phone (Galaxo), and later 2.1, 2.2 and even 2.3 (GAOSP). Every latest version had less features and was marked ‘public beta’ or ‘nightly’, which meant it could or it does contain bugs or unfinished features. I have installed all but 2.3 since it was marked as ‘beta 1′, very early release. Thanks to Drakaz I could use new apps from Google, I could use feature that otherwise I couldn’t. But all that came for a price: my Samsung Galaxy became so slow, that even a simple task of opening a contact list took 10-30 seconds (yes, seconds). I have tried some hacks but the speed didn’t improve. I got used that if I miss a call I need two minutes to be able to call back, that I need three minutes to check in with Foursquare and that I only browse when I have more than five minutes of free time. I even got used to remove some apps I didn’t use so often so the phone might respond faster.

I was both a proud owner of the first Samsung Galaxy and the user of Android 2.2 for almost a year. Not bad – when I forget about the speed it’s even great. Lately I started to look for a now phone, because the speed was getting on my nerves. I wanted a phone I could use without staring at the blank screen for 30 seconds. I’ve seen there’s many Android phones on the market, not all expensive. Sure, I thought, now’s not the time to buy a new phone, Android 4.0 will be out any time now and I’ll end up with an old phone again, this time maybe even sooner than in six months. So I got an idea: since my phone has basically made me to use just the basic functions and slim apps, maybe I can downgrade to a previous version of Android! The apps will be faster, but they will have fewer features. Compared to what I had, this was win situation.

So I have decided to downgrade to Android 1.6 (Galaxo). I created backups with Nandroid, then I used GalaxyUpdaterFull by Drakaz to install new OS. The fist impression of it was very positive – I have thought I have a new phone in my hands! I have installed several apps that I got used to and by doing that have found even some new interesting ones that I might start using. I have found several apps that mimic features of newer Google apps and so far they do their job very well. After loading all the apps I need, the phone is still surprisingly fast (compared to slow GAOSP 2.2).

The limitations of the older OS aren’t that big after all. My phone feels like it’s new and I don’t miss only a few programs that I got used to with the ‘enhanced’ phone.

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Google Plus finally available for Google Apps

Mihov.com — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:40:25 +0000

After four months of Google+ for Gmail accounts Google finally released Google Plus for Google Apps accounts as well. You can now create a new account based on your Apps domain name, which is really useful if you’re using your primary e-mail from your domain. Until now, you had to create a new Gmail account or use an old one, but which was not used in Google Apps.

Because Google didn’t offer tools to join accounts even the migration from personal to domain account didn’t enable you to use Google Plus. So many users used their secondary account to access Google Plus, where they have created circles, uploaded photos and written posts. Now that they have an option to create a Google Plus account with their first e-mail, will they do it? Will they have to re-add all the people and upload the photos again? Well, this time Google has the answer and it looks like in several weeks they will release a tool that will do this automatically:

With this tool, you won’t have to rebuild your circles, and people who’ve already added you to their circles will automatically be connected to your new profile. We expect this migration option to be ready in a few weeks, so if you’d like, you can go ahead and get started with your Apps account today and merge your connections once the tool is available.

I wonder if the tool will only update connections or will it migrate all the data as well?

To turn on Google Plus for your Google Apps domain account follow these steps:

Login to your account (“Manage this domain” from Gmail).
Click “Organization & users” tab.
Click “Services” sub-tab.
In the list of services, scroll down to “Google+” and enable it. Note that Picassa will be enabled automatically.
Go to https://plus.google.com and create your account.

Google+ should be enabled by default for users who have selected to have the newest features, but for my domains I had to turn it on manually.

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Slight design change at Miha’s utilities

Mihov.com — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:45:42 +0000

The pages that show descriptions of Miha’s utilities, more than 20 software titles I have developed through years, are outdated by design. I know that, but there is always so many other things to do, develop and fix.

Recently I have change the design of the multilingual translated sites a bit. I have removed yellow and brown color and have changed it to blue and white, which goes better with ‘corporate colors’ that I use on my company’s website.

Apparently, the complete redesign of the page will have to wait a bit more.

Testing different Firefox channels

Mihov.com — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:01:59 +0000

This time I have decided to do a comparison test between the versions of Firefox. I took the latest stable release (FF 6.0) and compared it to all the releases in other channels. That includes the following browsers:

Firefox 6.0 final
Firefox 7.0 beta
Aurora 8.0a2 (2011-08-22)
Nightly 9.0a1 (2011-08-23)

I have tested all the browser with the exact copy of the same profile with same add-ons and the same opened tabs and loaded pages. I have 44 add-ons in each profile and at the time of testing I had 2 Panorama groups, 7 pinned tabs and 61 opened tabs. However, because I use BarTab Lite add-on, only three three were loaded when testing: Gmail, Kraken Test and SunSpider Test. I have run the tests one after another and not at the same time. Besides the test results I have also noted the memory footprint of a firefox.exe process reported by Windows Task Manager.

Here are the results:

Firefox 6.0 final
Memory use before the tests: 221.620 K
Memory use after Kraken: 250.852 K
Memory use after Kraken and Sunspider: 274.536 K
Max memory use when testing: 532.264 K
Kraken results: 10485.7ms +/- 0.5%
Sunspider results: 386.3ms +/- 6.3%

Firefox 7.0 beta
Memory use before the tests: 227.088 K
Memory use after Kraken: 245.352 K
Memory use after Kraken and Sunspider: 286.920 K
Max memory use when testing: 535.116 K
Kraken results: 10548.9ms +/- 1.3%
Sunspider results: 359.2ms +/- 4.0%

Aurora 8.0a2 (2011-08-22)
Memory use before the tests: 242.020 K
Memory use after Kraken: 281.604 K
Memory use after Kraken and Sunspider: 297.432 K
Max memory use when testing: 551.820 K
Kraken results: 10592.8ms +/- 1.7%
Sunspider results: 374.5ms +/- 4.9%

Nightly 9.0a1 (2011-08-23)
Memory use before the tests: 250.188 K
Memory use after Kraken: 277.288 k
Memory use after Kraken and Sunspider: 291.076 k
Max memory use when testing: 553.500 K
Kraken results: 10762.3ms +/- 2.2%
Sunspider results: 379.9ms +/- 7.3%

I didn’t use the browsers for other tasks when running tests. Fore memory use data I waited about 20 seconds for the numbers to become stable.
The reason for the test was the main feature of FF7 – better memory handling. My overall impression on using Beta and Aurora for everyday tasks have shown me that FF beta 7.0 uses much less memory when confronted with many opened tabs and feeels to respond better than FF6 final.

These results, however, don’t directly show that. In fact, the results don’t show any improvements either at memory handling or speed. However, the feel and responsivness when several tabs are open are more important to me.