From Wikipedia :

(Le) Parkour (English: the art of movement) is a physical art of French origin, the aim of which is to move from point A to point B as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body. It is meant to help one overcome obstacles, which can be anything in the surrounding environment � from branches and rocks to rails and concrete walls � so parkour can be practiced in both rural and urban areas.

First off a Latvian group Dvinsk Clan showing off their skills.

Next in line is the talented parkour artist, stuntsman and martial artist Cyril Raffaelli.

And finally the founder of the art - David Belle himself.

Opera Software has announced yet another Widget Developer contest. Up for grabs are a Windows Mobile phone (that runs Opera), Nintendo DS Lite and Opera goodie bags. You can find more detail here. Few months back Opera gave away a Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS Lite in another Widget Developer contest. However, this time the contest has a definite theme - “Travellers”.

Widgets was one of the big new features in Opera v9. Since, its release Opera Soft has actively promoted it and encouraged developers to create widget. The surprise new feature in Opera v8 was userjs. However, Opera has done precious little to encourage userjs writers. Opera’s negligence towards userjs is evident from the fact that myOpera doesn’t yet have an userjs gallery. The only site dedicated to Opera’s userjs - userjs.org (created by Arve Bersvendsen - an Opera user), is now defunct. Userjs is a wonderful tool and scripts like oSpell demonstrate its power. Yet, there are very few quality userjs available for Opera (especially in comparison to the number of Greasemonkey scripts being developed by the large Firefox community).

Undoubtedly, widgets are useful (especially on Mobile platform) and I am happy to see Opera actively promising Widgets. Last time we got two fantastic widgets from the winners (Video Manager and Time and Date). If Opera Software makes similar investment into userjs, I am sure we would have more quality scripts being written.

Related : Top 13 Userjs Written for Opera

Sounds like this online music source may give iTunes a run for its money. Or not. Regardless, when it’s time to print out a song list from either source, don’t get stuck without enough printer ink in the machine. Double-check your supply now, and if you’re low, check out the cartridge solutions online. HP ink, Epson, Lexmark - they’re all available. Buying ink cartridges need not be a pain.

Spool.fm is a community oriented web-based music player whose goal is to make sharing music simple. I have been toying around with it since yesterday and I must say I am quite impressed. It has a fairly good collection of songs (this is subjective), including some hit Indian movie songs. The audio quality is average and there is definitely scope for improvement.

But, the low bitrate makes it possible to stream music while surfing even on my 256kbps connection. Spool.fm’s main objective is to allow friends with similar musical taste enjoy music collectively. You can drag and drop songs to create and save playlists which you can share with your friends. Not only that with the synchronization feature you can both listen to the same songs at the same time.

The most impressive aspect of Spool.fm is it’s integration of Audioscrobbler (which powers Last.fm also). While you are playing a song, it retrieves a list of related songs and albums based on data available at AudioScrobbler. If you have an last.fm account it can also fetch the list of top tracks, weekly top tracks and recent tracks played by you. It offers to play similar songs based on this data (Screenshot).
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In my previous post I had showcased my Desktop for the month. Since Anand posted a comment asking what software I had used, I decided to write a detailed article on Desktop Modding. There are several aspects to Desktop Modding. I have tried to cover each of them briefly in this article.

Shell

Shell is a term used to denote the user interface (in this case Graphical User Interface or GUI). The most important aspect to modding your desktop is modifying the basic user interface. You can either modify the appearence of the default shell, enhance it or replace it all together.

Shell Enhancement Software

These software modify and enhance the appearance of Windows shell to add that spark to your desktop.

MsStyle : Windows XP allows users to alter the appearance of the GUI out of the box (through MsStyles). You can skin various aspects of the Windows GUI like the title-bar, start-bar, start menu etc. But, don�t forget we are dealing with Microsoft here. They had to mess it up. Windows Xp only recognises visual styles that are digitally signed by Microsoft. This makes your choice very limited as till date Microsoft has released only a handful number of visual styles.
In order to overcome this restriction you need to patch the uxtheme.dll file. Don�t worry, its as simple as downloading and executing the UXTheme Patcher. You can now download and apply any Visual Style available on the web.

NextStart : NextStart is a GUI enhancement program which aims at increasing productivity apart from making your desktop look prettier. In terms of functionality it is one of the more powerful (if not the most powerful) shell enhancement program. It replaces the default windows taskbar, context menu and start menu with more functional versions. You can learn more about this software here. In short NextStart provides the functionalities of Shell Replacement software without actually replacing the shell.

WindowBlinds : WindowBlinds is probably the most popular 3rd party Windows Shell Modifier. It is created by Stardock, who also worked with Microsoft to create MsStyles discussed above. WindowBlinds integrates itself flawlessly with Windows XP and boasts of many features which are not present in MsStyles. Features like per-pixel alpha blending (makes skins look smoother) and Windows Vista like transparency makes it one of the best skinning software in the market. One of it’s biggest assests is the per application skinning system which allows you to set different skins for different applications or disable visual styles all together for certain applications. Like the Vista GUI WindowBlinds harnesses the power of modern day graphics cards to increase performance. The amount of resource used depends on the skin. if you use a no frills simplistic skin WindowBlinds would resource very little (sometimes even lesser than default the default skinning system). If you want to make your system look XP look truly out of this world go for WindowBlinds.

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We always thought “Kaspersky” sounded like someone sneezing. Here’s a thought that’s nothing to sneeze at: If you run a small business you probably need pdf conversion. The web can give you more info about pdf converters, pdf to image conversion and a pdf to excel converter. Find a reliable outfit that can help
you with just about anything pdf related!

Virus.gr released the basic results for their latest AntiVirus shootout earlier today. Expectedly Kaspersky was the best performer. In fact the top four spots are occupied by various forms of the Kaspersky Engine. F-Secure completed the top five. And if I am not wrong F-Secure and and eScan also use modified versions of Kaspersky engine.
The ranking of the popular AV softwares are as follows :

1. Kaspersky version 7.0.0.43 beta - 99.23%

2. Kaspersky version 6.0.2.614 - 99.13%

3. Active Virus Shield by AOL version 6.0.0.308 - 99.13%

4. ZoneAlarm with KAV Antivirus version 7.0.337.000 - 99.13%

5. F-Secure 2007 version 7.01.128 - 98.56%

6. BitDefender Professional version 10 - 97.70%

10. Nod32 version 2.70.32 - 94.00%

12. Avast Professional version 4.7.986 - 92.82%

13. AVG Anti-Malware Professional version 7.5.465 - 92.14%

15. McAfee Enterprise version 8.5.0i+AntiSpyware module - 90.65%

16. Panda 2007 version 2.01.00 - 90.06%

19. McAfee version 11.0.213 - 86.13%

20. Norton Professional 2007 - 86.08%

23. PC-Cillin 2007 version 15.00.1450 - 84.96%

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WordPress is a program that functions well and rarely breaks down. We wish we could say the same thing about computer hardware, and a busted monitor can really ruin your day. With laptop repair service you can save your current laptop computer. A top-notch laptop battery is available, as are flash drives, lcd monitors and more.

Everyone and their friends have probably written about their favourite Wordpress plugins - plugins one can not do without. However, this list is slightly different. Here, I present to you five wonderful plugins, which I feel haven�t received the spotlight that they deserve. In fact, a quick search on Technorati revealed that these plugins havent been covered by any English blog in Technorati Top 500.

5. Future Posts Calendar

Future Post is a very useful feature present in Wordpress blogs that allows scheduling of posts. In order to use future post all you need to do is to set a future date while publishing the post. Several High Profile bloggers have already covered future posts, so I wont elaborate on it (if you wish you can check out article on this topic at ProBlogger). Instead I am going to present a little known plugin that should help bloggers using Future Posts extensively. This plugin helps you in scheduling future posts by adding a month by month calendar to the “Edit Posts” page that shows all the days you have future posts for. Now, all you need to do is click on a date that doesnt have any future post assigned to it.

4. LMB^Box Comment Quicktags
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This is the long overdue second part the series (the first part is available here) I am writing on tiny utilities. In each article I shall feature three outstanding software - all of which are smaller than two megabytes. In this article the softwares featured are - JDiskReport, FastStone Capture and Recuva.

JDiskReport is a disk space Analyser. It scans you partitions and folders on your hard disk drive and identifies files and folders using up greatest amount of space, so you know what do delete if you are running short of disk space. JDiskReport helps you to analyse disk space usage through plethora of charts and graphs to show various statistics.

Download JDiskReport (542KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows, Mac
Version Reviewed : 1.3.0a for Windows
Cost : Freeware
Website : JGoodies.com

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