InternetTV is a small program that allows you to watch online TV channels on your PC. InternetTV installer is only 763 KB and after installed, InternetTV only takes around 1.22MB of your hard drive space. With InternetTV, you can watch over 5000 online TV stations from around the world. InternetTV uses Windows Media Player to play TV stations.

InternetTV has a very simple interface, so it is very easy to use. On the right panel is the list of TV channels. You can sort the list by name, genre, rating or bitrate. By right clicking on the channel list, you can add the channel to favorites list, rate and flag the channel. If your favorite TV channel is not on the list, you can manually add it to InternetTV if you know its streaming URL. You can filter the TV channels by country if you want to watch TV channels from specific country.

If you use Avant Browser, or you don't like the current web browser that you use now, you might want to try Orca Browser. Orca Browser is developed by the developer of Avant Browser. Orca Browser is developed to be fast, user friendly and designed to add more functionality on Mozilla Firefox. Orca Browser uses the same web rendering engine as Firefox, Gecko.

Features of Orca Browser according to the developer:

1. Online Profile Storage - users of Orca Browser can store their bookmarks, RSS feeds, browser configurations, web passwords, etc on Avant Online Storage so the users can access and synchronize their data anywhere or just simply as an online backup for Orca Browser's settings.
2. AutoFills
3. You can use Firefox Extensions on Orca Browser too! (some, not all)
4. Popup and ad blocker
5. Mouse Gestures - Navigation for the lazy. Mouse gestures will let you to perform some browser commands with mouse movements.
6. Session saving and recovery
7. RSS Reader
8. Clearing browsing traces with one click.

In my quick test, the memory usage of Orca Browser is lower (around 40MB) than Firefox 3 when opening same 7 websites. Compared with Orca Browser's sister, Avant Browser, the memory usage of Orca Browser is lower.

Like Avant Browser, Orca Browser will popup a small menu when you hover your cursor on images which allows you to save the image, zoom in or out, copy the URL of the image, open the image in new tab or e-mail the image which might be handy for some user. There is also a menu that allows you to translate a webpage to a few other language using Google Translate service.

Quick Tip. If you get this error, 'Not enough server storage is available to process this command.' when trying to access a Windows share folder, try this.

Open Registry Editor on the machine that sharing the folder. Navigates to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters. If the IRPStackSize value does not already exist, right click on the empty area on the right panel, choose New > DWord Value. Name it as IRPStackSize. The name must be case-sensitive. Double click the IRPStackSize value. Change the Base to decimal. The default value should be 15. Change it to something larger, 25 for example. The maximum value for IRPStackSize is 50.

Close Registry Editor, and restart your system. Try again to access the shared folder from another computer. If the error still occurs, try increasing the IRPStackSize value to something larger than previous value. Small IRPStackSize value will also cause other program on the system to stop functioning, for example antivirus program or copy handler. If you have these problems, try to increase the IRPStackSize value and see if it resolves the problems.

Take note that by using a value that is larger than necessary might waste system resources.

[Further reading]

FTP or File Transfer Protocol is a network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network such as the Internet or local area network. By creating a FTP server, you can easily share files on your system with your friends and allows them to upload files to your system too. In this post, I will show you on how to create a FTP server on Windows and creating a hostname for your IP, which is easier to remember especially if you are using dynamic IP address.

Set Up the FTP Server

1. In this post, I will use the FileZilla FTP server. FileZilla Server is a free and open source FTP server for Windows. Download and run the FileZilla Server installer.

2. Installing FileZilla Server

2a. Select 'I Agree' (1) to move to the next screen.

2b. Select the options that you want to install. We don't need to install the source code, so unselect it. Press 'Next' (2) to proceed to the next screen.

2c.

7z and RAR are both a compressed archive file format. RAR is a proprietary archive file format and 7z is available as open source. 7z main features are; open (alows any compression or encryption method), high compression ratio with LZMA, strong encryption, large file supports (up to 16 exabytes) an unicode file name. RAR main features are; high compression ratio, strong encryption and recovery record to recover damages archive. Usually the files on the internet are archived using ZIP and RAR, and I seldomly see files archived using the 7z format.

Which have the better compression ratio, RAR or 7z?

Drupal 6.x don't have a 'What You See is What You Get' (WYSIWYG) feature by default. There are a few WYSIWYG module available for Drupal 6.x, for example FCKEditor, TinyMCE, widgEditor, WYMeditor and Wysiwyg API.. I've tried most of these modules but somehow none of them work on my blog. Maybe the problem is caused by other installed modules or the browser that I use (Opera), but I'm not very sure.

I try again with Wysiwyg API. Wysiwyg API supports many editors such as TinyMCE, jWYSIWYG, nicEdit, FCKeditor and Whizzywig, but again, none of these editor work with my blog. Either I get error from Drupal or the editor didn't show in my browser. jWYSIWYG however cannot be installed since the Wysiwyg API module shows that it doesn't support jWYSIWYG 0.4. Then I tested with jWYSIWYG 0.3 and 0.2, but Wysiwyg API module still gives the 'not supported' error. Since jWYSIWYG is a very lightweight editor (101KB only including images), I've decided to hack the Wysiwyg API module. It is pretty easy actually.

Note: In this post, I will use Wysiwyg API 6.x 0.5 and jWYSIWYG 0.4. I will not responsible if this method renders your site unfunctional, but so far it works for me =)

1. You need to download the Wysiwyg API 6.x 0.5 and jWYSIWYG 0.4.

2. Extract the content of Wysiwyg API. You should have a wysiwyg folder created. Open the wysiwyg folder.

Quick tip. If you are looking for a method to quickly shutdown or restart Windows by just double clicking an icon (or one click if you put it on the Quick Launch menu), it is actually quite easy to do it. Create a .bat file on your desktop or on your Quick Launch menu (usually it is in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch). Give it a meaningful name such as shutdown.bat or restart.bat. Now, edit the file with Notepad. Put these commands:

Shutdown
shutdown -s -f -t 01

Restart
shutdown -r -f -t 01

-s will shutdown your system
-f will forces any running applications to close without warning
-t 01 will delay the shutdown process for 1 second

Save it and now you can shutdown or restart your system just by double clicking the file.

Quick tip. Sometimes we want to make a certain application to be always on top of other application such as a webcam screen while you work with other windows. While some applications have this option built in, most of other programs don't have this. I think Windows Vista have the ability to make a certain window always on top of other application, but unfortunately you cannot do this Windows XP.

PowerMenu is a small application that will add some useful options to your taskbar's right click menu including making a window always on top. PowerMenu's installer is only 110 KB and this application only use around 5 MB of your system memory. Besides making a window always on top, with PowerMenu, you can also set the transparency level of a window, change the priority of an application without the need to run Task Manager and minimize a window to system tray. PowerMenu is available for Windows 9x, ME, 2000, XP and Vista.

[Download: PowerMenu]

Everyone have their own favourite web browser. As for me, my favourite web browser is Opera. Why Opera? Even though Opera is not open source like Mozilla Firefox, it has a lot of great features that make me love Opera. One of them is the mouse gestures. The mouse gestures feature in Opera is indeed the most powerfull feature that a browser can have. Opera allows you to fully customize the mouse gestures.

Most of us usually have our own favourite web browsers that we use to access the world wide web. Each of these browsers have their own characteristics and features that made us love them. For November 2008, 49.13% of TMS Network's blog visitors use Mozilla Firefox to visit this blog, 39.2% uses Internet Explorer, 5.13% uses Opera, 3.33% uses Google Chrome and 1.7% uses Safari. As for me, I like to take my favourite web browser in my pendrive so I can use it if I go to internet cafe or at work. This allows me to use the browser with my own settings, addons and any customizations that I've done. In this post, I will list a few portable web browser that we can install and run from a portable USB drive.

Opera@USB

Since this is my favourite web browser, I will start with Opera. The portable version of Opera has the same features as the normal desktop version, surf the web, write emails, or use IRC. In fact, with Opera Link, you can synchronize your bookmark, notes, history and speed dial. Opera Link works very well with the portable version of Opera. You can expect it to be functional as the desktop version. However, the portable version cannot run directly from network (using \\192.168.1.10\Opera Portable\ path for example). You need to mount the directory as network drive first.