These days business is slow and I only need to scan a document once every few months. In my opinion that is far to infrequent to even think about investing in a scanner. Yesterday, I had to run down to Kinkos just to scan a page for school when I got to thinking, “there has to be a better solution then going to Kinkos”.

While I was searching around fora solution to that very problem I found a nifty program called Snapster, its a program that allows you to convert a picture that you took of a document, business card, or even a whiteboard and turns it into an image that looks like it was scanned on a flatbed scanner.

All that you’ll need to do is make sure that there is nothing else in the frame except the document. At times the program can be a bit sketchy, for instance if you don’t have very good lighting and the document has extreme contrast variation the program might get confused. But all in all the program works like a charm.

The best part is that Snapster comes with a30 day free trial. After the 30 days the program will still be fully functional but there will be a little watermark in the corner of your image. Or you could always pay the $20  to get that removed. Snapster will allow you to save your documents as a jpeg image or as a PDF.

Recently Google released a developers preview of Chrome that fixed more then 150 bugs within the original version of Chrome.

Chrome 2.0.169.0 is more geared towards the people that want the latest and greatest version of Chrome and don’t mind running into a few bugs or even possibly encountering a crash here and there.But to be honest these releases are also meant to just be a preview of the features soon to be available to the more reliable “stable” versions that are made available to the masses. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of the box Firefox is actually pretty fast, but who said it couldn’t be faster? With a few tweaks to Firefox’s internal settings we can make it 10 times faster.

The first thing you are going to need to do is type “about:config” into the address bar. There well be a warning message, don’t worry we arnt doing anything too dangerous so just click the button that says “I’ll Be carefully I Promise”

Now you should be a text field at the top, enter this in it “network.http.pipelining” (without quotes) Now, double click the top entry and that should set it to true. This will allow your browser to make more then one connection to the website at a time so you dont have to wait for the first one to finish to start the next one.

Now in the text box type in “network.http.proxy.pipelining” (with out the quotes) Double click this one, it should now be set to true. The will also allow you to make multiple connections to the same website, this allows you to load more then one part of a website at a a time.

Now in the text box type “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” double click it and a window should pop up. Put any number around 30 into that field then click ok. Tris will tell Firefox how many connections to make at the same time. WARNING: do not put a number that is too high because it may actually slow Firefox immensely.

Lastly in the white part of the screen right click and select New -> Integer. A window will come up asking for a “preference name” put “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” in (again without quotes) another window will come up asking for a value, enter 0. This tells the browser how long to wait to act on the information it receives. Since you want the page to load as fast as possible this will make the browser to render the page as soon as it receives the data form the website.

If you would like more firefox edits check out this website.

An update to a widely used Firefox addon today has broken gmail, tho your in luck the fix is easy.

Normal users using gmail did not run into this problem but people using a particular addon may have been encountering this frustrating error.

The add-on that may have been causing this is Gmail Manager. Gmail Manager adds a little icon to the bottom right of the Firefox window that displays new messages and allows you to manage multiple gmail accounts. This week after they updated to v0.5.7, users began to get an error “redirection limit for this URL exceeded”, when trying to read their mail.

Although this may have frustrating the fix is actually rather simple. All you have to do is update Gmail Manager from v0.5.7 to v0.5.7.1 and that should fix the problem.