Customize your Gmail Web Clips

Web Clips show you news headlines, blog posts, RSS and Atom feeds, and relevant sponsored links, right at the top of your Gmail inbox.
If the web clicps being displayed are not from your interest categories then you have an option to customize these web clips.
Log in to your Gmail account and go to Settings.
Click the Web Clips tab and there you have it all. Several categories of web clips are showed here. You can easily add or delete any of these categories.
You can also add your own URLs to get your favorite blogs and other news right above your inbox by using the search box provided on the left hand side of the page and thus adding a URL of your interest.

ReadyBoost - Speed up Windows Vista with USB drive

Your spare USB drive can help make your Vista run faster, with its ReadyBoost feature. The process is quiet simple.

Plug in the USB drive and you will see some option from the AutoPlay menu. Choose "Speed up my system" and the drive is all set to work for Vista and make it faster. Vista uses this memory as an extra cache.

Some prerequisites for the USB device are:

• The USB device must be at least USB 2.0
• The device must be able to do 3.5 MB/s for 4 KB random reads uniformly across the entire device and 2.5 MB/s for 512 KB random writes uniformly across the device.
• The USB has to have at least 64mb of free space

Just in case if your USB drive is not showing the above option then try the following trick:

• Open regedit (start->run->regedit)
• Expand - HKLM (Local Machine)->SOFTWARE->Microsoft->Windows NT->CurrentVersion->EMDgmt
• Find your device.
• Change Device Status to 2
• Change ReadSpeedKBs to 1000
• Change WriteSpeedKBs to 1000
• Plug in the USB device.
• Enable Readyboost.

Do not forget to take a backup of your Registry.

Microsoft requires IE8 Beta Testers

Microsoft is looking for beta testers to test IE8 beta. Currently the only way to directly file a bug with the IE Team is to be a part of the IE8 Technical Beta program on Microsoft Connect. The next beta version will be released sometime in August.

If you wish to be a part of making IE better by contributing great bug reports then you can email microsoft's IE team at IESO@microsoft.com and tell them a little about yourself including why you’d be a great beta tester.

Microsoft released the first beta of IE8 in March at its MIX 08 conference. The company plans to add more support for industry standard protocols, such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), in the browser and has responded to developer feedback that it needs to bring them in to test IE8 as much as possible so they can prepare Web sites for these changes.

Microsoft made IE 7, the current version of its browser, more standards compliant when it was released in October 2006. However, many Web sites that had been developed to work with older versions of IE that did not support open standards did not work on IE7 and had to be recoded. Microsoft hopes to avoid a similar problem with IE8.

Travellers to US may loose their laptops to federal Agents

This report was published in Washington Post.
U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers' laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold then for unspecified periods.

Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies. Agents are empowered to share the contents of seized computers with other agencies and private entities for data decryption and other reasons.
DHS officials said the policies applied to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens, and were needed to prevent terrorism.

The policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes -- as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials