So what’s a web designer to do? Although there’s a wonderful website Browsershots which can give screenshots in almost any browser/version out there, sometimes a screenshot is not enough.

Enter IETester. It’s essentially a Windows-only web browser which emulates the rendering and JavaScript engines of Internet Explorer versions 5.5, 6, 7, and 8 Beta 1. You can browse websites just like you would in any other web browser, with an option for each tab you open to render as one of the four versions. Although it doesn’t have all the features that an actual web browser would have, it’s great when you need to test websites, or if a particular site requires Internet Explorer but doesn’t work with the version you have.

One feature I like in IETester, which I’d actually like to see in Firefox, is its multi-paned view. As you can see in the screenshot below, the pane on the right side has a tab which is in IE 8 mode, and the pane on the left side has a tab in IE 7 mode and another tab hidden behind the drop down menu. This makes it really easy to compare side by side, without having to open a whole new window.

Do you use IETester? What do you think of it? I’d love to know how you feel about this program in the comments below, or if you know of something better.

Why do you need to use this? Well if you need to use contacts in more than one program or service (like email, IM, Skype, or others) or use a desktop app and need it on more than one computer, it’s difficult or even impossible to automatically keep everything in sync. The solution that iContact proposes is to have Gmail contacts as your central repository for everything having to do with people you know. When you need to look up one of them, instead of opening a full browser you open this small stand-alone contact manager to find or search for the person you want. It keeps everything in the cloud in your Gmail contacts, so they’ll still be available on any device with internet access and a decent web browser.

To get iContact, you can download it as a zip file with a portable executable and accompanying files, or an msi installer package (although the msi doesn’t seem to do anything special except extract the files and create a shortcut”¦um, I guess it’s good for people who don’t have unzip software?) and then run the executable.

Enter your Gmail credentials (if you’re using an @gmail.com account, you can just enter your username; if you’re a Google Apps user, enter the full email address, i.e. your_name@your_domain.com), and then watch as it loads your contacts. Certainly a lot faster than opening a web browser, signing into Gmail and navigating to the contacts!

You can edit your contacts by selecting one and clicking ‘edit’ at the bottom, add or remove contacts by clicking the (+) or (X) buttons, and all changes you make are made directly to your online Gmail contacts. I noticed, however, that if you modify your contacts in iContact, it won’t show up in Gmail until you refresh the page. The reverse is true for anything you do in Gmail, you have to sign out and sign back in to iContact in order to show the changes.

When you click a contact, you can then do a few things. If you have their email address stored, you can click the email category next to the address (Home, Work or Other) and click ‘Send Mail’ to open your default mail program and begin a new message to that address. For phone number, click the category (Home, Work, Mobile, Other, etc.) and you can choose ‘Call with Skype’ or display in large text. For addresses you can drop down the category and choose ‘Show Map’ to map it on Google Maps, and for any piece of information you can click ‘Copy’ to copy it to your clipboard. This solves the problem of having a separate contacts list in every program!

iContact currently doesn’t work with contact groups (in Gmail/Google Apps you can add contacts to a group, enter the name of the group in the To: field when writing an email, and send to all addresses in the group at once).

Also, unlike the Gmail contacts manager, there are no “actual contacts” and “suggested contacts” for people who you’ve communicated with but haven’t explicitly added as contacts. They all just show up in the same list.

These limitations aside, iContact does its job well. It’s certainly a convenience for people who use a desktop mail or chat client (especially Skype) and who wants all their contact information in one place without having to sync.

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Sure, if you need to access your files from both operating systems you could just save everything to a Windows-readable partition. But even when I tried doing that, I found there would be the occasional file I quickly saved to the desktop and forgot to transfer. Whatever the reason, there’s always some time when you may need files on your Linux file system, but don’t want to take the time to reboot into Linux just to get to the file.

So, How You Can Access and Work on Linux Partitions In Windows

Ext2 IFS solves that problem. Unlike other programs which merely create their own Explorer-type interface to work with Linux partitions, this program seamlessly integrates your Linux drives, making them behave like any native Windows file system type which any program can access. It adds an additional driver for mounting Ext2 file systems (and Ext3 since it’s backwards compatible, although it won’t take advantage of Ext3′s journaling ability).

From the Ext2 IFS homepage,

It installs a pure kernel mode file system driver Ext2fs.sys, which actually extends the Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating system to include the Ext2 file system. Since it is executed on the same software layer at the Windows NT operating system core like all of the native file system drivers of Windows (for instance NTFS, FASTFAT, or CDFS for Joliet/ISO CD-ROMs), all applications can access directly to Ext2 volumes. Ext2 volumes get drive letters (for instance O:). Files, and directories of an Ext2 volume appear in file dialogs of all applications. There is no need to copy files from or to Ext2 volumes in order to work with them.

What do you think of this program? Do you use something similar (or better)? Share it in the comments.

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, constantly learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities regarding Linux, Google, useful programs, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek.

Remember that not all programs should be optimized with Minimem. Some programs manage memory usage well on their own, so you won’t see a difference when trying to optimize that process. It might also have a good reason to keep information in memory, and using Minimem to force it to unload that information will therefore not be a good idea. It might be holding data in memory to help performance (since reading from the hard drive is slower). It is possible that using Minimem to “optimize” a process that doesn’t need it might actually make it run slower, so only optimize where you have to.

Minimem is good for programs that run in the background but you don’t use all the time. Kallout is a good example, it gives options to look up highlighted terms on a bunch of search, reference, video, news and other sites. It gives some handy features but I don’t use them all the time, and it tends to have a pretty big memory footprint.

Another good use is for programs with memory leaks like Firefox 2. Programs like this keep information in memory for longer than they should, and continue to build up more clutter as you use them. Chances are that it will not need most of the information it accumulates, so optimizing with Minimem will help.

I highly recommend Minimem for any power user, especially if you’re running on older hardware. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, which is supported on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 or Server 2008 (Linux and Mac users probably don’t have any performance issues anyway, right? ).

What do you think? Are apps like Minimem necessary? Would you use it? Do you know of anything similar? Let’s hear about them in the comments!

Once you get the hang of it, you can do more than just repeat a set of steps, and start scripting some very complex tasks in Firefox. You can call your mini-program from a library which goes in the sidebar on the left side of the screen. Or you can bookmark your macro: it behaves just like any other bookmark in your list (it can be organized and tagged, put in the bookmarks toolbar, etc.) but calls your macro instead of a web page.

Just click the ‘Record’ button on the ‘Rec’ tab of the iMacros pane, do some things in Firefox, click ‘Stop’, and you’ve got a macro. Then, find your macro in the list, hit the play tab and click ‘Play’ to do the task in the macro.

Of course, once you’ve made a macro in the visual interface, you can go to the ‘Edit’ tab in the iMacros side bar, select your macro from the list and click the ‘Edit Macro’ button to view and edit the code it generated. It’s easy to pick up the basics of the scripting language iMacros uses just by recording a macro and viewing its code, but there’s a more detailed reference of all the commands and how to use them here.

If you decide to code some macros from scratch, write code in the text editor of your choice, save it as a plain text file, then go to the ‘Rec’ tab in the iMacros side bar, choose ‘Load’, and find the file with your code in it.

Here’s a screencast demonstration of iMacros and how it works:

This extension is one of those tools that can do wonderful things, and is only limited by your imagination.

Do you use macros or a similar tool to automate your tasks? If so, what has it done for you? Share them in the comments!

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, always learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities regarding Linux, Google, useful programs, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek.

But all it provides in terms of actual search ranking is your position for the queries that land the most people on your site and your position for the top queries in which your site appears. What it doesn’t give you is a way of easily checking your search position for any search terms you want. That’s where the Google Position Checker comes in.

Simply enter your website, the search term you want to check, the region if your site is geared toward a particular country (or choose ‘world’ if country doesn’t really matter) and how many of the top results you want to check (you can go up to the top 1000 results, but for a faster check you can go as low as the top 100 results).

This way, you can easily see your ranking for any search term, without having to do the search yourself and look through the results for your own site.

They also have a similar tool for MSN and another one for Yahoo (although I’ve never met a single person who uses Yahoo or MSN for web search – have you?).

What do you think about Google Position Checker? Do you have a better tool for the job? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, always learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities regarding Linux, Google, useful programs, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek.

Also with the BestGuessâ„¢ feature, KallOut even analyzes the content you’ve selected and suggests the most relevant places to search for that phrase.

So, if you’ve selected an address, it will suggest Google Maps, Google Street View, and Microsoft Visual Earth. If you selected the name of a famous person, it will suggest their Wikipedia entry. This way, you don’t have to browse through the whole menu of services to find the one you want.

Once you select which site to look up your phrase on, it opens up a floating information palette with your results adjacent to the original content, as shown below.

This floating window stays on top of the original window so you can continue working on your original task while referring to the results that KallOut returned. You can close the pop-up with the X button in the upper right corner, expand the results to a full browser window with the button to the left of the X, and minimize it to the top of the screen with the [-] button (by moving your mouse to the top of the screen, you can access all the KallOut searches you’ve done, or start a new one by clicking the blue KallOut button).

Here is a video demo showing KallOut in action:

To download the Kallout installer (only for Windows XP/Vista) go here.

Do you use KallOut? Tell us what you think of it in the comments.

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, constantly learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities on Linux, Google, useful apps, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek. Contact him at blake[at]makeuseof.com

But there are some drawbacks to installing with Wubi. For one thing, you can’t suspend or hibernate to save power, which you could do if you had the regular install (i.e. burned and booted from the CD). Also, because Wubi doesn’t get its own partition, it actually uses the Windows boot loader to boot from a disk image of a Linux partition on your Windows drive; this results in slightly reduced disk speed and a dependence on the Windows boot loader (you can’t ditch Windows entirely and run Ubuntu as your main OS). So, Wubi may be good for people who want to test Ubuntu, but once you’ve decided to use it on a regular basis, Wubi probably won’t cut it.

Burning a CD can take a while, getting a CD shipped takes an even bigger while, and a friend who can lend you a disk might be hard to find. So, the other option is to use UNetbootin. UNetbootin can either download the contents of the Ubuntu Live CD (or CDs for other distros) or use an already downloaded CD image and put it onto a flash drive. It then makes your flash drive bootable, and makes it behave just like a regular Ubuntu CD.

Download UNetbootin here, insert your flash drive, and run the program you downloaded.

Where it says ‘distribution’, drop down the menu and choose Ubuntu (or whatever distro you want, if you prefer something else). If you already downloaded the CD image, then instead choose the disk image option and point it to the disk image you downloaded. At the bottom, choose your drive from the drop down (if it doesn’t show up in the list, make sure the type is set to flash drive, that your flash drive is plugged in, and that other programs like a file manager can open it””if it still doesn’t show, try closing and re-opening UNetbootin). Then hit OK and let the program work its magic. Once it’s done, head to the next step.

Now, this will only work if your machine can boot from an USB (most can). To do this: Reboot your PC, and either open the BIOS with whatever key it says (F2 on mine) and change the first boot device to an USB flash, or get a one-time boot menu (F12 on mine) and choose USB flash. It will open up just like the Live CD would. Then choose whatever language you want and start the installation. Make sure you know what partition you’re going to use: the setup will give you a partition manager to manage the partitions, but it’s a good idea to already know which disk you want to use, how much free space it has for a new partition, et cetera. Once you’re done, you can wipe the flash drive and use it for whatever you’d normally use it for (you couldn’t do that with a CD unless it was a CD-RW, but those are more expensive and aren’t as good for data quality).

If you already have a Wubi-installed operating system, you can use LVPM to upgrade it to a regular installation, but I won’t get into all the details here (maybe in a later post, but there’s a pretty thorough guide at the project page).

So there you go, a full Linux installation without having to burn a single CD, with all the features and performance.

If you have any questions or problems, leave a comment or if you know something better than UNetbootin, be sure to let us know in the comments too.

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, constantly learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities regarding Linux, Google, useful programs, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek. He can be contacted at blake[at]makeuseof.com