Last time, I lamented the end of Boxee on the desktop, but I got over it quickly when I started using XBMC. It’s the software Boxee is based on, and it’s fun to use. Sure, where Boxee is clean and organized, XBMC can be chaotic and hackerish, but that’s part of the fun. But the real fun comes when you discover the various plugins you can add to this system. I’ve been digging in the past couple of weeks, and was surprised to find very few of these great plugins are written up anywhere.

So here they are – the best plugins for the XBMC media center I’ve found so far. Try them out, and point out anything better in the comments below.

Adding Repos

Before we get to the fun part, a brief explanation of repositories. Installing these is important if you want to get updates for your plugins, but happily it is very easy to do. All you need to do is download a ZIP file, then point XBMC towards it. You can do this in the settings: just head to the “Add-Ons” section, then select “Add from ZIP file.”

Once you’ve added the repository you’ll be able to install the software from it, though I’ve sometimes needed to restart XBMC to see the new plugins. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

NaviX

If you want to browse, watch and download videos from across the Internet, this is where you should start. NaviX is a collection of user-generated playlists that we’ve covered before. You can find pretty much anything here.

Download NaviX and you’ll find it under “Programs“.

Free Cable

Do you want to watch content from TV networks around the US? This is the plugin you’re looking for. Featuring streams from NBC, FX, CBS, SyFy, USA Network and more, this plugin gives access to lots of American television content.

You’ll need to install the Bluecop Repository to install this add on. Once you do, you’ll find “Free Cable” in the video section of the add-on menu.

PsuedoTV

Imagine TV stations with only shows you like and no commercials. That’s the fun of PsuedoTV, a plugin that brings the mindlessness of channel surfing to your personal media collection.

The best criticism of media center software is how active it is. You, yourself, need to pick what you want to watch, as opposed to TV where you can mindlessly channel surf. If you just want to relax and just watch whatever for a while this is the plugin for you. It makes up TV channels based on the shows and movies in your collection, and you’ll never know what you’ll stumble upon.

You’ll find this add-on under “Programs” in the add-on menu, and there’s no need to add a repository.

Rom Launcher

Have a ROM collection? You’ll want this plugin, which lets you browse all of your ROMs from within XBMC. It even collects cover art and game descriptions:

You don’t need to do much to get this working. Just tell the plugin where your emulators and ROMs are and it will figure out the rest. This works great, and is a great deal simpler than the Boxee method I outlined last year.

You’ll find this extension under “Programs” in your add-on menu, and there’s no repository you need to add.

Sports Devil

It’s no secret – you can easily watch sports not broadcast in your country online if you know where to look. Sports Devil makes this even easier, allowing you to browse several online streaming sites with your TV remote.

Not every stream will work, but if you read through the directions you’ll find that most of them do.

You’ll need to add the Max Mustermann repository to get this working. Once you do, you’ll find this extension under “Videos.”

Other Favorites of Mine

I’ve found a few other great plugins, including Reddit, Al Jazeera, The Guide and YouTube. These can all be found under “Video” and work great.

I’m wondering, though – can you guys point out any other awesome XBMC media center plugins? I’d love to hear about them, because I’m relatively new to XBMC. Fill me in using the comments below.

Thankfully, the wait is over, and the map pack is here. The map pack features four Battlefield 2 maps, as promised. The maps are Strike at Karkand, Gulf of Oman, Wake Island and Sharqi Peninsula. In my opinion, Strike at Karkand and Sharqi Peninsula were two of the best maps from Battlefield 2, so playing them re-imagined is amazing.

In addition to the maps, this pack also adds more ten more guns and three new vehicles. The guns can be used in any map in Battlefield 3, not just the new ones.

The pack is out for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. If you did not pre-order the game, the pack is available for purchase for $15. For people who did, you simply need to enter the code that came with your game to download the maps.

If you play Battlefield 3, you need to download this map pack now! It has been a long time coming, and it’s finally here!

Source: Battlefield3.com

We’ve shown you how to back up and open tabs in the past, but SurfOn goes one step further. With plugins for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, most modern computer users are covered by this plugin. Even better, it’s very simple to use. The service’s website puts it well:

“Surfon is a simple way to save all your browser tabs and view them on another device. You can even send them between different browsers. No more emailing links to yourself to access them on another computer.”

Want to know more?

Set Up Surfon

Head on over to GetSurfon to get started. You’ll find extensions for Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and a place to sign up. Sign up for an account, then install the plugin for your browser. Repeat these steps on all of your computers and you’re pretty much done.

You’ll see a new button on your browser. Click it and you’ll see your options:

The function of these buttons are relatively self-explanatory, but Surfon provides a great explanation of the functions with this image:

Note the the service won’t save everything about your saved tabs. If you are making a purchase, for example, your shopping cart won’t be seamlessly moved from one browser to another. Similarly, a half-completed form won’t be saved and restored. The service simply saves the URL of your tabs which you had opened when you pressed the button. Then, when you’re ready, you can re-load them. This is perfect for research sessions, or for saving a large collection of tabs you need to get around to reading.

You can see your entire tab collection, without restoring it, on the Surfon website:

You can remove tabs from your saved list here, if you like, or simply open a particular tab you’ve been looking for.

There is, sadly, no mobile support for Surfon yet. Don’t worry: it’s part of their master plan, so you’ll be able to use this on your phone once they figure out how to get it working.

Why I Like This

Surfon works on most major browsers, is incredibly simple to set up and even simpler to use. I really can’t ask for more in a tab-saving solution, and I have to tip my hat to the Surfon team for providing this. I’ll be making use of it for a long time, I think.

You guys are frequently smarter than me, though. Do you know of anything better for the job? Share in the comments below, because I’m down to hang out and chat. Also let me know what you think about Surfon, because I’m always curious.

But what if you need a second opinion? Are you one of those people who finds something cool online and then sends a link to the listing to a few of your friends to see what they think? If you can’t decide between two similar items, maybe you send them a couple of links to get their opinion? I’m sure they must love you when you do that.

But what if I told you that you didn’t have to do that anymore?  In this article, I’m going to show you a much easier way of getting multiple opinions on items before making that final decision on a purchase.

What Is Rately?

Rately (directory listing) is a utility that makes it easy for you to save the things that you’re shopping for. It lets you create and share questions around the products you’re interested in, so you can get other people to help you make better choices.

Basically, Rately lets you shop with your friends. You can use the bookmarklet to stay connected to products from the brands that you like and to discover what products your friends are talking about. You can also utilize Rately via its browser extensions, but more on that later.

At the heart of Rately is the Rately Question. With this feature, you can highlight up to 9 items that are kept on your Saved Items list. The items will be accompanied by a question typed by you, like “which shoes should I order for tomorrow’s race?“, and you can publish it by posting to Facebook or Twitter, as well as grabbing a link and sending it to others via email or instant message. You can also embed Rately Questions in places such as your blog.

If you don’t want to ask questions with Rately, you don’t have to. The app still has utility in that you can use it to stay up-to-date with what your friends or favorite brands are talking about. You can see what they’ve been up to in your Recent Activity section, and you can weigh in on any outstanding questions asked by the people you know.

How does Rately work?

When you’re ready to test Rately, just head over to their site and hit the Sign Up button. A menu will drop down asking you to connect with your Facebook or Twitter credentials.

You’ll be redirected back to the site, where you’ll be on your (empty) Recent Activity feed. You can check out questions asked by Rately staff members or you can get started asking questions of your own by clicking through to the My Questions section and selecting the “Get Started” link.

Next, you are taken to the Tools page, where you can install one of the available browser extensions for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Safari, or add the bookmarklet to your search bar (also available for Internet Explorer and iPad/iPhone).

Lastly, you can begin using Rately, which is really quite simple. Whenever you’re on a shopping site – like Amazon – and you see a product you’re interested in, just click the Rately bookmarklet or browser icon and a box will pop up, allowing you to select a product image and enter in information such as an item description, price, and tags.

You can then type a Rately Question about that item and (optionally) share it with your Facebook and Twitter friends, or you can click the “compare multiple items” link to repeat the process with items. This is helpful if you’re torn between similar products and would like to seek a second opinion.

Lastly, you will be able to view your question, set notification settings, or embed/copy the link to it to share with others, who will hopefully help you make the right choice.

What do you think of Rately?  Do you think this will help make your purchasing decisions a bit easier?

Now, online music services are opening another door. They abandon digital files entirely, leaving some with the urge to uninstall standalone software and play music online via their browsers.

Picking A Service

To play music online with your browser, you usually need to pick a service that allows it.

There are a few types of services available at the moment. If you don’t want to pay, then you’ll still be looking at options like Pandora (currently restricted to just the United States), Rdio (to a limited extent), and the thousands of online radio stations currently operating. Free usage is the advantage of these options, but the downside is that you’ll usually have to deal with some form of commercial interruption or usage restriction, and you rarely have the option to pick the specific track that you want to listen to.

Paid options, like Zune, Rhapsody and Rdio, allow you to ditch the commercial interruptions and pick your own music in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. Often, you’re allowed to keep one or two albums per month as well. It’s a great deal for people who listen to lots of music, but paying a monthly fee forever isn’t everyone’s idea of a good value. The inevitable library restrictions (no one has a deal with every artist, ever) can be frustrating, as well.

Finally, we have the cloud services, which usually offer free use with paid premium options. Amazon’s Cloud Player, which lets you upload your music and then play it anywhere on any device with a browser (or an app) is a good example, as is Apple’s iCloud. Spotify is a hybrid between the subscription and cloud options.

What Should You Choose?

Well, the free options have no advantages besides the fact that they’re free, but for many people that’s enough. With certain extensions (which we’ll examine in a moment) you can obtain a lot of value without paying a dime.

The paid subscription services offer huge libraries, user choice, unlimited listening, and most let you keep some music every month. The cloud services offer less variety or restrict you to music you have already purchased, but there’s no monthly fee, so they’re good for occasional listeners as well as people who already have large libraries.

Listening In A Browser

So, now you’ve picked a service, and you want to listen in a browser. Easy! Go to the service’s website and use their built-in browser. Job done.

Okay, you probably already knew that.

Listening straight from a service’s site is easy, but it also has the disadvantage of requiring an open tab in your browser. That can be a bit annoying if you have a lot of tabs open at once. I know I’ve more than once cut a favorite track off because I closed the wrong tab.

That’s where browser extensions come in, but unfortunately, they can be a bit difficult to find. Official support is not as widespread as most users would like. In some cases, such as Zune and Spotify, this is because the online service has its own software that it expects users to download.

As an alternative, you can use extensions that are not associated with any specific service. Some examples for Chrome are Radio Player Live, which offers free access to hundreds of online radio channels, and DropBox Audio Player, which makes it possible to listen to music files that are stored in your DropBox account using simple media player controls.

The best player from Chrome is probably the Last.fm player (you don’t even have to sign up for Last.fm to use it, though you should to make finding tracks easier). Firefox users have a similar option in the form of Fire.fm. If you don’t want to put much effort into finding an extension, I recommend just using Last.fm for starters.

Conclusion

The state of music players for browsers isn’t where I suspect many users would like it to be. This is most evident when you look for players in the Chrome web store and find a number of options, only to realize that they’re listed as “web apps” rather than extensions, which means they open in their own tab (and in fact sometimes just re-direct to a service’s website) and doesn’t help with tab management. Firefox’s selection of music players is even smaller.

Still, there are some options available, as I listed above. If you don’t want to use those, you’ll have to rely on the website of whatever service you prefer. That’s still not a bad option, and it does effectively turn your browser into a music player.

Let us know what music service you prefer and how you’ve managed to turn your browser into a music player.

Dolphin supports tabs, bookmarks, and you can add favorite pages to the Speed Dial tiles, which are shown on every New Tab. While browsing with just the plain features is fine, there remains plenty of room for improvement. A variety of add-ons fill this space by offering cool extra features. This article covers five must have add-ons that will enrich your browsing experience with Dolphin.

Desktop Toggle

When browsing on a tablet, you will notice that many websites automatically load their mobile versions. While these page versions often load faster and are easier to browse, they may also lack features or impose screen size restrictions on you that are not necessary on a tablet. Desktop Toggle allows you to switch between the mobile and the desktop view of a website, granting you access to the best of both worlds.

To access the toggle button, swipe your browser window to the left, which will open the right-hand menu bar. Touch the button to switch between mobile and desktop version of the respective website.

Also have a look at my article How To Load the Desktop Version Of Websites On Your Google Android Honeycomb Tablet.

Tab Switcher

Per default, the Dolphin Browser switches to full screen mode when browsing websites. It provides temporary access to menus on the sides and tabs on top only by swiping them open. When you’re in the middle of a website and want to quickly switch to another tab, you have to scroll all the way up in order to view your open tabs. The Tab Switcher add-on solves this dilemma and makes it a lot more convenient to switch between tabs.

Click the right-hand menu button  (swipe browser window to the left) and switch to open tabs left and right via the respective bar. The green dots in each bar indicate the amount of tabs open on each side.

Speed Dial

Dolphin supports bookmarks and you can access them through the left-hand menu by swiping the browser window to the right. You can also add bookmark tiles to the ‘Speed Dial’ section shown when opening a new tab. The Speed Dials add-on adds some extra convenience for when you want to open a favorite bookmark into an open tab. You can access the Speed Dial menu through the right-hand sidebar.

Read Later

Read Later is Dolphin’s add-on for the popular Read it Later service, which we have covered in this article: Read It Later: Save Information To Be Read Later On Any Device.

After installing the add-on, the icon will sit in the right-hand menu. Sign in or create an account to start saving articles and webpages you want to read later. Once you want to park an article for later reading, click the icon in the sidebar. This will open your present reading list. Click > Save current URL in the bottom right to add the article you are viewing.

Tab History

This add-on, which is accessible through the right-hand menu, stores the history for each tab, allowing you to return to a previous website. Note that the information is tab-based and hence the history of the respective tab is lost when you close that tab.

If you are looking for an alternative to Dolphin, check out Miren – A Fantastic Free Browser For The Android Phone. Wondering What’s The Fastest Android Browser? Check out the respective Geeks Weigh In article.

What other add-ons are you using on your Dolphin Browser?

The most popular torrent client, uTorrent, has been getting a lot of extra effort put into it to simplify its use while expanding its feature set. I must say that the uTorrent developers have done an excellent job to do all of this while still keeping the program lightweight. One of the newer features that you’ll find is called add-ons.

µMap

µMap is one of my favorite addons. To me it’s always been quite interesting to see where certain peers are located. There are a couple of different ways to view these maps, and you can organize them by client type, country of origin, or swarm. This way you can easily identify any trends that may be interesting to you.

This app can also show you how closely it can identify your location as well. If µMap can find you within a smaller area than you’d like, you can try to use a free VPN service to mask your actual location.

uChat

uChat lets you chat with other people who are currently downloading the same torrent as you are. This could be a great way to kill some time while your torrent is downloading. You could also find a new online friend who shares similar interests with you, or you could learn about other torrents that you might be interested in. You’re not automatically signed into uChat when you download torrents, so you won’t be disturbed when you don’t want to be.

Skins

If you can already customize your uTorrent client with apps, why not change some visuals as well? With Skins you can easily do that! You can choose from a number of skins by simple browsing or searching via keywords. If you’re a little artsy you can even create a skin yourself.

4. Tetronimoes

So you’ve just added a new torrent to your client (such as a nice DVD collection of your favorite Linux distribution), and have nothing better to do other than to simply sit there and wait. Socializing with strangers might not be something you’d like to do either. After all, you can’t browse the web or you’ll use up bandwidth that could go to the torrent. Instead, you can go ahead and play some Tetris thanks to the Tetronimoes app. Now you can play a classic, lightweight game, and in no time at all you’ll see your torrent completely downloaded.

5. Khan Academy

As a student, I find this app to be very valuable. Khan Academy offers various different college courses whose class videos can be downloaded via torrent. This can be a great advantage to anyone who wants to catch up, get ahead, and simply learn something new that could be beneficial to their work or other activity. Don’t forget to allow some space on your hard drive for this. Khan Academy offers plenty of classes, and you should expect one class worth of videos to take around 2.5GB.

These are the top 5 apps that I personally recommend. Of course, you are never obligated to completely agree with this list, so it’s always best to browse through all the available apps in your uTorrent client. You could also check out this list of other apps. Personalization is always the best feature you can get out of a well-designed program. Also, don’t forget that uTorrent is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so everyone can enjoy them.

Is there an app that you believe should’ve been on the top 5 list? Which app would it be and why do you think so? Let us know in the comments!

1. You can’t be sure where you will land (there’s no way to tell where a shortened link goes just by looking at it).
2. You can fall prey to online spam and scams. Website owners have started using the services to hide affiliate URLs, to create “phishing” URLs, to cheat you (or your kids) into clicking adult and gambling links, etc.

This post will help you get smarter with what you click. Here are various browser extensions to preview and expand shortened URLs.

Firefox

1. Long URL Please Mod

Long URL Please Mod (an expanded mod of this addon MakeUseOf featured in much detail earlier) does a great job expanding short URLs shrunk by the huge range of URLs shorteners (currently “182 short URL services” are supported).

When having it installed you are unlikely to ever notice it working: it integrates very naturally. You can also slightly customize its behavior using the settings:

• To replace the short URL while maintaining the same number of characters (the rest of the full URL will be replaced by dots but you’ll be able to see the linked domain);
• Replace both the URL and linked text (to see the URL path without the need to hover over);
• Replace the URL path only or keep the URL path while changing the link text.

2. Xpndit

Xpndit (which also exists as a userscript) is another regularly updated option for Firefox users that is supposed to display the full URL path as well as the page title. It wasn’t able to retrieve the additional information with me. Besides, it has multiple performance reports (found on the addon Firefox page).

Google Chrome

3. ViewThrough

ViewThrough is the Google Chrome extension that displays the full URL path and the linked page title on hover-over. Short URLs from bit.ly, cli.gs, ff.im, goo.gl, is.gd, nyti.ms, ow.ly, post.ly, su.pr and tinyurl.com are supported.

Many users report it doesn’t work on the latest version of Google Chrome. However I didn’t seem to notice any performance issues.

4. LongURL

LongURL is the extension that uses LongURL API to quickly turn shortened URLs into the linked page title: hover over to see the full URL path as well as some additional information (like HTTP redirect, linked page meta description, etc):

LongURL supports most shortening services you are aware of. It also has a Firefox addon of its own but the addon has not been updated to work with the latest version of the browser.

Userscript

(Tested on Firefox only but it may work on Google Chrome and Opera as well)

5. Long URL Mobile Expander

This userscript acts exactly the same way as the ViewThrough Google Chrome extension above (so if you like it, you can have it on Firefox as well).

This script hasn’t been updated for quite some time but it uses LongURL API, so let’s hope it will work for both established URL shortening services and newer ones.

Are you aware of any other handy options that would allow people to browse the web without short URLs? Do you see yourself using any of them?