Yay new Minecraft beta version! With a lot of fancy things, no less! There are quite a few very cool changes that have come up in Beta v1.3 such as beds, new graphics and a new mapping version.

When I fired up my client after the update the first thing that I stared at was the world screen. The Worlds Have Been Changed!! (In other words, the save file format for the worlds have been changed) Players have to convert their old saves to the new version (wonderfully known as Scaevolus’ McRegion) which might take a while. It did so for me, of course. The best part about the new save file format is that you can name them! Previously all you had was “World 1″ or “World 2″.

The maps have the new lighting system which ran buttery smoothly on my machine and made the game look super cool. The shadows are more realistic, the shading is softer and… it just looks so pretty. The game also has the new Graphicsoption under settings and although it contains the same old Fancy/Fastgraphics settings, I’m sure there’s scope for other options in the upcoming updates.

And finally, (ignoring the redstone blocks and half-blocks) there are the beds. They’re quite cheap to construct, requiring three wool blocks and three wooden planks. The best part about them is that if you sleep in the beds at night, the game skips directly to the morning. This means no more running away from zombies, creepers, skeletons, spiders and skeletons riding spiders (*shudder). The other updates are given below:-

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
* Changed the options around, added a new Graphics optionsbutton
* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
* Added three new half-size blocks
* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
* Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter whitelist <cmd>where cmd is on, off, add <player>, remove <player>, listor reload
* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
* Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

Are you looking for free icons to be used on your website, or are you looking for high quality for your desktop. Browsing and searching them on the Internet is not that easy, so having a place to find all the icons in one place definitely helps.

Related: 6 Places to download high quality wallpapers.

IconArchive is definitely one of the best places to find high quality icons in one place for websites and your desktop including Windows icons, Mac icons and Linux icons.

The best part of IconArchive is that, all of the icons are neatly categorized making it easier to browse and find the type of icons you are looking for.

IconArchive currently hosts over 19,400 icons in 707 sets from 169 icon authors. Icons can be used for Windows (XP, Vista, etc.), Macintosh (OSX, OS) and Linux (as PNG Files). The list is bound to grow with newer icons being submitted everyday.

So the next time you want to find some icons, head to IconArchive and you will definitely find the icons you are looking for.

IconArchive

There may be several times when you may have downloaded, or received images through a email, now we can’t blame people for having preferences for using different formats for the images, but what if you want to convert them into your favorite format? What if you want to print a image without opening it?

Not everyone is a designer and resizing images could definitely take users a lot of time, also printing a image would require you to open up that image and then issue the print command. If you are hassled by these things, let us introduce you to a handy freeware utility that will ease your work when you work with images.

FirmTools ShellExtension is a real handy utility that allows you to convert a image to a different format. You can also configure which options should be displayed in the right click context menu, by using the configuration tool provided.

Convert Image Formats

Converting images is simple, you just need to right click on any particular image and then select the format you want to save it in. It takes less than 2 seconds to convert any image to any format.

Quick Thumbnails

The utility also shows a thumbnail of the image when you right click on it, making it easier to view the images in file/open save dialogs without having to see all the images in thumbnail view.

Clicking on the thumbnail will open the image in your favorite image viewer or editor.

Quickly Print Images

The utility also adds a print link to the context menu of the images, allowing you to easily print any image just by right clicking. Clicking on the print link will not exactly print the image, but open a print dialog using which you can easily print the image, saving you time nevertheless.

Summarizing

Overall this looks like quite a useful utility, and we were also impressed by the quick conversion and thumbnail previews. The print option looks good too since it saves us some time.

Download FirmTools ShellExtension [FirmTools ShellExtension Homepage]

How many times have you come across a wallpaper that is not the right size for your desktop? Do you simply setup the wallpaper even though its resolution does not match your desktop resolution?

There are tons of services which will help you make your image sizes smaller than their current resolutions while providing same or lesser quality but what if you want to increase the size of the image to a higher resolution? Have you been able to do it without degrading the image quality?

Reshade is a solution which allows you to resize your image without losing any quality. The major factor that makes Reshade better than others, is the fact that it allows you to increase your image resolution up to 20 times without incurring any loss of quality of the images along with the normal features of down sizing your image resolution.

How Does Reshade Work?

Reshade has both a online and offline version using which you can resize or enlarge the resolution of your images.

Reshade Online

Reshade Online has a easy to use interface and you can resize your images up to 3x times from the original resolution. Using the free online version you need to choose a image from your computer or provide Reshade with a URL to the location of the image.

Once you have uploaded the image you can choose the resolution you want to resize it to along with having options to center the image, stretch it and more. I gave the service a try and found pretty good results with the online image resizing.

This is the original image I used to resize to a bigger resolution, the original image size was 341 x 126 pixels

Below is the image resized to a resolution of 800 x 295. Click on the image to view the full image.

As you can see the quality of the image is almost intact and that is why Reshade can be quite a useful service for you.

Reshade Offline / Desktop Tool

Reshade also has a pretty useful desktop image resize tool which will allow you to increase the image resolution by up to 20x times which is quite good indeed.

The Reshade desktop resize tool allows you to easily resize image from the confines of your desktop. There are various options you can choose from while resizing a image. You can either use the zoom option or enter in a size you want to resize in the image to. In addition to that you can also control the quality, smoothness, texture, accuracy and threshold of the resized images.

The Reshade desktop resize tool has quite a simple interface and can be used by anyone without going through much trouble.

Reshade Desktop Resizer Features

• Innovative scaling algorithm – allows for over 2000% enlargements with no loss in clarity
• Easy to use interface – simple adjustments, with quick preview
• Fast access – use keyboard shortcuts to open and save files
• Drag and drop – open files directly from your Internet or file browser
• Multiple file types – support various formats including JPEG, PNG, bmp
• Standard image modes – can use CMYK, RGB and grayscale images
• Video tutorial – see a quick intro to the Reshade features
• Automatic updates – get notified when a new version is released

Innovative Processing Tools

• Control – have the best control over image clarity. Remove blur and highlight curves
• Soft Edges – get smooth, precise and consistent contours for all "Edge Control" values
• Smooth – remove image defects easier, directly from Reshade.
• Texture – extract even the finest details from your images. Contrast and enhance image features
• Accuracy – go from smooth edges to perfect estimations of the original image lines
• Threshold – make selective edge transformations
• Best Edges – get even better color estimation with just a little more processing time
• Quality – choose between speed or better quality for the resized image

The desktop tool is not available for free though and the price for it is $149 per license. The folks at Reshade are offering the desktop tool at a 51% discount, so you can get the product for $74 if you purchase it before 25th June.

Summarizing

Reshade definitely provides users with a nifty feature that many image resizers do not provide you with. So the next round if you have found a perfect wallpaper for your desktop which does  not fit the resolution of your desktop you know where to head.

This is a definite must have tool for designers and photographers so go ahead and download a free trial and if you like the product purchase it before 25th June to get a 51% discount.

If you were not content with convert your images to HTML ASCII art we will take it a bit further and introduce you to another software that will help you convert your photos to actual sketches.

Photo to Sketch is a software that will convert your photos to magnificent artwork, sketch or water color, completely similar freehand.

Photo to Sketch is a tool to convert a photo to excellent sketch and paint water color freehand. This can also be done using Photoshop but that is a very expensive piece of software whereas Photo to Sketch is absolutely free to use. In addition to that Photo to Sketch also converts the photos much quicker than Photoshop does it for you.

Using Photo to Sketch you can convert your photo to:

• Pen sketch;
• Pencil sketch;
• Brush sketch(Only Freehand panel);

The software also has a Pro model which will allow you convert photos in batches and allows you to use the Pastel style to make a sketch. The Pro model costs $29.50 per license.

But for those who are looking to just create basic sketches the free model would suffice more than enough.

Download: Photo to Sketch Free Version

Ever wanted to create ASCII art from your images? Browsing around our daily dose of Internet brought us to a cool little software that will allow you to convert any images to ASCCI art HTML pages.

Image2HTML is a handy little desktop software that will allow you to convert your image files to ASCII art.

Image2Html actually converts an image to a full-color ASCII art that may be rendered in any common web browser. The program scans and analyzes the input image to generate a pattern by using colored font characters.

The software requires no installation and can be run out of the box by double clicking on the exe file.

We decided to give the software a run for its money (its absolutely free by the way) and were more than surprised to see the results.

Below is the original Image we used to convert to ASCII Art;

And the output in ASCII art HTML format looks like the one below;

Mind you the entire image is made up of characters and was created in some 5-7 seconds or so. For those who want to view the html source for the above image you can download this zip file which contains the HTML code for the image.

The picture did not turn out very well and it was probably my mistake since I did not tune up the software well enough.

If you are looking to create some fine art and showcase it to your Friends and Family you should definitely give this utility a try, and since it is absolutely free you do not have to worry about paying any money too.

What do you think about this software? Do let me know through your comments.

Download: Image2HTML

If you may not have noticed the current design and Techie Buzz’s earlier designs, we have been making heavy use of tabs to compact content. It benefits both users as well as the site to compact content and present it in a nicer way.

Some time back we had also given a detailed tutorial on how to add tabs to your website, today in this post we will introduce you to 7 different tools that will allow you to add tabs to your own website.

JavaScript Tabifier

JavaScript Tabifier which uses CSS and JavaScript to create tabs to group content together. If you want to add tabs for your site you can download the script from the website. I prefer the light version of Tabifier which is around 5Kbs in size and does not cost much on site load time.

Advanced Tabs

Advanced Tabs is advanced tab creator which features tab scrolling, adding tabs programmatically and a context menu plugin.

MooTabs

MooTabs is a tiny(3kb) class for MooTools. As the name suggests, it’s main purpose is to help out with the creation of simple tab navigation.

YETTI

YETTI use lightweight , object oriented code to create tabs for your content, the script in itself is not dependant on any other library or framework.

TabView

TabView is a script that will allow you to add tabs for your content using simple JavaScript code. The tabs also have a close button allowing the user to close any particular tab.

Control Tabs

Control.Tabs attaches creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute. Since it attaches these behaviors to HTML that already has semantic meaning, it will degrade gracefully for browsers that do not support JavaScript, and is search engine friendly.

DOMtab

DOMtab is a JavaScript that turns a list of links connected to content sections into a tab interface. The script removes any “back to top” links in the section and automatically hides all but the first one when the page is loaded. You can use as many tabbed menus on the page as you want to.

Summarizing

Adding tags to your website not only compacts content but also makes it easier for your users to browse them.

Having tabs also definitely helps you to use less space to show more content.

What tab tools are you using for your websites? What are your favorites? Don’t hesitate to tell me I am more than eager to know about them.

If you are not a Digsby fan yet then I suggest you go and give the popular multi-protocol IM a try.

Digsby is a popular IM client which brings IM, Email and Social Networking including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace all in one application.

If you have already been using and are not happy with the skins they provide Digsbies.org a Digsby community site has the right thing for you.

At Digsbies you will find Skins, Conversation themes and Emotions sets to change the look and feel of Digsby.

There are quite a few options available to choose from so you can download and play around with huge number of themes.

How to Install a Theme for Digsby?

• Download a skin
• Unzip it to the Digsby user folder under Skins (e.g. C:Documents and SettingsYourNameApplication DataDigsbySkins) OR to the program folder (e.g. C:Program FilesDigsbyresSkins) (Paths might be slightly different on your system). Unzipping to the former is recommended, as your skins then won’t be erased during an auto-update.
• Select the skin under Tools – Preferences – Skins!

Likewise you can also spice up your chat conversations window and smileys by downloading them from Digsbies.org.

Via: [KillerTechTips]