If you are on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 allows you to pin a website to the Windows taskbar, and access the website pages directly without having to open Internet Explorer first. The unmatched visibility on users’ desktops results in increased traffic for a website. This also gives an app-like feel to the website or web app.

To pin a website, just grab the tab and drag it down to your taskbar. Apart from the one-click access, a pinned site also allows you to right-click on the icon to get a list that directs you to particular content on the site. Some pinned sites can also notify you that content has changed on the site. While pinned Facebook alerts you of the Facebook notifications for your account, pinned Hotmail notifies with a number corresponding to the new email in your inbox.

Microsoft has now launched a new service Pin My Website to encourage website owners to add the pinned site functionality to their websites. The site provides an online wizard to guide you to few steps that would give you a code snippet that you can use on your website to take advantage of this function. Microsoft claims that pinned sites gain traffic, and these steps take an average of only 36 seconds to complete!

In the first of a total of four steps, all you need to provide is your contact details and basic site information like site’s name and URL. You will also need to provide an icon for your main site.

Jump List items act as entry points into the website even when the browser is not running. The next step requires you to list the commonly used destinations and tasks that apply to the whole site.

A dynamic Jump List can contain items that will automatically change over time, to give access to periodically updated information like news updates. To use this feature, your site must expose an RSS feed with the items that you want to show on the Jump List.

The last optional step enables you to add a pinning notification bar on the  top of your webpages. This bar prompts IE9 users to pin your site.

Once you complete the four steps, you can generate the code to use on your site and allow IE9 users on Windows 7 to pin your site to their taskbar.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation tool. When used effectively, it can add visual appeal and support for a presentation. In this article, I would like to introduce you to a little used feature that PowerPoint provides called the Outline view. One common mistake that I see people make when designing a presentation, is that they often go straight to design mode rather than have their thoughts organized in a logical manner. This is like painting drywall before it is hung on the studs. Below you will see a partial view of the basic PowerPoint window. Along the left side of the window you will notice that a miniature version of the slide is viewable. As slides are added to the presentation, the miniatures will become viewable on this side of the window. If you look to the right of the tab that says Slides, you will see a tab labeled Outline. Let’s click on the outline view.

Once you have clicked on the Outline view, you will notice an even smaller slide icon. If you click to the right of that icon and begin typing, you will notice that the slide preview area on the right will fill in the Title area of the slide. I typed the title of my presentation and hit enter on the keyboard. By default, this will start a new slide. However, I wanted to add text to the subtitle area of the first slide. To achieve this, I clicked the Increase Indentbutton (blown up in the picture below) which moved the text under the title. Notice how PowerPoint recognized that. Since I started a new level in my outline, it should put that text in a new level on the slide. Now when I hit enter again, the text will be on that same level. In order for me to start a new slide I need to hit Decrease Indentbutton. This will move the text back a level and start a new slide. Now I can continue to outline my ideas and PowerPoint will generate slides and bullet points based on what I type.

Below you will see where I typed in a general heading of Get More Training. I then hit enter and clicked the Increase Indentbutton to create bullet points for my slide. If I hit Increase Indentagain you will notice it creates sub points.

I really believe this is a good way to work on a PowerPoint presentation, as it forces you to get your thoughts in order,   while creating the basic shell of your presentation. Once you have your outline all lined out, then you can start the task of adding colors and themes to your presentation.

==== About the Author ====

Darrin Jenkins is an IT manager for a large electrical contractor in Louisville Kentucky. Darrin posts his helpful advice at the SayGeek blog.

In my previous article, I explained about long exposure photography, the technique involved and the important features and materials you require while shooting photos in slow shutter.  In this article, I’ll show how you can take long exposed photos. In this simple tutorial, you’ll learn how to create the following effect – Writing your own name

Materials Required

Tripod
Flashlight or LED

You can use any kind of light source, but make sure that you can control the light. For best results, stick to a flashlight or an LED.

Setting Up Things

First things first. Get your camera and set it on your tripod or on a flat surface (make sure it does not shake). Set the focus of your camera using the auto-focus mode or AF mode. Once the camera is focused, switch it to manual mode and do the following changes:

ISO
Set your camera ISO to 100 or 200. Always use lower ISO when doing long exposure photography. It reduces the noise.

Shutter Speed
Since we’re writing a name, we require ample amount of time. Therefore, we need to keep the camera shutter open for a longer period. I took about 20 seconds to write my name. I suggest you to set the shutter speed to at least 30 seconds.

Aperture
Aperture completely depends on your lens/zoom, focal, exposure etc. I generally use f/11. Depending on the conditions, figure out what aperture suits best and set the aperture.

Once you’ve changed the above mentioned settings, you’re now ready to go.

Turn off the lights and press the shutter-release button. The camera shutter is now open. Without shaking the camera, slowly go and stand in front of it. Turn on the flashlight and start writing your name in mirror image (or you can draw/scribble something). The shutter will close after 30 seconds, so you need to be as quick as possible.

You may commit a few mistakes, but repeating the steps several times will definitely give you a result.

Now you can start experimenting with different colored flashlights to get some nicely exposed pictures. Use your art and make it look colorful! Here’s something you can try as well. Turn yourself into a ghost!

P.S. You need to remotely trigger the shutter-release button to do this, so you will need a wireless remote.

Within a day of its unveiling, and months before it will be launched, iOS 5 has already been jailbroken.

MuscleNerd, a member of the iPhone Dev Team announced on Twitter that he has already jailbroken iOS 5.

“iOS5 jailbroken on ipt4g: http://is.gd/7GxIcK http://is.gd/BwPvfh via limera1n + tethered boot..not too many surprises :)”

The jailbreak was done using Limera1n, but there is a catch. It is a tethered boot jailbreak, which means that you would need to connect your iPhone to a computer every time you reboot it.

Cydia works well on the jailbroken device running iOS 5, and he was also able to install iSSH successfully.

Since Apple won’t be launching iOS 5 until Fall 2011, this exploit isn’t very useful now, but MuscleNerd says that it can be used to jailbreak the final version of iOS 5 as well, when it launches. It would be quite realistic to expect a much more usable and convenient version of the jailbreak within a day or two of iOS 5′s launch.

Here are some images of iOS 5, jailbroken, with Cydia installed.

Check out our detailed coverage of iOS 5 – iOS5 Everything You Need To Know About It

If you have been following the news keenly, you might know that the IBM-built Watson artificial intelligence supercomputer trounced two of game show Jeopardy!‘s most famous contestants recently. Developed under researcher David Ferrucci, the Watson supercomputer trounced Brad Rutter (winner of the biggest all-time money on the show) and Ken Jennings (record holder for the longest championship streak) in a two-game combined point match. All this is known to you, reader of Techie Buzz. But have you felt the urge to actually make your own supercomputer in your basement, provided you have enough money for the enterprise?

If you did, then you have come to the right place. Tony Pearson, Master Inventor and Senior Managing Consultant for the IBM System Storage product line at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, has written up an easy-to-follow article on how to build your own supercomputer, called the “Watson Jr.. The system incorporates 3 host servers (as opposed to the senior Watson’s 90 servers) and will approximately have 1 terabyte of storage in total. The supercomputer might not be as fancy as the Jeopardy! winning artificial intelligence but it does promise to be a fun summer project if you have enough time and money to invest in (and, of course, a large-enough space to house the computer in).

The basic needs of this computer are as follows:-

• Three x86 hosts, with the following:
  • 64-bit quad-core processor, either Intel-VT or AMD-V capable,
  • 8GB of DRAM, or larger
  • 300GB of hard disk, or larger
  • CD or DVD Read/Write drive
  • 1GbE Ethernet
• Computer Monitor, mouse and keyboard
• Ethernet 1GbE 4-port hub, and appropriate RJ45 cables
• Surge protector and Power strip
• Local Console Monitor (LCM) 4-port switch (formerly known as a KVM switch)

I can see your hands itching to get to the meat of it, so do check out the tutorial on IBM’s website before going shopping!

WordPress is fantastic. Take out word for it. Even Techie Buzz runs on WordPress! One of the reasons why this blogging platform is so famous is due to its vast and vibrant community that creates, shares and modifies plugins.

Plugins are tiny (or large) pieces of code that extend your site to do a lot of things. According to WordPress itself, Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, from sending your new posts to Twitter automat[t]ically to having HTML5 MP3 players with a minimal interface.

Now, Jay Harley, the founder of Heaven Interactive and an avid web programmer has put up a very short primer on making your own WordPress plugin in PHP within ten minutes. This Graphical User Interface (GUI) plugin works off your WordPress Admin Dashboard.

The tutorial assumes that you have a solid grasp of PHP and some experience with WordPress. It also builds up on concepts introduced by a few WordPress plugin-authoring books such as WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide)

While the tutorial is not as fleshed out as a real introductory class on plugin development, it sets the stage for further development by you, the developer. If you have always wanted to write your own WordPress plugin, this is that ignition that you have always wanted!

Start making your own PHP WordPress plugin in ten minutes.

I’d like to share something interesting that I learned some days back. I was going through an article on Learning jQuery and my eyes struck on the date of the post. I was quite impressed the way it was designed and presented. At first, I thought it was an image, but when I viewed the source, I realized that it was done with CSS. I was very eager to learn how it was done and I Googled for this particular trick and found Snook’s article, Text Rotation With CSS. It wasn’t that hard to learn and implement as I had thought of it. I experimented on this trick and learned quite a bit of it. I altered the coding to insert Techie-Buzz logo and here’s the end result:

Demo | Download Source

The Magical Code:

HTML Code:

<div class="logo_box">
     <span class="techie_sample">Techie</span>
     <span class="tblogo_sample"><img src="tb.png" /></span>
     <span class="buzz_sample">Buzz</span>
</div>

CSS Code:

/* Techie-Buzz.com - Text rotation exmaple */
.logo_box
{
float: left;
background-color: #fff;
border: 1px solid #000000;
color: #ffffff;
position: relative;
margin: 0 0 0 20px;
}

.logo_box .techie_sample
{
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 30px;
line-height: 30px;
padding: 2px 0;
background-color: #000;
}

.logo_box .tblogo_sample
{
display: block;
padding: 2px 24px 2px 0;
}

.logo_box .buzz_sample
{
display: block;
color:#000;
writing-mode: tb-rl;
-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(90deg);
position: absolute;
right: 0;
bottom: 9px;
font-size: 24px;
}
*:first-child+html .logo_box .buzz_sample { right: -28px; } /* IE7 positions element differently to IE6 & 8 */

.logo_box span:nth-child(3)
{
right: -16px;
bottom: 24px;
}

Pretty simple, isn’t it? Download the source code.

P.S. Though this trick is a little old, I thought it would be great sharing it with you. Hope you liked it.

Have you ever heard of DVDShrink? It’s a freeware program that allows you to make backup copies of your movie DVDs. The shrinkpart of the name of this software is the real power behind it. Movies are usually distributed on dual layer DVDs, while most blank DVDs are only single layer. The DVDShrink program can allow you to shrink a dual layer movie onto a single layer blank disk. However, there are a few tricks you need to know if you want to do it the right way and get the best possible copy.

I’ve used DVDShrink for years, but I never did know the finer points to using it. I always used it to create backup ISO files that I stored on my hard drives. Fortunately, I know someone who does know a good many tricks for using this freeware. Jim Hillier has posted a complete how toon one of my favorite newsletters Dave’s Computer Tips.

Here’s that post: How to use DVDShrink… The Right Way!

Wait! Before you head over there, here are a few things you might want to know.

• Where is the download for DVDShrink? The home site of DVDShrink is at dvdshrink.org, however, you won’t find a link to download it there. I always go to the DVDShrink page at Afterdawn to get the latest version.

• If you have any questions about DVDShrink, just post a comment below and I’ll ask Jim to lend a hand.

• If you’d like to read a good monthly newsletter, be sure to sign up for Dave’s Computer Tips.

Zip files are a great way to pack up a collection of files to send them to other people, usually in an email. At least three or four times a year, I run into someone who doesn’t know how to zip up a collection of files in Windows. I ran into three people in the last two weeks at work.

Years ago, you had to have a third party tool such as WinZip to create and open zip files. In 2001, Windows XP was released with built-in zip capabilities. Microsoft decided to call these compressed folders.

Not only is it easy to use the built in zip features in Windows, it’s also possible to password protect zip files so that others can’t open the files inside them. However, even though a zip file is password protected, you can still see a list of files inside it. I have always hated that, but I found a way around it.

Here is how to hide all of your top secret files in a zip file (or compressed folder).

First, let’s create two zip folders. You’ll see why we need two of them shortly.

To create a zip folder, right click into any folder or in an empty place on your desktop, and choose NewCompressed Folder.

Let’s choose Stuffand Top Secretas the names of the new zip files.

Now we can add some top secret files to our Stufffolder. I’m going to add a JPG picture to it here. I’ll open up Stuff.zipby double clicking it, then drag the JPG file into it.

Now let’s add the Stuffzip file to the Top Secretzip file.

Now we need to add a password to the Top Secretcompressed folder.

You’ll have to type your password in twice to confirm it.

That’s it. The next time anyone opens that zip folder, all they’ll be able to see is a file named Stuff.zip. If they try to open it or extract it, they’ll have to know the password you’ve set.

As you can see, all of the files inside the Stuff.zip are hidden. That’s why we needed two zip files.

As a final cleanup step, you can delete the older copies of Stuffand the JPG. These are safely and securely inside the Top Secretzip folder now.

These techniques will work in all versions of Windows released after XP, as well as XP itself.

Here are some other ways to use zip files:

1. Compress and Zip Files Online Without Any Software
2. How to Fix Default Zip File Behavior
3. Open Zip Files Online
4. Repair Corrupted Zip Files
5. Unzip or Extract Files Online

Here are some other ways to hide files:

1. Lock And Hide Files & Folders
2. Windows Scripts: Show/Hide Hidden Files and Folders In Windows
3. Password Protect and Hide Personal Folders
4. Hide Drives From My Computer

If you have your own special way to hide secret data, let us know in the comments below.

Do you have favorite websites that you need to search? You might already know that you can search specific websites by using the pull down menu on the built-in search box in Internet Explorer. You can see a list of sites, such as Bing, Google or Yahoo; these are called Search Providers.

You can add Search Providers in Internet Explorer very easily, but what if the site you want isn’t included in Microsoft’s list of providers? Here are a few of the providers listed by Microsoft:

Bing Search – New York Times Instant Search – Wikipedia Visual Search – Amazon Search Suggestions – eBay.com Visual Search – Google Search Suggestions – Yahoo! Search Suggestions – ESPN Search – Realtime Web Search (by OneRiot) – Sports Buzz from Buzztap

Creating your own Search Providers is an easy trick to learn. It might save you several minutes every day if you have to perform lots of web searches. I’m only going to show instructions for Internet Explorer 7 and 8. If you have Internet Explorer 6, you should upgrade to a newer version. IE6 is getting too old, slow and insecure (like me). Unlike me, however, IE6 is not getting any wiser.

Let’s start with a good example. let’s say that you are in love with the Techie Buzz site and you need to search it every day. Follow the steps below to add your own “Techie Buzz Search” to Internet Explorer.

1. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to Techie-Buzz.