Windows Vista’s UAC can be overly frustrating at times. There are times when a program needs to be launched with administrator privileges from the start menu, and right clicking and clicking on “Run as Administrator” just doesn’t cut it when you are in a hurry and need to get something to be done in a hurry.

For example, to open Command Prompt as administrator, click Start, type cmd in the Search box and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. You should see the User Account Control window popping up for task elevation confirmation. Press ALT+C to continue. By using the keyboard shortcuts life certainly becomes a lot more easier doesn’t it?

The CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER shortcut is extremely useful for Keyboard junkies like me. It should be noted that this shortcut works only on the Start menu and nowhere else.

Windows Vista has been a lovely companion for me, but the UAC frustrates me all the time. With these keyboard shortcuts I’m actually trying to figure out if I’m using  CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER more than CTRL+ALT+DEL on my PC!

Did this shortcut make life easier for you?

• Rename the Start Button

Yep, rename the Start Button using this little trick. It’s perfect for a little show-off. Most of your friends will be quite surprised that you could actually do it.

• Use a keyboard launcher

I’m a keyboard junkie and I use Launchy on Windows and Gnome Do on Ubuntu to start programs. The instant appearance of the Launchy window never fails to amuse them. They don’t really know that you could actually launch programs without using the mouse.

• Use Linux

We learn Linux at school – but mostly we deal with theories, and nobody has experienced Linux yet at school. Boot into Linux, deal with the commands. Turn on Compiz Fusion. They’ll probably ask you if it’s Vista and say “Linux has GUI? I thought it only works with commands”. Watch their jaws drop in astonishment.

• Docks

There was a time when I used to try a lot of interface makeovers for Windows, and tried a lot of Mac OS resembling enhancements like Docks for Windows. Everybody was quite overwhelmed by the look. You can try the FlyakiteOSX transformation pack as well.

• Customized Firefox

Well, about this one, I will have to say that the default Firefox Web Browser doesn’t impress friends much (since the default Firefox interface is not-so alien). However, with something like PicLens and TabEffect, you could really make for a good show off.

That was all I could remember. I’m sure Daily Apps readers will have something even mor funnier to say. Please share your ideas and stories in the comments!

This is a guest post by Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old Blogger and Freelance Writer from India, who writes about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips. Please subscribe to his blog for more such interesting articles!

When the iPhone first came out, many people complained about the lack of Video recording capabilities in the iPhone. Many People including me thought it was pretty lame for Apple to release iPhone without the video editing features in it, because Apple touted the iPhone as a complete Multimedia device, and I haven’t really seen a Multimedia phone that comes without Video Recording. Heck even my Nokia 5300 does it pretty well.

But wait, didn’t I say this post was about recording video on the iPhone. Yes it is about that, and it really is possible to record Video on the iPhone using a third party app developed by drunknbass. Not much is really known about the Application right now, but here are a few details..

The application at present, record only a 5 second video at 10fps and can replay the video after the recording is complete. However, it can’t save the video to the iPhone’s memory. But the final version of the application should be able to do that, as well as record videos for an unlimited time (well, as far as the iPhone’s memory would allow it to), at a 2 Megapixel resolution and a quality of 30 fps. Also, the final release should bring a User Interface too, as the current version does not have one.

To Download the app to your iPhone, you need to register at the developers website. Please tell us how it goes, as I am willing to hear some feedback on this..

Well Google has always been a believer of the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle, and that is the reason why almost everything from the Google stable has a minimal design. Well if you have got yourself bored of the default Google search layout, then get yourself ready for a completely different Google Search page thanks to an amazing Greasemonkey script, Google Search Makeover.

Click on the screenshot above to see the various modifications that have been made to the default search layout. The script organizes the results into two columns, numbers them, grabs each website’s icon, and much more. The new look is not visually appealing, but also does away with the need to scroll vertically to see the results. The results have been organized for quick access. The most notable feature has to be the absence of Page numbers from the bottom. It has instead been moved onto Upper Right corner of the screen.

Well the Script really is feature rich, and I would like to highlight some of them :

• Google Suggest
• Two column results [Optional]
• Custom colored Snap Shots Previews [Optional]
• Result Numbers
• Custom logo
• Layout change [Optional]
• Embeds videos right into the search results. You can easily change the colors of YouTube videos. [Optional]
• Re-titles the page to easily identify what you are searching for and the page that you are on.
• Google Search Filter
• Adds PageRank after each link [Optional]
• Scans each result with SiteAdvisor
• Add favicons to all links [Optional]
• Add a clear button [Optional]
• Add sidebar menu [Optional]
• Open links in new tab [Optional]
• Turns off SafeSearch Automatically

Well the script does come with its own bugs and problems. For eg. Site advisor often defaults to the “unsafe” status for me. That’s why you see all those cross marks in the Screenshot. Another bug is the time it takes to format the layout. This is considerable in pages with a large number of results, say 50 or more. Other than that, the script has been a pleasure, and I just love it.

Grab yourself a Google Search Makeover. You will need to have Greasemonkey installed.

Via CybernetNews

Edit the following file:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer.plist

Add an entry like this:

  <key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
   <dict>
         <key>CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE</key>
         <string>0.62</string>
   </dict>

Save the file and restart your Mac and you should now be seeing the kind of Menu Bar that you have grown used to. The original tip from Steve Miner suggests a setting of “1”; this results in an old-school pure white menu bar, incase you set it as “0″ you get a dark gray Menu Bar. All values in between “0″ and “1″ give you varying shades of gray.

Hope this hack works for you. If you any alternative ways to disable transperancy then drop in a comment. Please note that this hack involves meddling with your System files. Please backup before you proceed.

Via Steve Miner

Well as I said in an earlier post that the cat and mouse race is still on, and right now it seems that the hackers are winning the race. We have been seeing a lot of iPhone related news this month and now its the time for iPod touch to steal the show. Well so far the touch was just the younger brother of the mighty iPhone but not now anymore. iPod Touch is now really the best iPod we have seen so far. The guys over at iPhone Dev Team have managed to decrypt the ramdisk of the iPod touch and are now busy running 3rd party apps on it.

Well as you can see the screenshot below, an iPod touch running Google Maps. Now how cool is that! Well iPod touch has become a little bit of more irresistible now.

Well it would be nice if someone gifts me an iPod touch right now. (me winks)

Via Engadget

Well the new unlock seems to be a lot better than the initial release. If you remember iPhoneSIMFree was the first SIM unlock solution that we saw for the iPhone. Well so far its been the best, simply because the number of phones that got bricked after the firmware upgrade were much less on iPhoneSIMFree unlocked iPhones.

Well the latest version of iPhoneSIMFree goes a lot beyond just getting the iPhone unlocked. It will also allow you to unbrick your unlocked iPhone if the recent firmware upgrade killed it. How nice of them. Well i guess we should be see anySIM and iUnlock to release updates to its hacks to activate the iPhone very soon.

Well the Hackers and the Apple team are treading dangerous waters here.. The more Apple tries to prevent the iPhone from being unlocked, the more serious bugs will be unearthed in the iPhone that will eventually make the iPhone a very vulnerable product. I hope Apple realizes this and atleast allows all those 3rd party apps to get onboard onto the iPhone.

If you wish to get yourself a copy of the iPhoneSIMFree unlock head over to one of their resellers such as the popular iPhone Worldwide Unlock based in Australia or Wireless Imports in the US. At this point of time iPhoneSIMFree seems to be the best option to unlock your iPhone.

Here they are :

• How to add Safe Mode to XP Boot List

Safe mode is required when you need to fix problems such as a nasty virus infection or unistalling buggy softwares on your windows XP install.The Normal route to go to safe mode would be to use F8 Key to get into safe mode and if its not timed properly you’ll have to restart windows XP again.Ashish has a small trick which lets you add Safe mode by default into your Boot list. You will see it when you restart your windows XP machine.

• How to Automatically Terminate a Unresponsive Program

Many a time, programs like Office, Winamp and others, would, hang and clicking on close button just doesn’t seem to work. Even the task manager “End program” option tends to fail or takes too much of time. Ashish has a small trick which you can use to Auto Kill the programs which gets hung or goes into status of “Not Responding”.

Read these wonderful posts by Ashish. They are definately worth checking out and really useful tricks.

Youtube recently launched their video ads service. While the new ads haven’t been accepted that well by the general public and actually many are complaining that it spoils the youtube experience. If you are one of those then you need this handy firefox extension that hides the ads from being displayed.

TubeStop is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube videos. This means that you can open multiple YouTube videos in tabs in the background without them all starting to play at once. TubeStop also disables the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com sites (MySpace, for example). TubeStop can also prevent ads on Youtube by replacing the youtube player with the embeddable version of it, so that no ads are shown..

Update : It looks like Youtube has temporarily pulled off the Ads. I guess its because of the negative feedback.