I never thought Opera was going to make this possible, but I'm pleased to say that in the new Opera 9.5 you can actually customize how many Speed Dial entries are shown at any one given time! They are so incredibly useful that I've found myself needing more than the nine that comes standard in the browser.

Windows only One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

Mac only When on a Windows computer one of the things I always did was make the Taskbar twice the normal height. The reason I did that was because it would then show the date in addition to the time, which is something I use quite regularly. Sure I could have hovered my mouse over the time to see the same information, but that often took more time than was necessary.

One of the most popular extensions for Firefox is Greasemonkey simply because it gives developers and users a chance to customize their browsing experience with very little work. The extension has been downloaded over 165,000 times which is pretty incredible, and new scripts that power the extension are always being created.

It's not often that I come across a single widget/gadget that is good enough to constitute it's own article, and I never expected to find one that would be good enough for its own CyberNotes article. When I tried out Informer, a Yahoo Widget, I was absolutely blown away at everything it could do. It's almost an entire application in itself!

One of the things that I've come to realize with using a computer is that you can never have too many ways to launch an application. The Quick Launch bar is probably one of the most famous ways of doing so, and I've seen people who have a Quick Launch bar that takes up more than 50% of the Taskbar. Crazy, I know.

Stardock has started to deliver the DeskScapes 2.0 Preview yesterday to anyone that wants to give it a whirl. Previously DeskScapes was a way for Vista Ultimate users to extend the functionality of Dreamscene, but now it works on any version of Vista without needing Dreamscene. It's a great way to have an animated desktop background on your Vista machine, oh, and did I say that it's free?

One of the areas that I've always felt Firefox has lacked in is sidebar configurability. Other browsers, such as Opera, come with way more sidebar options out-of-the-box making it easy to throw a sidebar onto any side of the browser. The beauty of Firefox, however, is that there are plenty of extensions to solve any complaints.

Stardock just released a new cursor management program called CursorFX (previously known as CursorXP). It is designed so that users can install any of the hundreds of cursor themes that have been created. One of my personal favorites is Uista, which is particularly slick on Vista.

Did you know that both Firefox and Opera come with shortcuts to make downloading files a quick and painless process? It's true, but few people know about the shortcuts that can save oodles of time. Lets take a look at how we can trim some time off of downloading files in Firefox and Opera.