Most web-applications offer snippets of HTML or Javascript codes to be embedded in your blog. From Facebook to Youtube, almost all web-applications follow this trend. But before you embed that widget in your website, you might want to see for yourself how it looks like — only the widget. Here's how you can do the same right from your address-bar.

All you have to do is to paste the snippet in your address-bar and prepend data:text/html, (note the comma) to it and hit enter! Your widget is on the page! For instance, if you have a YouTube "embed video" snippet like this:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bPfPK59weT8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bPfPK59weT8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

After you add data:text/html, it looks like:

data:text/html,<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bPfPK59weT8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bPfPK59weT8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

On Chromium it looked like this:

Note that it works on Google Chrome, Firefox, Chromium. I haven't tested this in Opera or Safari. It definitely doesn't work on Internet Explorer!

Google has open-sourced the source-code of its much-hyped operating system, today. The operating system is far from ready for regular use but you can still try it out — a VMWare image is up for grab at The Pirate Bay. Download the VMWare image and follow these steps to run Chrome OS. But in the meantime, you can watch these videos on Google Chrome OS.

Google Chrome OS Concept Video

This video shows the 'concept' UI of the operating system. Although Google claims that there will be significant changes in the UI, the current UI is much different from what is shown in the video.

What is Google Chrome OS?

Google's famous animated take of showing off products.

The Pirate Bay has officially shut down its BitTorrent tracker. After months of speculation about its fate, TPB has officially announced that the tracker is going offline forever. This, however, doesn't mean all your torrents with The Pirate Bay as the sole tracker would meet a horrible death. The Pirate Bay guys claim that trackers have become redundant with DHT or PEX which works without the need of a centralized server. The blog post further discusses the issue.

What's more threatening to the pirates is that TPB says it's going to talk to other torrent tracker providers to take their trackers offline. This will mean virtually no centralized servers to share your data. The server-less sharing has pros too. You won't curse the tracker when it's offline. In fact, nothing would change - you can still upload .torrents and download from TPB, the only thing missing is the tracker.

Facebook has become a great place to share photos. Apart from Flickr, Facebook is a "hot" place to share photos. Almost everyone in Facebook has a photo-album (besides, the default 'profile pictures' album, of course). Although Facebook has a Java-based multi-file uploader, it can be a pain to upload photos to Facebook at times. Fire up your favourite browser and go to Facebook and go to photos and...

How about a shortcut? How about a uploading them right from your dekstop without hassles? Well, Facebook LiveUpload is a plugin for Windows Live Photo Gallery that does the same. All you have to do is to install the plugin (of course, you need to install Windows Live Photo Gallery or Windows Live Movie Maker in order to use this plugin). Once installed, you are ready to use the plugin -- under Publish > More Services, you'd find "LiveUpload to Facebook" option.

You can create/choose Facebook photo albums through Facebook LiveUpload. What's more, if you have tagged people in photos through Windows Live Photo Gallery, your uploaded photos in Facebook will include those tags, too!

A newer version of Paint.NET has been released today. Paint.NET is a photo-editing software that runs on Windows under .NET framework (v3.5 SP1). It is a better version of Microsoft paint, with support for layers, multiple undo, redo, and several effects that Adobe Photoshop boasts of. 

The new version is much more lightweight than the earlier ones (the total disk space usage is around 12 MiB).  This new version integrates with Vista and Windows7's Aero interface. The one most striking new feature is that you no longer need to restart the whole application to let Paint.NET recognize newly installed fonts -- the new fonts toolbar enlists new fonts as they are being installed. You can find the whole list of new features here. If you need a not-so-serious photo editor, Paint.NET is for you.

Google's most ambitious project Google Wave has been launched as a developer preview to 100K developers around the world. And blogosphere is abuzz with lot of things to say about it. Even eBay users are selling Google wave invites.

Here in AbhiTech, I am offering 15 Google Wave invites to readers! All you have to do is to subscribe to AbhiTech (by email; see the form in the right sidebar) and leave a comment to this post stating why you want a Google Wave invite. Please note the following:

• Before you leave your comment, you must subscribe to AbhiTech by email. Don't forget to activate your email subscription. Or else email addresses won't be shown to me.
• Those who are already subscribed to AbhiTech by email, please state that you are already subscribed.
• In your comment you must include your email id (except the domain, i.e. if your email is user123@gmail.com, just state "my email starts with user123").
• In case the number of comments exceeds the number of invites to be sent, random comments will be selected. If so happens, Random.org will be used.
• You must state why you want a google wave invite. Incomplete comments will be rejected.
• Also note that since these invites are sent by users (not by Google), it takes a few days to reach you. To quote Google: "Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick."
• Contest will end on 20th November, 2009.

Microsoft’s not-so-famous cloud backup service Skydrive offers 25 GiB of web-space. Yet it has got less takers than Dropbox. That’s because it doesn’t have a desktop client even after more than 2 years of its launch. Dropbox gets an edge just because it offers a cross platform desktop client that seamlessly syncs your data.

Now, you can upload and download data from Skydrive without having to open your favorite browser, thanks to SkyDrive Explorer. It’s a tiny standalone Windows shell extension. All you have to do is to install SkyDrive Explorer and start enjoying SkyDrive features as a separate drive in Windows. After you install this program, you’d find a new drive under “Other” category. Double click on it and provide your login credentials. Once you are logged in, just copy paste files from your PC to this new drive, and they get uploaded to SkyDrive. But you can't view files right inside this drive — just copy the files to your local drives and open them.

SkyDrive Explorer works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows and runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows7. But I didn't have much luck in running it on XP. It worked fine in Windows7. Since it's in beta stage, future releases may address this issue.

Twitter today launched its much awaited and much hyped ‘lists’ feature. The blogosphere was abuzz with talks of Twitter working on lists. And Twitter indeed tested this in private beta. Today it’s open for everyone, although in beta.

Lists are groups of Twitter users you can create (and name) for everyone to see and follow. To quote Twitter, “Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it.” You can also create private lists which can be accessed by you only.

Lists are different from ‘groups’ since lists behave more like individual users — you can follow/unfollow lists. Once you start following a list, updates from the users in the list will appear in your timeline. But lists can be used as groups to sort people whom you follow and see what they are talking about.