Live and Beyond is around one month old now. Although the first blog entry was blogged on 8th Jan, things really took off after the 20th,as by then we had a proper theme, layout, RSS and all the other web2.0 jumbo on by then.

Live and Beyond’s Technorati Rank: 99,928 (115 links from 38 blogs)  (As of: 18:00 GMT 20th Feb 2007). Out of the 55 Millions blogs out there (Wonder how many of them are spam and how many are actually active) it is easily in the top 0.2%.

I am satisfied with it and I hope it picks up as the months go by.. But, I still don’t trust technorati as it is so slow and inaccurate. I wish there was another blog ranking service. I wrote to Google about it and they said they will look into it. (Yea sure!). I mean, they already have everything indexed and it will so easy for them to implement a top 100 blog list. (Anyone with the API’s out there can create this list using google? Drop us a comment!)

I think I should blog about technorati being crap…

Have another great month at Live and Beyond. A big thank you to all the people who visited, commented and linked us.

 - Pr0xy K1ll3r

Many people have asked me “What is this emoticon in Messenger for?” Well it’s a simple answer. There is a new marketing feature based around a charity event to promote Windows Live Search as well as generating money for charity.

Every time a Messenger is released as a full milestone, a charity event kicks off and a new emoticon is released. The person who bids for the highest emoticon goes into the final product. and were both auctioned off after the 7.5 and the 8.0 release, not sure about the 7.0 release but there was one, and now there is a new emoticon which every time you use it, generates you money.

I urge everyone, until the 31st March when the emoticon expires, put *9mil or *oxfam in your name to create the emoticon on Windows Live Messenger so that every time you talk to someone, it comes up in a conversation thus getting the most out of the offer.

I’m a big fan of The Simpsons - they’ve been going for over 15 years and have over 350 episodes out - the titles have only ever changed once and they still stand today. You can tell because when it goes to Lisa playing her saxophone in the class, the purple twins look huge. But being the winter season (up in the northern hemisphere anyway), I thought I’d show this - a slightly more festive Simpsons. Watch it quick before it gets taken down by YouTube for some lame copyright restriction!

Here is a video screencast of Windows Ultimate DreamScene (preview) in action. It clearly shows the new features of video playing as the background wallpaper on Windows Vista Ultimate. It has some really good demonstrations with a full Glass window on top of the video to show smoothness - a must see. I nicked it and put it on YouTube as I hate using Windows Media Player.

Source: VistaBase Demonstrations

The picture say’s it all…

Source : Gevil

Something which might make life easier for you - if you hover over the Ribbon area with your mouse and scroll with your mouse then you can easily navigate from one tab to another. Works in all the Office 2007 programs with the Ribbon menu bar.

Source: In-house

Another week bites the dust, and here in pictures, this is what it has to say for itself. Roll on Monday… well, don’t get a week off like most people but I really like my job

“Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen”

Via Twingly [download]

“The Windows Vista BootScreen is pointless, but Microsoft decided to hide a more visually appealing boot screen that can easily be enabled with very little trouble. I’m not sure why they didn’t make the boot screen better.”

The default boot screen:

The hidden one, called “Aurora”:

Type msconfig into the start menu search box, and hit enter…

After the System Configuration tool loads, click on the Boot tab and check the “No GUI Boot”.

Hit Ok and Reboot, you will see the new Aurora boot screen

“Note: You may get a Windows Defender error on the next startup. You can enable the system config utility using the tray icon and this error will go away.”

Source: How to Geek

1. Go to www.google.com
2. At the box where you search, type in this format.

?intitle:index.of? mp3 ***

The *** is for you to replace it with the artist and song title.
3. Click on the Google Search button.
4. Now you should see a list of all the websites that has the MP3 that you’re looking for.

Here’s a step-by-step example of searching for Beyonce and Jay-Z’s “Deja Vu” MP3.
1. Go to google and type “?intitle:index.of? mp3 beyonce dejavu”

2. Here are the results. Not necessarily that the #1 result contains the MP3. Sometimes you have to try a few sites.

3. Found Beyonce - Deja Vu, but it’s a freemasons club mix version.

4. Clicking on that link and it brought me to a site where I can start downloading the MP3.

5. Right click on the text that says “Download Now” and select “Save Target As” for Internet Explorer or “Save Link As” for Firefox. It will start downloading…

What are you doing here is entering into a server and downloading directly from it. You can also specify a different extension such as AVI for movies, PDF for ebooks and etc… Just change the mp3 to the extension you’re looking for.

Original article : Raymond.cc