Enrich your Gmail experience with Rapportive

I love how Rapportive "just works" out of the box.

Rapportive is telling me so much I didn't know.

I do not know how I ever survived Gmail without Rapportive.

Can't believe I waited this long to install.

From Twitter Buzz

Rapportive is a free browser plugin (available as both a Firefox add-on and as a Chrome extension), replacing the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar (which you would like probably to get rid of anyway) with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc).

You can immediately see what people look like, where they're based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. And you can record thoughts for later by leaving notes.

Installation is simple and takes no more than couple of minutes. You have to give it access to a minimum of information to get started (as your name and email address, via your Google account). The service pulls contact information from the Rapleaf database, so the amount of biographical information and links to social media accounts that are returned will depend on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie that contact’s email address to the various social media services.

Install plugin for free: http://rapportive.com/

Online Paper Grader

If you like to write stories or you have to write technical papers for your college, and you would like to improve your writing skills, you can get free real-time online assistance from Paper Rater - a free, web-based service that analyzes your writing and offers feedback on your grammar, spelling, and more.

Paper Rater couldn't be easier to use. Just paste in the text you want analyzed, choose what type of content it is—essay, research paper, speech, etc.—and submit it for review. Within seconds, Paper Rater generates a report that analyzes several aspects of your submission. It checks your document for grammar and spelling errors. On top of that, it helps you to improve the document's readability, word choice and style by an in-depth analysis.

PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. It is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing.

PaperRater.com combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM).

Main features

PaperRater.com analyzes documents immediately, 24/7, in real-time. It provides in depth analysis to help student, bloggers, and general computer users to improve grammar and writing. Some of our features include:

• Plagiarism detection. Find out if your paper contains plagiarized text before your professor does.
• Spelling and grammar check. Robust grammar checking allows you to find those pesky mistakes and correct them before turning in your paper.
• Style and word choice analysis. The proofreading system alerts you to opportunities to improve your writing.
• Readability stats are offered.
• FREE and premium packages are available.
• Vocabulary Builder tool.

Web site: http://www.paperrater.com/

Reasons to Use Paper Rater

• 100% FREE.
• It's simple - just copy and paste your paper in the box below .
• View detailed stats about word choice, grammar, spelling, and more.
• Your paper will be analyzed immediately in real-time.
• No registration or your personal information disclosure is required.  

Free Form access: http://www.paperrater.com/free_paper_grader

How to Speed up the Start Menu in Windows XP?

The default speed of the Start Menu is pretty slow, but you can fix that by editing a Registry Key. Fire up the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ MenuShowDelay

By default, the value is 400 (actually the number is timeout in milliseconds). Change this to a smaller value, such as 0, to speed it up. You may not have this registry parameter at all. In this case, you need to add it. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value: "MenuShowDelay"=0.

You may notice that setting the registry value to “0″ might be too quick for your mouse to respond. If that is the case, put the number higher, say 100, and check the effect on startup.

If this doesn't work for some reason, then you might try the following: Navigate to Display Properties then Appearance then Effects and turn off the option titled Show menu shadow. You will get much better overall performance.

Caution: Incorrectly editing the registry may severely damage your system. Before making changes to the registry, you should back up any valued data on your computer.