How To Change, Disable Opera Speed Dial

The question came up here whether it is possible to disable Opera’s built-in Speed Dial feature. Speed Dial displays a number of websites or Speed Dial extensions on the browser’s new tab page. Speed Dial was initially designed as the means to quickly access popular sites right away from the new tab page without having to enter the site’s name first or select the site from the bookmarks. Other browser vendors have started to integrate similar options into their browsers (the last to do are Mozilla with Firefox natively).

Speed Dial extensions are a relative new feature of Opera that allows users to install extensions to display dynamic contents on the browser’s new tab page.

Opera users who want to disable the new tab page, for instance to speed up the opening of new tabs in the browser or because they simply do not use the feature, can disable Speed Dial. The option to do so is however not listed in the options, but in Opera’s advanced configuration listing.

The easiest way to open the preference is to load opera:config#UserPrefs|SpeedDialState in the Opera address bar. This should put the focus on the Speed Dial State preference in opera:config.

To change Opera’s Speed Dial functionality or disable it, simply change the value of the parameter. Here are all values and their effect.

0 – This hides the Speed Dial on the new tab page. A Show Speed Dial link is displayed in the lower right corner of the screen. When you click on it, you see the standard Speed Dial tab page again.1 – The standard view mode.2 – Read only mode. This blocks all changes to the Speed Dial display, useful for Kiosk mode for instance.3 – A value of 3 disables Opera’s Speed Dial feature. A blank page is displayed instead.

If you want to disable Opera Speed Dial, change the parameter’s value to 3 and click on the Save button after scrolling down. The changes take effect immediately and without restart of the browser.

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Speed Dial Firefox Extension About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Monday February 27, 2012 -
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YouTube Search History Now With Disable Option

The popular video hosting site YouTube up until now kept a log of all of the videos that you watched on the site while logged in to your YouTube or Google account. YouTube knows about all the videos that you watched on the site while logged in to the account. The feature’s name could cause some confusion on its own, as it has little to do with searches on the site. Thus, viewing history would be more appropriate.

While it was possible to remove individual video or the complete list of all videos that you watched on YouTube, up until now it was not possible to disable the feature to have the site not record any activities in the first place.

This was a big issue for privacy conscious users who did not want their video history to be recorded at all. It could also be problematic on multi-user PCs that shared a single Google account, or where users sometimes forgot to log out of theirs.

Ghacks reader Odio just notified me that YouTube – finally – had added an option to disable the search history feature on the site. Google calls it pausing, but it effectively stops to record which videos you viewed on the site.

To disable My Search History, go to this settings page on YouTube. Please note that you need to be logged in for this to work properly. The page lists all the videos that you watched on the site in the past.

Locate the pause search history button at the top and click on it to disable the logging of videos that you watch on YouTube.

The button switches to Resume search history automatically which you can activate to have the viewing history recorded again. You may also want to click on the Clear all search history button to remove your existing search history records from the site.

I suggest you test the new feature by loading a video on the site, and then reloading the search history page to make sure nothing gets recorded anymore.

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See Who’s Watching Your Videos on YouTube About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday February 21, 2012 -
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Quickly Enable or Disable HTML Messages In Thunderbird

One of my security and privacy recommendations for desktop email users is to disable HTML emails. This basically turns every email that you receive into a plain text email that does not load anything from third party servers. Once in a while though you may stumble upon an email that you need or want to view in HTML. If you have disabled HTML you’d have to enable it again by going to View > Message Body As > Original HTML or Simple HTML to do that. And once you have finished reading the message, you need to perform the very same steps to disable HTML for all emails again.

Sebastian recommended the HTML Temp add-on for the Thunderbird email client to switch HTML messages in Thunderbird on or off more effortlessly.

Download HTML Temp from the official Thunderbird add-ons repository. Once it has been downloaded open up the email client and click on Tools > Add-ons to open the add-ons manager. Click on the options icon on the left of the search all add-ons form there and select Install Add-on from file from the context menu.

Select the downloaded add-on on your local computer and install it in the email program. You need to restart Thunderbird before it becomes available.

The add-on adds the current message display preference in the lower right corner of the status bar. You can now right-click on it to switch to Simple HTML or Original HTML whenever you need to view a message in HTML. Once you are done you use the same method to switch back to plain text messages.

The add-on allows you to move a button with the same functionality to one of the toolbars. This can be helpful if you have disabled the status bar in the program or prefer to click on the button in the header area of the email client.

Update: Sebastian mentioned that the toolbar button behaves different from the status bar button. When you click the toolbar button HTML will be enabled only for the active email and no other. This means that you do not have to click again to restore the plain text message view.

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Improve Firefox Private Browsing With Private Browsing Window Add-on About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday January 22, 2012 -
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How To Disable Restart Your Computer To Finish Installing Important Updates Prompt

We have all been there and seen it. Whenever updates are installed in Windows that require a reboot, you are prompted in regular intervals to do so. These messages appear shortly after installing the updates, and then regularly until you do so. The Restart Your Computer To Finish Installing Important Updates prompt offers to postpone the update for 10 minutes, 1 hour or 4 hours. The prompt is then displayed again if the computer has not been rebooted in the meantime.

Many Windows users dislike the nagging prompt, especially if they are currently running tasks that would be interrupted by a reboot. This includes video rendering, an important download or upload, or a document that needs to be finished in the next hour or so.

While you could select 4 hours from the menu to see the reboot prompt after 4 hours, you may still like to disable the display of the update prompt for a longer period of time. This can be useful if you are currently in a day long presentation that requires the computer.

There are two options to deal with the issue. You could first stop the Windows Update service for the current session. This basically blocks the prompt and any attempt to install new updates until the computer is rebooted.

The following steps are needed for this:

Open up an elevated command prompt window. You can do that by clicking on the Start button of the operating system, entering cmd in the search form and using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Enter to open it with administrative privileges. A user account control prompt may be displayed.Run the command net stop “windows update” to stop the Windows Update service for the current session.

You can restart the service with the command net start “windows update”. The service will also be started normally on the next start of the system.

The second option lets you disable the auto reboot option when users are logged on. This requires some Registry hacking and is only suggested for advanced users. You may also want to backup the Registry first before you make those changes.

Use Windows-r to bring up the run box. Enter regedit and hit enter to open the Windows Registry Editor.Navigate to the following Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto UpdateLocate the ForcedReboot key there and change its value from whatever it is set to to 0.

Please note that this works only under Vista, Windows 7 and newer operating systems.

The third and final option is the Local Group Policy Editor which is only available in some versions of the Windows operating system. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update and locate the following two parameters:

No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installationsRe-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

Enable the first parameter to block automatic restarts after update installations, and set the second to a high enough period to receive the reboot prompt less often.

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Disable Restart After Windows Update About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday January 19, 2012 -
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