Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows

VolumeTouch is a utility that replaces the sound icon in the Windows system tray with a volume meter that gives you a live preview of your volume settings. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The program also lets you adjust your system volume using your mouse.

Here's how it works, you hit the Ctrl+Shift buttons and then move your mouse scrollwheel up and down to adjust the volume. If you don't like those button combos, you can choose a different key combination, or choose a different mouse behavior. VolumeTouch lets you control the volume by moving the mouse up and down or left and right as well.

You can also choose one of 5 skins for the tray icon. Some skins look better than others, but each gives you a real time view of your volume level.

[via Freeware Genius]

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Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google, Googleholic, Search, web 2.0

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

In this, day late, dollar short edition:

• Inside the Google favicon redesign
• Get transit schedules from Google Maps for mobile
• Explore the Magic Kingdom in 3D
• Location-aware Applications now available to 3rd party developers
• Round-up of other Google stories we covered this week

Continue reading Googleholic for June 7, 2008

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Filed under: Weekend Review

Been so busy trying to figure out Steve Jobs would announce next week that you haven't had time to read the news this week? We'll save you some time. First, it's probably a new iPhone. Second, here are some of our favorite stories from the week that was:

• Wikia Search human powered search engine becomes useful
  Ever wish you could rearrange search results in Google? Well, you can't. But you can customize Wikia Search, the search engine from the makers of Wikipedia to your heart's content. Don't like the order of the search results? Just vote your preferred results up. In theory, this could be an excellent way to deal with the inadequacies of machine ranking. In practice, web publishers are just going to spend all day fighting for the top listings.
• VLC on the iPhone and iPod Touch? Yep
  The iPhone is a remarkable device that lets you make phone calls, surf the web, watch movies, and listen to music. But if you want to watch DiVX videos, listen to MP3 files, or use any number of other formats, you're out of luck. Or at least you were last week. Because this week, the open-source VLC media player was ported to the iPhone. And there was much rejoicing.
• As June 30th approaches, are you stocking up on Windows XP licenses?
  Microsoft has set a June 30th cutoff date for Windows XP sales. Sort of. While it won't be impossible to pick up a copy of the 6 year old operating system after that date, it will be a bit tougher. Since Windows Vista isn't exactly what we'd call popular, and Windows 7 is at least a year or two away, now might be a good time to pick up a spare Windows XP license in case you need to install the OS on a new computer.
• Ubuntu Netbook Remix gets real official
  Dozens of computer makers showed off new cheap mini-notebooks at the Computex trade show in Taipei this week. And while many of those "netbooks" run Windows XP or Vista, many more are running Linux. Canonical wants in on the action and is planning to release Ubuntu Netbook Remix later this year. It's basically a custom version of Ubuntu with a new program launcher designed for small screens and optimizations for the low-power Intel Atom CPU. Canonical showed off an early build of the system this week.
• Ever use Pandora? Ever use Pandora...on AIR?
  While there have been desktop clients that let you listen to streaming music service Pandora without a web browser for ages, the company finally released its own official client this week -- to mixed reviews. On the one hand, it's great that you can listen to music without having to launch a browser. On the other hand, the desktop client, based on Adobe AIR, is kind of bulky and feels more like a web service than a desktop application.
• NexusFile - Putting Windows Explorer out of its misery
  Looking for a good replacement for the Windows Explorer? NexusFile supports tabs, favorite folders, has a built in FTP client, and disk cleanup tool. And it's free.

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