Splashtop Instant-On OS Boots You Into Chromium Quickly (on Some HP Laptops) [Video]

Windows only: Splashtop, an instant-on, web-focused OS with Chromium, formerly pre-installed on laptops alongside Windows, has gone and made itself a free download. The catch? It's mostly HP Mini and Pavilion laptops, and one Compaq, that can run it, for now.

Which HP/Compaq laptops? Here's the compatibility list. For those who happened to pick up the right kind of PC, though, Splashtop does look pretty handy. It books quickly to a minimalist OS that features Chromium, the open-source version of Chrome, with Flash pre-installed. There's a search bar powered by Bing. Two big buttons make it easy to get back to Windows or power off/sleep the system, and your Chrome start tab panels make up your desktop.

If you're able to give Splashtop a go in its new download form, tell us how you like it in the comments. It's a free download, and installs through Windows.

Splashtop OS beta [via Tested]

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Right Click to Link to a YouTube Video at a Specific Time [Video]

You've always been able to hack a YouTube URL to link to a specific time, but now all it takes is a right click.

This is a very simple trick. Load up any YouTube video, seek to a specific time, pause the video, and right click. Then you'll be able to choose "Copy video URL at current time" and end up with a URL in your clipboard that'll start the video at the time you chose. Currently this only works on YouTube.com, but hopefully it'll roll out to embedded players on other sites in the future.

Thanks for the tip, HahSohrob!

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FindTheBest Compares Almost Anything Online to Find Your Best Option [Video]

FindTheBest is a comparison engine that lets you browse or search for almost anything and provides an unbiased overview of your options so you can choose the right one for you.

In the way travel sites like Hipmunk provide unbiased flight search results, FindTheBest attempts to do that for practically anything on the web. Suppose you're looking for the best blogging platform and our Hive Five on the subject didn't quite do it for you. Search for blogging software in FindTheBest and you'll end up with a page like the following:

(Click to enlarge.)

At first it's a pretty daunting list of your options, but on the left side of the page you'll see a list of checkboxes, a cost slider, and other options so you can narrow down your comparison grid based on things that matter to you.

FindTheBest isn't limited to just technology stuff. You can search and compare just about anything, from pet breeds to vacation spots to the best colleges for a particular course of study. Of course, if you're shopping for the holidays and want to compare a few products it can definitely handle that as well. FindTheBest is currently in beta and available to use now for free.

FindTheBest [via Mashable]

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Needle Is a Smart and Efficient Research Assistant [Video]

If you've ever spent hours clicking through web pages collecting data—whether you're planning a vacation or culling data for academic research—webapp Needle (presumably so-named with the haystack in mind) collects and organizes data from any source, online or off.

We could painstakingly explain Needle, but your best bet is to watch the video demo above. Basically you teach Needle how to understand a data source—and it's incredibly good at learning how a data source works, even if it's a tedious-to-navigate web site—and then, once its got the hang of the source, Needle collects all the data you ask for automatically, sorting it into an easy-to-parse format. Once you've got it, you can search, map, chart, and analyze the data however you see fit.

Again, check out the video to see it in action. Needle's definitely not a tool for everyone, but if you do a lot of research online, it seems like a lifesaver. (ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick sure thinks so.) Either way, you can't deny that it's a cleverly built tool. Needle is free for personal use.

Needle [via ReadWriteWeb]

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Stream Any Video to Your Apple TV, No Pre-Conversion Required [Video]

AirPlay is great if your video collection is in the right format, otherwise you can only stream Apple-approved videos from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Here's how to circumvent that limitation and how to get the best results.

AirPlay is Apple's great new media streaming technology that lets you stream your music, video, and photos from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Air Video is an iOS app that lets you stream any video from your Mac or PC to your iOS device, converting it on-the-fly if necessary. Wouldn't it be great if you could combine these two things? Then you could stream any video in any format from your computer to your iPad to your Apple TV. Because AirPlay's APIs aren't yet available, Air Video's developer says he can't add this functionality to the application. Fortunately, if you want to jailbreak your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can install a little hack that'll let you stream anything from Air Video directly to your Apple TV.

This is very easy to do. Here are the steps:

1. First, you need an iOS device running iOS 4.2 or greater. You'll need to jailbreak your device, and the currently redsn0w is the jailbreak method of choice for iOS 4.2. (Here's how to do it.)
2. Once you're jailbroken, you need to jump into Cydia—that's the package manager that should now be installed on your device—and download AidVideoEnabler. You don't need to add any special repositories. You should be able to just search for it, download, and install.
3. Reboot your device.

That's all you need to do to make this work. It doesn't work perfectly, however, so let's take a quick look at how you can get the best experience.

First things first, the bit rates don't matter here—the iPad we used could handle the highest setting in Air Video so as long as the computer converting and serving the video can keep up, feel free to tell Air Video it's okay if it wants to stream at the highest possible bit rate. For reference, that's 2560kbps and you can set it in "Global Settings." The only thing you really need to worry about is when you start streaming to your Apple TV. We found that if you don't let Air Video get a pretty decent head start of at least a few minutes, streaming will fail. If you let it convert for a little bit before you get started, however, it works like a charm.

That's it! Enjoy streaming all your videos!

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