Customize The Background Of Your Google Search Homepage

Google search page is something, we land on everyday, in fact spend a lot of time there searching our various queries. Initially Google allowed it’s users to customize the background image of the Google search page but soon that option was taken away and everyone was stuck using the white default page. But no more, using this very useful extension you can now get your preferred choice of background for Google homepage.

Custom Google Background is the Chrome extension that you must download for free from the Chrome Store to be able to customize the backgrounds.

Using the extension is extremely simple. Once you have installed the extension to Chrome, just launch the extension from the download windows and follow these simple steps.

Step 1:

In the opened window you can either select an image from your desktop or simply by the URL. So simply upload an image or direct the URL that you wish to see in the background when you go to Google’s homepage. You also have a few other customizations possible such as hiding the Google logo itself, or the search button and various other such things.

Step 2:

Now once the image is uploaded, select it by scrolling down. You can also randomize the image by clicking on the random tab which would let you cycle through the images if you selected more than one image in the step 1. If you decide to change your mind, you can simply click on No background.

Step 3:

The final step obviously is to visit the Google homepage and see the wallpaper you just set. A fairly simple thing to do.

Youtube hacks

We all watch YouTube videos most of the time. But did you know that there are several tricks to ease your life and get rid of the headache while playing videos.

Here are some of them-

Repeat YouTube videos

Almost any song can be found on YouTube these days and many of us prefer listening to songs on it while we may continue to browse the web on some other tab of your browser. What do you do if the song finishes? Switch back to the tab, play the video again and come back where you were before....tiresome..!!

You can use a variety of websites to repeat a YouTube video, such as youtuberepeater.com. To repeat any YouTube video, go to the address bar, change the youtube.com part of the web page address to youtuberepeater.com, and the video will load on the YouTube Repeater website, repeating itself every time the video ends.

Here's a screenshot of how to do this.

Link directly to times in a video

 Let’s say you’re watching a video on YouTube and there’s a really funny or insightful part of the video that you just have to share with your friends. You could link to the video and tell your friends to skip to a particular time in the video, but that’s more work for them. Instead, you can link directly to a specific time in a YouTube video. When anyone clicks your link, the YouTube video will load and automatically skip to the time you specify.

To link directly to a time in a video, simply add &t=#m#s to the end of the URL, where the first # is a minute and the second # is a second. For example, to link to the 2:30 point in a video, you’d add &t=2m30s to the end of the video’s address.

Download YouTube videos

YouTube doesn’t want you downloading their videos, so there isn’t a download button on YouTube. But there are good reasons you might want to download YouTube videos – perhaps you live in an area with a spotty internet connection and you want to download them to view at your own leisure, or watch them offline during airplane flights without an Internet connection.

To download a YouTube video, you’ll need to use a third-party website. One convenient one is pwnyoutube.com, which gives you links to easily download YouTube videos. While viewing any video on Youtube, change the youtube.com part of the URL in your address bar to pwnyoutube.com and the video will open on pwnyoutube.com and give you download options. You can download the video as an FLV, MP4, or even MP3 audio file.

Automatically play videos in HD quality

To automatically play videos back in HD mode, you can install a browser extension. Whenever you start watching a video, the browser extension will do the dirty work, automatically enabling your preferred HD video quality setting for you. Chrome users can use Auto HD for YouTube, while Firefox users can use the YouTube High Definition browser extension.

These browser extensions follow you to every YouTube video you open, so they’re better than a URL trick that would only work on a single video.