Gtalk Lab Edition, very few people know of its existence

Have you ever heard of Google talk? Of course, who could ignore big G IM client? But anyone familiar with Gtalk Lab Edition? Very few people left.

Let me introduce you the Gtalk Lab Edition. As the name implies, it is an experimental program from Gtalk team with the philosophy of bringing the web and desktop together. What differentiate Lab Edition and normal version is the use of the open source Webkit engine to host the Google Talk gadget.

Here is the list of features available only to Gtalk Lab Edition.

• Group chat, tabbed chatting
• Receiving notification from Gmail, Orkut and Google Calendar
• Option to set Gmail as default mail client
• Launch Gmail, Orkut, Google calendar from system tray
• Snooze option – temporarily stop notification

Wait a second please! Don’t get rid of your normal version for this lab edition unless you don’t mind of this missing features.

• file transfer
• voice chat
• option to hide offline friends from list
• option to change display picture

Yap. You’ve heard me. You can’t change your display picture in this lab edition yet. So it’s up to you to decide whether you’re willing to give up your existing features for the other cool new features or not.

How to install fonts without admin right

In Windows, you can’t install new fonts if you don’t have admin rights. Microsoft have made it extremely difficult for normal users to install fonts. As all the Fonts in Windows live peacefully in C:\Windows\Fonts, which is only writeable by Administrators or elevated privilege account owners

So, how can we install fonts without having to ask for Admin rights? Well, thanks to Tsukasa, there’s a workaround. He has developed a tool called Registerfont (You can download here)

What this tool actually does is that add a number of fonts to your font cache which do not need to use an elevated user account. How to use this tool is very simple.

• Just download the above file.
• Extract it to anywhere you can have access.
• Find the Bin folder and copy the font files into it.There you’ll also find registerfont.exe
• Go to Command Prompt and locate to registerfont.exe then type “registerfont add font1.ttf font2.ttf font3.ttf … font1000.ttf”

What if you don’t even have access to command prompt?

Well, then, you can create shortcut by right clicking on Registerfont.exe, choose create shortcut. After that right-click on that shortcut and go to Properties. Then append the string add with the name of the font file you want to add.

Example : “C:\Documents and Settings\usernamexxx\My Documents\RegisterFont.exe” add font1.ttf

Please note that you have to put Registerfont.exe, its shortcuts and all your fonts in the same folder. That’s it! Once you run the shortcut, you can see that the fonts you added are available to all your favourite Windows applications such as MS Office or Web Browsers.