Tech Marshal

Google recently changed the theme of its YouTube player from white to black. When you embed a video to your blog or website, you can, not only modify the appearance to white or black, according to your webpage theme but also change the color of the seek bar.

How To Embed Videos Using Black or White YouTube Player Skin?

To modify the player’s appearance to your liking you need to add the code in red to the embed code. You can choose from the following new themes introduced by YouTube:

Black Theme With Red Seek Bar:

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vYCahlG6bdY?theme=dark&color=red" frameborder="0" width="520" height="326" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Black Theme With White Seek Bar:

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vYCahlG6bdY?theme=dark&color=white" frameborder="0" width="520" height="326" allowfullscreen></iframe>

White Theme With Red Seek Bar:

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vYCahlG6bdY?theme=light&color=red" frameborder="0" width="520" height="326" allowfullscreen></iframe>

White Theme With White Seek Bar:

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vYCahlG6bdY?theme=light&color=white" frameborder="0" width="520" height="326" allowfullscreen></iframe>

POP e-mail fetching is a great feature of Gmail to retrieve messages from your other emails accounts via POP and display them in your inbox alongside the emails that come directly to your Gmail account.

Anyone who has been channeling emails from various addresses to one master Gmail address, knows that Gmail uses a timing algorithm to retrieve messages from POP accounts. The problem, however is the time lag. Often you would want to instantly check whether the email you were waiting for has arrived or not.

Quickly Check If a New Email Has Arrived or Not :

To check or retrieve emails at any desired time, head to your email settings and under Labs, enable the “Refresh POP Accounts” option. Then save changes.

From now on you will see a refresh link at the top of your inbox. Whenever you refresh, Gmail will check and retrieve any new message from any of your associated accounts.

One of the many features that Google introduced in its newly launched social platform: Google+, is that it displays all your Picasa web albums in the photo section of your Google+ account. You can view photos from your circles, your phone, your own photos and of course, it allows you to view, edit or delete your Picasa web albums directly from the Google+ interface.

What’s the link between Google Plus Albums and Blogger Posts?

Many Blogger blog users are not aware that the photos they use on their blog posts are saved in their Picasa web album. So when they join Google+ for the first time and see all their photos from their blog, they assume that the photos are also viewable by their friends and family members or even anyone who isn’t in their circles.

This is when the problem starts. Some Google+ users start deleting their albums and can unknowingly end up deleting the albums containing photos they have used on their blog posts for years.

This can easily be avoided. Users must know two things to be on the safe side:

1) Albums that you have not shared will be visible only to you:

As a Google+ users, you shouldn’t be worried about your blog images showing up in the photo section of their Google+ account as only the images that you share will be visible to your circles.

2) Deleting Photos from Google+ will also be permanently deleted from Picasa web album.

Any Picture that you remove from your Google Plus account will also be removed permanently from Picasa web album, hence from your blog if you had used it on your blog.

When you are about to delete an album, a dialog box will be displayed stating that photos will also be removed from Blogger, Picasa Web and other Google Products.

Related: Backup your Picasa Web Photos and data from other Google Product

While the platform preview of Internet Explorer 10 is available for use with windows 7, the users of vista or XP won’t be able to use the latest release of the still widely used Microsoft Internet Explorer even when the final release is made.

The surprise announcement came when computer world’s Gregg Keizer contacted Microsoft to find out about its plan for supporting IE 10 in windows Vista.

Microsoft confirmed that the latest release will only support windows 7 by giving the following email response:

Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware.

Although vista is no longer the OS of choice for both business or individual users. Globally, however XP is still the most widely used OS. The lack of the latest IE support or any other applications makes windows XP users the bigger sufferers.


If users try to install IE 10 Platform preview on windows vista they will get an error message and the installer will shuts down.

Google has launched a new social platform where people can earn money by solving problems.

Prizes.org is run by Slide, a gaming company that Google acquired last year for $182m. The Idea behind this new service is simple: Users create a contest where they post a question or task and fix a cash amount for the best answer or task to be done. For example users can ask for ideas for a new website, advice on a comprehensive “Get Healthy” plan, or planning an ideal summer vacation, etc.

Each task is to be done within a fixed amount of time, during which people can vote for the best answer or advice given. The user with the most votes wins the cash prize. The money on offer currently for the questions is between 10$-50$.

Interesting to note that the site features very little Google branding and the sign-in, currently is through Facebook or Twitter, not with a Google ID, which may be a smart move to reach a bigger audience.



Prizes.org is in beta but its available for everyone, although the contest creation like all recently launched Google services is still invites-only.

The Data Liberation Front, an engineering team at Google has launched a new service called Google Takeout, allowing users to create backups of data from various Google services.