After you download any Linux distro from the internet, you have to burn it to a DVD, CD or a number of CDs to install it. That CD or DVD is generally used only once after which it lies unused , and worse, almost every Linux distro comes up with a new release every 6 months. So if you are in the habit of upgrading to every new version, you must have dozens of CDs lying at the bottom of your drawer. What a wastage of CDs! But with a little trick you can install any Linux directly from the hard disk without burning a single CD or DVD. The prerequisite of this trick is to have an operating system already installed on your computer. This is obvious because unless you are able to boot into your machine, you can't install anything; and we are not going to boot from the Linux disk because we aren't burning any. Here I'm going to focus on Microsoft Windows as the pre installed operating system.

Though Google has acknowledged the presence of a number of bugs in blogger beta, and has conveniently started a Known Issues for the New Blogger blog to address these issues, yet there are a number of bugs not documented in the blog, which I encounter more frequently and are more annoying then any of those discussed on the blog. Here are some of those bothers.

There is a way to put your old floppy disks to good use - decorate them on your wall. That's what I have done.

What is Exif data?

Exchangeable image file format (official abbreviation Exif, not EXIF) is a specification for the image file format used by digital cameras. The specification uses the existing JPEG, TIFF Rev. 6.0, and RIFF WAVE file formats, with the addition of specific metadata tags. The metadata tags stores a wide range of information about the picture shot and the camera with which the picture was shot. Some information that get stored along with the image includes

If you pick up any computer book or dictionary and look up the term Gigabyte, you will find it defined as “1 gigabyte is equal 1024 megabytes”. Similarly, 1 Megabyte is defined as being equal to 1024 kilobytes, and 1 kilobytes as equal to 1024 bytes. That’s what we have been taught and that’s what we believe to be true. But that definition of gigabyte, megabyte and kilobyte has changed nearly 8 years ago.

Whether you use the Internet at home for entertainment or at work, you probably use some kind of instant messaging service to chat either with your buddies or your colleagues at work. Instant messengers like GoogleTalk or Yahoo Messenger by default allow only one instance of the application to be run, which means that you can login with only one user name at one time from one computer. But most of these application allow more than one instances of the application to be run, either by a registry edit or simply by changing a setting of the program. The following is a compilation of all the tricks for popular instant messaging clients that allow one to login with different user names from the same computer.

You must have noticed that the DVDs and CDs you burn at home to backup your favorite data becomes unreadable, even though you might have done nothing more than burn and store it. However, the factory made CDs that you buy last for years and read just as new. That’s because there is a huge difference between factory made CDs and home burnt recordable CDs, but most people are unaware of it.

The history of computers playing chess dates back to 1914 when the first real chess playing machine called El Ajedrecista built by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo made its debut during Paris World Fair. I say real because prior to that several unsuccessful attempts were made to create chess playing machines using cunning tricks like hiding a man inside the machine! The most famous being the machine called the Turk, unveiled in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, at the court of Empress Maria Theresa. After the advent of digital computers in the 1950s, chess enthusiasts and computer engineers have built, with increasing degrees of seriousness and success, chess-playing machines and computer programs. In 1997 computers made history when Deep Blue of IBM defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and the general outcome was that the strongest player in the world is a computer.

During one of my internet browsing sessions I stumbled upon this forum thread which held a poll. I laughed when I saw the poll question. I laughed harder when I saw the results.

What is metadata?

Metadata is usually defined as “data about data” or “information about information”. Metadata describes how and when and by whom a particular set of data was collected, and how the data is formatted. Most people are unaware that Microsoft Word documents store metadata in all word documents. You must have noticed that when you select a word document, the preview panel (Common Task in Windows XP) shows some details about the document such as the "author". You must have also noticed that the author's name might not actually appear in the document, and yet it somehow shows the author's name and you can't even edit it. That's metadata. The following are some examples of metadata that may be stored in your documents:

There are hundreds of online services that allow you to store files, just like your hard disk. In most of the services the storage capacity is limited to 100MB, 250MB or at most you can get 1GB. Some provide even as low as 10MB and 20MB. But there are a few services that provide massive amount of storage for free. Here is a list of services that provide in excess of 2GB.

The following site has a large collection of original soundtracks of games. Games ranging from Pacman to Call of Duty, you will find them all. Certainly worth a bookmark.

Download game soundtracks

How many times have you asked that yourself before buying a new game? Well, System Requirements Lab can answer your question.

System Requirements Lab is a FREE web service that automatically analyzes your computer and discovers if you can run a specific product.

Until a few years ago, Internet Explorer was the dominant and the most used browser on earth, infact, it still is. But things have changed. Internet Explorer has constantly been on the receiving end of user’s wrath. Numerous security holes and vulnerabilities and lack of improvement have given them enough bad publicity, such that users have started seeking for alternatives. Two such alternatives that are competing for user’s attention are Opera and Firefox.

http://y.20q.net/

Visit the above website and it will ask you to think of something. The object you think of should be something that most people would know about, but not a proper noun or a specific person, place, or thing. It then asks you a few simple questions as it tries to identify the object you thought of. The website claims that it is able to correctly identify the object in less than 20 questions, provided the user answers the questions correctly too. However, different people might answer the same question differently and there is no right or wrong answers, in which case it might take more than 20 questions to identify the object. Nevertheless, it does manage to identify the object after all. Give it a try, it's a good time pass.

What is CPU Affinity?

Simply stated, CPU affinity is the tendency for a process to run on a given CPU as long as possible without being moved to some other processor. When we run an application on a dual-core processor, usually both the cores get used depending on whether the application is multi threaded or not and how efficiently Windows distributes the threads between the 2 cores.

Sometimes you conduct a search on Google and the search engine returns a number of results, but when you try to open the ones that looks the most promising you get a registration page. One thing that you can do is click on the cached content to view the page directly from Google's cache. But what if you want to view another page from the same site, not present in Google’s cache?

There are plenty of astronomy softwares and sky simulators that help you to identify and observe astronomical bodies. Some softwares just let you travel around the universe and marvel at the stars and planets as you zoom past them.

Here is a collection of some very cool and descriptive flash animations that shows the different types of techniques machine guns uses. All the animations are taken form HowStuffWorks website.

Before taking on machine guns, lets begin with the old standard double-action revolver.

A breathtaking view of the Mt. Everest taken from the Space Shuttle Atlantis (Mission STS-37) in early April of 1991.

Gmail has an interesting little tweak where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. It does not appear, however, that the +string feature works when sending email from a gmail account to itself. Additionally (in some cases) the string appended to the e-mail address may not be longer than six characters.

Looking for your favourite magazine online? Look no more, for the following site has got hundreds of magazines for you to download, free!! The magazines are organised into the following categories (the figure in parenthesis indicates the number of magazines in the category)

Some poor guy bought a "Made in China" 8GB USB drive for cheap at an online store. He was wondering why it didn't work, until he broke it open. This is what he found.

How Keyloggers Work?

When you type on your keyboard, the keys travel along a path within the operating system before it arrives at your browser. Keyloggers plant themselves along this path and observe and record your keystrokes. The collected information is then sent to the criminals who will use it to steal from you.

Suppose we take a long ribbon and wrap it around the earth, around the equator, so tight that not even a piece of paper can go between the ribbon and the earth. Now we increase the length of the ribbon by just 1 metre so that it becomes slack. This makes it possible to raise the ribbon from the surface of the earth because we have loosened it by introducing another 1 metre to it's length. You have to tell me by how much the ribbon can be raised from the earth's surface. Remember, the ribbon is raised not at one point on the earth but all around the earth, equally. The following diagram will make things clear.

Consider this scenerio: You have some programs installed in drive C and now the drive is running out of space. You wish to reallocate the programs to another drive but cut-pasting the programs won't work. You don't even have the setup files of those programs, so you can't reinstall them on another drive. What will you do? Enter Application Mover

Universal Extractor is a program do to exactly what it says: extract files from any type of archive, whether it's a simple zip file, an installation program, or even a Windows Installer (.msi) package. This application is however, not intended to be a general purpose archiving program. It will never replace WinRAR, 7-Zip, etc. What it will do is allow you to extract files from virtually any type of archive, regardless of source, compression method, etc

A collection of some of the best nuclear explosion pictures. The images are amazing.

The internet is full of viruses, trojans and malicious programs called malwares. Unless you take precautions from viruses and worms before connecting to the Internet, sooner or later your PC will get infected with these. I have seen computers with massive infection due to lack of proper security softwares and mainly due to lack of knowledge of the owners. Everybody likes to and wants to browse the Internet but such bad experiences often mars the joy of Internet surfing. The aim of this article is to provide you with some tips and teach you how to keep yourself and your computer safe on the Internet.

Instant Fundas has been offering readers with interesting and useful articles on computers and technology for close to two years. It publishes software reviews, tech news, tutorials and various productivity tools and tips that help readers get the most out of technology. It constantly introduces you to unusual software and web applications you never knew existed. We always try to bring you software that are free and useful, yet largely unknown.

If you have any tips for us, news to share, or if you have written a software or web application we would like to hear from you. Write to us if you have any suggestions for this site. We are all ears.  

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Everybody has to begin with the first post. It's the most difficult of all post, in my opinion. Besides, this is my first venture into the unexplored territory of blogging, which makes it even more difficult. But soon I would be posting some cool and great ideas (hopefully!) on everthing that I know and think of. So keep looking.