Game making is a big business. Every year billions of dollars are invested by various game industries to make games. It is reported that sales of popular video games generate more revenues than the biggest Hollywood blockbuster! That's how popular video games are.
If you ask me to pick up one browser, it will always be Opera. When I started browsing the internet some 8 years ago, I began with Internet Explorer like everybody else. I was happy with IE because I was ignorant and there weren't many alternatives at that time. When the Firefox revolution arose I switched to Firefox. But I had hardly used Firfox for three months when I discovered Opera. After that there was no looking back and I have been using Opera ever since. But some people out there are still using Internet Explorer. If you ask them they won't be able to name even 3 other browsers. Even most of the people who are using Firefox or Opera are not aware that plenty of alternatives are available. So today I'm going to bring you 10 of the finest browsers that aren't IE or Firefox or Opera. Here we go.
The meteor trails are too faint to be visible in the thumbnails. To enjoy these pictures click on them to enlarge it.
Perseid Meteor Shower
If you are looking for free web hosting with no irritating ads, then you are lucky because today I'm going to present you 5 excellent web hosts that provides you plenty of disk space and a mammoth bandwidth. All the services are free and has no forced ads. Let's begin with the one that provides the largest bandwidth, since bandwidth is the one that you will require if your site draws a large number of visitors.
Now this is something I call a hobby. Alexei Karpenko in his new project has launched a balloon with GPS, camera, sensors and communications to an altitude of 30km. High altitude ballooning is an emerging hobby, since price of GPS and communications equipment has gotten quite low. It is an excellent hobby for people fascinated by space flight and telerobotics and has many learning aspects — from systems design to electronics design to software engineering. There is also an exciting risk factor, namely, that you could lose your precious electronics if something malfunctions. He says that by his project he has verified that the Earth is indeed round and that space is black!!
OxygenOffice Professional (previously called OpenOffice.org Premium) is an enhanced version of the multi-platform office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org, that contains additional materials like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support.
What do you do when the trials period of a demo software has expired? Either buy it or crack it. I don't condone piracy, at least not publicly, but then, I know how easy it is to say "buy it". Paying for your operating system or a word package is alright, but spending $29 for a ping pong game is something not many people are willing to do. What will you do if you want to use the software for just a few more days? Well, there are some softwares that we can use and exploit them to serve our sinister purpose. :^) Here are three of them.
There are very few softwares available like the one I'm going to mention today - the WinXP Manager. WinXP Manager isn't just one software, it's many. It has a bunch of tools that helps you optimize, tweak and clean up your Windows XP.
You must have come across image verification process on the Internet quite often. When you register in forums, social networking sites, blogs and other communities you have to type out some letters and numbers in a box from an image, to prove that you are a human and not a spam bot. The most widely used image verification technique, also known as CAPTCHA, is where you have to identify twisted images of alphabets and digits and correctly enter them in a box. Infact, I haven't seen any other image verification process anywhere, until now.
Piky Basket is a software that can reduce repetitive tasks when copying/moving files and folders in Windows. Say, you have to copy several files from several different locations to one folder. You have to tackle this task by copying and then pasting files from each of the location to the destination folder, one by one. It's like copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste and so on. How about copy, copy, copy and then paste all at once? This is what Piky Basket will do for you.
Usually email addresses are of the type yourname@domain.com. The part after the @ depends on which email service provider you have signed up with. Gmail address will add the domain gmail after the @ while for yahoo it's either yahoo.com or yahoo.co.in, yahoo.co.uk etc. You can't customise the domain name, unless you buy one. But there are some services that allow you to choose a domain name from several dozens to hundred different names available, for free. Checkout these three cool email services
Virtualization is a process of running multiple operating systems on the same computer, all at the same time. Traditional method of running 2 or more operating system on the same computer was to partition the hard disk into drives dedicated to each of the operating system, and then booting into any one of them. But virtualization allows you to run 2 or more operating system at the same time, side by side. The virtualization software works by setting up a virtual machine on the host computer, which emulates the hardware and behaves as a machine of it's own. The operating system that is run on top of the virtual machine can't tell the difference between the real PC and the virtual PC.
One thing that Windows lack is a clipboard manager. If you are unsure what a clipboard manager does and when you can use it, then let me give you an example. Suppose you are working on a document and you have two more documents open, doc A and doc B, as reference from where you are taking data and other snippets of information while preparing your document. Say, you have a certain piece of text X that you have to insert repeatedly at a number of position on your document. Apart from that, every now and then you are copy pasting lines, tables and other pieces of information from doc A and doc B to your own document. Now since you have only one clipboard, i.e. at any time only one object can be copied to the clipboard, every time you have to insert the text X you have to copy it and then paste it and then it would be replaced by some other item and again you have to copy it the next time you paste it. A lot of time is wasted in copying the same item over and over again. This is when a clipboard manager comes handy.
Artweaver is a Windows Freeware image editing program that can simulate natural brush tools. Artweaver offers you a clear program window, which can be used without training immediately. It looks very similar to Photoshop, unlike Gimp which has a weird look with too many individual windows. Anybody who is used to Photoshop's interface finds it diffcult to work on Gimp and prefer to work on Photoshop, even though Gimp is capable of minor to moderate photo editing and retouching of images. But with Artweaver you will find completely at ease. And it's only 8.4 MB!!
Want to make your WindowsXP look like Fedora? Presenting the Fedora Transformation Pack. It replaces the system files and changes the icons, so no extra resources is required to run it. It completely changes the look of Windows and give it a Fedora look. If you are Linux fan, you should try this out.
Have a look at these images. No, they aren't real. They are all computer generated images, rendered using an amazing tool called Mental Ray. Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model, by means of computer programs. It converts a 3 dimensional model into a 2 dimensional image. Mental ray has given us movies like The Matrix trilogy, The Hulk, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Men in Black, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Day After Tomorrow and more. I'm not a person who is fit to give you a lecture on Mental ray, so I won't. I will just show you it's wonderful capabilities.
A Photomosaic is a picture (usually a photograph) that has been divided into (usually equal sized) small rectangular sections, each of which is replaced with another photograph of appropriate average color. When viewed at low magnifications and from a distance, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination reveals that the image is in fact made up of many hundreds or thousands of smaller images. If you didn't get it, than have a look at the photomosaic below. It's a cool effect that you can do to your images, turn them into posters and hang them on the wall of your room.
When it comes to CD or DVD burning, the software most people tend to use is Nero. But Nero isn't the be all and end all of CD burning solutions. There are other softwares as well that perform much better than Nero in terms of resource usage and speed. Here is a list of 15 free burning softwares that you can use in place of Nero.
This is an interesting piece of article I read at Dansdata. The article is a review of different thermal paste compounds that is applied between the processor and the heat sink, something that probably nobody had done before. To make the test more interesting they had thrown in a couple of weird stuff to compete with the likes of Artic Silver. The "clowns" as they call it, consist of toothpaste and Vegemite, a type of sandwich spread.
VirusTotal is a service developed by Hispasec Sistemas, an independent IT Security laboratory, that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. The file you want to scan can be uploaded to their server through their file uploading service or you can mail the file to them. VirusTotal will then scan the file with 32 different virus scanners. Yes, you read that right! 32 top virus engines will scan your file using the latest virus definition updates. With so many virus scanners looking into the file, the chances of an infected file escaping detection is remote.
A widget is a small pretty looking self contained program that runs on the desktop and performs a specific function. There are weather widget that fetches up-to-date weather forecasts and information from the Internet, clock widgets that displays the time, calendar widgets and all sorts of widgets that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Widgets require a platform to run and there are several available for both Windows and Linux. A lot of users are already aware of the various options available for Windows, but Linux widgets aren't that popular. So here I'm going to present some of the best widget engines available for Linux.
Windows usually come with a lot of fonts to help you stylize your documents. Some of the fonts are pretty and nice while some others are just simply horrible. Nobody actually uses all these fonts. And if you install some graphics or publishing software like those from Corel and Adobe, they install some more fonts of their own. So when you are editing a document and desire to change the font you will find yourself scrolling through hundreds of fonts which is both tedious and annoying. Apart from that, the more the fonts you have on your system the more is the time required for Windows to startup. So it's always advisable to limit the number of fonts installed on your system.
JPEG, GIF and PNG are all image file formats that provide a standardized method of organizing and storing image data. The file format most commonly seen is the JPEG. Almost all images and photographs are stored in the JPEG format. Even digital cameras use JPEG to save photos. Another image format that we see often in web pages is the GIF format. You must have noticed that the same web site sometimes contain both JPEG and GIF images. Why do they use different formats? Why not stick with one? Let's try to find out the reason and advantages of using different image file formats and learn when to use what.
Do you like to browse the internet at office, chat during office hours or play games at office? Do you worry that your boss may catch you unawares during playing? Do you have to quickly close games, Internet browsers and messengers or reboot your system every time when somebody enters into a room? If your answer is yes, then what you need is a software called "boss key".
Do you know that you can display a webpage as your desktop wallpaper? Yes, you can and without using any third party tools. To do this follow these steps:
1 hour software by Skrommel is a software section of the popular Donation Coder website. It contains more than a 100 little softwares that can do every imaginable task you can think of. The softwares are tiny, from 5KB to 205KB. All the softwares are freeware and are written in the AutoHotkey scripting language. It has some really interesting piece of softwares. Here are some of those softwares that I particularly liked.
How do you determine which updates were downloaded and installed on your system by Windows update? Was the installation successful? Are the updates actually installed? To answer these questions there is a tool called Qfecheck that verifies which fixes are installed on your system. This is a must have tool for your system. Instructions and download link at here.
When I started my blog two months ago a few of my fellow bloggers advised me to go with Wordpress. But I had already started the blog and didn't want to go through the troubles of exporting everything to another platform, so I stuck with Blogger. I'm not of the opinion that Blogger is bad or inferior to WordPress. I have started to like Blogger and though it's a great blogging platform and the most popular too, there are some features that I wish Blogger had. Today I'm going to pen down my wish list.
Absolute Color Picker is a free software for webmasters and web-designers. This is a simple application based on Absolute Color Picker ActiveX Control that lets you select and pick colors by means of various color models and convert them into HTML-based hexadecimal representation. Being a great compact color designer it features a free color picker, color scheme generator, color history builder, color scheme management system, screen color grabber and much more.
Liked a particular Wordpress template and wished you could use that in blogger? You can, well, almost. A person named Jack Supit at JackBook is doing an awesome job converting popular Wordpress templates to Blogger templates. "You choose the design, We convert it into Blogger Template", they say. Right now there is some problem with the request page; they say that have messed up with the pages. Anyway, if you want a Wordpress template to be converted to Blogger template, just contact them.
Blogging requires a lot of other tools to help you, like an HTML editor for your post, a color picker to adjust colors of the fonts, the banner, the bar etc. A screen ruler to measure sizes of the various section of your blog or websites. How convenient it would be if you could find all these within the browser itself? Well, if you are using Opera then you are lucky, 'cause Opera has a number of widgets for web designers. If you own a blog or a website then here are 7 must have Opera widgets for you.
