Each free item is limited to the first 100 applicants. The only thing you have to do is pay the shipping cost which is a flat fee of USD 5.15 anywhere in the world. The shipping is still cheaper than usual rates.

1freeaday is also a shopping site that stocks low cost products, small gadgets, PC accessories, home accessories, car accessories, beauty products, clothing accessories, musical instruments, sports goods and so on. Most of the products are available at throw away prices from under $3 to around $30. A few are moderately priced at $50 or above, but most of them are affordable. And did I mention they ship every product for free? Yes, except the “daily free products”, all things you shop here are shipped free anywhere in the world.

If you don’t need the free product they are giving away today, you can come back the next day to checkout the new free giveaway. Actually, you don’t even have to visit each day because the site declares what they are going to give away for the next 6 days. This site goes straight to my bookmark.

[via The Red Ferret]

Usually most automation tools are a simple macro recorder that records user actions like mouse movements and clicks, key presses etc and replays the sequence later to perform the same actions. In WinAutomation, the macro recording feature is only a part of the software. It’s not necessary to use the macro recorder to create an automated job. A user can create and edit jobs by selecting from a huge list of more than 130 predefined actions. There are all sorts of actions – from simple ones like opening programs, creating files, mouse clicks to complex ones like downloading files from FTP sites, and sending email. There are also conditional actions like “IF”, “ELSE” and “END IF” that allows users to create jobs involving logic and decision making. There can also be loops within a job to repeat a block of action. It’s like writing a computer program, the only difference is that there is no writing (only drag and drop) and it’s much easier.

Moreover, the complete resulted task listing is presented in plain English, making it even easy to read, understand and modify. The software also lets you compile jobs into standalone executable (EXE) files. These jobs can run on any computers without having WinAutomation installed, not to mention, these EXE files are portable too!

Jobs can be run either manually or can be event triggered, such as triggered by a specific process, file, keyboard strokes, network pings etc. WinAutomation also includes a task scheduler that can run jobs daily, weekly, monthly or in any arbitrary schedule. In the event a job didn’t run successfully, it can be configured to notify the user remotely via email or made to run another job.

Other unique features:

The Integrated Debugger helps you identify errors in a created job. The debugger lets you enable and disable actions, watch each action as it executes, set breakpoints to pause execution, execute the job action by action and at the same time inspect the variables' values and system changes.

Exception Handling: WinAutomation has an exceptionally clever feature called “exception handling”. Say, you have a job to copy a file, but the job fails because the destination disk becomes full; or the job fails to uploads a file to an FTP server because one day the network is down. WinAutomation has the ability to catch these exceptions and allows you to implement additional logic into your jobs to handle them.

Image Recognition: WinAutomation uses image recognition technology that allows you to create macros that requires clicking on specific areas on the screen such as a buttons or some control or window that can only be described by its appearance. This enables users to create jobs that can automate extremely difficult tasks not possible with other macro recorders.

It’s quite obvious that WinAutomation is a powerful automation tool for Windows. It isn’t surprising that their clientele includes top brands like Intel, Vodafone, Adobe, NASA, British Petroleum and of that sort.

The software comes with a hefty price tag though - the Standard Edition is priced at $129 and the Professional Edition costs $199. Now here is an opportunity for you to win a free license of this tool.

Win a free license worth $199

The folks at WinAutomation were kind enough to offer us 3 licenses of the Professional Edition, each worth $199, for Instant Fundas readers. Since we have only 3 licenses to giveaway, we are holding a little contest. To enter the contest use the form below to tell us how you would use WinAutomation to streamline your work, improve productivity and save time. The best three entries will win a WinAutomation 3.0 Professional License. We will run the contest all throughout this week, so you have plenty of time to think over and come up with good answers. The contest ends on Saturday, 5th September 2009. Winners will be announced next week.

- Entry Closed -

Movie Synopsis: In August of 1945, in a closing chapter of the second World War, a blinding flash lit the sky over Hiroshima. The places that were shielded from that searing light became permanent shadows on the city's walls and streets, while the city itself was decimated. "Shadowplay" is the story of Akio, a shadow of a young boy, who wanders the city searching for his family, while trying to make sense of the unfathomable atrocity.

Some contests are insane. I mean, how do you choose between these two?

But some are difficult to decide

At the time of writing this Predator was clearly ahead with more than twice the number of votes than Wikipedia.

And when you get tired of playing Wikipedia Vs Predator, you can move on to Explosion Vs Boobs (yeah!)

[via Reddit]

1900 - The Enchanted Drawing
1903 - The Great Train Robbery
1923 - The Ten Commandments (Silent)
1927 - Sunrise
1933 - King Kong
1939 - The Wizard of Oz
1940 - The Thief of Bagdad
1954 - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1956 - Forbidden Planet
1963 - Jason and the Argonauts
1964 - Mary Poppins
1977 - Star Wars
1982 - Tron
1985 - Back to the Future
1988 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1989 - The Abyss
1991 - Terminator 2: Judgement Day
1992 - The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
1993 - Jurassic Park
2004 - Spider-Man 2
2005 - King Kong
2006 - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2007 - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
2007 - The Golden Compass
2008 - The Spiderwick Chronicles
2008 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

But where is “The Matrix”?

[via Gizmodo]

ChromePlus has the following features not found in Chrome.

1. Double click tab to close page: You don’t need to click the small "X" button on the tab, simply double click on it.

2. Super drag: Drag a link in the page and drop it somewhere else in the page to open the link in another tab. Dragging and dropping a block of text in the page will search the selected text on your default search engine and open the results in a new tab.

3. Mouse gesture: Hold down the right mouse button while making gestures to execute various actions.

4. IE tab: This feature allows you to render a page using the IE engine inside ChromePlus.

5. Download Tools Support: This integrates various download managers such as Orbit, QQ Xuanfeng, IS, FlashGet3, FlashGetMini, NetX, WebThunder, Xunlei etc with the browser. If these tools are installed, you can find the corresponding item in the context menu when you right click on a link.

ChromePlus currently supports only Windows.

A lot of attention has been given on skins and icons making sure it’s one of the most beautiful things on display on your living room PC. But underneath the eye candies run a very stable and powerful software. In fact, many other open source media centers like Boxee, MediaPortal and Plex are based on XBMC Media Center’s code.

XBMC Media Center supports almost all common audio, video, and image formats. It supports playlists, audio visualizations, image slideshows, video subtitles, CD ripping, weather reports, Last.fm steaming and a lot more. Like many media center application, XBMC supports plug-ins that brings a variety of features and services to it. These plug-ins make available services such as television program guides, YouTube, Hulu, Veoh, Apple movie trailer, SHOUTcast streaming etc to XBMC.

XBMC is surprisingly light on system resources despite all the features and eye candy. When idle it uses an unbelievable low 50 MB. That drops even further to about 30 MB when you minimize the application (windowed mode). When playing DVD the memory usage surges moderately to around 100 MB. CPU utilization is never more than 5% even on my 3 year old Pentium D. If you looking for an extremely nimble yet powerful media center, this is it.

Here are some major features of XBMC worth noting:

• Play media from local hard drives, from optical disks, via network, or stream them over PVR and iTunes.
• Automatically retrieve thumbnails and reviews on movies from IMDb.com, TV Show posters and episode plots, and audio album thumbnails.
• Play videos from ISO and DVD-images directly from RAR and ZIP archives.
• You can close a playing movie and when you return back it automatically remembers where you last left. You can also create bookmarks.
• Powerful library management features. The video library allow organizing your movie collection by genre, title, year, actors, directors etc. Similarly, XBMC’s music library allows the organization of your music collection by title, artist, album, genre and popularity.
• Large number of plug-ins are available. Apart from those mentioned earlier, there are plug-ins for Internet TV and radio streams, email clients, instant messaging, train-timetables, peer-to-peer file-sharing downloads, IRC etc.
• Play casual games like Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more through plug-ins
• Fully skinnable, and each skin can be customized to your liking.

The complete list of features is available here.

When you sign up for Ring2Skype you receive an online number along with an extension. All calls to this number are routed to your Skype ID, which lets you answer calls from Skype no matter where you are on the world. The caller doesn’t even need to have a Skype ID to call you.

You can have as many online numbers you want and you can have them in different countries. This can be pretty useful at times. Suppose you have a friend living in Australia and you live in the US and your friend wants to call you but he or she doesn’t use Skype. You can then give your friend the Ring2Skype number registered in US to call you, or you can register a new Ring2Skype number in Australia and ask your friend to call that number. Calling a local number in Australia would be cheaper for your friend than calling the US number. As for you, you would receive the call in your Skype no matter which number he calls. It’s win-win for both parties.

Unfortunately, I was not able to test it since they don’t offer the service here in India.

Also see Talkster

 
A photo taken during the Golden Hour

The actual time of Golden Hour varies from place to place and all throughout the year. The soft, warm hue of the sunlight typical during the Golden Hour is determined by the sun’s altitude. And the time the sun takes to reach a particular altitude depends on the location of the place (latitude) and the time of the year.

Taking all these factors into consideration, some good folks have created a Golden Hour Calculator that allows any person anywhere on Earth to determine when they can expect the Golden Hour to start at any place on Earth. For the sake of uniformity, the calculator considers Golden Hour as the period when the sun lies between 6 degrees below the horizon and 6 degrees above.

When you visit the Golden Hour Calculator, the website gets your IP address and determines your location by Geolocation and automatically calculates the sunrise and sunset times, the elevation and azimuth of the sun and the golden hour. IP-geolocating, however, isn’t accurate, so you might have to choose your correct location from the map. Using the mouse wheel you can zoom in and out of the map to pick your exact spot.

As you can see from the image above, the calculator displays the estimated altitude of the sun at your location during a complete 24 hour period. Hovering the mouse over each sun position tells you the elevation and azimuth. The day is indicated by the light blue region and the night by the dark blue region. The yellow bars overlaying the blue region indicates the Golden Hour. The various times of the day – sunrise, sunset, time of maximum altitude etc are available both at local times as well as at Universal Time.

The grid under the blue region is the calendar, where each square represents a particular day of the year. When you click on any day it recalculates and displays the Golden Hour and other time information for that day. The calendar also displays the days of full moon and new moon. A few International holidays like Christmas and Easter are thrown into it as well.

Be aware that the calculator determines the various timings at sea level. If your location is higher than the sea level (most places are) and if there are hills around your times will vary.

Also see: Camera Simulator

Bad Photoshopping aside, it’s a terrible mistake to tamper with photos involving sensitive issues. Microsoft has offered an apology and changed the image on the Polish site to the original. But it was too late. TechCrunch readers had a field day yesterday when they announced a competition for the best Photoshop job.

So get Photoshop fired up and make your funniest (and yet not in any way offensive) version of the Polish Microsoft head replacement. No rules. Replace all the heads if you want to. Add costumes and props. And text bubbles. Whatever. Winner (chosen by our interns at the end of the day on Wednesday) gets a Bing Tshirt.

Here are some of my favorite entries

When you search for a book on Google Books, click on the Download button in the toolbar and if the book is in public domain and has been converted into the EPUB you will find that option under “Download”.

Motta has designed and constructed an innovative laptop stand called the Nottable. Made of aluminum and brass, this anodized, rust-proof contraption can be adjusted in all sorts of fascinating ways allowing you to use your laptop in even the most bizarre positions. It can be easily disassembled and folded into a briefcase sized pack for storage or transportation.

Nottable supports notebooks of 10 inches to 17 inches in size. It has rubberized clips to secure the notebook on to the base which is ventilated to prevent overheating. Mousepads are available that can be attached to the sides to support external mice. Here is a video demonstration.

An indispensable product. Nottable is priced at $150 and ships worldwide.

[via The Red Ferret]

This can be done with a little utility called Blogspreading.

BlogSpreading is a free tool that automatically appends a link to the latest post in your blog to your email signature. So instead of a static link, your signature changes every time you update your blog. Not only can that break the signature-blindness your recipients may have developed, it can even entice them to actually click on the links to read your post.

How does it work?

Blogspreading will work with any email client that allows addition of email signature through an external signature template saved on your hard disk. Almost all modern email software have this feature, at least Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird has it. BlogSpreading can process this signature file in such a way that it always contains a link to the latest post in your blog.

To begin, you have to first configure BlogSpreading and then configure your email client. On BlogSpreading you have to enter the URL of your blog’s RSS feed and click “Get Data”. The title and link to your last blog post will be retrieved. You can’t edit the title but you can edit the template of the signature. Add your custom messages and arrange the position of the link, title etc. Once you are satisfied with your signature export it as a template. 

Next, open your email software and configure it to add this signature template to every outgoing email.

Now every time you update your blog, launch Blogspreading and click on “Update”. This will update the signature file with your latest post. The next time you write and send a mail, your email software will retrieve the signature file from your hard disk, which now contains the link to your most recent blog post, and append it to the mail.

Unfortunately, the process of updating the signature file is not automatic. You have to do it after every new post. In case you don’t want to open the application there is a smaller command line tool that you can use to update. BlogSpreading is sorely missing the auto-update feature, otherwise it’s a useful software. Besides, it isn’t likely we will see one in future because the software hasn’t been updated since November 2007.

The same Windows 7 sidebar with exactly the same functionalities can be enjoyed on Windows XP and Vista with Thoosje's Windows 7 sidebar. The sidebar includes about 20 popular gadgets by default such as sticky notes, calendar, the obligatory analog clock, media player, POP3 mail retriever, RSS reader etc. The sidebar uses the same .gadgets file as the original Microsoft sidebar, so all gadgets on Windows Live Gadget library are compatible with Thoosje's Windows 7 sidebar.

Memory usage is around 60 MB, and CPU utilization is light. You can easily use it even on old PC’s without any major issues.

Scientist still don’t know a lot about why proteins fold or display some strange folding behavior. The more scientists know about how certain proteins fold, the better new proteins can be designed to combat the disease-related proteins and come up with cures for life threatening diseases like HIV/AIDS, Cancer and Alzheimer's. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Part of the problem lies on the astronomical number of ways even a small protein can fold because of the availability of large degrees of freedom. Figuring out the various possible structures of a protein is one of the most challenging problems in biology today.

Breaking the protein code

Because of the large amount of money, time and processing power required to research on the subject, researchers have hit upon a novel idea of harnessing the power of the human brain to solve the complex computational problems. They have devised a game called Foldit where players solved puzzles involving protein folding problems. 

Computers programs too can calculate all possible protein shapes and make computations, but researches believe that human players can figure out things faster. In fact, personal computers worldwide are already involved in computing protein folding problems in one of biggest distributed computing projects -Folding@home where millions of wasted CPU cycles on thousands of personal computers are utilized to perform calculations. Folding@home is just one such project. If you are interested, there other distributed computing projects you can get involved in.

Foldit is available for the Windows, Linux and Mac platform. Players need to install the game, and register an account to get new puzzles to solve and also to submit scores. In the beginning a series of practice puzzles teaches the rules of the game and the basic laws of protein folding. The basic goal of every puzzle is the same – to achieve the best structure. There are no right answers because the game developers doesn’t know it either.

Points are awarded not by how close you're getting to the known solution, but by how much energy would be needed to hold a real-life protein in the shape you've created. The game also allows players to compete against other players to collect the highest point for a specific protein. Puzzles expire when the best solution has been found and a new protein and a new puzzle becomes available.

The game is actually quite challenging, and the structures so delicate it can get frustrating at times. You will need the patience to keep trying. Overall it’s a nice way to waste some time and that too for a good cause.

Thanks BoingBoing

OfficeTab enables you to open multiple documents within one office window without cramming up your taskbar. With OfficeTab you can choose which Office applications you want tabs on - Word or Excel or PowerPoint or all of them. Most interestingly, if you right click on the tabs a small menu appears which is quite identical to the menu that appears on Opera with options like Lock Document (to prevent accidental closing), Close and Close All, etc.

OfficeTab also allows you to compare two documents side by side.

Image credits: Slashnow.com

There are plenty of options under the settings window that allows you to change the behavior and appearance of the tabs – tab switching, double-click to close, hiding tab-bar when a single document is open and so on.

OfficeTab is compatible with Office 2003 and Office 2007 on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The publisher page is in Chinese; if you have difficulty finding the download button you can use this direct download link.

[via Downloadsquad]

Snarl is as stylish as the original Growl with plenty of sleek skins and user adjustable colors, fonts, alpha-blending, transparency, shadow size etc.

Snarl uses a plug-in system through which notifications from third party applications are routed through to Snarl. The user is allowed to control the alert’s behavior, occurrence and looks. Currently Snarl includes support for a number of popular applications like iTunes, Windows Live Messenger, Pidgin, foobar2000, Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp etc. You will need to download and install these plug-ins individually.

Once installed, you will start receiving notifications from these applications through Snarl. If any of these applications annoys you with their alerts or steals focus from the current window, you will be now able to prevent it. Snarl also includes some default notifications like hourly time alerts, battery power alerts etc.

Snarl can display several messages at any time in several message windows one on top of the other. Snarl notifications can either be cancelled by clicking on them, or left to disappear automatically if ignored for a period of time. The user can configure whether to display visual or audio alerts, the position of the alert window as well as duration of the alert. These settings can be made to override the default settings of the supported application.

How useful Snarl will be for you depends on whether your favorite/preferred application is supported by it. Tools and guides on how to develop plug-ins for their application are already available for developers. We just have to make them aware of it.

Dinky Page is the first such service offering disposable pages to any one who might need them. No registration is required. Just create any HTML page and publish it. The pages aren’t exactly disposable either, because their FAQ says “Pages do not expire and they will not be deleted automatically unless they violate the Terms of Use.” So you can keep them as long as you want. There is a “Delete” link that appears only once – the first time you publish the page. Email the link to your self if you want to edit or delete the page later.

Pages can be created using their rich-text editor or simply HTML editor. You can use JavaScript, Flash, and anything that can be embedded on an HTML page. The files and images however, has to be hosted elsewhere. DinkyPage is extremely useful for sharing quick information, showing examples of code usage etc.

I created one http://dinkypage.com/ifundas2 Pretty Cool, huh?

Update: Another one - PasteHTML

Building models out of clay is definitely easier than building models in software. Recently I stumbled upon an even easier and amazing method to create models –using still images or videos. Actually there are two software that employ this method.

insight3d is an open source and free software that lets you create 3D models from a series of photographs. You give it a series of photos of a real scene or object from different angles and it automatically calculates the positions in space from which each photo has been taken (plus camera’s optical parameters) along with a 3D point-cloud of the scene. It then creates a 3D mesh polygonal model of the software which you can import into any 3D modeling software and finish the rest of the job.

Here is one example.

The software is available for Windows and a Linux version is in the works.

The second software is the most astonishing one. The software called VideoTrace is capable of creating digital 3D models from actual videos of the model. The modeler simply traces the outline of the models over the video frames and the software magically extracts whatever the user traced, out from the video, complete with the exact graphics. It’s mind blowing! Watch the video.

VideoTrace’s application is going to be endless from architectural engineering to games and movies. VideoTrace is still in beta stages and not available for public download. The website also doesn’t indicate whether this software will be released as a freeware or as commercial. 

10 minutes is short movie that lasts, as it’s title indicates, only 10 minutes, but it tells a much longer story. It tells how different things can happen to different people in only 10 minutes, and how 10 minutes in someone's life mean nothing but can be fatal in another's. The film won the award for the best European short film in 2002.

The main screen of the program gives you a concise information about the battery status, but you can switch to the detailed view where you can see the total capacity of the battery, the capacity when the battery left the factory and the actual capacity you are getting, which helps you see how the battery has degraded in performance over time.

Like most battery monitoring utilities, BatteryCare too allows you to set different profiles for different running condition of the laptop. When the laptop is drawing power from an AC outlet, it can switch to a high performance plan and when it’s running on battery power it can switch to a power saving plan. The power saving plan will dim the screen or turn of Bluetooth or take other such power cut down actions to conserve battery power and life.

A very unique feature of BatteryCare is the monitoring of battery discharge cycles. Discharge (or charge) cycles consist of using all that battery charge but not necessarily all at once. For example, say you use the laptop until the battery capacity falls to half and then recharge it. The next day if you did the same, it would be counted as one discharge cycle and not two.

Now laptop batteries contain a capacity gauge that allows us to know the exact capacity of the battery or the amount of energy stored. However, due to the continuous charging/discharging cycles, this sensor tends to stray and becomes inaccurate. An inaccurate battery gauge will give wrong figures causing your laptop to shutdown unexpectedly.

The capacity gauge is hence required to be recalibrated, which should be done after every 30 discharge cycles. BatteryCare keeps count of this discharge cycle and alerts you when the time for recalibration arrives. It also includes the necessary tool to recalibrate the battery gauge.

BatteryCare is an amazing battery maintenance tool, and is highly recommended for anyone using a laptop. You can also try some other tools like BattCursor or Notebook Hardware Control, but these are just battery level indicator. PowerSlave is another good tool for squeezing the last ounce of power when working on the laptop. BatteryCare’s recalibration tool is however a must have.

Smrl.tk is a hosted service that allows you to create your very own short URL service at your own free .tk domain. You will get the free domain, depending on availability of course, and you won’t require to install any script.

To get a personalized short URL go to http://smrl.tk/, which is my short URL service and click on the link that says “get your own url shortener”. Enter your preferred domain name, click “create” and that’s it. Your short URL service is ready to use.

As as example, try this http://ifnd.tk/1

Auslogics Task Manager provides information about running applications, processes and services in three different views. It also shows all files that are currently open and in use which is very helpful in gauging what’s happening under the hood. Auslogics Task Manager also has the ability to show the full path of all running processes, but that option is disabled by default.

You can right click on any running processes or application and set priority, kill it, set CPU affinity, freeze it or retrieve information about it from FileInspect.com

Apart from that the task manager has real time graphical displays of CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk activity and Internet traffic. The tools menu provides quick access to other utilities like Services, Computer Management, Control Panel etc.

If you want to switch the default task manager with the more powerful Auslogics Task Manager, it’s easy to do it by checking that option under the Tools menu.

[via Downloadsquad]