Instant Fundas

FilerFrog is a free plug-in for Windows Explorer that offers a handy set of tools that eases the task of everyday file management. It has been a while since I came across a good plug-in for Windows Explorer , and FilerFrog surely falls into the “good” category.

Google just debuted a brilliant new feature called Priority Inbox aimed at providing users a way to tackle email overload by automatically sorting important emails for them. Priority Inbox, which the company announced yesterday and rolled out for users just a few hours ago, is actually godsend for those who gets inundated with hundreds of mails each day.

Windows 7 Media Center is designed to be your entertainment hub for the big screen. As such, it makes perfect sense to watch the latest movie trailers inside Media Center rather than go hunting for the same on YouTube. So let us look at two Windows 7 Media Center plug-ins that allow you to stream movie trailers to the software as they become available, without you having to go looking for them.

The results of last week’s giveaway of iSkysoft DVD Ripper are here. The 5 winners who have won a license each of the $39.95 software are:

Hardware acceleration is the new mantra of 2010. When you are looking for speed, harnessing the power of the hardware is next logical step to do. Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 3.7 and Adobe Flash 10 has successfully implemented GPU accelerated graphics rendering. This time it’s Google’s browser Chrome.

Although there is no limit to the number of Dropbox accounts you can create, you can run only one instance of their desktop client on your computer. If you have more than one Dropbox account and need to setup all of them on your computer at the same time, follow this tutorial.

If you find yourself with a task of cleaning up large amount of text that were typed by a nincompoop, you will discover that a typical word processor proves inadequate. Sure, you will get lots of red wriggly lines but you have to tackle each of them individually. And word processors do not format text by its own. You have to do that too.

Restore points allow users to roll back changes made to the Windows operating system to previous system states. This includes system files, registry keys and installed programs. Windows automatically creates restore points before key changes are made to the system, such as installation of Windows updates, drivers, software and un-installation of software. Windows wouldn’t create a restore point unless you give them a reason to.

Here is a quick heads up: those who failed to win a license of Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe that we gave away early this month , can grab a license of Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Standard which the software house is giving away starting tomorrow. The offer is open from August 27 till August 30 and details will be revealed tomorrow on their Facebook page .

Hard-core Digg users might spend all day digging their favorite links to the front page and burying unpopular ones to the bottom, and argue and debate why certain links made it and others didn’t, but all it take is a 17-year-old high school kid and some spare time to determine which stories will reach the frontpage 24 hours before it actually does.

iSkysoft DVD Ripper is a powerful DVD ripping software for Windows that can rip DVD movies to a wide variety of video formats. iSkysoft DVD Ripper can also rip audio DVDs to different audio formats. Thanks to its different pre-configured profiles, any average PC user can easily rip a DVD movie to the hard disk with excellent quality and optimum use of disk space.

Gmail’s long awaited feature has finally come to fruition: you can call any phone right from Gmail. Gmail had voice and video chat between PCs before, but starting today you can call any mobile or landline number anywhere in the world right from Gmail’s interface. This feature is currently available only for US users (sob); international availability is yet to announced.

Early this year we wrote about a privately funded, non-profit project by the name of OpenLuna Foundation , whose mission objective is to put a man on the moon using only open source technology. We haven’t checked out on their progress for a while but their website tells me that they are still around and, in fact, they are recruiting at the moment. Anyways, the reason why I remember them today is because of a news article I read at Neatorama .

Mozilla recently unveiled a new tab grouping feature called Tab Candy, now renamed Tab Sets, that is available for test run on Firefox 4 beta . If you were keeping tab (pun intended) of its development, we must know by now that Tab Sets offer a visually impressive way to group and view tabs in Firefox. Tab Sets presents an array of thumbnail images, each representing a tab, which can be housed inside rectangular boxes that constitute a group. Tabs can be moved from one group to another, and groups can be named and moved as well. It does look great.

Cameyo is a free, open-architecture based application virtualization software that allows software applications to run in their own virtualized environment. A virtualized application uses operating system resources such as environment variables, files and even Windows Registry keys within a virtualized layer. As such, application virtualization keep the virtualized application sandboxed and separated from the underlying operating system. Two common uses of application virtualization are testing of unverifed application and creation of portable applications. Cameyo does both.

Watching streaming movies online in a foreign language is impossible if there is no subtitle. And streaming movies usually don’t offer any unless the subtitle is embedded on the video. One trick is to grab the video URL of the streaming movie, if possible, and watch it in a media player that supports playing from a URL. The subtitle file can be downloaded separately and watched along with the video. Most video players support network play and subtitle these days. VLC, GOM Player, KMPlayer are just a few names from the top of my head.

A few days ago, the uTorrent team released an updated build of version 3 (which is still under development) with several privacy features. The new build featured a new Privacy option under Preferences that excited many BitTorrent users. There were three options under the new privacy heading, one of which reads “Do not share your IP with peers”.

I absolutely hate this behavior. Why does Chrome has to close the browser when I close the last tab? If I want to exit the browser I will click on the red X. If I want to exit a page I will click on the tab close button. It is as simple as that. Because of this annoying habit I have to keep a dummy tab open whenever I’m using Chrome. But then again, I often absent mindedly close the dummy tab.

PhotoShape is a free software using which you can give your images a perspective by allowing you to rotate any photo three dimensionally using your mouse. The software uses the OpenGL library to give you an updated preview of the result in real time.

The Gmail Undo Send option which was introduced early last year is a very handy feature that allows you to prevent a mail from going through if you hit the send button accidentally. When this option is enabled under Gmail settings, Google will wait for a few seconds before sending an email. If you act quick enough you can cancel the mail by clicking on Undo Send, and avoid the embarrassment of sending the wrong email.

W7 Theme is a free script that change the look and feel of your Ubuntu desktop to resemble that of Windows 7. You can download either a GNOME and KDE version. The developer also offers links to download Windows 7 theme for Firefox to get as close as possible to the Windows 7 look.

Search engines can pull up hundreds of recipes for any given dish. Which one will you choose? Surely, the one that doesn’t require you to run to the supermarket to pick up missing ingredients. Once in a while you can make that effort, particularly if you have guests coming over for dinner. But if you are feeling tired or lazy and just want to prepare something good out of whatever you have in your pantry, the usual cookbook won’t work. You need a reverse-recipe search engine.

First of all, thanks to everyone who took part in the giveaway contest for SPAMfighter Pro licenses that we organized last week. We received some 40 entries, and from among them the computerized random number picker at Random.org has picked up the following 5 names. 

Some software on installation tries to add an entry to Windows list of auto start programs so that the program would launch automatically every time Windows start. Some of these programs have the courtesy to ask the user whether they would like that, but most programs do not share these good traits. If you install software frequently but do not review your startup entries through the Msconfig utility, you will find that a large number of these programs are happily sitting in your system tray and consuming resources like uninvited guests.

CU3OX is a free and attractive Flash image slideshow creating software using which you can create fancy Flash slideshows for your website or blog. The software features a rather unique 3D transition effect – the images are sliced, rotated, bounced and then joined together to form an image. The Flash banner on CU3OX’s homepage provides enough clues on what the software has got in store. Do check it out .

Opera Software has just released a new Opera 10.70 snapshot for Windows, Linux and Mac users. The new release, which has a build number of 3488, made accessing your list of URLs blocked through content blocker from any computer easy by adding the synchronization functionality to it.

ASCII Animator is a free, fun software that can convert an animated GIF image to an animated ASCII GIF image. ASCII Animator extracts GIF image into frames, then converts each frames to ASCII art, and encodes the ASCII art into a new animated ASCII art GIF image. The user gets to choose the font and the number of characters in every 100 pixel width. This allows you to control the resolution of the resulting ASCII image.

1. Inception Infographic : If you had trouble understanding and keeping track of the various dream levels in the movie, this infographic will alleviate your problems. And while you are at it, see these awesome Inception Lego recreation .

Ever wondered how big the Pyramid of Giza is compared to your neighborhood, or how far the Mars Rover would have gone if you had let it wander from the front door, or how big an area you would have to clear out to construct a space Saturn V launch pad in your backyard? A new site from BBC answers such fascinating questions and more.

I suppose you understand the importance regularly backing up your personal files, pictures, documents and anything of value. This also includes saved games if you are an avid gamer. If you are playing a game on level 20 and very near completion and Windows crashes, would you like start from level 1, all over again? Definitely not.

The new Google Image search interface hasn’t gone down well on all users. It has too many problems. For one, it hides the image details on the search page. You have to hover the mouse over a thumbnail to view it which makes it very difficult when you are looking for images of a particular size. You also have to keep your mouse away from the screen to prevent random thumbnails popping over the page. It’s a bad design. It’s useless, It’s annoying.

SPAMfighter is a spam fighting tool that works in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird, and helps you to keep spam and phishing mails at bay. A lot of anti-spam products rely on filters and other rule based technologies, but spammers work every day to stay out of these filters. A filter that works one day might not work the next day. SPAMfighter keeps you one step ahead of the spammers by leveraging the spam detecting ability of thousands of computer users. That’s right, SPAMfighter is another spam filter that is powered by the community.

One of the most beloved role playing game, Age of Empires, is back. Microsoft announced this at Gamescom, a large conference held in Cologne, Germany. This new game is called Age of Empires Online and, as the name suggests, will be played through the internet.

Microsoft Mathematics Add-in for Word and OneNote is a set of tools that you can use to perform mathematical operations on expressions or equations in your Word documents and OneNote notebooks. The Mathematics add-in, which works with Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Microsoft OneNote 2010, makes it easy to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, calculate numerical results, solve equations or inequalities, and simplify algebraic expressions.

Here is quick heads up of a promotion currently underway at V3.co.uk. IObit Advanced SystemCare Pro 3.6.1 is available as a free download from V3.co.uk until the end of August 2010. That is a saving of $20.

HeyDoc!is a free software that lets you keep track of your personal medical history and records on your computer in a way that is both easy to lookup and retrieve. HeyDoc! provides an easy way for you to store and present all kinds of health information of you and your family. Even though the program is suited for personal and private recordkeeping, it can also be used to keep track of medical records of employees of a company or patients in a clinic, and so on.

Some download managers have built in bandwidth limiting features like Orbit Downloader and the BitTorrent client, uTorrent. This is to ensure that your downloader doesn’t choke your entire connection bandwidth leaving none for other applications that use the same connection, such as your browser. If your download software doesn’t allow bandwidth limiting, you can use NetBalancer.

Windows 7 has a smart feature called Aero Snap wherein you grab a window with the mouse and drag it into one edge of the screen to automatically resize the window into half and aligned with the screen edge. You can also do that by using the keyboard arrow keys while holding down the Windows key.

Not long after Facebook introduced the Like button, one developer created the Dislike button for Facebook in the form of a Firefox addon. This became very popular, if we were to judge by numbers. More than 3 million Facebook users are rooting for the Dislike button at the time of this writing. But what if you neither like nor dislike something? There should be a third button, one that expresses your apathy.

Remember that $35 tablet PC Indian HRD minister announced last month? It was received with skepticism and many people wrote it off as pure vaporware, which was predictable given the price. Now popular Indian gadget show called Gadget Guru just featured an exclusive hands-on review of the device that you can catch in full below.

VisualBee is a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that takes the plain out of designing a presentation by automatically selecting a suitable template and layout for you, leaving you to focus on the content. VisualBee analyzes the presentation text and structure and automatically builds a professionally designed presentation with the right set of images  like  abandoment stock images , layout and background.

I have seen a handful of file browsers touting themselves as Windows Explorer alternatives, but none of them has the right balance of simplicity and functionality. I prefer the simple ones which is why tools like Total Commander, which is perhaps one of the most beloved file browser, fail to impress me.

Public computers such as those in offices or school labs have various restrictions imposed on them by the administrator. A limited user account might be disallowed from using USB drives, or burning CDs or making changes to files. The administrator might have also set system wide restrictions. For instance, he or she might have disabled balloon tips, removed My Documents, disabled printers, disabled visual styles and so on.

Website Vladstudio by Russian designer Vlad Gerasimov is well known for its collection of artistic and illustrated wallpapers. Vladstudio has a large number of both free and paid wallpapers, the paid section consist higher resolution and higher quality works. The free wallpapers are of none-too-bad quality and usually sufficient for the average home user.

Windows users accounts security features are pretty basic. In fact, it doesn’t go beyond setting up of passwords. While average users might consider this adequate, power users like us who always want more than the simple controls will benefit from a free software named Accounts Tuner.

Being one of the biggest blog hosting platform, Blogger has to deal with enormous amounts of spam comments every day. Until now, the only option available for Blogger users to catch spam is to either enable comment moderation or use CAPTCHA. But this hinders real time discussion as each comments has to be screened and allowed or denied manually.

Ever since the WebM project was launched, YouTube has been encoding videos uploaded at 720p or higher resolution in the WebM format. Today, there are millions of WebM encoded videos on YouTube including the one million most popular videos of any size. But finding these videos is a little tricky.

The Google Chrome installer for Windows installs the browser only for the current user. This is to ensures that the user can install Chrome without having administrator rights on the machine. That is some sensible thinking from Google, but what if the administrator wants to install the browser for all users on a machine?

Microsoft has released a new theme pack for Windows 7. The new Bing Dynamic theme pack is unlike anything else that the company has offered Windows 7 users before. As the name implies, this theme pack is equipped with an RSS feed that brings fresh content to the desktop in the form of wallpapers every week.

Cyber-D's Autodelete is a powerful little program that does what it says - automatically delete files that are older than a specified number of days in a specific folder. It can also move old files to a different location.

GooReader is an application that allows you to search, download and read books and magazines available on Google Books from the Windows desktop.

AutoVer is an automatic backup software for Windows that can also be used as a personal file versioning system, thanks to its real time incremental backup. Once you set it up it does everything by itself. Apart from the regular backups that it performs, AutoVer can automatically create backup copies of a file each time you save it. This allows you to have multiple versions of the same file, a useful thing to have when you are editing important files. AutoVer also comes with a handful of features typically unheard of in backup software.

CCleaner is the most popular file cleaning software for Windows to be ever written. CCleaner’s success perhaps lies in its simplicity and also effectiveness in the cleaning operations. But out of the box support for CCleaner is limited. The application can only remove temporary files from Windows and file usage history from a limited collection of browsers and media players. This is where CCleaner Enhancer comes into play.

AwayFind is a marvelous web application that has found a unique solution to the problem of email overload. Most of the emails we receive are junk. An average user’s inbox is filled with updates from social networking sites, email forwards, mails from people they never reply to and other typical unimportant mails. But among them are some mails that are actually important. AwayFind acts as your personal email assistant that sifts through your inbox and lets you know only those mails that matter.

Last week we organized the Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe Giveaway where we promised to gift free licenses of the software, each of which is priced $59.95. Thanks to each one of you who took part in the giveaway. The 5 winners as decided by a random draw are:

WebMail Notifier is a browser addon originally developed for Firefox and recently ported to Google Chrome that periodically checks your webmail accounts and notifies the number of unread emails. WebMail Notifier works with multiple accounts and supports the major email service providers.

As you might be aware, Google Chrome’s Incognito mode is a private browsing mode that instructs the web browser not to record any information of site visits and history during the browsing session. The Incognito mode allows users to maintain privacy on computers that are shared by multiple users, like the living room PC.

When you try to open a file attachment in an email in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook may block access to the link. When that happens, you receive a message like this: “Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments.”

GLMixer is a free and unique real-time graphics mixing software ideal for live video performances, such as a live broadcast of an event, a stage performance or a presentation. GLMixer can intermix a number of videos and images and allows the user to manipulate and edit them on the fly.

Determining the total number of books in the world is a monumental task, but the number is finite and therefore measurable. Google Books recently concluded a project that just did that. The number they arrived at is - 129,864,880 as of August 1, 2010.

With the new Snow Transformation Pack, Windows Vista and 7 users can make their operating system resemble a Macintosh without losing out on any of the functionality Windows Vista and 7 has to offer.

Cognitive OpenOCR (CuneiForm) is an open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that can automatically recognize texts in scanned or printed documents in not one or two but twenty-three international languages. These include English, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, mixed Russian-English, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Gwennel is the latest kid in town to join the family of miniature word processors and oh boy, is he small. Clocking at under 140KB and with just the right set of features, Gwennel takes the crown for the smallest and lightest word processor around.

Microsoft has released three more Interactive menu to ribbon guides for three new Office 2010 products, namely Microsoft Visio 2010, Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft InfoPath 2010.

Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe is an all-in-one, immensely powerful flash slideshow and web photo gallery creating software that can convert a bunch of pictures into attractive flash slideshows within minutes. The resulting gallery can be embedded on a website, in your blog, social media profile or just shared with family and friends.

Google began rolling out a new feature today that allowed users to login into multiple Google accounts at the same time from the same browser. Previously users had to resort to private browsing mode or use a different browser. Chrome users could use Google Account Switcher while Firefox users had the option of multiple accounts sign-in through Multifox and CookieSwap which is still useful for other services.

Cloudmark DesktopOne is a free email filtering tool released today by Cloudmark, a San Francisco based company that provides solutions to fight spam, viruses, phishing, and similar threats that affect email.

Unlike Linux distributions, Windows doesn’t have a centralized repository of applications from where you can download and install all applications at once by just clicking a few buttons. Several independent developers in the past have tried to implement this in Windows with varying levels of success. FreeApp , Ninite (formerly Volery), FreewareUpdater , ZeuAPP , Ketarin and UpdateStar are a few worth mentioning.

When Microsoft Office 2010 was initially released early this year, it was (and still) available as a bundle of several applications packaged together in a ‘suite’. This has always been the way ever since MS Office debuted in 1992. This time around, Microsoft is offering standalone versions of the different component applications that make up the suite.

We want our computers fast and powerful, yet prefer to run light and easy application and bicker when any software consume resources larger than what we perceive to be appropriate. A strange attitude, perhaps an artifact from those days when processing power were expensive. Whatever, SlimPDF fits right into this trend.