Instant Fundas

Google India today launched a fascinating new tool called Script Converter that converts texts in one script to its phonetic equivalent in another. For example, say you can speak Hindi and you know that ‘namaste’ is a greeting in Hindi but you can’t read ‘नमस्ते’ in Hindi script.

Along with theme redesign the Firefox team is also working on a new Addon Manager which just became available on nightly builds.

ProgressBar Clock is a transparent, aero-style desktop clock for the geeks. It’s a normal clock that shows seconds, minutes, hours, years, months and days, but in the form of progress bars.

During the past few months Facebook has re-written it’s privacy policy several times. Each new edit stirred new privacy concerns among users as bloggers dissected, criticized and accused Facebook for eroding privacy and creeping commercialism on Facebook. Recently, Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” started yet another privacy storm and even some US senators started getting worried by the intruding privacy settings.

Previously we wrote about a software called Driver Magician that can extract installed device drivers, backup them and restore whenever required. Double Driver is another free utility that can backup your drivers.

Close on the heels of the stolen iPhone 4G event, another major cell phone manufacturer seems to have misplaced their latest phone prototype. The manufacturer in question is Nokia and the prototype which eventually evolved into a full product, the N8, has made it’s debut today .

If you find Twitter’s default interface insipid, here is a simple way to make your Twitter experience similar to most Twitter web applications such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite.

Bccthis is a free tool that allows a user to append a private note for a subset of recipients in a group email without having to compose a second message. The private note is sent only to the intended recipients; the rest of the group cannot view it.

AeroZoom is a simple AutoHotKey program that enhances upon the new Magnifier in Windows 7 to turn any mouse into a presentation tool where zooming in/out and moving around becomes a breeze without a keyboard.

A watermark is any recognizable text, logo or pattern that appears over an image to identify the owner of the image and generally used to prevent unauthorized reuse of the image. Watermarks are usually transparent and can be difficult to remove. The difficulty or ease of removal depends on the content of the image and the position, color, size etc of the watermark.

Previously we featured software such as iColorFolder and Rainbow Folders to add color to Windows folders . Folderico is another utility that works with Windows 7.

Geocities-izer is a tool that makes any web page look “like it was made by a 13 year-old in 1996” – awful colors, illegible text and animated GIFs. This is how Instant Fundas look. Ah! my eyes!

Can’t get your videos working on the iPad? You have to convert them into a compatible format first. Although there are a large number of video converters that can do the job, Aleesoft Free iPad Video Converter is one that caters specially to iPad so that you don’t have to waste any time figuring out the right output format.

Likebutton.me is a new website that shows what people are sharing or “Liking” on Facebook across several websites like YouTube, CNN, Huffington Post, TechCrunch etc.

A very bad practice among majority of Windows users is using the My Documents or Documents folder to store personal files and the biggest perpetrator of it is Microsoft.

Today the Hubble Space Telescope completed a major milestone – 20 years of amazing service to science. On April 24, 1990, NASA launched the space observatory aboard the space shuttle Discovery and since then the telescope has been extraordinarily prolific.

1. How to Install Android On An iPhone 2G : I hope you have already heard the biggest story of the week, the hacking of iPhone to install Android ? Now here is a detailed guide on how to do it.

The Union government of India introduced the Copyright Amendment Bill, 2010, in the parliament on Monday with some major amendments over the Copyright Act, 1957 in place.

You know, those smart phones with touch screen interface… and how difficult it is to click on links on a page especially if you have fat fingers. If the links are placed too close to each other you have to very precise where your finger tips touches the screen. Needless to say, it’s a very frustrating experience.

Recently Facebook launched the Like button for the web that enables users to share a page directly on Facebook. As a blogger or webmaster you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity of getting your site and posts shared among Facebook users. This is how to add the button to your websites.

Okay, the second part of the title is just a prediction of what would happen when the news carried by the first hits him. It’s true, Android has been successfully ported to the iPhone!

If you are using McAfee anti-virus products on Windows XP and sincerely auto updating virus definition files every day, you might not be reading this at all. Yesterday, a buggy update released by the manufacturer early in the day brought Windows XP machines worldwide to it’s knees. Although the update was available for only four hours before distribution was halted it was enough to cause widespread damage.

Today, Google launched a fascinating new tool in the form of a map listing requests received from various government agencies for removal of content from Google services or provide information about users of their services and products. The map shows various countries around the world and lists the number of requests from that country between July 1, 2009 and December 1, 2009.

DevVicky Word is a new free word processor for Windows that supports a wide variety of document formats, most notably DOCX, and comes with an extensive range of features you would expect from any competent Word processing application.

Mozilla has been experimenting with new themes for Firefox 4 for some time . The new theme for Firefox is designed to modernize the web browser interface, reflecting the power, simplicity and customizability of the popular browser.

Just noticed that Google’s latest re-design of their search results page is now live. Nothing dramatic, just a few changes. A new Google logo with softer colors and the advanced search options which were previously hidden under the “More options” are now permanently displayed on the side. Tell your friends and go test it .

HTML5 provides option to embed video files in web pages without using Flash or any other streaming media technology. This allows visitors using an HTML5 compliant web browser to play these files on their browser without installing any plug-in such as Adobe Flash Player or QuickTime.

Chemitorium is a wonderful free organic chemistry analysis and visualization tool that lets you can draw chemical formulas and then generates a 3D view of the structure of the molecule, with the ability to export the results as image or video files.

RadioShack, the electronics retail store chain, has over a thousand outlets and over four thousand company-owned stores all over the United States, and parts of North America, Europe, South America and Africa. The company has been in business since 1921 - for over 90 years and for 65 of those years has produced an outstanding electronics and technology catalog, surpassing the catalog of all rival companies.

Microsoft is beta testing Fix-It Center, a tool which automatically detects and fixes several common computer problems that may affect your Windows based system. Fix-It Center also helps prevent new problems by proactively checking for known issues and installing updates. The tool is extremely user friendly and allows any average Joe to solve PC problems with ease.

YoWindow is a weather application that tells you the present weather, as well as the forecast of coming days, on any place around the globe. What makes YoWindow different from other weather programs is that it’s pretty to look at. (Oh! well, MyFreeWeather is equally pretty too, so I recommend you check that out). And YoWindow is also a weather screensaver.

There could be several reasons why you might want to hide files on your computer. It could be files containing sensitive information if you work for the NSA or something. It could be personal emails or just some naughty stuff you downloaded from the Internet. If you do have a reason to hide files yet look unsuspicious, you should try Plain Sight.

ControlPad is a small light weight application written in AutoHotkey that turns the numeric keypad on your keyboard into a quick launcher for applications and commands. Using ControlPad you can open any program, files or a web address, perform operations like minimizing/maximizing window, or execute system commands.

FreeApp is a free tool that automatically downloads some of the best freeware programs available and silently installs them on your computer while you relax with a cup of coffee.

Microsoft disclosed in an announcement that its MSN Video Player service would start showing full length movies from Paramount Pictures.

Kylo is a free web browser based on Mozilla designed specifically for web surfing on a big screen, such as your wall mounted living room HDTV, while you sit relaxing on a comfortable couch. Kylo enables users who have already connected their PCs to the television to browse the web without squinting and without spoiling the home theatre experience.

Explain and send screenshots is a dead simple and extremely useful screenshot taking extension for Google Chrome. With this extension you can capture any part of a web page, add arrows, lines, circles and text and then share it directly on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace or send as an email attachment.

The first public release of VLC Media Player 1.1.0 Pre-build with support for GPU acceleration is available for download. With the ability to offload number crunching involved in video decoding to the GPU, the developers hope to improve video performance of H.264 encoded videos that has been plaguing the media player for long.

Note: The product has since been updated and doesn't have stealth capabilities. Please visit the product's website to learn more. Jaipur (India) based startup has launched a new kind of service called SpyBubble that allows a person to log in from any computer and spy on calls and text messages from any smart phone or BlackBerry in real time, and even eavesdrop on conversation.

Remember ASPEX Corporation, the guys who accepts any material from people, scans them with an Electron Scanning Microscope and publishes the images for everyone to see? Yes, that ASPEX Corporation. In case you missed the story when we covered them, they are still accepting submissions. Anyway, the reason why I’m mentioning them again is because of a contest they are running.

1. Solar Beat is a project by White Vinyl Designs that tries to find that out by converting the planetary system into a type of music box. Each planet generates a specific tone as it passes by a virtual string. Turn on your computer speakers and adjust the tempo to listen to the music it generates.

Recently a bogus web application stated making rounds on the Internet, (thanks to many high profile tech blogs who wrote about the application without actually caring to test it) that allowed one to preview how a site looks like in an iPad.

The desktop context menu is the next best place to keep your programs and files shortcuts, because it keeps your desktop clean. Now there is no easy way to edit the context menu in Windows, is it? We always have to use a third party software unless you are willing to dig into the registry.

Firefox like all browsers has the ability to remember form inputs by the user. Previously entered inputs are displayed in a drop down menu when you type into a form input box on a page. But how do you edit or delete those entries?

The footer on a web page begins where the main page content ends. Unlike the page header which always sticks to the top of the page irrespective of the page size, the position of the footer depends on the amount of content the page carries.

Last week I showed how to synchronize files across multiple computers through a USB Flash drive using SyncSharp. SyncDesk is another open source tool that can sync files across several computer using an intermediary device like an external disk.

Tabbles is a relational file management software for Windows that gives you a taste of what WinFS would have been if Microsoft hadn’t kicked the project to the curb almost four years ago. To put it in their own words,

Synthesia, formerly called Piano Hero, is a free program plus game that teaches you to play the piano using visual cues like falling notes. Don’t worry if you can’t read sheet music, because you require none. Synthesia lets you learn to play the keyboard and also keep track of your progress.

Remember Cuil, the search engine that was launched with much hype but never came even close to being a Google-killer? You would have thought the company was dead, the investors bankrupt and the creators hiding themselves in shame. Yet they are back, back with another awfully incompetent product called Cpedia .

Motorola is planning to release a new kind of product that will allow parents control who their children call on their phone and even intercept their conversations.

We all have to agree that the Internet Explorer team is doing a great job, this once, with IE9. Those who are not aware, IE9, which Microsoft demonstrated a preview last month, will offload rendering job to the GPU thereby improving speed of videos and JavaScripts rendering and general responsiveness of the system by a significant factor. Hardware acceleration is going to be the next big thing for web browsers; even Adobe Flash is adopting the same path .

Sitemaps are an invaluable resource for search engines, and an important part of a website. They allow search engines to discover contents on a site that would otherwise be impossible to locate, hidden among hundreds and thousands of pages. Along with text content another important element of the web most webmasters ignore are images.

Many people struggle with forwarding ports even though there are hundreds of guides and tutorials on the Internet. If you are using a router and don’t know how to forward ports, some programs that require port forwarding will fail to function properly. Common examples of such programs are P2P software like uTorrent or Limewire.

Gmail today added two extremely useful and functional features to Labs. You know Labs, right? The first one is Nested Labels. Yup, that’s right. Now you can create labels within labels creating a tree like structure as shown in the image below.

Some websites have awful designs – weird color schemes and ridiculously small fonts that’s impossible to read without bringing tears to your eyes. Yes, you can adjust the zoom levels but Firefox can’t remember the settings. With the NoSquint addon you can:

Mighty Box is an open source application launching utility for Windows, that is touted as the Windows version of the QuickSilver software for Mac.

With 300,000 iPads sold within the first few days and the device jailbroken within 24 hours, it’s never too early to start taking preventive measures against malware threatening to invade your iPad. Mac security specialist Intego has begun offering the first antivirus scanner for the iPad.

Adobe has unveiled the next release of Flash Player 10.1, a major improvement over previous versions, as a release candidate. The new Flash Player 10.1 is hardware accelerated, which means that users will see a significant reduction in CPU usage while viewing H.264 encoded online videos and while playing Flash games.

Those who use Picasa web album extensively to store pictures online must be pissed by the arbitrary limit of 1000 Google has placed on the number of albums you can create on Picasa. Well, the good news is: the limit has been raised to 10,000.

Most file synchronizing application assumes you have your computers networked with each other either through the Internet or through a local area network, wired or wireless. File synchronizing fails if there is no direct communication between the computers. So how do you synchronize two or more computers that aren’t connected to each other?

Juice is a cross-platform, open source aggregator for discovering and downloading online podcast media files. Essentially Juice Receiver is a podcast feed aggregator using which you can subscribe to RSS feeds of podcasts and let the program automatically download new media files as soon as they are available. 

Previously we wrote about a program called FreewareUpdater that helps you find and install some of the most popular freeware applications. ZeuAPP is a similar program; you can call it a repository of free applications.

Alt + Tab Tuner is a small tool that allows you to access several hidden settings related to the Alt+Tab program switching shortcut of Windows.

Although all pictures on your Blogger blog are stored on Picasa web album, there was no direct way of embedding existing pictures on Picasa to your blog. The only way to do it is get the image URL from your Picasa album manually, or re-upload the images.

Disabling USB ports on a computer by the administrator is easy and well documented on Microsoft’s support site . But protecting USB ports with a password so that only authorized users can access it, is a feature not to be found on Windows. To do this we have to use a software called PenyuUSB.

Most people would never dream of taking apart a $500 toy the very first day of buying. But Do-it-yourself website iFixit, which publishes self repair guides of various kinds of gadgets, had to - it’s their job. Yesterday they they posted a full teardown of the iPad accompanied by several high quality images of the process. Some of the things they discovered are:

Most lower end TV tuner cards in the range of $10 to $20 give poor performance, but their quality is not because of bad hardware but terribly written drivers and software. You can get very decent picture out of even cheap TV cards by using the right software. DScaler is one such program.

Okay, so you have read some 303,628 iPad reviews so far. The iPad has been covered by everyone from Stephen Colbert to Cory Doctorow to Mike Arrington, and even your mom has an opinion about it. But the review by Jason Kottke from kottke.org is the only one you need to read, ever. (Highlighting is mine)

Microsoft's troubles over the browser ballot screen is not over yet. According to a report published in The Register , Opera Software informed the European Union of a possible problem with the browser ballot screen which was introduced following an antitrust accusation against the Redmond giant.

As you know, Apple’s latest gizmo the iPad doesn’t support application multitasking throwing users back into the primitive age. But a Portugese firm called ElasticFiction has somehow managed to convince Apple to let them sell a split screen browser that will allow users to browse two web pages at the same time.

7plus is small program written in Autohotkey that adds a number of features to Windows Explorer and modifies Window file handling behavior.

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) team has developed something that truly shows off what this engine is capable of doing. They have ported Quake2, the popular shoot-them-up game of the 90s, to GWT using use WebGL and HTML5 goodies like the Canvas tag which demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome.

BBox is a free music player for Windows that looks more like MS Office than a music player, thanks to it’s ribbon based interface. In fact, it’s the first media player I have come across that sports the ribbon. BBox lets you play, edit, convert and manage audio files, rip CDs, and also enjoy online radio stations.

MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 15 is a professional video editing software that lets you easily edit videos, movies, photos, and audio from a wide range of sources. MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 15 lets you easily transmit your recordings to your computer and then, once you have improved and enriched them, onto DVD and Blu-ray DiscTM. It’s great for theater-quality presentations on TV, screen, or monitor.