Instantbird is a cross platform, open source, multiple protocol supporting instant messaging client which has just reached version 1.0. The project was announced back in 2007 and was under development since then. Over the last fours years developers have been releasing working versions with small version numbers - the next one due to be released was 0.3 - before the team decided to abandon the petty updates and jumped directly to version 1.0.

Before I started using Torrents, I used to get most of my stuff from the Gnutella network – old software abandoned by developers, music nobody sells and games nobody plays anymore. Between year 2000 and 2008, the Gnutella file sharing network had an explosive growth. By late 2007, it was the most popular file sharing network on the Internet.

Wondershare MobileGo is a one-stop solution for managing your Android phone from your PC. With this handy and smart Android manager, you can transfer Contacts from your old Symbian phone, import your Contacts from Outlook, convert movies with formats that Android phone can play, import or export Contacts, SMS, music, photo, or movie, backup and restore your Android phone data, and perform other phone managements between your PC and Android phone.

The Data Liberation Front – an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products – has just debuted its first product, Google Takeout.

Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 of Microsoft Office 2010 on Tuesday. The Office 2010 SP1 includes a roll-up of all previously unreleased fixes that were made specifically for this service pack, in addition to several fixes intended to improve stability, performance, and in security. The Service Pack contains all the public updates that were released through June 2011, and all the cumulative updates that were released through April 2011.

Usenet is a vast, globally distributed system of discussion and file sharing groups known as “newsgroups”. Users read and post messages called articles or news to one or more newsgroups which are then broadcast to other newsgroups interconnected via a wide variety of networks. Individual users with access to a Usenet server may then read messages from and post messages to, download files etc., using a Usenet client software called Newsreader.

OSForensics is a free forensic investigation software created by Passmark Software, for locating and analyzing digital evidence that are found in computer systems and digital storage devices.

The forensic suite contains a number of modules with specific functions - discover and read files, recover deleted files, find good and bad files using known hashes, search within files, recover passwords and much more. The modules can be run independently to perform a particular task, such as recover passwords or recover deleted files. You can also use the case management module to create a new case before analysis. This allows you to perform analysis on different hard disks or computers and save data from each case separately.

Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an internet meme that depicts an 8-bit animation of a cat with the body of a cherry Pop-Tart, flying through outer space and leaving a rainbow behind it. In video form, the animation is often set to a remix of the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!”. As with any absurd internet memes, Nyan Cat is insanely popular, so much that last week YouTube enabled a custom flash player for the original Nyan Cat video that showed an animated mini Nyan Cat flying across the progress bar with a rainbow trail.

StudioGPU has quietly made its $3,999 flagship rendering software MachStudio Pro 2 available to the public for free. This is great news for anybody interested and associated in 3D graphics and CGI, and game industry.

The toughest part when shopping for gadgets is making the decision. Should you buy that laptop, or should you wait for a newer model? Should you wait for the price to drop? Did you wait too long that the price increased? Should you risk buying the older model because it’s cheap? Decisions, decisions! As exciting the consumer market has become, it has also become a nightmare for buyers. More often than not, buyer end up buying a gadget only to see the newer, better version released weeks later …and at a lower price.

No doubt, Microsoft Excel is one of the finest spreadsheet program in its category and there are hundreds of built in functions and formulas to manage and analyze your data efficiently, but different users have different needs and there are occasions when you might find that these functions are not enough to perform some tasks. This is where add-ins come in to fill the gaps.

Here is the list of winners of the Picture Collage Maker Pro Father’s day giveaway that we organized last week. I was a little late for the announcement as Father’s Day went by early this week, but it’s never late to say how much you love your dad. So here are the 20 winners.

Remember the Windows 8 Immersive Metro UI start page for the browser? You can now bring that to your Windows desktop too and enjoy the tile based layout Microsoft showed off at the D9 conference. For those who joined in late, Microsoft had unveiled a new user interface for Windows 8 for touch devices such as tablet PCs. The interface consist of customizable, resizable tiles instead of the start menu and desktop icons. It was a radical design and looked fantastic on stage, and thanks to Fediafedia, it looks fantastic on my Windows 7 desktop too.

There is a huge difference between search engines such as Google and Bing, and the search functionality built into applications such as the history search in browsers. Search engines bring relevant results based on how closely your query matches resources on the web, and while doing that they make guesses, correct spellings and weights hundreds of different parameters.

In Firefox 4 there appears a small arrow at the end of the tabs bar entitled ‘List All Tabs’. Clicking on it drops down a menu that lists all opened tabs. This is a handy feature intended to make navigation easier when you have too many tabs open. Although made visible in Firefox 4, this feature was introduced in version 3.6 but hidden by default. There is another hidden feature - two actually - that adds thumbnail previews to this list as well as Windows like Alt+Tab switching.

Many employers actively block Facebook on their office network to prevent employees from getting sucked into the fearful time sink and disrupting the space-time continuum of the office. Fortunately, a new application has emerged that allows people to access Facebook without anybody being the wiser that you are social networking instead of working on some documents.

3G Smartphone’s had not even settled into their place on storefront shelves before the exciting news came, 4G was coming. Wireless internet is evolving as fast as the rest of technology, and the new hot topic is the amazing upload and download speeds which can be reached via a 4G network. There is also quite a deal of controversy surrounding this new mobile technology that has many consumers wondering exactly what 4G networks can bring to the table and which mobile service providers are offering the best networks.

You are watching a good afternoon movie on your computer after which you plan to take a nap. You might even doze off while the movie is running, if it doesn’t turn up to be that good. The computer continues to run, of course, wasting precious energy long after the movie has ended, or after you dozed off, whichever comes earlier. This, unless you drag yourself across the room to turn it off. You have a remote? That’s good. But you still have to turn it off, and that’s no good if you are sleeping. Of all the things a computer is capable of doing, can’t it switch itself off after a movie has ended? Sure it can. This is how to set your computer up.

FBVPN, which bills themselves as faster and better VPN, is a US-based VPN provider that provides customized VPN service packs for individual, family, and enterprise. FBVPN allows users to browse the web anonymously where all traffic is encrypted and safe from eavesdropping or wire tapping.

Over the last 20 years, some tremendous products have come out of Microsoft Research many of which you are already familiar with such as Photosynth, Image Composite Editor, WorldWide Telescope, Surface, Songsmith, Kinnect, Street Slide, Touch Mouse, PowerPivot and so many others.

In a new research paper, Johannes Kopf of Microsoft Research and Dani Lischinski of The Hebrew University describe a new algorithm for converting pixel art (those old school 8-bit video games) into super smooth vectors which can be magnified by an arbitrary amount without image degradation.

The Windows 8 Immersive Metro UI for tablet PCs that Microsoft demoed a short while ago has left quite an impressions among Windows enthusiasts. One DeviantArt user has coded a start page in HTML, CSS and JQuery intended to be used as new tab page in browsers, that mimics the tile-based Metro UI interface.

The Matroska Multimedia Container (MKV) is an open standard free container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file. Matroska is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software. In many ways, Matroska is better than AVI as it supports virtually any video and audio format and has limited support for DVD menus. In comparison, AVI has no support for menus and is problematic towards certain video formats like H.264/AVC.

Smart Desktop is a program, files and folder launcher and system monitoring utility for Windows that wants to be the start panel of Windows. Smart Desktop allows you to launch Windows programs and system utilities, and commonly accessed folders like Documents, Pictures and Videos. It also holds shortcuts to different websites. It displays weather data and forecast of any location, and carries a couple of basic system usage indicators like memory, CPU, network and battery.

Here is a fresh collection of Windows 7 themes. Please read the instructions provided by the theme author to learn how to use it. Often the author provides links to wallpapers, icons etc. which makes it possible to achieve the exact look as shown in the screenshot. These needs to be downloaded and applied separately or using separate tools, some of which has been previously discussed here.

Also checkout the May collection and previous collection of Windows 7 themes – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

BleachBit is an open source system clean-up utility for Windows and Linux. The program helps you recover disk space by deleting unwanted files such as browser cache, cookies, temporary files, backup files, log files, broken shortcuts etc. Just like the popular CCleaner, BleachBit can clean temporary files created by over 90 applications by default. This can be extended to include over 500 more applications by updating an INI file online.

What’s with browser companies trying to predict where we want to click next? First Chrome, and now Firefox. Under the Prospector experiment, Mozilla Labs have released a new restartless add-on called Predictive Newtab for Firefox that attempts to guess, or rather suggests, a list of sites that the user may want to visit when they open a new tab.

Taking periodic breaks from work, especially if your work involves working in front of the computer, is a must if you value your health and your eyes. Experts recommend taking short breaks to rest your eyes every 15 minutes, and long breaks every 60 minutes to release tension in back, neck, shoulders and arms. Unfortunately, sticking to a schedule is hard.

Here is the list of winners of the giveaway for iSkysoft iMedia Converter that we organized last week. To recap, iSkysoft iMedia Converter is a powerful media converter and DVD ripper program for Windows that supports converting DVDs and videos to virtually any format or for playback on mobile devices like iPhone 4, iPad, iPod touch 4, iPod nano, Apple TV, PSP, Android phones and more. Here is the announcement.

Whether you are writing a school essay or an article for a website or your local newspaper, pictures are a great way to grab the attention of the readers. Images enhance the visual impact of a blog and make it more likely a post will be read. Aside from paragraph breaks, strategically placed pictures can go a long way into turning a huge wall of text into an appealing article.

The internet has become a crucial part of our everyday modern lives. We are connected to it practically every moment of the day whether through our desktop machines, the mobile smart devices that can always be found in our pockets, or even through the multitude of other appliances that we barely even knew had online access such as our television sets, MP3 players, and even microwaves and refrigerators. Wireless connections such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi allow us to instantly access the crucial information in the online world wherever we are. With such widespread connectivity, our capabilities are practically infinite.

To celebrate the occasion of Father’s day, Pearl Mountain Software has decided to giveaway 20 licenses of Picture Collage Maker Pro for our readers. This is the second time we are holding a giveaway for the same software. Early this year we had a very successful giveaway contest where twenty of you readers had walked away with the $40 software.

Interactive Calendar is a free customizable desktop calendar that integrates with your desktop wallpaper and keeps your upcoming appointments and events in front of you at all times, without the need to open another application window. You can add and edit items such as tasks, appointments and events directly from the desktop display or through the program’s configuration window. Interactive Calendar supports rich text notes, integrated spell checking as well as import and export of calendar data.

Last year, Google introduced Google Instant, a feature that auto completes queries and returns results immediately as the user typed. Today, the company unveiled a new feature called Instant Pages, available only to Chrome, that takes Google Instant a step further. After returning results for a query, Google will guess which results the user is likely to click and prefetch it in the background. If the user happens to actually click on the guessed result, the page will open instantly. Google says Instant Pages will save 2-7 seconds for every search.

Remember TinEye? It’s a image search engine that allows users to input images as search query and get results based on the input image. The user uploads a picture or pastes the URL to a publicly available image on the web and TinEye returns links to web resources that host the same image. TinEye is an excellent tool to find sources of images without attribution. Google is working on a similar concept.

When you are designing websites, it is the layout that matters most – contents usually doesn’t exist at this stage, they are to be filled in later. Lorem Ipsum is the most popular filler text used for such purposes. But what options do we have for images?

Windows 8 is not yet ready for prime time and no one knows for sure what the final release will look like, but whatever little information we could gather from screenshots, video previews and the occasional leak builds, was put together to create a premature Windows 8 transformation pack called Windows 8 UX Pack.

Sometime last year, Facebook overhauled the Facebook profile page implementing several new cosmetic features. The most prominent among them is the way Facebook profile picture and recently tagged pictures of yourself are displayed. The profile picture was changed from the regular rectangular shape to a vertically elongated one, and at the top of the page a row of the five most recently tagged photos of yourself on Facebook was now visible.

Even if you have legally paid for a copy of Windows 7 and have a product key that is genuine, there is only a limited number of times you can use it activate your copy of Windows 7 automatically online. After you have exhausted your online activation attempts, you have to fall back to the time consuming and cumbersome phone activation. This is very inconvenient to users who frequently format and reinstall Windows.

Getting objects such as inserted images, clipart, charts and textboxes to line up correctly on a slide can be frustrating. Crudely aligned objects look unappealing, but designing the perfect slide takes time and patience. To fix this problem, Microsoft introduced a feature called Guides in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010.

YouTube has always been a great alternative for those webmasters that does not have the resources to host their own videos on their own servers. There are many such video content producers that use YouTube as a video hosting platform. This helps them offset costs they would have otherwise incurred in terms of bandwidth usage and server resources. In return, YouTube places a small transparent watermark/logo in the lower right corner of the video screen, as well as one in the video player.

The Host File of an operating system is like an address book used to associate host names with IP addresses, just like the Domain Name System (DNS). But unlike the DNS, the hosts file is under the direct control of the local computer's administrator, and in most operating systems, the host file content is used preferentially over DNS. This allows the administrator to route traffic around the local network and block websites from being accessed or viewed. On standalones machine that aren’t part of a network, the host file can be efficiently used to block ads or adult websites across all applications – not only browsers.

EASEUS Software has just released a new version of its Windows backup and recovery software Easeus Todo Backup Free. The new version 2.5.1 boasts of several new features that previous editions of the free software did not have such as searchable system restore to dissimilar hardware, disk and partition incremental backup, browse image partition and restore files directly, and automatic deletion of out-of-date image files. Additionally, users of the Free edition can now create the powerful and comprehensive bootable disk based on WinPE.

YouTube already has a number of Indian movies for free viewing under www.youtube.com/movies page, but the collection is a bit stale and movie viewers have to wait for long periods before new titles become available. Now YouTube India has launched a new channel called BoxOffice that will feature one full-length blockbuster movie every month. Unlike YouTube Movies, these movies will be available to only Indian users.

iSkysoft iMedia Converter is a powerful media converter and DVD ripper program for Windows that supports converting DVDs and videos to virtually any format or for playback on mobile devices like iPhone 4, iPad, iPod touch 4, iPod nano, Apple TV, PSP, Android phones and more. The program also includes a DRM removing feature that may be required if you intend to rip copyrighted DVDs for playback on your computer and mobile devices.

National Academies Press is a publishing house that publishes authoritative reviews and research reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. It publishes nearly 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in the sciences that are available for purchase. These books – more than 4,000 titles - are now being offered as free PDF downloads.

Phishing mails asking users to enter their account username and password for “verification” in order to avoid dire consequences is all too common. As anyone who knows the basic anti-phishing procedures will tell you, one of the primary things to look out for is the domain where the verification page takes you to. In all phishing attempts, this is always hosted on an outside site.

Unless you are an extremely deft typist, it is impossible to avoid spelling mistakes. Thankfully, most applications that require typing such as word processors, blogging tools like Windows Live Writer and even browsers have built in spell checkers to help you avoid embarrassing spelling mistakes before you publish anything on to the web.

Twitter has unveiled a new Follow button that makes it easier for visitors to find and follow you or your blog’s Twitter account without leaving the website or having to visit Twitter.com. Previous Twitter follow buttons simply linked to your Twitter account page, which a new visitors have to open and then click the follow button on the account’s page. The all new one-click Twitter button allows new followers to quickly follow you straight from your blog.

Theta Music Trainer is an interesting online service targeted towards people who have just about started to learn and train in music. The site aims to teach the basic in music and provide common ear training skills through a variety of simple musical games that help you become familiar with the tones of major and minor scales, identify chord patterns, finding best chords to match melodies and more.

Ellora Assets Corporation has announced the availability of Freemake Video Converter 2.2 beta, that promises improved conversion speeds by up to 50% in HD video conversion. This is made possible through the added support for DirectX Video Acceleration.

When you are travelling or trekking, it’s a good idea to have a multi-tool Swiss Army knife in your hip pocket – you know, those little red shiny things that look like a nail clipper, but comes with a bunch of miniature tools including bottle opener, scissors and screwdrivers. Free Opener is such a Swiss Army knife kind of program for your laptop or desktop. This 20 megabytes-something software can open as many as 75+ different file extensions including MS Office documents, PDF, images, media files, archives, and many many more.

Guest article by Christian Arno

According to a Times Higher Education review, the UK is in danger of becoming one of the most monolingual places in the world. Being a native English speaker can certainly give a false perspective when it comes to the true prevalence of your mother tongue elsewhere. It's generally possible to find someone who understands enough English to point you to the nearest bar or loo, which is why many Brits abroad are happy to simply repeat themselves in a slower and louder tone of voice, confident they'll eventually get through.

Google has announced Street View for India that will let you explore cities and streets around the country in 360-degree panoramic view as well as videos of select location. Street View for India is an ambitious and long awaited project – started in 2007 in the US, the project has since moved through more than 27 countries, encompassing almost the entirety of North America, Australia, Japan and majority of Europe. Last September, Street View even went to Antarctica.

Wise Disk Cleaner Professional is a comprehensive and thorough junk and temporary file cleaning utility for Windows that frees up disk space by deleting files that are no longer used by any software on your system. Wise Disk Cleaner Professional can scan and remove more than 50 types of junk files, left behind during program uninstallation, windows updates, etc.

If you notice your number of Facebook friends decrease by one overnight, you can only wonder which one let you go because Facebook doesn’t make this information available, possibly to prevent bad blood between ‘friends’. But there’s a browser extension/userscript called Unfriend Finder that makes this information readily accessible.

Evolution Player is an unconventional media player that allows you to listen to your music library and use a community voting system to automatically download new music with creative commons license from other users or from music sharing sites like Jamendo and Magnatune.

There are various ways by which your internet service provider (ISP) can help you make your internet browsing a better one. You need to know that it is not every problem that comes up from your internet connection is what you can solve on your own. If you want to be free from having problems many times, you have to learn the habit of keeping in touch with your internet service provider. Have you ever experienced some problems with your internet connection and you called them for help but they weren’t helpful and you want to know how to get the best from them? This might have made you felt bad but there are ways by which you can get the best from your internet service provider. Some important ways to get the best from your internet service provider will be analyzed in this post and if you follow them you will be glad you did.

Microsoft has released the beta of a new, free system recovery tool designed to deal with the most severe infections that leave computers unbootable. Some malware infections are so extreme that it renders the computer unusable by preventing Windows from starting or preventing anti-virus software to run and remove the infection. Under such cases the only option left is to format the hard drive and perform a clean install of Windows.

Google has added the ability to obtain flight schedule information for all airports directly on Google search results page. Previously, you were required to visit dedicated online flight searching/booking services to get that information. Although, you’ll still need them to book your tickets, but for a quick search for available flights, you no longer have to open another website.