Instant Fundas

Glydo is an interesting addon for Firefox that automatically parses the page you are viewing, analyzes the contents and retrieves related news stories, Youtube videos, and tweets and displays it in the status bar.

Calibre is a free, open source and cross-platform ebook management software that allows one to organize, save and manage ebooks, in and between a variety of formats. It also supports ebook syncing with a variety of popular ebook readers. Calibre is the one stop solution for all ebook needs - library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion and an in-built ebook reader.

StandaloneStack is a pretty application launcher that brings the stylish Leopard-like stacks to Windows. One major advantage of StandaloneStack over other applications launcher is that, StandaloneStack doesn’t need to be running always in the background and hence unlike others, doesn’t waste any resources. StandaloneStack runs only when you are using it.

For most people, VLC is the favorite media player because it plays everything they throw at it without hiccups. No hunting for codec. But VLC can do a lot of other things as well. Find out how many of these listed below you knew, and how many you did not. 1. Rip DVDs : VLC includes a basic DVD ripper. You probably would never use it when there are better DVD rippers available, but it helps to know that you can in fact, get a decent quality DVD rip with VLC. To rip a movie follow these steps:

Stykz is a free multi-platform stick figure animation program that does all that Pivot StickFigure Animator , the original stick figure animation software, did and more. Stykz was designed to be a superset of Pivot, attempting to incorporate all of the features that Pivot has to offer, plus adding additional features and making it available on multiple platforms. Unlike Pivot StickFigure Animator, which has not been upgraded for years, Stykz is under active development.

Beeping Bios Codes is a simple tool that explains the various BIOS beep error codes given when the system won’t boot. It lists all beep codes given off by IBM POST, AMI BIOS, and Phoenix BIOS.

GLC_Player is an open source software that can be used to view 3D models like those created using Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, Blender, Sony Collada etc. Why use a separate viewer when we already have these applications to open 3D models? Because 3D modeling applications are usually resource heavy and takes a lot of time to load a model. GLC_Player on the other hand, is extremely light and fast, and allows you to quickly go through your 3D models collection.

There are several web services which are locked to particular regions. Hulu and Pandora, for instance, are available only for US residents. In order to access these sites from outside the regions they are meant for, you have to trick them into believing you reside inside those regions or countries. One way to achieve that is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

The Windows XP Recovery Console can be brought up in three ways. From Windows XP installation disc By installing the Recovery Console to the hard disk so that it’s always handy By creating a bootable USB flash drive with the Recovery Console in it

StrawPoll is a web service that lets you create and run polls or surveys among your Twitter follower. Simply register at StrawPoll, compose your question, provide the choices and post it to Twitter. Your posted tweet appears like as this: Which Office suite you use?: Microsoft Office (1) or Open Office (2) ? http://tinyurl.com/123456

Liaise is a new email addon for Microsoft Outlook Express 2003 and 2007, recently launched at the DEMOfall 09, that automatically analyzes the text as you write an email, identifies keywords that points to assignments, tasks, deadlines and other actionable items and catalogues them according to priority. These tasks are available on a separate panel which you can call anytime to review, and clicking on any tasks automatically pulls the emails and contacts associated with that tasks.

Probably one of the biggest Internet annoyances is the multiple-page article phenomenon. Often when an article is too long it’s broken down into several pages to avoid stretching the page to absurd lengths. It’s understandable when the article is really long, but more often than not, web publishers do it to simply increase page views which translates into higher advertising revenues.

Invisible Hand is a unobtrusive plug-in for Firefox, which subtly alerts you whenever a deal better than the one you are viewing is available. Say you are looking to buy an LG LCD TV. You go to Best Buy and decide upon a certain model. And while you are reading the page, a small toolbar drops down to inform you that the same product is available at Buy.com for $200 less – a saving of 17%. It then provides the link to go to Buy.com’s page for the product. Additional links are provided that lets you look at the same LCD TV model at other shopping sites.

Selective coloring is a processing technique where most part of a colored photo is converted to black and white, but some parts are left in color. The technique is seen quite often and in some movies too. It looks gorgeous.

I use a number of different ways to keep my work and others folders at my finger tips. I use the Quick Launch Toolbar generously, which for some strange reason is disabled by default. I always get annoyed at people who don’t use Quick Launch, and a lot of them don’t use it. It’s like deliberately cutting off your arm and then fumbling around trying to grab things.

Motion Portrait is a Japanese application that can turn any portrait-style photo into a living 3D animated face. Just upload any photo by clicking on “Change” and then “Upload”, and wait till it does it’s magic. Presently, you will see the face becoming live, blinking eyes and reacting to your mouse clicks and movements.

You can lock a Windows PC by pressing Win+L. This locks the screen displaying the Windows logon screen. Nobody can use your PC unless they enter the correct user password. This also means that anybody can enter into your computer if they know your password. This is where Predator comes in. Predator is a free utility that allows you to temporarily lock your computer when you have to move away from it by using your USB flash drive as a key.

LiveBrush is a drawing application based on the Adobe AIR platform. The most wonderful feature of LiveBrush is it’s unique motion control brush tool that irons out any jitters and sharp, awkward movements usually associated with mouse drawing allowing the user to draw exceptionally smooth lines, curves and patterns.

Among all image editing applications Photoshop hold a special place. Not too far below is Gimp. Gimp is a very good open source image editor, and even regarded as a free alternative to Photoshop, a claim which is often debated upon. No doubt, Photoshop is a very well built software. It’s so good that it has become the unofficial standard for every other image editing application, and that includes Gimp. Photoshop might be the superior software here, but Gimp enjoys a slight edge over the Goliath of image editing from the perspective of price.

Preventing users from messing around with your file system is one of the toughest thing to implement on a Windows machine. I discussed this issue in some detail in the past, enumerating the various choices you have. Now you can add another tool to the kitty.

Partition Find & Mount is quite a unique piece of software. It’s a deleted and lost partition recovery software that helps you recover partitions that you may have accidentally deleted, or partitions lost due to corrupted Master Boot Records or due to a failed hard drive. The difference between other partition recovery software and Partition Find & Mount, is that the latter mounts the lost partitions as generic disk volumes making it accessible from Windows explorer or any file manager.

If you are looking for a web based word processor, Google Docs or Zoho Writer or the recently launched Microsoft Office Online should be more than enough for your needs. But if you are looking for something simpler, something in between a text editor and a full fledged word processor, then My Writing Nook is likely to fill your bill.

Aviary, the online service that offers a number of web based applications for graphics designers, is now targeting amateur sound artists and hobbyists by launching a web based audio editing tool named Myna.

1. Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs – This is not the first time anybody has attempted to put together a list of IE6 bugs, but no one has explained it so beautifully. Must bookmark for all web designers.

Still using that bloated iTunes to transfer music back and forth between handheld devices and the computer? Do your computer a favor, just get rid of it. Believe me, there is no dearth of software with the same capabilities as iTunes have and more. Now a Finnish startup, Linkotec, is challenging iTunes’ dominance by launching a web based solution called Dazzboard that has all the goodness of iTunes but without the disadvantages of Apple’s closed environment.

ABRViewer is an open source utility that allows one to preview Photoshop brushes without having to load them first in Adobe Photoshop. It hardly needs to be said how useful this tool can be. Designers who frequently work with Photoshop regularly download different sets of brushes that needs to be tested before they can be used. Loading and unloading these brushes in Photoshop is cumbersome. Also the default preview size for these brushes in Photoshop is too small to make out anything. So they often need to be used on a blank canvas to test. All this is extremely time consuming.

Probably the earliest depiction of a communication device resembling a laptop has been discovered in an ancient Flash Gordon Comics by a certain Mr Mende Petreski of the Republic of Macedonia. Mr Petreski was browsing through his comics collection when he stumbled upon a drawing of a familiar form in a panel in Politikin Zabavnik weekly published June 14, 1974. The sketch shows the forces of Ming the Merciless, using a device which resembles a lot like a laptop, to talk to their leader.

If you are out with your laptop or smartphone and need to find an Internet connection, the first thing you will require is a good Wi-Fi scanner. Checkout these 4 free options you’ve got. 1. NetStumbler is one of oldest wireless scanner for Windows. It runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP 32 bit. The 64 bit version of Windows XP has trouble running this tool and it refuses to run on Windows Vista or 7. NetStumbler can help you locate wireless networks in your neighborhood and also detect unauthorized access points.

One of the biggest complaints that people, including me, have with Twitter is that it’s difficult to actually follow people. Most people follow from a few dozens to hundreds and even thousands of people on follower. But they can’t actually be following the tweets of this many people, can they? It would take gigantic amount of time each day to read them. Worse, most Twitter users produce so must junk that the few, really valuable stuff gets buried deep under a steaming pile of tweet-shit.

I have a love-hate relationship with my FM radio. I love listening to music on the FM radio channels, but I can’t stand the radio jockeys. Their incessant inane chattering and smarminess always gets on my nerves that I end up switching channels back and forth, constantly.

First, answer the following questions: Do you download music from the Internet? Have you ever bought MP3 music CDs? Do you rip music from CDs? Have you tagged or renamed your music collection, downloaded album art, normalized music files etc with various software? If you answered yes to even one of the above questions, then chances are your music collection is corrupt. Many MP3 software that rip music albums, create or edit MP3 files are broken and as a result the files created using such tools have various issues.

The Windows Run box is a very useful utility to launch programs and applications quickly. There are more than a hundred run commands that let you launch all sorts of built in Windows applications such as Control Panel modules, and system tools like Disk Defragmenter, Device Manager, Group Policy Editor etc. Most of these commands are well documented – you will find plenty of run command lists on the web, published and republished countless number of times. But I’m pretty sure you will never find the following commands in any of these lists.

VLC media player has an amusing ability, targeted especially towards nerds, to playback movies in ASCII art. The option to enable this is right there in the “Preference” window, but most users are unaware of it because they usually don’t dig through the settings of the software. To enable ASCII mode, open VLC media player and click on Tools>Preferences. Open the section “Video” section and under “Output” select “ Color ASCII art video output ” from the drop down menu. Save it.

If you remember, just days ago I wrote about a software called Snarl inspired by the much famous Growl application for Mac OSX. Growl allowed users to receive alerts from installed software and other system alerts through a universal notification system. Specto is a similar tool but for Linux.

1. Where We Do What We Do : A place to view and share pictures of your workplace. Visitors can rate pictures and leave comments. There are some truly great workplaces here. This is where you can get some inspiration to improve your own workspace. 2. TechPosters : Hundreds of poster sized cheatsheets and keyboard shortcuts on various IT topics like programming languages, Linux, software etc, available for download and print. This is a goldmine. 3. FloodMap : A visualization on Google Maps showing the regions of the continents that would get submerged if the ocean level rises, something which is going to happen sooner than you think. The default level is 7 meters but you can choose any level from 0 to 14 meters. 4. Moonbell : The Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya spent 20 months on the lunar orbit collecting valuable data on the lunar topography. The data from one of the sensors onboard Kaguya called laser altimeter (LALT) is used by this site to generate sounds. 5. How

Even though most websites today are web standard compliant, there are still some sites that refuses to render correctly on any browsers other than Internet Explorer. The IE Tab addon for Firefox is hence one of the most regularly downloaded addon from Mozilla’s website, clocking at more than 200K downloads per week, at the time of writing this. But there is a much better competitor to the IE tab that has been around for some time, and that is Coral IE Tab . Coral IE Tab enables users to view any web page using the embedded IE engine within Firefox allowing them to quickly switch between the IE engine and the Gecko engine without switching browsers, much like the old IE Tab addon. Additionally, Coral IE Tab will sync cookies between IE and Firefox. So if you have logged into a page from an IE tab and want to switch to the Firefox engine, you can do so without losing your login session. From the “Settings” window you can manage URLs of the sites you want to sync cookies and

Remember Nimi Visuals? We covered this neat little Windows visual effects and customization tool some time back when version 10.1 was released. The last edition of the program came with hundreds of nifty tricks and effects from transparent borders, jelly windows, snow effects, taskbar blurring and so on. If you thought those were enough, checkout the newly released version 10.2 which comes with even more bells and whistles as well as numerous new features and improvements. In addition to all previous effects , the following new effects can be seen in version 10.2. Window shifting - When a window is selected, the last window is shifted below the active window. Minimize non-active windows – Instantly minimizes non-active windows. RightLeft slider - Maximizes window to half screen size on Win+F4 or Win+F5 key press, similar to AeroSnap . Taskbar fade - Fade in taskbar when mouse is over it, fades in or out start menu Maximum spacer - Maximizes win

A Content Management System without a database seems so unorthodox that one might feel that it shouldn’t have been put into practice in the first place. Many web site owners might even doubt if it could possibly work. But the fact is, there are plenty of CMS that allow you to run a full fledged website or a blog without requiring a database like MySQL. In some situations, it even makes sense to use a database-less CMS. But the question is: why would anyone want to do that? Most systems run beautifully under Wordpress or under other powerful CMS like Joomla and Drupal. So why go database less? 1. Speed : The major advantage of a database-less CMS is speed. Database queries slow down the servers. On a high traffic website this has a dramatic effect on the speed of the site. A database-less website with no server side scripting or database queries is lightening fast. 2. Easy to install/migrate/backup : Setting up and configuring a database for the first install is generally easy.

Microsoft has made available a new release of WorldWide Telescope desktop application as well as an upgrade to the web client. The new release named Aphelion includes many new features and bug fixes from previous versions. Microsoft also scrapped the Technical Preview label from the application taking it one step ahead in the development stage as WorldWide Telescope enters the beta phase. WorldWide Telescope Aphelion brings to desktops around the world hundreds of terabytes of images from a variety of sources, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, and Spitzer Space Telescope. The heart of the latest release is the incorporation of an entire collection of science-quality data, which will be available not only to researchers, but also to the general public, and amateurs to feed the astronomy addiction. The images on Aphelion includes information such as when an image was taken, the start and stop times of the exposure, how long the exposu

One of the many interesting features of the Intel Core i7 processor is the Intel Turbo Boost technology. While most modern processors are capable of running at various clock frequencies depending on the power usage, Turbo Boost is different. Instead of throttling down clock frequencies, Turbo Boost allows the processor to run at clock speeds higher than the stock speed. Turbo Boost is an over clocking feature managed autonomously by the processor. The amount of over clocking depends on how heavily the cores of the processor are utilized and how much power is available. If the CPU is operating below rated temperature and power and if there is enough headroom, the clock speed of one or more of the cores could be automatically increased resulting in increased performance. TMonitor is a CPU clock monitoring tool that allows you to watch the fluctuating clock speed of each core of the processor in real time. This tool is particularly useful in visualizing the Turbo Boost feature of

outSSIDer a free Windows software that scans your neighborhood for open, unencrypted WiFi networks so that you can surf for free. Whenever it finds one it alerts you and then tries to connect to it automatically. All you have to do is run outSSIDer , close the laptop lid and start walking around the streets. When it detects an unencrypted wireless connection it alerts you with a sound. As the signal gets better you get a repeated ding-ding-ding sound, which means that you should stop and wait to allow the program to connect to the network. Once it successfully connects to the network you get a different tone notifying you of the success. The best thing about this program is that you don’t have to move around the streets looking for an open signal with your laptop open in your arms and instead disappear into an open manhole. Just walk around casually with your laptop nicely tucked under your arm but keep your ears open for the beeps. Once you are connected, find a place to

Zim is an open source WYSIWYG text editor for the Windows and Linux platform that takes word processing and note-taking to a new level by bringing the functionality of wiki to the desktop. If you create notes, to-do-list, or even write articles and you frequently need to switch back and forth between your notes, the proper way to organize is to create a wiki.

Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome ... when we have so many browsers to choose from, why stick to only one? I use at least 3 browsers to surf the web, but Windows allow us to keep only one as default. So if you have a web page saved on your hard disk and try to open it, or click a URL on a PDF file the page will always open in the browser you have assigned as default.

Blaze is a an open source application for Windows that can be best described as your personal desktop assistant. It has a remarkable feature of always being aware of what you are doing and using that information to help you do your daily tasks. Blaze can be used in several different ways. As an application launcher Blaze functions as an application launcher. Now we have seen more than a couple of programs of this kind in the past. Blaze automatically indexes all your applications and all recently accessed files and folders. By default, Blaze only indexes your start menu shortcuts and the program files directory but you can make it index any directory on your hard disk. After it successfully builds up it’s index you just have to type the first few characters of the program you want to launch and it immediately finds the correct program.   But there is more to Blaze’s application launcher. Blaze has the ability to bear typos and, therefore, you don't have to be so ca

1. Goollery : A fun collection of projects related to Google build by various people. Really nice collection but not entirely complete. I couldn’t find some of the cool projects I covered in the past like Ships and Moon Lander . 2. CChronicles : Watch videos of computer experts of the 1980s in weird hairstyles talk about revolutionary technologies like computers, Internet, operating systems and such. It’s awesome how technology has evolved in such a short span. There are more than 70 videos at the time of writing this. 3. Ta-da List : Easy to use, sharable, web based to-do lists. I like the name. 4. Freezly : This site tells you what’s free on the Internet right now by searching Twitter for links to giveaways and offers. It’s a lot like Tweetmeme. 5. How many people are in space right now? If you ever need to answer this question, you go to this place. They also got an RSS feed.

How many times have you shouted at people for putting CDs on the desk the wrong side up? You must have taught countless number of people to put the CD with the label side down to avoid getting scratches on the writing side. Well, this might come as a surprise for you (unless you already know it) - you are protecting the wrong side of the CD! The shinny side of an optical disc is the side the data is read off by the CD or DVD player, so it seems only right and natural to protect the shinny surface from scratches by laying the CD, label side down on our desk when not in use. But that’s a big mistake. To understand why you have to understand how CDs are constructed. CDs store data as tiny physical pits on a perfectly flat polycarbonate or plastic disc. The data is stamped on the top side of a plastic disc creating millions of pits and bumps in a spiral from the center of the disc outward. A very thin layer of reflective material, usually aluminum (copper, silver or gold on higher