Instant Fundas

I never knew microprocessor manufacturer AMD makes software too until I read about AMD Fusion Media Explorer at Chris Pirillo . The AMD Fusion Media Explorer (FME) is a 3D social media and digital media browser, that allows you to explore your digital media content from either your local machine or online resources such as Flickr, YouTube, Microsoft Live as well as Facebook.

The Large Hadron Collider is preparing it’s first ever proton collision at 7 TeV and the event will take place live via a webcast direct from CERN headquarters . 

If your friend is sensible enough he wouldn't send you links with questionable content with a NSFW warning. But what if he didn’t and you are unsure whether to open it or not? Or what if he did but now you are tempted to take a peek while at work?

Pinging a blog is one way to get your blog picked up by search engines and aggregators whenever you post a new entry. Although services like Ping-O-Matic has been around for years and can also be integrated with popular blog engines like Wordpress, the range of servers they ping is too narrow. This where services like BlogBuzzer comes in handy.

The earlier version of TuneUp Utilities 2009 is up for grabs through a German promotion page. Those who aren’t aware, TuneUp Utilities is a Windows maintenance tool with a wide variety of functions from disk cleaning to system tweaking. Here is quick rundown of the features you will find in TuneUp Utilities 2009.

Remember that demo video of the amazing new content-aware fill in the upcoming version of Photoshop? Sure, it left everyone’s jaw dropping. Now guess what? There is already a plug-in available for the open source image editor GIMP that does the same thing… almost.

Here is the situation: say you need to burn a gigantic amount of data that could require several DVDs. You don’t know how many disks you will need but you want to carry out the job using the fewest number of disks as possible. If you try to calculate the space used by each folder and files, and then try to organize them into chunks that would fit on a DVD and at the same time try to achieve the best fit, it will probably drive you crazy.

1. Where is Jesus? : Who would have thought finding God could be so easy? Just go to this site and try to find Jesus in the picture. Once you positively identify him in the crowd, click on him to get another picture and another and another. Find him on public rallies, on shopping malls, among children and hippies. Holy bejeezus, you have found Jesus 11 times! You are finally saved!

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13 moon mission, Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) and noted space author Andrew Chaikin teamed up to tell a part of the story that they unearthed and validated with the help of original mission personnel.

If you take a picture of yourself holding your iPhone, Nexus One, Droid and iPad, this how you will look like 20 years from now.

The Newspaper Club is one of those wackiest ideas that’s so wacky that it actually works. This new London-based start-up allows anyone to print their own 12-page newspaper, complete with images and color.

GMapCatcher is a program that lets you view maps from a variety of different sources from the desktop. The program can also download maps to the local hard drive allowing one to view these even when offline.

PicasaExt is a free addon for Windows Explorer that provides better integration with Google's image editor and manager Picasa. To make PicasaExt work, you must have Picasa installed on the computer. PicasaExt reads the ini files that Picasa uses to store information and makes them available on Windows explorer. Currently, the only thing it does is show starred pictures in Windows Explorer, but we hope there will be more features in future releases.

Apparently, there are hundreds of periodic tables floating around the web. No, not the usual Periodic Table of elements you studied in high school. These are another class of periodic tables of random and sometimes bizarre stuff (like periodic table of elephants ), where periodicity is the last thing you will find in them.

A Blogger template inspired by Twitter is available for download .

Chem4Word is a chemistry addon for Microsoft Word developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, that makes it easier for students, chemists and researchers to insert chemical information, such as labels, formulas and 2-D depictions, from within Microsoft Office Word.

Google announced a new security feature for Gmail that should help users ward off hackers and scammers from accessing their email accounts.

Adobe recently demonstrated an eye-poping feature called Content-Aware Fill in their upcoming Adobe Photoshop CS5 which is so mind blowing that there has to be some sort of witch crafty involved. This new feature makes painstaking photo retouching jobs, which could take hours to complete, as easy as clicking a few buttons and watching Photoshop do it’s magic within seconds. This is one of the craziest things I have watched.

Spiceworks IT Desktop is a network monitoring, management, inventory, and helpdesk software application designed for network administrators working in small to medium-sized businesses.

There are more than a handful of places to store photos online - Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, to name just a few. Many people use Facebook to keep touch with family and friends and share pictures. Others use Picasa or Flickr and some even mail pictures to each other. The trouble when you have too many options is that your photos are scattered everywhere. Showzey is a service that helps you assemble all your photos at one place.

How do you like this desktop?

Google and several other partners including Enterprise UK, BT, e-skills and PayPal have got together in a joint initiative called "Getting British business online" to help small businesses in the United Kingdom, by giving away 100,000 free .co.uk web addresses along with a website.

Google Account Switcher is an extension for the Chrome browser that makes managing multiple Google accounts easier. If you have more than one Google account (or Gmail account) you can quickly switch from one account to the other using this extension.

SuperbarMonitor is a group of Windows resource utilization indicators that reside in the taskbar and indicates the resource usage of various components of the computer. Currently 5 different indicators are available – Memory, CPU, Disk, Volume and Battery. Each indicator is a separate application and has to be downloaded and run individually.

Are you tired of receiving pictures of kittens and jokes you read a decade ago in the form of mails forwarded to you by your friends? We all are, but how do you tell these people to stop sending you junk without offending them?

Anybody who has used Microsoft Word is familiar with those wriggly colored lines that appear underneath whenever you make a spelling error. This is a standard feature in all Microsoft products and, in fact, all word processors from different software publishers. A red colored line indicates spelling error while green indicates grammatical error. Microsoft included a way to customize the color of these lines in Word 2007. This is how to do it.

Many users, usually the less tech savvy ones, have trouble installing custom themes on Windows. And why not? There are no setup files that you can click through and no button with ‘Install theme’ written on it. Everything needs to be done manually, from patching files to copying folders. For a typical Windows user, it’s too much of work. So if your friend asks you how to do it, just direct them to Windows Themes Installer.

Remember Soichi Noguchi , the Japanese astronaut who tweets wonderful pictures of the earth from the International Space Station? Now he has started uploading videos on YouTube. His YouTube channel has just 5 videos at the moment but there are already a thousand subscribers.

Benubird PDF is a comprehensive PDF document managing and archiving solution for Windows. It allows you to manage your PDF files from one central location and perform a handful of operations on them, including conversion, editing, searching and more.

The other day, Microsoft announced that they had done away with the hardware virtualization requirement to run Windows XP Mode. This update KB977206 is now available for download.

iCare Data Recovery Software is dedicated in most frequently data loss like formatted hard drive, MBR (Mast Boot Record) corrupted, bad boot sector, drive inaccessible, partition unreadable, partition deleted, software operation failure like Partition Magic caused data loss, Ghost failure, virus attacked, etc.

Somehow Google felt that this wasn’t worth mentioning, perhaps because they have more pressing matters at hand such as the lawsuit against Viacom, but this new YouTube feature didn’t escape the notice of long time Google blogger Alex Chitu of Google Operating System. It’s possible you have noticed it too.

Feedling is an interesting RSS feed reader for Windows that lets you read feeds from your favorite sites on the desktop, quite literally. Feedling extracts news items from one or more feeds and displays it on the desktop over a transparent background. The result of the effect is that the feeds look like as though they have been embedded on to the desktop wallpaper.

Good news for users stuck with a processor without hardware-level virtualization. Microsoft just announced that a new update to Windows XP Mode enables it run on all processors, irrespective of virtualization support. Although Windows XP Mode will continue to use hardware virtualization technology if available.

With the rising popularity of digital music, popularized by the 99 cents per song iTunes store, videos, ebooks and cheap iPhone apps the micropayment market is fast growing. But the high transaction fees on credit cards reduces the profit share of merchants in such micro transaction, so much that many web merchants are reluctant to accept credit cards. In order to tap into this growing market and at the same time offer a cheaper payment model, PayPal wants to launch a platform where there will be cheaper fees for transactions under $10.

1. Seven alternatives to the Apple iPad : Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town.

GnuWin32 is a set of tools that were ported from Unix to Windows, ideal for those who can’t live without their favorite Linux applications. The tools include Windows executable files, patches, and source code along with required dependencies needed for running the application.

Shipping fees has always been a big deterrent for me when shopping online, because often the shipping costs exceeds the cost of the product. If you hate paying for shipping too, you will be interested in Flippity, a web service that searches eBay auctions based on what you're looking for and where you live.

Some applications particularly Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Microsoft Word and a few others display an overwhelming number of file types in their Open and Save As dialog boxes. Often it takes a long time to locate a file type you want to save as or open because it’s buried deep in a list of other file types, most of which you never use.

Although hot air balloons today are used more as a sport than for transport, they are indeed, a viable alternative to shuttles, at least for space tourism. A Spanish company based on Barcelona called zero2infinity has taken the first baby step to fulfilling that mission, with their state-of-the-art near-spaceship balloon called Bloon .

Microsoft Corp today quietly launched a video-on-demand service called MSN Video Player that enables UK consumers to watch TV anytime at no extra charge. MSN Video Player, which was has been available as beta since August 2009, is now a fully launched service even as it faces stiff competition from other players like BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD and another recent entrant SeeSaw .

The Yahoo Mail Blog announced a new change to their mail inbox. Users will now be able to temporarily hide advertisement shown along the sides of the inbox by clicking on a small hide button just to the left of the advertisement, “ to give you more real estate to read your emails ” Andrew Molyneux, Program Manager of Yahoo Mail wrote.

Although partial solar eclipses are quite common and can occur four to seven times a year, total solar eclipses are rare. The number of viewable total solar eclipses are even fewer because in order to be seen, the shadow of the moon during an eclipse must pass over human reachable regions on Earth. Since two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water a large number of total solar eclipses pass over oceans and other remote areas.

If you are heavily into Internet marketing and use a ton of affiliate programs like Google Adwords, Commission Junction, ClickBank etc apart from publisher advertising programs like Google Adsense, Yahoo publishers and so on, you probably waste a significant amount of time each day logging-in and out of these program, checking statistics and performance. For such webmasters and marketers, Nifty Stats is indispensable.

Do you need to connect one computer to another to transfer data but setting up a network is too complex for you? USB Go Link offers you the easiest solution.

The entire purpose of a progress bar is to let the user know how much longer he or she has to wait till the program finishes doing whatever it’s doing. But most progress bars I have come across are useless. Have you not seen a progress bar that randomly switches between varying lengths of time from 2 hours to 5 minutes, when the actual file copy operation took 10 minutes?

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has just released an updated version of Nokia Ovi Player, a software solution for Nokia devices users. The new version 2.1 of Nokia Ovi Player, which was formerly known as Nokia Music when we reviewed them last , lets users manage and transfer music between their computers and phones, discover new music from the Nokia Music Store, and more.

EasyBCD is a free software that provides an easy to use graphical frontend to the Windows Vista and 7 bootloader. EasyBCD makes it easier to set up, configure and tweak Windows boot entries, often useful on machines running multiple operating systems of like Windows, Linux and Mac.

Worksheet Database is a free program that lets you to use spreadsheets in ways you never thought possible. The program allows you to create spreadsheets that has check boxes, drop down menus and date calendar, which you can use to create any kind of lists, manage projects, organize information, track inventories, etc.

If you thought EULA (End User License Agreement) is a 21st century invention by evil businessmen, meet Sir Thomas Alva Edison. This photograph shows what could possibly be the oldest EULA ever. It’s a license statement on Edison’s Wax Cylinder , one of the oldest sound recording and reproducing medium, whose terms proves that EULAs were in existence for over a century ever since man learnt to keep record of music on physical objects.

When you run a virtual machine in Windows Virtual PC, you may experience high CPU usage in the guest operating system on certain hardware platforms, such as notebooks. Oddly however, when you examine Task Manager, no CPU usage issues are displayed in the host operating system. Keystrokes in the guest operating system are delayed and there is a definite lag in the response of the system.

Start Menu 7 is a new software that replaces the Start Menu on Windows 7 with a different one. The standard Windows 7 start menu is compact, while Start Menu 7 covers a larger area and comes with additional functionality. It’s difficult to say whether the new Start Menu 7 offers a more productive alternative, but it does offer us a choice in start menus.

Zemana AntiLogger is a powerful way to protect your PC from malware attacks. The program doesn’t rely on virus signature updates and file scanning like the traditional anti-virus programs do. Using a unique technology, similar to heuristic methods used by antivirus software, Zemana AntiLogger detects when malware runs on your computer, and terminates it before it can cause damage to your system. Zemana AntiLogger eliminates threats from keyloggers, SSL banker trojans, spyware, and more.

Lately a website called Chatroulette is creating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere, and unless you just emerged from under a rock you have probably heard and used it too. Those who are truly clueless, here is an extract from Wikipedia:

For a long time the collection of templates that Blogger offers when creating a new blog has remained constant. I’m fairly certain no body uses them any more particularly when there are so many good templates available from other designers. Google wishes to change this by introducing a new feature on Blogger in Draft called Blogger Template Designer.

Desktopify is a web service that lets you convert web widgets into standalone desktop widgets to be used on the Windows or Mac desktop. Web widgets are those typical widgets that we can embed in our blogs or websites, consisting of a snippet of HTML or JavaScript code or Flash content. Desktopify can take these codes and convert them into self executable files.

MusicCubeOne is an utterly simple music player for Windows. The player’s overly simplified interface might not go down well on some users, but those who love minimalism will like it’s bare but attractive look.

RT Se7en Lite is a Windows 7 configuration tool (similar to nLite and vLite for Windows XP and Vista respectively) that allows you to create a completely customized installation disk or USB Flash drive of Windows 7. Using RT Se7en Lite you can integrate updates, drivers, remove components, add wallpapers, Icons, themes, and create an unattended installation disk.

The name 3RVX on paper might look odd to read and spell, but on the desktop it looks fantastic, for it’s a stylish and skinnable volume display and controller for the Windows desktop. It displays the sound volume level with its on-screen display and allows you to control the volume via a skinnable slider or custom hotkeys. 3RVX also supports drive eject notification, mouse hotkeys, and a wide range of customization options.

WhoReadMe is a free email tracking service that lets you track emails you have sent and inform you when they get opened. There are many email tracking services available, all work on the same principle – by embedding a small invisible tracking image to the mail. Some services require you to generate the tracking code and manually paste it on to the mail, while others require you to use their email service. WhoReadMe is of the latter kind but it doesn't require you to abandon your existing email address.

Rockbox is a free, open source replacement firmware for various portable MP3 players that greatly enhances the capabilities of the player. Rockbox offers an alternative to the player’s operating system firmware, in many cases without removing the original firmware, with a plug-in architecture for adding various enhancements and functionality to the player which are not present in the original OS. Enhancements include PDA functionality, applications, utilities, and games. Rockbox can also enable video playback functionality onto MP3 players that doesn’t support video like those released in mid-2000.

OrangeNote is a free WPF-based text note manager for Windows (and Mac) with a dash of eye candy. The program allows you to store an unlimited number of text notes that can be tagged and pulled up from the database at any time with a quick full-text search. OrangeNote also functions as a clipboard manager allowing you to copy and keep unlimited number of text items on the clipboard.

Posterous is a simple blogging platform that enables a user to post to their blog by simply emailing them whatever he or she wishes to publish. Posterous became an instant hit among casual bloggers. The unique blogging method enabled them to post to their blog from mobile devices, and Posterous automatically handled all attachments like music, video, images and documents.

If you have changed the default Facebook profile picture and uploaded your own, it’s fine. But if not, then why not replace that boring picture of the guy with a wisp of hair sticking out of his head with something different and funny?

1. Punch Cartoon is an archive of high quality scans of cartoons published on Punch, a popular British satirical weekly magazine that was in existence from the 19th century to almost the 21st century. You can also buy prints from them. 2. How porn has changed the Internet : 12 innovations by the sex industry.

Did you ever felt the need to send a big fat message to somebody? Big Ass Message has you covered.

Basket Buster is a plug-in for Firefox that helps online shoppers save a few bucks by alerting them of deals and coupons. Many price and deals related addons for Firefox exist, but Basket Buster is different from most of it.

LinuxLive USB Creator or LiLi USB Creator is a software for Windows that allows you to create a bootable Live USB key of any Linux distribution. LiLi USB Creator was formerly called Live uSbuntu Creator which we reviewed earlier on Instant Fundas. LiLi USB Creator is an improved version that supports not only Ubuntu but 30+ different Linux distribution.

If you upgraded your Windows Vista or Windows XP computer to Windows 7 using the upgrade option, you still have your old files on your disk in a folder called Windows.old. It’s possible to revert back to the earlier operating system using this folder - this is why that folder exist. The following article will show you how.

Microsoft has published a new article that details the steps required to disable or remove the Browser Ballot screen that began displaying on Windows machines for European customers, this March. If the ballot screen has been annoying you, this is how to disable it:

Want to see how your hair looks under an Electron Microscope, or your skin, or paper, or anything around the house? Send it to ASPEX Corporation.

Microsoft isn’t the only one who is facing the wrath of the European Commission for supposedly “unfair practices”. Google is another organization against which the European Commission opened inquiries following competition complaints by three different companies, one of which is, ironically, owned by Microsoft.

Sites like Tweetmeme and Retweet.com helps you find the hottest stories on Twitter at any moment, but they fail to show which stories from a particular domain are currently hottest. Tweetmeme can provide that information but only for articles within the last 7 days. If you want to find out all articles from your blog that are shared on Twitter or which one got the highest number of tweets you will have to use different tools.

An SSD or Solid-State Drive is a replacement to the traditional hard disk drive with the advantage of better performance, lower power consumption and higher reliability. People who own Intel SSDs now have to way to manage and retain the out-of-box performance of their SSDs with the Intel SSD Toolbox.

When it comes to extremely small Linux distribution, it’s hard to beat Tiny Core Linux. At an image size of 10 MB, it’s one of the smallest distribution with a graphical user interface (although operating system smaller than that exist ).

The popular Popular Science magazine is now available online for free browsing. Scanned copies of the entire archive spanning 137 years were put up by PopSci, the web version of the print magazine.

With Facebook and Google Buzz hogging the limelight and drawing media attention people tend to forget there is another social networking site from Google – Orkut. Ever since it’s launch in 2004, Orkut failed to gain traction among Internet users except among users from India and Brazil which together accounts for more than 70% of it’s user base.

Have you lost your HP printer’s driver disks? Did you get a new HP printer but don’t have the drivers? Well, don’t bother searching because the HP Universal Print Driver is all you need.

It seems like people have finally realized that they do have a choice against Internet Explorer. Just days after Microsoft’s browser ballot screen went live for European users, Opera’s download tripled, said Rolf Assev, the chief strategy officer for Opera Software.

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, is a helluva number. Any digit followed by a truckload of zeros deserves a name of it’s own. The International System of Units (SI) currently allows for a maximum of 24 zeroes which was named “yotta” in 1991. Since then no new prefix has been added to the family even though researchers in various scientific fields regularly come across numbers greater than a yotta, for instance in calculations relating to the wattage of the sun, distances between galaxies, or the number of atoms in a large sample.

Continuing from where I left three months ago , here is another fresh collection of beautiful Windows 7 themes, handpicked by me from among hundreds.

Disk Space Fan is a free hard disk space and file analysis tool that provides you an  overview of the contents of your disk partitions, enabling you to determine which folders and files are occupying the most disk space. Sounds familiar? Of course, there are quite a number of such software in the market. Recently we brought you one called DiskAnalyzer Pro , and previously another powerful one called Xinorbis .

We have seen a fair deal of screen capture software, haven’t we? You must have tried a handful of ones we reviewed here as well others we didn’t, and you must have already have your favorite screen capture utility by now. Nevertheless, we will continue looking at new screen capture tools. Today we look at iClippy.

The guys behind the Google Webmaster Tools are making a commendable effort in helping site owners prevent their websites from getting hacked. On November last year, Google announced that they would be notifying webmasters about new releases of software running at the backend of websites such as CMS like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla, whenever they are available so that owners can get their site patched. A lot of sites get hacked because they run on outdated, unpatched software and according to Google, the numbers are staggering.

The integrated file downloader on Firefox is too bare bone. You can add some fancy buttons and tweak it’s file download behavior using the Download Manager Tweak addon for Firefox, or you can use the previously mentioned Download Statusbar addon to convert the download manager into a status bar. Another very useful addon is Download Scheduler.

The Windows 7 operating system provides built-in support for sensor devices, such as GPS devices, and offers an API that allow third-party developers to build native application that are location-aware. However, Microsoft didn’t integrate a default geolocation provider. Thus developers could not take advantage of this until Windows 7 PCs started shipping with GPS sensors.

The navigation button of Windows Vista and 7’s explorer window is blue, and it always remains blue even if you tweak the Windows border color through the “Personalize” settings section on the desktop and control panel. If you want to change the button color, then there is an application for that.

Soichi Noguchi , a Japanese astronaut on the International Space Station, is rocking on Twitter. His 100,000+ Twitter followers are being treated daily with stunning images of the Earth, he takes himself.

Macrium Reflect Free Edition is a disk imaging software for Windows that can create disk images using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service and perform data recovery operations using Linux based and Windows based rescue CDs. The free version is limited to disk imaging and data recovery only, while the paid version packs in a file backup solution, incremental disk imaging and a handful of useful features.

CPU Usage Logger is a simple program that provides a means for developers and software testers to monitor and log CPU usage (utilization) for any period of time. This open source, portable application that weights just 65KB, is also capable of calculating the moving average of CPU utilization and logging the same to a text file.

FlowHeater is a powerful tool that makes it possible to import and export data to and from a widely differing data sources and targets using a flexible graphically defined conversion. FlowHeater facilitates quick transport of data from one place to another with necessary conversions performed on the fly. Using FlowHeater, a wide variety of data sources can be interconnected by making use of exchangeable adapters, with unrestricted data flow.