Instant Fundas

Drop-down lists are useful when you want to force the user to enter only specific values into a cell in an Excel sheet. The user is presented with a drop-down list and he has to choose any one value from it. If the user enters a different value, it will be rejected. For example, you may create a drop-down list where users select a day of the week or Yes/No. This little tutorial will show you how to add such a drop-down list to an Excel cell.

Well, nobody browses the web with only two browser tabs open. I know a few who does, but most hardened Internet users who are regular web surfers have plenty of tabs opened at the same time. A few modern browsers have some kind of built-in tab management feature. For Firefox it is Tab Panorama, for Opera 11 it is Tab Stacking. Google Chrome doesn’t have any. This is where extensions come in.

This morning I had a great news waiting on my feed reader – LastPass Password Manager extension for Opera has been released . That’s good news not only for the users but the browser itself since lack of support for this particular password manager was holding many users from making the switch.

Dropbox, the popular cloud based storage service, offers users some easy ways to grab extra space. Referring friends is one which lets you get additional 256MB of space for every referral, up to 8GB. Currently Dropbox is offering additional means of acquiring free space. You just have to be a little social. Well, not exactly. Just connect your social accounts to Dropbox, that’s it.

Security product publisher Agnitum has launched a free security suite for Windows - Outpost Security Suite Free 7.0. Right out of the box, Outpost Security Suite Free provides robust, easy-to-use OS Windows protection with optimal default settings to address web-borne threats including known and zero-day viruses, spyware, hacker attacks and intrusions, spam, and more.

There is such an abundance of photos sharing sites on the Internet that any new player trying to enter the saturated market has to do something significant and interesting to get attention. Yogile is one that has managed to do just that. Apart from the extremely effortless procedure of creating web albums and sharing photos, Yogile has one major feature that makes it stand apart from the crowd, and that is collaboration.

Last week we organized a giveaway contest for iSkysoft SyncPod for Windows , a iPod/iPhone to PC syncing software. We have received a number of entries, from among which 10 winners has been chosen by a random draw. The 10 lucky winners are:

The GPU on a video card is well known for its ability to crunch numbers, and if you have one there is no reason why you should keep him idle inside a dark cabinet, unless you are gaming all the time. A GPU’s raw processing power shouldn’t go to waste. He could lend a hand to the CPU when the CPU’s hands are full, and video conversion is one area where the CPU would never say no.

Simple CSS is a free Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) authoring tool for Windows and Mac that lets you create one from scratch, or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface. You don’t have to write any code. This is useful for non-designers (and designers alike) who might have trouble remembering declaration property names and their valid values.

Users who just upgraded their browsers to Firefox 4 beta 7 have started to notice that the status bar is missing. Instead the status bar functionality has been moved to the address bar or location bar. Users like me who are so used to glancing at the bottom of the screen – to the status bar - to view the link destination are getting annoyed at the omission.

When I watch news on TV my attention is constantly drawn towards the ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screen, because I find it more convenient to read the headlines rather than wait for the news readers to read them aloud to me. Keeping track of current events on the Internet is a completely different affair. Here you are in complete control of what you want to read or see and when. RSS feeds serve this purpose. One way to read them is in your preferred news readers, at your own pace. Another way to read RSS feeds is to have them scroll in your desktop just like in TV news channels. That way you can nibble at the news one byte at a time, as they come without putting too much effort on your part.

DOCX and XLXS are Microsoft Office file formats for Word documents and Excel sheets respectively introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. Since all documents created and saved using Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 will save in these two newer formats by default, unless you change them which most users do not, plenty of DOCX and XLXS files are exchanged everyday between users.

There are quite a few ways to keep track of local weather on your computer – desktop gadgets, software, websites and other peculiar ways . Nimi Indicator Weather is one which you might find useful because it puts weather reports right on the taskbar of Windows. The application takes advantage of Windows 7’s new taskbar but is reported to be compatible with older version of Windows too.

Two years ago when Google released Chrome, the company created a comic to introduce the new browser to the world. Now the Google Chrome team has prepared a beautifully done HTML5 guidebook - 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web – that teaches people in simple terms how the Internet, the browser and the technologies that drive the massive World Wide Web works. Some of these things the book addresses are cloud computing, HTML5, JavaScript, privacy, malware, phishing, IP addresses etc, which are explained using beautifully drawn illustration real-life analogies.

Adobe has quietly released the latest iteration of Adobe Reader version 10, which is represented with the Roman numeral X - Adobe Reader X. Adobe had announced the upcoming version of their Acrobat Family of Products last month promising better security via sandboxing – the so called “Protected mode” – along with the usual assortment of feature upgrades that comes with every new release.

iSkysoft SyncPod for Windows offers you a backup solution to transfer videos, songs, and pictures between iPhone, iPod and your computer PC, as well as sync your iPod to iTunes, should you have it installed. The software also provides you an easy way to browse file information and organize your iPod or iPhone playlist and convert video and audio files to iPod or iPhone friendly formats.

Sometime to reduce the download size, file uploaders will pack files into a compressed archive and then re-compress the archive file into another archive. Often, the uploader will do this a number of times. The objective is achieved, but it drives the downloader crazy from repeated extractions that is required to get the original files. Then afterwards they have to clean up the mess.

If you are a heavy downloader and bad organizer like me, your download folder must be quite a mess. If you were to sort these files neatly into separate folders, you would need a tool that could do the job automatically and save you hours of cut and paste. There are a number of such automation tools, out of which I found two particularly useful and easy to use.

If you have visited Wikipedia during the last few days you must have seen and hopefully read founder Jimmy Wales appeal for donations. Wikimedia, the parent non-profit that runs the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia as well as a number of sister sites, survives solely on donations. Towards the end of each year, the organization launches a fund raising campaign. The two-month campaign for 2010 has just kicked off, during which Wikimedia hopes to raise $16 million necessary in order to keep the sites free, stable, and running smoothly.

If you use third party Windows 7 themes , and lots of them, the Personalization panel on Windows 7 -the one from where you apply themes and other cosmetics is inadequate for managing them. Theme Manager for Windows 7 is a better alternative. It’s neat tool from where you can change, install, remove, or in other words, manage all installed themes on your Windows 7 machine.

Windows 7’s built in firewall is a solid firewall program and quite capable of fending off unwanted intruders but the lack of a proper interface for configuration often makes users reach out for third party firewall programs. Windows 7 Firewall Control seeks to mend this.

Last week we conducted a giveaway for a unique kind of software - Musereo Mono to Stereo Converter , that allows mono audio files to be converted to stereo with amazing results. The response to the giveaway was a bit lukewarm, compared to previous giveaways we have run. But that meant greater chances of winning for those who took part. The 10 winners chosen by a draw using random.org are.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 comes with a set of six screensavers out of which only two are customizable (3D Text and Photos). For Bubbles, Aurora, Mystify and Ribbons there are no customization options whatsoever, but with freeware Idle Time Edit you can tweak them to such an extent that they look completely different from the original.

AeroWeather is a fun application that sits in the background and retrieves the temperature or current weather conditions for your location, and then set the Windows Vista and 7 Aero color based on the temperature. Now before you proceed to the download page, let me tell you that the application only accepts US zip codes, so it’s pretty much useless for non-US based users.

If you fancy creating your own 3D animation short but lack the effort, time, dedication and mostly the skills required to master the art, Muvizu 3D is exactly what you need. This free 3D animation software makes it super easy for anyone to produce their own movies, with full camera control, lightening and visual effects, backdrops, music, dialog and what not. All you need is a few spare hours (or minutes, depending on how long your movie is) and absolutely zero drawing/modeling skills.

Since November 1, 2010, Amazon has started a new Free Usage Tier program under which customers can signup and use Amazon’s entire line of Web Services at no cost for a complete year. The offer which is valid only to new customers, will let users run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.

Earlier, we reviewed an application called Cameyo that lets you create portable versions of Windows applications by comparing system snapshot before and after installation of the program and packing all changes into a virtual environment. Essentially, every application virtualization software works this way. Today we have yet another virtualization software – Evalaze.

Want to change the look of your Google Chrome? There are lots of themes available for the browser, some of them official and many contributed by the community of users. You will find one that suits your taste. Or, if you have the time and patience, you can get your hands dirty and create your own from scratch.

Here is a quick heads up: Digiarty Software has just released version 6 of WinX DVD Ripper Platinum, and they are giving away the same at no cost. Interested users can avail the offer at the giveaway page . The giveaway will last till November 17, 2010. Installers for Windows and Mac are available.

Internet security company Webroot has created a new application that stops people from posting updates on social media sites when under intoxication – updates that might cause embarrassment later. It achieves this by forcing the user to undergo a sobriety test, akin to the roadside drunk driver's test that cops enforces on speeding drivers. If the user passes, he or she is allowed to login to one of the protected social media sites. If the user fails, the application automatically posts an update saying, "You are too intoxicated to post right now."

Stereophonic sound, commonly called stereo, is the reproduction of sound using two or more independent audio channels through a symmetrical placement of loudspeakers in such a way as to create the impression of sound heard from various directions. In contrast, monophonic or "mono" sound, is where audio is in the form of one channel, often centered in the sound field.

Rows of social media share button making a mess of the page are a common sight on blogs and websites. To tackle this problem Mozilla Labs has just announced a new extension called F1 that aims to make sharing content on social networking sites much easier.

Remember Firesheep - the Firefox extension that makes it easy to steal user logins and take over social media sites and email accounts when users log in through unsecured WiFi hotspot? Although the intention of the developers were philanthropic, the temptation for people to use it for nefarious purposes is too great. Take into the account the huge number of downloads of the addon, and we have got a real threat.

Ever wondered what would happen when an asteroid “ the size of Texas ” hits earth? Would it annihilate earth? Nope. Contrary to what you have been led to believe by Hollywood, it is not easy to destroy the earth. It’s a 4.5 billion years old, 5,973 billion billion tonne ball of iron that has taken more devastating asteroid hits in it’s lifetime than you can imagine, and yet, it’s still orbiting. On the other hand, smashing the moon on to earth at 72km/sec would be something.

I first wrote about Kingsoft Office more than two years ago - it was Kingsoft Office 2007 back then, and it was the first time I ever heard about this office suite. But I could tell right off the bat, there was something impressive about the software. It was much smaller than either Microsoft Office or OpenOffice, yet vastly powerful and feature rich.

EmailTray is more than just a desktop email notification program. It is a free email manager and prioritizing application, that can monitor multiple email accounts, analyze your email messages and assign a priority ranking to each mail based on your interaction with the sender. It then notifies you of incoming messages based on the priority.

If you use both iTunes and Windows Media Player to manage and play your music collection on one computer, then using a tool called Orzeszek Ratings you can sync the ratings and play counts between the two applications. This enables you to use both music players in tandem and still maintain common ratings and play counts.

Last week, Mozilla Labs announced the availability a very interesting new extension called Lab Kit, that automatically adds, updates or removes experimental features developed for Firefox by the Mozilla Labs team. The experimental addons and features will be reviewed and approved by the Mozilla Labs team before being pushed to Lab Kit. The interesting change is that you don’t need to restart the browser, one of my biggest pet peeves with Firefox, to try out new experimental features.

Paragon Migrate OS to SSD is a new software that offers a handy solution for transferring a complete Windows installation from the hard drive to SSD. The software consists of a convenient wizard, which detects all existing Windows operating systems at launch. Users specify which Windows installation they want to migrate, and the wizard then automatically picks the appropriate partitions and prompts the user to select a destination disk.

Sometimes when you are at work, which means you should be working, but you are playing some Flash game or visiting sites you aren’t supposed to, and then a colleague, or worse, your boss walks past your cubicle. If you use Firefox, there are several addons to lets you hide your browsing tracks and session. Google Chrome doesn’t have that many options, but one that helps is Tab Renamer.

Three years before Photoshop 1.0 was released, computer engineers in the USSR were already retouching photographs using some surprisingly advanced technology. The video below shows how the Soviets went about restoring damaged images with the help of rotary scanners, magnetic tape, and trackballs.

MacX Video Converter Pro is a high quality video converter that is built with 420+ Audio/Video codecs and advanced HD video decoding engine. The software owns powerful capabilities to convert among all HD video and SD videos and transfer to Mac, PC, iMovie, iTunes, iPhone iPad, iPod, etc. It also enables users to download YouTube videos and convert to other format or create VOB files from video for burning to DVD.

32-bit Windows XP has a limitation that prevents them from addressing hard disk space greater than 2TB (actually TiB ). So if you have bought one of those new 3TB hard drives you will find that you cannot utilize a significant portion of the drive. The root of the problem lies in the Master Boot Record (MBR) which cannot address storage space larger than 2TiB. An alternative to MBR is GUID Partition Table (GPT), which has none of the drawbacks of MBR, and supports large enough volumes for 3TB drives. However, GPT is not supported by Windows XP.

iCore Virtual Accounts is a free software that creates isolated virtualized user accounts on your Windows PC within which other programs can run. These virtual accounts can be used as a sandbox program for safer browsing and installing and testing of new software.

Chrome Toolbox is an extension for Google Chrome released by Google themselves that brings a handful of new features that should have been native to the browser. Chrome Toolbox add plenty of new enchantments, tab tweaks, keyboard shortcuts, and other options that regular Chrome users love to have. Here is a brief overview of what you get with this extension.

If you ever have to reinstall Windows and the software you purchased, you will need the serial numbers for those applications when you install them. If you lose the license key, you cannot install them. Losing the key is essentially losing the product and the rights to install them. So what if you have actually lost them? There is one way to recover – grab them from the registry.

Microsoft has began rolling out a feature that will enable Windows Live Hotmail users to send and receive email from other existing email addresses while using Hotmail. This essentially turns Hotmail into a web based email client.

Cyberghost VPN is a fast and reliable premium VPN service that allows users to surf the web anonymously through a very secure 128-bit SSL encrypted connection. The premium service of Cyberghost offers faster speed compared to the basic version - a minimum of 2 mbps is guaranteed – and 40GB of monthly bandwidth for all your streaming needs. In addition, the premium account also provides 2 GB of 256-bit AES-encrypted online storage.

Expat Shield is a new VPN service from AnchorFree, maker of the popular HotSpot Shield, that enables users to create VPN connection to servers located in the United Kingdom, and thereby access all services which are region locked to the UK, such as BBC iPlayer and Spotify. Expat Shield also enables user to remain anonymous, and offers protection from packet sniffers, such as Firesheep , by way of encrypted (HTTPS) connection.

The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to the initial round, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is <enter dramatic pause> Internet Explorer 9. My first reaction when I read this over at The Register was: ‘How Did This Happen?’.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a powerful disk defragmentation tool loaded with features hard to find in a free software. Auslogics Disk Defrag not only defragment files but can also optimize your hard drives for maximum performance. Aside from defragmenting entire drives, this software can defrag individual files and folders, consolidate free space, move system files to the fastest part of the disk and clear the MFT Reserved Zone from regular files.

Google Search always delivers customized search results depending on the geo-location of the user. The location is easy to guess from the IP address. This is why you are always directed to Google’s local search domain even if you begin from www.google.com. For instance, a user from India gets re-directed to www.google.co.in and a user from UK to www.google.co.uk.