Instant Fundas

Amazon has launched an online trade-in program which allows people to trade old electronic goods, video games, movies and textbooks in exchange for gift cards. All you need to do is head to Amazon's trade-in website and pick the item you'd like to trade in. Amazon will accept only those items that are listed on their Trade-In stores. To find whether your old junk is eligible for trade-in, you can search by product title, ISBN, or product model number or manufacturer.

In Windows 7 you can quickly group photos in explorer by the date the picture was snapped – this data is readily available in the EXIF tag of the photos and added by almost all digital cameras. However, the timeline used in the ‘group by date’ option in Windows is relative. For example, files and photos are grouped by “this week”, “last week”, “last month”, “a long time ago” and such vague time periods.

When you compare how different browser’s display progress of downloading files, you will notice that Firefox has the most detestable behavior. When you start a new download in Firefox, it will pop open the download window in your face. Other browsers are less annoying – Opera opens it in a background tab, Chrome opens a download bar at the bottom of the page, while IE9 displays a balloon like notification box at the bottom.

WinThunder is the marriage of two seemingly incompatible and naturally unrelated tools – an application, files and folders shortcut launcher and a weather notifier, housed together under a jumplist-styled interface.

The ‘Hidden’ file and folder property in Windows is a very rudimentary way of hiding things on a Windows machine. Sure it will keep your stuff away from casual users, but you can’t hide them from experienced ones.

In Windows 7, the labels on taskbar icons are hidden by default. This, along with the ability to group icons, is designed to allow more and more program icons to remain pinned or minimized in the taskbar. The obvious disadvantage is that when more than one window of an application is open, such as two or three browser window or explorer window, it requires more clicks to select and open the program. The labels also has the advantage of displaying real time updates on the taskbar such as title of the playing song in music players, download progress etc.

Until May.31, 2011, Digiarty Software, Inc. is offering one of their flagship product WinX DVD Ripper Platinum KungFu Edition as a free download. Digiarty Software explains, We are specially running the giveaway in this summer movie season in hope of benefiting users at the right time. We call it Kungfu edition because it is the recent version upgraded with significantly enhanced performance and a cool interface.

Previously, I wrote about two excellent Twitter search engines - Topsy and Ubervu - that lets you find not only great stories shared on the micro blogging network but also use it as research tool to find about any website’s popularity on Twitter – which links were shared the most, who shared it, broken down by timeline and all. Apparently, Topsy has an API which has been utilized to build a useful Twitter application called Counting Tweets.

With so many coupons and deal sites on the web, finding the best prices for products require just a few minutes of searching. Browser plug-ins such as Invisible Hand and Basket Buster does an amazing job at alerting users to the best available deals without the user having to do anything on their part.

You might have never heard of G Data, but this German security software developer has constantly topped anti-virus test results largely due to its dual malware detection engine. G Data’s products are not free, but the German developers have recently released a free security solution called CloudSecurity which offers real-time protection from malware and phishing attack from malicious websites.

Bing Dynamic theme pack for Windows 7 was introduced last year. Dynamic themes, as the name suggests, are dynamic. They are equipped with an RSS feed that brings fresh content to the desktop in the form of wallpapers every week. When you install a dynamic Windows 7 theme you automatically subscribe to the RSS feed and your computer downloads new images when they are added to the Microsoft theme server and you are connected to the Internet. The images are saved to a special folder, and automatically appear on your desktop when you use the dynamic theme.

Marble is an open source virtual globe and world atlas software, very much like Google Erath, that lets you pan and zoom around and look up places, streets, airports and geographical features like mountains and lakes, and rivers.

Some people like things the old way, and when Microsoft removed the ability to switch to the classic start menu from the modern one it saw many discontent among the users. Then programs like Classic Start Menu and Classic Shell started appearing that brought back the old start menu among other things to Windows 7.

The space shuttle Endeavor took off yesterday morning on its final mission to the International Space Station. When Endeavor touches down at the Kennedy Space Center on June 1, it will be the final time the 19 year-old vehicle will ever return to earth. With just one more mission to go - the Atlantis, before NASA wraps up the space shuttle program, every mission on the last leg of the shuttle program has been historic.

Most media players are capable of organizing your music by artist and album, by reading the relevant information from the meta tag such as ID3 on MP3 files. The actual files on your hard drive often remain untouched. So even though you may appear to have a neat library when viewed through your media player, from Windows explorer your collection could be a complete mess.

OmniMail for GMail is an extension for Chrome that makes the omnibox even more ubiquitous by integrating your Gmail contact list to it. With OmniMail extension installed you can quickly compose new emails directly from your browser’s address bar!

All digital camera makers advertise their products in terms of megapixel and zoom. The megapixel myth has been debunked several times in the past. What about zoom? Is it another marketing tool to get people to buy large zoom cameras? Digital Camera makers often use the zoom ratio of a camera to hoodwink you into thinking that it means image magnification. When a camera is advertised to have 5X zoom or 10X zoom, they want you to believe that shooting pictures at that zoom ratio will magnify your images 5 and 10 times respectively. They do not.

Sometime last year, Facebook began showing the combined number of friend requests, inbox messages, and notifications within the browser tab. The figure on the tab updates whenever new alerts are received to keep the user up to date on any changes even if the Facebook tab is not open. But this does not include chat messages which usually updates more often than notifications.

NaClBox is an amalgamation of Chrome’s Native Client Technology and DOSBox that allows old MS-DOS based programs including games to run natively inside the Chrome browser. Native Client is an open-source technology that lets developers to build web applications that seamlessly execute native compiled code inside the browser. In other words, it allows web apps to access the hardware directly and work like a normal software installed on your computer.

Facebook has launched a new feature today that gives people the ability to tag photos on Facebook with a product, company or person’s Facebook page the same way they can tag their friends. Photo tagging for Facebook Pages enables people to “share richer stories with friends about the things they interact with in the real-world, such as businesses, brands, celebrities, and musicians,” wrote Facebook in a blog post .

Texmaker is a free, open source LaTeX editor for Windows, Linux and Mac that integrates many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX. Like most other text editors Texmaker is equipped with a unicode editor to write LaTeX source files with syntax highlighting, undo-redo, search-replace. Most of the LaTeX tags and over 370 mathematical symbols can be entered quickly using menus. Handy wizards guide first time users through creating tables, tabulars, figure environments etc. Texmaker opens PDFs too.

The giveaway from iVPN anonymous VPN accounts that we conducted last week received plenty of entries – I guess everyone needs an anonymous VPN account. The random list generator at random.org has picked up 10 names from among those who left their names in the contest. If you have taken part in the giveaway, checkout below to see if you are among the 10 lucky winners.

One of the best multi-platform, multi-protocol, IM application – Trillian, has just been updated to the latest version 5 that brings to the free users all features previously available only to paying customers, in return for some unobtrusive advertisements. The latest version includes a beautiful new interface, vastly improved social integration, cloud-based chat history, and synchronization of open IMs between all your devices.

Windows Sysinternals supplies users with numerous free utilities to manage, diagnose, troubleshoot and monitor a Windows environment, most of which are being actively developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. Many popular programs like Process Explorer - an advanced version of Windows Task Manager, Autoruns - an advanced manager of startup applications, RootkitRevealer - a rootkit detection utility, PageDefrag – a defragmenter tool for Windows pagefile and many more are all part of Sysinternals utilities.

Popular video game Angry Birds, which until now, was available only on the Android and iOS platform has finally become platform independent when the developers released an HTML5 version of the game. The game was released specially for Chrome but you can be played on any modern web browser, including Opera, Firefox and IE. The entire game is also available to play offline.

Previously, I wrote about three different services that could take a partial or truncated feed and convert it into a full one. The problem with these services, as I realized later, is they tend to stop working after sometime. If you are experiencing similar issues, you can use a Google Chrome extension instead.

Graphs Made Easy , as the name implies, is an easy to use graph making software for Windows. The program does not require spreadsheets or entering data through wizards – simply enter the values for each bar as you go. You can choose and easily switch between different graph types - bar graphs, pie charts, line graphs, stacks and area graphs.

Do you watch non-English movies or movies in languages other than your mother tongue? If not, you are missing out on a huge chunk of good cinema. European countries such as Germany, France, and Italy produce excellent movies. Persian movies are exceptionally touching and down to earth. Japanese and Koreans are famous for the horror genre. There are so many good cinemas in the world, none of which we could have enjoyed without subtitles.

If you are planning to upgrade from your point-and-shoot digital camera to an SLR, but afraid to take the leap because you are unsure whether you will be able to handle all the dials and functions on the more expensive camera, the Online SLR Camera Simulator created by camerasim.com will help you get started.

Google has introduced a new feature to Image search that might help you find images a lot easier. Users will be now able to sort images by subject to better find the pictures they are looking for. When searching on Google Image search click on the “sort by subject” option in the sidebar to organize all results into different categories.

After months of speculation, Google confirmed that YouTube will indeed be offering Hollywood movies for rent through the YouTube Movies service. YouTube has partnered up with Universal, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Lionsgate Films, Starz, The Weinstein Company, and Magnolia Pictures and others to offer full length feature films including a slew of recent blockbusters such as Inception and The King’s Speech. Already 3000 titles has been added to the catalog.

Planning a road trip to somewhere you’ve never been, and wondering what the scenery would be like? Now you can find out with Google Earth Driving Simulator .

Here is the announcement - the winners of last week’s giveaway contest for AnyBizSoft PDF Converter . We had promised to gift 5 licenses of the $59.95 software that allows you to convert PDF files to 6 different formats - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, Text and HTML. If you have taken part in the giveaway, checkout below to see if you are among the five lucky winners.

Last week's US Navy SEALS mission in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden has now been replicated as a free multiplayer game that uses Valve's Source Engine, reports Newowin . The Kuma Games development team has released the latest chapter of their classic First Person Shooter Kuma War II, that allows gamers to recreate the mission that changed the world.

Gmail Notifier Pro sounds like its only purpose it to provide notification for Gmail messages but actually it can used to monitor Google Calendar and Google News as well. Initially the program started only as a Google email notifier, but on subsequent releases support for Google Calendar, Google News and RSS/Atom news feeds were added making it one comprehensive utility to keep track of multiple Google services for multiple Google accounts.

I use all browsers, but my primary browser is Opera. Whenever I’m required to use another one like Firefox, the inability to perform some basic actions that has become almost my second nature when browsing with Opera constantly pokes at my brain’s annoyance center. Today I’m going to fix a handful of those issues, at least the ones related to tab behavior, with the Classic Opera add-on.

Firefox store a user's preferences and data such as installed add-ons, saved passwords, history, bookmarks and others in a unique profile. The first time you start Firefox, it automatically creates a default profile and stores all settings associated with the profile within a special profile folder on your computer.

Previously, I wrote about a printing application called CleverPrint that did a wonderful job in cleaning up pages before printing with the added ability to print multiple pages on a single paper. A similar free program called iPrint was recently brought to my notice by Freewaregenius . Although not as feature rich as CleverPrint, it does a good job as far as saving paper is concerned.

iVPN.net is a privately owned offshore company based in Malta that offers maximum security, anonymous VPN service with servers located in UK, USA, Netherland and France. iVPN is based on OpenVPN technology and uses strong 256 bit AES encrypted connection that is essentially unbreakable. They also offer L2TP/IPSec as an alternative for those wishing to use this service over mobile devices such as Android and iOS.

Comodo Internet Security Pro 2011 is being offered for free for one complete year - no strings attached. Basically they are extending the trail period of the $50 software to one year. During the trial period, you are entitled to 24 x 7 remote support that comprises PC support for first 60 days and Comodo Internet Security software support for the remainder of the trial. Malware removal service and Protection Plan are however excluded from the 1 year trial.

Opera Software has just released the first official version of Dragonfly, the web developer toolkit which ships with the Opera web browser. Opera Dragonfly was first introduced in version 9.5 in 2008 and was in beta ever since. But now Dragonfly is ready for prime time and offers several compelling features you won’t find in competitor products such as Firebug.

XnConvert is a cross-platform batch image editing tool that lets you convert image formats, resize images and apply different kinds of adjustments to images in bulk. These include rotation, adding watermarks, adding text, applying image enhancing filters, fancy effects, stripping EXIF and other meta data and a vast number of actions.

Last week, Google Chrome added a Flash cookie deleting feature in the dev channel of the browser enabling users to remove the persistent Flash local shared objects data from within the browser. This was made possible by the NPAPI ClearSiteData, which Adobe has implemented in Flash Player 10.3. Turns out that Chrome isn’t the only browser that had this function.

Previously, Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. This was enough for most of us, particularly after Google enabled users to turn off automatic inclusion of email addresses of people they email to, to Gmail’s contacts which was the primary reason for some people hitting the 10,000 contact limit. But starting today, Google has increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts

Want to embed an audio player right into your blog post, that readers can play and listen to your uploaded Mp3 files? Here are two easy ways to do that. The first one is the Google audio player . To embed an MP3 file, add the following code to your web page or blog post.

Tiny Burner is a portable free optical disk burning program for those who want to move from commercial programs such as Nero. Like any capable disk burning program, Tiny Burner supports the most popular hardware burners and can write to all types of optical media, including CD, DVD and Blu-ray (single and double layer). Tiny Burner can not only write data to disks but also create ISO images from existing discs.

SnakeTail is a free Windows log/text file viewer than can load and open files that are being currently written to with new data. In other words, a growing log file. SnakeTail can be used to monitor Windows log files such as Event Logs for system, security, applications etc. as well as generic log files.

Until now, Opera had no separate channels for development builds like those on Google Chrome (Canary channel, Dev channel) and Firefox (Aurora and Nightly). Users wishing to try out new snapshots of work-in-progress builds of the Opera browser were forced to abandon the stable version because two different versions were not made to exist together. This is now changed with the introduction of Opera Next – the developer channel of the browser.

If you are running out of space in your Gmail inbox, the quickest fix is to locate all attachments using the search operator “has:attachment” and then delete the ones consuming the largest space. But Gmail offers no way to sort mail by size, or to see their dimensions. So how do you find the largest attachment?

Here is a fresh collection of great looking themes for Windows 7 . Please read instructions provided by the theme author to know how to use it. Often the theme author provides links to wallpapers, icons etc. which makes to 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.

Lately I have been reviewing a lot of different movie managers cum organizers. The trouble with the majority of them with the exception of My Movie Library, to a certain degree, is that the preparation of the library consumes too much time. If your collection consist of hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of movies, manually entering the title of each movie is a logistical nightmare.

AnyBizSoft PDF Converter is a commercial PDF conversion utility that can be used to convert PDF files to 6 different formats - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, Text and HTML. The most notable feature of this program is that it is capable of retaining the original layout and formatting of the PDF including graphics, tables and even hyperlinks in the converted document with a fair degree of accuracy.