Instant Fundas

Here are the winners of the CactusVPN giveaway we organized a few days ago. CactusVPN is a special VPN service, in a way that it allows Torrent and P2P downloads on their servers. In fact, the ten accounts that they are providing for this giveaway are all Torrent-supported and valid for a period of three months. If you took part in the giveaway, see if have won.

Tomahawk is a free, cross-platform and open source music player that combines your local library of music with those of several popular music streaming services like Spotify, Grooveshark, SoundCloud, Last.fm, YouTube and more to offer a unified music listening experience. And it doesn’t stop there – by hooking up with your Jabber or Google account you can play music from your friends’ libraries too, provided they’re also running Tomahawk.

Sunrise Seven is a powerful Windows 7 customization and tweaking tool that brings all the tiny configuration settings and options distributed across the operating system under one common roof. Sunrise Seven meets your customization requirement in almost all that concern appearance, performance, security and usability. Not only does it allow for quick customization, but it also helps you discover hundreds of settings you were probably not even aware of in the first place.

Raspberry Pi , the teeny-weeny microcomputer that was announced late last year , and the one that has amassed a huge fan following even before it was released, is finally available for orders. The Raspberry Pi is available at either Premier Farnell or RS Components . Search for Raspberry Pi, and then follow the normal shopping and checkout process. Apparently, the announcement has caused a huge rush of buyers and both the retailer's websites are down at the time of this writing.

Windows automatically identifies media files on removable devices such as CDs, DVDs and Flash drives, and performs an action as configured by the user under the AutoPlay options in Control Panel. The action can be chosen based on the type of media inserted – audio CDs, video CDs, video DVDs, Blu-Ray disc, USB drives – or based on the content of the discs - software and games DVD/CD, pictures, video files, audio files, mixed media etc. Video and audio discs can be made to automatically playback on a media player of choice. For USB devices, memory sticks and camera, Windows will pop open a dialog box asking users to choose an action. While these are all very helpful, it still requires user’s action.

When photographing architectural structures, buildings or other large structure from the ground, it is often impossible to fit the entire building in the frame without tilting the camera upwards. This results in distortion of the perspective causing the top of the building to appear smaller than its base and the entire building appears to be leaning away from the viewer. This is known as converging verticals or converging lines, and effect is undesirable in photography.

A selection of articles published between February 12 and February 25 of previous years. 1 Year Ago Host Static Websites on Google App Engine for Free : Rock solid server, near 100% uptime, plenty of bandwidth, for the sweet price of nothing. Who can beat that?

Google has partnered with the University of Queensland and their sponsor, a multinational insurance firm called the Catlin Group, to produce an underwater variant of Street View called Catlin Seaview Survey. The venture plans to cover Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in September of this year, and another reef in Bermuda later. The goal of the project is to let people explore the ocean in three dimension and also carry out the first detailed study about the composition and health of coral reefs.

BSNL, the state-owned telecom giant, announced on Friday that it would bring three Android tablets in partnership with Pantel, a company based in Noida. Of the three, the cheapest one TPAD IS701R is priced at just Rs. 3,250 -  a few hundred rupees more than the commercial version of Aakash tablet with better configuration.

Fluent is a a new web-based email client created by three ex-Google employees that turns your Gmail inbox into Facebook styled newsfeed. Fluent allows instant searching through emails as you type, shows attachments like photos in a slide show and lets you manage multiple accounts under one log-in. Former Google Australia employees Cameron Adams, and Dhanji Prasanna began work on Fluent full-time about six months ago, after becoming frustrated at Google's work culture and leaving the company after Google axed Google Wave. Jochen Bekmann, another former Googler joined the cause in November 2011.

Not many VPN service providers allow downloads through Bittorrent and other P2P file sharing network on their servers, but new entrant – CactusVPN - does. CactusVPN has servers on three countries – the US, the UK and the Netherland. Torrents and P2P downloading is allowed on the Netherlands server, a country which has always been tolerant to file downloading. However, after the recent change of heart of the Dutch government, CactusVPN might want to review their decision of placing servers in the Netherland.

Scheduling emails so that it gets to the recipient at the right time is important, particularly if you are mailing busy people. But email isn’t supposed to be a real-time conversation, you may ask, so why is timing important? Let me explain. For someone who receives hundreds of emails each day, it is easy for important messages to get buried below tons of mails from people who are eager to initiate a conversation with the person. If the person lives on the other side of the globe and you mailed him while he was sleeping, the next morning he wouldn’t see your message because several new mails will have arrived during the night pushing your mail out of the screen and into several pages deep. But if you email him while he is on his desk, there is a good chance that he will see your message. And that means scheduling your email so that it hits his inbox at the right time.

One of the many problems with Gmail’s new design is the lack of text on the buttons. A black & white icon on a black & white button conveys nothing. Does a square box with a downward pointing arrow say ‘Archive’ to you? Looks more like ‘Download’ to me. Does an octagon with an exclamation mean some kind of a warning? No. It is just spam.

DreamMail is a powerful, yet somewhat obscure, email client software for Windows with features filled to the brim. It was designed to handle multi-user and multi email account, and supports SMTP, eSMTP, POP 3, and even RSS feeds. You can even access webmail accounts such as Yahoo which doesn’t have POP3 access for free users. With support for filters, labels, mail blacklist/whitelist, search and other functions, DreamMail makes for a pretty darn good email program. It’s two sore spots are - lack of support for IMAP and poor junk filtering capabilities.

Microsoft has released a handy troubleshooting tool kit that will sure save some headache for people who provide tech support, either professionally, or to family and friends or take care of their own machines. The Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool (OCAT) provides a mean to analyze your Microsoft Office Outlook profile for common configurations issues that may cause problems in Outlook.

Canonical today announced Ubuntu for Android , a unique version of Ubuntu that is designed to seamlessly integrate Android with the Linux distribution. This is not an Ubuntu app running atop Android, nor it is an Ubuntu device running an Android emulator. Rather, Ubuntu for Android is a full Ubuntu desktop running side-by-side with Android on the same phone.

National Geographic publishes some amazing pictures each day taken by some of the most renowned photographers of the world. If you like National Geographic, here is an application I’m sure you will love. Picturethrill is a free program that downloads fresh pictures and wallpapers everyday from National Geographic and several other sites. Picturethrill will automatically download images and optionally set them as your desktop wallpaper.

FoxE9 is an add-on for Firefox that skins the browser and makes it look like Internet Explorer 9 in appearance. There are two perfectly legitimate reasons why anybody would want to do that. 1. Unlike its predecessors, IE9 has an attractive interface. It’s understandable if one wishes to have the same interface on Firefox.

Mashable recently published a list of Pinterest clones, pointing out the obvious similarity between them and the incredibly popular image collecting site, but they didn't answer the question of what sets Pinterest apart from these copycats and why it continues to be more successful than any other similar service. Let's take a look at each of these sites and see how they really measure up. Is it that the early bird gets the worm, or is there more to Pinterest than just a Masonry layout and bookmarking service aimed at collecting images?

For most people, a web browser is all they need. Email, Facebook and a little surfing is pretty much all they do. Whatever documents they create or edit can be handled by Google Docs and Zoho. For playing music and video you have a bunch of streaming sites. You can also setup your own music streaming service to play your music collection from anywhere. Did you know, you can drag a music file and drop it inside Chrome to start playing? But you can’t keep dragging every file you want to play. You need playlists, and if possible, a library. So, here are three Chrome extension that turns your browser into a full featured music player.

Backing up the entire Windows registry hive, which you may intend to do when you move your programs to another computer or before you reinstall Windows, is pretty easy. Just fire Windows’ default registry editor tool regedit.exe and use the Export function from the File menu. This under-rated tool also allows you to selectively export registry keys. For instance you may want to backup the keys of a particular application, wherein you right click on the concerned key and use the Export function from the context menu.

Start Orb Mover is a free software that lets you move or re-locate your start button and start menu to another location on your Taskbar. Currently it can move the start button to the right or center, for taskbars that are docked to the bottom or top of the screen; or move it to the bottom or to the center, for taskbars that are docked to the edges of the monitor. Additionally, Start Orb Mover gives users a quick option to do tasks such as Change Start Orb, Restart Explorer, Open an Administrative Command Prompt, Exit Explorer, Open Explorer, Open Start Menu and Taskbar Properties, Hide the Taskbar or change location of Start Orb, simply by right-clicking the Start Orb.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that allows users to write in plain text format using easy to write markup, and then convert it to structurally valid XHTML or HTML. Simply put it’s a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web coders. Let’s face it, writing HTML in a text editor isn’t the most efficient way to create webpages. It requires lot of effort and time, and all it takes is an accidentally misplaced closing tag to mess up the whole document. WYSIWYG editors rather than solving the problem further aggravates it by being too helpful with HTML tags essentially destroying your formatting. True, today’s HTML editors are smarter than what they were a few years ago (Microsoft Frontpage) but they still have a long way to go before they can start producing code like humans.

A selection of articles published between February 5 and February 11 of previous years. 1 Year Ago Guide to Automated Software Installation : Install your software unattended, silently and in bulk. The complete guide.

Here are the winners of the Auslogics File Recovery 3 giveaway we organized a few days ago. Auslogics File Recovery is an easy to use file recovery software for Windows that can recover any type of files irrespective of the file extension/type from any kind of storage media. The 5 lucky winners are:

Stuff Organizer is an open source, catalog application for Windows for organizing ebooks, movies, music, software - whatever you have that needs organizing. Using a simple folder/sub-folder structure you can organize any files on your computer. You cannot use it to catalog physical objects  – it’s not a home inventory software, only files. Aside from maintaining a fully searchable database of your files, Stuff Organizer will unpack archives and move your files around to organize them into clearly labeled folders. Stuff Organizer is not just a file tagging software , it’s a true file organizer and cataloguer.

Apparently, Microsoft is not yet done changing the interface on Windows 8. Screenshots purported to be from Windows 8 Beta (build 8220), dubbed the “Consumer Preview”, posted on the Chinese website PCBeta, showed the taskbar without the Start button orb. In the Developer Preview, Microsoft had flattened the start button in an awkward attempt to match it to the Metro style interface. In the Beta build, the start button did the vanishing act.

This collection consist mainly of themes released/updated during the last two months since the last collection . Previous collections: September , August , July , June and May and Windows 7 themes – Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 .

A selection of articles published between January 29 and February 4 of previous years 1 Year Ago Sync Evernote Notebooks With Gmail : If you use both Evernote and Gmail this free tool will synchronize Evernote notebooks with a GMail account. The notes in Evernote are uploaded to your GMail account as emails, and stored in a folder of your choice.

Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes gave viewers a glimpse into Adobe Photoshop CS6’s Camera Raw tools. The most dramatic change that you will notice from this video is the darker color of the new interface which Hughes explains was chosen to make Photoshop consistent in appearance with some of Adobe’s other products like Lightroom . Users will however be able to change back to the lighter classic color if they want to.

Veteran developer of 3D application software, DAZ 3D is well known among 3D circles. DAZ provides large number of add-on products and models of human figures, anatomy, clothing, animals, vehicles and such for use in popular 3D software applications such as Poser, Blender, Maya and Photoshop Extended. DAZ also has several of their own 3D creation programs, the most notable among them are DAZ Studio and Bryce. Bryce is one of the first realistic landscape generating computer program while DAZ Studio is a 3D posing and rendering applications.

Firefox 11 Beta, which is now available for download and testing, comes with some big changes, the biggest of which is add-on sync. Firefox Sync, introduced in Firefox 4, allows users to synchronize bookmarks, browsing history, preferences, passwords, and even opened tabs across multiple computers. Users who desired add-on synchronization had to use third party services like Siphon. With Firefox 11, this will be no longer necessary.

Headscape co-founder Paul Boag was recently quoted by .net magazine on the subject of customer service in the web industry, that, "As web designers, we like to think we just build websites. We don’t. We also offer a service to our clients. We are often so obsessed with user experience, code and design that we forget other important factors such as good communication, understanding business needs and exceeding client expectations. If we are going to prosper in 2012 we need to blow our clients away, not just their users.”

Windows 8 includes two built-in push-button type recovery options - Reset and Refresh in Windows 8 - akin to the factory-rest setting often found in cell phones. The Reset option will remove all personal data, apps, and settings from the PC, and reinstall Windows allowing you to start from a scratch. This is usually what happens when you perform a clean installation of Windows. The Refresh option will reinstall Windows 8, but keep all personal data, Metro style apps, and important settings from the PC intact. Windows 8 includes a third option that allows you to create an image of the hard drive and restore the computer from the image. This way, when you need to start over, you won’t have to reinstall the apps from scratch.

Ever wanted to create a movie about yourself, and star in it as well? Now you can, thanks to a new Facebook app called Timeline Movie Maker that takes content from your Facebook timeline and creates a movie highlighting the special moments of your life. Timeline Movie Maker was created with marketing agency Definition6, and it will only work for users who have upgraded to the timeline profile.

Microsoft has published a new blog post regarding changes that have been made to Windows 8 Explorer, this time, based on actual feedback received from blog commenters, newsgroup discussions, and reviews that have been written about Windows 8. Back in the summer, last year, Microsoft detailed the Explorer ribbon and explained how Windows 8 Explorer will handle file copy operations and resolve conflicts. In response to the mountain of feedback received on those particular features, Microsoft is incorporating new changes just in time for the first public beta of the operating system slated for release next month. Microsoft noted that nearly 2,200 reader comments were taken into consideration when deciding which features to include and which ones to axe.