Instant Fundas

It’s pretty odd that Microsoft should impose a limit on the number of files that can be downloaded simultaneously in Internet Explorer. In Internet Explorer version 8 and 9 the number of files that you can download at once is restricted to six, but it was worse in Internet Explorer 7 and earlier where Microsoft limited the number to mere two. The limit is sensitive to the connection speed. If the browser detects dial-up connections, both Internet Explorer 8 and 9 will revert back to the limits from earlier versions.

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform for creative projects, recently issued a statement to dispel some misunderstandings surrounding Kickstarter. The company is concerned that many backers/investors have started to view the crowdfunding platform as another online shopping site, and hence might invest in something without fully understanding the risks involved. “Kickstarter is not a store”, wrote the site founders on their blog, “it’s a new way for creators and audiences to work together to make things”.

Cloud storage services are designed to serve two primary purposes - provide a place to securely and reliably backup your important files, and make these files available on all your devices at all times. Space is a limiting factor in such kind of services and the cost of extra storage, although cheap, is recurring. The other is security. If you have highly sensitive data or simply don’t trust cloud service providers, or otherwise, have an inordinate amount of data to synchronize you’ll be better suited if you run your own cloud storage service.

Can’t decide which movie you should watch next? Try FlickChart , a website that allows you to rank movies and create your own personal chart of favorites, browse movies ranked by others and discover new movies to watch. Flickchart offers a unique way to rate movies. Instead of rating movies in a scale of 1 to 10, two movies are pitted against each other. You pick the one you like the most, and two new movies go head-to-head. If you haven’t seen one of the movies, click a button and the movie is replaced by another movie. If you haven’t seen either of the movies, click another button and two new movies will lock horn.

Google Play, the premier destination for Android apps, recently clocked 25 billion downloads and to celebrate this milestone the Mountain View company has announced a promotion on Tuesday. During the next 5 days, Google will offer a selection of apps for just 25 cents a piece.

Sean Parker has been involved with some of the biggest movements on the web, and now he has placed his bets on the video chat application Airtime as the next big thing. Sean Parker is an internet entrepreneur whose work as co-founder of the file sharing service Napster in 1999 gained him notoriety, wealth and, in some circles, infamy. As a teenage hacker, Sean and a friend created the online service to share music amongst Internet users. The site became an overnight success, garnering tens of millions of users within the first year. The site was famously opposed by the Recording Industry Artists of America (RIAA) among others and was shut down by a court judgement only a couple years after launch.

A hand-picked selection of articles published between September 9 and September 22 of previous years. 1 Year Ago 3 Volume Control Tools With Pretty On-Screen Displays Use File History to Backup and Restore Previous Versions of Files in Windows 8 Folder Options X Brings Extra Features to Windows 7 Explorer

Usenet has been around for more than 30 years but public knowledge about this system is mostly low. When the Internet boom came in the late 90s, Usenet was already on their way out replaced by the World Wide Web and all the fancy things it brought to people’s desktop. Then came Naptser and finally BitTorrent, and Usenet was largely forgotten. Few people who were born during the last two decades have any experience of Usenet. If you are one of them and want to try out a Usenet service but price is the inhibiting factor, here is a chance.

With the rising popularity of Android powered smartphones and devices, Android malware has been increasing at an alarming level. According to security research firm Kaspersky Labs, the volume of new malware targeting Android devices nearly tripled in the second quarter of 2012 and this will only get worse in coming months. While the number of malicious programs targeting Android pales in comparison to the millions or so found on Windows, it is still a sizeable chunk that should worry any Android smartphone user who frequently download apps from the Internet.

BitTorrent networks are favorite fishing spots for anti-piracy outfits such as RIAA and other research organizations specialized in collecting intelligence on downloaders. BitTorrent is inherently insecure and anyone who engages in file sharing leave a trail of information behind that can uniquely identify a peer and the files they have downloaded. There have been hundreds of cases in the past where file downloaders were sued for copyright infringement on the basis of IP address alone.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it has added a new recycle bin feature on SkyDrive.com cloud storage. The feature which will be rolled out in the coming weeks will allow users to recover files that were accidentally deleted providing some amount of protection to user’s stupidity. While SkyDrive already keeps previous versions of your Office documents automatically, the new feature will be particularly useful in group projects where many users have access and permission to modify files in a SkyDrive folder.

A while ago I wrote about three tools that allows users to manage their files on several cloud services all from a single interface. We saw that web based tools were better equipped at supporting multiple services and protocols at once compared to desktop based tools. Out of the three tools reviewed only one was a desktop program and it worked with only three services - Dropbox, Google Docs, and Box, which is too less for many users. Here is a nice alternative.

Facebook first announced the Timeline layout more than a year ago. It was met with lots of resistance at first, but with the passage of time more and more Facebook users are warming up to the new design. Now that Timeline is the default Facebook layout, a new market for unique cover photos have started to appear. Over the last few months several of these wallpaper-like sites have sprung up and their numbers will continue to grow, until the next Facebook redesign.

Windows Photo Viewer – the default programs for opening images in Windows is more customizable than you think. Previously, I showed you how to change the default time interval between pictures when slideshow viewing mode is turned on in Windows Photo Viewer. In this short tutorial I’m going to show you how to change the background color of Windows Photo Viewer as well as Windows Live Gallery. The default background color is light blue (in Photo Viewer) and white (in Live Gallery). Some people feel that a darker background is better as it makes the pictures pop-out. If you have strong color preferences and want to change the background, here is how to do it.

Want to play a game? Alright! Start at any Wikipedia page and click the first link you encounter in the main text of the article, and then repeat the process for subsequent articles. Eventually you’ll end up at the article about Philosophy. The first link on the Philosophy article takes you to Problem which returns you back to Philosophy. It has been estimated that more than 95% of all Wikipedia articles exhibit this phenomenon which was first discovered in May 2008.

It’s nearly six months since the launch of Google Drive, yet there is still no integration of Drive’s storage with Gmail, particularly one that makes it possible to save attachments from Gmail directly to Google Drive and have them available instantly across all synced computers. Thankfully, there are more than a handful of different ways to do this. And these third-party services will probably be better than any native Google Drive integration we may see in future, because they support more than just Google Drive.

Here is another collection of themes that were not previously featured on Instant Fundas, not necessarily released in September, but definitely new and fresh. If you missed out the previous collection, you will find them all under the Customization section – more than 190 hand picked themes in all.

Reddit’s AMA, which stands for “Ask Me Anything”, are interactive sessions where people of all kinds, be they celebrities, leaders (such as the U.S. President Barak Obama) or just common people with interesting jobs or unusual experiences take part in interview sessions with Reddit’s community. AMAs often lead to in-depth personal interaction and interesting connection between Internet users – secrets are revealed and tricks of the trade shared. It’s one of the most popular section on Reddit and one of my personal favorites too. Unfortunately for me, I always end up late to every AMA party, by a good 6 to 12 hours or more after the AMA session is over. Differing time zones is part of the problem, but the real reason why I miss out on these discussions is simple and rather stupid – I forget.

Internet Explorer 9 introduced pinning of websites to the taskbar. Users could simply drag an open tab and drop it into the taskbar to pin the website into place. All website shortcuts could be pined to the taskbar and start menu, but websites that took advantage of the new codes could customize the jumplist for these shortcuts and incorporate additional features and shortcuts to various sections of their website. Google Chrome has a shortcut creating feature too, and while not as gorgeous and functional as Internet Explorer 9 pinned sites, it’s something you might want to check out.

A hand-picked selection of articles published between August 26 and September 8 of previous years. 1 Year Ago OpenWith Enhanced: A Better ‘Open With’ Dialog Box for Windows How to Remove Unskippable Anti-Piracy Ads, Region Lock, and Encryption From DVDs Translate Text and Documents With The Windows Key

DropboxPortableAHK , as the name suggests is a portable version of Dropbox implemented using AutoHotkey. It allows you to run Dropbox’s client program from a USB Flash drive and sync files contained on the USB drive to your Dropbox account, regardless of which computer you are using. This enables you to carry your files around with you and at the same time have them sync seamlessly with your Dropbox storage. DropboxPortableAHK is especially great when you do not have permission to install the program on the computer, or if you work on multiple shared computers and do not want to hassle with Dropbox’s web interface. There are plenty of other scenarios where DropboxPortableAHK can be useful.

Everybody needs a little help in spelling, whether you like to admit it or not. In junior school we had teachers and parents to look over our shoulders and gently correct our spellings and fill in missing prepositions. Today, we have automated spell checkers and we must be thankful that we have them, because without those helpful wriggly green and red lines, the web would be a rather embarrassing place.

Opera has decided to follow suit after Google Chrome regarding protection of users from potentially harmful third-party extensions. In a new blog post , Opera developers explained that starting Opera 12.50, the browser will block installation of extensions that do not originate from the official repository. Opera already alerts users when they try to install extensions outside addons.opera.com, but does not prevent the user from installing the extension. The alert is a mere message that warns the user that the extension is not located on the trusted source. A simple click on the “OK” button is enough to dismiss the alert box and proceed with the installation.

Sound Lock is a free program that allows you to limit the sound output level from your computer speakers. The program monitors the loudness of playing media and decreases it to the level you have set the audio volume too. If the playing media is too loud, Sound Lock will turn down the loudness and then turn it back up when the loud media finishes playing. This kind of automatic audio volume control is also known as normalization.

YouTube is no stranger to B-grade movies. Just head to Youtube.com/movies to see the marvelous collection of Indian movies that typically run on cheesy theaters and aired on late night “local” channels. But if you are lusting for some serious B-grade stuff, then you should have Troma Entertainment productions high on your list. This giant in the world of B-movies have just released more than 150 movies from their catalogue including classics like The Toxic Avenger, Redneck Zombies and the Bela Lugosi starrer The Corpse Vanishes on YouTube for full viewing .

Those Indians who are waiting for advanced Google Maps features like voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation and live traffic updates will be pleased to learn that these are now available on select Indian cities. The feature is available on Google Maps Navigation app for Android 2.2 or later and live traffic information is visible on both the mobile and desktop versions of Google Maps.

Wolfram Alpha, the self-styled computational knowledge engine, has launched a new service that allows anybody to gain deep insight into their social life on Facebook. The new “personal analytics” takes your Facebook data and in a remarkably short time converts it into a series of mathematical graphs that shows things like how many of your friends are married or single, how many of them share a common name, who has the most number of mutual friends, who leaves the most comments on your post, as well as details about your own social habits like at what time of the day you are most active and much much more.

FileOptimizer is a lossless file size optimizer program that can reduce the file size of different types of files such as images, Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point files, music files, EPUB, PDF, archives and more. The program utilizes a number of different, open source compression engines to achieve this. For instance, to compress PNG files, FileOptimizer uses the APNG engine, OptiPNG or PngOptimizer; to compress PDF it uses Ghostcript and MP3packer to compress MP3 files. Basically, FileOptimizer is a one stop shop for all your file compression needs.

Last week we organized a giveaway for UnoDNS , a unique DNS service that makes it possible to bypass geo-graphical restrictions on websites. Now it’s time to announce the winners. Here they are: