Instant Fundas

Calligra is a suite of programs for word processing and graphic art developed from the now defunct KOffice, the word processing program for KDE. The program is currently in version 2.6 release candidate 3 and aside from Linux, Calligra is also available for Windows and Mac OSX users. Calligra contains applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, databases, vector graphics, digital painting and more. It uses the OpenDocument format as its default file format for most applications and can import other formats, such as Microsoft Office documents.

You might not be aware that Windows 8 deliberately delays the loading of desktop programs when Windows starts. These are shortcuts located in your Start Menu’s Startup folder as well as the items which run from various Registry locations. The slow down has a positive effect on Windows startup time as it makes the desktop usable sooner and apparently more responsive. However, you can reduce the startup time if you want by editing the Registry.

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has warehouses across North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and separate retail websites for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and China. These different versions of Amazon often have the same products on sale but at varying prices.

Japanese camera manufacturer Nikon Corporation has just launched a new image sharing and storage service called 'Nikon Image Space ’ that is open not only to users of Nikon digital cameras, but anyone who enjoys taking photos and sharing them. While everyone gets 2GB of storage space for free, if you own a Nikon camera you can convert your Basic account to Special account and your storage will be increased to 20GB. You can also utilize several advanced functions, including the ability to apply a password when sharing images, and a function that restricts image download.

OpenSignal is an Android app that brings together a set of tools and features that help you understand and learn more not only about the mobile network that surrounds you and its coverage, but also monitor its performance and your own cell phone and data usage behavior. OpenSignal even lets you find the best nearby Wi-Fi hotspot using crowd sourced information and a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and compare speeds, coverage and quality of service for mobile broadband networks across selected countries.

Wi-Fi and 3G connections are battery draining operations that will empty the power cells on your phone within a few hours if kept enabled at all times. But data connectivity is essential for things like downloading email, Facebook updates, tweets and other stuff that keeps you connected to the world – both real and virtual. CleverConnectivity allows you to do all that and still save battery power by cleverly managing your phone’s data and Wi-Fi connection without you having to change your social habits.

You must be familiar with Giveaway of the Day (GOTD). It’s a popular website that hosts software giveaway everyday, all round the year. Each software offered on the site is free only on that particular day and should be downloaded, installed and activated on the same day. A protection software included with the download makes sure that you cannot install the program once the 24 hour giveaway period has expired, even if you’ve still got the installer.

A Windows PC that has been put to sleep or on standby can be woken up by pressing a key on the keyboard or by moving the mouse if the mouse is connected through the PS/2 port. An asleep machine can also be woken up by sending a wake signal through the Ethernet cable on a network connected PC. But you can also wake up your PC at a specific time, automatically, such as in the morning and even wake you up too by playing a song, for instance. Here is how to do it.

Recently Facebook started experimenting with new ways users could send messages to each other, while cutting spam and making a few bucks in the process. Previously users set their inbox to allow messages from either everyone or friends of friends, or friends only. Anyone else that didn’t qualify had their messaged dumped to the “Other inbox” that most people rarely checked. There are many instances where important messages from people remained unread for months or even years in the other inbox because they weren’t friends or friends of friends. So last month Facebook started testing a new paid messaging system where strangers could pay $1 and be guaranteed that the message will be delivered to the recipient's inbox.

Should someone arrive unannounced at your desk and ask you to show something in Firefox or want to borrow it for a while, will you comply? Are you sure your browser history is clean and there isn’t something you shouldn’t be viewing? Nothing is more embarrassing when you have people around, and you start typing an address in the URL bar and Firefox autocompletes it with the most inappropriate address from your bookmarks or history. How you wish you had time to delete your browser history before starting, or that you had never saved that website to Firefox’s bookmark.

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Real APK Leecher is a free program written in Java that allows people to download APK files of Android apps directly from the Google Play Store on to their Windows computer. Then transfer the files to their Android device for manual installation. There are other ways to download APKs from Google Play, one of which involves editing the browser agent string of the Chrome browser to disguise it as an Android device. But Real APK Leecher is the easiest way to do it.

The standard ‘Send to’ menu in the right-click context menu for files and folders in Windows Explorer shows a number of popular locations where you can copy or send files to. This menu can be customized by editing the items located under the “send to” shell folder. There is another menu called the “extended send to” that shows, aside from the locations on the standard menu, all the folders located under the user profile directory.

One of the advantage of using a Microsoft user account on Windows 8 is that you can sync your apps, data and personal files across the Internet to multiple Windows 8 machines you own. Aside from keeping your apps and data synchronized, it also keeps your data backed up on to the cloud. This is handy even if you don’t have any other Windows 8 PC. In the event of a computer crash or when you need to reinstall Windows, Windows 8 will automatically download your apps and data from your Microsoft account and put it back on your computer. If you wish to keep a local backup of your apps and data, you can use the freeware tool, Windows 8 App Data Backup.

One of the first thing a virus or worm does once they infect a computer is disable access to all tools and software that could be used to detect and possibly kill the malware. Windows built in programs such as the task manager, group policy editor, and Registry editor are usually the ones that goes first. Some malware would also disable third-party security software such as anti-virus programs, making it impossible to run a scan on the infected computer. Modern malware writers are clever enough not to allow installation of any new security software either, detecting them at launch and terminating the installer. How does one deal with such infection?

One good thing about computer games is their wide user base, irrespective of age or culture, especially among kids. That is why when Microsoft released Windows 8 with its Apps store and applications, it became an instant hit. Since then, developers have built various free game apps that kids will not only enjoy playing, but will also teach and help them in their learning process. Even better, Windows 8 RT tablets optimized for all of windows 8’s best features are now also available in many online retailers like Newegg. As a parent, if you are considering giving your children gifts that they will appreciate, here are the must have list of Windows 8 apps that you can download.

Cookies aren’t evil. They are needed by websites to remember user’s preferences and the state of their activity on the website. This can include clicking particular buttons, logging in, or a record of which pages were visited by the user even months or years ago. This is legitimate tracking and necessary for websites to maintain a certain degree of usability. It’s the third-party cookies that advertising companies use to track users across multiple sites in order to target advertisements that bring bad press. These cookies are often persistent in nature, meaning that they stay active on the system even after the user session has terminated and continue to monitor the user’s movement across the web. The ‘Do Not Track’ policy and cookie laws by the European Union are the result of such intrusive tracking.

If you have downloaded a file that you aren’t sure is safe or malicious, you can have it scanned locally on your computer using your existing antivirus or anti malware programs. You probably have one or two or maybe even three such scanners at most, and except one single resident, real-time scanner, others are likely to be demand only since no two real-time scanners can exist together without killing each other and the system it resides on. This is why online malware scanning services are so handy, because it allows you to scan files with multiple scanners without installing any of them locally on your computer. Let us look at some of the online malware scanning services at our disposal.

Windows 8 boots remarkably faster than its predecessors, and this is made possible by the newly implemented ‘hybrid boot’ or ‘fast start-up’ feature. Hybrid boot is a combination of logoff and hibernate. In fact, before Windows 8 was released, the hybrid boot feature was internally referred to as ‘Logoff + Hibernate’, and it does exactly that. Hybrid Boot is an improvement of the hibernation feature that has been with Windows for a long time. In hibernation, the entire content of the memory is saved to the hard disk and power to the machine is terminated, so when you start your computer the next time you can resume from where you left.

I signup on lots of websites to try out new web apps and other stuff, and more often than not, end up on their mailing list. Everyday these sites send me scores of emails that goes straight to trash. I skim through the subject lines in my inbox, select the ones I do not need and delete them. Since I never open any of these mails, I’ve never had a chance to unsubscribe from them. This had become a daily ritual until one day I decided to unsubscribe from each and every one of these unsolicited correspondence.

Windows 7 offers two different window switching shortcuts to cycle through open windows – 1) the hotkey combination Alt+Tab displays a grid of thumbnails of open windows and 2) the hotkey combination Win+Tab displays a 3-dimensional view of all opened windows. If you like neither and prefer a simple list, then here is how to get it.

In a surprising move, Adobe has released an older version of some of their most popular products as freeware. The version which can be now downloaded from Adobe’s website free of cost is Creative Suite 2 and includes Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, InDesign CS2 and more. This is great news for those who couldn’t afford to shell out hundreds of dollars for an image editing application, and is definitely bad news for GIMP and the numerous other free Photoshop clones.

Windows 8 supports two types of account – one is the regular local account and the other is the Microsoft account. When you login to Windows 8 for the first time using your Microsoft account, which is the same as your Microsoft Live ID or Hotmail account, Windows automatically creates a user folder under C:\Users. The user folder is named as “username_000”. If the “username” is long it may be truncated to keep the length of the folder’s name to under ten characters. Furthermore, the “username” that Windows assigns to you depends on your Microsoft account’s sign-in name and not your actual name. If you have a Live ID or Hotmail address that doesn’t reflect your real name, like an anonymous handle, the user folder will bear the handle name. Understandably, you may want to rename this user folder. But you cannot rename it like you do to a regular folder, because obviously, doing so will break your account. There is a proper way to do it.

Do you save a lot of pictures from the web? If you do, then there are some easy ways you can make the job easier. Opera users can use a nifty trick to quickly save pictures from web pages – simply point the mouse pointer to the image you want to save, and while keeping the CTRL key depressed, click on the image. This opens the Save As dialog box. Hit the Enter key and image gets saved. If you use Firefox, you can install the DoubleClick Save Picture extension . This add-on enables you to save images by double-clicking on the image. Both these approaches are browser specific, so if you use a different browser such as Chrome or Internet Explorer, take a look at the following solution which is browser independent.

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Automatic updates are a good thing because it keeps software on user’s machine patched and secure, and this is important for software like web browsers and the operating systems. Google Chrome has a silent auto update feature that neither asks the user’s permission before updating nor alerts them after the update has been applied. It would have been possible for Google to include an option in Chrome that allows users to turn-off auto updates, but Google knows that most people cannot be trusted with manual update.

Google Bar is the black toolbar like thing that appears at the top of all Google web services, with links to Google’s flagship products like Search, Google+, YouTube, Maps, Play, Gmail, and so on. A dropdown menu at the end gives users access to more products that couldn’t be fitted on the bar. While the bar is extremely handy if you use Google’s products a lot, the inability to customize which links appear on the bar diminishes the utility of the bar to the point that some users absolutely loathe it. But if you can customize the bar and rearrange the links on it, the bar can become useful again. Here is how to do it.

I use a software called Font Xplorer to view fonts installed on my system, as well as preview font files that are not yet installed. Previewing fonts before installing lets me decide whether I want to use them or not. But sometimes, previewing is not enough – I have to see them live, in the design I’m working, to judge how the final result will appear. Often I end up installing too many fonts on the system, most of which I never use at all, and I’m not even a web designer. I can only wonder what the font folder of a person who makes his or her living designing websites might look like.

In previous versions of Windows, one could invoke the Advanced boot menu when the computer was booting by pressing the F8 key. While the key still works, it has become harder than ever to hit it on time as the time window during which the computer accepts the key press has been reduced to less than a second, thanks to Microsoft’s optimization of the boot process in Windows 8. To overcome this, Windows 8 provides a way by which users can restart their computer and enter the Advanced boot menu from the Modern control panel.