Instant Fundas

April fool’s day is two days away. There is still plenty of time to make arrangements, but those who haven’t made plans yet or have run out of ideas, here is nice prank to play on your co-workers or family members. If your victim uses Google Chrome, this trick is straightforward because it was written to work with Chrome. However, it is possible to duplicate the trick on Opera and on Firefox quite easily. We will see how to do that in a short while, but first, let us start with Chrome.

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between March 17 and March 30 of last year. 3 Tools to Download Pictures from Tumblr Blogs 11 Twitterific Tools for Music Sharing 8 Cool Windows Settings Hidden Under ‘Ease of Access’ or ‘Accessibility Options’ 12 Totally New and Modern Windows XP Themes

Third party visual styles, also referred to as themes, for Windows 8 are coming up at a steady pace. Here we have rounded up some new eye-catching themes that were released since the last collection in December last year. Get more beautiful themes at our Windows 8 Themes page.

Here is our latest collection of visual styles for Windows 7. Please refer to the theme author’s instructions on how to apply the themes. Checkout our Windows 7 themes section for all past collections.

When Google announced the shocking news of the impending death of Google Reader, the angry reactions that followed on social media, blogs, and the Internet in general, had one interesting side effect – it increased awareness about RSS. Many people, who had never heard about RSS before, discovered a new way to follow their favorite websites, and hopefully are enjoying the freedom to read articles at their own pace and time (as opposed to real-time updates on Twitter). I think this is a good time to look at some of the best RSS feed reader add-ons available on one of the most popular web browsers – Firefox.

In most shared computing environments such as classrooms, computer labs, kiosks, internet cafes, and libraries, the administrator is faced with the daunting task of having to continually keep the PCs in working condition. This includes removing unwanted programs that were installed by users, reverting undesirable changes, cleaning the computers of malware and so on. Back in the days of Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft had a program called SteadyState, which allowed administrators to lock a computer down in such a way that no changes, whatsoever, are possible to be made on the system. SteadyState will cache all changes made to a file which are then discarded when the computer is restarted thereby undoing any changes made and returning the system to its previous state.

Google has pushed a new update to the Google Translate app for Android, that enables users to download offline language packs that will provide translations between foreign languages even without an Internet or data connection. This is particularly useful when you are travelling abroad and don’t want to incur expensive overseas data roaming charges. The new feature provides translation in 50 languages. All you have to do download your desired language pack in advance. Be aware, that these packs are hefty in size – in the order of 150 MB – per language, so ideally you will want to download only the languages you need.

Google has started making movies and TV shows available through the Play Store , which can be bought, downloaded or streamed instantly to any Android device. Movies can be streamed via the Google Play Movies & TV app, and in addition, can be downloaded for offline viewing. On a computer, the same movies can be streamed or downloaded by going to play.google.com/movies on any web browser.

Ever wondered why an website is taking so long to load, or why an online multiplayer game is lagging? It could be a network issue, but can you be sure? Yes you can if you have a handy network speed meter in your Android device’s notification drawer. I wonder why there isn’t one by default, but if you wish you had one, try Network Speed.

Google Chrome 26, which recently landed on the stable channel, includes an intelligent cloud based spell checker that can offer users more than simple spell check. The most notable improvement is the ability to perform context sensitive corrections, check grammar and distinguish between homonyms. Additionally, words added to the browser's custom dictionary can now be synced between Chrome installations with Google Sync enabled.

A power plan, according to Microsoft, is a collection of hardware and system settings that manages how your computer uses power. Power plans can help you save energy, maximize system performance, or achieve a balance between the two. Power plans are most effective on laptops because the power source is a battery which can only hold a limited amount of charge. By changing power plans between Balanced, Power saver, and High performance, you can control how much power the laptop can consume, and thus extend the battery backup duration or increase the performance of the laptop when desired.

Another Google service bites the dust. Google has quietly killed off the Blocked Sites feature from Google Search, that allowed users to block select websites from appearing in search results. The feature was introduced two years ago in an effort to keep low quality sites out of search results. The tool granted users more control on what they want to see on their search results page. Google Operating System now reports that Blocked Sites has been removed from the search preferences page. Clicking on the manage blocked sites page greets users with the message:

No, there is no official announcement from Google yet, but brace yourself, you will hear one soon. Google Alerts is dying a slow death, for past several months, but nobody was taking notice, until now. After Google put Reader on the death row, users are sitting up looking for tale tell signs among other Google services – which one will go next? Google Alerts was quickly recognized as a likely candidate.

Do you have contacts that you don’t want others to find out? Sometimes it isn’t about keeping the contacts secret, it’s the information that is exchanged between them that is private. All smartphones offer locking abilities that prevent anyone from accessing your phone, but totally blocking everyone from everything on your phone isn’t the ideal solution. You may need to let your friend borrow your phone for a while, or allow your kids to play with it. You don’t want them to discover those messages or find out who you have been calling. If you want to take control of your privacy you need to download Shady Contacts to your Android device.

Google Translate has introduced a new feature called Phrasebook that allows you to save your favorite translations to a list. The phrasebook can be used for easy reference later if you are learning a new language and trying to memorize sentences, or find yourself translating the same phrases repeatedly. By revisiting the useful phrases in your Phrasebook from time to time, Google says, you can turn any brief translation into lasting knowledge.

Starting today, Microsoft will, or already has, started pushing out Service Pack 1 to Windows 7 customers. The first service pack has been made mandatory for all customers as the end of date for Windows 7 RTM looms closer. Previously users could install SP1 through Windows Update, but the task required manually adding that request to the installation list. Windows 7 SP1 has been available since February 2011 but there are still many users who haven’t upgraded their operating system. Now customers who have Windows Update enabled but avoiding installation of SP1, for whatever reasons, will no longer have choice in this matter.

When you browse the web for long periods of time without restarting Firefox, or launching a fresh instance of the browser, the memory usage can go through the roof, bringing Firefox to a crawl. This is not specifically a Firefox problem. It can affect all browsers including Chrome and Opera. To prevent this, it is recommended to periodically restart the browser before memory usage becomes too high. There is even a handy add-on that lets you automatically restart the browser keeping all open tabs intact. But you can avoid having to restart if you adhere to the following best practices.

Google is readying a new note-taking application that will let you create notes and checklists, which you can color-code and add pictures. Called “Keep”, the application made a brief appearance at the URL https://drive.google.com/keep before disappearing from the web, indicating the service had inadvertently gone live before it was planned. Google Keep is reminiscent of Google Notebook, another note keeping service that has been discontinued back in 2009.

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between February 24 and March 16 of last year. Tomahawk Music Player: Play Tracks Locally or Stream from Multiple Music Services Automatically Transfer Files from USB drives to the PC with PhotoWizz Sunrise Seven–Windows 7 System Tweaker

Over time and after continued usage, an Android smartphone can collect a large number of junk files and left overs from uninstalled apps. Although they rarely go out of bounds in terms of size and quantity, as it tends to happen in Windows, they still occupy space, and since memory space is scare in all mobile devices, even a small number of junk files can contribute to a large amount of wasted space. Hence, every Android phone requires a good junk file cleaner, one that could seek out unnecessary files from all corners and remove them from the phone. Clean Master is a great tool for this job.

YouTube is all about sharing videos, although users have been using it to share picture slideshows as well. People use tools like Windows Movie Maker or Picasa (also see: Bolide Slideshow Creator , Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder , PhotoFilmStrip ) to produce video slideshows and upload them to YouTube. Sometime in the recent past, Google added a new option to the upload page on YouTube that allows users to upload pictures and create a slideshow right there on YouTube. If you upload videos to YouTube frequently, you might have already noticed it. If not, here is how it functions.

Windows 8 is the most controversial release from Microsoft ever, one that has left people lost and disappointed like never before in the entire history of the operating system. As with all new releases, there are users who hate the OS - they hate the modern interface, the start screen, the apps, the touch thing. They complain the lack of start menu, the loss of Aero and the general inability to get anything done without being constantly interrupted by the start screen. At the other end, are those who adore Windows 8 - they love everything about the modern interface, and would rave about it to anyone who would listen.

Privacy policies and terms of service are those documents that lay down the rules, the contracts between you and the company whose service you use. You would never sign a document from your bank or insurance company without reading them first. But when was the last time you read the privacy policy and terms of service of a website before you signed up? Right, never! Just because you don’t pay to use these services doesn’t make their ToS less important because they still have access to all the information you share on these sites. Terms of service are a lot like EULAs, but with one major difference – EULAs don’t change after you have agreed to them.

Understandably, printing email is something most people never do, but occasionally, you might have to print out a message such as invoices when claiming a warranty or expense receipts when filing tax returns. To print emails in your Gmail inbox, you have to open each message one at a time which is both a pain and time consuming. If there is a bulk of messages to print, here is something that will help you get the work done easily.

Microsoft has rolled out a new version of Bing Desktop that aims to improve the user experience by allowing more customization options, and at the same time, get more users to download and install this software by integrating a way to view Facebook news feeds. When Microsoft launched the Bing Desktop application back in 2012, it was a simple tool to get background images visible on Bing.com to use them as desktop wallpaper, along with a desktop search box. Later updates brought a part of the Bing homepage to the program – the ability to view trending stories and pictures and videos.

A study conducted last year by cyber security vendor Bit9 revealed that more than a quarter apps on the Google Play store ask for permission to access information that isn't critical to their performance. Out of 400,000 apps analyzed, more than 100,000 of them were found to pose a potential security risk to their users. 72 percent of the 412,000 programs examined used at least one potentially risky permission - GPS location data, phone calls or numbers, information on contacts and such. For example, there was one wallpaper app in the analysis that asked for permission to access a phone's GPS data, when it was evident that the app didn’t need that information to function.

All Android apps require access to certain data on the device or permissions to perform specific functions in order to operate. According to the terms of Google Play, the official marketplace for Android apps, the apps are required to declare these permissions when they submit their apps to the store. Although these permissions are clearly stated on the app’s page, these is no way to search or filter apps on Google Play based on permissions. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Google yet, but such a filtering scheme will enable informed users to stay out of trouble by quickly filtering out apps that request inappropriate and questionable permissions such as the ability to make calls and send SMS. Fortunately, there is a remedy – an Android app called APEFS.

Have you ever wondered why your browser isn’t as fast as it used to be when it was new and fresh? Right, it’s the add-ons and plug-ins that you have been installing ever since. It’s a known fact that all extensions use memory, and some of them use more than the other. But which one? If this was Chrome, you could have fired open the built-in task manager and found out the answer right away. In Firefox, it’s not so easy. You could type about:memory in the address bar and get a pretty detailed report, but the information is presented in too haphazard a way to be of any meaningful use to the average user.

Internet connectivity on mobile phones, or data plans are costly, and are often bandwidth capped or speed limited or both. This is why Opera Mini is so popular among mobile phone users. The Opera Mini browser employs a technology called Turbo that reduces bandwidth cost of the users by pre-rendering pages on Opera’s server and sending highly compressed version of the page to the user.

One of the biggest complaints that we have been hearing about Microsoft’s new operating system is the limited support for multi tasking when using Modern apps. Windows 8 apps run only in full screen mode, with the possibility of running not more than two apps side by side, no matter how large your screen real estate might be. Even when running two apps at once, the screen is split asymmetrically; rather than offering equal screen space to both apps, the screen is divided in 2:1 ratio, so that one app gets more importance than the other.

Opera Software has released a new Beta of the browser Opera for Android based on Webkit, bringing a revamped user interface aside from a new rendering engine. In order to signify the big change – the switch from Presto to Webkit – the company decided to skip version 13 and go straight to number 14. The current Opera for Android runs on Presto, so does the desktop version of the browser, but both will eventually move to the new rendering engine, a decision that was announced last month .

The easiest way to keep your email inbox spam free is to use disposable email addresses instead of your real email ID when you signup on websites. Depending on which disposable email service provider you use, messages on your temporary inbox can stay for as short as 10 minutes or as long as 7 days or even a month. Generally, a few hours is enough for most cases. If it’s longer than a few days and if you tend to use the same temporary email ID everywhere, even your temporary inbox may start to pile up with spam. The solution – use a different email ID every time. But it takes a hell of an effort to think up of new IDs each time. No one goes through the trouble of changing email IDs on-the-fly, but if you had an automatic generator, things would be different.

People usually have one browser they use for regular surfing. This browser has their passwords saved and websites bookmarked, but if you use more than one browser and aren’t particularly loyal towards one particular brand, it is handy to have your bookmarks synchronized between the various browsers you use. While all major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer via SkyDrive) have means to synchronize selected user profile data, including bookmarks, saved passwords, speed dials and more, between different devices, cross-browser synchronization is not natively possible at the moment. But for those who use Chrome and Firefox, there is a solution.

You must have seen those pictures that appear blurry, and when you take a closer look you realize that the image is made up of hundreds of tiny pictures. Such images are called photo mosaics, and they are almost always computer generated. Foto-Mosaik-Edda is a freeware program that enables you to create photo mosaics.

GM-UniversalSync is a simple, free file synchronization software that allows users to keep two or more folders in sync with each other. The folders can reside either in a local system, on a network, on removable drives or on a remote server. When on a remote server, the program syncs over FTP and WebDav protocols. GM-UniversalSync doesn’t synchronize in real-time like most cloud backup services do, but has a powerful built-in scheduler that can be configured to run tasks periodically, effectively turning the program into near real-time file synchronizer. The program supports filename filters that allows user to include or exclude certain file types, error action and a system that lets users choose the direction of the sync.

In any web browser, it is easy to see which links have been previously visited by looking at the color of the links. By default, all unvisited hyperlinks are blue in color, unless their colors were altered by a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), and all visited links appear in the color purple. The colors persist even when you refresh the page, or open the page after several days, as long as the URLs clicked are still available on Firefox history.

Google has just released a new app called Google Hindi Input that allows users to type in Hindi on their Android smartphones. The coolest thing about this app is that it supports transliteration. This means that you can type in English, phonetically, and have the words converted into Hindi automatically.