Instant Fundas

Freemake Music Box is a streaming music player and online jukebox that lets you find and play music tracks over the internet. The software which initially came out as beta in December 2011 has only recently been released as a stable version. The company behind Freemake Music Box - Ellora Assets Corporation – boasts of 42 million audio tracks in the library. These tracks are sourced from YouTube, and possibly YouTube alone. This makes Freemake Music Box basically an interface to YouTube but designed for music streaming only. Freemake wants to keep the software free and legal, so no downloading of tracks is allowed.

Yahoo has launched a new service called “Search Alerts” that lets users keep themselves updated about new developments, “hot-off-the-press information” and mentions on things that are important to them. “All you have do is tell us the topics you want to be alerted about, and we will constantly scour the web for you, emailing you when we find a new hit so that you will always be in-the-know,” Yahoo wrote in a blog post .

Do you tend to doze off in front of the computer while its playing a movie? While it would be awesome if the computer could shut itself down the moment you fall asleep (possibly by detecting eye movement using a webcam), there is one software that could at least put the computer to sleep after the video or movie finishes playing. Sleep# is a free and open source application for Windows that can monitor a playlist of videos playing in any media player, and when the video finishes playing, Sleep# can send the computer to either sleep or hibernation.

Jovial Notepad is a free and open source notepad application for Windows that packs quite a punch despite its small size. The portable notepad software weights just under 50KB but is furnished with a set of tools that makes creating and editing notes easier while still keeping the software uncomplicated. Jovial Notepad supports rich text formatting which alone sets the application a step apart and ahead of Microsoft Notepad and plenty of other notepad replacements. Features supported under “Rich text” are changing of font type, font size, and font color, making text underline, bold, italics, strikethrough etc. You can also insert images and save the file as RTF. Aside from rich text editing, Jovial Notepad has the following functionalities.

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Did you just go overboard with Windows customization, that your PC is no longer functioning as before and the Windows registry is a mess? Here is a quick and easy method to reset everything to the default without having to get your hands (more) dirty. RefreshPC is a nice little tool for Windows users that allows them to return select registry values and all Windows services to their default state, thus wiping away all user customization and returning the computer to as it is on freshly installed Windows machine.

YouTube doesn’t really have adult videos on the network, but there are some content that are age-restricted either because they deal with sensitive subjects, have sexually suggestive content or have graphic imagery. Then of course, there are many educational videos and documentaries on YouTube that could be categorized as borderline pornography. When a video has been marked as age-restricted, YouTube requires users to sign-in to their Google account before the video can be watched. The sign-in serves as a mean to verify the age of the user and also protects users from accidentally stumbling across these videos.

Sismics Reader is a new RSS feed reading application that can be installed on any machine running either Windows, Mac or Linux, and can be accessed via a web browser using the loopback address (http://localhost or 127.0.0.1). This enables Sismics Reader to be installed either on a local machine or on a remote server and accessed from any computer connected to the network from where the remote server is accessible. All you need is a web browser, the address of the remote server and the port number at which Sismics Reader is running.

RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is a format for delivering regularly changing web content to the readers in a way that is easy to consume. If you are regular reader of this blog, there is pretty high chance that you are reading this in an RSS reader. Many news-related sites, and almost all weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. BitTorrent search engines such as The Pirate Bay publish RSS feeds too, that can be entered into a compatible torrent client such as uTorrent and have the content automatically fetched and added to the client for download.

In an exceedingly stupid move, Yahoo announced last week that the company will reset all Yahoo IDs that's been inactive for a period of 12 months, and then once again offer those usernames for public registration. Describing the decision as an exciting change, Yahoo’s vice president wrote: “we want to give our loyal users and new folks the opportunity to sign up for the Yahoo! ID they’ve always wanted.”

Google has added a new section in the Google Account settings page called Recent Activity. The page shows a list of recent sign-ins to your Google account accompanied by related information such as browser used, device, IP address and approximate location. Unlike the Last Activity information in your Gmail inbox, the information on the Recent Activity page is for your entire Google Account, so sign-ins from any Google product such as Blogger, Gmail, or YouTube will be listed in this section. In comparison, the Last Activity is only limited to sign-ins to your Gmail account.

Looking to try out a new flavor of Linux? Distrowatch.com has information and daily news about tons of Linux distributions, and is a good place to start the hunt. You can also use Google to look up on distros built for special purposes and with specific functionality. Another great resource for information about Linux distros is Get Linux.

8Smoker Pro is a free tweaking program for Windows 8 that allows power users to exploit all that the operating system has to offer, by changing the way Windows 8 functions and responds to user interaction. All improvements that 8Smoker Pro can implement in Windows 8 are made at the Registry, and there are tons of performance and security tweaks on offer. Additionally there are shell tweaks, Internet Explorer tweaks, a service manager, junk file cleaner, a tool to remove shared DLLs, among many others.

Security software vendor Bitdefender is currently beta-testing a new product called Safepay. Bitdefender Safepay is a protected web browser running in a secured environment designed to protect your credit card information, account number or any other sensitive data when you enter them while accessing different online locations such as shopping sites and web portals of banks. Safepay blocks keyloggers that may steal your credentials for fraudulent purposes, prevents tempering attempts that other browsers are exposed to, provides protection against unshielded Wi-Fi hotspots, blocks phishing websites and much more.

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Some of you may remember Poptray, an email notifier program for Windows XP, which was at that time, one of the best in class. It had support for multiple email accounts, spam management features, rules based actions, and totally customizable. After years of refinement, development of the software ceased on September 2006, the date when the last version was released. Last year, the abandoned project saw a new leash of life when another developer decided to pick up from where the original author left, and forked the project into a new one called PopTrayU .

Think about podcasts and the first thing that will turn in your mind is music. But there is more to podcast than you may have imagined. Podcasts these days are used for education in schools and colleges to make classroom learning interesting. Podcasts register well in the minds of students, though they are not substitutes for classroom instructions. Podcasts are easy to use. Video cast of course will add an extra punch, and teachers must consider using them.

Updating drivers is fairly easy in comparison to updating software, because there are only a handful of devices that needs manufacture specific drivers to function. You need drivers for the display card (also called graphics card), the motherboard, network, Wi-Fi, sound, and probably one or two peripherals you may have. The rest of the devices/peripherals are mostly plug-n-play, meaning you can plug the device and play with it. Forget drivers.

Amazon has quietly launched an online marketplace in India that allows sellers to list and sell their products directly to consumers. Initially the service will offer books, movies and TV shows for sale, but plans are on to introduce mobile phones and cameras in the coming weeks. India is the tenth country where Amazon Marketplace is available, however, unlike Amazon sites in other countries, Amazon India is strictly for third-party sellers. Amazon will not be selling its own merchandise to customers as restrictions on foreign direct investment prohibit web-based foreign companies from selling direct to consumers in the country.

Sometimes a file or a directory gets locked and simply refuse to get deleted. This might happen due to several reasons. In most cases the file is in use by the operating system or by a program. Until the program relinquishes possession of the file, it cannot be deleted. Incorrect file permissions is another reason why a file may become difficult to delete. The file might be created by another user or might be marked read-only. Files with long filenames also tend to be difficult to delete.

In our latest edition of Windows 8 themes, we’ve rounded up 9 best looking visual styles designed by the creative minds at DeviantArt.com during the months of April and May 2013. These third-party visual styles are different from “themes” that Microsoft releases for Windows 8 and Windows 7 from time to time, but they are still sometimes referred to as themes. Installing third-party visual styles is not as straightforward as installing official themes. Please read this guide to learn how to install them. Also, follow any instructions that comes from the theme author regarding how to achieve the look depicted in the example screenshot.

For reasons unknown, Microsoft decided to drop support for animated GIF files in Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, and it’s unlikely that this feature will ever make a return to the operating system. Previously in Windows XP, you could watch animated GIF images in the default image viewer program. This is simply not possible starting Windows Vista. Now animated GIF images are displayed as static images with only the first frame of the animation visible in Windows Photo Viewer.

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