Instant Fundas

There are some pretty good free and open source RAW image editing software that photographers can use to enhance the images they capture with their cameras. RawTherapee, UFRaw and Darktable comes to mind. But if you are a professional photographer who need to process large volumes of high quality images in a fast and efficient workflow, be prepared to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a software that handles the entire process of transferring pictures from a digital camera, organizing them into categories and processing them in a bunch.

The Windows Experience Index measures the capability of your computer's hardware and software configuration and expresses this measurement as a score. A higher WEI score generally means that your computer will perform better and faster than a computer with a lower score, especially when performing more advanced and resource-intensive tasks. Each hardware component receives an individual subscore, that helps users understand the capabilities of the hardware. These ratings helps the user in deciding which software to purchase or which hardware component to upgrade.

When Google Reader closed shop, a bunch of alternatives popped up over the next few months. A few of them that existed before Google decided to terminate the service, welcomed the decision and worked hard to pick up the slack. Feedly gained the most with 8 million new users signing up for the service, as of June 2013, while another smaller startup - The Old Reader – reportedly added 350,000 new users following the shutdown announcement. Unfortunately, the sudden and unexpected influx of Google Reader refugees was too much for the modest servers of ‘The Old Reader’ to handle, as the team behind the simple RSS reader struggled to balance their work and personal life. In the end, they had to make a decision.

CCleaner is a great all round system cleaning utility that works as advertised. It cleans browser history, removes cookies and cache, deletes temporary files, uninstalls programs, deletes file usage history of Windows and many Windows’ programs. It also helps manage startup programs, find duplicate files and shreds files. For many, this is the only tool that is needed to keep the system well oiled and tuned. But sometimes it is necessary to find out what other developers are offering, because if you don’t try and experiment, one day you might discover that you’ve been using the wrong tools. You cannot go wrong with CCleaner, but should you wish to change, here is small list to help you get started.

BZR Player is an audio player, or “sound player”, as the developers like to call it, whose primary goal is to play as many different audio file formats as possible, even non-standard ones like those used to pack music data in video games. Currently it plays over 480 different formats. Supported formats includes numerous audio files as well as formats used by hundreds of video games of consoles like Amiga, Atari, Nintendo, C-64, PlayStation, XBOX, WII, and many many more.

About a month ago, Google removed the ‘Stop Download’ option from YouTube that allowed users to instantly stop download and buffering of a video. This option was available in the context menu when a user right-clicked over the YouTube video player. You may have noticed it or you may have not, depending on whether you used that option. Many did , and it was sorely missed.

Software programs that tags MP3 files are dime a dozen, but programs that tags other music file formats such as FLAC and Ogg Vorbis are a little hard to come by. This is bad, because the industry is moving towards lossless formats such as FLAC, and the open source Ogg Vorbis is a superior alternative to the patent-ridden and restrictive MP3 format. MetatOGGer is an audio file tagging software that supports all three and a couple of more.

Last month Yahoo announced that they will reset accounts that were inactive for more than a year, so that they could free up usernames for new users to pick up. The company has started the ball rolling. Last Monday, all dormant Yahoo accounts were reset. Immediately after, the company opened up a wish list allowing users to request username they’d like to own, before actually letting people get hold of these names. Users can request up to 5 usernames, in order of preference. If the first choice isn’t available, Yahoo will try one of the backups. Then in mid-August, users who filled the wish list will get an email letting them know which of their picks is available, with a link to claim it within 48 hours.

How do you organize your digital camera pictures? I’ve found this question being asked and discussed a numerous times in photography related forums and social networks like Reddit and Stack Exchange. It’s a difficult question to which there is certainly no correct answer. Photos are so much different from, say, music files. Music can be organized in a definite way because each music track is composed and performed by a certain artist, belong to a certain album released in a certain year. But pictures? Pictures can be organized by the date the pictures were taken. They can also be organized by events, such as holidays or birthdays. They can also be organized by the subject matter like portraits, landscapes, etc..

Some people are predominantly mouse users and some are predominantly keyboard users, and if you pit one group against the other, the keyboard user will almost always finish a task faster than the mouse user. Why is that? Because keyboard shortcuts save time. Every time you use your keyboard instead of reaching for the mouse, navigating the pointer to the correct button or menu, and clicking, you're saving anywhere from 2-10 seconds. When you work eight hours a day, all these seconds count and you end up saving as much as 30 minutes or more each day, at least, according to Robertson Mcllwain who created KeyRocket.

So you load a foreign language movie into VLC Media Player and find that it doesn’t have embedded subtitles. What do you do? Go looking for the right subtitle file on the Internet, right? Here is how you can stop wasting your time and download subtitles right from within VLC Media Player. Vlsub is a plug-in for the open source media player that allows users to search and download subtitles for the video currently playing without opening a web browser or a third-party downloader.

Kids are naturally drawn towards computers. They love to push buttons and move the mouse and watch things move on the screen. Mostly they love smashing the keyboard. If you already allow your kids to bang away at your keyboard to their heart’s content, why not make the effort a little more fun? Bringing the full face of a toddler’s palm or fist to a smashing crash against the keyboard may either produce nothing or do terrible things on the computer depending on which application is running on screen. If only the desktop is showing with all programs closed, hitting the keyboard may cause nothing to happen on screen, save for the occasional appearance of the start menu, if the kid manages to hit the appropriate key. If you have a word processing program running, the page will fill with gibberish. You can make this interesting by increasing the size of the fonts and changing the color to something bright like red or green.

Those using Corsair SSDs on their computers can now download the Corsair SSD Toolbox developed by Corsair to help Corsair SSD owners to install, configure, optimize and monitor the health of their drives. SSD software utilities help owners take care of their drives such as install firmware updates, securely erase data, and monitor vital signs such as S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Intel , Samsung and OCZ have their own set of software tools to achieve this end. There are a few third party SSD maintenance utilities that work with drives of all make and size, but manufacturer specific functions such as updating of firmware and making performance adjustments are not possible.

June was a great month for desktop modders. Microsoft released Windows 8.1 with new desktop customization options such as the ability to set their own wallpapers as start screen background. Then those who are looking beyond what Windows 8 has to offer in terms of customization, have plenty of Windows 8 visual styles to choose from. June saw a flurry of new themes being designed over at DeviantArt.com. We pick eleven great looking themes for our readers.

The final version of Opera 15 is out, and this is the first Opera browser to be built upon Blink/Webkit, the engine that drives Google Chrome. With the underlying code being the same, it’s inevitable that both browsers will share features that are similar and compatible with each other. Even extensions built for either browser now works on both. This opens a floodgate of extensions for Opera users and at the same time allow Chrome users a chance to taste the small but rich library of Opera extensions.

Animated GIF was invented in 1987, and despite its age, is a format that is still widely used on the web today. Back in the early days of the world wide web, it was fashionable to use animated GIF images as decorative elements on web pages. Over the years, they evolved into something more artistic and found use in other areas such as humor and entertainment. Popularity of animated GIFs renewed in recent years with the rise of memes and the so called “reaction gifs” popularly used in message boards and sites like Reddit.

From Cupcake to JellyBean, Android has gone through numerous iteration over the course of 5 years of its existence, but one very basic thing hasn’t changed – it still doesn’t show the battery’s power status in percentage in the notification bar. Android shows the remaining power left in the device’s battery as an icon in notification bar that doesn’t include the information in a readable format. One has to guess the power level by either counting the bars in the battery icon or by judging the length of the progress bar. Since the battery icon is often tiny, it is possible to make only a rough estimate of the remaining power level.

When you format your hard disk to install a fresh copy of Windows, you lose all your installed programs. Then you have to start from a scratch, installing Windows followed by drivers, then security programs and finally all your user programs. Things become a lot easier and faster if you know what to install, and that means having a list of applications to install. If you want to start from where you left before you decided to reformat the hard drive, you will need a list of applications that are currently installed on your machine; a list prepared months ago will be of no use, especially if you frequently install new programs.