Instant Fundas

Small software developers often try to generate revenue from their free software by bundling third-party software as well as display advertisements into the installer. These third-party software serve no useful purpose other than try to push the user into paying for something they don’t need, such as Windows registry cleaners. Then, there are browser toolbars whose purpose is to gather data about the user’s browsing habits such as the websites they visit, search engine they use and the queries they make. What happens to the data is anybody’s guess. Occasionally, there would be malicious programs that harm the system or consume inordinate amount of resources that makes the computer less responsive.

First launched in 2006, Orbit Downloader is a popular file downloading software that can integrate with nearly every popular web browser and speed up download of files over the Internet. With features like clipboard monitoring, peer-to-peer transfer to increase speed, and URL sniffing that enabled download of embedded videos from streaming websites made it one of the most successful download managers. Now a new research by security firm and anti-virus product manufacturer ESET has revealed that the program includes code designed to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on other machines.

Have you ever noticed that certain advertisements and banners keep following you wherever you go on the Internet? For instance, if you’ve recently searched for shoes on search engines or on a shopping website, you might notice that suddenly there are lots of advertisement for shoes everywhere on the Internet. This happens when advertising networks start tracking what users do on the web using tiny files called cookies, and use the information to deliver targeted advertisements to them. The easiest way to lose the tail is to periodically delete cookies that accumulate in your browser.

The Google “search by image” option allows you to perform reverse search on an image and discover all sorts of content that's related to that specific image. I have used this feature a couple of times to successfully find the source, author or photographer of certain images that I found on the Internet. You can search the web by images by going to images.google.com, click the camera icon in the search box and enter an image URL for an image hosted on the web or upload an image from your computer. To make it even easier to search with images you encounter on the web, the Google Chrome team have also released extensions for Chrome and Firefox that allows users to search with any image on the web, simply by right-clicking on the image.

Thousands of documentaries have been produced till date. A simple search for “documentaries” on Google brings hundreds of great results, among which are websites dedicated to documentaries such as Topdocumentary Films , Documentary Storm , Free Documentaries and Documentary Heaven that allow you to search and watch documentaries for free. Even more documentaries are available for viewing on YouTube, Netflix and elsewhere. But how do you find them?

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between July 29 and August 11 of the previous year. 5 Free Horror Games as Terrifying as Slender Automatically Hibernate Your Laptop on Power Failure EasyBrake: One Click Video Conversion to MKV or MP4 InstallGuard: Monitor and Block Software Installation

There are many features that are unique to Opera. One that receives little to no publicity at all is “Follower tab”. You can create a follower tab by right-clicking on a current tab in the tab-bar and then clicking Create Follower Tab. Any link you left click on the parent tab will no longer open in that tab. Instead it will open in the follower tab. It is like right-clicking on a link and then clicking on “open in a new tab”, only fully automated. This is a very novel feature, which when used cleverly allows you to effortlessly browse social media websites such as Reddit, Digg, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and in fact, any website with lots and lots of outgoing links.

The latest stable version of Google Chrome 29 includes a new feature – a reset button that lets user revert their browser to its original state. Using the reset button will strip all user customization out of the browser, delete cookies, forget web history and more. The Chrome team offers this option to use when rogue third-party programs make unwanted changes the browser such as install additional extensions and toolbars or a different search engine. Resetting your browser settings will reset the unwanted changes caused by installing other programs. However, your saved bookmarks and passwords will remain intact.

Brackets is a relatively new open source code editor for web design and development, created and maintained by Adobe and built with web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This means that Brackets is built using the same technologies the software is meant to build, which implies that any developer qualified enough to develop web pages also have the skills necessary to customize, modify and extend the editor. The uniqueness of this fact is driven home through their catch phrase: “If you can code in Brackets, you can code on Brackets.”

A new parental control feature has been spotted in the latest Developer and Canary builds of Google Chrome. Described as “supervised user”, the new feature allows parents to create less privileged user accounts on Chrome that can be used to grant kids limited and controlled access to the web. Chrome has been supporting multiple user accounts with individual settings for a while, but this time these user accounts has been brought under the control of a supervisor account rather than existing as separate accounts entirely.

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between July 7 and July 28 of the previous year. QupZilla: A Feature-Rich WebKit Based Browser That You Must Try Lower Bounce Rate In Google Analytics with a Timer Create Annotated Screenshot Based Tutorials in Your Browser with IORAD

Many people use a portable browser to surf on public computers such as those in the workplace, and a regular installed browser for surfing on their home computer. Both browsers keep separate user profiles for storing browser history, installed add-ons, bookmarks etc. A bookmark made on Firefox Portable will not be available on Firefox installed on your PC or an add-on installed on your home computer will have to be reinstalled on Firefox portable. This can be frustrating. This article shows you how to access the user profile data of Firefox Portable from a installed copy of Firefox on another computer, and vice-versa.

The world’s most resilient Torrent search engine, and arguable, the most censored website – The Pirate Bay – has just completed 10 years of existence, and to celebrate its surprisingly long life, the website has released an anti-censorship browser. Called Pirate Browser, this is a custom-made version of Firefox Portable with a Tor client and a Proxy add-on bundled together. The idea behind the release is to create a readily available web browser for people whose government and ISPs have blocked them from accessing certain websites, and at the same time protect their privacy from snoopy organizations, governments and adverting agencies alike.

Last week was “Geek Week” on YouTube. For those who were not aware, it was a celebration of geek culture during which more than 100 geeky YouTube channels were showcased, unveiling new videos, series premieres and creative collaborations, as well as highlighting some of the best geek videos and shows already on YouTube. Aside from featuring daily videos, YouTube also featured a daily Easter Egg. Since these were never officially announced, it took sometime for the word to get out and the Easter Eggs be known. Here is a roundup of what YouTube engineers were doing last week.

Here are the winners of the Kvisoft Flash Slideshow Designer giveaway contest that was organized last week. Those who had taken part must be waiting for the results, so without further delay, here is the announcement you were expecting. The following five people have each won a license to activate their copies of Kvisoft Flash Slideshow Designer, a Flash slideshow maker that enables them to create attractive slideshows out of pictures and videos accompanied by background music. The five random winners picked by random.org are:

This installment of “One Year Ago” was long overdue. To keep the list of articles short and readable, we are going to split this post into a number of short intervals that will be published frequently in the next few days. Here is a selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between June 23 and July 6 of the previous year.

Up until now, the Windows Store for Windows 8 was available only through the Store app from Windows 8. If you didn’t have Windows 8, you couldn’t see what was on offer. There are, of course, third party sites such as MetroStore Scanner and Great Windows Apps that offered ways to browse and search for Windows 8 apps from a browser, but officially there was no solution. This is different from every other app store model, including Microsoft’s own Windows Phone Store. Other app stores for Android, iOS and Blackberry are accessible directly from a web browser.

Want to play Russian Roulette with your smartphone? S.M.T.H. (Send Me To Heaven) is a sport game for Android that challenges players to throw their phone into the air, as high as they can to score points. Using the phone’s accelerometer, the app measures how high the phone has travelled from your hand. Once measured, your high score will be uploaded to an online worldwide leaderboard where you can join fellow idiots who played the game. If you switch on GPS on your phone and allow the app to use location, you will be able to take part in local competitions. Finding idiots around you was never so easier.

I used to keep a couple of live CDs of various Linux Distributions at hand for the purpose of carrying out data recovery tasks, should my computer refuse to boot because of corrupted Master Boot Record, or corrupted Windows files or hard disk failure. Later those disks were replaced by bootable USB drives. USB drives today come in large capacities with enough space to carry two or more live operating systems at the same time. Here are some tools that lets you turn a USB or Pen drive into a multiboot system with several operating systems.

The choice available for mobile-compatible social games is really quite extensive, which is why this article has been put together. Below you can find some of the hottest social games available right now, with all compatible on mobile devices.

Flash Slideshow Designer is an easy to use Flash slideshow maker that enables you to create attractive slideshows out of pictures and videos accompanied by background music, using any of the multiple built-in templates or by using the powerful template designer to build one from scratch. You can either use pictures and videos stored on your hard disk or saved on Flickr or YouTube. The resulting Flash slideshow can be exported as a standalone SWF slideshow that can be played on any computer or embedded on a website using XML.

Just think of a topic you like – popular or unpopular, obscure or weird, cheerful or morbid – and chances are that you will find a subreddit that caters to it. On Reddit, there is a subreddit for every topic, and this is not an exaggeration. Reddit has millions of active users who have put together more than 248,000 different subreddits (a conservative estimate, as of August 2013) on every subject known to humans and everything under the sun and beyond. But finding subreddits that interest you is tough. Truth be told, Reddit is a mess and with so many subreddits finding the right one is like looking for a pin on a haystack, at night. So how does one discover great subreddits to follow?

Yesterday, we discussed how we can disable private browsing in Firefox to enable parents to keep an eye on what their kids are doing online. Today, we’ll see how we can actually improve private browsing in Firefox Portable. Private Browsing by PortableApps is a private browsing add-on developed by PortableApps.com for Firefox Portable that enhances private browsing by several ways. While Firefox already has a private browsing mode that doesn’t keep a history of sites you have visited, or cookies, or passwords, or a list of downloaded items and search entries, Private Browsing by PortableApps comes with all of that and a couple of privacy plugins and a custom profile that turns of persistent cookies, provides improved separation from the local PC and keeps other privacy features off.

Sometimes, it appears that some software are more prone to vulnerabilities than others. Zero-day exploits and unpatched security holes are all too common with Windows, and applications such as Java and Adobe Flash. While this might be true, the truth is no software is immune from vulnerabilities. Whether the software is in your PC, your phone or in your car, all software has bugs, but who gets attacked and who doesn’t depend on the vendor market share, the motivation of the attackers and the profile of the victim. So how does one keep themselves and their software protected from attackers?

Private Browsing allows users to browse the Internet without saving any information about which sites and pages they’ve visited in the browser’s history. By enabling private browsing, one could visit any website they want without the fear of anyone else knowing. These days, all web browser offer private browsing options that make it difficult to monitor a user’s browsing history. If you are a responsible parent, this should concern you because you can never know what your kids might be doing online under the protection of private browsing.