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A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between September 15 and September 28 of the previous year. Where to Shop for Successfully Funded Kickstarter Products? Syncbox: Access Files on Your PC From Anywhere via the Internet Check Your Android Phone for Security Vulnerabilities CarotDAV: Portable Client for Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, FTP and More

Protect My Folders is a data security software that let users password protect any folders and files on your local computer. The password protected folders and files remain inaccessible or invisible or both, while keeping them free of modification and deletion by unauthorized users.

MyPaint is a free and open source painting program specialized in creating digital art, very similar to what Corel Painter is capable of. You may have heard about Corel Painter, or you may have not, which is entirely okay. The name of this program seldom gets mentioned outside the circles of digital artists, unlike Adobe Photoshop, which is almost as ubiquitous as Microsoft Paint, thanks to rampant pirating (hey, did you know you can grab Adobe Photoshop CS2 for free , and legally?).

For those looking for a way to manage their Android phones from the undeniable comfort that only a mouse, keyboard and big screen can provide, there is yet another contender – Mobogenie . This impressive software allows users to manage every aspect of their Android devices from their computer. This includes basic tasks such as back up and restore of contacts, messages, photos, videos and other contents of their phone, as well as some interesting features such as the ability to send SMS from their PC, and download apps, games, ringtones and wallpapers using their computer’s internet connection, thus avoiding additional cost incurred on their mobile bills.

Windows 7 has a great volume mixer that enables users to set audio volume of individual devices and programs independent of each other. Many people are not aware of it because the mixer is hidden. The advanced volume mixer panel can be launched by clicking on the speaker icon in the notification area (system tray) and then clicking on the link “Mixer” as shown below.

Different Android devices behave differently, which is why Android emulators are a great thing for developers, because it gives them an opportunity to develop applications without having a real Android device. A basic Android emulator is included with every copy of Android SDK. But using the default Android emulator is not a very pleasurable experience.

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between August 25 and September 14 of the previous year. Taskbar Pinner: Pin Practically Anything to the Taskbar Change Background Color of Windows Photo Viewer and Windows Live Gallery Different Ways to Save Email Attachments to Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive Directly

Mozilla has been working on a touch optimized version of Firefox ever since Microsoft revealed Windows 8 and the special version of Internet Explorer designed for Windows Start Screen interface. For a while, this touch friendly version of Firefox for Windows 8 made especially for tablets was available on the Nightly channel. Yesterday, Mozilla pushed this version out of Nightly and into Aurora, which means that this particular build is more stable than the former and while it’s not exactly ready for consumers, it’s good enough to be used by people who aren’t technically savvy or are developers and bug hunters.

Google today announced that it’s making Quickoffice free on Android and iOS. This means that Android and iOS users are no longer required to pay fees to edit Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on their respective mobile devices. This could be one of the biggest blow to Microsoft in recent times and a threat to their business. While Google allows users to upload and view Microsoft Office documents to Google Drive, editing these documents require them to be converted to Google Docs format. To edit documents in Microsoft Office format, users had to get an Office 365 subscription that gave them access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps from any browser including Office Mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Private browsing causes the browser to disable all record keeping it normally does during a browsing session. When private browsing is turned on, it forces the browser to ignore cookies, and doesn’t keep record of websites you visited, files you downloaded or keep copies of files used by the website such as images, stylesheet and others. It’s good for hiding your browsing from people who use your computer. However, private browsing doesn’t mean anonymity, which is totally different. Your ISP still knows where you went and advertisement trackers can still sniff out information about you. Private browsing offers privacy locally, on your computer. If you want privacy on the web, you must use a proxy.

Sometime around April, Google changed the mail compose window into something that has been hated by people ever since. Initially, Google offered users an option where they could revert back to the old compose window temporarily. But now changes are permanent. All is not lost though, especially if you are using Internet Explorer 8 or Chrome.

YouTube Center is an extension and userscript for browsers that improves the usability of YouTube in a variety of different ways. Originally written to center the left aligned YouTube page, the extension has grown since then to become, arguably, the single most useful extension that one can use on YouTube.com. The extension, aside from centering the layout of the page, does a number of other things such as remove advertisements, prevent auto-play of videos, show video thumbnails and ratings, gives users the ability to auto select quality, download videos and more as described below.

Alias is one feature that is unique to Outlook.com, a feature that was added to Hotmail in early 2011, but became “news” only after the name change when Microsoft made the feature easier to find and use. Aliases are alternate email addresses that are linked to the primary email inbox, designed to let you segregate certain email tasks from your main account. They can also be used as throwaway addresses when you don’t want to give away your primary account name to newsletters or shopping sites that might misuse your address. When the spam starts coming in, you can just delete the alias.

What will happen when you hook up your wireless router to your DSL connection and turn it on with all the manufacturer’s default settings still in place? Your network will function just fine, but unbeknownst your neighbors will use your internet connection, and hackers will thank you. Here are some things you should be aware of regarding wireless connections, and what you can do to keep your information secure.

Early last month, Google announced the Android Device Manager that helped users track and locate any Android device associated with your account, a functionality that was previously provided by third-party applications. The built-in device tracker included three options – location tracking, factory reset and secure wipe, and alarm, all of which can be executed remotely from the web interface.

Many of you must be familiar with Giveaway of the Day and its sister site Game Giveaway of the Day , that gives away licensed software and games, respectively, that you would have to otherwise buy, for free. Each software offered on the site is free only on a specific date, and protection software included with the download will only activate the free license if the software is installed on the correct date. Launched in 2006, Giveaway of the Day became hugely popular and until a few months ago, it was the only such website on the web.

The untimely death of Google Reader orphaned a number of desktop RSS readers that used the once popular online feed reader in the backend for synchronizing data between machines. I shed a tear for my favorite FeedDemon. While RSS supporters wait for a practical solution and a robust API from the current breed of online feed readers that have come to replace Google Reader, which would hopefully enable users once again to read RSS feeds on the desktop, offline, while still synchronizing data across the Internet, a new, useful extension has appeared on the Chrome Store.

Google Forms have come a long way the last few years. Early forms were simple affairs with limited support for data types and data fields. Google Forms today can be designed into advanced data gathering tools with support for more data types, and the ability connect multiple online apps, create multi-page surveys with conditional redirects and more. A recent update to Google Forms added four new features to it.

Despite the large number of so called “easy to use” photo editing software at our disposal, using them still requires skills that most of us lack. This is where Zhopped comes in. Zhopped is an online community of image editing wizards that takes photo editing requests from the public, whether that be a simple crop or complicated photo manipulation, and delivers them at no cost. All the work is performed by the community members and artists having decent image editing skill, who use their own tools and time to get the job done. The service is completely voluntary and is driven by sheer passion of the work.

Following the footsteps of Google, Microsoft has added optical character recognition (OCR) to images stored on its SkyDrive cloud storage service. With this new SkyDrive update, the online OCR tool powered by Bing will automatically run on photos that you send to SkyDrive so you can instantly see the extracted text whenever you view your photos on SkyDrive.com.

One of the perks of being a student is the ability to get student discounts. Many retailers offer handsome rebates on products such as clothing, magazine subscription, movie and flight tickets, insurance and of course, software. Some service related industries and software companies in particular give one hundred percent rebates on their products. In this article, we will focus only on those products. Those who are interested in all types of student discounts, a simple search for “student discounts” on your favorite search engine will reveal plenty of offers.

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between August 12 and August 24 of the previous year. Copy and Paste Data as Files Replace Ease of Access Button in Windows With Useful Tools FVD Speed Dial With Online Sync for Firefox and Chrome Add Windows Defender to Desktop Context Menu in Windows 8

Here is another collection of themes for Windows 7 that I’m bringing you after a gap 5 months. During this period plenty of new themes were designed. The following here handpicked from among hundreds. Please refer to the theme author’s instructions on how to apply the themes. Checkout our Windows 7 themes section for all past collections.