Instant Fundas

You probably gave no more than a casual glance at the settings under the “Mouse Properties” applet in Control Panel on a Windows 7/8 computer. Possibly you opened it to adjust the mouse’s pointer speed or sensitivity of your laptop’s touchpad, which is typically the only adjustment a user makes for the mouse. But let us dig a little deeper and see what this tool has in store for the user.

Chicago resident and blogger Andrew Huff has published a smashing post on the community driven website Metafilter listing all Twitter accounts that are named after countries of the world, and what each of them represents. With the exception of @Israel, which is maintained by the Foreign Ministry's Digital Diplomacy Team, and @Australia, which is the country’s official tourism account, none of the rest of the near 200 Twitter accounts listed are officially affiliated to any of the countries by which the accounts are named. A few of them belong to travel companies or news sites, but the majority of them are just regular personal accounts created by people who may or may not be residing in the said country. A handful of these accounts are banned for whatever reasons.

The absence or presence of familiar noises can greatly affect sleep. While some sounds like a dripping faucet or the ticking clock or the barking of the neighbor’s dog can get on your nerves, other sounds like the whir of a fan or the sound of rain on the roof can actually improve sleep. Steady uninterrupted noise also referred to as “white noise” or more realistically as “pink noise” is known to produce a soothing effect on the brain, helping people relax and fall asleep. It’s called pink noise because light with a similar power spectrum would appear pink. Pink noise not only drowns other noises and distractions, but slows and regulates your brain waves, which is a hallmark of restful sleep.

Last month, there appeared in town a new download manager. While these kind of software have been done plenty of times in the past, what caught my attention towrds the newcomer, aside from being an open source project, is how light weight the program is. Called Xtreme Download Manager, this new download tool weighs just 207KB.

73-year old Tatsuo Horiuchi uses the popular spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel not for number calculations or data listings, but to draw elaborate Japanese motifs. In an interview to PC Online , Horiuchi said that he did not use Excel at work, but when he saw other people use it to draw graphs, he figured he could make drawings using the office tool. In 10 years, Horiuchi became proficient enough to issue works in art exhibitions.

While there are plenty of notepad add-ons for different web browsers that lets you jot down short notes without opening a dedicated notepad application, here is a nifty trick that lets you create quick notes from within your web browser using neither an add-on/extension nor a third-party program.

Tabbed browsing has given multi-tasking a whole new meaning, but it can also bring your entire computer to the knees if you do not keep check on the tabs you’ve opened. Often, a single rogue tab is enough to bring the browser to a standstill. Even without any runaway scripts, too many tabs will slow down the performance of the browser making web surfing sluggish and unresponsive. A cure for this is to prevent background tabs from using too many resources unless needed.