Windows 7 is the flavour of the season, it seems. Microsoft’s latest OS has been creating quite a buzz around the blogosphere and if initial reports are to be believed, it just might be the OS to finally dislodge Win XP.
The requirements for running Windows 7 aren’t too hefty given the beefy hardware that most of us own these days, but if you’re still concerned about compatibility issues and wondering if your work horse would be able to run Windows 7 or not, Microsoft has you covered.
Facebook is, by all accounts, the biggest photo sharing site on the planet. Millions of photos are added everyday to facebook and the number is only going to grow given the ridiculous growth that facebook is seeing.
The photos application is also one of the more social aspects of facebook and everyone loves to tag, comment and generally have fun with photos.
All that is well and good, but what do you do if you want to download a complete album to your computer and view it offline. Facebook doesn’t provide any tools to do that. Sure, you could save each photo individually but that’d take a long time and be really painful.
Twitterrific for iPhone just updated to version 2.0 (iTunes Link) and I’m already in love with it. I’ve been a long time twitterrific user but that was mostly because of two reasons. The first reason was that it was free (with advertisements) and the second reason was that I liked the clean interface more than the other free twitter clients available for the iPhone.
Twitterrfic in it’s earlier version was not a tool for power users, though, and as I started to *get* twitter more and more, I started missing the features I wanted to use in twitterrific, and was even toying with the idea of purchasing a better and more powerful twitter client.
That changed with the launch of twitterrific 2.0 recently and from what I’ve seen till now, it is an absolute delight to use. I don’t think I need to leave twitterific anytime soon. This post is a walk through of the major features that Twitterrific 2.0 brings to the table.
I’m sure you agree that having the screen saver kick in, while you’re watching your favourite movie on the PC, is one of the most annoying things that can happen.
And if you do agree with the above statement, we’ve got just the utility for you.
Caffeine is a small utility that sits in the system tray all day long and prevents your PC from going to sleep. It does this by simulating a keypress every 59 seconds by default. The time can be changed with the help of command line options to Caffeine.
Caffeine is free to use and the small download (13kb only) gives you absolutely no reason NOT to give it a shot.
Go on, download Caffeine and the next time you’re watching a movie, run it. Just make sure that you set the keystroke time to be less than the time you’ve set for your screensaver to set in.
I have a confession to make – I am addicted to news. I have to read a newspaper the first thing in the morning and my RSS reader is open all the time that I’m on my desktop.
While I’m not yet ready to switch full time to an e-paper, there are days when I wish that my newspaper would cover more technology and give a little less coverage to politics. Of course, since the offline newspapers cater to audiences with a wide array of interests, customizing them for specific tastes is not possible.
This is where Meehive comes in.
Most Linux/Unix veterans use cron to schedule tasks on their machines and it is a very powerful utility for what it does.
The problem with cron is the cryptic syntax which tends to scare away most new users and the fact that a user has to use the terminal to create a new job.
In this tutorial we will explain how to use a graphical front end to cron, called gnome-schedule.
Fizy is a simple no frills search engine for finding songs and music videos. It does not let you download the music, nor does it offer a way to queue songs and form a playlist. All it does it find the music that you’re looking for and let you play it, one song at a time.
What is great about Fizy is the speed with which it gives results. Try it and you’ll know what I mean.
Fizy has a pretty vast index for a search engine this new. The folks behind Fizy claim that they index about 75 billion MP3 floating around the web and that is a pretty big number by any standards. In my tests, the results have been pretty decent and I’ve almost always found that one song that I’d been dying to listen to.
If there is a song that you’ve been humming all day and just want to listen to it once to satisfy your cravings, Fizy is perfect.
Twitter can either be an amazing tool or an absolute waste of time, depending on the people that you follow. Follow the right ones and you will have the right information at the right time and follow the wrong ones and you will lag behind your peers by a mile !
When a new user joins, Twitter gives a nice list of suggested people that everyone should be following. The list contains some of Twitter’s heaviest users and (for obvious reasons) the most followed people. I haven’t been able to figure out how are those users selected and what parameters does Twitter take into account before recommending them to a new user, but I think I’ve found just the service to help me find interesting people to follow.
The Amazon Kindle
Last month Amazon released version 2.0 of the Kindle and that has also been recieved very well.
The only problem with the Kindle is that it doesn’t display PDF and HTML files and so you will not be able to view a lot of ebooks that you might have collected over the years, will not be viewable on the device.
The Kindle uses the .mobi format for displaying files and if you’re looking for a utility to convert PDF and HTML files to the .mobi format, you should give Auto Kindle a try.
It is a very simple tool which just does one job and does it well.
How to translate emails to English with Gmail
On a more serious note, this is probably more useful than it sounds. We all live in an increasingly social world. The Internet has made it possible to communicate with people from around the world and I cannot begin to tell you guys the number of times I’ve recieved emails from people with a phrase in a foreign language which I don’t understand. That will be a thing of the past from now on.
Gmail Translate uses the google translate service which, while quite accurate, is not always correct. But, it works quite well for translating simple phrases and understanding the gist of a conversation.
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