See below how our Chandrayan is piercing into the sky from ISRO Launch Centre in Srihari Kota near Chennai
Windows Live Writer Plugin for Amazon S3 Storage
Recently we set up an Amazon S3 account for uploading all images and files for this blog. We used the Firefox plugin S3Fox for uploading all the images to Amazon S3. We were searching for some integration of Amazon S3 services into Windows Live Writer as we use it to compose the posts and found this really good Amazon S3 browser plugin for Live Writer. Once the plugin is installed, restart WLW and you can see a link at the bottom right portion of WLW.
When you click Insert S3 Object, you will be prompted to enter you Access ID and Secret key for Amazon S3.
Once you enter the details, you will be able to access all you Amazon S3 images uploaded with the folder set up.
You can insert as link or as an image from the S3 browser. This browser also supports uploading of files to your S3 account. This plugin is pretty useful for people using S3 account for image uploading and WLW for composing posts.
How to Add a Watermark to Excel Sheets
Previously we had published a tutorial on how to add watermark for a Word document. You can also add watermarks for Excel sheets, but the procedure to add watermark is different from that of Word documents as Excel does not have a built in feature for doing it. So in Excel you can add an image as watermark to the sheets. Here are the steps to add a watermark in Excel sheet
1. To add an image as watermark, select the Insert tab in the ribbon, make sure you have created a graphical image using your favorite image editor.
2. In the Insert tab, click on the Header and footers button.
3. Header and footers are displayed on the Excel and now click on the "Click to Add Header" on top of the screen.
4. Now select a picture from the Picture button located in the ribbon.
5. Browse for the image you want to add as water mark and add it. Now the image will be displayed on the header. Click Enter on your keyboard to bring it to the center of the sheet. The watermark added will look similar to the one shown below.
This watermark will be available when we take the print of Excel sheets and also in the normal display of sheets.
Lyrics Viewer Displays Lyrics of Songs while Playing
The Lyrics Viewer is a freeware application which is a tool that allows the user to view song lyrics. It also allows the user to pull up extra information about the album containing the song as well as play the song while viewing the lyrics. Once you open the application, select the song from the hard drive using the left panel window and the available songs are displayed in the right panel window. When a song is selected, you can view the lyrics, play the song, get more details on the song and also embed lyrics.
For the lyrics to be displayed while playing, the song should have the lyrics must be embedded previously and if not the program gives directions on how to have lyrics embedded in the song.
This is a useful utility for music lover as they can view and embed lyrics of favorite songs. If you use Winamp, then check out this post to know how to display lyrics in Winamp.
Convert Video to Flash with Free Flash Converter
If you want to publish your video files as flash on your blog or website, then Free Flash Converter is a good application for the same. It can convert .avi, .mpeg, .mpg, .mp4, .m4v, .wmv, .asf, .mov, .qt, .3gp, .3g2, .dvr-ms. .flv video files to .flv and .swf files to publish on your website. The interface is pretty simple and easy to use. Add the files into the conversion window, select the output format and folder and then click convert.
Free Flash converter includes 80+ variants of flash players. Video to Flash converter also has provision to trim the video, so that you can selectively convert video to flash. This application is free of cost for both personal and commercial use.
And now it's the turn of Britney Spears to become a blogger. Britney Spears has relaunched her website BritneySpear.com. The site has a blog as well and this is maintained by the so called Britney Team. It's also great to see that the site has all the elements to market it wonderfully well using the social media platforms like twitter and youtube to name a few.
Following is a welcome video from Britney promising her fans a regular update and cool stuff on the site:
It'd be interesting to see how the site is being maintained and modified and what content comes up on the site. Also, if there will be some time when the site will become a platform to launch her music videos and other similar stuff. The website looks pretty neat. However, I'd have loved to see the main page or the TLD as page which doesn't have a big fold as in it should not be too scrollable. However, the fold can be big on the blog page.
Britney Spear Website
There are many freewares applications for converting FLV format to iPod or MP3 formats. Here is another free online service, Convert Direct, to convert FLV Videos to your favorite formats. It supports conversion to iPod, Zune, PSP and MP3 formats.
Convert Direct allows you to convert FLV format online for free to MP3, iPhone, iPod, Zune, PSP and many more formats. The file after conversion is emailed to the user.
Steps to Convert;
1. Enter the YouTube video URL or the URL of the location where the FLV video is available.
2. Select the Output format for the FLV video.
3. In the third and final step enter the email ID where the converted video will be sent.
The converted video will be emailed and the video will be available as a link and you will be able to download it for 48 hours from the time of conversion. Once this time is over, the file will be deleted from the server.
For Youtube Videos
To Download Youtube and Google Video Online use
Tags: Convert youtube video to Ipod, Youtube to MP3, Download Youtube Video
How to: Launch Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in InPrivate Mode! Why do you need the inPrivate or similar features in a browser. Let's say you are going to use a public computer and you don't want any of the private data to reside on such PCs for privacy issues, then I am sure you'll appreciate a feature like this. Also, if you want to browse porn and don't want others in the house to know about it then this feature will come to your rescue. The only browser that has this feature in the final running mode is chrome. Chrome's privacy feature is called as incognito and you can launch a new incognito chrome window using the shortcut CTRL+Shift+N. But launching chrome directly into incognito mode is not possible. I searched the web for ways to achieve this but in vain. The only way to launch chrome's incognito is to first launch the normal chrome and only then launch the incognito window. So, I got curious to know if this achieving this functionality in Internet Explorer Beta 2 is as impossible as chrome. Good news is that you can actually launch the IE beta 2 directly into the inPrivate mode without having to start it in normal mode first. But before we do this, let us understand what inPrivate mode is and how it affects your browsing. InPrivate™ Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data. While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place: Isn't this handy! Now let's see how to start IE 8 beta 2directly into the inPrivate mode. 1. On the desktop, right-click your mouse and select New->Shortcut You now have an Internet Explorer shortcut that'd start you IE 8 beta 2 directly into inPrivate mode. Enjoy hassle free browsing!
I think the next wave of browsers will have a very important feature of private browsing. Not that it's not already there, but most of the browsers have this feature in the testing phase.
2. Type in the following line into the Shortcut window prompted out:
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" –private
3. Click Next.
4. Add a name for this new shortcut, e.g. IE-InPrivate
5. Click Finish.
Firetask is a free utility which can be useful in scheduling and automating tasks in Windows. You can schedule Windows applications, copy files and folders, display message dialogs all in scheduled or automated mode. These tasks can be either trigger based on hot key or time based. Once the program is installed, it will prompt to download ready to use tasks from the Internet. If you do not need predefined tasks, then you can skip the process. The application opens the main window, where in you can add different tasks and schedule them as needed. To add a new task, select the New Task button and here you can see the options available for scheduling. Enter the title for the task, the days of the week when its active, the time when it should run, the hot keys and finally the action required. If you want to run a software, then select Open file and give the path of the installed program. Features of Firetask: Firetask is a good option if you want to run specified programs at any time or even schedule a message for you as reminder.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ is an interesting site to check the status of a website... For example your ISP is having DNS Issues the your site may show "Page Cannot be Displayed" but actually the site may be up... So just browse to this site enter your site URL to get the status... Nice one...
This might be a feature which many of Indian users are waiting for. As many people cannot afford for GPRS & many people even don’t know about how to use GPRS. Mobee.in forwards all your emails via SMS to your phone. This service doesn’t requires any GPRS connection which can be used on any mobile phone which supports SMS.
Login was bit time consuming for me, as they sent mobile verification code & password to mobile via SMS. One should have been enough to verify mobile phone, either they could have sent password or verification code. After sign up, it took me 3-4 mins to find out how to change password! I actually went to “My Account” to change password, but it was provided at “Dashboard”.
After sign up it creates an email ID something like yourmobleno@mobee.in. This email ID should be added in “Forwarding Options” of actual email service. Like in gmail, goto “Settings–>Forwarding & POP” & forward your mails to mobee.in email ID. Now mails sent at gmail comes to your mobile via SMS. Mobee.in has filtering options & black list using which you can receive only emails which are important via SMS.
Mobee.in isn’t a completely service, infact it cannot be continued using for free. Upon sign up user gets 20 credits, means can receive 20 emails via SMS. Free account also has limitation of only 10 emails per day. You have to buy more credits to continue using this service. If you get too many emails & an active user of internet, this might not workout. GPRS might come cheap. This service will be useful if you want to track important emails like Job Offerings, Interview replies…etc using filters.
Shift+Del is easy to delete but hard to recover, Is this you have in your mind? Nope, Now there are options to recover deleted mails from outlook.
"Tools -> Recover Deleted Items" is enabled by default in Outlook 2003. Also you should be using Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail account in order to use this facility. Follow below steps for Outlook 2003.
1. Go to Run by clicking on Start and type in regedit.
2. Now go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expand Software.
3. You will find Microsoft there. Expand Microsoft.
4. Expand exchange and then client.
5. You will find Options there. Right click on Options, choose New and click on D Word Value.
6. Now right click the new Dword Value and rename it to DumpsterAlwaysOn. Note: This is case sensitive.
7. Right click on the DumpsterAlwaysOn and modify the Value data to 1 and click on OK. When you type 1, this means the Recovery deleted Item is on. Also 0 to turn it off.
8. Now open Outlook and click on Tools.
9. Choose 'Recovery Deleted Items'
Free group SMS service is not new to India now. The leadrunner SMSGupshup along with Vakow etc are well placed in this feild now. No one would have expected big brand like Google to enter this market. Google has started a service SMS Channels, but still in labs. Eventhough Google is a big brand, it has to face tight competition in this area.
Google calls groups as channels & it’s quite easy to create a channel. Since almost everyone has a google account, there is no need for sign up. Just use your Google Account to login & create a channel.
Try Now!
Friends,
There are lot of websites to send free sms which I'm listing below so that you can save time in searching for sites and directly start sending sms. Some sites have daily limits and most of them add advertisement below your sms...
1) http://www.160by2.com/
2) http://www.way2sms.com/
3) http://www.indyarocks.com/
4) http://smslife.in/
5) http://www.www.freesms8.com/
6) http://www.meow.me/
7) http://www.smskwik.com/
8) http://www.allindiasms.com/
9) http://www.smsjunction.com/
10) http://www.foosms.com/
With Apple store being too nagging to approve applications for iPhones, people often resort jail breaking to get these applications working on their phone. This was the case up until now for Fring, a free mobile Voice-over-IP service (VoIP). However, this application is now available officially at apple store.
What does this mean. This means that now you don’t have to jailbreak or hack your iPhone to get this application running on your phone and now skype calls can be made on the iPhones. Using Fring you can also chat with your friends over Google Talk, AIM, MSN and Yahoo messenger and also Frings own chat service.
Also watch the video below to see this software in action
If you love to use skype and have been waiting for a solution that can make skype service available on your iPhone then your wait is over. Grab your Fring application from the apple store.
Tags: apple store, Best iPhone Apps, Download iPhone Applications, Free iPhone Apps, fring, skype on iphone, voip iphone application
Are you concerned about your telephone bills. Do you change plans or wish to change your service provider because you’ve had poor experience with the huge mobile bills that you incurred. Or you are just researching to find what’s the best mobile service provider for your kind of mobile usage. Now you have a service that tells you exactly the service provider that you’ll need to cut your payments on the mobile bills. I am afraid this service is only available for Indian mobile users.
This service is called as YourBillBuddy and helps you know what is the best plan and which service provider is going to provide you with such a plan. As the site says and rightly so, there’s no one best plan for all the people. The best plan however depends on various parameters like:
1) Which provider are you on ?
2) Which providers do you call the most ?
3) Are the voice calls you make STD or Local ?
4) What time of day do you call ?
5) Are there some numbers you call most often ?
6) Are the calls you are making roaming ?
7) Are the calls being made to landlines or Mobiles ?
Same parameters apply on your SMS usage as well.
Now that I have managed to open your eyes to the parameters that affect your mobile bill, I am sure you are curious to know what plan will best suit your needs. Based on all the above information (which of course you have to share with the service YourBillBuddy) you’ll be given a best plan for the kind of usage you have.
This is calculated:
from the whole variety of plans available in your circle. With an average 6 Providers, 10 plans each, with around 8 Service packs available to go as a addon to the plan leaving you with a choice of almost 480 (6*10*8) plan + service pack combinations !! Of these roughly 500 plan combinations only ONE is best for you based on your usage.
You’ll have to submit your ebills of your current plan and service provider for the site to pick the heuristics and calculate for you the best plan available. Following is how the site promises to calculate your mobile usage pattern and come up with a plan for you which is the best plan available.
From your E-Bill we extract call details of each and every single call you make. For each call you make we determine the attributes of the call that effect the billing rate. The attributes we consider in our calculations are the service provider of the number called, units of call, your pulse rate in the current plan, type of call (STD/ISD/Local), Time of call, is the call made while Roaming, is the called number a landline or a mobile. Same extraction process is followed for every SMS you make. In short summary all the hundreds of calls and SMSs that appear in your E-Bill are extracted and the relevant details that will impact your bill are pulled up. This extraction is supported for hundreds of E-Bill formats available across Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance, Tata Indicom and Idea.
The company says that after they’ve had your ebills and they have given you the best plan they also would give you free sms worth rupees 700 to be sent to your contacts. If you are concerned about the privacy, you might want to read their privacy policy here. Personally, I use a prepaid mobile and hence haven’t tested this service (for the lack of ebills for prepaid). However, if any of our reader would like to share their experience about the service, it’ll be great for us to rate it and for our other users to try it.
Also, I am delightfully surprised to see such a useful service being launched in India.
Tags: best mobile plan, best mobile plan india, cheap mobile plan india, cheap mobile service provider, Mobile, mobile bills, reduce mobile bills
Finding, sharing and downloading files has been becoming easier by day both because of the better technology and increasing bandwidth and speed. If torrents have been a ground breaking technology to share things (most of the times illegally), then file hosting services have had their own share of success and criticism.
Rapidshare, is probably a classic example of file hosting service that has been the most successful example of doing business by uploading and downloading user generated and shared content. Let’s try to see:
What is Rapidshare?
What it means to a normal user?
What are the benefits it can give you?
How can you use rapidshare to download stuff?
How can you search rapidshare to get the most out of it?
How can you get premium account with rapidshare by sharing files which will be downloaded?
How can you use rapidshare to generate money (yes, it’s a viable business model)?
Let’s answer these questions and I am sure we’ll cover everything related to rapidshare. Consider this as a tutorial and one stop shop for know everything about rapidshare and similar services.
1. What is RapidShare?
This is what Wikipedia has to say
RapidShare is a German owned one-click hosting pay- and free-service (with limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. According to Alexa, Rapidshare.com is currently the 12th most visited website.
In simple words, you can use rapidshare to upload files up to 200 MB each and share that link with a friend for her/him to download.
2. What does Rapidshare mean to a normal user?
For a normal user it’s a platform to share and download applications, movies, music and literally everything that can be downloaded from Internet. You just need to know the link of download and you are good to go.
3. How can you benefit from Rapidshare?
Well, the benefits are multi fold. One, you can share and download files. Two, you can download files of other users if you know the download link. That means there are limitless possibilities for you to get a file which you are not getting otherwise. These files could be both legal and illegal.
Also, the great download speed from Rapidshare makes it a superior platform to download files compared to torrents.
4. How can you use rapidshare to download stuff?
As is the case with most of the services, free download from rapidshare is limited to certain amount of download per hour per IP. So if your internet connection is of dynamic IP you can flush your IP to download more files as a free user. However, this also comes as a disadvantage because your ISP can assign you an IP for your session which was used recently by other user who used rapidshare to download stuff. This means that even though you have not downloaded anything as a free user you cannot download if someone used that IP to download.
This is a classic problem when you are trying to download from office, university or college which has same IP for 100s of users.
You can however, buy a rapidshare premium account to take advantage of both high speed download and over 10 GB continuous download in a day. You can check the advantages you get with a rapidshare premium account over free account here.
5. How can you search rapidshare to get the most out of it?
Well, this is the most typical problem and actually has the most easy solution. The problem is that fact that Rapidshare doesn’t have a search facility because of confidentiality of files of it’s users. However, there are many resources out there both software based and online services which can help you search rapidshare. Just Google "rapidshare search" and you should get what you are looking for.
However, I am more of a believer of the fact that Google can be used to search for almost anything out there which has a web presence and so I use Google to search rapidshare. How do I do it:
Let’s say I am searching for the movie Iron Man, I’d use a search query which is something like this:
"Iron Man" rapidshare.com site:blogspot.com
Let me explain this. Because I am looking for Iron Man, I have used that as the first query and that too in quotes so Google knows that I am looking for Iron Man as a term and not as 2 different words. The next part of the search has rapidshare.com, this means that I am also looking for rapidshare.com along with Iron Man. And the last one is a query modifier i.e. site:blogspot.com. That means I am telling Google to look for Iron Man and/or rapidshare.com only on blogspot.com.
The reason I am using blogspot.com is because I’ll avoid a lot of webspam as blogspot is mostly user generated and is not created by machine.
I am most likely to find results for Iron Man movie to be downloaded from rapidshare using the above query or I can modify and make the query more precise. Something like this:
"Iron Man"+rapidshare.com site:blogspot.com
I added + which tells google to look for pages which have both iron man and rapidshare.com
6. How can you get premium account with rapidshare by sharing files which will be downloaded?
As we just discussed premium account is the best bet if you want to unleash the power of rapidshare.com. You can either buy a rapidshare premium account or ensure that you collect enough points as a free uploader so that you can convert those points into buying a premium rapidshare account. Let me explain:
As a free uploader, when you upload files to rapidshare, rapidshare gives you point every time the file is being downloaded. That means if you are an uploader of Iron Man movie and I download it, you get some points. You can accrue these points to buy a premium account, This means that you’ll have to upload good number of files and ensure that you post them on a lot of forums and blogs so that people download the files and you make points.
7. How can you use rapidshare to generate money (yes, it’s a viable business model)?
Now then, if you are smart, you can extend your knowledge from point six discussed above and generate so many points that you can create multiple premium accounts. Next you can sell these accounts to various buyers for a discounted price thus making money.
We hope that this guide will help you with your quest for using rapidshare more effectively and possibly making some money out of it.
Tags: get free rapidshare account, rapidshare, rapidshare download, rapidshare links, search rapidshare files
SERPs Finder is a free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) utility that allows you to find rankings of your pages in all major search engines. SERPs Finder can easily check search engine position of your site for a given query in Google, Live Search, and Yahoo! Search.
Despite it's simplicity it is one of the most powerful tools of its kind, unlike many others it searches for position deeply, analyzing first 1000 of search engine results. It is also incredibly fast, the only practical limit is the speed of your network connection.
Note: We have recently got our attention to some complaints by the users who got their access to Google temporarily blocked after excessive use of our product, so we decided to reduce the depth of the search to the first 100 results instead of 1000. If someone of you still have problems please let us know. It is possible to rewrite the program to search the first 100 results trough only one Google query (currently there are 10 queries).
IconDial is a latest service which has been launched recently, which allows you to make telephone calls to any land line or mobile phone in any country. There is no information about the owner, but it seems that it has some relation with MeBeam
They have flashphone to make call directly from your web browser, you do not need to download or install something. Furthermore, No registration is required.
For free calls, you have to listen few seconds advertisement before the call gets connected.
Click here to visit IconDial
There is not much information about the length and number of the calls per day available on their website. They wrote that you can call anywhere in the world. Thats it. Anyway you can give a try to this service and see if its worth using.
Please leave your experience about the call qualities and countries supported.
Businessweek just released The 25 Most Influential People on the Web for 2008. This list is generated every year when businessweek asks its readers and staff members to contribute to the survey by naming the people who they think are most influential on the web.
Here goes the list…
The Seeker: Steve Ballmer, microsoft.com
The Marshall: Mitchell Baker, mozilla.org
The Innovator: Jeff Bezos, amazon.com
The Searchers: Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt
The Investor: Jeff Clavier, softtechvc.com
The Papa Bear: Paul Graham, ycombinator.com
The Muckracker: Arianna Huffington , huffingtonpost.com
The Adviser: Joi Ito, joi.ito.com
The Mastermind: Steve Jobs, apple.com
The Filmer: Jonathan Kaplan, theflip.com
The Communicator: Loic Le Meur, leweb3.com, seismic.com
The Trader: Jack Ma, alibaba.com
The Publisher: Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress.org
The Mogul: Rupert Murdoch, myspace.com
The community Organizer: Craig Newmark, craigslist.com
The Traffic Driver: Gabe Rivera, techmeme.com
The Poster Boy: Kevin Rose, Digg.com
The Adult: Sheryl Sandberg, facebook.com
The Edutainer: Jon Stewart, thedailyshow.com
The Money Man: Peter Thiel, Clariumcapital.com
The Crafter: Maria Thomas, etsy.com
The Advocate: Anssi Vanjoki, nokia.com
The Crowd Sourcer: Jimmy Wales, Wikia-inc.com/wiki/wikia
The Blogger: Evan Williams, Twitter.com
The Fighter: Jerry Yang, Yahoo.com
Surprisingly a few names like Michael Arlington, Mark Zuckerberg, etc are missing on the list! Not Influntial anymore?
Realnetworks recently launched its controversial software which lets users copy their DVD content to PC’s, Laptops or media players.
I was surprised at the RealPlayer Plugin which lets users download videos from any flash based player on the internet. That was not the end of it; RealDVD lets users copy all the DVD content from the DVD to a computer.
Copying a movie from DVD is as simple as inserting the DVD in the DVD drive, launching the RealDVD application and clicking on COPY; didn’t I tell you it was simple?
The software also offers features like Information on each DVD from Gracenote, Cast information, etc.. As RealDVD gathers information such as gener, cast members, MPAA ratings for every DVD copied using RealDVD it makes it possible for you to pull movies based on type, Comedy, Action, etc..
One thing you should know about RealDVD is that the content of the DVD which is copied to a specific location on the computer or a laptop is locked in that location. It does not let you move or copy the content from there.
RealDVD is currently available for $29.99 as part of its introductory offer however the original price of the software is $49.99.
Click here to visit RealDVD and Buy or Download RealDVD Trial Version of the software.
Few Facts from RealNetworks Press Release
- RealDVD saves an exact copy of the DVD image to a PC’s internal or portable hard drive. Users can simultaneously watch and save a DVD
- Saved DVDs are then encrypted and locked again to make sure they cannot be shared or stolen
- Saving DVDs takes an average of 10-40 minutes, and takes up roughly 4-8 gigabytes of space
- RealDVD lets users pause and resume playback where they left off
- Watching a saved movie or TV show with RealDVD uses less battery life than viewing the same content from a physical disc in the drive
- Consumers can browse cover art, genre, title rating and actor information, imported automatically during saving
Parental controls ensure children only access entertainment that is appropriate for their age - Fifty percent of U.S. broadband households have more than 50 DVDs in their collections, and last year consumers spent more than $16 billion purchasing DVDs (According to TDG Reports & Screen Digest)
- Hollywood shipped 1.1 billion DVD discs in 2007 — nearly 30 million more than in 2006 (According to Screen Digest)
Following video from Demo-Fall-2008 shows you a full demo of the product: