MAKE YOUR PHONE SOUND LIKE A KOREAN MOBILE!!!

Now tell me how much is your mobile???
Hmmm... quite costly!!! right???
Are you worried that your phone's sound is very feeble when compared to a Korean mobile? Then for all you folks out there, here is a perfect solution.
1. You must have NERO CD/DVD burning software installed in your pc.
2. Open Nero Wave Editor.
3. Open the mp3/wmv/wav or any other music source file.
4. Select the portion of the song you like(or even the entire song), and select volume->change volume.
5. In the dialog box that appears, key in 6 dB and give OK.
6. That's it. Load the output file into your mobile and enjoy the high sounding music!!!
CAUTION:
Do NOT increase the decibel (dB) level beyond 6, as it may lead to a jarring effect on your mobile's speaker. I recommend 6 as an optimum level. (Anything between 3 and 6 would suit!!!)

ROTO CHARGER - CHARGE YOUR MOBILE ON THE GO!!!

Now you can charge your mobile pone anywhere and any time! Idea-Forge Technology, a company founded by three IIT Bombay alumni, has introduced a hand-powered mobile phone charger called Roto Charger. It helps you tap power from your own self by the means of cranking (wind-up mode) or rolling (roll-on mode) the device any time you need to top up charge on your phone to survive it the next hour or make that last call.


With Roto Charger, you can charge your mobile in two ways – by simply rotating a handle on the charger or by rolling the charger with one hand on any surface. According to the company, one minute of rotating the handle gives about three minutes of talktime and about 30 minutes of stand-by time.

It is claimed to be safe to use for the cellphone batteries. In fact, the lower charging currents can lead to a better battery life. The eco-friendly device is priced at Rs 450 (almost $10).

For further details, visit, http://www.ideaforge.co.in/web/products/poweralternatives

THUNDERBIRD - FEEL THE THUNDER

Mozilla Thunderbird, a free and open source software that can be used for email and news transactions, has been developed by Mozilla Foundation. It is a great tool to manage your emails, as it offers a good number of useful features. The features include better search option and email archiving; you can also open your mails in tabs just the way you open new tabs in Mozilla Firefox.
It is cross-platform software, hence runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and others. For more information visit http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

KINGSOFT 2009 - The office manager suite

Kingsoft 2009 has been created by Great Worth International Limited. This is basically a cost-effective office suite that offers all the features of a normal office suite. But interestingly, it looks just like Microsoft Office. In other words, you may consider it as a replacement for Microsoft Office. It comes with a writer, a spreadsheet and a presentation software. One of the advantages of this software is that users who have used Microsoft Office at any point of time can easily operated it. Moreover, it supports cross-platforms, hence supports the Microsoft Office files too. It also incorporates a PDF converter. The trial version of this software is available for 100 days. The minimum system requirement for the software is Windows 2000 or higher, 266MHz CPU or higher, 64MB RAM, 80MB hard disk space and IE6.0 or higher. For more information visit http://www.ksoffice.net/

PENCIL - THE ULTIMATE ANIMATOR AND DRAWING FREEWARE

It is a free and open source animation and drawing software that lets you create both traditional hand-drawn animations and vector graphics. The software has been created to enable anyone to make 2D animation. The main website of the software contains a wiki for developers, where you can find how to join the Pencil group, how to get started, documentation on the existing code and a list of tasks that needs to be addressed by the developers. The software can be run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. For further information, visit http://www.pencil-animation.org/

INKSCAPE-THE VECTOR GRAPHICS EDITOR.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor that is similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw or Xara X. it uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics (SVG) file format. The software is compatible with XML, SVG and CSS standards. Certain features that Inkscape offers are object creation, object manipulation, styling objects, operations on path, text manipulation, rendering and many others. Using the object creation tool box you can create objects such as rectangle, polygon, circle, etc. you can also create 3D images such as 3D boxes using 3D tool box.


The object manipulation tool lets you move, rotate, scale and skew objects. You can also copy and paste objects on the clipboard. There are styling objects in Inkscape, which lets you fill colours into the created objects. Text rendering in Inkscape is based on the Pango library, which supports complex scripts including Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Tibetan, etc. the software runs on Linux, Free BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. For more information visit http://www.inkscape.org/

avoCADo - an open source 3D modelling software

Avocado is an open source software for 3D modelling, 3D rendering and visualisation. Target users for this software are engineers and artists. Improvements in the latest version include a revolve tool to build menu; you can now reference arcs by unique IDs or sketch new faces after a build operation or select material. It also includes lots of CSG debugging features and an updated graphics.


Avocado has its own wiki, which can be viewed at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/avocado-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page. This wiki is basically a tutorial which explains how to use the software. Further, it explains the basic requirements to start the development for the software. Also, source code for the software is available here. The software has been built for cross-platform usage, hence it runs on Linux and Mac OS. For more information visit http://avocado-cad.sourceforge.net/

Open Cascade - The 3D graphics developer

Open Cascade, a software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM and CAE, is supported by Open Cascade S.A.S. It can be used by industries, research institutes, universities or individuals. The fundamental functionality of the Open Cascade technology is modelling data. Any object can be created in 2D or 3D geometry using this software. There are other features too, using which you can create chamfers, draft and offset shapes. An interesting feature of this software is visualisation, which lets you view an object in different modes.


Open Cascade also gives you the freedom to adapt, modify and enrich the code as per your requirements. The software comes with a complete support, for which the user has to pay a nominal fee. But the fee is charged for support, not licence. The software finds applications in various industrial domains, aeronautics and space, automotive, shipbuilding, etc. BMV and TATA Motors use this software in the automobile industry and CIRTES in the medical sector. The minimum system requirement for the software is 256MB, 500MB memory space and OpenGL graphics library. For more information visit http://opencascade.org/

BLENDER-THE ULTIMATE 3D GRAPHICS DESIGNING APPLICATION

Blender is a 3D graphics designing application. This software offers features like modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, shading, rendering, particles and simulations, non-linear editing, imaging and compositing, animation, Python scripting, 3D game creation, etc.

Blender has been used in production of animated movies like Elephant Dreams (2005), Big Buck Bunny(2007) and Yo Frankie!(2008). It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. The minimum hardware requirement of this software is 300MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 20MB free hard disk space and Open GL graphics card with 16GB RAM. For more information on the software visit http://www.blender.org/

THE TRUE ENCRYPTOR - TRUECRYPT

A lot of organizations require you to work on sensitive data, such as financial records, database, or proprietary secrets. To ensure that no one can sneak a peek at your files when you’re away from your computer, TrueCrypt can make them simply vanish! A simple keystroke and a password are all you need to ensure the safety of your documents. While it a bit daunting to set up, the comprehensive help and support material available on its website make TrueCrypt a force to reckon with. You can mask folders or entire hard drive partitions so that no one but you will be able to find your information. Choose from a number of encryption algorithms or create a verification keyfile that you can carry on a pen drive. If you want to get truly hardcore, you can even hide an encrypted volume within another encrypted volume for double security.

The download link is given below

http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads

AUDACITY - THE FREE AUDIO EDITING THING!!!

Audacity is considered to be one of the best audio editors. It manages to achieve this due to the loads of excellent features it integrates while maintaining the toolbar and work space uncluttered. It can record and play sounds and import and export WAV, MP3, OGG, and AIFF files and also supports 32-bit floating-point audio. Basic effect such as reverb, delay, and compression are also included. Another eye-catching feature is the Best Analyzer, which helps you hold the beats per minute of a phrase.

To edit an audio file, you just need to select the required file. Once selected, it loads onto your screen and now you can edit the file with the aid of the mouse cursor and by keeping the duration scale as a reference. Using the effects tab, a variety of operations can be performed on the selected track after which the file can be saved in the desired audio format. Along with sound editing, audacity also features sound recording, which you can use to record uncompressed or external sounds. Audacity also has a Meter Toolbar added for monitoring volume levels during playback and recording.

The performance of most functions is quick, including tasks such as exporting to MP3 or adding complex effects which demand a large share of the CPU’s resources. Though Audacity doesn’t offer advanced features out of the box, it still stands out of the crowd.

The download link is given below;

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

IZArc - The File Archiving Freeware

What is the first thing that comes that comes to your mind when Windows warns you of low disk space? Is it something like ‘Wow! It’s time to get a hard drive’ or ‘Oh! No, what do I keep and what do I delete’? if your response is the latter, then help is at hand, you need to use a file archiving application. File archive managers such as Winzip and Winace are quite popular but these are shareware. If it freeware you are looking for, then try IZArc.

IZArc supports a humungous number of file archive format that include ZIP, ACE and RAR. IZArc is quite user-friendly and at the same time packs a reasonable amount of functionalities as well. If you have an archived file of a certain format and need to convert it to some other format, then you can use IZArc to do that as well. However, the number of formats it can convert files into is limited, although it can extract files that are archived in different formats.

The download link is given below

http://www.izarc.org/download.html

ABI WORD, THE WORD PROCESSING FREEWARE

Word processing is one task which is performed by most computer users. Almost all PCs in the world have been used for word processing. While MS Word is the most commonly used word processor, there are also other free applications that offer comparable performance. AbiWord is a free word processor that offers all the features that you would ever require for word processing. In addition, it does not hog system resources.

If you are a user of MS Word, then using AbiWord wouldn’t make you feel out of place. Most of the features you would use in the former are available in AbiWord. It supports common Word file formats such as DOC and RTF in addition to some of its own unique formats such as ABW and ZABW. The ZABW format is some what similar to the DOCX format in MS Word 2007 wherein the document is in a compressed format hence it takes up less space. AbiWord is not as refined as MS Word or Open Office Writer, but it still has advantages over them because of it being a standalone word processor.

The download link is given below

http://www.abisource.com/download/

You can even download it for Linux OS.

FLASHGET - THE ULTIMATE DOWNLOAD DESTINATION

The days when you needed to wait for hours to download a big file using a snail-paced dial-up connection are long gone. With the advent of broadband, downloading files with sizes in GBs has become very easy. FlashGet is one of the best free download managers around.

The DropZone icon graphically represents the rate at which the download represents the rate at which the download takes place and also the percentage of the downloaded file. FlashGet has always been known for its better integration with web browsers, so much so that the Firefox plug-in for integration of third-party download managers is known as FlashGot. It supports quite a number of communication protocols such as HTTP, FTP, BT, MMS, RTSP, and also the popular BitTorrents. Overall, it is a decent download manager and it is also free, giving you more reasons to use it.

The download link is given below.

http://www.flashget.com/index_en.htm

From the above link, you can download any version of flash get. You can also review the power of this software.

CD/DVD BURNING FREEWARE- DEEP BURNER

This one is absolutely power packed and can do all the basic functions like burning of audio CDs, multisession discs, erasing rewritable CD/DVDs, and so on. One interesting feature in DeepBurner is the availability of designing CD labels even for pocket CDs. Here, you can insert pictures and text in accordance with your needs. And all of this can be done with utmost ease.

You can also try Deep Ripper and Deep DVD Movie which are also available free for download. The download link is given below.
http://www.deepburner.com/?r=download

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

Are you that kind of a person who doesn’t like to switch between keyboard and mouse frequently while editing images???

If yes, then you have reached your ultimate destination. Just download the following pdf file which contains all the keyboard shortcuts applicable to adobe photoshop cs2 version.

http://www.megafileupload.com/en/file/202981/adobe-photoshop-cs2-keyboard-shortcuts-pdf.html

You never need to take your dexter and your sinister off your keyboard!!!

Say bye to your mouse while editing!!!

Printing files using specific printers through the “Send To” menu

Documents can be printed directly from their context menu only on the default printer. However, many offices use several printers; for example, a laser printer for text and an ink-jet for images. Here’s how you can print directly to a specific printer from the “Send To” menu option.

Windows XP:
1.Press [Winkey]+[E] to open Windows Explorer.
2.If the taskbar is visible on the left pane of Windows Explorer, click on “Folder”.
3.In the directory structure, browse to “C:\Documents and Settings” and open your user profile.
4.The directory has the same name as your user account.
5.In that, select the folder “SendTo” in the tree structure and open it.
6.Now drag and drop the required printer shortcut from the “Printers and Faxes” in the Control Panel to SendTo folder.
7.Now whenever you right click any file and select SendTo, you can see the printer shortcut; clicking on which your file gets printed instantly!!!

Windows Vista and Windows 7:
1. Start menu and paste the following link in the search bar “C:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo”.
2. Right click anywhere on the empty area, select “New->Folder” and name it as “Printer.{2227a280-3aea-1069-a2de-08002b30309d}” and press enter.
3. The new folder will display a printer icon that contains the icons for all printers installed on your system.
4. Click on the icon of the desired printer and drag it to the “SendTo” directory.
5. That’s it!!! You made it!!!
NOTE: Some file types; for instance, Outlook news in the MSG format; can be printed only using the default printer.

Integrating videos as the desktop background

 

Windows Vista is optically quite impressive with every series. But its interface can be tuned further-with tools from Redmond.

DreamScene is used for animating the desktop background. This program is one of the free tools offered by Microsoft for the Ultimate version of Windows Vista.

SETUP: To install DreamScene, connect to the Internet, click on “Security” in Control Panel and then click on “Windows-Update”. If you have activated the classic view of the Control Panel, just double-click on “Windows Update”. Then, select “Search for Updates” and “Display Available Updates”. In the “Windows Ultimate Tools” area, select the “Windows DreamScene-preview” option and click on “Install”. Click “Restart now” to complete installation. To select an animated background, right-click on the free space on the desktop and select “Personalize”. Then, click on “Desktop Background” and open the drop down box near “Location” and choose Windows DreamScene Content. You will get an animated sample background. Select it and finally click OK. You can also install the “Contents packet for Windows DreamScene”. This extra contains more animated wallpapers. In addition, you can use every other video file as a screen saver; for example, a slide show from your last vacation that you have saved in MPG format. Your creativity sees no bounds. But be careful: hectic film sequences are annoying and distracting!!!

Tips and Tricks

For all you font freaks out there, here are the 10 BEST FREE FONT SITES.
http://www.free-fonts.com
http://www.urbanfonts.com
http://www.getfreefonts.info
http://eknp.com/fonts/weird1.php
http://www.perfecttableplan.com/html/fonts.html
http://www.fontriver.com
http://www.acidfonts.com
http://cooltext.com/ (generates logos with effects!!!)
http://www.downloadfreefonts.com
http://www.maryforrest.com/fonts/fonts.html#Links

Create stylish font effects for existing fonts using Photoshop

For those of you who were wondering how to create special effects for fonts using Adobe Photoshop, here is a great catch to kick-start with!!!

1. Start “File->New”, assign width and height as “8 inch”, resolution as “72 dpi” and colour mode as “CMYK”.

2. Select the entire canvas and press D, X, [Ctrl] +Backspace. (This will make your canvas black).

3. Now select text tool and type any text (ensure that colour is set to white).

4. Select the text layer, then “Layer->Layer Style->Blending Options” and select “Bevel and Emboss”.

5. Select “Contour” and reduce default “Range” to “15”.

6. Select background and hit [Ctrl] + I (background will become white and text will be shining).

7. Open “Blending Options” again and select “Drop Shadow” and input the “Distance”, “Spread” and “Size” as ‘3’, ‘33’ and ‘13’.

8. Start a new layer and select the “Elliptical Marquee Tool”.

9. Make a circle around your text and go to “Edit->Stroke” and select Stroke width as ‘8’.

10. Select text layer, “Layer->Layer Style->Copy Layer Style”.

11. Select circle layer, “Layer->Layer Style->Paste Layer Style”.

And you can vary all the given input numbers by using trial and error to achieve your preferential text look!!!