A Complete Guide on How to Extend Your Laptop's Battery Life

For many of us our laptop is an indispensable part of our lives and is carried to work and back every day. However, nearly everyone knows the frustration of needing to do three or four hours' worth of work and only having an hour's worth of battery life left without a charger in sight! There are some ways to prolong the life of a laptop's battery, especially if your laptop is one of the new sleek and simple design, yet exceptionally powerful modern laptops, such as the new range of Samsung laptops.

Reduce Screen Brightness:

From a purely physical point of view the biggest power draw on a laptop is the screen display. Reduce the brightness of the screen to the lowest level that you can comfortably work at. Do not sacrifice your eyes for the sake of an extra half-an-hour of battery life, but do reduce the screen brightness as much as you feel able to.

Reduce Sound and use Headphones:

When watching videos or listening to music on your laptop reduce the sound as much as possible, even if you are using headphones. Not only does this conserve your battery, it can protect your hearing too!

Turn Off Wifi and Bluetooth:

Software can play a part in draining battery levels, and the worst offender is Wi-Fi. Modern laptops are designed to hunt around for Wi-Fi signals and can use an inordinate amount of battery power to do so. If you are travelling from home to work or vice versa and do not need to be connected to the Internet, then disable the Wi-Fi acquisition feature for the journey. This will prevent your laptop from hunting for access points that you have no intention of using anyway!

Remove USB and CD's when not in use:

If you are working during your commute to and from the office, try not to keep USB devices connected for long. Flash drives, optical CD drives and even USB mice can all drain power from a laptop, so plug them in, transfer information or do the tasks you need to, and then remove them as soon as you are finished. (It is not advised to try and use optical disc drives while travelling anyway, a sudden bump or jolt can damage the mechanism.)

Replace your Old Battery with a new one:

Finally, if your battery is over two years old, it may simply be getting old. Speak to the manufacturer about purchasing replacement batteries and ask if they offer long-lasting replacement batteries that hold a longer, stronger charge than the original one. Laptops are there for our convenience and to be used, but with a little care and attention your battery can last much longer, giving you a great user experience!

3 Great Facebook Games for Halloween

Watch any horror film, and you’ll learn one absolute truth. Things tend to go horribly awry whenever someone suggests that the protagonists split up. In the world of Eli Roth and M. Night Shyamalan, flying solo is perhaps the quickest way one can end up with an axe in the back. With that in mind, why don’t you spend this Halloween playing games with a slightly social twist? Facebook is a great platform for gaming with friends, and there are some incredible games to play this Halloween. Here are some that you will really dig. Ghost Tales – Ghost Saga...

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An Easy Way to Download APK Files from Google Play

Android apps and games are packed as APK files. Learn how to easily download any APK file from the Google Play Store.

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This story, An Easy Way to Download APK Files from Google Play, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 30/10/2013 under Android, Internet

New Features in Google+ for Android

Mobile apps for social services are strange. Until now, the Google+ mobile app didn't allow you to copy the text of a post. You had to get the URL of the post, open the browser and copy the text there. I thought this must be a bug until I checked the Facebook app and noticed that you can't copy text.



The latest version of the Google+ app for Android lets you copy the text of a post, copy comments, quickly reply to comments, translate posts and comments.

While the new features are useful, I don't see why you can't select some of the text and copy it. The Google+ app still doesn't support sharing intents. I assume that apps like Google+ and Facebook want to force users to stick to their own sharing features.



The Google+ app actually supports sharing intents, but only for your photos. The sharing interface looks different and it includes Google+ options. Google+ Photos has a new icon, it's now called "Photos", it includes photos and videos stored on your device, an Auto-Awesome section and is poised to replace the standard Android Gallery.

There's also an updated notification sidebar that shows the notifications you've read in a new section: "previously read". The interface is cleaner, but it's more difficult to hide the sidebar.



If you can't update to the new Google+ version, blame staged rollouts and download the APK file from here.

11 Hideously Scary Halloween Makeup Ideas You Can Borrow From The Web

Halloween is time for fun. It’s time for spooky music, it’s time for yummy creepy food, it’s time for good horror movies, and most of all, it’s time to unleash your creativity and dress up any way you want. While some may go for cute or funny, it’s hard to ignore the horror factor of Halloween. Anyone can color their face black or orange, but can you make your eyes bleed out? Can you zip open your face? Can you look like a zombie? With some inspiration to follow, you can. And we’ve found this inspiration for you, along with...

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Technophilia 87 Live From MakeUseOf

This week: a new virus encrypts your files and takes them hostage until you pay. I’ll ask James – who definitely didn’t make this, why are you even asking – what could possibly be worse than this. Blackberry’s BBM service is out now for Android and iOS users, and we couldn’t possibly be less excited. Rating bots disagree, find out why (hint: it’s because they’re bots). And we tell you about the greatest anti-piracy tactic of all time. This week’s episode is brought to you by Bitdefender QuickScan. Whenever you need a quick check or a second opinion, such as...

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7 Tech Savvy And Fiendish Tips To Get Ready For Halloween

With Halloween hot on our heels, procrastinators may have slipped behind on getting ready. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the Internet, even the lazy can catch up quickly with a few simple apps and sites. From playing the latest spooky games to dressing up your home, the Halloween experience can be yours in a snap! Get Candy or Costumes Quick Need a costume or candy immediately? A few websites ship a wide selection of Halloween costumes quickly and cheaply. In my experience, the best is Amazon, particularly if you have its Prime service. Amazon even has its own Halloween...

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The 15 Most Useful Email Addresses That You Should Save in your Address Book

Most popular websites offer an email interface allowing you to post content on to that site from basic mobile phones that don't have apps or even a web browser.

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This story, The 15 Most Useful Email Addresses That You Should Save in your Address Book, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 30/10/2013 under Email, Internet

Invest A Minute A Day Into Making The World A Better Place

Economic crises, social inequality, unemployment, species extinction, scarcity of resources, climate change, and overpopulation, to just name a few. The challenges humans are facing are nothing short of overwhelming. You as an individual must feel powerless. And you’re not alone! The truth is, everyone is busy and struggles with the daily grind. Only few people have the mental or financial freedom to commit their lives to creating a brighter future. If you would like to contribute to a better world, you can do your part by supporting these people. The Internet is our ally in stopping big corporations from exploiting...

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Create Your Own Meme Online With These Free Tools

A meme is an idea, style, or action that spread person to person through Internet. A meme might be considered as a mimicked theme. The Internet meme can be a video, an image, website or any other theme. It will spread person to person through social media, websites, blogs, email, and news sources. They might relate different Internet cultures and sub cultures. The Internet memes are far much better than general memes as they can easily mark their footprints to social media that makes it analysable and traceable.

History of Meme

Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme in 1976 in his popular book- The Selfish Gene. He attempted to explain the cultural info spread by the means of word meme. Meme originally had come from a Greek world Mimema, which means something, imitated. The internet meme are the sub streams of general meme and is totally based on concept of specific culture and environment. In the year 2013, Dawkins characterized the internet meme as a meme that is consciously altered by humans and their creativity. He also added that the internet memes are just hijacking of the true ideas that had made the memes mutated and given a new direction to them.

Most of the memes are humor-centered these days because humor reaches to most of the people and appears very attractive. Some internet memes are about drams, shock-value, social commentary, deep content,super heros and intellectual absurdity. These memes are spreading among people in virus like fashion. Internet memes were first born on Reddit and 4chan. This made the developers to think about creating the meme tools for designing the memes to increase the graphics and make them more innovative. If you are eager to design the internet memes then here are meme makers for you. Let us have a look over the popular meme makers.

Best Tools to Create Meme's for Free Online:

Imgur

Probably one of the best tool I found to create memes online.It has an inbuilt tool called 'memegen'.This tool has great features using which you can select multiple text layers.Once you created a meme ,the image will be automatically uploaded to the imgur gallary .You can share the link on social networking sites or you can also embed the image.Even you can download the same on to your pc.

Rage comic builder

Rage was a popular comic series that featured characters like Me Gusta Guy and Forever Alone Guy. You must use this tool, if you prefer to work with Rage Guys. The tool is brought ti you by CheezBurger Network and Memebase.com.

QuickMeme

It is just like memegenerator.net. You can easily browse the most popular memes through home page in the featured list. You can also design random memes and you favorite memes. You just need to click ‘make a meme’ in order to browse different memes and then select the image and start designing your own caption.

Memegenerator.net

This is the most popular toll to design meme. You can also browse to the memes that are created by others and can look to different images, characters that are newest and popular. Just click to ‘generate an image’ and start creating your own meme.

DIYLOL

The popular meme maker stands for ‘Do It Yourself’ and ‘Laugh out Loud’. It will allow you to create star ratings ob meme and upload the image for meme and fill the captions. It also has an iPhone application for memes that will cost only $0.99 to be installed and you create the memes.

Troll.me

It is a great meme generator, which looks similar to zipmeme. You can also create account, login, memes and browse through variety of memes. You can put on just everything on your memes.

Meme Center

This is a particular type of meme generator, which allows you to create moving images (GIF). You must sign up a free account before starting this tool. Then you can start designing your meme by uploading the image to GIF maker or meme builder tool.

Meme Creator

This tool was started by memecreator.org, which moved to memecreator.com. Users can easily access both of the sites to use meme maker tools. There are simple option on the top of the menu- Home, Create, and Browse. You can select from the bunch of meme themes by using create option.

IB Memes

The service is given by Tumblr blog. You can select ‘create meme’ option from the menu top. It is a simple meme generator tool.



So if you are interested in designing the meme, choose any of the tools from above option. They will help you to design the best meme.If we missed out any do let us know in your comments.

Best budget smartphones under Rs 10,000

Phones under Rs. 10,000 offer some good features such as build quality, the ability to run a smartphone OS smoothly, access to a large number of apps, so on and so forth. On the other hand, to maintain the low price point, they compromise on some features such as the camera, display quality, built in storage and more. Here, we have shortlisted five products that will give you the best possible bang for your buck in the sub-Rs. 10,000 price range. There are feature phones on this list for those [...]

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Xolo launches the Q900 smartphone in India

Xolo has added the Q900 to its smartphone portfolio. The device is priced at Rs. 12,999 and is available to consumers in white. It has a 4.7-inch 720p display giving it a pixel density of 312ppi. We have seen the Nexus 4 showcase a 4.7-inch 720p display. Coming to the specifications, the Q900 runs on the MediaTek MT6589 chipset with the processor clocked at 1.2GHz. It also sports 1GB of RAM. It has 4GB built-in storage expandable up to 32GB via a microSD card. The Q900 is relatively slim measu [...]

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Hands on with the Asus Transformer Book T100 and the Asus FonePad 7

Asus today launched two devices – the Asus Transformer Book T100 priced at Rs. 34,099 and the Asus FonePad 7 priced at Rs. 17,499. Both the devices will be available to consumers in November. Asus FonePad 7 Starting off with the Asus FonePad 7, the device is a successor to the Asus FonePad we saw earlier this year. The tablet has a 7-inch IPS display with 1280x800 pixel resolution. It will be available in two colours – black and white. In its look and feel, the Asus FonePad is ver [...]

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BBM clocks 20 million users on Android and iOS, within a week

Within a week of the official availability of the BlackBerry Messenger on Android and iOS, the company says that that 20 million active users are on board, and using the cross platform BBM. Add the 60+ million users currently using BBM on BlackBerry smartphones, and the overall number now crosses 80 million. The BBM for iPhone and Android saw 10 million downloads in the first 24 hours of being available on the App Store and the Play Store, and similar momentum has carried through the rest of the [...]

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Custom Google+ URLs

Until now, vanity Google+ URLs were only for popular business, famous people, Google employees and some other special users. Now anyone can get a custom URL and replace the long Google+ URL with something more memorable. Unfortunately, you don't get to choose the URL: you can only pick from Google's preapproved URLs.



"If you meet the eligibility requirements, you can get a custom URL for your Google+ account or page. This means you can choose one of the custom URLs Google preassigns to your Google+ profile or page. Depending on the preassigned custom URL, you may also need to add a few letters or numbers to make it unique to you," explains Google.



For profiles, you need 10 or more followers, an account that is 30 days old or more and a profile photo. For pages, you need to link your page with your site or use Google+ Local and verify your local business.



Pages get Google+ URLs that are based on the site's URL. I got google.com/+GooglesystemBlogspot, but I haven't enabled it. Maybe Google will provide more options in the future.

"Once you meet the eligibility criteria, just visit your profile or page to begin the claiming process. If you don't see the option yet, don't worry: we're expanding availability throughout the week, and you'll see the in-product notice as soon as your custom URL is ready," informs Google's Otavio Silva.



{ Thanks, Tolis Nubis. }

300 Million Active Google+ Users

Google+ continues to grow and the growth rate is impressive, according to Google's stats. Back in December, Google announced that "235 million [people] are active across Google (+1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search), and 135 million are active in just the stream." Now Google says that 540 million people are active across Google+ each month and 300 million people are active in the Google+ stream.



The number of Google+ users doubled in less than a year. Even if you use the conservative stream data and conclude that Google+ only has 300 million active users, that's still a lot. No other social network had so many users in 2 years and a half. Sure, Facebook has more than one billion active users, but the service got to 100 million users in 4 years.



Google has more than 1 billion users, so that's the upper boundary for Google+. It's unlikely that all the Google users will join Google+ and actively use it, but most of them will. Google+ is integrated with so many Google services and the YouTube integration will bring a lot more Google+ users. Google+ is now at the heart of Google's photo service, messaging service, local search and it will soon power core features of the most popular video sharing service.

Auto Awesome Action, Eraser and Movie

Auto Awesome is a collection of features that create new images which use the photos you upload: panoramas, animations, HDR, better group photos. They're created automatically and Google now even sends notifications when they're ready.



There are 3 new Auto Awesome features: 2 of them are only for photos (action, eraser) and the third one is for both photos and videos.



Action is great for action photos. "Take a series of photos of someone moving (dancing, running, jumping) and Auto Awesome will merge them together into one action shot where you can see the full range of movements in a single image, capturing the movement in one captivating still."



Google combines these 6 photos:

and creates this awesome visual effect:

Eraser is useful when you want to remove people from photos. "If you take a sequence of 3 or more photos in front of a structure or landmark with movement in the background, Eraser will give you a photo with all the moving objects removed. It's helpful for those situations when you're trying to get a great shot of a landmark or other crowded place, but want to avoid including all of the people in the background of your photo."



These photos aren't great:

but they can be combined to get this:

Auto Awesome Movie is a bit like HTC Zoe, but it's a lot more advanced. In fact, it's the only Auto Awesome feature that lets you customize the result and the only feature you can trigger manually. Google creates a video that combines some of the videos and photos you uploaded, processes the videos, adds image stabilization and picks some appropriate music. "You can create Auto Awesome movies from the Google Photos app for Android, which are short films created automatically by editing together the videos and photos you capture around an experience. Choose the photos and videos you wish to make into an Auto Awesome movie, and let Google do the rest. You can change the theme, style, background music, or even remove, shorten, or re-order scenes. After your movie is created, you can choose to share or save it. Auto Awesome movies are currently only available for some devices running Android 4.3 and up, including the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and HTC One."

Auto Awesome shows that advanced features don't need complicated interfaces. It also shows the power of the cloud: Google+ Photos finds your best photos, enhances your photos, it lets you search your photos and it even creates new ones. All of this without buying expensive photo editors and learning how to use them.

Google+ Photo Search Detects More Than 1,000 Objects

Back in May, Google announced an impressive search feature that allows to find photos even if they don't include any useful metadata. "To make computers do the hard work for you, we've also begun using computer vision and machine learning to help recognize more general concepts in your photos such as sunsets, food and flowers." Here are more details: "This is powered by computer vision and machine learning technology, which uses the visual content of an image to generate searchable tags for photos combined with other sources like text tags and EXIF metadata to enable search across thousands of concepts like a flower, food, car, jet ski, or turtle."



Now Google announced that it detects more than 1,000 objects. It may not seem like a lot, but it's extremely difficult to detect objects algorithmically and do this with enough precision. Distinguishing between so many objects makes this task even more difficult. Google can now detect labradors and snowmen, tulips and umbrellas, laptops and shoes.

Google's announcement is strange because a Google post from June mentioned that the classifier already detected 1,100 classes of objects:

We came up with a set of about 2000 visual classes based on the most popular labels on Google+ Photos and which also seemed to have a visual component, that a human could recognize visually. In contrast, the ImageNet competition has 1000 classes. As in ImageNet, the classes were not text strings, but are entities, in our case we use Freebase entities which form the basis of the Knowledge Graph used in Google search. An entity is a way to uniquely identify something in a language-independent way. In English when we encounter the word 'jaguar', it is hard to determine if it represents the animal or the car manufacturer. Entities assign a unique ID to each, removing that ambiguity, in this case '/m/0449p' for the former and '/m/012x34' for the latter. In order to train better classifiers we used more training images per class than ImageNet, 5000 versus 1000. Since we wanted to provide only high precision labels, we also refined the classes from our initial set of 2000 to the most precise 1100 classes for our launch.

I'm not sure if there's some improvement I'm missing. It's likely that the search results are better, but the number of objects has not increased.

Your Best Story Ideas For MakeUseOf [We Ask You Results]

MakeUseOf means a lot to us – and, it seems, to you too. We all love what we do, which is creating articles for you all to make use of in some way. But it can be tough finding subjects that will really resonate with the readership in a big way. So, for last week’s We Ask You, we handed the baton of responsibility over to you, asking you all to conjure up the titles and descriptions of stories you would like to see on MakeUseOf. As always, you didn’t let us down, and those who took part may spot...

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3 Desktop Tools To Make Your Experience As A Twitch.TV Viewer Easier

Do you want to get more out of your favorite Twitch streams? There’s no denying that Twitch.TV is the place to go on the internet when it comes to entertaining yourself with live streams for speed runs, gaming marathons, LAN parties, huge competitive events, and just casual observing and chatting. Maybe every now and then you’re just feeling a little bored and nostalgic, and you want to watch someone play a bit of Mario Kart. Twitch.TV has you covered for everything, even those games that you’d never expect. While Twitch does blow its competitors out of the water, you or...

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Mozilla Location Services Makes Geolocation Data Public And Gamifies Collection

Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, has launched an experimental pilot project called Mozilla Location Services, which aims to freely provide geolocation data of publicly observable cell towers and Wi-Fi access points. And it’s also come out with an app to make collecting this data into a social game. While there are already commercial players who provide such geolocation data, Mozilla wants to fill the gap of a large public service for this information. The company says that by mapping this data, devices without GPS or those with weaker GPS chips will still be able to find their approximate current position...

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A Little Bit Of Me: 4 Reasons Why You Should Set Up Google Authorship

What would you say if you spent a year writing a novel, only to have someone come along, copy down that entire novel and then republish it as though it’s their own? Not many writers would be very happy about that! Unfortunately, the last decade of Internet growth has been a wild west of writing and publishing. For skilled writers, the environment has been even more difficult. More often than not, unscrupulous website owners would search the Internet for well-written content, copy that content, and then republish it on their own website. Content thieves have been the scourge of the...

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A Little Bit Of Me: 4 Reasons Why You Should Set Up Google Authorship

What would you say if you spent a year writing a novel, only to have someone come along, copy down that entire novel and then republish it as though it’s their own? Not many writers would be very happy about that! Unfortunately, the last decade of Internet growth has been a wild west of writing and publishing. For skilled writers, the environment has been even more difficult. More often than not, unscrupulous website owners would search the Internet for well-written content, copy that content, and then republish it on their own website. Content thieves have been the scourge of the...

Read the full article: A Little Bit Of Me: 4 Reasons Why You Should Set Up Google Authorship

Automatically Change Start Screen Background Color In Windows 8.1

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A couple of weeks ago, we introduced you to a new tool called ColorSync that lets you automatically set Start screen background color as window border and taskbar color in Windows 8.1. The good news is that the developer of this tool has updated the tool and it now can now automatically set the window […]

Now cruise River Thames with Google Streetview

Google Street View will now showcase 360 degrees waterside view of the Thames river. River Thames is the first river to be mapped in Google street view across Europe and UK. Google UK attached its Trekker camera to a Port of London Authority boat which cruised 30 miles of the waterway snapping a picture every 2.5 seconds. The news comes after the Port of London Authority (PLA) approached Google to map the iconic river to offer a new perspective of it to Internet users worldwide. Ed Parsons, Ge [...]

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Tata Sky slashes price of its HD set top box to Rs. 2,000

Tata Sky has announced slashing price of its HD set top box from Rs. 3,100 to Rs. 2,000 – bringing the range closer to the standard definition set top box. "Tata Sky has been a strong believer in the potential of the HD segment in India and has played a pioneering role in growing it. Equating the price of the HD box to an SD box will further accelerate the adoption of HD service,” says Tata Sky, Chief Commercial Officer Vikram Mehra said in a statement. The DTH service prov [...]

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Samsung rules the smartphone market with quarterly shipments of 88 million units

According to a recent report, Samsung Electronics has posted a record 88.4 million smartphone shipments in Q3 2013 increasing the company's market share to more than 35 percent worldwide. Research firm Strategy Analytics stated that Samsung's smartphone shipments in the July-September period surged 55 percent compared to last year. It's market share has increased to 35.2 percent from 32.9 percent in the third quarter of 2012. Apple has reported a third consecutive quarterly decline in earnings [...]

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Sony introduces VPL-VW500ES 4K projector for Rs. 7,99,000

Sony has launched a new 4K home cinema projectors, called the VPL-VW500ES. The projector comes with 4K SXRD panels, which the company claims are capable of delivering DCI based 4096 x 2160 resolution. The project comes with HDMI 2.0 standard. The VPL-VW500ES also comes with a 4K up-scaling algorithm that has been designed for “Mastered in 4K” Blu-ray discs from Sony Pictures Entertainment. The projector features 1,700 ANSI-lumen brightness, 200,000:1 contrast ratio and TRILUMINOS d [...]

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Instagram to arrive on Windows Phone soon

Instagram is one of the most anticipated apps on Windows Phone platform. If Nokia's new teaser image is to believed, the wait for Instagram app on WP is going to be over pretty soon. Nokia has tweeted an image of two Lumia 1020 smartphones, with one of them running Instagram for Windows Phone. Nokia, however, hasn't provided any date of availability for the app, but just says it's “coming soon”. At the company's recent Nokia World event, it confirmed some major apps including the l [...]

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Homeworld: Revisiting the classics

Homeworld tells possibly the greatest story ever told in any game. Yes we know many would give that honour to something like Bioshock but before rushing to the comments to in a rage fit, hear us out. There are things other than the story arc itself that added to the whole experience with Homeworld. The Homeworld franchise not only told a beautiful playable story complete with spectacular visuals, artistic cut-scenes and immersive music, it also introduced players for the first time ever to a tr [...]

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Samsung Galaxy S4 Active mini appears on Benchmark site

Samsung is reportedly working on a mini version of the Galaxy S4, which ended up being quite a success when launched this summer. Identified by its model number GT-I8580, the Active mini will have specifications smaller than its counterpart - the Galaxy S4 mini. Its not as mini as it sounds as it will come with 4.65-inch screen. According to GFXBench benchmark data, the Active mini (GT-I8580) will be powered by a dual-core QualComm Snapdragon processor cloocking at 1.2 GHz. The screen wil [...]

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Spice Android Smart Flo Ivory 2 and Flo Edge budget smartphones available online

Two new Spice smartphones- Spice Smart Flo Ivory 2 and Smart Flo Edge - are now available on Saholic.com for Rs 4,099 and Rs. 3,099 respectively. The smartphones feature Android OS, dual-core processor and dual-sim connectivity. The Spice Smart Flo Ivory 2 (Mi-423) has a 4-inch TFT LCD display with 320x480 pixels resolution. It has a 1GHz dual-core processor and runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The smartphone comes with 256MB of RAM and 512MB of inbuilt storage, expandable via microSD card up to 32 [...]

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Snapdeal launches 'price search on SMS' service

Online marketplace Snapdeal has introduced a new “Price Search on SMS” service. The new initiative allows users in India to search information about any product on Snapdeal before buying them. To avail this service, users need to send a SMS (Standard SMS charges apply) with the name of product they want information about to 92789-92789 and Snapdeal would send them the top results along with their prices and a link for instant purchase. “Furthering Snapdeal’s vision of p [...]

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Indian youth prefers to watch movies, TV serials on mobile phones: Vuclip survey

Vuclip, mobile video and media company, has released its third quarter 2013 Global Video Insights covering over 50,000 people globally, including approximately 8,000 from India. The survey reveals a high consumer appetite for watching full-length movies and television shows on their mobile phones even in areas lacking fast network speeds. According to the survey, 62% of Indian respondents prefer to view movies or TV serials instead of short movie clips on their phones. At 79%, this preference f [...]

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Nokia Lumia 929 hands-on video leaks; reveals 5-inch 1080p display, 20MP camera

Finnish telecom giants Nokia is currently preparing to unveil its second aluminum Windows Phone - Lumia 929, designed to be a substitute for the Lumia 928 in the Verizon wireless lineup. A teaser video has appeared that shows the device in black, sporting a 5-inch 1080p display and support for the three new columns of Live Tiles. There is a high probability of the device being launched in an aluminum frame with black and silver colour variants available in the initial stage. The smartphone will [...]

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Users report system freeze issues with latest MacBook Pro Retina models

Quite a few of those who have purchased the recently launched MacBook Pro Retina versions are reporting system freeze and other issues with their systems. While the issues seem to be largely affecting the Haswell powered Retina MacBooks, some users with the 2012 version are also chipping in with their anguish and frustration. There is now a 30 page long thread on Apple’s Support Communities. Users are reporting system freeze issues, which may include the entire system not responding, or c [...]

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Change Firefox New Tab Page Background Using New Tab Tools Extension

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While more and more PC users are using Google Chrome as their default web browser these days, a significant number of users still prefer Mozilla Firefox over other browsers for a couple of well-known reasons. By default, Mozilla Firefox offers limited number of options to customize the New Tab page that appears when you open […]

Get Into The Halloween Spirit With The Best Horror Films Ever Made

Looking for a terrifying horror film to watch this Halloween? Thanks to sites that aggregate movie reviews, we now can get the scariest ever made, without tons of searching. Sites such as Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and Reddit keep vast databases of compiled film reviews. These sites then handily synthesize lists containing the top genre films of all time. To get the absolute scariest films, though, you need to filter out other genres. In this article I’ve already filtered out other search results. The movies listed are, according to their respective sites, the best reviewed horror films ever made. Metacritic Metacritic...

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Clip, Save, And Tag Your Way To A New Language With Phraseum

The Web is the new language tutor you should pay attention to. In most cases, it does not charge a dime. You only need to charge yourself up so you can supplement your language learning routines with the many online aids that are at your disposal. Phraseum is a simple but handy browser tool that turns your day-to-day browsing into a language learning class. But only if you are thinking of learning something new. We can harp on the fact that learning a new language improves the way our brain works; we can dwell on its benefits while travelling; we...

Read the full article: Clip, Save, And Tag Your Way To A New Language With Phraseum

Xbox-style game controller for iPhone leaks

Today @eveleaks revealed that Moga is working on a gamepad for iPhone, one that can charge while you play, dubbed as the 'Moga Ace Power'. The gamepad includes an 1800mAh battery pack alongside a set that looks pretty close to Xbox 360 style controls. All you need to do is to simply pull two halves of your controller apart wide enough to fit your device. There is also a video on YouTube that confirms the controller's existence, and establishes its compatible devices, however the video has been [...]

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Samsung Galaxy Golden with dual 3.7-inch displays launched at Rs. 51,900

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd has introduced its Galaxy Golden smartphone in India. Priced at Rs. 51,900, the smartphone features two 3.7-inch slim Super AMOLED screens. While the outer screen enables users to make and receive calls, flipping the phone open brings up the inner screen that has a 3x4 keypad. The Samsung Galaxy Golden is powered by a 1.7GHz dual-core processor with 1.5GB of RAM. It runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and comes with 8MP front and 1.9MP front camera. The smartphone comes wi [...]

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PlayStation Plus monthly subscription introduced for Rs. 410

With the gaining popularity of the PlayStation Store subscription among Indian gamers, a recent subscription has been introduced for Rs.410 a month. PlayStation Plus is already available in in two basic offers, Rs. 2,950 for an annual subscription and Rs. 885 for a subscription for 3 months. The subscription has also been extended to the PS4. According to Atindriya Bose, Country Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE), “PlayStation Plus membership entitles gamers to a broad r [...]

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Zen Ultrafone Amaze 701 FHD with 5-inch full HD display launched at Rs. 17,999

Zen Mobile has introduced a new Android smartphone, called the Amaze 701 FHD. Priced at Rs. 17,999, the Zen Ultrafone Amaze 701 FHD runs Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean and is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core processor along with 1GB of RAM. The Zen Ultrafone Amaze 701 FHD comes with a 5-inch full HD display, featuring Corning Gorilla Glass 2. The smartphone supports dual-SIM (GSM+GSM). It has 13MP rear camera and 8MP front-facing camera, 16GB of inbuilt storage with 64GB microSD card slot and comes wit [...]

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Vodafone announces new affordable international roaming plans

Vodafone India has announced new and affordable international roaming packs for its postpaid and prepaid customers travelling abroad. Vodafone's new packs cover 53 countries including UK, USA, UAE, Thailand and Singapore. The operator says new international roaming packs give up to 95 percent discount on data and up to 78 percent discount on outgoing local and international calls as compared with prevailing rates. The international roaming packs are available for a rental of Rs. 599 and Rs. 149 [...]

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Pinterest partners with Getty Images to Pin data

Pinterest has announced a partnership with Getty images which holds digital rights to more than 80 million still images, illustrations and over 50,000 hours of stock film footage. Pinterest will pay Getty a fee in exchange for metadata. The financial details about the deal were not disclosed, however the companies stated that the Metadata will start getting added in the coming months. According to the deal, Pinterest will draw on Getty’s massive amount of image data to do reverse image se [...]

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Google enables Snapseed photo editing tool for ARM-based Chrome OS machines

Google+ users can now access the new Snapseed-powered photo editing features introduced in September this year. Earlier, ARM-based Chrome OS machines could not use the Snapseed-powered tools, considered a must-have app for mobile photographers. They provide advanced image editing functions above and beyond the basic editing tools available to users. Brian Matiash, a community manager for Google+ Photos, announced the additional support over on Google’s photo-friendly social network, calli [...]

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GTA 5 bags 'Game of the Year' at this year's Golden Joystick Awards

Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 5 has won the 'Game of the Year' at this year's 'Golden Joystick' awards, held at an event in central London. Unveiled barely a month back, GTA 5 has become the fast selling game ever, generating a revenue of around $1 billion in just three days. GTA 5 recently got caught up in a controversy, as human right activists have expressed contempt towards the latest installment, courtesy of a graphical torture scene. “Rockstar North has crossed a line by effectively [...]

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Edward Kenway to be present at midnight launch of Assassin's Creed 4 in India

Edward Kenway, the new assassin in Ubisoft's upcoming title Assassins Creed4: Black Flag, will be present for the midnight launch event of the title at Oberoi Mall, Mumbai on October 28. Edward Kenway is the main protagonist in Black Flag, father of Haytham Kenway and grandfather of Conor from Assassin's Creed 3. Edward is known as a Privateer, Assassin and occasional pirate. The game is set in the Caribbean, on multiple islands including Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas. Black Flag is one of the [...]

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Nexus 5 images leak yet again

Yet another leaked images of LG Nexus 5 have appeared on the web before its official announcement, thanks to @eveleaks. Other than a different wallpaper, the image is exactly the same as the leaked image that appeared last week, when it appeared on the Google Play Store. Coming from the same source, there is an image of the white colour variant of the Nexus 5. According to a leaked service manual, the document claims that the smartphone will have a 4.95-inch IPS display with a 1920x1080 pixel [...]

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Micromax to enter the European markets soon

After having gained a significant share in the Indian mobile phone market, home-grown mobile phone maker Micromax has now set its sights on the European markets. According to reports, Micromax will be entering Russia and Romania markets by the end of this year - with an objective to become a global brand. Reports come shortly after the company signed Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman as its brand ambassador. “Our end goal is to go global as an Indian hardware brand. I do not want to be seen as [...]

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Airtel launches new SD Set-Top box with recording feature at Rs. 2,000

Airtel has launched a new set-top box that features recording by plugging in an external storage device such as a pen drive. Users can schedule the recording even via Internet or their smartphones. The set top box has been priced at Rs. 2,000 in India. According to Airtel, users can view the recorded programs with a DVD like control of TV viewing that has features such as pause, slow-motion viewing, rewind and fast-forward. The company added customers can record on an external storage device of [...]

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LG officially unveils G Flex with curved OLED display

LG has officially unveiled the G Flex smartphone. The biggest feature of the device is the curved glass display. The smartphone will be available starting next month in South Korea. There is no information on an international release date or price. Coming to the specifications of the smartphone, the OLED screen is curved and 6-inches in size. It has a 720p resolution and its thickness measures between 7.9 and 8.7mm. The smartphone weighs 177 grams. Under the hood, a 2.26GHz quad-core Snapdragon [...]

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Google search now reaches users from 700 percent more locations: Study

Google Search has increased its reach to more than 1400 locations globally this year, an increase of more than 700 percent since last year. According to researchers, Google is re-purposing existing infrastructure to change the physical way that Google processes web searches. A technical report on the study will be presented at the SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference in Spain on October 24. The researchers found that from October 2012 to July 2013, the number of locations utilising Google's [...]

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Xolo LT900 smartphone with 4G-LTE support to launch in India next month: Reports

Information circulating the Internet suggests that Indian smartphone maker Xolo will launch a 4G LTE capable smartphone in India. The smartphone christened as the LT900 is expected to be unveiled in the first week of November. There is no information available on the price of the smartphone. In terms of its specification’s, the LTE capable Xolo LT900 will house a dual-LED flash at the back along with an 8MP BSI camera. The smartphone will have a 4.3-inch HD IPS OGS display with a pixel de [...]

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BBM for Android clocks 10 million downloads; no more waiting list

BlackBerry Messenger for Android shows no signs of slowing down, with the application crossing 10 million downloads on Android alone, worldwide. However, not everyone who downloaded BBM on their Android or iOS devices could sign in immediately, because BlackBerry had deployed the waiting list method for a majority of users to ensure there was no repeat of the server load issues that the first release attempt faced. However, that test of patience has now been removed as well, with anyone download [...]

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Yahoo Image Search's Fullscreen Slideshow

One of the features I've always wanted to see in Google Image Search is slideshows. Google lets you quickly go to the next image result using the right arrow shortcut, but a slideshow button would make things even easier. Picasa Web search used to have this feature. I know that webmasters will say that this wastes their bandwidth, so let's get past this.



It turns out that Yahoo already has this feature. Yahoo's search results are powered by Microsoft Bing, but Yahoo has its own UI and it does a pretty good job. Yahoo uses the same infinite scrolling interface (Google it borrowed from Bing), but things look different once you click a search result. Images occupy the entire page and you can click the small "play" button at the bottom of the page to start a slideshow. There are some cool zoom effects for big images and, if you use a browser that supports the HTML5 fullscreen API (Chrome/Firefox for desktop and Android, Safari for desktop), you can click the "view fullscreen" button at the top of the page and only see the images. You may want to restrict the results to large images.

Yahoo has a similar interface for the mobile search engine and it looks more like the old Google Image Search for mobile. The new Google interface has some benefits if you don't want to see all the results sequentially, but the old UI placed more emphasis on the images. The nice thing is that Yahoo has the slideshow button in the mobile interface, as well.

Almost A Year Later: Are You Using Twitter’s Vine? [MakeUseOf Poll]

Last week we asked you if you’re using a third-party firewall on your computer. In the day and age of built-in firewalls, you’d think we’d get a clear-cut answer. Not so. Out of 427 votes in total, 2% use a third-party firewall but don’t think it’s actually necessary, 10% don’t use a firewall but think they probably should, 40% don’t use a third-party firewall, and 48% of the voters use a third-party firewall on their computer. Full results and this week’s poll after the jump. Don’t forget to check out last week’s best comment by Keefe K, who gives a...

Read the full article: Almost A Year Later: Are You Using Twitter’s Vine? [MakeUseOf Poll]

Google WiFi Passport

Google found a new way to get people online: a service called WiFi Passport that's currently tested in Jakarta (Indonesia) and allows people to connect to Wi-Fi hotspots for free or at affordable rates.



"WiFi Passport powered by Google is a fast, easy and affordable way to get online when you're out and about in Jakarta. To use it, just get a voucher, sign into your Google account, enter the code then head to the nearest participating hotspot. It's exclusively available for Android users and works across official Android smartphones and tablets running version 2.2 (Froyo) and above."

"After connecting, you'll be online for the next 24 hours so long as you're in a hotspot. You can use up to 3GB of video, music, photos and other content in a single day – or 7GB over seven days and 10GB over 30 days. With hotspots around the city, you can connect with buddies, watch the big matches, or stay in touch with the office all day long."

There's a free voucher that lets you use WiFi passport for 10 days and there are vouchers that cost $1.82 and $4.55 for 20 and 50 days of use. Here's the Android app that lets you add Wi-Fi time.



{ Thanks, Florian K. }

YouTube Drops Support for 1080p Streams in the Regular HTML5 Player

I've mentioned in the previous post about Media Source Extensions and YouTube's HTML5 player. For now, only Chrome, Opera and IE11 for Windows 8 support Media Source Extensions. If you're using Firefox, Safari or an old version of IE, you're out of luck.



Why is this important? YouTube switched to adaptive streams in the Flash player and now does the same thing for the HTML5 player, but this requires Media Source Extensions. The adaptive DASH player uses separate chunked streams for audio and video, so that YouTube can switch the stream to a lower or higher bit rate, depending on the network bandwidth.



A few days ago, YouTube removed the non-DASH streams for 480p and 1080p. This means that you'll no longer be able to watch 1080p videos in YouTube's HTML5 player if you use Firefox or Safari. Here's an example of video that includes the 480p and 1080p options in the Flash player and the DASH HTML5 player, but not the regular HTML5 player.



Firefox screenshot:

Chrome screenshot:

This change affects desktop browsers and mobile browsers, third-party mobile YouTube players, as well as the apps and extensions that download YouTube videos and break YouTube's terms of use. You're not affected if you use the Flash player, the HTML5 player in Chrome, Opera and IE11 or YouTube's mobile apps.