30 October 2013

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



creepy-makeup.jpg

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



technocover

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



halloween-pumpkin

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.





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



world-care

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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