11 December 2013

10 Festive Wallpapers To Prepare Your Desktop For The Holidays



christmas-wallpapers.jpg

Did you notice that Christmas is coming? If you venture out of the house once in a while, you’ve probably noticed the decorations slowly going up. But what about your home? With Christmas being almost 3 weeks away, chances are you haven’t started decorating, yet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get into the holiday spirit right now. Unlike decorating your house, decorating your computer only takes seconds, and is a great way to put yourself in the right mood for the holidays. As expected, there are tons of sources for Christmas wallpapers out there, but if you’re too busy...


Read the full article: 10 Festive Wallpapers To Prepare Your Desktop For The Holidays



10 Festive Wallpapers To Prepare Your Desktop For The Holidays



christmas-wallpapers.jpg

Did you notice that Christmas is coming? If you venture out of the house once in a while, you’ve probably noticed the decorations slowly going up. But what about your home? With Christmas being almost 3 weeks away, chances are you haven’t started decorating, yet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get into the holiday spirit right now. Unlike decorating your house, decorating your computer only takes seconds, and is a great way to put yourself in the right mood for the holidays. As expected, there are tons of sources for Christmas wallpapers out there, but if you’re too busy...


Read the full article: 10 Festive Wallpapers To Prepare Your Desktop For The Holidays



Technophilia 92 Live From MakeUseOf



technocover-live

This week we talk with Lou Hong from BitTorrent Inc, the company behind BitTorrent Sync and uTorrent. We’ll ask about direct file syncing and managing your reputation when your name is shorthand for piracy in the broader culture. Also: the army leaked chat logs between Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. Don’t they respect the right to secrecy? And we’ll let you know the easy-to-remember nuclear launch codes from past decades, just in case you’re travelling through time this weekend. This week’s episode is brought to you by BitDefender Antivirus for Mac. Think Macs don’t catch viruses? Think again! Although Macs...


Read the full article: Technophilia 92 Live From MakeUseOf



Make Beautiful Christmas Cards In 5 Minutes With Canva



canva-christmas-cards

Christmas is coming, and as the Yuletide season nears, you’ll be faced with the unfortunate reality of sending Christmas cards. If you want to send personalized cards that actually look good, you’ll either have to fork out a small fortune, or compromise on quality by sending Aunt Mabel a flimsy piece of A4 littered with enough word art, it could have been made with Microsoft Publisher 98. But what if there was another way? Remember Canva? That’s the kick-ass startup from the Antipodes which makes it easy for non-design minded people like myself to make vaguely passable graphics? The one...


Read the full article: Make Beautiful Christmas Cards In 5 Minutes With Canva



9 New Languages in Google Translate



Google Translate supports 9 new languages: Hausa (Nigeria, 35 million speakers), Igbo (Nigeria, 25 million speakers), Yoruba (Nigeria, 28 million speakers), Somali (Somalia, 17 million speakers), Zulu (South Africa, 10 million speakers), Mongolian (Mongolia, China, 6 million speakers), Nepali (Nepal, India, Bhutan 17 million speakers), Punjabi (India, Pakistan, 100 million speakers), Maori (New Zealand, 160,000 speakers). Google Translate now supports 80 languages and that's impressive.






According to Ethnologue, there are 80 languages with more than 10 million native speakers, 200 languages with at least 3 million speakers and 1,300 languages with at least 100,000 speakers. Google Translate supports all the languages with more than 100 million native speakers, 13 of the 16 languages that have between 50 and 100 million speakers, 4 of the 13 languages that have between 30 and 50 million speakers and 15 of the 47 languages that have between 10 and 30 million speakers.





Share Files Up To A Whopping 30GB With Anyone Through Filemail



filemail-feat

One of the biggest limitations of email is sending files. Almost every email provider imposes limits on the size of files that can be sent through their service, which is fine for sending documents and spreadsheets, but when you need to send something really large, that’s when issues arise. Enter Filemail, an awesome service that allows you to send massive files up to 30 gigabytes on a free account (with no size restriction on a premium account) to anyone. Getting Started You can use Filemail in a number of ways. First, you can just jump on the site, enter the...


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Create Portable Windows 7 USB Using VHD W7 Compact



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Windows To Go is a fantastic feature introduced with Windows 8 operating system to enable users install and carry Windows 8 on a USB drive. Officially available in Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise edition, it requires a minimum of 32GB mass storage device such as USB flash drive in order to prepare your Windows To Go drive. […]

5 Windows 8 Apps To Get You Into The Mood For Christmas



muo-w8-xmas-apps

Christmas is upon us once again, but this time it’s slightly different: there are Windows 8 apps that you can use to enhance and enjoy the seasonal cheer and get you in the mood for the visit from “the fat man.” If you’re looking for music, entertainment, a tradition made digital or help preparing food for the biggest feast in the Christian calendar, the apps listed here – easily installed from the Windows 8 Store – are what you’re looking for. Advent Calendar Fun For adults, planning for Christmas starts early. Children, too, might be planning their Christmas list in...


Read the full article: 5 Windows 8 Apps To Get You Into The Mood For Christmas



How to Resize Windows on your Mac to Specific Sizes



One of my favorite Windows utility happens to be Sizer, a tiny app that can resize any window on the desktop to an exact size. For instance, when I am recording screencasts for the YouTube channel, I use the 1280×720 (HD) or 1920×1080 (1080p) preset to automatically resize the target window before hitting the Record button.


Surprisingly, there’s no Sizer like app available for the Mac platform.


Resize any window to a specified size with Apple Script

Resize any window to a specified size with Apple Script



I did find some paid alternatives in the Mac App store – Mercury Mover, TileWindows and Divvy to name a few – that do allow you to reposition and resize windows on the Mac with keyboard shortcuts but these apps are more targeted at power users for working efficiently with multiple windows while Sizer is purely a resizing utility.


Resize Windows with Apple Script


If you are looking for something more simple, without the extra bells and whistles, a little AppleScript should do the trick.


Just open the AppleScript editor and copy-paste the script below. You can change the app name (theApp) from “Google Chrome” to iTunes or any other window that you wish to resize. The script resizes the window to 1920×1080 and moves it to the center. You can set a different default height and width through the appHeight and appWidth variables.


Now you can press Cmd + R to run the script. Alternatively, you may export the script as an application (.app) and run it anytime with a double-click.


There are some Safari (Resize Me) and Chrome extensions as well that will you resize the windows to any specified size on your Mac but they will obviously work with the browser window only.



(*

This Apple script will resize any program window to an exact size and the window is then moved to the center of your screen.
Specify the program name, height and width below and run the script.

Written by Amit Agarwal on December 10, 2013

*)

set theApp to "Google Chrome"
set appHeight to 1080
set appWidth to 1920

tell application "Finder"
set screenResolution to bounds of window of desktop
end tell

set screenWidth to item 3 of screenResolution
set screenHeight to item 4 of screenResolution

tell application theApp
activate
reopen
set yAxis to (screenHeight - appHeight) / 2 as integer
set xAxis to (screenWidth - appWidth) / 2 as integer
set the bounds of the first window to {xAxis, yAxis, appWidth + xAxis, appHeight + yAxis}
end tell




This story, How to Resize Windows on your Mac to Specific Sizes, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/12/2013 under Mac, Software

Google Settings Page for Phone Numbers



Google's account settings page has an updated section for phone numbers that groups some features that were already available elsewhere. If you click "edit" next to "phone numbers", Google will show the phone numbers associated with your account.



You'll probably see a phone number associated with Hangouts. You can enable or disable this setting: "Help people who have your phone number find and connect with you on Google services, like Hangouts and caller ID by Google." You can edit the phone number, change the way it's verified or remove the number.



There's also a phone number that's used for account recovery. Google encourages users to enable this feature, but it's optional. For now, the account recovery page is not integrated with the account settings page, so it looks different and has a long URL. "We'll use your phone to do things like challenge hijackers or send you a text message to help you access your account if you forget your password," informs Google.









The phone number management page was added back in May, but now it's more functional.



{ Thanks, Herin. }