Burned: Why Trusting Shopping Reviews On FocalPrice.com Is a Bad Idea

“Absolutely terrible,” I wrote, proceeding to explain exactly what was wrong with the LED light I bought from FocalPrice.com and protect future buyers against making the same mistake. Only the review was never published: When I signed back on a couple of days later to check on it, I discovered it had been inexplicably marked as Rejected: The Story I first found out about FocalPrice after I wrote about 3 Interesting Shopping Websites Offering Free International Shipping. One of the sites I mentioned was DealExtreme, and FocalPrice was mentioned in the comments as an alternative. While the review’s title may...

Read the full article: Burned: Why Trusting Shopping Reviews On FocalPrice.com Is a Bad Idea

What Is the Best Podcast Manager For Windows?

The tech world is obsessed with mobile apps and web-based software, but the reality is that many people — if not most people! — still use Windows most of the time. If you want to listen to podcasts while at your Windows PC, the best option is still a Windows desktop application that will play them for you. With these programs, you can listen to the MakeUseOf podcast and all your other favorite podcasts. As with many things in life, there’s no one best podcast manager for everyone. If you have an iPod you want to sync your podcasts to,...

Read the full article: What Is the Best Podcast Manager For Windows?

7 Photography Websites Every Shutterbug Should Keep A Click Away

Whether you’re looking for inspiration, want to see what other photographers are up to, see the latest gadgets and toys, read reviews, or even feature your own work, there are a variety of sites that every photographer should follow to do just those things. There is no better way to improve your photography technique than by keeping up with the latest — whether on the amateur or professional level — on sites that are run by people who are just as passionate about photography as you are. These seven sites fit that description and are a surefire way to keep...

Read the full article: 7 Photography Websites Every Shutterbug Should Keep A Click Away

Panoramic Virtual Tour Of CERN Comes To Google Street View

The Large Hadron Collider is the centerpiece of CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). It is the world’s largest laboratory for studying particle physics. Now, thanks to Google Street View, you won’t have to travel to Geneva to understand how it is helping to develop our understanding of the universe we live in. The Google Maps and the Google Street View project team have created a panoramic virtual tour of the CERN site and some of the behind the scene experiments. Start your CERN virtual tour. The CERN home webpage had this to say about the process, which must...

Read the full article: Panoramic Virtual Tour Of CERN Comes To Google Street View

Google Mobile Image Search Regression

Google has a great mobile interface for image search. It was launched in 2010 and improved multiple times since then. You can use swipes to go to the next image result or to the previous one. It looks like Google changed the image search UI for smartphones and tablets and now sends you to a landing page that shows the image and loads the corresponding page in the background. Intuitive gestures are gone and now you have to use the back button.

This seems to be limited to iPhones and iPads running iOS 7, so it's probably a bug. A lot of people complain about this in the Google Search Forum.



There are many reasons why the new interface is strange: loading the associated page uses more bandwidth and that's not a good idea for mobile devices, it's more difficult to check multiple search results, thumbnails are smaller and even the desktop interface shows a bigger image instead of sending users to a new page.

How To Select Specific Wallpapers In A Theme To Use As Desktop Background In Windows 7/8.1

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



Desktop slideshow, a feature first introduced with Windows 7 (available in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 as well), is a handy feature designed to automatically change the desktop background at pre-defined time intervals. Microsoft has been releasing new themes almost every week ever since the release of Windows 7 and one can download hundreds of […]

4 Great Windows 8 Apps For Entertaining Little Kids

Bored kids are a nightmare, and that’s why tablets were invented. Weren’t they? Much as you may love your tablet, if there are kids around you know sometimes your tablet is going to wind up in their hands. It might be that you want to keep them entertained while you wait somewhere, or maybe the kids just really love to play with it. Either way, you’re going to want to have a few apps ready and waiting. Here are a handful of apps which are perfect for entertaining little kids, from toddlers to nearly school age. There’s a paint app,...

Read the full article: 4 Great Windows 8 Apps For Entertaining Little Kids

Installing Firefox Metro In Windows 8.1

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



By now, you’ve likely heard about the release of Firefox Metro for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. For those who missed the big news, Mozilla released the Metro version of Firefox browser to the Aurora channel about a week ago and is now available for download. Firefox Metro sports a clean interface, shows address bar […]

A Life Less Ordinary: 7 Places On Reddit For Your Own Personal Growth

Wisdom of the crowds. There’s no other way to describe Reddit. While it won’t win any awards for its pretty face in a hurry, there’s no denying that Reddit is one of the more influential websites on the planet today. So, what better place to go to if you are starting to feel that your life needs to be more than ordinary. After all, many consider it to be among the websites you cannot live without. Feeling deflated is a perfectly fine human condition. Feeling absolutely demotivated is easy when one is caught in the bear trap of humdrumness. But...

Read the full article: A Life Less Ordinary: 7 Places On Reddit For Your Own Personal Growth

How To Open Command Prompt As Administrator In Windows 8.1

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



As we all know, a Command Prompt is used to launch programs, change various Windows settings, and enable or disable some Windows features. An elevated Command Prompt or Command Prompt with administrator rights is necessary to execute certain commands in Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions. For instance, you have to run […]

Take Google Task Management And Scheduling To A Whole New Level With GQueues

Task management is about as exciting as getting a health exam. The truth is, task management is as important to your work health as a health exam is to your physical health, so it’s important to get it right early before you drown in all the chaos. A Google Task replacement called GQueues may be one of the best solutions around. We’ve explored a steady stream of time and task management apps through the years. One good example is Bakari’s review of Wunderkit, or Azim’s review of Chaos Control. I’ve personally tried a number of those recommended here at MUO...

Read the full article: Take Google Task Management And Scheduling To A Whole New Level With GQueues

Bookmark This: Us Vs Th3m Is The Best Website You’ve Never Heard Of

As you may have noticed already, the Web is vast. Scrub that, it’s epic. There are hundreds of millions of active websites out there waiting to be explored, and that number is growing all the time. This is why the Internet section of MakeUseOf is so important, as part of our mission is to pare that colossal number of websites down by sorting the wheat from the chaff. This is usually done by organizing websites into collections around a certain theme or topic. But just occasionally a website crops up that deserves its own entry into the MakeUseOf hall of...

Read the full article: Bookmark This: Us Vs Th3m Is The Best Website You’ve Never Heard Of

7 Really Simple Tips To Manage Your Files And Folders On Google Drive

Sometimes it is easy to disregard something that’s available and accessible for free. Google Drive fits that bill. It’s there connected like a relationship to whatever we do with Google. Just like a relationship, we don’t realize its value till we really make the effort to get close and personal. One of the ways is to understand how to manage files and folders on Google Drive. It is simple stuff really, but still something that needs a few tips to perk up our interest about it. There’s a lot you can do with 15GB of free storage. You can do...

Read the full article: 7 Really Simple Tips To Manage Your Files And Folders On Google Drive

Is Slackware, The Oldest Remaining Linux Distribution, Right For You?

Linux has been around since 1991, but the most famous distros – from Ubuntu to Fedora to Mint – were born in the mid-2000′s. Slackware, by contrast, dates back to 1992. You read that correctly: 1992. Slackware remains the oldest actively maintained distro, and to this day remains true to its (non-user friendly) roots. Think it’s something you might be interested in trying out? Keep reading. History Debian might be the oldest popular distribution that a large number of Linux users directly and indirectly use, but Slackware is ultimately the oldest one still in existence. The project started in 1992,...

Read the full article: Is Slackware, The Oldest Remaining Linux Distribution, Right For You?

Force YouTube to Use the HTML5 Player

YouTube's HTML5 player is great, but it's not enabled for all the videos. Even if you go to youtube.com/html5 and join the HTML5 trial, you'll find a lot of videos that use the Flash player. "Some videos with ads are not yet supported (they will play in the Flash player)," mentions the site.



There's a simple Greasemonkey script that forces YouTube to use the HTML5 player for almost all the videos you watch at youtube.com. You need to install Greasemonkey if you use Firefox or Tampermonkey if you use Chrome, then click the "Install" button here.



The script works better in Firefox. If you install the script in Chrome, it will disable the new Ajax interface, but everything else seems to work well.

Here's a video you can use to test the script. Please note that the script doesn't work for embedded videos.

Google+ Improves RAW To JPEG Photo Conversion With Support For 70 Cameras

Google+ now gives photographers more latitude with RAW to JPEG conversions by adding RAW support for 70 camera makes. Google+ has always been a favorite destination for photographers with the feature to store full-size photo uploads. This change helps them to upload large-sized RAW images for backup without converting them to JPEG. But Google+ converts them to JPEG for faster image load times when someone wants to view them. Editing the JPEG is also faster. Google+ does not support RAW post-processing, but the ability to upload RAW file formats and keep them backed up from a cross-section of cameras is...

Read the full article: Google+ Improves RAW To JPEG Photo Conversion With Support For 70 Cameras

How To Open Disk Management In Windows 8.1

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



Disk Management utility that ships with Windows 8.1 is primarily used to create and format hard disk partitions. In addition to that, you can use the Disk Management to shrink and extend partition size, change the drive letter of partitions, assign drive letter to partitions, and create, attach, & detach VHDs (virtual hard disks). Just […]

Card-Style Interface for Google Mobile Search

As previously anticipated, Google's mobile site has a new layout that uses cards, just like Google Now, Google Maps, Google+ and an increasingly long list of Google services and apps.



"A new look and feel for Google Search and ads on your phones and tablets. It's cleaner and simpler, optimized for touch, with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you're looking for," informs Google's search blog.

Ads stand out a lot more and, depending on your phone's resolution and screen size, you might not even see a regular search result without scrolling down. Google shows up to 2 ads at the top of the page and no longer uses a different background color. There's just a small "Ad" label next to the URL.

Sections are clearly separated and the information density is lower. There's more white space and bigger text for page titles.

Google's 15th Birthday Doodle

This year, Google's birthday doodle is interactive: it's a game that asks you to get as many candies as you can. The game uses HTML5 and it also works on smartphones and tablets. You can share your score on Google+ and generate URLs that remember your high score.

Here's a video that shows the game, just in case you don't see the doodle yet (you can also visit Google Australia):

Filter and Compare Knowledge Graph Results

Google's Knowledge Graph feature gets smarter every day. You've probably noticed the carousel that's displayed when you search for things like [dog breeds], [asian rivers], [swedish bands], [science fiction books], [surrealist painters]. For some queries, you'll now see a drop-down that lets you select other similar categories. If you search for [surrealist painters], you'll see a long list of genres: abstract, cubist, impressionist, rococo, romantic.

Until now, Knowledge Graph displayed information about a single entity. Now you can compare 2 things. For example, you can search for [orange vs tangerine] and find out that oranges contain two times more vitamin C than tangerines.

"You can try this for some other things you might be curious about, such as dog breeds (compare pekingese vs. chihuahua) or celestial objects (compare earth vs. neptune) — and we'll keep adding more," informs Google.



It looks like Google brings back some of the features from an old Labs project called Google Squared and makes them more usable.

Yahoo Moves Ahead On The Revival Road With The New Yahoo Maps

The last few months has seen Yahoo grabbing news headlines with a flurry of product re-designs and revamps. The latest – Yahoo Maps. A refreshed Yahoo Maps for the desktop comes to U.S. users. The new Yahoo Maps comes with a slew of new features and more interactivity, but missing an equivalent mobile app so far. The refreshing new design makes it more consistent with the design tweaks on other Yahoo properties. Key new features include pedestrian and public transit routes. Map users can enter an origin and destination point, and track the route as either a pedestrian, a driver...

Read the full article: Yahoo Moves Ahead On The Revival Road With The New Yahoo Maps

7 Ways To Make A Google Map Using Google Spreadsheet Data

If you maintain a lot of data in Google Spreadsheet, you’ve probably at least once thought, “Hey, I should be able to get all those locations and quickly plot them in a Google Map”. Well, you can of course. But doing this is not quite as obvious as you might expect. With Google writing both the spreadsheet and the map-making software, there should be several easy ways to do this. You’d expect to see a File > Export as Map option or a File > Download as KML. But no, there’s nothing like that. What you soon realise is there...

Read the full article: 7 Ways To Make A Google Map Using Google Spreadsheet Data

Be Your Own Travel Guide: 7 Tips To Travel Smarter With Google Maps

Going on a trip can be such a stressful experience. There are hotel reservations to make, restaurant reservations to place, activities to plan out, and tickets to buy. What if you forget something, or you discover that the place you wanted to visit for your dream vacation falls far short of being anything anyone would describe as a dream? I do recall a time when people planned out road trips using paper maps. In fact, I still have memories of my dad staying up late the night before a trip, and tracing out the whole route in pencil on a...

Read the full article: Be Your Own Travel Guide: 7 Tips To Travel Smarter With Google Maps

MetroSidebar: Beautiful Tiled Sidebar For Windows 7/8.1

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



It’s a well-known fact that Microsoft has dropped desktop gadgets from Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions due to security reasons, and has been offering a tool to completely remove sidebar or desktop gadgets from Windows 7 as well. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 users who aren’t concerned about the security can download and install […]

Evernote’s New Web Clipper Is The Ultimate Content Saving Tool

Evernote’s Web Clipper isn’t new, especially if you’re an avid user of Evernote. But if you haven’t heard, or perhaps didn’t like the Evernote clipper in the past, this is the right time to look into it again, as they’ve completely redone its look and added new features that make it better. Sometimes “upgrades” aren’t really upgrades, and instead just add bloat to an application or extension, but that’s not the case with the upgrades Evernote made to their Web Clipper recently. To put it simply, it’s magnificent. Also, before this big upgrade, they also made a smaller, but very...

Read the full article: Evernote’s New Web Clipper Is The Ultimate Content Saving Tool

Android Is Watching: 8 Ways A Typical Smartphone Is Monitoring You

Android automatically backs up your Wi-Fi passwords to your Google account, where they’re synced to your future Android devices. This is a convenient feature that saves you from entering Wi-Fi passwords over and over, but it means that Google likely knows all your Wi-Fi passwords. And, given recent revelations about PRISM and the NSA’s ability to demand data from Google without a warrant, the NSA likely has access to all of them. But Wi-Fi passwords aren’t the only thing that Google — and therefore the US government and other governments around the world — can get from your phone. Google...

Read the full article: Android Is Watching: 8 Ways A Typical Smartphone Is Monitoring You

How To Recover Windows 7/8.1 Product Key Without Using Third-Party Tools

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



There are times when you may want to recover your Windows product key from a working Windows installation, whether to back up the product key before beginning to install a newer version of Windows, or to reinstall existing version of Windows operating system. The standard or the popular way of retrieving Windows product key is […]

How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress

This step-by-step tutorial describes how you can easily move your blogspot blog from Blogger to WordPress while maintaining all your search traffic and Google juice.

---

This story, How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 26/09/2013 under Blogger, WordPress, Internet

Google+ Celebrates 15 Years of Google

Mr. Jingles, the Google+ notification mascot, celebrates Google's 15th birthday. Just click the bell icon, read all your notifications or click "mark all as read" to see it.

Mr. Jingles also changed its profile photo with a pixelated image: "A little change of pace in my profile photo for #throwbackthursday.". The file name is self-explanatory: "1998-jangles-avatar.png".

Google's 1998 Easter Egg

Search Google for [Google in 1998] and you'll see a search results page from 1998, the year when Google was incorporated as a privately held company. It's an Easter Egg that reminds you how much Google has evolved, while preserving a simple user interface.



The old search results includes the original Google logo that had an exclamation mark just like Yahoo!, GoogleScout - another name for the feature that returns similar pages, a drop-down that lets you pick the number of results per page, search within results, the size of the cached pages and a list of links to other search engines. All the search results link to the Wayback Machine, since most of them no longer exist.

Google's birthday is in September, but the date has changed over the years. "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake," mentioned a Google page. Google has usually celebrated its birthday on September 27 and this year is special: Google is 15 years old. Happy birthday, Google!



{ via Search Engine Land }

How To Always Show Address Bar and Tabs In Internet Explorer 11

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



The Modern version of Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) that ships with Windows 8.1 doesn’t display address bar and tabs with default settings. One needs to right-click anywhere on the screen or swipe-up from the bottom-edge of the touch-screen to see address bar and tabs. Users who are running Windows 8.1 on a large screen might […]

A Google Experiment Asks Users to Rank Results

Google has its own search quality raters, but it doesn't hurt asking regular users to improve search results. A recent Google experiment highlights 2 search results and asks users which one is better.

Users don't have the read the search quality guidelines first, they only need to visit the 2 pages and tell Google which one they prefer. There are 4 choices: the first result, the second result, both results are equally good, neither result is good enough.



{ Thanks, Marcus. }

Learnist For Android Tries To Make Munching RSS Feeds Into An Educational Experience

Learning is an admirable goal. We all strive to better ourselves, and gaining new knowledge is one of the best ways to do so. Traditionally, learning meant hitting the books — sitting down for an extended period of time with a few authoritative resources, gradually working your way through a curriculum and (hopefully) ending up with a new skill or a clearer understanding of whatever it is you’re trying to figure out. That was the past, though — today, this traditional view of learning feels almost quaint. In today’s brave new world, when you need to know something, you just...

Read the full article: Learnist For Android Tries To Make Munching RSS Feeds Into An Educational Experience

How To Add Pin to Start Option To All File Types In Windows 8.1

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



Start screen, the Start menu replacement introduced with Windows 8, is one of the most talked about features of Windows 8 operating system. The Start screen has been enhanced in Windows 8.1 by adding support for new tile sizes and more customization options such as the ability to set desktop wallpaper as Start screen background. […]

Best Ways To Spell-Check As You Go In Chrome

Proper spelling is more than a courtesy; it’s also a sign of intelligence and good education. These days, you don’t actually need to know how to spell to make a good impression. If you’re smart enough, you’ll just use one of the many free spell-check tools, some of which can also correct your grammar. And by paying a little attention to the corrections these tools make, you can also improve your native spelling skills on the go. The Situation In Chrome Chrome comes with a native spell-checker, which should be enabled by default. The dictionary is typically set to the...

Read the full article: Best Ways To Spell-Check As You Go In Chrome

Chrome's New Tab Synergy

Chrome shows a new version of the welcome screen for the updated new tab page. Instead of "changes to the new tab page", you'll see "Chrome has updated". It looks like Google wanted to synchronize 4 important changes:



1. the new Google navigation interface

2. the updated new tab page

3. Chrome's app launcher

4. the new Chrome apps

There's an interesting synergy that deserves some explanations. Google's new drop-down menu from the homepage and search results pages looks just like the app launcher, but it only links to Google apps and you can't customize it. Chrome's app launcher was first available in Chrome OS and it's now added to the regular version of Chrome. It includes the apps that were previously available in the new tab page, but it's optimized for a new breed of apps that work offline and look just like native apps. They can be launched from the operating system's taskbar, use APIs that integrate with the hardware, open links in a browser tab. Install any app from this page to enable the app launcher.

The old bookmark apps have a small arrow just like regular Windows shortcuts and open in a new Chrome tab, the new apps don't have the small arrow and open in a new chromeless window.



Chrome's new tab page has a different goal: teach people to use the omnibox (the unified address bar and search box). Many people type google.com and use the search box from Google's homepage to search the web. Google decided to replace the new tab page with a modified Google homepage that uses the omnibox instead of the regular search box. "While you can search straight from the omnibox in Chrome, we've found that many people still navigate to their search engine's home page to initiate a search instead. The goal is to save people time by helping them search and navigate the web faster," explained Google.

To sum up: the new Chrome apps are no longer bookmarks to websites and no longer open in Chrome tabs, so they're moved outside of the browser. There's a new bookmark called Apps that links to chrome://apps, where you can still find the old apps list. The updated new tab page is an educational feature that tries to simplify the search workflow for regular users.



Advanced users probably don't need it, so here are two ways to tweak the updated new tab page (Google might remove them in the future):



1. How to replace the updated new tab page with a local version that doesn't load Google's homepage and doesn't show doodles? Paste this in a new tab:



chrome://flags/#enable-local-only-instant-extended-api



and click "Enabled" in the drop-down below "Enable local-only Instant Extended API", then click the "Relaunch Now" button at the bottom of the page to restart the browser.



2. How to go back to the old new tab page? Paste this in a new tab:



chrome://flags/#enable-instant-extended-api



and click "Disabled" in the drop-down below "Enable Instant Extended API", then click the "Relaunch Now" button at the bottom of the page to restart the browser.

Technophilia 82 Live From MakeUseOf

This week: SteamOS! The year of Linux gaming is finally here. No, seriously! Also, in a bizarre twist of fate, the world’s favorite spambot turns out to be human – and people are crushed by the news. And we sit down with Aibek Esengulov, the mysterious non-spambot who pays us to do all those things you like it when we do. This week’s show is brought to you by Bitdefender Family Pack. You can use the Bitdefender Family Pack license for all the devices a family member has. Family Pack can cover 3 or 5 family members. A subscription for...

Read the full article: Technophilia 82 Live From MakeUseOf

5 Ways To Prevent Hackers From Accessing Your Online Accounts

Getting hacked is an unfortunate part of being on the Internet today. The cold hard truth is that if you want to stay 100% digitally secure, then stay off the Internet. But it’s not all doom and gloom — by using some simple, yet effective security measures, you can make any hackers dream of getting into your accounts, an absolute nightmare. Always Use Strong Passwords The sheer amount of people that still use extremely basic passwords is astonishing. For example, I recently had a client whose password for PayPal was something along the lines of “doggybag” and this was for...

Read the full article: 5 Ways To Prevent Hackers From Accessing Your Online Accounts

Spoiler Foiler Aims To Stop Twitter From Spoiling Your Favorite Shows

The series finale for Breaking Bad airs this Sunday, and if you don’t want it to be spoiled for you over Twitter, Netflix may have a solution for you. Their new website, Spoiler Foiler, will allow you to scroll through your Twitter feed completely spoiler-free. Any tweet that may have a mention of Breaking Bad in it is censored, and you have to click on it to reveal the text. Many people can’t watch Breaking Bad the moment it airs. It airs on the east coast of the US long before it reaches the west coast, and it reaches the...

Read the full article: Spoiler Foiler Aims To Stop Twitter From Spoiling Your Favorite Shows

Don’t Stop The Music: 4 Ways To Set Up Alerts For New Album Releases

There was a time when you could keep track of new music releases by checking in at your local record store, but we live in a different world now. Apple’s iTunes alone offers over 28 million different songs you can purchase, and there are a huge amount of different bands. With access to a much wider world of music, everyone seems to have their own tastes and their own favorite artists. You’ve already found bands and artists you love — but how are you going to know when they release new music albums? You could keep an eye on each...

Read the full article: Don’t Stop The Music: 4 Ways To Set Up Alerts For New Album Releases