BitTorrent Chat Seeks To Bring Free P2P, Secure, User-Owned Instant Messaging

With growing concerns over how secure your online data is from intelligence organisations like the NSA, the makers of BitTorrent are looking to roll out a new instant messaging app that protects your privacy using the same infrastructure as the file-sharing network. BitTorrent Chat, an experiment in BitTorrent Labs, is currently in private alpha. “BitTorrent Chat applies distributed technology to the idea of IM. Our goal is to ensure that your messages stay yours: private, secure, and free,” said Catherine Meek, Director of Product Management at BitTorrent. The biggest sell here is that BitTorrent Chat is completely server-less. By not...

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Easily View Multiple Tabs At Once With These Chrome Extensions

Screen real estate is particularly important in a job with high productivity requirements. Forget endless tab management extensions, it’s time to redefine how you can view multiple open tabs at once on Chrome, and not just push them into the background. Some online tasks like web designing, online research, translation, social media management, and collaborative telecommuting demand it. We recently asked our readers about the number of open tabs in their browser. Would you believe it – 20 was a low figure! Powerful processors can handle the individual processes of each open tab easily without slowing down the computer. But...

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Use Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool To Create Windows 8.1 Installation Media

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Back in 2009, soon after the public release of Windows 7 RTM, Microsoft released Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool so that users who download Windows 7 ISO image file from Microsoft Store can easily create a bootable USB or bootable DVD using Windows ISO file. Even though Microsoft hasn’t updated Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool […]

10 Social Media Accounts Every Food Lover Should Follow

Do you like food? Do you use social media? Ever thought of combining the two in a bowl, transferring to a pan on medium heat and tasting the results? Of course you have. But like a good supermarket, social media is literally flooded with foodie accounts, and unless you tackle the task with a list, you’ll end up getting more than you’ve bargained for. Yes, there are many foodie accounts out there. Follow the ones below and you won’t be sorry. @SeriousEats on Twitter Yup, that’s right. Kimchi and bbq sauce. On a cheeseburger. Get the recipe (it’s awesome): http://t.co/MtIjxCpgl4—...

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SkyDrive Brings Smart Files With OCR Search In Windows 8.1

Microsoft might be making it cheap to get online storage by announcing a plan that gives you 200GB of SkyDrive space for $100 a year, but it still doesn’t want to tax your physical hard drive. With Windows 8.1, SkyDrive will be rolling out “smart files”, previously called placeholder files, complete with Bing-powered OCR search. Optical Character Recognition, which Microsoft revealed at the end of August, will be baked into the OS in Bing Smart Search when SkyDrive is hooked up to your Camera Roll. This feature basically reads text in a photograph and captures it, so when you search...

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Google and Brandy: A Sober Mistake

When you search Google for [brandy] or [brandy drinks], you'll get a Knowledge Graph card with information from Wikipedia: "Brandy is a spirit produced by distilling wine. Brandy generally contains 35–60% alcohol by volume and is typically taken as an after-dinner drink." Unfortunately, the photo that illustrates the card is not appropriate: it shows the popular singer Brandy, not the drink.

The photo is from an article about drinks and the caption says: "If this is the first brandy you think of, you need to get out more". Well, this shows that Google's algorithms are far from perfect.



{ Thanks, Sébastien Izouaouen, Sushubh Mittal and Max Kemman. }

Technophilia 83 Live From MakeUseOf

We were deemed non-essential by the US government, but we’re doing a show anyway! This week: IE5 usage is down to five per cent. Who are is the five percent? Your grandparents. EA finally agrees to pay college athletes for using their name and likeness in video games…and announced they’re going to stop making video games about colleges. Win? And Apple Maps is telling people to drive out onto an airport runway. No, seriously, that’s the story. I don’t even need to put a joke here. This week’s episode is brought to you by Bitdefender QuickScan. Whenever you need a...

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Chrome's System-Level Installer, Now Default

When Chrome was released 5 years ago, many people were surprised to see that the browser didn't install in the Program Files folder. Chrome was Windows-only back then and Google wanted to make sure that users can install Chrome, even if they don't use admin accounts. Per-user installs worked well, but Google had to create a separate system-level MSI installer for enterprise.



Now it looks like Chrome has a smart Windows installer that combines both approaches. The setup file tries to install Chrome in the Program Files folder and switches to the AppData folder if it fails.

"We did change the download page to install system-level by default (and fall back to user level if that fails or the user says "no" to the UAC prompt). Installing in AppData was never a security measure, it was for convenience to make sure people could install Chrome even without admin rights. Our data shows that *preferring* a system level (Program Files) install with a fallback to user level improves the install success rate," said Mark Larson from Google.



Apparently, this is a feature launched last year, but I haven't noticed it until today, when I had to reinstall Chrome because of this error: "Update failed (error: 7) An error occurred while checking for updates: This computer already has a more recent version of Google Chrome. If the software is not working, please uninstall Google Chrome and try again."

Chrome's help center still recommends to use an alternate installer "to install Google Chrome for all user accounts on a Windows computer. By doing so, you'll replace all other versions of Chrome that may already be installed on your computer for other user accounts." For Mac, "you can install Chrome for all user accounts on your computer if you're signed in as an administrator."

Google's Reverse Image Search, Now in Chrome

Google's reverse image search feature is about to become more popular, now that you can easily use it in Chrome 30+. You no longer have to install an extension, just right-click an image and click "search Google for this image".



"Search by image allows you to do a reverse image search and discover all sorts of content that's related to a specific image. For example, search using a picture of your favorite band and see search results that might include similar images, webpages about the band, and even sites that include the same picture," explains Google.

Reverse image search also works for modified versions of an image, so you can use it to find more information about an image, other sites that include the image, the original source of an image. You can also use TinEye, a similar reverse image search engine.

How Chrome’s Built-In PDF Viewer Lets You Do More Than Just Read PDFs

The next time you have to fill out a form in a PDF or split a PDF’s pages, you don’t need to dig around for a good program or web app to do the job. As long as you have Google Chrome installed, that’s all you need. Chrome comes with a built-in PDF Viewer tool that can be used to do a lot more than just read PDF files. Sure, it’s not as powerful as Windows programs like PDFSam and there are a few cool apps to annotate PDFs online. Still, as a quick-fix solution, Chrome is perfect. You first...

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µTorrent: Still Tiny, Still Powerful, And Still The Best Torrent Client

Do a Google search for “BitTorrent Client” and it will come up first, but is µTorrent really the best client out there? In short: pretty much. Sure, there are other clients, but few match µTorrent for features. Which is odd because as a 1.1 MB portable app, µTorrent is one of the smallest clients out there. There’s some compression at work there, sure, but it’s impressive none-the-less. And yes, there are ads, but you can turn them off. And yes, the interface can feel cluttered, but you can customize it. It’s a program that goes a long way to treating...

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Download Windows 7 Themes For Windows 8.1

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PC users who have upgraded to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have been complaining about the lack of Start menu, Explorer toolbar, and Aero glass theme (visual style) ever since the release of Windows 8. Microsoft has restored only the Start button in Windows 8.1 update, and end users who aren’t satisfied with the default […]

How I Self-Published My Magazine Online And In Print

In August 2013 I reached the end of a project that had its origins over two and a half years earlier in a pub in Manchester, England. I finally self-published my magazine online, but how did I manage it? What tools did I use, and what did I learn? Why I Launched My Magazine I’ve been running my website Kasterborous.com since 2005, reporting on the latest news, providing reviews, interviews, and feature articles on the popular British TV show Doctor Who. We’ve also got a “podKast”, released a book of reviews (Ultimate Regeneration, the basis for my recent MakeUseOf guide...

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