Need A Laugh? Brighten Up Your Day With These Bad Lip Readings

Are you a fan of nonsensical and silly parody humor? If so, you’ll love the Bad Lip Reading series of videos on YouTube. The gist of the series is that they take well-known clips, for instance political speeches or movie scenes, and completely dub the audio with their own lip reading interpretations. The results are often hilarious, completely wrong, yet surprisingly fitting. I admit that I thought the idea was stupid when I first heard about it. However, upon watching a few videos, I will say that there’s a lot of humor to be found in these Bad Lip Readings...

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External Drive Not Recognized? This Is How To Fix It In Windows

External drives — either USB flash drives or external hard drives — should be easy to use. In some cases, you may connect your drive to a Windows PC or another device with a USB port and find that it’s not recognized. This problem can be caused by partition issues on your external drive, using the wrong file system, dead USB ports, driver issues in Windows, or other problems. In a worst case scenario, the drive itself may simply be dead. The steps below will be the same for both USB flash drives and larger external hard drives, which work...

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Google Trends And the New Navigation Menu

I've recently watched someone browse the web and I was surprised to see Google's welcome message that announces the new navigation interface. If you don't hide the message or click the grid icon, the message is displayed every time you use Google. Apparently, the person next to me used Google to search the web, but he wasn't curios to check Google's app launcher.



Since the new app launcher is hidden, it's likely that less people used it than the old black bar. Google Trends shows that the search volume for queries like [google docs], [google drive], [google news] or [google calendar] increased a lot in September, when the app launcher was released. If the links at the top of the page are missing, the search box saves the day.

Here's a Trends chart that shows the US search volume for [Google Calendar] in 2013 and 2012:

{ Thanks, Jérôme. }

Facebook services restored for many, Internet rejoices

Well, it's over. After about two hours of issues, Facebook seems to have resumed services for the most part, although some of our readers are still reporting problems. For the preceding two hours, Facebook users were unable to update new posts or like anything new. On account of no activity, the news ticker on the right side of the Newsfeed had also disappeared. The social networking giant has yet to reveal why this significant down-time occurred although, it seems that the Facebook team might b [...]

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Find Out Who’s Eating Your Bandwidth With These Tips

Click….wait. Click….wait. Click….ARG! Sound familiar? That’s the sound of someone running out of Internet bandwidth. A lot of things can drain away the capacity of that pipe that connects your computer to the Internet. It could be other people or devices on your network, or it could even be malicious applications or services running on the PC itself. The problem can get so bad that some people will toss out their computer and buy a new one. It doesn’t have to be that way. While the problem could be coming from anywhere, it isn’t impossible to troubleshoot if you know...

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Google Books Ngram Viewer Spells Change With Wildcards And Inflection Search

The Google Books Ngram Viewer finds use in the hands of word lovers and those interested in linguistics. Maintaining its tradition of continuous tinkering, Google made two major improvements to the analytical tool for a more powerful linguistic search. The Ngram Viewer gets wildcard search and the ability to search for inflections, aided by multiple capitalization styles. Anyone who has seriously searched the web knows the power of wildcards. Wildcards now allows anyone to dig deeper into phrase usage by placing a ‘*’ next to the word. For instance, to find the most popular words following “University of”, search for...

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Picasa Web Search Goes Missing, Redirects to Google+

Ever since Google+ was launched, I wondered what will happen with Picasa Web Albums. Google now redirects all Picasa Web links to Google+ Photos, but it still lets you switch back to the Picasa Web interface. There are still Google users who haven't switched to Google+, so they need a way to manage their photos.



Picasa Web's search was a great feature that allowed you to restrict the results to your photos, the photos from your favorite users or all the public photos. Google included a lot of advanced search features, so you could sort the results by date or relevance, change thumbnail size, find Creative Commons photos, restrict the results to panoramas or portrait photos and start a slideshow from the results.

"Picasa Web Albums searches across tags, captions, album titles, album descriptions, and album locations to deliver you relevant photos and videos. Choose one of the advanced search options on the left to refine your results. Among your options are faces (with faces or without), aspect ratio (Landscape vs. Portrait vs. Panoroma), size, format (photos vs. video), camera type (Nikon, Canon, etc.), Creative Commons license type (copyright status), and the order (by date or by relevance)," informed Google.



Unfortunately, Picasa Web search no longer exists and it now redirects to Google+ Photos, which lacks all the advanced features I mentioned.

If you've joined Google+, you can see results from your photo albums and from the albums created by your circles:

If you're not a Google+ user, Google shows a list of Google+ posts that include photos:

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Facebook users confirm services down globally

Facebook users from India and Romania have confirmed that Facebook services seem to be down globally (or at least in Europe and India). Users have noticed that they are unable to post any updates on Facebook using both the PC and the mobile app. There's still no word on the reasons behind the downtime but there's a good chance services should return to normal soon, as they have in the past. The error message that pops up when you try to post an update reads: "There was a problem updating y [...]

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New Forza Motorsport 5 trailer out, has Jeremy Clarkson in it

A new teaser trailer for Microsoft's next-gen racing title Forza Motorsport 5, features UK 'Top Gear' host 'Jeremy Clarkson' offering his insights on modern day Hypercars. In the video, Clarkson says that the end of the Concorde eventually led to the start of ground-based air race, which led to the outset of hypercars. He also talks about the 'Mclaren P1' and 'Pagani Huarya', which according to him, could turn out to be the best hypercars ever. Forza Motorsport 5 will have all three members of [...]

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Google rolls out new Gmail login page

Google has quietly rolled out a fresh new design for Gmail’s login page. The new page will focus on one account for all Google’s services and will look more like the Gmail mobile app. The new page has been spotted by a few people only as of now. Users can log off and login again in their Gmail account to view the changes. The most significant part of this new login page design is the fact that it shifts the login in pane from the right of the page to the center. Users will find a ta [...]

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Now move images and videos from a smartphone to a tablet just by touch!

Researchers from the Technical Research Centre of Finland have developed the innovative InTouch technology that ensures easy transfer of files between smart devices. The technology lets you use a ring, nail or wristband that acts as a user interface and allows sharing of files directly from one screen to another simply by touch. The InTouch interface allows you to touch a file on one screen, with a nail and transfer it easily by tapping your friend's smartphone with the same nail. The solution, [...]

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Creating and Porting NDK based Android Apps for IA

Android applications can incorporate native code using the Native Development Kit (NDK) toolset. It allows developers to reuse legacy code, code to low-level hardware, or differentiate their apps by taking advantage of features otherwise not optimal or possible. This article is a basic introduction on how to create NDK based apps for IA from start to finish, and also on simple use cases for porting existing NDK based apps to IA based devices. We will walk through a simple step-by-step app devel [...]

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Google Hangout for iOS gets free voice calling in North America

Google's Hangout app for iOS has received a major update, that has added new voice calling features. Users can now call and receive phone calls from the app itself, with no charge for any calls to the US and in Canada. Google Hangouts will use your Google Voice number for answering incoming and outgoing calls from your Hangouts app. The feature is available for iOS users only for now. The Google Hangouts for iOS app is cross-platform and will allow people using a desktop system and a mobile sys [...]

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Simmtronics XPAD Freedom quad-core dual-SIM tablet launched for Rs. 13,999

Simmtronics has launched a new Android tablet with voice-calling facility, called the XPAD Freedom. The new tablet is priced at Rs. 13,999 and comes with a free tablet cover worth Rs. 1,999. The XPAD Freedom sports a 7.8-inch IPS display with 1028 x 768 pixels resolution. It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and is powered by 1.2GHz quad-core processor along with 1GB of RAM. It comes with 5MP rear camera and 2MP secondary camera. The tablet features 8GB built-in storage, expandable up to 32GB via [...]

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Govt. plans to provide low-cost mobile connections to 25 million rural homes

The Indian government is planning to improve rural connectivity, with Internet enabled mobile phones for over 25 million rural households. The scheme will also provide relief to state-owned BSNL, who will be the telecom operator for the scheme. A senior Government official, spoke to the Hindu Business Line and said the beneficiaries will get a mobile phone and a connection by paying a one-time fee of Rs. 300. The recharge will give them 30 minutes airtime, 30 MB of data usage a month and 30 SMS [...]

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Speeding Up the Android Emulator on Intel Architecture

This article will guide you through installing the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel HAXM), a hardware-assisted virtualization engine (hypervisor) that uses Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) to speed up Android* development on Windows. It also explains how to setup a hardware-assisted KVM on Linux and best known methods in compiling natively and submitting apps to the Google Play Store for x86. 2. Installation 2.1. Prerequisites You need to have the Android SDK inst [...]

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Microsoft pulls Windows 8.1 RT update after blue-screen errors pop up

Microsoft seems to have committed a major boo-boo with its Windows 8.1 RT update after users who installed the update on their Windows 8 tablets began complaining of the dreaded ‘Blue Screen of Death’ errors. Microsoft quickly pulled the update from the Windows Store stating, “Microsoft is investigating a situation affecting a limited number of users updating their Windows RT devices to Windows RT 8.1. As a result, we have temporarily removed the Windows RT 8.1 update from the [...]

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Images of a white Nexus 5 appear online

Images have surfaced online which show the Nexus 5 in white. We have seen several leaked images of the Nexus 5, but they have all shown the black version of the smartphone. The Nexus 4, which was launched last year, came in black. A white version of the Nexus 4 was subsequently launched. If the leaked information is to be believed, then both, the white and the black version of the smartphone will be unveiled together. Sticking to the rumours of the Nexus 5, the device will be available in two [...]

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5 Ways to Tilt-Shift Your Photos for Model-tastic Mockups

Tilt-shifting is a popular way of presenting digital photos which “miniaturises” a scene – giving the impression it’s a toy or model diorama. Several tools now exist which can help you apply this effect to existing photos, so let’s take a look at your options. Fundamentals Before we get into the tools themselves, it’s important you have a basic understanding of what the effect actually is, and why it works – this will help you to get the best results. Take a pen and hold right in front of your eyes, focussing on it. Your peripheral vision – everything else...

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