Mail.Ru Launches My.Com In US With myMail, myChat and myGames

Russian internet giant Mail.Ru has launched its services in the US under the My.com brand, with a suite of mobile-based app offerings—myMail for email, myChat for instant messaging and myGames for mobile gaming. In the near future, it will also launch the myCamera app. myMail is an email client for Android and iOS that combines multiple email accounts. Users can customize and enable real-time push notifications even if email providers don’t support them. myMail also uses a custom “traffic congestion technology” for faster and more secure emails. You can find out more information and download at mymail.my.com. myChat is a...

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Office Remote Helps You Control Microsoft Office Docs On Your PC with A Windows Phone

Microsoft Research has just developed a nice little app that turns your Windows Phone into a remote device for controlling MS Office documents on your PC. The use of the remote app with the Windows phone as a carrier has many practical uses when working with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. With the phone in your hand, you can control the presentation by going back and forth between slides; or bring up supporting Word document; or illustrate a point on a spreadsheet. The Office Remote has been spawned from the minds of the Microsoft Research team and the Microsoft Office engineering...

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4 Ways to Speed Up Your Linux PC

Is your Linux setup not as speedy as you’d like? Here’s how to speed it up. Many computer users who try Linux do so because they’ve been told that the operating system is a lot more customizable and uses less system resources. However, despite installing Linux on a computer and reaping from those benefits, you might still feel like your system could still use an extra boost to truly get a speed-up – even if you’re using a high-end machine. Here are four ways which you can quickly and easily speed up your system to get the best performance possible...

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Hangouts Extension For Chrome Brings Conversations To Your Desktop

Use Hangouts outside the browser. An overlooked Chrome extension from Google lets you chat without opening Gmail or Google+. Back in May, Google announced it was launching a new messaging service: Google Hangouts. This was a way for the company to combine its redundant messaging services: the ever-popular Google Talk, the little used Google+ Messenger, popular videoconferencing service Google Hangouts and (eventually) phone enhancement service Google Voice. There are mobile apps, of course, but no platform-specific desktop version – most users doubtless think of the service as part of Gmail. But a perhaps overlooked feature is the Hangouts extension for...

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Phones On Planes, Sockpuppeting, Female Geeks, Lulu Larks [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, planes may soon be full of people using their cellphones, Wikipedia tries to stop sockpuppeting, Samsung is told to pay up, female geeks are on the rise, Microsoft is rumored to be interested in buying Winamp, Opera 18 is released, Microsoft turns to eBay to sell its hardware, and a potentially sexist app is talked up by the New York Times. U.S. Considers Cellphone Use On Planes The United States is considering allowing people to make and receive cellphone calls on flights. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be...

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How To Set Animated Wallpaper or Video As Start Screen Background In Windows 8.1 [Video]

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Animated desktop background concept was probably first introduced with Windows Vista operating system. DreamScene, one of the extras released for the Ultimate edition of Vista, let users set a video file as desktop background. Even though Microsoft dropped this excellent feature from Windows 7, there are plenty of tools out there to enable DreamScene feature […]

Chrome's Predictors Page

Chrome has a lot of fascinating features you'll probably never use. Tony Hirst spotted one: open a new tab, type chrome://predictors in the omnibox and press Enter. This page shows some cool stats about the characters you've typed in the omnibox and the URLs you've selected.



For example, if you usually type "y", Chrome autocompletes the URL to youtube.com and you press Enter, you'll find this association in the table. There are also 3 values: hit count (how often you type those characters), miss count (how often you pick a different suggestion) and confidence score = hit_count/(hit_count+miss_count). Check "Filter zero confidences" to remove entries with a 0 confidence score. Green entries have a 1 confidence score, which means that the text is always associated with the URL.

You can find all the internal Chrome pages by going to chrome://chrome-urls/. For example, chrome://view-http-cache/ shows a list of all the URLs requested by the browser, chrome://components/ shows a list of components like Pepper Flash and Portable Native Client, which can be independently updated, chrome://flags/ shows a list of experimental features you can enable, while chrome://net-internals/ is a very advanced network logging and diagnostic tool.



{ Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by Tony Hirst. }

Pegman's Return and the Full-Screen Google Maps

I posted about Pegman's return to Google Maps two weeks ago, but I only got the update today. Sometimes it takes a few weeks until Google rolls out new features, sometimes it takes months (Gmail's pay button is an example).



While Pegman's return is a good news, the most striking thing about the latest Google Maps update is that the black bar has disappeared and the new navigation is placed on top of the map. The settings and help buttons have been moved to the bottom of the page.



Here are some screenshots from the "Welcome back, Pegman!" tour:

{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

GIMP: A Quick Walkthrough Of Everyone’s Favorite Open Source Image Editor

Many people enjoy GIMP as one of their favorite open source tools, and with good reason: it’s among some of the most developed ones out there. We’ve covered all sorts of things about GIMP here at MakeUseOf, but we never really gave a rundown of what it can do. Is it just an over-hyped version of Paint, or can you do some serious image manipulation with it? Editing Tools GIMP has many of the tools you’d expect to have, including some slightly more advanced ones such as: color select burn dodge color alterations (hue-saturation, colorize, brightness and contrast, etc.) layers...

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GIMP: A Quick Walkthrough Of Everyone’s Favorite Open Source Image Editor

Many people enjoy GIMP as one of their favorite open source tools, and with good reason: it’s among some of the most developed ones out there. We’ve covered all sorts of things about GIMP here at MakeUseOf, but we never really gave a rundown of what it can do. Is it just an over-hyped version of Paint, or can you do some serious image manipulation with it? Editing Tools GIMP has many of the tools you’d expect to have, including some slightly more advanced ones such as: color select burn dodge color alterations (hue-saturation, colorize, brightness and contrast, etc.) layers...

Read the full article: GIMP: A Quick Walkthrough Of Everyone’s Favorite Open Source Image Editor

Dolphin, Chrome, Firefox Browsers For Android Get Updates

It seems that developers of internet browsers on Android have been busy as the major browsers have all released new updates. Dolphin Dolphin, the fast and elegant browser, has had the most significant update. For starters, the browser now comes with a master password, giving you one more layer of security. Dolphin 10.1.2 now features Night Mode, which can be activated from the swipe menu on the right. This darkens your whole screen for a battery-friendly and more eye-popping experience. There’s a new option to also customize Dolphin with new skins. Under the hood, Dolphin’s got a bunch of new...

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15 Productive Things To Do Online When You Have 15 Minutes To Kill

We cannot capture time. I think we can snatch it for…a small amount of time. It’s human nature to focus on large blocks of time, and ignore the value of the minutes and seconds that pass by unnoticed. We put a value to the time spent on a large project. We store the fortnight of a great vacation in our memories. But we don’t remember the time spent stuck in a traffic jam or that spent on catching up on gossip at the water cooler. Can we use some of those “lost” minutes and seconds and put some value in...

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