Get Creative And Make Your Own Maps With Custom Layers On The New Google Maps

With Google unveiling a completely revamped Maps, now available to all, creating your own maps has become easier than ever. You can create private and public maps, share the maps with specific individuals, add descriptions to locations, and choose from several map styles and appearances. The new Google Maps features makes map creation easier than ever, and with Google’s solid sharing settings, you have complete control over who sees the maps, who can add items to the maps, or if you prefer, you can simply keep the maps completely private. Getting Started After launching Google Maps, click on the settings...

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Keyboard Shortcut for Google Voice Search

If you use Chrome, you've probably noticed the small microphone icon from Google's search box. It lets you search Google using your voice and it's now just as good as the voice search feature from Google's mobile apps.



There's even a keyboard shortcut for this feature: Ctrl+Shift+. (or ⌘-Shift-. for Mac). Yes, that's a dot, full stop or period.

"Say your question and hear an answer back on your desktop Chrome browser. All you will need is a built-in or attached microphone. Also, be sure to have the volume up on your computer to hear your answer loud and clear. Please note Voice Search with spoken answers back is available for US English only," informs Google.



"Open the Chrome browser and go to http://www.google.com/. You'll see a small gray microphone on the right-hand side of the search box. Click the microphone or press Ctrl+Shift+Period (Mac: ⌘-Shift-Period) with your cursor in the search box to start voice search. When the large red microphone icon appears, begin speaking. You can press ESC or click the red button to cancel. As you speak, Google will interpret your voice input. Afterwards, your results show up just as if you had typed the search term," mentions a help center article.



{ via Mike Downes }

To The Manner Born: Essential Technology Etiquette Tips For Our Digital Age

Technology impacts society in many ways — some of which are obvious and others more subtle — and those changes often call for changes in behavior. Etiquette is an important social construct that we tend to forget or ignore, but I would argue that etiquette has never been more important than now. One misstep could permanently damage or fracture your relationship with another. Technology etiquette could easily fall under the topic of “common sense” yet there are many who remain ignorant — and that’s not a judgment against those who don’t know any better. For a long while, I never...

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6 LEGO-Tastic Brickfilm Channels To Follow On YouTube [Stuff to Watch]

Brickfilm – the art of bringing plastic building blocks to life, for the purpose of video entertainment. The Brickfilm scene is huge online, having started way back in the mid-80s when actual film was required. These days brickfilmers benefit from advancements in digital SLRs, stop-motion techniques and the endless range of LEGO on offer. If you’ve not encountered much in the way of stop-motion animation and plastic building blocks, be prepared for a pleasant surprise. The production values, time, effort and scale of some productions is mind-boggling. Some people even go as far as recreating some of their favorite movie...

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7 Fun Uses For Twitter You Haven’t Figured Out Yet

It isn’t difficult to get addicted to Twitter. After all, it hardly takes an effort to type in 140 characters. In those itsy-bitsy lines lies a great power, to either change the world with a tweet, or change your own world with a bit of Twitter-aided personal development. There are the obvious uses of Twitter we keep harping on, but isn’t it always the uncommon and unnoticed uses of social media that piques our interest? The list of creative uses of Twitter is a mile-long. With half a billion users, you would expect a percentage of the tweeples to find...

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Arch Linux: Letting You Build Your Linux System From Scratch

For Linux power users, it’s highly desirable to be able to completely customize your system. Sometimes, that can be best achieved from the start — by piecing together the components that you’d like to include on your system. This way, as there are usually multiple programs that achieve the same result in different manners, you can pick those applications which you’re most fond of. Having to piece together can also let you take a deeper look at the system for maximum control. Most common desktop distributions don’t make this high level of customization very possible (as it’s not ideal and...

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Google Image Search Collections

Google works on a new image search feature that lets you create collections, add image search results to your collections and annotate them. The source code includes multiple references to "collections", "notes", "folios", "clips", "groups" and the feature could integrate with Google Profiles.

For some reason, this looks like a standalone feature and notes aren't added to Google Keep.

Bing Image Search used to have a scratchpad, where users could save their images.

Google also had Notebook, a product that worked well for saving image search results. "Google Notebook is a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online. This personal browser tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from the pages they're browsing, save them to an online notebook that is accessible from any computer, and share them with others," explained Google back in 2006.



{ Thanks, Florian K. }

There’s a Scientific Calculator inside your Web Browser

There's a scientific calculator included in your web browser that can help you solve basic calculations as well as complex Maths expressions.

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This story, There’s a Scientific Calculator inside your Web Browser, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/07/2013 under Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Software.

The India Edition of Hundred Zeros is Live

Book lovers in India should visit Hundred Zeros to download best-selling ebooks that are currently free on Amazon.in - you can read the books on any device.

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This story, The India Edition of Hundred Zeros is Live, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/07/2013 under Amazon Kindle, India.

On Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone 8

The Nokia Lumia series of mobile phones stand out from the crowd. The devices, powered by Windows Phone 8, are responsive, the interface feels fresh and they have great cameras.

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This story, On Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone 8, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/07/2013 under Nokia, Windows Phone, Gadgets.

How To Convert MBR To GPT Disk Without Data Loss

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Ever since we were young, we have been told that one can create up to a maximum of four primary partitions or three primary and one extended partition on a PC. Although this was quite true till a couple of years ago, you can now have up to 128 primary partitions provided that you are [...]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Chromecast

You don't need a teardown to notice that Chromecast's model number is H2G2-42. From iFixit:



"Wasn't 42 the answer to life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? And H2G2 is an abbreviation given to the book, as well as the name of a website dedicated to making a guide to life, the universe, and everything."

If you check YouTube.com's source code, you'll find some references to "hitchhiker".

One of YouTube's sprites has "hitchhiker" in the filename.

Corsair SSD Toolbox: Free Tool To Optimize SSDs

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Upgrading your conventional hard drive to a Solid State Drive (SSD) is the easiest and best way out there to significantly speed up the overall performance of your PC. There are many benefits of using a SSD over HDD: your system boots faster, applications start faster, better battery life, less heat output, etc. Even though [...]

Download AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro For Free

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When it comes to disk partitioning, Windows users have a couple of good, free and user friendly software to choose from. There are popular tools such as EaseUS Partition Master and Mini Tool Partition Wizard Home, Paragon Partition Manager, and even the native Disk Management tool in recent versions of Windows is pretty good and [...]

Are You Getting Yourself A Chromecast? [MakeUseOf Poll]

Last week we asked you about BitTorrent, and whether you use it or not. If you read last week’s poll you already know that BitTorrent is not illegal, only some files are illegal, and there are many legal ways to use the protocol. Legality aside, it seems that a large number of you are going the same way when it comes to BitTorrent. Which way is that? Out of 510 votes in total, these are the results: 8% never use BitTorrent, 10% use BitTorrent only when there is no other alternative, 25% use it from time to time, and 56%...

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SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop: Better Than Red Hat?

Recently, I took a closer look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or “RHEL”, to see how good of an enterprise desktop operating system it really is. I found that it’s a top quality product, and Fedora users would be extremely familiar with it (no surprise there). However, Red Hat isn’t the only company in the Linux enterprise desktop market — there’s also SUSE. While aiming towards the same goals, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or “SLED” which costs $120 for a one-year subscription, and offers different technologies and software to get the job done. But just what can SLED offer, and...

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Download Themes For Windows 8.1

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No one likes staring at the same desktop background picture all the time. To help users better personalize their desktop, Microsoft introduced desktop themes (themepacks) with slideshow feature for the first time in its Windows 7 and the feature is present in the latest Windows 8.1 release as well. Installing a new themepack is probably [...]

Puush: Take Screenshots and Share Them Instantly

Image hosting and image sharing sites are all the rage these days, especially with the widespread explosion in popularity of Internet image macros and memes. Images are pleasing to the eye and people are more likely to view an image than read a block of text – which is why infographics are great. The problem? Storage limits and inconvenient uploads. Way back at the start of all of this we had sites like Imageshack and Photobucket, which both still exist but have drastically fallen off in terms of popular usage. After that came Flickr, Instagram, and Pinterest – social media...

Read the full article: Puush: Take Screenshots and Share Them Instantly

Puush: Take Screenshots and Share Them Instantly

Image hosting and image sharing sites are all the rage these days, especially with the widespread explosion in popularity of Internet image macros and memes. Images are pleasing to the eye and people are more likely to view an image than read a block of text – which is why infographics are great. The problem? Storage limits and inconvenient uploads. Way back at the start of all of this we had sites like Imageshack and Photobucket, which both still exist but have drastically fallen off in terms of popular usage. After that came Flickr, Instagram, and Pinterest – social media...

Read the full article: Puush: Take Screenshots and Share Them Instantly

Get HD Netflix Video on Android With Two Apps From XDA Developers

Does Netflix on your Android device either not work, or not work properly? If so, you might benefit from using a hacked version of the Netflix installable file, also known as an APK file. This article covers two modified versions of Netflix for Android, from XDA developers, that can solve a lot of your video watching woes: One employs customizable backgrounds, fixed subtitles and enables autorotation while playing video. The other allows for higher definition quality video. However, before installing, you will need to set your phone to use files from outside the Play Store. How To Install from Unknown...

Read the full article: Get HD Netflix Video on Android With Two Apps From XDA Developers