5 Fears You Can Destroy Today To Become A Kickass Blogger

Can you write a blog? Without knowing you, I can tell you the answer is probably yes. Ever since their debut at the beginning of the millennium, blogs have been an integral part of what we consider as “the Internet”. Starting as a simple way to record and share your thoughts and experiences, blogs have developed into something much bigger: a full-blown alternative to printed newspapers and magazines. Unlike newspapers, though, absolutely anyone can write a blog. Yes, even you. It takes almost no effort to set up your own blog, and once you do, you’re left with the really...

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Send An Email For Mobile Payments To Friends With Square Cash

Mobile payment solution Square, which lets merchants accept debit cards and credit cards on their smartphone, has launched Square Cash — a new service that allows individuals to transfer money to their friends through an app or an email. It seems to be the simplest way to make payments on your mobile. “Square Cash makes it convenient to send money to anyone—without making them jump through hoops to retrieve it. Now it’s easier than ever to split a bill, send a birthday gift, or settle up with a friend, no matter where you are.” said Square Cash lead Brian Grassadonia....

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A New Google Experiment Hides Search Results URLs

There's a war against URLs. Browsers start to hide them from the address bar: some remove "http" from the URL (Chrome, Firefox), Opera removes parameters, Safari for iOS only shows the domain name, Chrome and Safari show queries instead of Google's search URLs. All in the name of simplifying the interface.



A new Google search experiment replaces search results URLs with site names or domain names, depending on their popularity. Google tested a similar feature in 2011.

Most people don't understand URLs and find them too complicated. That's why many of them use search engines instead of typing URLs in the address bar, even for sites they visit frequently.



Still, web addresses are helpful because they provide useful information and they can be easily shared. If you only display "New York Times" instead of any New York Times URL, it's not obvious if you're linking to the homepage, to a section of the site, to a NYTimes blog or a blog post. URLs sometimes include useful information like the date when an article was published, the topic of the article or categories for shopping sites.



Google already shows incomplete URLs for search results, only displays site names for news results and replaces some URL elements with linked breadcrumbs.

{ Thanks, Rubén. }

Inline Google Help

If you click the "Help" link when you use services like Gmail or Google Drive, Google no longer sends you to the Help Center by opening a new tab. Google shows a small panel with suggested articles related to the feature you're using and lets you use the search feature without leaving the app.



All the articles open inside the panel, you can move the panel using drag and drop and maximize it. The panel doesn't close when you click inside the app, so you can read Google's instructions and follow them.



Here are some screenshots from Gmail. Just click the gear button and select "Help" to see the help widget.

If you go to the contact manager, Google's suggested articles are about contacts.

Drag the header to move the help box.

Some Google services that use inline help: Gmail, Google Drive, Play Music, AdSense, YouTube, Google+.

Google Music's Feeling Lucky

Google Play Music has a new feature called "I'm Feeling Lucky" that creates a radio based on your listening history. If you subscribe to All Access, Google includes a lot of songs that aren't in your library, otherwise the feature is a fancy name for "shuffle".



Here are some screenshots from the Android app:

There's a "dice" animation while the playlist is generated:

You can reorder the songs, remove some of them or add all the songs to a playlist by tapping "save queue".

You can find a similar feature in the desktop interface: go to "Listen Now" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky Radio".

You get a different "Feeling Lucky" playlist every time you roll the dice and the songs from the playlist are usually related. Here's an example of Eurovision-related playlist:

Click "Refresh station" and you'll get a completely new playlist:

For the old-fashioned shuffle feature restricted to your library, go to "My Library" and click "Shuffle My Library". In the Android app, go to the "Songs" tab from the "My Library" section and tap "shuffle all".



{ Thanks, Zachary. }

A Test Of Character: 10 Font Games That Prove Typography Can Be Fun

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is the famous pangram for anyone who pays attention to fonts and the art of typography. If you haven’t heard this ever, then it’s time to exit the arena because the battle could get bloody as we head to some of the font games mentioned below. There will be a lot of kerning and only the strong characters will survive. You can’t turn tail. Well, I did manage to playfully throw in some font terms there. But it was all done to point out that playing around with typography can...

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F.lux Gets A Huge Update With Movie Mode And House F.lux Scheduling

The F.lux Windows app has just been given a rather significant update for Windows 7 and Windows 8 with some very cool new features. You can now F.lux your house with a schedule for Philips Hue, enter Movie Mode when you’re using your PC as a home theatre or disable it until morning if you’re planning on working all night. Every evening at 6.30pm, my screen starts to get less brighter and more Sepia-brownish-softer-colour. No, my monitor is not on the blink. Rather, that is my F.lux installation kicking in, a rather not-so-subtle hint to tell me to get off...

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What Is The Internet? We Asked Google Suggest. Here’s What It Told Us.

We love the Internet. MakeUseOf readers would give up alcohol, caffeine and various limbs before giving up on this network. That’s the value of the Internet. But what is it, exactly? Let’s ask Google, together. Google’s Suggest isn’t just a useful feature: it’s insight into the minds of millions. Start typing something into the search bar and Google will guess what you might be asking, based on what others have asked. This view into the collective can be disturbing, but I’m convinced the meaning of life is hidden somewhere in it. Tina showed you interesting Google Suggest results and what...

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Google Tests New Desktop Sign-in Page

Back in August, Google changed the sign-in page for mobile devices. A few readers report that they see the updated sign-in page in the desktop Chrome when opening Gmail.

It's strange to see a mobile page in a desktop browser, but it wouldn't be the first time when Google ported mobile sites or apps to the desktop. Most of the new features are added to the mobile sites first.

I haven't seen the new interface in a desktop browser, but the mobile sign-in page has an important issue: it doesn't allow browsers to autofill your password if you've previously signed in to a Google account. The sign-in page remembers all the accounts you've used to sign in, so you can quickly sign out and sign in to a different account just by choosing one of them.

{ Thanks, KH Subscribe and Arunraja. }

How Forge Makes It Simple To Publish Your Website

My first foray on the Internet was an Angelfire website. It was an unholy mess that made the TimeCube manifesto look like an aesthetic masterpiece sculpted by none other than Jony Ive and Michelangelo themselves. Without going into much detail, I shall just say that I used an excessive amount of <blink> and <marquee> tags, and leave it at that. Like most sites back then, it was static. That’s to say that there was no interactivity. Since then, there has been an explosion in web technologies that make it possible to create dynamic, engaging websites. But is there still a...

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The Coursera Of Europe: iversity Opens With 24 Free Courses And 100K Students

Berlin based iversity.org has planted its footprint in the ever-expanding MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) universe. It starts with a fresh bouquet of free courses and a strong student base of 115,000. For the present moment, 24 courses are on the catalog with more expected soon. The open courses have been designed by the top professors from Europe and the US according to the press release. iversity has started with free open courses at launch; the course catalog has a total of 24 for now (15 of which are in English, with the rest in German). The other courses will...

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Windows 8.1 now available, brings many new features to the table

Microsoft Windows 8 gets a new lease of life, with the Windows 8.1 update that went live last night across Microsoft servers. The update should show up in the Windows Marketplace and if it doesn’t, we suggest some patience as the rollout is happening sequentially. Windows 8.1, just like Windows 8, is a fresh departure from what we have come to think and see of Microsoft Windows. Windows 8 in of itself was radically different in terms of user interface and user experience, but Microsoft [...]

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NVIDIA announces Flame Works, Flex and GI Works technologies at Montreal

NVIDIA today announced three new dev tools at the Editor’s Day 2013 meet in Montreal Canada. The tools are a part of NVIDIA’s GameWorks library which has about 300 visual effects engineers working on it currently, many of whom hold PhDs. Making the announcement Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President, Content & Technology emphasised the cross platform nature of many of these tools. The GameWorks library consists of the following components: Visual FX SDK: Provides turnkey solut [...]

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Huawei dispels security fears, states no government has asked for its data

China's Huawei Technologies Ltd. has been trying to dispel fears that the company is controlled by China's Communist Party or might be a security risk. It has released a cybersecurity report stating that no government has ever asked information about its customer data. Huawei was founded by a former Chinese military engineer in 1987 and since then has established itself as the world's second-largest supplier of telecoms network gear. The company has reported a profit of 33 percent over the prev [...]

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Samsung launches Galaxy Trend and Star Pro smartphones in India

The Samsung Galaxy Trend and Star Pro are available online for Rs 8,260 and Rs 6,730 respectively. The two smartphones boast of Android Jelly Bean OS and dual-sim support. The Samsung Galaxy Trend has a 4-inch TFT screen with 800 x 480 pixels resolution and 233ppi pixel density. It has a 1GHz processor and runs on Android Jelly Bean operating system. The smartphone has 4GB internal storage expandable via microSD up to 32GB. The Galaxy Trend smartphone offers dual-sim, 2G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3 [...]

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Researchers claim that Apple and NSA can read your messages

Apple had recently released a statement on customer privacy stating that the company was unable to access or decrypt iMessage and FaceTime conversations. Researchers have refuted the company's claim at the Hack the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur. Researchers in a recent study of the iMessage protocol found that Apple has the ability to intercept and decrypt iMessages. Despite the fact that the messages are encrypted end-to-end, Apple handles the keys needed to encrypt and exchange the messages [...]

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Real Steel: World Robot Boxing launched as free to play download

Reliance Games has officially announced the launch of Real Steel: World Boxing on iOS and Android as a free to play download today. The game is inspired by 2011 DreamWorks film Real Steel, is built upon by the foundations laid down by its predecessor. The game features better graphics, new robots, more gameplay modes and head-to-head multiplayer. Real Steel: World Boxing has 24 bots in total including the likes of Zeus, Atom and Twin Cities, including eight new contenders, ten brand new arenas [...]

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RCom launches 'Awesome America' roaming pack for its postpaid GSM customers

Reliance Communications (RCom) has introduced a new international roaming pack for its postpaid GSM customers travelling to the U.S. Called the “Awesome America” pack, the operator is offering discount up to 98 percent on data usage and up to 76 percent on voice calling on roaming. The pack is available for Rs. 849 with validity of 30 days. The operator says under the new international roaming plan data charges have been reduced to Rs. 10 for 1MB on roaming in the U.S. “W [...]

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30% of orders on Snapdeal come from mobile phones

Online retailer Snapdeal's recent study on the m-commerce (mobile based transactions) trends reveals 30 percent of all orders placed over on the store are for mobile phones. According to Snapdeal, this trend has grown 10 times in the last 12 months. Samsung dominates the mobile traffic share from the various handset brands at 42 percent, followed by Nokia, Apple and Micromax. Android is the most popular operating system accounting for 71 percent of the traffic followed by iOS at 12 percent of t [...]

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Kobo launches Android tablet and e-book readers in India, starting from Rs. 7,999

Kobo has launched Kobo Aura HD, Kobo Glo, Kobo Touch e-readers and the Kobo Arc Android tablet in Indiat. The devices are available through Crossword, Croma and WHSmith retail stores. The Kobo Aura HD has a 6.8-inch Pearl E-Ink WXGA+ touchscreen. The company claims it has a battery life up to 2 months. The Aura HD features a front-lit e-reader technology. It comes with 4GB inbuilt memory expandable up to 32GB via the microSD card slot. The e-reader is priced at Rs 13,999. The Kobo Touch e-read [...]

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