Have It Your Way: Hide The Windows 8.1 Start Button

You probably know that Microsoft killed the Start button in Windows 8. With the Windows 8.1 update, they restored it, turning it into a shortcut button for the Start screen or desktop. Thing is, some users aren’t happy – they don’t like the Start button, and want to remove it. You Can’t Please Everyone Windows users. You’ve got to hand it to us, we know how to complain. Following the introduction of Windows 8, we complained at the lack of a Start button. At first, Microsoft held its nerve, but eventually relented in the face of users installing third party...

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3 Free Tools To Get Windows Experience Index In Windows 8.1

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It’s a well-known fact that Microsoft has dropped the GUI version Windows Experience Index from its latest Windows 8.1 operating system. Windows Experience Index, a feature first introduced with Windows Vista, evaluates and then rates your PC’s hardware. As some of you may know, even though the GUI version of WEI isn’t present in Windows […]

6 Ways to Watch Live TV on Windows 8

Watching TV has never been easier, with apps for smartphones and tablets streaming live pictures to your handheld device. It’s been tougher for desktop users, but with the release of Windows 8 several apps have come along that make enjoying TV on your computer much easier. Desktop and notebook owners have long had the advantage of TV cards and USB signal converters that enable the capture, display and recording of TV signals from terrestrial, satellite and cable providers. However, setting up these devices can be tricky, and in the case of the USB solutions, a drain on your system resources....

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Take The Guesswork Out Of Buying Gifts With These Cools Tools

The holiday season is upon us and just like every year you need to get gifts for family and friends. While the holidays are usually fun and relaxing, the days leading up to them are usually quite hectic. To be honest, remembering what your nephew wanted for Christmas and dealing with the hectic pre-season activities is a tough task. This is exactly why you need some tools to help you select the best gifts for everyone. In this article, I will show you some great tools you can use to come up with gift ideas, refine them, and materialize them...

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6 Really Easy Ways To Make Charity A Happiness Gift For Your Christmas

Christmas is a celebration. Thankfully, it is also a state of mind. When Yuletide comes around every year, we put love into our actions. We put thoughts into our gifts. We also place charity in our hearts. The Web makes it so much easier. Charity organizations have taken readily to the Web, and with a few innovations they make giving as easy as a click. Last year, we took a look at some tech savvy charities and the year before that we took Angela’s advice on how to charitable throughout the year and not simply wait for a special season....

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What To Back? Use Social Networks To Find Great Kickstarter Projects

Kickstarter projects are a great way to spend your hard-earned money on something truly fun and innovative. Some projects go super nova, at which point everyone writes about them, but most projects aren’t so lucky. There are several ways to find good Kickstarter projects to back, but most require some diligence and a bit of research. The simplest way to find those Kickstarter gems is to integrate your search with something you already do daily — namely, your social networks! With these feeds, you’ll always know what to back, who to back, and when. Twitter @CrowdFundingBB 5 Hottest New CrowdFunding...

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How to View your Old Notifications in Android

There were a couple of pending notifications sitting in the status bar of your Android phone and you have just tapped the “Dismiss” icon to clear them all. And then it occurred that you may have dismissed certain important notifications. Where did they go? Can you retrieve the old notifications even if they have have removed from the notifications bar?

Well if your phone is running a more recent version of Android, Jelly Bean or later you can get a log of notifications that have pushed by various apps. Here’s how.

Go to your Android home screen and tap the apps icon. Switch to the Widgets tab, tap and hold the 1×1 Settings Shortcut and place it on your your home screen. Now select “Notifications” from the available choices.

Tap the settings icon that you have placed on the home screen and it will display the notification history in reverse chronological order. You will know the name of the app that pushed the notification, the title of the notification and the time when that message was pushed.

You may also use the notifications shortcut to prevent certain apps from sending notifications to your phone. Just tap the name of an app and deselect the option that says “Show Notifications” from the App info page.

Credit: Stack Overflow

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This story, How to View your Old Notifications in Android, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 16/12/2013 under Android, Software

How To Install Windows 7/8.1 From Your Phone’s Micro SD Memory Card

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A couple of years ago, during the days of Windows XP and Vista to be precise, we all used to use traditional CDs and DVDs to install Windows operating system. Post the release of Windows 7 Beta in January 2009, a number of tools started appearing on the web to create bootable USBs that help […]

Skynet Edges Closer, Twitter Experiments, 40k Bitcoin Valuation [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Google buys Boston Dynamics (bringing Skynet closer to reality), Amazon starts selling its Kindle Fire tablets in installments, SteamOS arrives, Twitter experiments with location-based tweets, Microsoft Photosynth gets updated, Doctor On Demand debuts, and Winklevii (the Winklevoss twins) make a shocking prediction about Bitcoin. Google Buys Boston Dynamics Do not be alarmed: News broadcasts about Google acquiring Boston Dynamics are a fictional dramatization. Plz return 2 your homes immediately — Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) December 14, 2013 Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, an engineering firm with a slew of robots under its command. We only recently...

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Instagram Users Categorized - So Which Type Are You?

When Instagram reinvented the meaning of photo sharing, I am sure not many of us would have thought that we would discover photographic talents among our friends and family. In addition to taking pictures of everything under the sun, photo-filtering craze had caught on immediately after Instagram was launched. I have friends who, after spending years in their company, do not even have the slightest inclination towards art or photography. And these days the same friends are posting pictures of brightly lit skyscrapers and calling them ‘modern art’. The picture looks good, no doubt, and it also looks like it has been ripped out of 1960 photo album. Thanks to the filters, every single click of the camera turns into a masterpiece!



After some pretty interesting scientific research and data analysis, we have deciphered the mind and pattern behind these pictures. Sifting through a huge stack of Instagram pictures and burying our nose behind data for quite some time, we have been able to identify 10 different user type patterns emerge. These people are almost everywhere, they are among us, they are a part of our lives! They could be your close friends, your next door neighbors, and the old man down the street or your good ol’ colleagues. They could just as well be you. Which type are you anyway?

1. The obsessed Selfie – Always me. Always the same smile

They were the creators of the new term ‘selfie’! They defined and redefined it as well. Regardless of the time of the day or night, you could always spot them posing for their own cameras, smiling their perfect smile, minutely documenting their facial expressions from ‘a-wee-bit-too-close’ angle. You could see them taking a shot of themselves stranded in traffic or posing in front their bathroom mirrors. Well, you might think that the world could do well without selfies, but not everyone has the same sane thoughts like you and me! There is yet another manner in which you can spot these self obsessed selfies, their favorite Instagram filter is Mayfair. There you have it. Are you one among this crowd? Well, you know who you are.

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Secure Passwords v2.0

You want to have lengthy, complicated and unique passwords for every website that you use but that rarely happens in practice because complex passwords are impossible for anyone to remember.

Some people rely on password managers like LastPass or KeePass – they store all your passwords in an encrypted database which is then protected by a master password. You enter the master password and you instantly have access to all your stored user logins and passwords. LastPass and 1Password also offers apps for mobile devices.

A Unique Password for Every Website

Here’s a simple open-source app that I am internally using for managing the passwords of my various online accounts. The app is called Secure Passwords and it generates unique and strong passwords using the secure bcrypt algorithm.

Secure Passwords is available as a web app that you can use from any browser on any device, as a Chrome extension, as an Android App that you can sideload or you can download the single-page app and save it to your Dropbox for offline use.

To get started, enter your user name (or login id), the site’s domain name where you are trying to log in (e.g. google or facebook), your master password and hit the generate button.

The generated passwords meet all the criteria for strong passwords – they are made of digits, special characters and letters are in mixed-case. The passwords are generated using bcrypt which is still resistant to brute-force attacks and therefore it will be impossible for anyone to decrypt the master pass phrase should any of password ever gets leaked online.

You only have to remember the master key (pass phrase) and tool will generate unique passwords base on the site name and the user name. Also, the tool computes passwords in your web browser itself and not a single byte of data ever leaves your machine.

The source code is available for download on Github (↓).

Related reading: Keep your Online Accounts Safe and Secure

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This story, Secure Passwords v2.0, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 16/12/2013 under Password, Internet

How To Stop Gmail From Automatically Loading Images In Emails

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Those of you who have logged-into your Gmail account on or after 12th December probably have seen automatically load images in emails option upon signing into your account. On December 12th, Gmail team announced that Gmail will now automatically display images in emails, meaning users don’t need to click Display images below or always display […]

The Secret To Finding The Perfect Writing App That Works For You

Writing is difficult enough as it is. Stop making it more so by wrestling with an unfriendly writing application. Given that we live in the Digital Age, it’s very likely that you do all of your writing on a computer or some other digital device. It can be a little more complex than simply using a pen and a notebook, because of the wide variety of options available to you. From word counters to idea generators, from fancy timers to writing metrics, there’s plenty to draw your attention away from your writing. Even the choice of distraction-free writing tools is...

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CreativeLIVE Launches Unique 24/7 Live Education Broadcast For Free Classes

CreativeLIVE is taking a lead with its 24/7 live online education broadcast network. What’s more noteworthy about the classes on offer is that they will be completely free. CreativeLive will host live classes on five free channels: Art & Design, Business & Money, Maker & Craft, Music & Audio and Photo & Video. The round-the-clock classes, seven days a week, will help you switch on your learning wherever you are in the world. Live broadcasts of instructor led classes is just a step away from prominence. Google recently launched Helpouts with live video as the instructional medium; Google’s offering is...

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New Photosynth Brings Spin, Panorama, Walk and Wall for Immersive 3D Photos

Microsoft’s Photosynth is a fantastic way to create 3D panoramas to really give you a look and feel of a place. And it’s just got a whole lot better. A preview of the new Photosynth offers a peek at the different upcoming features, which Microsoft calls Spin, Panorama, Walk and Wall. Spin: Spin around any object to capture it from all angles. It only lets you go all around though, not up and down as well. (20-30 photos) Panorama: Stand in one place and turn in every direction to capture a 360-degree view of everything around you. Again, only go...

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Google Spreadsheet Gets Offline Support, Speed-up and Bunch of Features

Google Spreadsheet, the spreadsheet app of what was formerly Google Docs and is now Google Drive, already lets you do pretty cool things, including making your own RSS reader. Well, Google’s now amped it up with more functionality, including offline support and some cool features. Google Docs and Slides have worked offline for some time and Google Spreadsheet is now getting the same treatment, provided you’re running Chrome. While you can’t create new spreadsheets, you can edit existing ones offline, which will be synced when you reconnect to the Internet. It’s a one-time setup. Of course, if you aren’t yet...

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Balance Transfer Trick for All Indian Mobile Operators - 100% Working

Mobile Balance Transfer is one of the very unique service provided by mobile operators. Using this method your friend or you can transfer mobile balance to other mobile within few seconds.

In today’s post I will share a awesome trick which will help you transfer balance from one mobile to other.

But before every thing , this service is not available for all mobile operators. Some operators which provide this service are – BSNL, Airtel, Idea, Tata Docomo, Vodafone, Aircel, Reliance, Uninor. If you are already using this service provider well and good, if not, to enjoy this you may have to port to these networks.

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Types Of Small Business Marketing Automation Tools

Businesses that market to other companies can make money directly and indirectly. When done directly, one business sells straight to another business. For example, a business might sell office furniture at wholesale prices to another business, helping the buyer furnish five satellite offices. With indirect business sales, a company might sell furniture to another company through a reseller. Marketing automation tools like social marketing and email marketing are a part of this and other sell processes.

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Skype on Linux: Is It Functional, Or Falling Behind?

Skype, the popular chat service known for its high video quality, has had a Linux port of its client around for several years. However, like a handful of other Linux ports, it isn’t quite the same client as you might find on Windows or Mac OS X. Is the Linux port of Skype still a functional application, or is it in need of some tender loving care by its developers? Let’s take a look. First Impressions When you first download Skype for Linux, you’ll notice that the version is 4.2 (which means it’s finally out of its “beta” phase), which...

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How To Make A Shared Christmas Shopping List Using Google Shortlists Or Pinterest

You’ve no doubt been in this position before: a group of people are trying to decide what gift to buy the extended family for the holiday season. My family is in the same boat. While trying to collaborate on Christmas gift ideas, I thought, “We both have computers and smartphones, so how can we make this easier?” This got me thinking about the best way to share a visual list of potential gifts between a couple of people (or more) privately. Here are two great solutions I’m sure you’ll enjoy too. Google Shopping Shortlist Google Shopping is yet another great...

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