Microsoft Releases ‘Bing Top Searches of 2012 Report’

Microsoft has released the ‘Bing Top Searches of 2012 Report’ – a list of the top most searched keywords, celebrities and events performed by users of the Bing search engine. Usually this kind of data is published in mid to end December, but this year Microsoft decided to release it almost a month in advance.

Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries of the last 11 months, the Bing Top Searches of 2012 Report highlights the most searched in a number of different categories that include, people of different professions (such as sports star, musicians, Olympians, celebrities, etc), celebrity events, news stories, movies, song, tech, TV, fashion, holiday destination and others.

Here is the report in brief.

Most Searched Person Of The Year

Top 10 comparison for 2011 and 2012:

Rank	2012	2011
1	Kim Kardashian	Justin Bieber
2	Justin Bieber	Kim Kardashian
3	Miley Cyrus	Jennifer Aniston
4	Rihanna	Lindsay Lohan
5	Lindsay Lohan	Jennifer Lopez
6	Katy Perry	Britney Spears
7	Selena Gomez	Katy Perry
8	Jennifer Aniston	Megan Fox
9	Nicki Minaj	Lady Gaga
10	Taylor Swift	Miley Cyrus

Most Searched Sports Stars

Rank	Sports Stars
1	Peyton Manning
2	Tiger Woods
3	Tim Tebow
4	Maria Sharapova
5	Kobe Bryant
6	Serena Williams
7	Lamar Odom
8	LeBron James
9	Cristiano Ronaldo
10	Terrell Owens

Most Searched Musician

Rank	Musicians
1	Justin Bieber
2	Whitney Houston
3	Katy Perry
4	Selena Gomez
5	Rihanna
6	Nicki Minaj
7	Taylor Swift
8	Beyoncé
9	Chris Brown
10	Jennifer Lopez

Most Searched Olympic Athletes

Rank	Olympian
1	Serena Williams
2	Lolo Jones
3	LeBron James
4	Michael Phelps
5	McKayla Maroney
6	Hope Solo
7	Misty May-Treanor
8	Gabby Douglas
9	Usain Bolt
10	Ryan Lochte

Most Searched Reality TV Stars

Rank	Reality TV Star
1	Kim Kardashian
2	Khloe Kardashian
3	Kourtney Kardashian
4	Kate Gosselin
5	Honey Boo Boo
6	Snooki
7	Emily Maynard
8	Bethenny Frankel
9	Kim Richards
10	Teresa Giudice

Most Searched Celeb Couples

Rank	Celebrity Couples
1	Chris Brown & Rihanna
2	Kristen Stewart & Robert Pattinson
3	Khloe Kardashian & Lamar Odom
4	Kim Kardashian & Kanye West
5	Selena Gomez & Justin Bieber
6	Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt
7	Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes
8	Will Smith & Jada Pinkett Smith
9	David & Victoria Beckham
10	Beyonce Knowles & Jay-Z

Most Searched Celeb Event

Rank	Celebrity Event
1	Beyonce's baby
2	Jessica Simpson baby
3	Whitney Houston death
4	Snooki's baby
5	Kourtney Kardashian baby
6	Coachella
7	Rodney King overdose
8	Grammy Awards
9	Jennifer Garner baby
10	Academy Awards

Most Searched News Stories

Rank	News Stories
1	iPhone 5
2	2012 Elections
3	2012 Olympics
4	Hurricane Sandy
5	Honey Boo Boo Reality Show
6	Gangnam Style Dance
7	KONY 2012
8	Academy Awards
9	Kindle Fire HD
10	Facebook IPO

Most Searched Tech

Rank	Social Media		Rank	Consumer Electronics
1	Facebook		1	iPhone 5
2	Twitter		2	iPad
3	Myspace		3	Samsung Galaxy S III/Samsung Galaxy S3
4	LinkedIn		4	Kindle
5	Tumblr		5	iPad 3
6	Instagram		6	iPod Touch
7	Reddit		7	Xbox
8	StumbleUpon		8	PlayStation 3
9	Digg		9	iPhone 4S
10	Klout		10	Windows 8

Most Searched Movies

Rank	Movies
1	The Avengers
2	Dark Knight Rises
3	Titanic
4	Magic Mike
5	Prometheus
6	Breaking Dawn Part 2
7	Flight
8	Bachelorette
9	Snow White and the Huntsman
10	Dark Shadows

Most Searched Song

Rank	Song
1	Psy - Gangnam Style
2	Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe
3	Justin Bieber - Boyfriend
4	Gotye - Somebody that I used to know
5	Fun.- We Are Young
6	One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful
7	Drake- The Motto
8	Maroon 5 Feat. Wiz Khalifa - Payphone
9	The Wanted- Glad You Came
10	Katy Perry- Part Of Me

Most Searched Videos

Rank	TV Shows
1	American Idol
2	Dancing with the Stars
3	The Young and the Restless
4	The Walking Dead
5	Family Guy
6	Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
7	Glee
8	Vampire Diaries
9	The Bachelor
10	Game of Thrones

View the full report and a presentation at the Bing blog.

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The Best Free Apps to Analyze Your Android’s Storage Space Usage

Storage space is limited on mobile devices and tablets. The most money can buy is 64GB on a tablet and 32GB on the smaller form factor of phones, but even these are prohibitively expensive devices. Budget conscious customers usually settle on a lower spec device such as 4GB or the moderately priced 8GB and 16GB phones and then extend the storage capacity with memory cards, which are surprisingly cheap these days. But even microSD cards are space limited to a maximum of 64GB. Even more frustrating is, most phones wouldn’t support memory cards higher than 32GB. Besides, you still need phone memory to install apps.

The only way avoid running out of space is to delete files which you don’t need. Here are some excellent apps that show you exactly what files and folders are hogging the most space in your device, so that you can decide whether they are worth keeping.

Storage Analyser

This app can analyse Sdcards, external Sdcards, USB storage devices, and system partitions and show you the contents by size. It will also show you the space used by applications using App2SD (.android_secure folder), and data left over by apps already removed in /sdcard/Android/data/ and /data/data.

You can sort the contents listed by the amount of files, the date or by name. There is an option to filter out the content you are aware of (for instance, video files) to make the rest more noticeable. A useful feature is that you can delete no longer necessary data directly from the app, without opening external file managers. You can also copy and move files directly from the App.

Storage Analyser is designed to work with both phones and tablets.

Memory Usage

Memory usage is a simple but functional tool to find out which files and folders are using the most space. It lacks the filtering and sorting options you will find on Storage Analyser, but the standard ‘sort by size’ is very effective in weeding out the space hogs. The interface is simple and clean and that alone more than makes up for the lack of features.

 

Like Storage Analyser, Memory Usage can open and delete files directly from the app, but copy and move operations are not supported.

DiskUsage

If you are looking for a WinDirStat like visual map, then DiskUsage is the app for you. This app can analyse app storage, storage cards and sdcards, and show you space usage in a spatial map. You can tap to zoom into the map, several levels deep, to view details, and tap outside of the folder to zoom out.

Other tools that you might want to consider are:

Disk Space: Another app that shows a visual map of the storage space. The map is not zoomable and therefore gets very crowded at the lower end. The folder/file names are barely readable

FreeSpace: Looks pretty good judging from the screenshots, but couldn't test it because it kept crashing.

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Find your Friends crush name - Facebook Prank

This is Fourth  post in the sires of posts on “ Facebook Pranks”. If you didn't the checked the previous posts you can check it from here..

Facebook Pranks collection

Many of our shy friends wont let us know about their crush name, But what if we are capable of finding out our friends crush name, We can tease them a lot ...!

This seems to be interesting wright ? yeah it will be...
You will start having more fun, once you started using this..

How this prank works

You will send a link to your friend, which will look like Love calculator. You will somehow make him believe that it can calculate love between people very accurately. So when your friend  enters his name along his crush name, instead of calculating the love, it will send  your friends crush name to you  ;)

Few days ago one my friend sent me link saying that it is a perfect love calculator, I entered some names of Hollywood actors to check it, some how i didn't enter My crush name ;)

Now its time for you to know your friends crush name

Finding your friends crush name

There are several website through which you can make this prank to work, here i will a show a tutorial of bext site among them and i will mention the other sites name so that you can check them latter.

5 ways to find your friends crush name

1. Crush Bits

1.  First click here to register


2.  Enter all the details provided over there and make sure that you enter a valid email address and remember the password


3.  After entering the details click on the “create link”. It will redirect you to another page which contains a link,copy it and that is your link, which you have to share it on Facebook. Simply send it to your friend on Facebook or just make it as your status.


4. When your friend opens that link this is how it looks like, when he enters his name and his crush name both if them will get saved in your account on the same site. you can check it by logging in to your account from HERE.

2. secret-loves

3. Magic crush

4. crush page

5. crush007

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Fake news Generator - Facebook Prank

This is the Third post in the sires of posts on “ Facebook Pranks”. If you didn't the checked the previous posts you can check it from here..

Facebook Pranks collection

What are fake news generators ?
how can you Prank others ?

Using fake news generators you can create fake news about friend and you can share the link on facebook, so the people who visit the link will be directed to the site where there will be fake news about any of your friend that you wish.

When i saw a link regarding my friend, I really thought that was a genuine information. Later i came to know that, it was a prank my my friend. Even many of my friends thought that it is a genuine link. That made me to Google about this fake news generators and i found few sites regarding it.

4 Fake news generators/Creators  to play pranks on Facebook.

Out of all the fakenews generators on internet the noob is very interesting to use. you can add your frieds profile picture in the fake news. Check it out

1. Noob – fake news generator

Here is the way to create fake news using Noob

1. Go to  http://www.noob.co.in/


2.  In the first box there will be about 20 fake headlines, from which you can pick one. Make sure that , the headline should be similar to your friends activities,so that there are more chances for you to make people believe.


3. In the 2^nd and 3^rd boxes enter your friend’s first name and second name of the one, on whom you want to play the prank.


4.  In the fourth box you have to enter your friend’s Facebook USERNAME so that he his profile picture will appear on the site. To get his username just open his profile and in the URL copy the text after Facebook ,for Example if your open my profile it will be like www.facebook.com/saicharan123. so “saicharan123” is my username for Facebook  In a similar way add your friends username over there. This is optional and if you don’t want your friends profile pic to display over there you can skip this step.


5. Enter you location over there and click on Fish you can share that link on Facebook,and you can prank your friends with that . :D

You can aslo check the folowing other similar sites

2. Wasarested

3. The Newspaper Clipping Generator

4. Fakeawish

Make sure that the news you will select to Prank your friend should be smilar to his activities , Only then you can make this prank work..!

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7 Best Free Wardrobe Organizer Apps for Android

Two years ago we looked at some of the solutions that were available at that time for cataloguing the contents of our wardrobe and managing the same from our computer, creating matches, deciding what to wear etc. There were no good wardrobe organizing apps for Android at that time. Today, we have a handful, and we are going to find out which works best.

ClosetVirtual

ClosetVirtual is a wardrobe organizer that lets you manage your clothing from your Android phone. Decide what clothes to wear, or mix and match without walking into your closet, or opening a drawer.

The home screen of the app has six buttons – Closet, Camera, Outfit, Calendar, Wishlist and Search.

 

 

The Closet is where all your clothes goes into and this may include shoes, accessories and any other thing that you wear when you go out. To add your wearable items, whip out your phone camera (the camera button in the home screen is for this purpose) and shoot pictures of them. Then go to Closet and add them by category (top, bottom, shoes etc). You are allowed to add a short description, tags, brand name, season to wear and color. These information will come handy later when you use the Search feature.

If you can’t get a clean picture with your camera (poor light, clothes in laundry or even poor camera), you can search for images on the web from within the app. Once you’ve added all your clothes, you can now create outfits by matching and mixing. You can pre-decide what to wear and associate it with a date in the calendar. This also lets you keep track of what you wore during the previous days so that you can avoid wearing the same outfit too often.

Personal Closet Lite

Personal Closet Lite offers a huge array of tools to manage your wardrobe in your phone. Like ClosetVirtual you begin by adding items to your closet. This you can do that by taking pictures with your phone, adding pictures already present on your phone or searching for images on the Internet. You can crop the picture, straighten, rotate and even flip it horizontally or vertically. This is useful if you take picture of yourself in the mirror. You can add two pictures for each item – one from the front and another from the back.

 

Add name, description, category, sub-category, style (casual, evening, work etc), color, season to wear, brand, size and even price, date of purchase and availability (laundry, lent out etc ) among other things. To create outfits you actually drag and drop your clothes on a virtual mannequin. You can decide what to wear on a certain day and add your outfits to the calendar.

Additional tools include easy access to several fashion magazines, shopping sites, reminders etc.

ClosetLovin

ClosetLovin is simple and very easy to use. It’s designed for women, but men can use it too if they don’t mind adding shirts to the “tops” section and trousers to the “bottoms”.

 

There are only three categories available, hardcoded into the app – tops, bottoms and accessories. There are however multiple sub-categories available which you can edit.

To add your clothes, use the built in camera app to take a picture and with one touch add them to the collection. Adding subcategories, title, season and style are optional, but adding them will allow you to sort through your clothes easily when your collection grows large.

To create outfits, scroll through the images and select the ones you wish to mix.

iDressUp

iDressUp provide a simple and clear interface to mix and match your clothes, shoes, accessories in your mobile or tablet and schedule your daily outfits. You can plan what you wear tomorrow, next week, month and even year with iDressUp, and track your outfits history to avoid repeating them too frequently.

 

There are two tabs on the program - Calendar and Wardrobe. The wardrobe is where you add your clothes and the calendar is where you plan your outfits. Unlike, other programs where you have a separate outfit section to mix and match, in iDressUp this has been merged with the calendar. So you have to create outfits and immediately assign it to a particular date. An outfit maintenance page is scheduled for the next version.

The wardrobe is similar to those of other apps. You can arrange your clothes by category, color, brand, and season, and then use filters when you browse through your virtual wardrobe.

ANDress 2

ANDress 2 has one of the cleanest interface and it’s pretty rich on features too.

 

With just a few taps you add pictures of your clothes and file them under a type or category and subcategory. Choose a color from a large palate and assign a 5-star rating, which is optional. The rest of the details such as brand and season non-essential are optional too. Once you have added all your garments you can view them under ‘Clothes’ nicely listed by type, name and rating, and of course, a thumbnail picture.

To create outfits, scroll through the various thumbnails until you have found the perfect match. Then name and save the outfit. If you can’t decide what to wear, let the app generate an outfit for you. All you have to do is tell what the weather is like (hot, cold, any) and ANDress 2 will generate a random outfit by matching top, bottoms, shoes and other accessories.

Stylish Girl and Cool Guy

Stylish Girl and Cool Guy are two similar apps from the same developer for the different sexes. Both apps function as a virtual closet organizer as well as fashion assistant, on-line shopping portal, a bag packer for vacation trips, and an outfit album. Stylish Girl and Cool Guy have a well designed interface that looks actually fashionable on your phone.

 

 

Explore your closet and take pictures of your clothes. Once you have added them to Stylish Girl or Cool Guy you can create outfits by mixing and matching pictures of your clothes on a white canvas. The app displays all your clothes simultaneously. Just scroll the categories and pick stuff for your outfits. A filtering option lets you quickly navigate fast by filtering your results (e.g. search for summer clothes only).

The Calendar tool lets you save outfits for a specific dates and decide in advance what you will year the coming or even the coming month. The Suitcase tool is like a virtual baggage packer where you pick outfits from your closet to take with you on trips.

Also included is a shopping portal (shopstyle.com) where you can browse tons of fashion items from the biggest fashion retailers. You can compare prices and looks, and mix the things you want to buy with your own clothes to see if they match, before you actually buy them. Finally, there is a share feature that lets you share pictures of your clothes with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

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Facebook Fake wall post creator - Facebook Prank

This is the Second Post in the series of posts on “Facebook Pranks “. Hope you enjoyed pranking your friends with the first Prank, If not check it from here.

 Facebook Pranks 1 : Ghost profile Prank

Facebook Fake wall posts Creator/ Generator.

“Fake wall posts” are some sort of images which look similar to the facebook conversations, you can create images as if someone had a commented on any status and had a conversation over there..

Confused??

OK Check the Image Below, As you know this is not a screen shot of  Real wall post conversation actually, I created this image using  using “fake wall generator”.

Now I know that, even you are interested to create such Fake wall post; I don’t want you to wait any longer here you go...

How to Create Fake Facebook wall posts .

Things  you need

1. A creative concept or conversation to surprise your friends


2.  Image of people if you want to add them in conversation(not needed if they are in your friends list)


3. Finally, a Facebook account ;)

Here is the procedure to create Fake Fall posts

1. First Go to http://wallmachine.com

2. Click on  “F Connect” to log in into your Facebook account. Now it will automatically redirect you to a page where you can create fake wall posts as you wish....

3. Now this is how the page look like and check the image to know how to edit it...!

You can just double click on the text to add your own Text.
and for images click on the image and choose “ Facebook friends” to get their images in a easy manner.
If you want to upload some others pic who is not there in your friends list then you can click on the image and upload an image by selecting “ upload image “

4. Now you can simply take a screen shot of it and you can even prank your friends with funny conversations...

Note :- Not only fake conversations you  can also create fake relationship updates, fake image conversation  fake “like” activities and lot more using the similar way...

Just try to create fake post and You will love to see good response from your friends
but before that check the few Fake conversations which are funny and i found them  on Google :D

This is the Fake Wall post i  created

Check the Fake wall post Of Salman Khan (Funny )

Fake wall post for Bin Laden ;)

Hope you will try you own versions of "fake walls"
Stay tuned for much more pranks  :)
Comment here if you facing any problem in creating the fake wall posts....

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Photivo, an Insanely Powerful Camera RAW and Image Editor

There are plenty of image processing software - from expensive professional tools like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom to free software such as Gimp and Picasa. With a few exception, most of them can handle RAW files well as far as viewing and light processing is concerned. For advanced RAW processing and correction people generally use Adobe products or the software that comes with their digital camera. While most software try to strike a balance between functionality and simplicity, Photivo is all about “raw” power. If you thought Adobe Lightroom is powerful, you haven’t seen Photivo.

What is Photivo?

Photivo is an open source image processing software that offers an impressive array of tools and adjustment options to enhance images. It handles most common image formats as well as RAW files of almost all popular camera manufacturers. Instead of providing tools based on a single algorithm, Photivo tries to provide the best algorithms available. This means you have multiple tools to sharpen images, multiple tools to remove noise and more than a couple to adjust brightness.

None of these algorithms are better or worse than the other, and it’s possible to get the exact same results using different algorithms, just their workflow will be different. To get the most out of Photivo, it’s therefore essential that you know about these algorithm, their benefits and drawbacks. The sheer number of tools can be intimidating at first, and you may wonder how to proceed. You will find lots of redundant tools that you will have to choose. Deciding which one to use can be quite tasking.

Photivo is definitely not for novices and even pro users may occasionally be at a loss. But you can always play with the options and sliders and see the results in real-time preview.

Some of the various tools available in Photivo are:

• CA correction, Green equilibration, line denoise, badpixel reduction, wavelet denoise, median filters on RAW data.
• Perspective correction (tilt and turn), distorsion and geometry (also defish) correction
• Demosaicing: Bilinear, VNG, VNG4, PPG, AHD, DCB, mod. AHD, VCD, LMMSE, AMaZE
• RGB correction, Texture, Detail, Denoise, Hue, Saturation.
• Tonemapping, Dynamic range compress
• Several local contrast filters (HiRaLoAm (Local contrast), texture contrast, local contrast stretch).
• Sharpen (Edge avoiding wavlets, USM, Highpass, Inverse diffusion, Wiener filter, Gradient sharpen).
• Denoise, seperately on Luminance and Color (Edge avoiding wavelets, GreyCStoration, Wavelet, Masked bilateral, Pyramid) and via a hue or luminance sensitive denoise curve.
• Adaptive saturation.
• Film grain simulation.
• Black and white conversion.
• (Split) Toning.
• Cross processing.
• Gradual overlay (like Cokin(R) GND filters).
• Vignetting.
• Softglow / Orton.
• Texture overlay (external texture)
• Fake tilt/shift, toy effect

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Ghost profile on Facebook - Facebook Prank !!!

This is my first post in the sires of posts on “ Facebook Pranks”. You can check all the pranks from here

Facebook Pranks collection

This post is about the Facebook prank through which you can scar your friends for sure. So are you ready to scar your friends with this prank?

Well before that let me tell my experiences with this “Ghost Profile prank”.

My Experience with  "Facebook Prank of Ghost"

Few weeks ago when I was chatting with one of my Collage mate, He sent me link on Facebook chat and asked me to see that profile. Without any thought I opened the link and it was just a Facebook profile of someone but the profile picture, and status seemed to be little odd. And when I clicked something on that profile, Out of nowhere a scary Ghost face appeared on the screen tearing the screen with some wired sound. The image itself is looking scary and just think about my situation wearing a head phone...!
It really scared me, After that I thought to use the same prank on my friends to piss them off

When my turn comes to prank my friends, Believe it or not few my friends shouted in fear with this...!
It works even better on girls and I am sure that it will screw them up...!

Facebook Pranks 1:- Ghost Profile Prank (with link)

It is not that difficult to execute this prank on your friends, you are just few steps away from it ;)

1. First Copy this link and Send it to your friend

http://goo.gl/czFaf

2.  Lie him that it is a Profile of a dead person, (somehow scar him with your story  )

3. Ask him to click on the “photos” option to check the image

4. When he is trying to click there, the Ghost animation will be on screen,

So what are you waiting for Send that link to your friends and have Fun
Happy Pranking

Note: please don’t try this on Heart patients as this my effect their pulse rate **

Soon i will be posting many Facebook Pranks, Stay tuned...!

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Security Hole Allows Pirates to Get Windows 8 For Free

A new security hole has been discovered in Microsoft’s product activation process that allows pirates to get a legitimate copy of Windows 8 for free. The loophole is based around the ongoing Windows Media Center promotion that is giving away free Media Center keys to Windows 8 Pro users until January next year. Essentially, all pirates need to do is receive an upgrade key from Microsoft and use it to convert an illegal copy of the operating system into a genuine one.

With previous versions of Windows pirates relied on volume keys to activate illegal copies of the operating system. Windows would bypass activation when volume keys were used to make it easier for OEMs to mass deploy the operating system on their machines. Since there is no technical limits on the number of possible activations, some software pirates have exploited volume licensing to acquire illegitimate copies of Windows.

This is not possible with Windows 8 as Microsoft no longer allows volume keys – each copy of Windows 8 requires a unique activation key. Until the discovery of the new security hole the only way out for pirates was to use local KMS (Key Management Server) to activate their copies for 180 days, and then rearm their copies every six months. However, this new and embarrassing security hole could enable practically anybody to acquire a genuine copy of Windows 8 without paying anything, thanks to Microsoft’s generous promotion.

Basically, this is how it works: pirates install Windows 8 Pro using any valid key, even if it's in use and, once the system is installed, activate it with a KMS server. Then request a free Windows Media Center upgrade key from Microsoft, install the Windows Media Center pack using the key provided and then activate Windows. Since your new product key is valid and unique, you'll activate permanently with no issues.

This is made possible because Microsoft don’t bother to check if the key you are currently using is valid. As long as the system is activated, even if it is activated with KMS, it will take the key and apply the upgrade. Since the WMC key comes directly from Microsoft and is unique for each user, it activates Windows 8 Pro permanently.

Now that the word is out through Reddit, Microsoft will likely to add a key check before they allow product activation.

Photo credit: Computer pirate from BigStockPhoto

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Firefox For Android Adds Support For ARMv6 Processors

If you are running an older generation Android phone and have no immediate plans to upgrade, here’s some good news – Mozilla had just announced that it has made Firefox for Android available on phones using ARM’s older v6 architecture. The open source browser has been out for a while but until now was available only on Android 2.2 and up, running on phones equipped with ARMv7 processors. The update will enable Firefox for Android to run on at least 500 million more Android phones, Mozilla estimates.

According to Mozilla, “roughly half of the nearly 500 million Android phones in use today run on ARMv6 architecture.” This include some familiar names such as HTC Status, HTC ChaCha, Samsung Galaxy Ace, Motorola Fire XT and LG Optimus Q.

The new Firefox for Android will run on ARMv6 phones with at least 800MHZ processor and minimum 512MB RAM.

Firefox for Android also adds new accessibility features to make browsing the Web on a mobile phone easier for the visually impaired. It also integrates seamlessly with TalkBack, the Android screen reader, with no need for additional configuration or installations.

Firefox also support advanced accessibility features recently introduced to Android, including Explore by Touch and Gesture Navigation. Explore by Touch is an Android feature that makes it easier for the visually impaired to browse the Web using speech output, sounds and vibrations.

You can download the new Firefox for Android from the Google Play Store.

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How to Hide Drive Space Indicator Bars in Windows

In Windows Vista (and later in Windows 7 and now in Windows 8), Microsoft introduced a visual drive space indicator in the form of a colored bar that show up against a drive when you open Windows Explorer. Looking at the indicator you can quickly tell how much the drive has filled and how much space is available. The indicator appears blue when there is plenty of space left, but once the drive consumes more than 90% of the available space, the indicator turns red. The trouble is, percentage is not always a good measurement of free drive space.

Five years ago, 250GB and 320GB hard disks were the norm and 40GB partitions or even 20GB partitions were not unusual. Filling 90% of this partition will have left only 4GB or 2GB of free space. This was critical even by 2007 standards, so it made sense to set the warning threshold at 10% free space (or 90% fill).

Switch to 2012. Now we have 1TB, 2TB and 3TB hard drives, and partition sizes are also growing proportionately. If you have a 500GB partition, you will trip the “critical space” threshold even when you have a comfortable headroom of 50GB free space left on the drive. The indicator bar will turn red calling your attention to an issue that doesn’t exist. I know you can ignore it, but it’s still annoying and a pet peeve of mine.

Unfortunately, you can neither adjust the threshold percentage nor change the red color to something else (blue, perhaps?). Your only resort is to remove the indicator bar completely. If you think you can live without the indicator bar, then here is how to hide it.

1. Open Registry editor (Press Win+R to open the run box, type regedit and press Enter).

2. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Drive

3. On the right-pane, right click on TileInfo. Remove the phrase System.PercentFull;

The key should read the following:
Before: prop:*System.PercentFull;System.Computer.DecoratedFreeSpace;System.Volume.FileSystem
After: prop:*System.Computer.DecoratedFreeSpace;System.Volume.FileSystem

Open Windows Explorer, and the drive space indicator should be gone. If you don’t see the changes immediately, restart Windows Explorer.

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Prevent Applications from Auto Pinning to Windows 8 Start Screen

Traditionally, program installers would place shortcuts of installed programs on the desktop, start menu and occasionally and optionally on the quick start menu. Now that the start menu is gone, on Windows 8, where does these shortcuts end up on? Right, on the start screen. Previously, a couple of additional shortcuts on the start menu didn’t matter because the start menu was small, didn’t expand more than it is necessary and the icons themselves were tiny. On Windows 8’s start screen, the icons are fat and thick. Install a handful of programs and your start screen will elongate by another foot or so.

AutoPin Controller is a free program that takes care of this issue by temporarily putting a hold on programs wanting to pin tiles to your start screen. All you have to do is click on the “Lock Pin to start screen feature” button before you install a program. After installation, click another button to disengage the lock. This is particularly useful when you are about to install a large number of application.

It would have been great if AutoPin Controller was automatic, but it’s not. So you have to remember to run this tool before commence installing a program.

Alternatively, just keep an eye on the installation process. Most installers will ask you whether you want shortcuts placed on the start menu/start screen and desktop.

Another feature of AutoPin Controller is that it allows you to reset the Start Screen with one click. Resteiing the start screen will remove all tiles/shortcuts placed by third party programs and set them to first logon state.

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How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Note: This is only for Facebook Pages not your personal Facebook profile.

PageCovery

PageCovery allows users to schedule their cover photo thus making it easy for brands, agencies and publishers to schedule cover photo changes at different intervals of the day, week or month. For instance, restaurants can promote special preparation via cover photos at different intervals of the day like lunch and dinner. Brands with different products can rotate images of their products on the cover photo by hour or day.

PageCovery has 4 types of scheduler – Day, Date, Live Feed and Social Feed.

Day Scheduler allows users to schedule cover photo changes by day of the week at specific timing. The schedule will repeat itself at preset timing on the specific days. This is perfect for brands running repeat promotions at specific timing of each day.

Date Scheduler allows users to schedule cover photo changes at specific dates and timing. The schedule will run once and remove itself upon completion. This is useful for scheduling important events and promotions in advance and ensure that the cover photo is changed at the correct day and time even when you are not around.

Live Feed Scheduler allows users to display live image feed directly onto Facebook cover photo which changes automatically at every minute interval. Perfect for streaming real-time images via cover photo.

Finally, Social Feed Scheduler allows users to display the most recent image of your Pinterest or Instagram account onto Facebook cover photo automatically.

On free accounts only the Day Scheduler is available, and the number of schedules is limited to 5 which isn’t enough to cover the entire week. But if you are willing to shell out some 30 odd dollars every month, you can try out all the different schedulers. Now I agree, PageCovery is a novel application but $30/month is expensive. And that’s for PER PAGE. If you have, say, three Facebook Page, the cost increases by a factor of three, and that’s ridiculous.

Cover Live!

Cover Live is another new application that enables brands and agencies to automatically update their Facebook cover photo without having to do it manually.

Cover Live lets you change cover photo on a specific date and time. Free accounts are limited to 5 changes per month and all cover images carry a watermark. Unfortunately, you cannot set a schedule that repeats every week or month.

But there are other triggers available, like you can change the cover photo as soon as your page receives a certain number of likes, so that you can present a thank you note or a celebratory image. Another way to trigger a change is to use an externally hosted JSON or XML file. Cover Live will look for a certain key and value which you have to define, and as soon as the conditions meet, it will update the cover image. You can set how often Cover Live will check for these triggers. The default value is 15 minutes but it can be as short as 1 minute.

Want to go premium? That will be only 100 Euros a month please, and yes, per Facebook Page.

via NirmalTV and SocialGo

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One Year Ago: Best Subtitle Support in Media Player, Fake Incoming Calls, Automatic Photo Retouching and More

A hand-picked selection of articles published between November 4 and November 17 of previous years.

1 Year Ago

• Which is The Best Media Player for Playing Movies With Subtitles?
• Forgot to Logout From Facebook? End Active Session From Any Computer
• How to Extract Images, Audio and Video from Word and PowerPoint Files

• 6 Android Apps to Fake Incoming Calls And Escape Boring Meetings
• PC On/Off Time Graphically Displays Computer Uptime for Last 3 Weeks
• How to Display Key Presses in Screencasts on Windows
• Decreased Productivity Hides Images and Multimedia Content on Webpages for Discreet Browsing
• Perfect365: Free Automated Photo Retouching Software
• Opera-Like Follower Tab Extension For Chrome Makes Web Surfing Effortless

2 Years Ago

• Free Windows 7 Theme Manager: Install, remove and manage themes
• Windows 7 Firewall Control: Manage Windows firewall better
• AeroWeather changes Windows Aero color by weather
• Create your own portable applications with Evalaze
• Chrome Toolbox extension adds keyboard shortcuts, tab tweaks and more

3 Years Ago

• Never miss movie stingers with “What's After The Credits?”
• Vitamin D turns your webcam into a security system
• TimeToGoAppi – Powerful task scheduler for Windows

4 Years Ago

• Automatically monitor 500+ private Bittorrent sites for sign-up openings
• Add annotations to a PDF file with PDF-XChange Viewer
• How to know when an offline website becomes available again?

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Microsoft SkyDrive Adds Selective Synchronization, or Does it?

Microsoft has released an update to the SkyDrive app that brings the much requested selective synchronization functionality to the service. Selective synchronization gives users the ability to sync only selected folders on their computer to SkyDrive. Now before you start celebrating, let me explain – selective synchronization in SkyDrive is not what you might be expecting. Microsoft’s implementation is different and whether or not you can benefit from this new feature will depend entirely on how you use it.

First thing first – no, you cannot select random folders on your hard drive to sync with SkyDrive. Huh? So what’s this selective synchronization all about? Well, Microsoft seems to have a different understanding of selective synchronization.

Under the new SkyDrive app for desktop and other platforms, you still need to create a special SkyDrive folder on your hard drive, and SkyDrive will upload no files other than those located inside the SkyDrive folder. What you get now is the ability to choose which folders or files inside your SkyDrive folder become available on your other devices.

Say you want to keep all your photos and documents on the desktop PC backed up to SkyDrive but want only your photos to be accessible from your laptop. You can do that now by choosing only the photos folder for sync even if your desktop is syncing the full set. So whatever files you put inside the SkyDrive folder, all get uploaded to the cloud, but only files inside the chosen folders get synced to your other machines. In other words, SkyDrive is now a cloud backup service and file syncing service but with the possibility of keeping either one separate from the other, to some extent.

The primary advantage of this feature is that it makes sharing with your friends and family easy. You can have all your important office documents and vacation pictures on the same SkyDrive folder and share only the pictures with your family while keeping your important documents exclusively to yourself. Previously you would have to move your pictures to the public folder which meant anybody could access those photos if they knew the URL.

While some users will surely benefit from this update, for the rest SkyDrive is still a one-folder-only synchronization service.

It appears that improving sharing is the main objective of this upgrade. SkyDrive includes some additional ways by which sharing folders, documents, and photos is made easier. Whenever you’re ready to share a file or folder, you can just right-click it in Explorer and select Share. Your default browser will open right to SkyDrive.com and you can share your folder or file right from there. You can also view the file itself right on SkyDrive.com, which works great for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with the Office Web Apps.

The new SkyDrive app is available for Windows desktop, Windows Phone, iPhone and iPad and Android. Download it from http://apps.live.com/skydrive

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New Chrome Experiment Allows Users to Explore 100,000 Stars

Google’s latest Chrome Experiment is an amazing visualization of 100,000 stars in the vicinity of the solar system. The 3-dimensional map actually plots a hundred thousand stars that you can explore by zooming in and out and flying around the galaxy. Zooming in reveals the names of the most prominent stars close to our sun, and if you click on the star's name, Google provides an excerpt about the star (pulled from Wikipedia) as well as a digital rendition of what it looks like.

Zooming in further shows the relative location of the Oort cloud, the planetary orbits, and finally the Sun. Zooming out gives you some context for where we are in the Milky Way. You can also click the tour button in the upper left for a quick trip to some of the coolest perspectives in the galaxy.

The map was created by the Google Data Team, using imagery and data from several sources including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). This was finally rendered on screen using WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio. Music was provided by Sam Hulick, who composed music for the video game "Mass Effect".

Chrome Experiments is an initiative by Google that showcases creative web programing to demonstrate what’s possible when combining the latest web technologies with a little code and imagination. All experiments are built with the latest open technologies, including HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and WebGL. These experiments are made and submitted by talented artists and programmers from around the world. There are currently over 500 Chrome Experiments on the website.

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2800+ Metro Tiles/Icons for Windows 8 Start Screen

Windows 8 apps that you install from the Store comes with their own Metro/Modern tiles that show up on the Start Screen. But standard programs that are installed on the Windows 8 desktop appear as classic icons on the Start Screen, which doesn’t blend with the rest of the icons. Thankfully, there is a tool called OblyTiles that allows you to customize these tiles by adding your own images or icons.

The following collection of icons are meant to be used as Dock or with OblyTiles, but you can also use them any other way you want. Some of these icons are available only in the ICO format which isn’t supported by OblyTiles. You have to convert these files to PNG using Paint.Net before you can use them.

Metro UI Dock Icon Set

This set currently includes 678 icons in 256 x 256 pixel ICO and 512 x 512 pixel PNG formats for today's top applications, internet browsers, Operating Systems/system icons, manufacturers, and more. The set contains one to five different color/style variation. The set also includes a few reflective/glossy icons.

This set is kept continuously updated by the creator. So check back often for new ones.

135 Missing Metro-Style-Icons

This set was inspired by by DaKirby309's Metro UI Dock Icon Set (above) and contains 135 more icons that are absent from the original. Icons are available in 256x256 pixel ICO and 512x512 pixel PNG formats.

Windows 8 Icon by simobortolo

This pack contains over 1300 icons in metro style and is available both in the ICO and PNG formats. Also included are 670 reflective icons.

WP7 Mobile Icons

These were designed for Windows Phone 7 but can also be used on Windows 8. The pack contains 102 blue themed icons with a slight background gradient.

METRO icons

Contains around 70 black and white circular icons.

Icons metro style (full pack)

Contains 60 metro icons for different apps and web services.

METRO styled icons

Contains 58 PNG icons in 4 colors for various web services and a few apps. Also included are 256x256 pixel .ICO files.

MetroID Icons by JRawson

This set contains 395 icons for most programs, devices, websites, etc. as well as 27 folder types and 43 drive types in 11 different color schemes. All icons are in 256 x 256 pixel PNG format.

Metro Special Folder Icons

A pack of six icons of special Windows folders – desktop, documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos. All icons in ICO format.

Office 2013 - Icons Pack

Contains icons for all Microsoft Office programs both in the PNG and ICO formats.

Adobe Tiles

A collection of 8 tiles of Adobe products.

Adobe Master Collection Metro Style for OblyTile

A slightly larger collection, and different styled, tiles for Adobe products.

Bonus Icons: Metro Games

These aren’t actually Metro styled, but they’ll still look great on the start screen. Contains 47 high quality 512 x 512 pixel PNG images of some of the most popular Windows games.

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