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It’s no mystery that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer vast opportunities to spread your word quickly, efficiently and without any hard labor. When you upload a video to Youtube, you obviously want the world to see. You go about manually putting links to your videos in your Facebook status, email them or tweet them. Well, Youtube now offers a feature that can simplify the job of sharing your uploaded videos and it’s completely automated. If you want, to autoshare your videos uploaded to Youtube to Facebook, Twitter or Google reader, here’e how you go about it:

1) Login to your Youtube account and go to your ‘Account' settings.

2) In the left pane, click ‘Sharing’.

3) In the right pane, you will find the ‘AutoShare options’. Click on the service on which you wish to autoshare your uploaded videos. Authorization on respective services will follow.

4) Finally click ‘Save Changes’. Here after, whenever you upload a video, it will get autoshared on the connected services. (Videos marked ‘private’ won’t be shared.)

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I must make it clear that this little tip is for beginner’s only. You must have experienced that many of your contacts have multiple email accounts and its quite irritating to see your address book filled with multiple entries of the same person. The reason is, Windows Live Hotmail treats every email address as a unique contact and this makes your address book unorganized and cumbersome to use. However, Windows Live Hotmail offers a feature to counteract this issue.

Here’s how you can either merge multiple email IDs of the same contact or delete all but one of their email IDs:

1) In your Windows Live Hotmail account, click ‘Options’ > ‘More options’.

2) Now, under the ‘Customize your contacts’ category, click ‘Clean up duplicate contacts’.

3) Then click the ‘Clean up duplicate contacts’ button and select a contact from the list.

4) Now you can either select all but one contact details and delete the rest or you can select all and merge them.

There you are. You just made your address book much more clean and well-organized.

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Sometime ago I showed a simple trick how you can minimize Windows Live Messenger to system tray in Windows 7. Based on the similar trick, I am going show you how you can set Windows Live Mail to always minimize to tray.

1) Right-click on the Windows Live Mail icon and then click ‘Properties’.

2) In the ‘Windows Live Mail Properties’ window, click the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Here, set the ‘Compatibility mode’ to Windows Vista. Click OK.

3) Run Windows Live Mail and you will see its icon in the notification area (system tray). Right-click its icon and choose ‘Hide window when minimized’.

Now whenever you minimize the Windows Live Mail window, it won’t appear in the super bar and you can make it appear again by double-clicking its icon in the system tray.

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I have seen many of my friends who recently switched to Windows 7 but have all the nostalgia and love for the aging Windows XP. They are not wrong. Windows XP did rule for quite a long time and I see no reason for someone not to get used to it. One of the many things people still crave for is the Classic Start Menu from the Windows 2000 and XP era. It was a minimalism norm back then. Even Windows Vista has it but Windows 7 doesn’t. So if you are the one using Windows 7 and missing those fly outs of the classic start menu then you might want to check out CSMenu.

CSMenu is a light weight application built specially for Windows 7 that acts like the classic start menu. It does nothing fancy. Just brings back the pure classiness which is favored by millions.

While CSMenu is a freeware, there’s an advanced version too – The Classic Menu with Aero, a shareware. This version give a little eye candy by making the fly-outs transparent.

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Blogging is amazing when it is unrestricted and hassle-free. And to make blogging a smooth experience, there are many desktop blog-publishing applications available but most of them are ‘typical’ softwares that you need to install. Some might require you to download a suite in order to get a simple blog-publishing application. Here is something for those who love blogging on Blogger and hate installing a blog-publishing software – Blogger Buddy.

Blogger Buddy is a Windows Vista/Windows 7 Gadget that lets you create new posts and publish them to your Blogger blog. It also lets you preview the content before you publish.

Although a mere 120kb download, this small utility has full fledged text editor where you’ll find everything you need.

Features of Blogger Buddy:

» Unlike a typical blog publishing software, Blogger Buddy is a Windows Vista/Windows 7 Gadget.

» Just 120KB download size and low on resources.

» Rich text editor.

» Post previews are available before publishing to Blogger blog.

So, if you are a Blogger user out there, I would recommend you to use thisgadget for posting to your blog just because it is too hassle-free and has a footprint of an ant.

Download Blogger Buddy / 120kb

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This is a very cool trick that saves time and doesn’t require any 3rd party software. If you want any folder or a file shortcut to be placed right in the ‘My Computer’ window, then you can do that by following these simple steps:

1) Make a shortcut of the file/folder (‘Properties’ > ‘Create shortcut’)

2) Place the shortcut in this folder:

C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts

Make sure you change <Username> to the user’s name of your computer.

Done! You have now placed a shortcut of your file/folder in the ‘My Computer’. I have tested this on Windows 7 and Windows Vista and it’s pretty neat.

[via HackTheUgly and TWC]

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I haven’t used offline mail clients to an extent that I could actually write a post about them. I never felt the need to have one because I am always connected to the internet and Gmail does the best job for me. Such was a scenario until yesterday when I had to use Outlook. While using it I felt the need to sync my Gmail contacts with Outlook and one of my friend suggested a really helpful piece of software that does this precise job – Go Contact Sync.

Go Contact Sync is a perfect synchronization tool to manage contacts between Gmail and Outlook. It’s a free, open-source tool that supports contact categories and their photos so that your address-book (contacts) look exactly the same on both. Finally I can get rid of entering the contact details again and again.

Features:

» Smooth synching of contacts between Gmail and Outlook.

» Multiple sync options, categories and contact photos are supported.

» Automatic synchronization feature.

» Choose one-way or two-way sync according to your preference.

You can also use Go Contact Sync to backup your contacts too.

Download Go Contact Sync / 1.1MB

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Want to make your wired connection a wireless one but don’t have a wireless router? Wish to share your wired internet connection when your friends come over with their laptops? Well, how about turning your own laptop into a WiFi Hotspot to which other laptop computers can connect to and share the internet connection? ‘Connectify’ does the precise job of transforming your laptop to a secure WiFi hotspot.

The setup is simpler than you think. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Connectify website and download the installer. It’s a painless 1.4 MB download.
2. Install the software and click its icon in the notification area.
   
   
3. Everything is pretty intuitive. Give ‘WiFi Name’ which will be the SSID of the wireless network and the ‘Passphrase’ for security. Choose the internet connection and click the red ‘Hotspot Off’ button. The devices that connect to your laptop are shown in the box above.

Once done, your laptop will now act as a red hot WiFi Hotspot! Let other WiFi enabled devices to connect with internet using your laptop computer as a WiFi hotspot.

Features of Connectify:

» Easy to setup a WiFi Hotspot within seconds.

» Secured WiFi connectivity.

» Eliminates the need of a wireless router for internet sharing if you have a WiFi enabled laptop.

» It is a software based wireless router that takes any type of internet connection (wired or wireless) and lets you share it wirelessly.

» Runs on Windows 7 32bit (x86) as well as 64bit (x64).

Connectify website explicitly states that the Beta version of Connectify is built for Windows 7. However, if you find any problems with Connectify in Windows Vista or Windows XP, mention it in the comments.

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Now come on face it. You love torrents. You love to download all legally distributable¹ ‘videos’ and music files from torrents. But many a times you can’t control your anxiety and want to grab a sneak-peek preview of what’s getting downloaded. Ya, I do it too and it’s always fun.

However, you know that you are not lucky always. The problem is, even though it seems that the video or a music file have downloaded fairly well, the first piece or the 0th piece is yet to be downloaded. In that case, even if your torrent client has downloaded the rest of the file, it can’t be previewed in your media players because the header of the file (the first piece) is missing. So how to go about it? Well as they say, first thing’s first. Let’s see how you can download the first piece first so that you can preview the file while it’s still being downloaded. We will use ‘uTorrent’ for that matter. Download uTorrent.

1) Open uTorrent and click ‘Options’ > ‘Preferences’.

2) In the window that appears, click ‘Advanced’ in the right pane and search for ‘bt.prio_first_last_piece’.

3) Change its value to ‘true’ either by double-clicking it or by selecting the ‘True’ radio button. Click OK.

Behold, you have cast the spell! Now onwards, uTorrent will try to first fetch the first and the last pieces. However, do keep in mind that, this works optimally only when the torrent has good amount of seeders.

¹TechExplorer.in insists you to use torrents for sharing general public licensed media or media that you own. Discussing piracy is strictly against our terms and conditions. 

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Are you a feed addict? Have you subscribed to more than 25 feeds of different websites? If you are one of those who like to get all the information at a one stop shop, then you must also be knowing the confusion that comes along with. Managing multiple feeds in your feed reader is not an easy task. But hopefully there is something that comes to the rescue – FeedMingle.

FeedMingle.com is a feed aggregator site. Meaning, it turns your multiple feeds into a single feed so that you don’t have to manage all of them. It is not another feed reader so you can relax. Just visit FeedMingle.com and you will know what I mean.

The best part is, there is no such thing as ‘sign up’ or any kind of identity verification. Just stuff in the desired feed URLs, give a name to your ‘hybrid’ feed and click ‘Mingle Now’. You can use the new merged feed just as a regular feed.

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I love music. I love by 20GB+ of music library. And I love it more when they are properly organized in an orderly fashion. That’s why I always double check ID3 tags for proper Artist, Album and Year information before adding any new mp3 song file to my library. Nowadays the music players have become so flexible that they can organize your music collection based on ID3 tags and presents you automated playlists based upon them. But for this, you need to have a music collection that has superbly well-organized ID3 tags.

While on one hand you can easily set Artist, Album, Year and Contributing Artists tags through the mp3 file properties, very few might know that you can add more information about Lyricist, Copyright, Mix artist, Recording company, Composer, Publisher, Album art and even full Lyrics into the mp3 file itself. All these information can be added to the mp3 file. All you need is a good ID3 tagging software and I think MP3Tag is the best out there. Download it and get ready to optimize your music library by adding extended ID3 tags:

1) Open MP3Tag and drag n’ drop some mp3 files into it. Select mp3 file(s), ‘Right click’ > ‘Extended tags…’

2) In the window that appears, you can edit the existing extended tags or make your own.

3) Press the ‘Add Field…’ button as shown above and the ‘Edit tag info’ window will appear. Use the drop down to select the desired field you want to set. Enter its value in the ‘Value’ field below. Press ‘OK’. Likewise you can set many such extended tags which are inaccessible otherwise.

4) Some of the important extended tags you would want to set are: Composer, Lyricist, Lyrics, Copyright and Website information.

Download MP3Tag

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Firefox is an amazing browser with lots of features and support for 3rd party addons. But with lots of features, comes little annoyances that you hardly even notice. But it there. Such is the default download manager window. Whenever you start a download, the download manager window pops up, distracts you, takes away focus and requires your action to minimize it. I personally find it very irritating. I just need to know my download progress whenever *I* feel so. If you are also the one getting annoyed by the little download manager window, here’s a quick tip:

1) Open Firefox and navigate to ‘about:config’.

2) In the ‘Filter:’ box, type in ‘download.manager’ and you will get all the configuration options related to download manager.

3) Double click ‘browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting’ to change its value to ‘false’.

You’re done. Now whenever you click a download link, the download will be done silently and in case you want to see the download progress then click ‘Tools’ > ‘Downloads’ or simply Ctrl+J.

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Ever found yourself in quite a baffling situation where you play your favorite movie on your computer but it’s hardly pleasing to eyes and ears? That happens when the audio and/or subtitles is not in sync with the video. Nowadays, you may find rips of DVDs and Bluray discs which are not properly encoded. The result is unsynchronized audio and video. One solution is to have your own video editing software, a technical know how and at least an hour of spare time. If you don’t want any of them, then follow the trick:

1) Download VLC Player and install it, if you haven’t got it yet.

2) Open the video file in VLC Player.

3) Click ‘Tools’ > ‘Track Synchronization’

4) In the windows that appears, you can change the values in milliseconds to get the desired results – right away.

If audio and/or subtitles are lagging behind: Use + to advance the audio and/or subtitles to match the video.

If video is lagging behind: Use – to slow down audio and/or subtitles to match the video.

You can even change the speed of subtitles in frames per second to get optimum results. Most videos have frame-rate of either 23.976 or 25 FPS. The best part is, you can tweak the synchronization on trial and error basis without encoding the video which saves time!

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Have you ever subscribed to a mailing list or commented on a website/blog and check-marked ‘Notify me of follow up comments’ and are now fed up with the thread that always shows up as ‘Unread’? It becomes more irritating when you find the updated conversation has nothing to do with you. But you still want to continue subscribing it because you hope something might just interest you in future. If you are using Gmail, there are two ways to spare yourself the annoyance.

Method #1 – Using ‘mute’ feature

If you find a mailing list conversation irrelevant, you just need to ‘mute’ it and all the future conversations will stay out of your inbox. To mute a conversation, simply select it and click ‘More actions’ > ‘Mute’.

However, muted conversations are simply ‘off’ your inbox and not ‘Read’ mails. They will remain as ‘Unread’ mails and you can search for muted conversations by typing 'is:muted' in the search box.

To unmute the conversation, select the muted conversation and click ‘Move to inbox’.

Method #2 – Using Filters

You can manage such friendly spam with ‘Filters’ too. This will require you to have a bit of common sense.

1) First, select the conversation and click ‘More actions’ > ‘Filter messages like these’.

2) The ‘Filter options’ panel will be displayed on top. By default, the email address of the sender is already entered in the ‘From’ field. You can tweak the filter by using a ‘unique’ word from the subject line of the conversation and entering it into the ‘Subject’ field. Click ‘Next step»’ button.

3) Now, checkmark ‘Mark as read’ and ‘Also apply filter to xx conversations below’ options and click ‘Create filter’.

Once you make a filter, all the future additions to the conversations won’t light up as ‘Unread’ mail. It will still remain in your inbox but will less annoy you.

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It’s October 2009 and Microsoft has already released Windows 7 a few days ago. People all over the world has embraced the new operating system but there are some who are still nostalgic about the operating system that ruled the world for 7+ years – Windows XP. Apart from all the good things that Windows XP had, it had those really beautiful games which you grew up playing them. Now we are on a highly advanced OS called Windows 7 which has the super stylized version of games that featured on Windows XP. But here is your chance to play the same old versions of Windows XP games on Windows 7 without much hassles.

The thing that makes this task easy is the simplicity with which these small applications (like games) were incorporated into Windows XP. In Windows XP, such applications need just an executable file and a dll file to run. Here I am going to show you how you can play the Windows XP version of Solitaire in Windows 7. You can use this method to play other Windows XP games.

Windows XP Solitaire in Windows 7:

You’ll need: Two PCs, one running Windows XP and other, Windows 7 and a USB flash drive.

1) Plug in the USB flash drive in Windows XP machine and navigate to this folder:

C:\Windows\System32

2) Copy and paste the files ‘sol.exe’ and ‘cards.dll’ from the System32 folder to the USB flash drive and safely remove the flash drive.

3) Insert the flash drive in the Windows 7 machine and store both the files in a folder on the local hard disk.

4) Run ‘sol.exe’ and there you are! Enjoy the Windows XP version of Solitaire in Windows 7.

As I mentioned earlier, you can follow this method to play other Windows XP games but I leave that upon you. Enjoy!

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Google Chrome has paved its way to become one of the finest browsers due to its remarkably sleek and light interface. But as with all applications, Google Chrome is prone to crashes and unexpected shutdowns. Chances are, you may not only loose your current session but also the bookmarks, profile settings and history. To avoid such implications, there is a small application called Google Chrome Backup which easily backs up your profile settings and can be summoned in case of a crash. Google Chrome Backup lets you create, manage and restore Google Chrome profiles which holds data like bookmarks and history. This application also supports Chromium.

Screenshots: parhelia-tools.com

The GUI is very intuitive to use. Just a few clicks and you are all sorted. Although this software is free to use, you can avail features like ‘Bookmarks Manager’ if you register.

Download Google Chrome Backup

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If you have observed and compared closely how Windows Live Messenger behaves in Windows Vista and Windows 7 then you must have figured out that in Windows 7, the Live Messenger does not minimize to tray. Quite annoyingly, it just sits in the Super Bar of Windows 7 which looks absurd. Here is a quick little trick to make Windows Live Messenger behave exactly as it used to in Windows Vista. Many of you must have already got the hint. Yes, the compatibility mode.

To always minimize Windows Live Messenger in system tray in Windows 7, here’s a quick workaround:

1) Click to open the ‘Start menu’ and in the search box, type ‘msnmsgr.exe’. The start menu will fetch it. Right click ‘msnmsgr.exe’ and choose ‘Properties’.

2) Click the ‘Compatibility’ tab, change the compatibility mode to ‘Windows Vista’. Click OK and you are done.

You must be aware of the Internet Explorer’s built-in phishing filter which keeps users safe from malicious websites that pose a threat of delivering spam and other malware. Not to keep the other browsers feel left out, WOT, an add-on for Mozilla Firefox does a similar job albeit in a much better way. WOT (Web Of Trust) warns users about suspicious websites that scam internet users.

When it comes to Firefox, which is one of the most used web browsers, there was always a need for a phishing filter that could do a substantial job considering the massive scamming cases that recently hurtled many online businesses. WOT, quite significantly, eases the job by providing a hardcore solution to phishing.

Till now, WOT was available for IE and Firefox. Recently, it has extended its support to Google Chrome. Talking about Google Chrome, I personally feel that it is much more harsh on phishing websites although it doesn’t seem to have any in-built phishing filters. I think it gets the website’s health information from Google servers which keeps a close eye on the website’s activity. Nevertheless, some additional security won’t hurt. 

The best thing about WOT is that it is much more visual. It uses colored icons against links that show up in searches making it a lot more easier for even a beginner to identify a phishing site. You can customize the level of protection to optimize your browsing experience. So, go on and download this nice piece of software and stay protected!

Download WOT for Mozilla Firefox | Download WOT for Google Chrome

This happens every now and then. You are watching a really good video on YouTube or any other video hosting site but the only glitch you face is that the volume of the video is really low. The worst part is there is nothing much you can do except for maxing out your speaker’s volume. Most of the times this trick turns out to be a mediocre solution. But here is a quick and efficient way to go about it. For this you need to have VLC Player installed on your computer. I am not sure if Media Player Classic (with K-Lite Codec Pack) can do this job. So, install VLC player and let’s get started.

1) Open VLC Player and click ‘Media’ > ‘Streaming’.

2) In the window that appears, click the ‘Network’ tab. Choose ‘HTTP’ as the protocol and paste the link of the video in the ‘Address’ box. Make sure you does not include ‘http://’ again.

3) Additionally, check mark ‘Show more options’ and you will be able tweak the advanced options like caching and start time of the video. Click ‘Stream’.

4) When the video starts playing, you can increase the volume of the video by 400% just by sliding the volume control of VLC player. Enjoy!

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Don’t miss these posts:

How to integrate subtitles to a video quickly and neatly

How to make ‘Most Played Songs’ auto-playlist in Windows Media Player

Last night I was working with my brother on his project and there was a lot of material needed to be copied from websites to Word. It was a tiresome process to copy and paste the required material, neglecting few lines in between, again copying and pasting few lines and so on. It was then that I tried to search for something that can ease this everyday process of copy-pasting. I found the clipboard managers. A lot of good ones.

A clipboard managers does the basic task of storing the information for the temporary period of time during the time you copy the content and paste it somewhere. Now the built in clipboard of Windows stores one entry at a time. This is where clipboard managers come in. They let you temporarily store multiple bytes of information, maintains a history, and lets you paste that content one by one. I used some of these clipboard managers but I’d favor ‘Ditto’ clipboard manager.

‘Ditto’ lets you save multiple items in the clipboard and lets you retrieve them one by one at a later time. Unlimited amounts of data can be stored in clipboard using ‘Ditto’. The most advanced feature of ‘Ditto’ is that, it lets you copy information from one computer and paste it to another.

‘Ditto’ offers lot more features like:

1) Keeping synchronization of clipboard data within multiple computers.

2) Ability to encrypt data when transmitted over the network

3) Foreign character support

and many more…

It may seem like a not so useful utility but let me tell you, you will realize its importance when you’ll truly need it. It is definitely a time saver.

Some other clipboard managers that I came across: Clipmagic (8/10), Clipboard Recorder (8/10), Sanvient (6/10) and ClipTorrent (6/10). Use them and make copy-pasting a breeze! :)

Don’t miss these awesome tips/tricks:

Draw a picture in Wordpad

Password protect your files using WinRAR

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