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Winners of CactusVPN Giveaway

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Here are the winners of the CactusVPN giveaway we organized a few days ago. CactusVPN is a special VPN service, in a way that it allows Torrent and P2P downloads on their servers. In fact, the ten accounts that they are providing for this giveaway are all Torrent-supported and valid for a period of three months. If you took part in the giveaway, see if have won.

The winners were chosen by a random draw using the list randomizer tool on random.org.

  1. FairLight
  2. Wisnu
  3. Bumba
  4. Stephen
  5. Amit
  6. Ankit
  7. Darren
  8. Jose Gallo
  9. Avisidea pa
  10. Ye Gaung

Congratulation to all winners, and thanks to all who took part. The people whose names appear in the winner’s list will hear from CactusVPN shortly.

Tomahawk Music Player: Play Tracks Locally or Stream from Multiple Music Services

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tomahawk-logoTomahawk is a free, cross-platform and open source music player that combines your local library of music with those of several popular music streaming services like Spotify, Grooveshark, SoundCloud, Last.fm, YouTube and more to offer a unified music listening experience. And it doesn’t stop there – by hooking up with your Jabber or Google account you can play music from your friends’ libraries too, provided they’re also running Tomahawk.

When playing music from your local computer, Tomahawk behaves like a normal audio player. It will scan your computer for music files and build a library of the same, offering easy access modes like search and filter. It supports playlist, shows album cover and all other stuff that is staple of any music player. The fun starts when you want to play music that is not in your collection.

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Using so called ‘content resolvers’, which are basically plug-ins, Tomahawk can find and play music from a bunch of different streaming services. The ones currently supported are Spotify, Grooveshark (accounts required), YouTube, SoundCloud, Jamendo, Official.fm, Last.fm, Ex.fm, Dilandau, OwnCloud and even the file sharing/hosting site 4shared. It also plays music from your local network.

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Whenever you try to play a song, Tomahawk might use any combination of these sources to provide the audio. The player is based upon the idea that users just want to listen to music. The location of the track, which could be stored online or locally, is of no concern. The increasing popularity of music streaming services proves that this is indeed a fact.

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Tomahawk allows the user to access all albums currently topping the charts on different music services like iTunes, Billboard, HyperMachine, Rdio and more.

With Tomahawk users can create playlists combining all the music they have access to, whether it’s stored locally on their computer or in the cloud, or even on their friend’s computer. When playing from your friend’s library, Tomahawk simply sends the metadata of the songs, and the player then finds the best match from the available content sources. This way you don’t actually stream music from your friends’ PC and suck their bandwidth. The cross-platform nature of Tomahawk also removes the OS barrier. It doesn’t matter whether you friend is running Linux or Windows or OS X. Tomahawk is available on all three.

Tomahawk includes a unique feature that allows users to create radio stations from their playlist, which they can broadcast to their friends so that they can listen along in real time.

Yet another unique feature of Tomahawk is the ability to create playlist based on mood, tempo, duration, style, loudness, song/artist hotness, key and even latitude and longitude. For example, you can choose a tempo of at least 40 BMP, or key of C sharp, or loudness of 80dB, and Tomahawk will scour the Internet for matching tracks. You don’t know what you may end up with, and this is a great way to discover new music.

Go ahead, download Tomahawk and give it a try.

You might also like Clementine Music Player.

Sunrise Seven–Windows 7 System Tweaker

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Sunrise Seven is a powerful Windows 7 customization and tweaking tool that brings all the tiny configuration settings and options distributed across the operating system under one common roof. Sunrise Seven meets your customization requirement in almost all that concern appearance, performance, security and usability. Not only does it allow for quick customization, but it also helps you discover hundreds of settings you were probably not even aware of in the first place.

The interface of this tool is straightforward and simple. On the left are categories into which the many options are split, and on the right are the options clubbed under a particular category. These include UAC setting, performance, security, explorer and start menu, cleaning and maintenance, appearance and other miscellanea.

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Most of the settings can be enabled and disabled by clicking on the corresponding checkbox. Sometimes there are sliders and selection menus. There is no ‘save’ or ‘apply’ buttons; the tweaks are applied right away, which is something of a concern. It is highly recommended that you create a system restore point before you attempt any change you do not fully understand. Thankfully, the program author offers this option from within the program window.

Sunrise Seven encompasses a huge number of tweaks but the program offers no explanation of the same. The only hint to their effect is the name. The majority of the settings are self explaining, but some of them are not explicit enough for the average user to have an idea of what it stands for. The Performance section that concerns with services is possibly the most cryptic of all. There is a button called “Configure another services” which doesn’t mean anything. Don’t click on it as it seems to turnoff services it thinks are unnecessary, and without warning.

The problem is further aggravated by the undesirable behavior of the program to apply the setting immediately. This leaves no room for experimentation. You have to know exactly what each option means and what their effect will be on the system. This is no tool to play around with.

On the bright side, you will probably won’t need any other tweaking tool if you have Sunrise Seven around. Aside from the system integrated tweaking, you can do other tricks like change logon screen, change start button/orb, pin a mini quick-launch-type start menu to the taskbar and change OEM information, branding and Windows product key.

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$35 Computer RasberryPi Launched. Available For Purchase

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rasberry-pi-logoRaspberry Pi, the teeny-weeny microcomputer that was announced late last year, and the one that has amassed a huge fan following even before it was released, is finally available for orders.

The Raspberry Pi is available at either Premier Farnell or RS Components. Search for Raspberry Pi, and then follow the normal shopping and checkout process. Apparently, the announcement has caused a huge rush of buyers and both the retailer's websites are down at the time of this writing.

Update: Both sites have sold out within minutes.

Those who have tuned in late, the Raspberry Pi is a small computer, no bigger than a credit card, running on 700MHz ARM11 processor with 256MB of RAM and with all essential connectivity options such as VGA ports, HDMI, USB, Wi-Fi and Ethernet ports.

The tech world is pretty excited about Raspberry Pi. For $25 or $35 you can get a fully functional ARM-based computer running a special version of Fedora Linux; all you need to do is plugin a monitor, keyboard and mouse. The HDMI output supports 1080p playback, and we have already seen videos of games being played on it. Raspberry Pi will be an impressive media center.

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The whole things is also pretty damn small. Although you can’t use it without a monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up, it’s still nice that you can carry it around and hook it up at home, at work, or in conference rooms.

All of the first units that are on sale are the $35 Raspberry Pi Model B. These are the more fully featured versions of the Raspberry Pi that include an Ethernet port, and 2 USB ports. The $25 Model A has been reworked to include 256MB of RAM – double than what were originally planned to offer – and will be going into production immediately.

This first launch is aimed at software and hardware enthusiasts, makers, teachers and others who want to build exciting things with the Raspberry Pi before the official educational launch, which will happen later in 2012.

The developers expects that when Raspberry Pi is launched into the educational market, there will be an experienced community of people using and making things with the Raspberry Pi. Software will be more mature and free of obvious bugs, and easier for children and educators to use.

Automatically Transfer Files from USB drives to the PC with PhotoWizz

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Windows automatically identifies media files on removable devices such as CDs, DVDs and Flash drives, and performs an action as configured by the user under the AutoPlay options in Control Panel. The action can be chosen based on the type of media inserted – audio CDs, video CDs, video DVDs, Blu-Ray disc, USB drives – or based on the content of the discs - software and games DVD/CD, pictures, video files, audio files, mixed media etc. Video and audio discs can be made to automatically playback on a media player of choice. For USB devices, memory sticks and camera, Windows will pop open a dialog box asking users to choose an action. While these are all very helpful, it still requires user’s action.

PhotoWizz is a digital media card handler which acts as Windows autoplay handler to quickly move or copy digital content from USB drives and memory cards to your computer, without user interaction.

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Once enabled PhotoWizz will automatically intercept the insertion of a removable media device and quickly transfer the content to a user defined directory on the computer hard drive. Users can define the type of files to transfer. Additionally, users can define command line commands to execute when a removable drive is inserted.

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If PhotoWizz is running when a removable drive is inserted, the configured action is immediately executed without any warning. The program window opens briefly and closes once the transfer is completed. You cannot pause or cancel the process. If PhotoWizz is not running when the removable drive is inserted, starting PhotoWizz will cause the program to execute the transfer process on all connected USB drives.

Keep in the mind that the default action is move, which deletes the files in the source medium. If you would rather copy files than move, press and hold the keyboard control key down while inserting the media card or press the Ctrl key while running PhotoWizz. This will cause PhotoWizz to copy the files instead, leaving the originals on the source media card.

The default behavior of the program is destructive. Keeping this program idly running in the background can result in dangerous circumstances.

Another drawback of this tool is that it doesn’t preserve directory structure when transferring files. All files that match the filetype criteria are unceremoniously dumped into the destination folder horribly intermixed with each other.

Fix Converging Lines in Photographs With ShiftN

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When photographing architectural structures, buildings or other large structure from the ground, it is often impossible to fit the entire building in the frame without tilting the camera upwards. This results in distortion of the perspective causing the top of the building to appear smaller than its base and the entire building appears to be leaning away from the viewer. This is known as converging verticals or converging lines, and effect is undesirable in photography.

Converging verticals can be eliminated by keeping the camera parallel to the edges that you don't want converging. You will also need to move further back from the structure that you’re photographing to make sure the entire structure fit within the frame. Another option is to use special perspective control lenses or shift lenses. Yet another easier and cheaper solution is digital post processing.

ShiftN is one such such software that automatically corrects converging lines in photographs.

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Fire up the program, load an image and click on "Automatic correction." Just like it says, the image will be automatically corrected. You will see one version of the corrected photo on the left, and another version with correction lines superimposed on the right. If you don't like the results, just click the Re-optimize button for another try. You can also click on the individual green and red vertical and horizontal lines on the picture on the right to make corrections. If you still not happy, click on “Adjust Correction” to fine tune the results.

ShiftN is an absolutely amazing software for both casual and serious photographers.

Checkout some of the examples below. On the left is the original image and on the right is the image after correction by ShiftN.

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One Year Ago: Static Websites on Google App Engine, and CPU Throttling

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A selection of articles published between February 12 and February 25 of previous years.

1 Year Ago

  • Disable CPU Throttling on Core 2/Core i CPUs: Laptop CPUs are commonly throttled down to conserve power and reduce the amount of heat generated by the chip, for a price – reduced performance. But you can remove the bottleneck.

A number of software that were once commercial-ware were released as freeware during this period. These are:

  • WinX DVD Author, a very powerful DVD authoring and DVD burning solution.
  • BufferZone Pro, a sandboxing software that allows users to run software in isolated environments for security.
  • Spider Player Pro, a free music player with built in Internet radio stations with recording capabilities, a CD ripper and music converter.
  • Chasys Draw IES, is a suite of application consisting of a layer-based raster graphics editor with animation, an image viewer, a multi-threaded image file converter and a tool for processing RAW digital camera image files.

2 Years Ago

  • Nuance PDF Reader is a free Adobe PDF Reader with annotation capability and an integrated online PDF to Word, Excel, RTF converter.
  • TVersity is a media streaming software package that can stream any video to any device regardless of the limitation of the device, by automatically transcoding videos to the proper format on the fly.
  • Alcohol 52% – Free CD/DVD emulation software. A lighter version of Alcohol 120% that supports up to 6 virtual CD DVD-ROM drives.
  • Interesting hard drive facts you probably didn’t know

3 Years Ago

  • 4 tools to get the most out of your screen real estate with efficient window management.
  • GE-Graph is a fantastic visualization tool for Google Earth that takes data in a simple tabular format and then lets you plot it as 3 dimensional polygons and bars directly over Google Earth.
  • Orbiter is a free flight simulator for Windows with emphasis on realism. It lets you fly a number of spacecraft, from the realistically modeled Space Shuttle Atlantis to the fictional Delta-Glider. Travel around the solar system or perform orbital and sub-orbital space flights or try docking to the International Space Station.
  • Hawkscope is cross-platform Java based program that allows you to access your hard disk’s content from the system tray.

4 Years Ago

Explore Underwater with Google Sea View

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Google has partnered with the University of Queensland and their sponsor, a multinational insurance firm called the Catlin Group, to produce an underwater variant of Street View called Catlin Seaview Survey. The venture plans to cover Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in September of this year, and another reef in Bermuda later. The goal of the project is to let people explore the ocean in three dimension and also carry out the first detailed study about the composition and health of coral reefs.

The Catlin Seaview Survey camera will be equipped with a depth range of 30 to 100 meters and will capture thousands of 360-degree underwater panoramas. When these images are stitched together, people will be able to choose a location and dive underwater for unobstructed view of the underwater world. A sample of what users can expect once the mapping is completed can be tasted at Catlin Seaview Survey website.

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The project proper kicks off in September, when three surveys begin at 20 points around the 2300-kilometre long reef. Footage from each site will be posted online as the surveys progress.

Once all mapping with the Catlin Seaview Survey is done, there will be roughly 50,000 panoramas that will be accessible on Google Earth and Google Maps. The project will also have a dedicated YouTube channel  that will include livestreams of the expedition team from the ocean floor.

“For the first time people will be able to explore thousands of environments along the length of the Great Barrier Reef from the comfort of their own home,” cinematographer Richard Fitzpatrick told the conference during a live underwater interview from Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

[via Google Sightseeing]

BSNL to Launch Pantel-Made Android Tablet to Rival Aakash

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BSNL, the state-owned telecom giant, announced on Friday that it would bring three Android tablets in partnership with Pantel, a company based in Noida. Of the three, the cheapest one TPAD IS701R is priced at just Rs. 3,250 -  a few hundred rupees more than the commercial version of Aakash tablet with better configuration.

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The Penta TPAD IS701R features a 7 inches resistive touchscreen, powered by a 1 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM and 2GB of Flash memory that can be increased up to 32 GB via memory card. The tablet has Wi-Fi connectivity, 3G dongle support, accelerometer, HDMI port and a camera on the front. The tablet will be sold along with special data plans and 3G services from BSNL. The low cost tablet will appeal to Aakash fans who are still waiting for their devices. Penta, on the other hand, expects to start shipping by the first week of next month. It remains to be seen whether they can keep up with the dates.

Penta will also launch two other models priced slightly higher at Rs 10,999 and Rs 13,500.

The Penta TPAD WS704C features 7 inches capacitive touchscreen along with 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and 4GB internal memory expandable up to 32 GB. Along with Wi-Fi and 3G dongle support, this tablet will also carry a SIM card slot, GPS, Accelerometer, Bluetooth and two cameras one each at the front and rear. This tablet is priced at Rs 10,999

The third tablet, Penta TPAD WS802C has an 7 inches capacitive touchscreen with 1.2 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and 4GB internal memory expandable up to 32 GB, other features being same as TPAD WS704C. This tablet is priced at Rs 13,500.

You can pre-book your tablets on this page.

[via Times of India]

Fluent: A New Kind of Web Based Email Client for Gmail

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Fluent is a a new web-based email client created by three ex-Google employees that turns your Gmail inbox into Facebook styled newsfeed. Fluent allows instant searching through emails as you type, shows attachments like photos in a slide show and lets you manage multiple accounts under one log-in.

Former Google Australia employees Cameron Adams, and Dhanji Prasanna began work on Fluent full-time about six months ago, after becoming frustrated at Google's work culture and leaving the company after Google axed Google Wave. Jochen Bekmann, another former Googler joined the cause in November 2011.

The one thing Fluent aims to change about email is presenting it in a stream that lets one act on items as quickly as possible. Rather than presenting the inbox as rows upon rows of message subject, emails are presented as threads, with the subject and a snippet of the message displayed first. A “more” link you click to display the body of the email. Replies are shown just like comments on Facebook.

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Additional buttons to forward message, add label, mark as spam etc. are available from a small menu. Fluent also introduces a new action – to-do. This allows you to mark messages that require an action from you, such as a reply, and then optionally set time-based reminders.

Other features of Fluent include letting users quickly browse attachments such as images in a slide show format, the ability to search for emails as one types - something Google's search engine pioneered with "Instant Search" but is not available in Gmail - and the ability to pinpoint emails one has sent to a specified email address on a timeline.

Fluent is in private beta but a demo is available on the website. The basic email experience will be offered for free or maybe for a small fee, and special features that went beyond standard email, such as offering document collaboration, file-sharing and integration with services such as Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs will be offered in premium versions.

Fluent currently works with only Gmail. More email services, such as Hotmail, are planned in the future.

[via Venturebeat]

Giveaway: CactusVPN’s P2P/Torrent Supported VPN Accounts

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cactusvpn-logoNot many VPN service providers allow downloads through Bittorrent and other P2P file sharing network on their servers, but new entrant – CactusVPN - does. CactusVPN has servers on three countries – the US, the UK and the Netherland. Torrents and P2P downloading is allowed on the Netherlands server, a country which has always been tolerant to file downloading. However, after the recent change of heart of the Dutch government, CactusVPN might want to review their decision of placing servers in the Netherland.

Depending on why you want a VPN account, you can choose from one of the 4 VPN packages CactusVPN offers. If you want to gain access to sites restricted to only the US and the UK such as Hulu, Pandora, ABC, NBC, BBC iPlayer, Spotify and recently, Grooveshark which is now blocked in Germany, you can take the package containing the US or the UK servers. If downloading torrents anonymously is your plan, then the servers on the Netherland is what you should go for. Each of these packages contain only one country server and are available on a fixed rate of $4.99 a month. A fourth plan with all three servers/countries is also on offer at $9.99 a month.

With every package you will get OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP/IP Sec protocols. Download bandwidth is not metered and no connection logs are kept. CactusVPN also does not monitor the communications of its clients, unless it becomes aware of harmful activities in which case CactusVPN may shutdown your account. CactusVPN doesn’t support downloading of copyrighted materials.

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CactusVPN offers their own connection software which makes it easier to connect to their servers, than set up a PPTP connection by yourself or download OpenVPN certificates to configure with your OpenVPN client. Those alternatives are still available for those who prefer that way.

The VPN username and password required to connect is available on your account page. Enter the login information in CactusVPN’s software and then choose a server to which you want to connect.

The Giveaway

CactusVPN is offering 10 accounts of the P2P/Torrent package for our readers. Each of these account will remain valid till 3 months. If you are interested in grabbing an account, leave your name and email ID in the form below. Winners will be selected by a random draw. The contest is closed.


Schedule Emails in Gmail with Right Inbox

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right-inbox-logoScheduling emails so that it gets to the recipient at the right time is important, particularly if you are mailing busy people. But email isn’t supposed to be a real-time conversation, you may ask, so why is timing important? Let me explain. For someone who receives hundreds of emails each day, it is easy for important messages to get buried below tons of mails from people who are eager to initiate a conversation with the person. If the person lives on the other side of the globe and you mailed him while he was sleeping, the next morning he wouldn’t see your message because several new mails will have arrived during the night pushing your mail out of the screen and into several pages deep. But if you email him while he is on his desk, there is a good chance that he will see your message. And that means scheduling your email so that it hits his inbox at the right time.

Gmail doesn’t have an email scheduling feature, but this functionality is offered by a third party service called Boomerang for Gmail which has been in service for the past few years. There is a new service now called Right Inbox that offers this function.

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Right Inbox is an extension available for Chrome and Firefox that allows Gmail users to send emails at a specified time at a later date. It appears as a button next to the Send button on Gmail’s interface. Clicking on it reveals a menu with options to send the mail after 1 hour, 2 hour, 4 hour, tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon or at a user specific time.

The emails are sent based on your own timezone, but there is also an option to send an email based on another timezone which is extremely handy if you’re corresponding with someone who lives overseas – the timezone problem I discussed earlier.

Users who have had experience with Boomerang will notice the similarity between the menus of the two services. Unlike Boomerang, however, Right Inbox is simple and offers only scheduling. No reminders for messages that no one replied or options to bounce an email back to the top of the inbox at another time and other advanced features offered by Boomerang.

But Right Inbox is free, at least, for the time being. The developers have hinted that a pricing model will soon be introduced once the app is out of beta. Maybe then we will start seeing more features beyond very basic scheduling.

Hate Icons? Get Text Buttons on New Gmail Interface

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One of the many problems with Gmail’s new design is the lack of text on the buttons. A black & white icon on a black & white button conveys nothing. Does a square box with a downward pointing arrow say ‘Archive’ to you? Looks more like ‘Download’ to me. Does an octagon with an exclamation mean some kind of a warning? No. It is just spam.

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“Well, I am a literate person and it is easier for me to recognize the ‘Answer’ or ‘Archive’ and ‘Delete’ button with texts than trying to recognize and remember arrows and a great host of other stupid unrecognizable icons.” complained one user in Gmail’s support forum. He isn’t alone. Millions are enraged over the changes. If you are one of them, here are a few solutions, based on the browser you use.

Google Chrome

Gmelius is an extension for Chrome that does a lot more than add text button to the new interface. It makes Gmail’s new interface more usable by adding custom colored subtle row highlights, makes header auto-expandable, adds a scroll to top functionality, removes the "People Widget" and use the space left to read/write your emails, removes advertisements, removes chat box, and of course, inserts text into the iconized buttons.

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All changes are optional so you get to choose the changes you want.

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Firefox

If you use Firefox install the Stylish add-on and then install this userstyle. You can also install this as plain CSS or user JS. Aside from restoring text to the buttons, this userstyle will also colorize the icons on the buttons. So cool.

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This userstyle is actually a combination of two different userstyles – one that adds text to the buttons and one that colorizes the icons. If you wish not to have the icons colorized, you can install this userstyle.

Opera

Opera users just needs to install the GMail-TextButtons extension and get this result.

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DreamMail: Feature Packed Email Client of Your Dreams

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DreamMail is a powerful, yet somewhat obscure, email client software for Windows with features filled to the brim. It was designed to handle multi-user and multi email account, and supports SMTP, eSMTP, POP 3, and even RSS feeds. You can even access webmail accounts such as Yahoo which doesn’t have POP3 access for free users. With support for filters, labels, mail blacklist/whitelist, search and other functions, DreamMail makes for a pretty darn good email program. It’s two sore spots are - lack of support for IMAP and poor junk filtering capabilities.

Given below, in brief, are some of the features of Dream Mail.

Multi-accounts and Multi-users: A single DreamMail installation can be used by multiple users who share your computer, such as the family PC. You can’t read your mom’s email and neither can she read yours, and both can have multiple email accounts. Each user’s account is password protected.

Protocol support: Common email protocols POP3, SMTP, ESMTP are supported. As already said, IMAP is not supported. Webmails like Hotmail or Yahoo! are easily reachable from the User Interface.

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Message sorting: Quickly sort mails by unread, read, from a particular sender, mails with attachment, mails received/sent during a certain period such as 1 week, 2 weeks etc. You can also filter emails by subject, content, priority, flag and others.

Messages filtering: You can use blacklists or whitelists of email addresses, subject, message content, source, IP addresses, header and more to make sure important mails are never missed and junk emails do not clutter your inbox. The programs automatic junk filtering however leaves a lot to be desired.

Mail categorizing: Assign priority and colored labels to emails, or move them to virtual folders.

View in HTML or TEXT mode: Received mails can be displayed on HTML mode or TEXT mode with or without online preview. E-mails header are also shown.

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Templates: Many dozens of mail templates are included into the software, and you can create new templates yourself. There are 15 categories, each of them containing at least two to more than 10 templates, ranging from serious ones like business, birthday wishing or salutations to leisure-like ones as cartoons, moods or butterflies.

Address book: Contacts are arranged alphabetically and spread across multiple pages sorted by letter. A contact page can be opened by clicking the corresponding letter in the lower part of the page, like on a diary. The details for the contacts are numerous with fields like instant messenger ID, nickname, hobbies, birthday and more. You can even rate your contacts.

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Attachment Management: All email attachments can be viewed together under the attachment manager, and sorted by date, type, size etc.

Export, Import and Backup: You can import mails from an EML file, Microsoft Outlook, Foxmail or another installation of DreamMail. Similarly, mails can be exported as EML, HTML, MHT and TXT file. As with mails, the address book can be imported too from Microsoft Outlook, vCard, WAB, CSV and TXT file. Address book can be exported to a CSV file.

DreamMail can also incrementally backup your mails and restore it from a backup.

RSS Feeds: The feed reader is unfortunately quite bad. It can load only XML files, so if a website is using a service such as FeedBurner, you won’t be able to subscribe to it. Since nearly every website uses FeedBurner or some other redirection service, the RSS reader is pretty much non functional.

DreamMail has its shortcoming but at the end the positives outweighs the negatives. The program’s vast number of features and highly flexibility is hard to ignore. It is a very fine piece of software indeed, one that deserves to be tried, at least once.

Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool

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outlook-iconMicrosoft has released a handy troubleshooting tool kit that will sure save some headache for people who provide tech support, either professionally, or to family and friends or take care of their own machines. The Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool (OCAT) provides a mean to analyze your Microsoft Office Outlook profile for common configurations issues that may cause problems in Outlook.

The Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool provides a detailed report of your current Outlook profile. This report includes many parameters about your profile, and it highlights any known problems that are found in your profile. For any problems that are listed in the report, you are provided a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article that describes a possible fix for the problem. If you are a Help Desk professional, you can also export the report to an XML file. Then, the report can be viewed in the Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool on another client computer where the tool is installed.

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Once installed, launch OCAT and start a scan. If Outlook is not running OCAT will ask you to, otherwise, you can choose the ‘offline scan’. The time required for a scan depends on the complexity of the profile being analyzed, for example, how many accounts, mailboxes, and archive mailboxes are opened, the version of Outlook that’s installed (hot fixes, service packs, and so on), and the health of the system registry. Once the scan completes, OCAT will display a configuration report. The report generated is divided into two sections - Informational (reports that are useful to know) and Issues (things that require your attention). Any issues it finds are highlighted with an alert icon.

OCAT can find issues with unpatched vulnerabilities/fixes, identify non-standard registry settings and detect other unusual behavior such as too large mail folder.

After you’ve finished reviewing the data, you can export it in XML format to forward it to a support engineer for further analysis. However, OCAT is only able to print reports if you run it on a Windows XP or Windows 2003 client. This is an acknowledged issue that the authors say will be fixed soon.

You’ll need to have .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 installed on a PC before OCAT can be installed. Supported platforms include Windows XP SP3, Vista SP2, and Windows 7. OCAT does not support Outlook 2003.

[via WindowsITPro]

Ubuntu for Android Turns Your Phone Into a Desktop Computer

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ubunutu-androidCanonical today announced Ubuntu for Android, a unique version of Ubuntu that is designed to seamlessly integrate Android with the Linux distribution. This is not an Ubuntu app running atop Android, nor it is an Ubuntu device running an Android emulator. Rather, Ubuntu for Android is a full Ubuntu desktop running side-by-side with Android on the same phone.

Designed to coexist with Android on multicore smartphones, the new version of Ubuntu will launch to a full Ubuntu desktop when the phone is docked with a keyboard and monitor. The rest of the time, the phone runs Android as usual. The installation basically gives you two devices in one: an Android phone while on the go, and a Ubuntu desktop when plugged in. Thanks to tight integration with the Android service layer, the transition between the two environments is seamless, making it easy to access the phone's services from the desktop when docked.

ubuntu-for-android

Ubuntu for Android will offer a full range of desktop applications including office, web browsing, email, media and messaging. Both Ubuntu and Android access the same mobile address book. So even when the phone is docked, you can view, edit, call, text or email a contact. Personal information like contacts, calendars, photo galleries and music can be accessed from both the phone and the desktop interface. SMS texts arrive on your desktop if you are docked when they show up, and calls are handled like VoIP if you want to stay working while you chat. A pop-up window appears when you receive a call, and you can simply mouse over and click to answer.

android-messaging

Ubuntu for Android will give mobile users a compelling reason to upgrade to multi-core handsets with more RAM, more storage, faster GPUs and CPUs. It’s not just a phone they are buying, it’s a desktop too. While mid-range phones can deliver a perfect Android experience, it takes high-end horsepower to drive a phone and a desktop at the same time.

The hardware requirements are, expectedly, a bit steep – dual-core 1GHz CPU, 2GB of storage for OS disk image, and 512 MB of RAM. Your phone will also need the docking capability and hardware support for HDMI and USB. But that’s standard for high-end models in the current generation of devices.

There is no installable version yet. Canonical says that Ubuntu for Android will be loaded onto phones by manufacturers, and but these devices aren’t yet available, but can be expected to land in late 2012.

[via Wired]

Download New Wallpapers Everyday from NASA, National Geographic, Bing and More

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National Geographic publishes some amazing pictures each day taken by some of the most renowned photographers of the world. If you like National Geographic, here is an application I’m sure you will love.

Picturethrill is a free program that downloads fresh pictures and wallpapers everyday from National Geographic and several other sites. Picturethrill will automatically download images and optionally set them as your desktop wallpaper.

picturethrill

Currently supported sites include:

  • Bing – Bing publishes a new picture everyday as background on bing.com. Also supported is www.bing.co.jp
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day – A NASA website that features a different image of our universe each day, along with a brief explanation.
  • Earth Science Picture of the Day  – This is another NASA website that highlights, through pictures, the diverse processes and phenomena which shape our planet and our lives.
  • National Geographic - National Geographic publishes a high resolution picture every day under the section ‘Photo of the Day’
  • Nature Pic of the Day – As the name suggests, this site feature a new, beautiful, nature picture every day.

Support for other sites will be added later.

Similar tools:

FoxE9: Internet Explorer 9 Skin for Firefox

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FoxE9 is an add-on for Firefox that skins the browser and makes it look like Internet Explorer 9 in appearance. There are two perfectly legitimate reasons why anybody would want to do that.

1. Unlike its predecessors, IE9 has an attractive interface. It’s understandable if one wishes to have the same interface on Firefox.

2. You want your parents to embrace Firefox and all its open source goodness but they are resilient to change. You can secretly change Firefox’s appearance to resemble IE9, replace IE9’s shortcut with Firefox and your parents will never know.

FoxE9 turns this

firefox-before

into this

foxe9

For comparison, here is how the actual IE9 interface looks like.

ie9

Pretty good, huh?

 

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