Free Ram Optimizer – Clear up RAM on your computer for a faster computer

Ever since I was not happy about my Laptop’s performance, I started looking for a small handy tool (software) for utilizing the maximum of my RAM efficiently. And that lead to the discovery of a really neat app (really, its just 332 KB) namely – “Free RAM Optimizer XP”. Though you will usually mis-understand the name and will think that its meant for the Windows XP operating system, however I have been using it on my Windows 7 Professional version and it has never given a problem.

The software is a small window which silently sits on your Taskbar’s Notification area and automatically keeps optimizing your system’s RAM usage. However you can easily disable the Automatic optimization and just keep doing it manually whenever you feel like doing so.
Don’t forget one thing that it just optimizes your available RAM, it cannot increase the RAM memory available. So be cautious while changing any settings otherwise it may lead to your system going dead slow.

My Personal Advice

If you are using the manual setting, don’t clear more than 1% of your total RAM at once.
Download Link: Free-Ram-Optimizer-XP

Speed up your Firefox by tweaking your browser’s configuration

When it comes to browsing the Internet, Firefox is an unbeatable name. However, only a few people know that Firefox provides for certain configuration options which can enhance your browsing experience and let you speed up. Moreover, there is no need to install any add-on for speeding Firefox up.

Just follow the simple instructions as below:

• Open a new tab in your Firefox browser window.
• Type the url just as given – “about:config”

• It will display a warning to you as given below and you just need to accept that.

• Look for the following settings and change the values.

Setting name: network.http.max-connections
Default value: 30
Change it to: 96
Setting name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Default value: 15
Change it to: 32
Setting name: network.http.pipelining
Default value: False
Change it to: True
Setting name: network.http.proxy.pipelining
Default value: False
Change it to: True
Setting name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Default value: 4
Change it to: any value between 4 and 8

• Restart your Firefox browser to make the changes effective.

Note: These settings are Firefox specific and do not apply to your Internet server speed.
Drop in your comments on whether these speed tweaks really enhanced your browsing speed or not!

ePaperGallery.com – Read & Browse Old Archives of Famous Newspapers online”

I do admit that I get most of my news from the internet or the television, but I still cannot get out of my habit of reading the newspaper first thing in the morning. I grew up in Mumbai and now work in Pune. This makes me miss my local newspapers which I grew up reading. Also sometimes I wish I can look up old archives of some popular Newspapers.
Thankfully ePaperGallery comes to the rescue.

• I could look up a few newspapers from around the world and specially from India. Also I could surf through the different editions –  city wise on the site.
• Most times we can read the front page of the current newspaper, but if you register and login I could look up the entire newspaper.
• One good feature of this website was when I was reading the newspaper I could also look up archives of that particular newspaper. This was really useful and I could read some papers dating back to almost a year ago.

So if you are into reading newspapers and for some reason cannot get one, try out ePaperGallery to look up newspapers from around India.
Do drop in your comments.
Link: ePaperGallery

YouTube – Top 5 Tech Related Videos in 2010

YouTube is all over and just like it grew more influential in 2009, it continued its domination of being the number one website to share videos online.

Recently YouTube released certain trends to help people look for latest trends. I decided to look for the top 5 videos which were tech related. I must say all the videos are not really tutorials or highly technical, but it probably comes under tech culture.

#5. Google Chrome Speed Tests

This video demonstrates the lightening speed of Google Chrome with strange and weird experiments. This was viewed over 4.13 million times.

#4. “Take me Out” by Atomic Tom LIVE on NYC subway

This was a song sung by Atomic Tom on a NYC subway train. The video is tech related because the entire song was recorded and played with instruments using only iPhones and its applications. This video was viewed over 4.17 million times.

#3. Iggy investigates an iPad

Iggy is the name of the cat who in this video investigates an iPad. The natural curiosity of the animal along with iPad touch sensitive apps make it an amusing video. This video was viewed over 7.2 millions times.

#2. iPhone 4 vs HTC Evo

This video has two characters discussing the iPhone and is a sarcastic take on how people are looking to buy an iPhone only because of the brand and not so much know much about its features. This video was viewed over 11 millions times.

#1. Annoying Orange: Pacmania

We all realized this year that Pacman still evokes massive mania as Google found out when they put up a pacman interactive game as a doodle on their homepage. On YouTube is a video which has a fruit changing places with Pacman in the video game. This was viewed over 12.3 million times on YouTube.
Most of these videos show how Tech brands have become iconic in our everyday life and that is the main reasons of these videos becoming so popular. Do drop in your comments and let me know which one is your favorite among these videos.

Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to change clothing color in Photoshop. Its easy and fun

You can see the result in the image above.
Step 1 : Create a duplicate layer of the image (Press shortcut key Ctrl+J).

Step 2 : Select the ‘top’ by lasso tool or pen tool which ever you prefer, here I have used lasso tool.

Make sure your selection is proper as shown in the below image.

Step 3 : Now create new fill or adjustment layer option from layer control panel.
(Refer image below) and select Hue/saturation option.

Step 4 : Hue/saturation window will appear. Set the Hue at (-113), Saturation at  (+7), Lightness at (-34) or you can play with the settings till you get your desired color.

Step 5 : Look for any holes or missing pieces. Hit Ctrl+click in the layer box.
Fill in as many holes as you can with the Brush Tool.

Make sure that the foreground color is white and background color is black.

Your Final image is now ready.

I hope you had fun doing this.
Do drop in your views and ideas through your comments.

Google Bookmarks – An Alternative to Delicious

Do you still manage your Bookmarks on your local browser? What if your installed browser suddenly gets corrupt and you have no backup for your bookmarks? Even in another case, if you use two browsers constantly at a time, how many times would you need to synchronize between them. Think ahead of all this and start storing your bookmarks directly under your Google Account ID.
Google Bookmarks uses the same Account Login you use for your Gmail account, and hence it becomes too easy for you to manage your bookmarks.

Source: My Google AccountIt provides you with the following features:

• Labels – Just like you create groups for your bookmarks, Google Bookmarks is all about labels. The basic difference between a group and Label is that you can apply multiple Labels to the same bookmark. So basically your bookmark stays at the same location and you just apply one or more tags, called “Label”.
• List – You can create your own Lists and even share them with your friends or the Internet public as well.
• Sorting – Sorting is ofcourse a well-defined feature in Google Bookmarks.

Now let’s discuss a query which you might have! You might be thinking that everytime when you want to add or view a bookmark, you would need to visit the Google Bookmarks website. Here, I would say that its not the case. Both Firefox and Google Chrome provides for an addon (called Extension in Chrome) which can tackle this query easily.
For Firefox Users:
You can download an addon named – “Google Bookmarks for Firefox” from the following link given below. This will let you directly add, manage and access all your Bookmarks stored under Google account through a menu-based format.
Link: Google Bookmarks for Firefox

For Google Chrome Users:
There is an extension even for Chrome users which is named – “Google Bookmarks” which automatically syncs all your bookmarks from your Google Bookmarks account, lets you add or manage your bookmarks and presents them to you in a light & small window without hampering your browsing experience.
Link: Google Bookmarks for Chrome

Since Delicious’s future is looking bleak, I think Google bookmarks could prove to be a better option for the time being.

Link: Google Bookmarks

Chrome Extension to Speak and Search on the Internet”

Voice search is a Google Chrome extension that provides a method to search by speaking. Nowadays  most of the smart phones have the ability to accept voice commands and perform actions and this experimental add-on will allow us to search by speaking out the words we want to search on the internet.This is a really amazing add-on and goes on to show the capabilities built into Google Chrome.

How to use it:

• If you want to search for “cats” just click on the microphone and say “cats”. If you want pictures of cat say “google images cats”.

Features and requirements:
It comes preloaded with the following services :

• Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha.
• We can also add our own custom search engines.
• It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Github.
• Requires a microphone.

Drawback:

• Speech input is experimental and hence speech recognition is not perfect.

Link: Google Chrome Voice Search

Check out Improvement In Google Translate

Google translate is an excellent tool for translation of different languages, I was just translating some something through Google Translate and observed few improvements and started searching around. You might have not noticed about the few improvement Google has added in Google Translate this month. Google has developed automatic translation tools because they want to help people find information, no matter what language they speak. Below you will find three distinct improvements to Google Translate.

Improvements in Google translate

• Alternative Translation : Google has added the feature to see alternative translations, which can help us understand the true intended meaning of the phrase, and provide another kind of feedback for them(Google) to improve their translation algorithm. See the images below how you can edit the sentences, to do so left click with your mouse on the word you will get alternate words for that choose amongst it to use.

         Virtual Keyboard : Google has also added virtual keyboards to Google Translate, because it is very            difficult to type any of the 57 languages that is supported by Google Translate on a standard           QWERTY          keyboard. Just look at the below screenshot, click on the keyboard icon appears at bottom-right of the text area to get the virtual keyboard for other languages

• Speech Synthesis : One of the feature that user enjoy is to listen the text which they have just translated in other language. For this Google has added speech synthesis for three more languages and they are Arabic, Japanese and Korean. And dramatically improved another 17 languages approximately, so that we can not only see text translations, but also hear them spoken aloud. Few of them are as follows Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish etc.