Kiran Upadhyay

All work and no play makes computers seem very dull. They’re not. You can  turn your computer into the ultimate media center with Boxee , and you can even  set up Boxee to launch your favorite games and old-school ROMs . If you like playing old-school ROMs you’ll adore the Super Mario War multiplayer game. This fan-made game is basically Super Smash Brothers set in a 16-bit world, but it’s superb. It was among my favorite videos games to play in college—group sessions were invariably a blast. The nice thing with this Super Mario free game is it’s accessible—even your non-gamer friends can get into it quickly. You can get it working on any Linux, Mac or Windows machine, so let’s take a look! The Basics The Super Mario War free game is, at it’s heart, a multiplayer game. While you can play against the computer, it’s not nearly as fun as playing against your friends. Picking up some cheap USB joysticks is great idea, but without them you can crowd around a keyboard with...

Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) has been in the limelight ever since it came into existence in 1993. However, Adobe made it ridiculously expensive for end users to create PDF documents. While the PDF Reader was free, the creator itself was very expensive. And the story hasn’t changed one bit in all these years. PDFCreator, however, is an open source alternative that lets you create Adobe PDF files. While it doesn’t have the advanced features contained in the latest Adobe Acrobat, it does pack enough power to deal with everyday PDF requirements easily. How It Works PDFCreator is an elegant piece of software and is very good at what it does. It installs a virtual printer driver, and any file which is sent to that printer, results in a PDF document. Once sent to print, the user gets a dialog box to customize anything that he/she might want to. This dialog box also asks for the path of the final document. Once all settings are finalized, the printer produces a spanking, ...

So you’ve come up with the million dollar idea when you took a shower one morning. You entertained your imagination with a scenario about cashing out on it and living the life of the rich and famous. Then you finished showering, continued your life with the 9 to 5 routine and totally forgot about that chance to be successful until one day you saw somebody on TV getting rich using that very idea! What should you do about it? Find a lawyer and prepare to sue that “idea thief”? Actually, there’s nothing you can do but continue on with your life. You can’t copyright ideas and it’s very possible that there are several people among millions of others who came up with exactly the same idea. Aside from taking actions, the first difference between success and failure is the act of taking notes of those ideas. Anytime, Anywhere, Any Forms Ideas pop-up unpredictably anytime and anywhere, and most of the time, they are only doing a one time visit. If you are determined to be successful, you’d...

Regular backup of data and files is an absolute must as you might have read a number of times here. Rsync, being the versatile file copy utility that it is, has been the ultimate backup tool for Linux geeks. However, using rsync from the command line is not what you would call a stroll in the park. There are more options than you can shake a stick at, the switches are cryptic, on top of that you are never really sure which one to use until you have goofed up and learnt it the hard way! The other day, we showed you  Grsync , which provides a frontend to the ever so geeky rsync command. You could use Grsync to create your backups for you. However, there are a number of good backup software available for Linux, which make the task even easier. Let’s have a look at one such software. It is called  Back In Time  and it is a pretty useful option if you are looking for a backup solution for your Linux computer. On Ubuntu, it is available via Ubuntu Software center, just do ...

Perhaps you have taken the plunge and established your Twitter persona after hearing so much about the incredible growth of this social networking application. Now it’s time for you to track how much of your own voice has grown on the Web through Twitter. Maybe you wish to know how many others are retweeting what you said. You could certainly perform a search over at search.twitter.com or monitor your mentions through a Twitter client, but since you want to be productive on Twitter, why not get these searches delivered to your inbox or via free SMS alerts to your phone? Here’s an easy way to do it if you already have a Yahoo! ID and an AOL account. Using Yahoo! Pipes The  Digital Inspiration blog posted a nice how-to article  on subscribing to password-protected feeds. To summarize it, you can subscribe to your favorite password-protected feed if you type your username and password right in the RSS feed URL, which is why ...

It’s hard to best LogMeIn when it comes to remote desktop software. This program, once installed, allows you to remotely log into another computer – regardless of the router configuration of the computer you’re connecting to. If you have access to a web browser you can access any and all computers you’ve set up using the service. The entire process is possible with or without a browser plugin, but it’s much faster if you have one.  Aibek reviewed the program back in 2006  and since then it’s only got better. I love this software, and use it for work quite a bit. I’ve had a problem, however: my netbook runs  Jolicloud , meaning I can’t install the official LogMeIn plugin for my browser. As such, my remote connections are incredibly slow. Or at least they were, until I found LogMeIn for Linux. Yes, there’s an experimental browser plugin for LogMeIn. LogMeIn itself advises that you should not make use of this plugin in a production environment, but it’s still worth ch...