Kiran Upadhyay

After what seems like forever, Google Music is finally out of beta. The program has been invite-only for some time, but now it is available to everyone. One fear many users had was that Google would charge once the service went public, but it appears as though those fears were groundless, because users can still upload up to 20,000 songs for free. To sign up to Google Music, simply head to  music.google.com  and log in with your Google account. Users will need to download the Google music program on their computer and at the moment, you must be resident in the United States. If a user has an enormous music collection it will take a while to upload, but once it does, users will be ready to listen to all of their favorite music anywhere they want. In addition to going public, Google has also added a music store on the  Android market . Their music store offers more than 13 million tracks. Music can...

Firefox has been steadily losing ground to Chrome and Opera in the past few years. I find this sad, as Mozilla were groundbreakers at the time and rescued us all from an IE-only world. I, myself, switched to Chrome a while back, but now that  Firefox 8  is out, I decided to give it another chance. But Firefox is not perfect (it’s OK, neither is Chrome). So why not make it better? Here are 5 excellent add-ons, which when combined, will revolutionize your Firefox experience. You can, of course, try only one or two, you’re still bound to feel the difference. Mar Mod Mar Mod probably deserves an entire article of its own. This is an enhancement add-on that tweaks so many things, it might take you a while to remember all that it’s doing. Remember or not, you will feel the difference right away. Just from this screenshot you can see that the orange menu has turned into a nice icon, a  “Restart ” option has been added to the menu, along with a new “ Addons ” menu wh...

When it comes to keeping your website or your blog healthy and strong in search engine listings, regularly checking for broken or otherwise bad links on your website is a very good idea. Not only is it good for your site’s overall standings in search listings, it’s also good for your visitors. No one wants to encounter broken links on a site – it’s a sign of a poorly cared for website. Then again, regularly checking your site for bad links can be a tedious chore. We’ve covered a few tools here at MUO that can help you stay on top of things if you have the time, like Ann’s article on  Xenu Link Sleuth , and Saikat’s article on  Hyperlink Checker . Those are good solutions, but again, they require your time. Checking for bad links takes work. A better solution would be to set up an automated script on your own server (or any computer connected to the Internet) to check your website for bad links and then issue a report with all of the results. Better yet, schedule it to ...

A lot of times when you need to get something done on your computer and think that perhaps there’s a program that can do it for you, you most likely go to your favorite search engine and research away. By the time you’re an expert looking for the best free software, you might find yourself a fan of freeware, so you might even look forward to receiving updates on cool new programs. Sound familiar? Looking for software online has actually become easier these days. Do you want to see a comparison of all similar software for a specific task? There’s an app for that. Do you want to see all alternatives to a specific program? There’s an app for that too. You probably knew this from using the many rich repositories of software available on  FileHippo, SourceForge, etc . However, there are other more recently developed applications with interesting approaches to listing software that might just help you find what you need quickly and painlessly. Use  CatchFree  To Compare...

Want o make your PC run faster and smoother?  These are some small tips which make great impact on the performance of your computer. Everybody wants a PC which runs the way we want. A newly bought computer just impresses you, with its fast interface, quick reactions, negligible garbage, in short just like what a new computer should. But after using your computer for about a year or so, like me, you would also face some minor problems with your computer performance e.g. takes more time to boot up, hangs up very frequently, you see a large cluster of useless icons on your desktop, applications run slower, some even refuse to run. Innumerable problems are faced by all of us. Now all of us won’t buy a new computer just for this reason, so what would you do? Format your hard disk? Probably, but who wants to lose precious data? There are many small things that PC users, don’t know about, or though being aware of them don’t prefer to use them as they require investment of time. And wh...

It seems that Facebook is actually not using cookies to track you. At least not after you log out. Users, however, should still be wary about what Facebook knows about them and what it chooses to do with this information. According to writer and hacker,  Nik Cubrilovic , Facebook’s tracking cookies are not deleted when you log out of Facebook, but instead are simply altered. These cookies can then be used to track your online presence wherever you go via social plugins, to sell your information to third parties and for ad targeting. Facebook has recently responded to these allegations via a comment on ZDNet. A Facebook engineer denied that Facebook is using these altered cookies as a source of information, but says they are instead used to protect users against hackers, prevent underage users from trying to re-register and to identify shared computers (again, to protect users who choose the “ keep me logged in ” option). Even if this is true, we should all keep in mind that c...

Most of us suffer from information overload. Being overwhelmed with private emails may not be a big issue and ignoring half the emails is actually acceptable to a certain degree. In a professional life, however, not only are you expected to find ways to cope with all incoming channels, you also have to process the information, i.e. forward, respond, discuss, keep track, and follow up. At MakeUseOf we have written a lot of articles about different ways to use Google Mail and how to make the most of it. But which features and techniques do people who receive hundreds of emails a week really use? How do we keep track of dozens of tasks and yet remain on top of the daily mail flood? While I cannot speak for my colleagues, I can certainly speak for myself. I use Google Mail to handle emails and most of my tasks and with this article I would like to share my ‘magic tricks’ with you. Filtering Incoming Mail For me, a key step to deal with the floods, was to set up filters for incoming m...

Unlimited bandwidth is the dream of every geek, but unfortunately, it’s not always available. Caps are one way for service providers to squeeze extra money out of existing services, so there have been many attempts to introduce them, some of which have stuck. If you’re on a cap, it’s important to know how much bandwidth you’re using. Sometimes a provider will give you a meter for free, but if that’s not the case, you’ll need to check out a few freeware computer bandwidth usage management tools. Keeping Up With Downloads Monitoring bandwidth manually is virtually impossible. Individual webpages don’t report their size readily, and even if they did, there are many variables such as streaming content, automatically refreshing news feeds, and more. Software downloads are not much better. Yes, you can usually see the file size, but sometimes those files are just downloaders rather than full installers, and even if it is the full software, it may need to download an update. How do you...

Team Viewer is one of the more popular remote desktop applications on the market. They have had an application available for  Android  for some time, and they have finally stepped up with an update for the Apple app store that allows transferring of files to and from the device for free. It’s great to see them step up with such an important feature. They have an  iPhone  and  iPad  version of the application available for free to non-commercial users. If you are using the application for commercial purposes than they offer an app for  iPhone  and  iPad  for $99. The new app supports file sharing with Windows PCs, Lion OS and Linux systems, so no matter what type of computer you are using they have you covered. If you are looking to access your files while away from home, this is a must-have application. The people behind Team Viewer actually conducted a national survey of 2,000 people and found that 74% of them wanted to be able to a...

Dropbox  is awesome. Sometimes I don’t know how I lived before I had Dropbox, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. But as much as we take Dropbox for granted, many people still don’t use it, or don’t even know about it (yes, it’s true!). Many times I find myself in a predicament, when I know the easiest way to get a file is to use Dropbox, but explaining about Dropbox will just take too long. Or maybe I need to get something into my Dropbox and I just don’t have access to it right now. For these scenarios, some nice people invented services we can use to send files directly to our Dropbox, without using Dropbox. Note that all these services require your Dropbox credentials in order to work, and you must authorize them within Dropbox. FileStork FileStork is a web-based service which you can use to create file requests to be sent to your Dropbox. If you need several people to send you one (or more) files, or you want to give someone permanent permission to send files to your Dropbo...

I used to be a huge  TV  addict. Now because of the lack of time, I may only use it as background. But I am still watching it from time to time to relax and switch off from work. Therefore I was quite happy to discover this (quite old but not yet covered) tool. TV Chrome  is a Google Chrome extension (it does have a Firefox version but it doesn’t seem to be compatible with Firefox 5.0) that tunes into live television feeds from across the world and lets you watch various international TV channels online. I have found it great for various purposes: You can keep track of hot news or sports while at work with no TV; You can use watching TV as background noise (especially when you need to do some monotonous work and music makes you either too sleepy or two energetic); You can use it to relax and switch off from a hard task you have just completed; You can use it if you are learning a foreign language and need the constant stream of a foreign language speech in the...