Kiran Upadhyay

MoviePass, the subscription service that lets consumers pay a monthly fee to see unlimited movies in theaters across the U.S., is slashing its prices yet again. The company announced today it’s now offering its service for $6.95 per month, down from the current price of $9.95 per month, when customers commit to a one-year subscription plan. That works out to a flat fee of $89.95 annually. The deal is a limited-time promotion, as opposed to a permanent pricing change, but MoviePass didn’t say how long the offer is valid. However, it is open to both new and existing subscribers – the latter who would receive a 25 percent savings on their current subscription if switching over to the annual plan. This is not the first time that MoviePass has dropped its pricing. When the company introduced its $9.95 per month, one-movie-per-day plan this August, down from $15 for 2 movies per month (or more in select markets like L.A. and NYC, and going as high as $50), it saw so many new sign-up...

As you will by now have probably read, around 100 women celebrities (including Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice and Kate Upton) have had naked and explicit pictures seemingly hacked from their iCloud accounts and published online, first on 4Chan and now all over the place. As a reminder, iCloud automatically stores photos, email, contacts and other information online, allowing users to sync this data across different devices. Many of the photos have been confirmed as being genuine, most notably by Lawrence. The anonymous hacker who originally posted the images first on 4Chan claimed they were taken from iCloud accounts. They demanded donations via PayPal and Bitcoin in exchange for posting them, but only received 0.2545 BTC in donations, which is verifiable at this address: 18pgUn3BBBdnQjKG8ZGedFvcoVcsv1knWa While it’s highly unlikely to be a security issue with iCloud, the incident has served to remind us all of the issues around internet security in general. ...

Video games have become a massive business. There’s a ton of money to be made, and lots of companies are trying to cash in. Yet designing, developing and supporting a title that goes beyond anything seen before isn’t easy, and it often leads to spectacular failure. Here are the five worst blunders, scandals and botched releases of 2013. SimCity’s Release Shenanigans Few games received more hype this year than  SimCity , and it’s easy to see why. The first new entry in the franchise to be released for ten years, the title promised to modernize city-building with attractive graphics and gameplay mechanics that computers simply couldn’t handle a decade ago. A relatively smooth beta and glowing previews elated fans who believed they would soon be diving into city-building nirvana. Then SimCity was released and, well, it didn’t really  work . Part of the title’s modernization included always-online play which promised a global market and collective gameplay, but the ...

With 2011 just around the corner, this is a great time to think about all the different things you could commit to doing for the next 365 days. We’re probably all working on our New Year’s resolutions but how about committing to something that will last the entire year? There’s no limit to the kinds of things you could commit to doing on a daily basis throughout the year – and possibly beyond that. To get you started, here’s a list of 6 year long project ideas that you might want to try – from creative projects to good deeds. Get started with these guidelines, ideas and places where you can keep your project going for 365 days. Write a Novel If you’ve been itching to finish your novel, giving yourself a specific time frame may be the trick to finally getting it done. Set aside a certain amount of time per day and write a set number of pages. Getting organised could be a good way to motivate yourself – setting goals and achieving them can often lead to great momentum. Louise Dought...

Sometimes it’s the music that makes the movies. You just have to watch ‘Sound of Music’ or ‘Saturday Night Fever’ to understand what I am talking about. You have to be a Martian not to have heard about either of those two. Then let me throw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at you, a movie that entered the musical consciousness of a lot of people, as time went by. Yes, it’s the magic of movies. But even as the movie unspools, music lends a bit of its own too. Just for the nitpickers, let’s use the more precise term of soundtrack . The word ‘soundtrack’ has obviously come from the sound recording on a narrow strip of a motion picture film, which runs with the images. Today, we also know it as a  Film Score or more promotionally as OST (Original Soundtrack). It’s music by another name and quite similarly, it can uplift, it can sadden or it can give us goose pimples. If you have seen ‘Chariots of Fire’, then the opening scene with Vangelis’ score is as energizing as the scene of the athletes. ...

For those that aren’t in the know, the browser based “IDE” is an abbreviation of I ntegrated D evelopment E nvironment. Very simply said, it’s an application that can be used to write code, but usually with added compiler/interpreter, debugging and automation features. Finding a decent freeware code writing application (view previous code-editor compilations for Windows or Mac ), never mind an IDE, can prove difficult. Some operating systems have it harder than others, and if you use more than one, or are on the move a lot, coding can be a bastard. Hence it pays to code in the cloud. By elevating your coding platform to an online environment, you not only rid yourself of OS issues but even of hardware independence. No matter where you find yourself, you can always access all your files with the same IDE. Here’s Why You Want An Online IDE If the aforementioned motivation of increased portability and accessibility wasn’t enough, here’s something else to think about. With your codi...

You probably already knew about IMDB for its movie reviews on upcoming, recent and even older movies, but when you have that wide of a movie selection available, it’s good to have more streamlined ways to help you narrow down which films are worth your while and which most likely aren’t. Good starting places would be movie recommendation sites (such as Criticker or Filmaster ), places that aggregate movie ratings from different sites, or reputable sources’ guides to the best and worst movies of all time. Here’s our list of the latter, which includes the better known sites (that you read about on Saikat’s skillfully written free e-book, The Awesome Internet Guide to the Movie Addict ) where you can find great lists to the top (and not-so-much) movies. All-Time Best and Worst Reviewed Film Guides Rotten Tomatoes The site name refers to movies that suffer from a rating of less than 60%, while the movies that get good ratings and reviews are called fresh (tomatoes). Since it has su...

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...