Kiran Upadhyay

Starting on December 1st, Universities that license Office Education for their faculty and staff can offer students Office 365 ProPlus for free thanks to a new program called Student Advantage . For students at these institutions, that means free access to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher, and Lync. While many cheaper alternatives to Office have sprung up, many students still rely on Redmond’s good ol’ productivity tools. Office 365 University  typically costs $80 for a 4-year subscription for students, which is already a heavy discount over the usual $99 per year subscription to Office 365 Home Premium . Microsoft has been moving from selling Office as a one-time deal to a subscription service through Office 365. Microsoft’s stated goal is to better prepare students for a workforce in which Office plays a very central role. In a study by Microsoft and the IDC, they found that proficiency in Microsoft Office was the third most sought afte...

For those of you who want to have absolute privacy and no geo-restrictions while browsing the Internet, a Virtual Private Network is the way to go. However, by virtue of the name itself, a VPN may sound very daunting to a lot of people, and so it is probably dismissed as something which can’t be done by someone with no tech knowledge. I am happy to tell you that it is  extremely  easy to set it up. In fact you can have it up and running in minutes, and I am going to show you how. The VPN that I am going to use today is  Tunnelbear .  This is without a doubt my favourite VPN and I  haven’t hesitated to say so in the past , and  neither has Erez . It’s reliable, fast, available for mobile and tablet devices, offers a minimum of AES 128-bit encryption, and if you are willing to pay a nominal $5 a month, you can have unlimited service (free users only get an initial 500MB a month, then an extra 1GB a month – and that’s only after they tweet on Twitter ...

I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least). If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always  Corel Painte r. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle,  MyPaint  gives you a nice chunk of functionality for the even nicer price of...  free . The program comes with many brushes that are divided into several categories. The brushes seem to work quite well at default settings. In case you want to tweak something, though, hitting Ctrl+B shows the Brush Settings dialog, which has a mind-boggling array of parameters that you can change for the brush you've selected. The interface is multi-windowed but is not as horrible as GIMP's (sorry, GIMP lovers). The color picker is quite advanced and features color-matching harmonies (wh...

Ubuntu 10.04 was released last month, and comes with some breath taking design enhancements, and has some fabulous art work integrated into it. We’ve put together a collection of wallpapers to make it more customized. We thought of pulling out some of the best Ubuntu wallpapers in this post so that you have a good mix to choose from when you are slightly bored of the default Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) wallpaper. The following is a collection of top 21 Ubuntu wallpapers. To download the wallpaper just click on the hyperlink above the image. Ubuntu Wallpapers EgFox Lucid Lynx Blue 2010 by ~Eg-Art EgFox Lucid Lynx K HD 2010 by ~Eg-Art Lucid Lynx 10 04 by ~Momez Ubokeh Wallpaper Pack by ~giantspeck lucid fog brown by ~darkburt EgFox Lucid Lynx HD 2010 by ~Eg-Art LTS 2010 by ~alkore31 Ubuntu Bokeh by ~ttk1opc Ubuntu Aurora by *monkeymagico Ubuntu by ~gorkisview Ubuntu Glow by ~BigAction Destroy Ubuntu by ~lukeroberts Ubuntu Triskell by ~deviantdark Ubuntu 2.0 by ~monsteer Ubuntu leaves by ~...

The weekend is upon us once more, and the spring is here, too. If you're planning to go outdoors with your camera, you might be interested to know that BBC Wildlife Magazine offers over a score of photography Master Classes for free, in PDF format. Each "class" is a richly-illustrated four-page tutorial, which seems to be taken directly off the pages of the magazine; the one I looked at still had the original page numbers -- 67 to 70. While some photography tips are timeless (composition, light), it's nice to note that the information presented is quite timely -- the tips all come from issues published in 2006/2007. Since it's a "master class", there is a lot of emphasis on who's presenting the information. These are all experienced wildlife photographers who stand by their words. The tips presented in the issue I reviewed were quite elementary, but were solid nonetheless -- advice such as "it's not what you include - it's what you e...

Are you jealous of  i Pad ’s awesome document reading capabilities? Well, never fear,  Aji Reader  is one iPhone app that will get you reading PDFs in no time! iPDF  is another free one, as well. If those two aren’t the bees knees, you can use  DropBox  as a Reader or you can create your very own free PDF reader using iPhoto and iTunes. The best part of being a MakeUseOf writer is that we get to play with  lots  of tools and apps. Hunting for the best free PDF readers was a challenge because there aren’t too many that are truly free and don’t require an eventual upgrade. Of the handful that exist, a lot of them were too complicated to use and, in some cases, were document readers but not actually PDF readers. In identifying the best iPhone PDF reader, I wanted to find one that was free and simple to use and had good search capabilities. I didn’t want to waste a lot of time downloading, searching, or converting files. I wanted to instantly...