Kiran Upadhyay

If you have some time to kill then nothing beats passing the time than playing a game. Portable Apps have steadily been filling up their Games Section so I decided to play some of the games to see if they were any good. Being portable, none of them require installation and can easily be run off a USB stick.   The games are fairly simple and straight forward so don’t expect any World Of Warcraft types of game.   But that doesn’t make them any less fun to play. So, let’s take a look at 5 of the games and see which ones are best. Jooleem Portable Jooleem’s appearance reminds me a bit of Bejewelled (a.k.a. Diamond Mine).   In Jooleem, you have to click on four marbles of the same colour to form a rectangle.   They then disappear, the remaining marbles rearrange themselves and off you go again.   It takes a while to get the hang of the whole rectangle thing but eventually you are whizzing along and the whole thing is really addictive....

Whenever my family travels or we’re away from home for any extended period, as I turn to lock and close the front door I always consider how nice it would be to be able to build a WiFi home surveillance system that would immediately alert me if someone has entered my house when there’s nobody there. This has been a dream of mine for years, but I’ve always avoided the project because of the costs I assumed were involved. However, writing for MakeUseOf often forces me to think a bit outside the box. How would I accomplish a home security system inexpensively or free? As an automation engineer, I often have to work with machinery or equipment where a central processor needs to read data from a number of distributed sensors. So, for starters I would distribute “sensors” – both wired and wireless web cams – in and around my property. The question still remains, what central processing software could handle all of those webcams and accomplish the “alert” scenario I want? After doing a lot...

Are you a self proclaimed artist? Maybe you write graffiti or maybe you doodle ?  Either way we all know that we love to make our own creations and share them with our friends and strangers alike. I have come across a very nifty web site that is called SketchFu – kind of like Kung Fu but with more drawing,m, less killing. You do not have to sign up or register to enjoy SketchFu to create drawings online, contrary to popular belief. But if you want to save your doodles or submit them for others to see, you will need a free login and password. I did not do that for this article. Let’s see how it works. Navigate on over to SketchFu and you will be greeted by this screen: They have up a basic doodle showing what you can do with the application with a little imagination. You can see drawings other users have created on the right hand side. You can click on them and see what the users created. You can also “cheer” it or comment on it if you have an account. To create a drawing o...

This is not another post about smilies. This article deals with the Windows command line. The command line lets you communicate directly with your computer and instruct it to perform various tasks. For this you have to use specific commands. The commands are not necessarily intuitive, so they have to be learned, just like words in a language. Fortunately, there are graphical user interfaces (GUIs) replacing most procedures that formerly required using the command line. However, sometimes using the command line is quicker or even the only way to access certain information. Thus knowing how to use the command line can be extremely valuable. And that’s where this Windows command guide comes in. To access the Windows command line in XP, click > START > Run , type cmd into the > Open: field, and click > OK . Alternatively, you can go through > Start > All Programs > Accessories and select > command prompt . This launches cmd.exe, a window that reminds us o...

For beginner and amateur musicians, there are many online websites offering free sheet music. But once you begin to visit these sites, you will find that many of them are thinly disguised search portals with broken links or front-ends to lure you into purchasing something related to music. We here at MakeUseOf are always happy to show you the truly free sites that you can make use of , so without further ado, here are the best sites where you can find free sheet music to print. IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library Listed by PC Magazine as one of the Top 100 Websites of 2009, this site is a treasure trove of free public domain sheet music, as well as a thriving community of music lovers. There are over 39,000 scores for 18,000+ works and thousands are being added every month. You will find multiple versions of sheets for popular works, all available for download as PDF files. While some PDFs are typeset using software and are clearer, some are scanned versions. The International Music Sc...

As many of you know, with virtualization you can run an operating system within another. There are plenty of reasons why you would want to do that: if you are a developer you might want to see how your application behaves on different operating systems; you can test out software, products and suspicious files in an isolated environment without damaging your host operating system. There are various software available for creating and running virtual machine image. Microsoft’s Virtual PC , VMware , and Sun Microsystems’ VirtualBox to mention a few. Usually, there are several steps you would need to follow in order to create a virtual machine. These include creating a virtual hard disk and then installing the required operating system on the virtual hard disk. Recently, Microsoft-owned Sysinternals released a utility that would be useful for easily creating a virtual machine image from your existing hard drive contents. This can be very useful if you have one of your computers at ho...

Phone numbers are a little like fingerprints. They can reveal a lot about a person, for example their name or where they live. If you have a missed call from an unknown phone number, you may want to identify the phone number of the person who tried to reach you before you dial that number. Chances are you’re hooking up with a telemarketer. Eventually some random person simply dialed the wrong number. Or it’s your long lost best friend who finally found you. You never know. There are several free online tools to reverse lookup and identify a North American phone number. However, with cell phone numbers it’s almost impossible to find out the identity of the person behind the phone number. Unless you are willing to pay. Sadly, most seemingly free services will redirect you to a paid option, even if it’s possible to find the information for free elsewhere. To avoid these pitfalls, I have compiled a list with services for reverse phone number search and how to use them. 1. WhoCallsMe?...