Kiran Upadhyay

Do you hate using Microsoft products? Do you instead want to use a free, lightweight, easy to use calendar and contact management application? Well I needed something very lightweight for a project I was working on. My requirements were to use a small amount of memory, be cross-platform, we needed a calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Notes. Last of all, it needed to be easy and intuitive. I went looking and I found a little application quickly called Osmo on Sourceforge. It fit the bill to a tee. You can find the project’s page over at this link here and the authors home page is over here . The Windows download for this free contact management software is a measly little 4.6MB. The application is available for Windows or Linux and is released under the GNU General Public License. After a easy installation of next, next, next you will see this screen: On the calendar screen we have an easy to use calendar which display the current time, day of the year, amount of days till the year is...

ASCII and HTML art has long been a time consuming, but much rewarding geeky art form. The process consists of recreating an image or scene by solely using respectively plain or colored text characters. The images which this results in serves little practical purpose other than retro entertainment. The scenes that can be rendered using these techniques are often nothing short of astounding. This once tedious process has long since been simplified for the common human being as well. Everyone can now create incredibly looking text art in just seconds. For this article, we would like to focus on online services to convert images to text. With the two sites we’ll discuss below, you can upload your own images, and convert them to ASCII, HTML and even Matrix text art. Photo2Text Photo2Text quickly converts any picture to ASCII art. After selecting and uploading a picture of your choice, the site will select characters to convert your images to text. The detail that this technique can ren...

This application is pronounced as ‘ transfuse ’. Literally that should stand for imparting something gradually. Functionally, Transfz does the exact reverse – it’s meant to make your search easier and faster from any application. The usefulness of this tool that lets you search the Internet from any application is what makes us call it an integrated search agent . Look at Transfz from another angle; it takes away the dependency of search from the browser and extends it system-wide. In this post we will take a look at Transfz v.1.22 (Beta) . Transfz runs from the system tray. All the functions of Transfz are contained within a context menu. The Global Menu is launched with a shortcut key press of CTRL+D . This key can of course be customized to anything of your choosing. The Global menu is not a part of the regular Windows right click context menu but it behaves like one in the fact that it can be called up in any application. We need to only highlight a piece of text and pass it o...

Easeus Partition Manager became one of my go-to drive utilities after the first time I used it. They're now offering a hard drive cloning utility, and it's just as handy. Unlike Partition Manager, there's only one version of Todo Backup , and it's totally free to use in any environment. You can clone drives and create images of your partitions all from the comfort of your Windows desktop. Performance is excellent and comparable to Macrium Reflect which has been my app of choice up until now. Since I can put Todo to work at the office as well, I'll likely be making the switch. Todo also supports sector-by-sector copying, compression, spanning, and encryption. Image files you create can also be mounted and explored from within the application. Create a bootable rescue CD and Todo can restore images without booting into Windows. Perfect for those times when the proverbial poo hits the fan. I love Easeus products - so much so that I'd be willing to help them ...

Do you use Firefox? Most of our readers do and we all know that 10 open tabs can be highly problematic for our system memory. There have been times I have seen my Firefox get close to 1.5 gigs of memory. That is just unacceptable! So what do you do? Do you stop using Firefox? Absolutely not!  Will you use Internet Explorer? It is just as big of a resource hog and it causes system crashes as well (well it depends on what version you are using). I have found a much needed extension to control memory usage in Firefox called Memory Fox. You can grab the installer over here . So to start, I took a look at my 4 open tabs in Firefox. They are using 256 Megs of memory. No big deal right. But a few hours from now that can balloon up to 4 times what it is. You can see my task manager open below with the Firefox process at the top hogging up my resources. And that is on a good day! What about my Vista machine at home that ONLY runs Firefox? Take a look at the 1.4 gigs of used memor...

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th...

Last week we talked about the advantages of carrying your music with you on the go – not on an MP3 player, but on an ordinary USB stick. Accompanied with a portable audio application, you would be able to play your music anywhere, anytime; be it at home, at work, or even at your grandmother’s place. We already showed you how to do a custom portable Winamp install , making it fit for any portable storage device, but this time we’d like to focus on native MP3 players that are portable. That is, audio application that can be put on your USB stick without messing around. Some of these are adapted to run on portable media, others simply work. CoolPlayer+ Portable This one is, if we may, a ‘real’ portable application. Based on the original CoolPlayer, PortableApps has modified the application and repackaged it as a portable app. With 1.5 MB and over 2 million downloads to date, CoolPlayer+ Portable has proven itself both a lightweight and a fit candidate. Apart from audio playback, ...