Kiran Upadhyay

Use Hangouts outside the browser. An overlooked Chrome extension from Google lets you chat without opening Gmail or Google+. Back in May, Google announced it was launching a new messaging service: Google Hangouts. This was a way for the company to combine its redundant messaging services: the ever-popular Google Talk, the little used Google+ Messenger, popular videoconferencing service Google Hangouts and (eventually) phone enhancement service Google Voice. There are mobile apps, of course, but no platform-specific desktop version – most users doubtless think of the service as part of Gmail. But a perhaps overlooked feature is the  Hangouts extension for Chrome . This extension takes your conversations outside your browser and to your desktop, but is it functional? In truth this is a mixed bag. Here’s why. Pro: Brings Your Chat Outside Your Browser Let’s start with the obvious pro here: the Hangouts extension for Chrome pops out of the browser, so you don’t have ...

The Internet is a huge part of our lives, and having your own website is more important than it’s ever been. But what if you want to create your own website, yet not have all of the headaches like searching for the best web hosting services, or even creating your site from scratch, out of something like WordPress. Well, have you considered  Webydo ? We’re giving away 10 Webydo Premium accounts valid for 1 year right after this review, so read on then join the competition! What Is Webydo? Webydo  is a  free , and very easy to use What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) website designer and Content Management System (CMS), which allows you to make gorgeous looking websites, very quickly, with absolutely no coding skill! Pretty cool stuff I think you’ll agree. So let’s dive in and take a look at what Webydo has to offer. With a free Webydo account, you can create unlimited websites with 15 different pages each, with 1 GB of storage. You...

Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006 – any Mac from before then uses the PowerPC platform. For a while Mac software was designed to work on both types of computers, but those days are for the most part gone. Put simply: you cannot use the latest Mac software on devices build before 2006. Whether you’ve had such a Mac for years, or picked it up at a garage sale, figuring out what you can and can’t do with such a Mac gets confusing fast. I should know: my primary computer until a year ago was a PowerMac G5. That is admittedly among the most powerful PPC Macs in existence, so speed wasn’t much of a problem for day-to-day computing – the machine could keep up with low-end devices even six years later. I could easily use this hardware for another couple years, from a hardware perspective. The problem is software. Apple hasn’t released a PPC-compatible operating system since Leopard, meaning new features, and the Mac App Store, are completely out of reach. The situatio...

Google Hangouts for Android just received SMS-integration, while  Facebook Messenger for Android   just received a completely new user interface. As two of the best messaging apps out there, this just makes them even harder to choose between. On the surface, they’re quite similar, but dig a bit deeper and you begin to see the major differences. To decide on a winner, I’ll be examining every facet of both apps from their visual appearances to their differentiating features. Let’s get started. User Base First off, to message anyone on Messenger or Hangouts, they have to be using that service (unless you’re sending an SMS through Hangouts). That means that no matter how amazing an app is, it’s useless if none of your friends use it. Since Facebook already has a massive user base, and Google+ (which is tightly integrated with Hangouts) still struggles to gain steam, Facebook has a clear advantage here. Winner: Facebook Messenger User Interface Hangouts h...

Is your utility bill killing you? Costs for gas, oil, water, and other natural resources rise steadily. In great parts of Europe, Australia, and Japan the worst price driver is electricity. Who would have thought that Reddit is a source of wisdom that can help you counter-balance these developments. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s not so surprising. Reddit is a haven for geeks, nerds, and intellectuals, interested in all sorts of niche topics, including energy efficiency and saving money. Moreover, Reddit is a community where everyone can contribute, regardless of education, status, or rank. And most importantly, contributions are evaluated by the community. In other words, Reddit is crowd wisdom at its best and a great resource for solving everyday problems, like gigantic utility bills. Prologue I dived into this article thinking I would hammer out a list with tips & tricks sourced from Reddit. To the detriment of my Saturday evening and Sunday morning, I ...

Are you concerned about your privacy online? Many people are and have taken to encrypting their internet traffic with a VPN (Virtual Private Network). For the uninitiated, a VPN allows you to tunnel your Internet traffic through another computer. The computer, acting as an intermediary, ensures that any data you send out cannot be identified to you based upon your IP address. More often than not, VPNs employ encryption; ensuring that nobody on your local network can intercept your traffic. VPN usage has historically been linked with the enterprise, offering companies a way for remote workers to access an internal network without worrying about external threats getting hold of their precious, private data. From this stuffy, corporate heritage, the consumer has found use for the humble VPN, with the proliferation of VPN services reflecting that. Common use cases involve circumventing georestriction on the likes of Hulu and iPlayer; anonymizing BitTorrent traffic and avoid...

Gigabytes and terabytes. In the world we live in now, storage space is everything. Megabytes no longer satisfy our relentless demands to store entire music libraries on an MP3 player. Single-digit gigabyte storages are no longer sufficient to hold our photos, videos, games and applications on smartphones. We need more! Or do we? How long do you reckon we’ll take to make the jump from terabytes to petabytes? Will the computers of the future come with petabyte drives as standard? What’s with our incessant desire to store everything? And just how much data can there be? datascience@berkeley explains.