Kiran Upadhyay

Christmas is coming. There is no doubt about it. Stores stocked up on Christmas treats as early as September, and meanwhile the matching decorations followed throughout town. It seems like every corner of our environment is blinking and shining in Christmas colors. Every corner? Maybe not yet! Do you have a Christmas theme desktop yet? Here is your chance! I found wallpapers, screensavers, Christmas trees, lights, critters, and a Windows Christmas theme for you. All free and 100% Christmas originals. Dig in! Christmas Wallpapers A Christmas wallpaper is a must! WallpaperStock has a great selection of images in resolutions up to 2560×1920 pixel. Vladstudio provides many more seasonal wallpapers . Christmas Screensavers Giveaway of the Day offers some great seasonal screensavers for free. I fell in love with this 3D Christmas fireside. It’s an animated screensaver with lovely fire and bell sounds. You will find many more holiday screensavers at the bottom of the page. Natur

A lot of people use USB MP3 players these days, but why not the other way around? Using a standard USB stick (often way cheaper), we can have our music on the go as well. With the lack of headphone support, you won’t be able to use it on the bus, or in the queue at the supermarket, but if you often use different computers – at home, at work, at school and at a friend’s place – it really pays to carry your collection with you. By loading the Winamp portable media playing software on a USB stick, as well as your music library, you can listen to your tunes everywhere, as if you were at home. Winamp The Winamp music player is still something of a phenomenon. It eats memory like a vegan (which is: nearly nothing) but can play almost any type of file. Even a lot of ‘newer’ media players are based on Winamp. This all comes to show how powerful and influential Winamp really is. Best yet, we can easily take a regular Winamp install and adapt it to our portable drive. Start out by downlo

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres

Most Windows users know about the utility of the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys when dealing with an unresponsive application. A program is said to be unresponsive when it doesn’t respond to any user interaction and neither does it perform its intended actions. There are plenty of jokes surrounding the whole Ctrl + Alt + Del combination that brings up the task manager in Windows and allows you to end unresponsive applications. Things seldom go this far in the Linux world, however claiming that such Linux unresponsiveness doesn’t occur would be a plain lie. The good thing about Linux is that you almost never have to hit the reset button due to unresponsive or hung applications. There are so many ways you can gain back control that you never have to resort to such extreme measures. In this article, we take a look at some of the ways you can deal with unresponsive applications on your Linux box. Dealing with Linux Unresponsiveness – Using System Monitor First and foremost you can use the famili

In the past, we here at MakeUseOf have covered sites that you can learn how to repair your own computer , but what happens when you need that one on one computer advice as you have no idea why your computer does not work? The first thing most people go and do is to Google it, but when you can’t find a solution, the next thing to do is ask someone to help you. That is why I present to you a list of websites and forums where people are willing to help you get your computer fixed. 1. Crossloop I am a regular using of Crossloop. If any of my friends need help with their computer, I will always tell them to install Crossloop so I can control their computer and show them how to do something, rather than having them try to explain it over the phone. But for those who aren’t my friends yet, you can get computer help and advice from someone else. They will help you guide you through your problem by connecting to your computer to control it. You can find more information on how Cross Loop

So you don’t want to spring for Adobe Acrobat Pro?  I can empathize as it is really expensive and in today’s economy we shouldn’t be spending money when we don’t have to. What do you do when you need to create a PDF or convert a PDF to word document? That is why I am about to show you a free application that will allow you to create PDF’s right from your Microsoft application.  As an added bonus this will also allow you to convert any PDF or XPS file to an editable Microsoft Word document. The conversions seem really fast. The only downside I see is the HUGE 120MB download. It seems that the application is so big because they bundle a trial version of their Fusion application which is a PDF viewer. You do NOT need to use this). Let us take a look at the application. There is a 32 bit and 64 bit version and it is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7. Go here to grab the download.  Then after the download, the applications will install. Make sure you close your browser and any Op

I once had a 20GB hard drive and it was always full. I thought that with bigger space – 40 or 80 Gigs – I could have some storage to spare. I couldn’t be more wrong. My 160GB was filled in no time. Even the new 500GB external hard drive is already at the last quarter of it’s remaining space. I wonder what’s eating the free space out. Where Has All The Free Space Gone? I have found five alternative applications to analyze hard drive space and determine what occupies the storage space. Here they are in no particular order. Finder : Every Mac user should be familiar with this app. Even though it’s designed as a general purpose file manager, Finder could be used to help you determine which ones are the biggest hogs of all. However, you need to do some modifications before you could use it for the hogs hunt. It’s because, by default, Finder will not reveal all the sizes. Open the “ View Options ” window by using Command + J (or by clicking the Action Button and choosing “ Show View