Skype is one of the most used software these days for making free calls to the other users through the Internet. One of the primary reasons for its success is its simplicity and to the point interface for the basic operation. Also, I think starting from the Skype version 4.0 onwards they have improved the video calling (or video conferencing) feature considerably including the quality of the  video calls and HD quality video calls on supported hardware/software. One of the limitations of the ...

Facebook PhotoZoom is a nice little extension that allows to zoom in or show much larger thumbnails in Firefox when mouse is hovered over a thumbnail. Basically, whenever mouse is over a thumbnail in the Facebook website a tooltip appears with a bigger thumbnail in it (see below). It works on both profile pictures and gallery thumbnails. It can also be temporarily enabled or disabled form the Tools menu or from the statusbar button as desired. It is a tiny extension weighing in about 10KB in size.Facebook ...

By default, in Windows if you don’t use the computer for a specific time it goes in to so called sleep/low power state. The time after which the system goes in to the sleep mode depends upon the power settings on that specific Windows system. In most of the cases it is fine because you actually want the system to go in to sleep mode if you are not using it because it is low power mode and it might be able to save some energy in this way. However, there might be some scenarios where you want to ...

There is a large variety of applications available that allows to resize images in Windows and these applications come in a variety of flavors in terms of feature set and complexity. However, there is a lack of good utilities for the users that just need to quickly resize one or a set of images to another format directly from Windows explorer without the need to open complicated image editing applications such as GIMP, Adobe Photoshop or any other photo editor they are using.One of the solutions ...

Back in 2008, I posted an article on how you can use a Firefox extension called External Application Buttons to create buttons and add them to the Firefox toolbar to launch any Windows application. It was really nice to have such flexibility but some users experienced difficulties in using that extension with the newer versions of the Firefox 3.0 and 4.0 betas. Another disadvantage is that if you want to create buttons for too many application – Firefox toolbar will be quickly filled up.Today ...

As you might know a new release candidate 1.0.0 is released just recently for the Dropbox application. A notable new feature in the new version is the inclusion of the Selective Syncing as they call it. Basically it allows to exclude some folders from syncing to every computer on which you have Dropbox installed. This is useful in some scenarios in which you might want to store a backup only in the cloud but not want to synchronize among computers like any other contents in the Dropbox folder. Some ...

If for some reason you happened to have a broken partition table on some hard disk, or have a partition that is deleted accidently and now you cannot access the data that was stored on that partition then a great system software that can allow to recover this deleted partition can be a god send. Actually, I was in a similar panic situation some time ago when I accidently deleted one of the partition on a hard disk in my Toshiba laptop. After I realized this I panicked a bit because there was some ...

Dropbox is an extremely popular data backup and synchronization service that is adopted by its users mostly because of its simplicity and performance. But as with any other online storage service you can never be sure about the privacy of data that you are putting in there (despite what the company claims). I know that many of these services does offer enhanced encryption when transferring the data from your computer to the cloud and some even store it on their servers in the encrypted form. This ...

Some windows users prefer to customize the placements of desktop icons on their Windows systems particularly if they have a lot of icons such as many applications, documents and folders placed on the desktop. It takes a lot of time for the custom placements of the icons on the preferred places and users would like that placement to be maintained. However, some windows application particularly some full screen applications can play mess with the placement of icons. Another scenario is when screen ...

Despite the fact that a long time has passed since the Blu-ray format for movie distribution has been accepted as the mainstream, most of the consumers still don’t have the Blu-ray players or Blu-ray drives installed in their computers. For this reasons for majority of the consumers DVD is the ideal medium of choice for buying movies, music videos etc. In addition with the passage of the time storage mediums are getting more and more capacity while becoming cheaper at the same time. These days ...