CASES

Using cases is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to provide a new funky look to your device. There are multiple variety of cases in the market which you can select from depending upon or need for protection or looks and creativity. These cases are usually cheap and easily available on amazon or ebay, although there are number of renowned case makers in the market.

• Hard cases: Mostly available for smartphones as well as tablets. Creative design available. Makes the phone quite heavy though maximum protection. Some of the nice cases can be found by an easy search on amazon or ebay or vendors like casemate.

• Leather cases : These are the cases preferred by people desiring a simple , plain, professional look. Available for almost all phones. Most common colour being black leather.

• TPU Rubber cases : These cases have become quite popular. With low cost comes low protection but the cases which are in the market are amazingly creative and beautiful. One can find a sprkled designer case to a shiny bright case to a plain, sober one.

• Silicon Cases : These are the cheapest of the lot and available for most of the phones. Though they offer least protection and durability but well worth the cost. Started out with plain single colour cases but presently numerous arty cases are available.

 Although, it is easier to find cases for popular smartphones such as iphone, samsung and HTC android phones whereas it is tougher to find creative cases for other devices.

SKINS

Skins are newest adoption by users instead of cases. These offer minimal or no protection but mostly serve the glam role of a cover. Though, in terms of jazzing up your phone these are way better than any covers.  These are also available for your other devices such as tablet, mp3 players, ipods, laptops etc.

• Vinyl Skins :These are vinyl based skins for your phones, tablets, laptops etc. The provide effective resitance from scratching but a hard impact on your device will render any protection from a skin useless. They have ultra thin removable adhesive-backing that contains non-visible air release channels to assure a bubble free application.

• Gel Skins :

Gel Skins give your device a completely custom 3-D look. Gel skins offer more protection to your device but they are also slightly higher priced. Gel Skins are created by applying a clear resin coating over the skin to enhance the graphics and creating a eye-popping more attractive appearance to your device.

 A number of websites have come up which provide you some wonderful arty skins. Users can also  design their own skins. Also you have access to skins designed by other users and can easily browse through some of the most popular skins. Some of the websites to checkout for skins are www.gelaskins.com and www.skinit.com 

View some of beautiful skins below.

Look out for a new post on some amazing ipad skins, soon.

Most of us used to taking screenshots have rooted their phones to enable taking screenshots. But many still would like to have an option to take screenshots without rooting their phones.

There have been apps which have worked on non rooted phones but depending on the phones, they work on some and don’t work on some non-rooted phones. Here is an app which has been around for a while which works on all non-rooted phones : ‘No Root Screenshot It’

Obviously, as the name suggest the app allows you to take, edit, and share screen captures from your Android device without rooting it first. But you would need a desktop utility which is provided by the developer ( Windows and Mac supported) You would need to pair up with the desktop utility and once connected, you are good to take screenshots.

Negative: If you restart your phone, you would have to reconnect to the desktop app.

You can set timers for screenshots to allow menus to be captured, shake the phone to get captures, annotate or crop screenshots and share the shot to web, email and other apps.

Price: $4.99

Some of the other screenshots apps which may or may not require your phone to be rooted depending on your phone model : Screenshot it, Shake to screenshot(Galaxy series only), Screenshot UX, X-Shoot

When you access a website through Opera, it first downloads the page on its server, compresses it there and then redirects it to your phone. Thus your browser downloads lesser amount of kb for the same page. Opera has been claiming that using Opera reduces the page size by 80%, thus directly reducing your data charges. Though, there was no verification offered for the same.

But with the newly updated Opera browser, you can have exact idea how much data you have downloaded during your browsing session and how much you have saved using Opera as your browser. It also keeps track of total data usage, enabling you to translate your usual monthly internet activities into a data usage figure. Thus, allowing you to choose an optimal plan or reduce usage.

To view the data usage using Opera : Launch Opera and click ‘data usage’ under ‘help’ section.

Opera can, obviously. track only the data passing through your Opera browser. There are other apps which may be used to track the entire data usage, including data used by apps : eg : 3gwatchdog, netcounter, TrafficInfo, Onavo and more.

A review of best data tracking apps soon.

With upgrading to the new version of Os x i.e. Lion os x, the scrolling pattern has changed and is reversed. Kind of uncomfortable if you are used to using the older and more accepted version of scrolling pattern.

Following is how you can revert OS X Lion’s page scrolling to the old direction.

1. Start System Preferences

2. Click Trackpad.

3. Uncheck the box that says “When using gestures to scroll or navigate, move content in the direction of finger movement“

4. This should get the old scrolling behaviour back.

The change only affects the current logged in user.

The German computer magazine COM is currently running a giveaway of Avast Internet Security. The offer is in German but is accessible to anyone and the license works with the English version as well.

Enter the first name, last name and your email address on the promotion page (link at the end of the page) to receive the license in you email address.

In your email click the link which ends with license-com-so-gehts.zip.

This is a zip file and you will use this to register your Internet Security suite. The license expires in 9 months. That is you will be able to use this till April 2012.

Promotional Page Link

Download the English Avast Internet Security

(I have not rated them but given some of the good options to consider)

Toshiba Canvio Portable

Toshiba’s Canvio is one of the lightest external drives around. The attractive point of this disk is its small size and light weight with the make quality of Toshiba. It can be fitted in your pocket or purse and carried around anywhere. It weighs around 6 ounces and supports USB 2.0. It comes with storage upto 1TB with number of lower storage options available. It comes with NTI BackupNow EZ software for easy storage and backup options. It requires Win XP or higher to run.

Colours: Blue, Green, Red, Black, Silver

Iomega eGo

Iomega’s eGo drives are available both in desktop and portable models. eGo is a good option if you are looking for a desktop external disk.

eGo desktop comes with capacity of 2TB connected to the desktop by USB 2.0. The eGo 3.0 version supports USB 3.0, thus higher transfer rate. Also this version has higher capacity upto 3TB.

eGo portable is also a good option to consider. Lightweight and tough, eGo portable is available in numerous capacities. The dropguard feature of the disk prevents any damage to the disk from a fall as high as 51 inches.The price also includes Protection Suite backup and anti-virus software by download.

Colours: Red, Silver, Blue, Black and more

LaCie Rugged

This hard disk is specially mentioned because of its sturdy structure and shock resistent capabilities. It has a sturdy and unique aluminum casing and rubber sleeve for added protection. The Rugged XL comes in 1 TB and 2 TB models and supports data transfer by eSATA and USB 2.0. It also supports connection by firewire 400 and 800 and by USB 2.0. Both the Rugged and the Rugged XL are compatible with Time Machine backup software for Mac OS X.

Western Digital My Book Studio

The WD My Book Mirror Edition looks good, with its sleek black casing and curved corners. With capacity upto 1Tb and portable form factor of 3.5″, WD hard disk comes from the popular brand name of WD. It has interfacing abilities with firewire 400 and 800, SATA I and USB 2.0. Fast performance and sturdiness are two main attributes of this disk along with availability in different colors.

Note: This post was not aimed at technically reviewing the hard disk but rather providing you with a start to help you figure out your preferred hard disk to buy.

It was a major problem for users with more than one gmail account to switch accounts. One had to sign out of one account and sign in into another account. This problem was solved when google introduced the feature of ‘multiple sign in’. If you activate this option, you can switch accounts with just one click being in the same browser. But now, there is another option to make it even simpler and read the emails of your other accounts in the same inbox. Google has introduced the feature of email delegation.

Although this feature introduced by Google aims to let any other gmail users to access your email account and read and respond to emails on your behalf. So, it is great for those who would like someone to read and reply to their email on their behalf. This feature can also be used to read emails of more than one gmail accounts by the same person in a single inbox by activating this feature for all but one gmail account and choosing that one gmail account as the account where delegated emails reach. Thus it may prove to be better from multiple sign in in sense that it does not require you to sign into the accounts, rather it fetches emails of all accounts into a single inbox.

In general, the delegation feature allows you any designated user to read, reply or delete your emails. It also enables to access the contacts of the account. It won’t allow the person to alter your password or account setting. Also it won’t allow log in to Google chat of the delegated account.

Enabling delegation feature

1. Click on Settings link on your gmail window

2. Click on ‘Accounts and Imports‘ tab. Under Grant Access to your account, click on add another account

3. Enter the email address of the person whom you would like to be able to access your account. If you want to manage your multiple gmail accounts, add one of your gmail accounts from which you would like to read all your emails.

4. You will see a confirmation message. Click on email to grant access.

5. An email will be sent to the account explaining him that you have granted access to him. Now in case, you added your gmail account as monitoring primary address, you will receive the email and access to your delegated account.

When you’ll have access to more than one account, you’ll be able to access any of them from the account selector in the right top corner

Each account will be opened in new window to ease the distinction between the accounts. Signing out of your main account will lead to signing you out of all the accounts.

A small video from google to explain the process.

Note that this feature is introduced to allow other users to manage your account but as explained in the points above you can configure it to use it to manage all your gmail accounts.

Well, on twitter you may find a certified profile which means it is a trusted user profile of the actual celebrity and has been confirmed. But it is not easy to search through battery of fake profiles and then find the real one. What about other social media platforms ? How easy it is to find a genuine facebook profile? Here I talk about a site which lets you search all your favourite stars and their social media presence.

The Website: The Official Profile Of

Now here is a site which prevents your trouble of searching through the net for the official profile of your favourite star. Now, you have a single portal to look for the entire social media presence of your star. You can connect to celebrities on facebook, twitter, youtube and more.

This may not serve people who do not care much about what a celebrity might be tweeting or posting on his facebook profile but I believe, majority of the people do like to read about their favourite celebrities on social media. For them, it might be a really useful one stop site to loo for all their popular celebrities.

How it works

All celebrities are categorized on basis of various categories such as actors, actresses, musicians, athletes, sports etc. You can browse through these categories to find for the celebrity you are looking for. Otherwise you can also use the search provided to directly search for a specific person. Once you find a celebrity , the site will display all the social media links to the person’s presence on various sites.

Here are are results of some of my searches :

The famous Indian actor : Aamir Khan

The site did not actually find some of my searches. Apparently, users can submit any official profile of a celebrity they know of and the team of site verifies if the submitted profiles are genuine. IF yes, the profiles are added to the database. Currently, the database is not huge as you can see in the numbers with the categories.

But I think over a small period of time, it might be a good source of all the celebrity social media info you would like to have.

How to Install Cracked Mac Store Apps on Mac

Step 1: Install the latest Snow Leopard update (10.6.6) and sign into the new App Store (in your dock).

Step 2: Download Twitter for Mac and navigate to Applications folder to locate Twitter. Just right click and select Show Package Contents and then navigate to Contents folder. Copy_CodeSignature, _MASReceipt and CodeResources.

Step 3: Download Angry Birds (Link http://51.fi/fT).

Step 4: Run the dmg file and drag Angry Birds into the Applications folder.

Step 5: Right click and select Show Package Contents and then navigate to Contents folder and delete _CodeSignature, _MASReceipt and CodeResources.

Step 6: Now paste in the files you copied from the Twitter.app.

Step 7: Done. Enjoy Angry Birds and any other .app file from the new Mac App Store that you can find online.

Via gadgetsdna