Well this may come as a pleasant surprise but you can actually run ads on TV for your business for the price of a dinner out. The ads may not air during the very expensive prime-time shows but you can still reach the TV audience with a limited budget. Watch this story from Slate.

Seth Stevenson of Slate Magazine shares how he used Google TV Ads, a service of Google, to run an ad on the national Fox News channel for as little as hundred bucks!

It’s a pretty straightforward process and anyone can run a TV campaign in minutes from the comfort of their living room using any Internet connected computer.

You upload a video file to your Google AdWords account, set a daily budget (amount that you are willing to spend per day on the TV commercial), pick a time of the day when you want the ad to air and finally choose a list of networks (or specific TV shows) on which you’d like to broadcast your ad.

Coming back to Slate’s experiment, their TV ad was aired a total of 54 times on 4 different cable networks and was seen by at least 1.3 million people.

Slate had put a website URL in their TV ad and it turned out that 1,000+ people actually visited that website after watching the TV commercial. The total cost for running the TV campaign was only $1300 -- that’s like paying a very reasonable cost of $1 per visitor (CPC).

Whether you a freelance web designer or run a discount store on eBay, Google TV ads can be an exciting platform to find new customers for your small business with limited budget for advertising. The service is currently available to advertisers located in the United States and you can only target U.S. based cable networks.

Want to Advertise your Website on TV Channels?

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Eeshan inserted thermocol pieces at the edges to adjust the height of the cardboard according to the fan. Now the continuous circulation of air below the laptop prevents the machine from heating up.

Here are some pictures of Eeshan’s home-made laptop cooling pad.

Build a Cooling Pad for your Laptop

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

It might have take them several days to plan and draw the whole thing but luckily, you get to enjoy the process in under 60 seconds.

How to Paint in an Excel Spreadsheet?

If you want to create your own spreadsheet art but don’t have the time (or patience) to carefully paint every single square cell manually, here’s a nice shortcut.

Go to boydevlin.com and download their free Excel Art program. It’s a standalone utility that will convert any bitmap image into a spreadsheet that you then open in Microsoft Excel or even Google Docs. You don’t need Excel to use Excel art.

Excel as a Pixel Drawing Tool

For instance, here’re pixel portraits of painter Vincent van Gogh (Google Docs) and Mona Lisa all created with Excel Art. The conversion might appear a little pixelated from close but its beautiful nonetheless.

Thanks Richard Devlin for the tip.

Turn your Images into Spreadsheet Art

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Say your password for website badwebsite.com is the same as the password for goodwebsite.com. Now if the website badwebsite.com gets compromised (or the owner is malign to start with), they’ll know your password. Chances are that your username is the same (email address) for both websites so the badwebsite.com people can can easily log in to your goodwebsite.com account and impersonate you.

Yeah, there are quite a few reliable Password Managers that serve as a strong room for your complex passwords but that they require you to install specific software on the computer. What do you do when you want to check your web email on a different computer where you do not have your security tools installed and you do not remember your secure, random, email password?

In addition, I doubt you can memorize all your passwords for each and every website, if they are secure from brute-forcing and unique, that is.

Write your passwords down on a paper

What I am trying to solve is to give users a simple way of generating strong passwords unique to every website they visit using just a piece of paper, credit card-sized, that you can carry in your wallet.

What you need is just a piece that has a unique (per card) combination of secret letters to help you create a unique password for each website. You may use the RAND() function in an Excel spreadsheet to generate unique password cards.

To create a password, take each letter of the website you want to create a password for and then take the corresponding code from the table. For example, if you want to create a password for www.amazon.com, it would be:

1st letter is a –> a (Column 2, Row 1)
2nd letter is m –> jv (Column 7, Row 2)
3rd letter is a -> AN6
4th letter is z -> xs7
5th letter is o –> enb

So the password for your Amazon website becomes ajvAN6xs7enb.

You can optionally (make sure you do this with all your passwords) intertwine the generated password with a memorized password – it could the city name where you were born, your childhood hero, name of your favorite author or anything memorable.

For instance, if you were born in Philadelphia, the password for Amazon.com would be ajvAN6xs7enb intertwined with Philadelphia: PahjviAN6lxs7aenbdelphia. This would ensure that your identity consists of something you know (Philadelphia) and something you have (the paper password card).

Even if a malicious administrator of website badwebsite.com retrieves your password for that website, they cannot impersonate you on say PayPal or Amazon because you aren’t reusing passwords anymore.

It is a bit cumbersome to use if you had to use it to type in passwords each time, but when used in conjunction with your everyday “remember password” feature found in every browser, you get extra security at the cost of just tiny real state in your wallet.

Security involves trade-offs, in this case is between usability, portability and robustness against collusion or more sophisticated attacks. Arguably though, for a vast majority of people, this is more realistic than carrying an electronic password generator.

The writer, Andres Torrubia, is the co-founder and CEO of Fixr, an eBay like online marketplace for homeowners and contractors.

Related: How Strong is your Password ?

Keep Your Passwords Safe on a Piece of Paper

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The good news is that you can now withdraw money from PayPal to your local bank account without requiring an IEC code.

The PayPal blog incorrectly mentioned “Export Code” in their previous blog post though they actually meant “Purpose Codes.” Unlike IEC codes that are unique for every individual / business, Purpose Codes are pre-defined by the RBI and their value varies depending on the type of service that you are offering to the client.

Which Purpose Code Should You Use

Following is a list of select Purpose Codes that are most relevant for us though the full list is available on the website of Reserve Bank of India.

The code “P0805″ has been fixed by RBI for “News agency services” and all freelance writers and bloggers, according to PayPal, will come in that category. The code “P1007″ is reserved for Advertising and Marketing so SEOs, SEMs, Social Media Consultants, Web Designers and even Internet Marketers should use this code.

The problem is that you’ll have to specify a Purpose Code each time you initiate a money withdrawal request from PayPal and your bank, as per Indian law, may require you to provide related documentary proofs to reconcile with your withdrawal.

As a blogger, you may receive revenue from both advertising companies (for putting ads on the blog) as well as for freelance assignments (you write for another blog). Same holds true for independent software developers who may also have a blog. Some of the money in your PayPal account could be from writing software code while the other half could be advertising revenue generated from the blog.

Am not sure if PayPal will allow users to specify multiple Purpose Codes at the time of withdrawal but if they don’t do it, you need to be a bit careful because the same Purpose Code may not be applicable for all withdrawal requests.

You can no longer use PayPal as a money remittance service (for example, you are in US and transfer a certain amount of money from your PayPal account to your father’s PayPal account who then transfers it to his local bank account in India). If you have made such “personal payments” in the past, the recipient can only withdraw that money by requesting a cheque from PayPal.

Thanks Mahendra Palsule for the tip.

Which Purpose Code Should You Use with PayPal

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The problem, however, with Twitter’s built-in web client is that its quite basic and you can’t really do much there except for replying and retweeting tweets. That explains why such a large chunk of Twitter users prefer using third-party web apps like Brizzly, Seesmic Web, HootSuite, Dabr, Slandr, etc. over Twitter.com for managing their Twitter accounts from the browser.

If you follow a fairly large number of people on Twitter and are looking for a tool that can bring some order to your chaotic friends timeline, check out JournoTwit. This is also a web client for Twitter but, unlike competition, JournoTwit is more about filtering noise from your Twitter stream and it can do this, more or less, automatically.

You just have to sign-in to JournoTwit using Twitter OAuth and you’re almost ready to go. The app will automatically arrange your incoming tweets in different categories so all the messages containing pictures and videos show up in one column while retweets, or forwarded messages, are displayed in a different one.

A unique feature in JournoTwit is that you can create custom search columns that will only search tweets from people you follow. Regular search in Twitter is almost always full of noise but by limiting that search to tweets from people you trust, you can virtually eliminate spam from search results.

JournoTwit, using all the tweets in your timeline, builds an automatic tag cloud so you can instantly figure out popular topics that your friends are currently discussing on Twitter. However the feature that I liked most about JournoTwit is “Black listing” – you can specify a list of hashtags and words and tweets that match these terms will never show in your timeline.

Give it a shot sometime! Oh yes, it supports the blue Google Chrome theme as well so the thing should look good inside your Chrome browser.

Thanks Sherene Jos and Patrix for the tip. If you are looking for more ways to manager Twitter, please check out the following stories:

• The Best Mobile for Twitter
• The Best Desktop Apps for Twitter
• Use Twitter through Email

A Smart Web-Based Client for Twitter

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

This works nicely but there’s one area where Google is still lacking – image search.

Steve Jobs introduced the much-awaited Apple iPad to the world on January 27, 2010. The news was covered by almost every blog and news website, millions of tweets were written for the iPad and thousands of images and videos from that Apple event were shared on sites like Flickr and YouTube.

With so much excitement around the device, the disappointing part is that though a week has passed since we saw the first iPad unit, Google Images still has no clue about the existence of this Apple device.

Try a simple search for “iPad” on Google Image search and you’ll only see mockups but none of these images represent the official Apple gadget. Move to page 2 and you’ll find that the story is no different.

In this quick test, Bing did manage to find some images of the Apple iPad on the first page of search results but the top slots were still occupied by mockups.

The surprise winner here was Yahoo. It not only returned the best results for “iPad” but also had a section called “Recent Images” that pulled the very latest photographs of iPad from news stories. Google seriously needs to implement something similar for their “real-time search” as well.

Screenshot 1: iPad search on Google Images

Screenshot 2: iPad on Bing Images

Screenshot 3: iPad according to Yahoo!

The Problem with Google Image Search

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Since ink is still the most expensive component in the print workflow, you can reduce printing costs of documents if you can figure out ways that will decrease the consumption of ink while printing. For instance, when printing a document in Microsoft Word, you can switch to “Draft output” and the toner will last much longer.

Use a Font with Holes

An interesting option to help you save ink is Ecofont. Ecofont is like the popular Arial font but it has these little holes punched in the letters. These holes aren’t really visible in the printed document (that uses standard font sizes like 11px) but will save money as no ink is required when printing these dots.

Ecofont is available for download on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It may not be a good idea to use Ecofont in client communication but you can definitely consider using this font for personal or internal use.

Printing Web Pages with Custom Fonts

If you are printing web pages, I highly recommend Readability – this is a bookmarklet that will not only remove images, ads and other clutter from web pages but will also replace the font that was originally used in the formatting of that page.

Readability can sometimes remove sections from web pages that you would like to see in the print version. If that’s also a problem for you, check out PrintWhatYouLike.com – this is also a printing bookmarklet but it gives you complete control over the page layout including the font family that is used for rendering that page (see video demo).

Both the above bookmarklets require a live internet connection to work. If you are looking for an alternative that will work offline, check out Green Print – they have a free version for Windows though the Mac edition costs a few bucks. Another good option is Smart Web Print from HP but that’s only available on Windows.

Which is the Best Font for Printing Documents

Now consider the third scenario. You have a document – say some training material or presentation handouts – that you want to print without sacrificing readability.

Fonts like Arial, Times News Roman, Courier, Helvetica, etc. are generally available on every machine but which one among them is the most economic typeface when it comes to printing?

Matt Robinson recently conducted a fairly unique study to determine the ink usage of these different typefaces. They used ballpoint pens to hand draw the same text at the same size but using different fonts and here’s the result.

Garamond* followed by Courier turned out to be the most economic fonts of them all while Impact and Comic Sans consumed the maximum ink. This is definitely not a “scientific study” but you still get the idea.

[*] Most Harry Potter books are set in 12pt Adobe Garamond.

Which Fonts Should You Use for Saving Ink

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Some great news for movie buffs.

You can watch some of the popular Bollywood movies on YouTube for free using this page. These are full-length videos so you can just connect your computer to the TV screen, grab a snack and watch movies from the couch with your family.

The collection is currently limited to Hindi movies from film producers like Shemaroo Entertainment, Rajshri and UltraHindi. And like most other YouTube videos, you can embed these movies on your site as well.

For example, here’s one of my favorite Bollywood movie -- Sarkar (the Indian version of The Godfather starring Amitabh Bachchan). I can watch this movie anytime, anywhere as long as I have an Internet connection.

The movies are available in both High Quality and Standard Quality versions. For a list of full-length English movies that are currently available for viewing on YouTube, go to this page. Thanks Brajeshwar for the tip.

Watch Bollywood Movies on YouTube

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

While Google has never disclosed the exact percentage of revenue that it shares with AdSense publishers, once can easily derive that number using the earnings report that are released at the end of each quarter.

The “Google Network Revenues” section reflects the total revenue that was generated though AdSense while the “Traffic Acquisition Costs” section reflects the total amount that was paid by Google to AdSense publishers. To know the approximate revenue share, simply divide TAC with the total AdSense revenue.

Here’s a quick chart comparing these numbers for the year 2009. The percentage of revenue that Google is sharing with AdSense publishers has reduced from 75% in Q1 to 72% in Q4 2009. That’s not a very exciting news.

The following charts have numbers from the last eight quarters.

Google is Reducing Share of AdSense Publishers

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you have stored documents on Google Docs, you can use the built-in export feature of Google Docs to save all your documents on to the hard drive with a simple click.

Photo sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook will only let you download one photo at a time but there are third-party utilities (like FlickrDown and FotoBounce) that you may use to download all the pictures to the local drive in bulk.

The Problem

You can find similar solutions /workarounds for backing up your online data that may be residing on Twitter, Gmail, WordPress, PhotoBucket and other cloud based services.

There’re however some drawbacks with most of these “backup” solutions. First, they are all manual workarounds so you have to initiate the backup process on your own (in an ideal situation, backups should be automated). The other problem is that none of these solutions offer incremental backups (you will only want to download files from the cloud that are either new or have changed since the last backup).

The Solution

If you are looking for a simple solution that will let you backup all your online data to a central place effortlessly, check out Backupify.com – this an online service that will fetch your documents, tweets, blogs, pictures, etc. from all your online accounts and will store them to Amazon S3, another cloud based storage service. Alternatively, you may also download these files to your local computer straight from Backupify.

Backupify works like this – you first need to associate all your different online accounts to Backupify and then backups will occur automatically at frequent intervals. If you are techie, think of Backupify as a web-based cron job for performing daily backups of your online accounts. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, and most other popular online services.

Get Backupify for Free

Backupify is a commercial service and you’ll have to pay around $4/month for 2GB of storage or $5/month for a premium account that offers 10 GB of online storage space. However, the good news is that if you sign-up before January 31st, the monthly fee will be waived and you can enjoy Backupify services for free.

The Backupify site currently makes no mention of any limitations for free accounts but there will probably be some, at least on the storage front.

Use Your Own Amazon Account with Backupify

As mentioned above, Backupify uses the reliable Amazon S3 service to backup your online accounts. Alternatively, you may choose the S3 option during the sign-up process, supply your Amazon Access keys and Backupify will then store your accounts data in one of your S3 buckets instead of their own.

This is useful because you can then access these files directly from the desktop using any of the S3 clients without having to use the web interface of Backupify.

Backup all your Online Accounts to Amazon S3

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Last summer, Microsoft Research released a community game cum programming environment for the Xbox 360 called Kodu. Unlike most other video games,  Kodu would let players create their own video games for the Xbox without any prior knowledge of programming.

Design Games on your Windows PC

The initial version of Kodu required the Xbox 360 console but now Kodu is available as a free download for your Windows PC as well. This means you no longer need an Xbox to design games with Kodu and you can play them on just about any computer using a keyboard and mouse (or an Xbox game controller, if you have one).

The entire Kodu program is more like a video game than a programming environment. It includes several tutorials to help you quickly figure out how to create new games, or you can look at the sample games bundled with the program for new ideas.

You can easily edit any game by pressing escape, make the changes and then jump back into playing the game with your changes. Although you cannot edit every little thing inside the game, it still gives you a nice launch pad for creating simple games.

You can download Kodu for PC from fuse.microsoft.com/kodu. Additionally, the graphics settings can be turned down to allow it to run on a computer with lower resources. Kodu requires .NET 3.5 and the XNA framework 3.1 to run -- if you don’t have them, the Kodu installer will automatically download and install them for you.

In this CES video, a 12-year old girl is making a computer game with Kodu live on-stage -- she’s using Xbox but you can use a Windows PC as well with Kodu.

Scratch from the MIT Media Labs is another popular tool that you may use to create interactive games and animated stories on your Mac OS X and Windows machine.

Also see: Run Classic DOS Games on your Computer

Create Video Games on your Windows PC with Microsoft Kodu

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Schedule Meetings Online Effortlessly

If you are working in a corporate environment, scheduling meetings is not that big a hassle because you can check availability of people through Outlook Calendar itself. The situation however is a bit different when you are planning events with friends and family members as their schedules aren’t published anywhere.

In such cases, you can either propose some tentative dates to your friends through email (or personal phone calls) and then analyze their responses in a spreadsheet, or if you want to save some time, try these wonderful web apps that will make it easy for you to decide dates that are convenient for the entire group.

1. Make Plans with Which Date Works

Which Date Works will help you quickly shortlist dates that will be preferred by your friends and family members. You start by selecting a list of tentative dates for the event (it could be a movie show, a birthday party or even a family outing) and then send out the proposed dates to all your friends using the tool itself.

Your friends will get an email with a secret link that they’ll have to click in order to select their preferred dates. They can either say Yes, No or Maybe which indicates that they may or may not be available on a particular date. Once you have all the responses, finalize the date that works best for the majority and a confirmation email will go out to all the invitees.

WhichDateWorks.com is and will always be free according to their site. Thanks Chris.

2. Tungle for Online Scheduling

While "Which Date Works" is perfect for planning events within a group, the downside is that it works only with dates so you can’t use it for planning meetings or events where "time" is an important factor (a lunch can start at 12:30 or even 1:00).

Enter Tungle – this is another cool application for scheduling meetings online that will take care of the time factor. You start by sending out email invitations proposing multiple times and, based on their responses, Tungle will automatically find the time that works best for everyone.

You can sync Tungle with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook and they even have an iPhone App that will let you schedule events from the phone.

3. TimeBridge – Run Great Meetings

If you are trying to figure out the best time for scheduling online meetings, Time Bridge is a good option. It will send out an email to your clients and once all of them have responded, you can refer to response chart to pick a time that bestsuits everyone.

A unique feature of Time Bridge is that you can attach the meeting agenda, files and other documents with the meeting request itself so everyone has access to the required material at the time of the actual meeting.

Related: Fill Dates in Outlook Using Natural English

Find the Best Date That’ll Suit Everyone’s Schedule

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Basically you need to tell Facebook what parts of your profile should be visible to your friends, friends of friends, to search engines and to stalkers or people who aren’t connected with you yet.

How to Change Facebook Privacy Settings

The above video will give you a good idea about how you can customize your Facebook privacy settings. It’s easy.

Double Check your Facebook Privacy Settings

Now that you have updated your Facebook privacy settings, you should try looking at your own profile from the eyes of your friends, strangers and search engines to make sure that none of the information you want to keep private on Facebook is visible to other people.

Privacy Check A: For people outside your friend circle

A person may not be your friend but if he is logged into Facebook, he can possibly see some bits of your Facebook profile even though you not connected with each other.

Log into your Facebook account and follow this link to instantly know how your profile might look to other people on Facebook who are not your friends.

Privacy Check B: For search engines

The best way to find out how search engines will see your Facebook profile is through their cache. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full vanity URL of your Facebook profile into the Google search box.

Unless your account is very new*, your Facebook page will likely be the first result on Google for such a query (see example). Just open the "Cached" page and you’ll get a pretty good idea about how other people see through search engines.

[*] The cached information is only as new as the last visit of Googlebot. Therefore, if you have recently changed any privacy setting, rather than waiting for Google to index your public page, you can simply log out of Facebook and open the vanity URL directly in your browser to know what’s visible in search results.

Privacy Check C: For existing Facebook friends

Follow the same link but this time, type the name of any of your existing Facebook friends and you’ll instantly know how your profile appears to that particular person.

After you run your Facebook profile through these three simple checks, you can at least be sure that you aren’t accidentally exposing any private information on Facebook that you don’t want to.

How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

It’s your own personal photo album on Facebook but none of these pictures of odd-looking cartoon characters, horoscope charts, photo collages, friend graphs, etc. have been uploaded by you.

What photo tagging applications can do to your Facebook profile

The culprit, as you may have guessed, are these Facebook applications that tag random images with your name and the tagged image therefore shows up in your Facebook profile page without you doing anything.

What’s the problem?

These "collages" not only make your Facebook profile look very unprofessional but there’s something else to worry about as well.

Some photo tagging applications on Facebook (as the one below) add links to bad sites in "your" photos and your innocent Facebook friends, who are just randomly browsing your pictures, might fall in the trap.

What can you do?

The simple way is that you remove your name tag from the tagged photo and it will be instantly removed from your Facebook photo album as well.

Next you should find the Facebook application that you friend used to create that photo collage in the first place and block that application forever so that your other friends are unable to use that application to spam your Facebook profile page.

Also make sure that you get notifications each time someone tags you in a photo. You can control this setting from the "Notifications" tab on the Account Settings page.

Photo tagging is the one of the most popular features on Facebook and, probably for this reason, Facebook doesn’t offer a simple setting that will prevent other users and applications from tagging you in photographs. You can however hide "photos tagged of you" from the privacy page so that the images don’t appear in your public photo albums and are visible only to you.

And as a precautionary measure, visit the authorized apps pages to make sure that you haven’t authorized any Facebook app to tag images of other people on your behalf. If you find one, just click the cross to remove that Facebook app from your profile permanently.

What can Facebook do?

When you are tagged in a photo by your friends (or a Facebook application), the tag is automatically approved and the picture appears in your profile. All we therefore need is an extra privacy setting that would let us to approve tags before a tagged photo appears on our profile page.

Facebook won’t let developers add apps to your profile without permission then why do they allow them to add pictures to your profile without asking.

The Biggest Nuisance on Facebook – Photo Tags

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you are still using an older version of Windows (like Windows XP or Vista), you don’t have to feel left behind because, with some simple tricks, you can enjoy all or part of what these Windows 7 themes have to offer.

Use Windows 7 Themes with XP and Vista

First, launch the official Windows 7 themes directory and download some of the themes you like to your Windows XP or Vista desktop.

These files have a unique .themepack extension which is just another zip format containing all of the elements of a theme including the background images, Aero glass colors, sounds, cursors, icons, screen savers, etc.

To use these files on an older version of Windows, you first need to extract them as only Windows 7 can natively understand the themepack format. You can either change the file extension of the Windows 7 theme file from .themepack to .cab and then extract the files with a right-click, or install the free 7-Zip utility as 7-Zip can automatically hand the themepack file format.

Once extracted, your theme files will now be in a new folder that has the same name as your original themepack.

Aero Glass Border and Desktop Backgrounds

Now that you have all the required files, its time to activate the Windows 7 theme on your non-Windows 7 computer.

If your computer is running Windows Vista that supports Aero, simply double-click the .theme file that is present in the them folder you just extracted.  This will set your windows border glass to the color of the Windows 7 theme and your wallpaper to the default background of the theme. However, this background picture will disappear when you reboot your computer, so you need to set that as a permanent background.

Windows XP does not support Aero glass, but you can still use the background images from downloaded Windows 7 theme on your XP desktop. You can find the backgrounds inside the themepack folder itself or in a sub-folder named DesktopBackground. Pick any image, right click on it, and select “Set as Desktop Background.”

Windows 7 like Desktop Slideshows for XP and Vista

Most Windows 7 themes consist of multiple background images and Windows 7 will automatically change your desktop background at periodic intervals using one of the images from the themepack. Windows Vista and XP do not support desktop slideshows, but you can easily bring that feature use the excellent and free John’s Background Switcher program.

To create a desktop slideshow, click the add button and choose “A folder on your computer.” Now select the Windows 7 theme folder that contains all the background images. The program allows lot of tweaking but you can skip that because the default settings are very similar to what you need for simulating Windows 7 behavior on your XP or Vista computer.

However, John’s Background Switcher by default shows the name of the image in the top right hand corner of the picture.  To remove this, click the “More…” button that has a gear icon on it.  Uncheck the box beside the 3rd entry which says “Show picture info on the top-right corner of the screen.”  Now click Ok, and then click Ok in the main window, and your desktop slideshow is all ready.

For RSS-enabled Windows 7 Themes

Some Windows 7 themes download images from the internet (via RSS feeds) when switching desktop backgrounds.

To know if the theme you are looking to port on your Vista or XP computer uses RSS or not, open the .theme file in a text editor like Notepad. Then search for the string “RssFeed” without the quotes. If you find that string, copy the link address of the RSS feed and, you can then use the “RSS photo feed” option in John’s Background Switcher program to create an RSS powered desktop slideshow on your XP or Vista machines.

Windows 7 Sounds, Cursor, Screensavers, etc.

Most Windows 7 themes only contain a glass color and desktop backgrounds.  However, some may contain screensavers, sounds, cursors, and icons as well. The good part is that you can use the elements on your Vista / XP theme as well.

Sounds - You can copy the sound files (.wav) to the default media folder (C:\Windows\Media), and if you have set the Windows 7 theme in Windows Vista as described above, it will automatically these sounds.  Else, you will have to manually change your sounds from the Control Panel.

Icons - If the Windows 7 theme that you plan to use with XP or Vista contains a different set of desktop and system icons (.ico files), you may follow the directions below to apply them on your version of Windows:

• For Windows Vista – Right-click on the desktop, select Personalize and choose “Change Desktop Icons.”  Select the items you which to change, click “Change Icons,” and browse to the location of new icons that are part of the Windows 7 theme.
• For Windows XP – Right-click on the desktop, select Properties and choose "Customize Desktop" under the Desktop tab. Select the items you wish to change, click “Change Icon,” and browse to the location of the icons from your theme.

To change icons of individual programs, simply right-click on the program shortcut on your desktop, select Properties, and click the button that says "Change Icon" in the Shortcut tab. Browse to the location of the icon extract from the Windows 7 theme and select the one you want to apply.

Screensavers – For using a Windows 7 screensaver inside XP or Vista, just copy the relevant screensaver files (.scr) into your Windows system folder usually located at C:\Windows\System32.  Now, change your system screensaver using the usual method. Please remember that not all Windows 7 screensavers will work correctly on previous versions of Windows.

Cursors – You can copy the Windows 7 cursor files (.cur or .ani) to C:\Windows\Cursors on XP or Vista, and then apply the new set using the mouse settings under Control Panel. Use the [Control Panel\Cursors] of the .theme file (see example) to understand the default cursor mappings.

How to Use Windows 7 Themes on XP and Vista Computers

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you are not a subscriber, don’t hit the torrents yet because Microsoft may announce the general availability of Office 2010 beta sometime today itself. Update: You can download Office 2010 now.

Microsoft Office 2010 – What’s New

Here’s a quick visual guide to some of the new features of Microsoft Office 2010 that you’re likely to find useful once you get access to the software.

#1. Save Office Documents to the Cloud

With Microsoft Office 2010, you can directly upload documents to your Windows Live SkyDrive account and access them from any other computer.

SkyDrive provides 25 GB of free online storage and, since the service is integrated with Office Web Apps, you can view and edit these documents anywhere in the web browser without requiring Microsoft Office (even on a Mac).

#2. Embed Web Videos in your Presentations

With Office 2010, you can easily embed video clips from the Internet into your PowerPoint presentations just the way you embed Flash videos in regular web pages. Just copy the embed code from YouTube (or any other video sharing site) and paste it anywhere on the slide.

#3. Quick Steps in Outlook

Gmail includes a useful feature called Send and Archive that performs multiple tasks. When you click this button, it will first send the reply and then archives the thread with one click.

With the new Quick Steps feature in Outlook, you can create a sequence of commands (Send & Archive is just one example) and apply them to any Outlook item with a click. For instance, here’s a quick step for “Send and Delete” which would delete the email from your inbox after you’ve replied.

#4. Built-in PDF Writer

All Office 2010 programs include a built-in PDF writer to help you save documents into the PDF format with a click. Earlier, you had to download an add-on separately but now PDF support is native.

#5. Document printing made simple!

With Office 2010, Microsoft has completely revamped the print dialog and it’s a tremendous improvement. For instance, you can tweak printer settings (like page margins, etc.) and preview the changes side-by-side.

#6. Broadcast Slideshows within PowerPoint

This is probably my favorite new feature of PowerPoint 2010. You can deliver live presentations over the web from within PowerPoint and anyone in the world can view your presentation using a web browser. It just works.

#7. Video Editing meets PowerPoint

Do you want to trim some parts of a video clip before using it in your presentation? Or do you want to apply professional styles to a video (like reflection coupled with 3D rotation) so that your audience stay glued longer? Well, that’s easy because PowerPoint 2010 now includes some very powerful video editing features.

#8. Distribute your slides as video

PowerPoint 2010 can convert your presentation into a video file that you may upload on to YouTube or distribute on a portable media player like the iPod. The video conversion happens in the background so you can continue using PowerPoint while the video is being created.

#9. Built-in Screen Capture

All Office 2010 programs now include a screen clipping utility to help you quickly capture any area of the desktop screen. The tool will automatically take screenshots of all open applications on your desktop (that are not in minimized state) and you can insert them directly into your document or presentation.

#10. Outlook gets social

When you open an email message inside Outlook 2010, it will show you related information such as email attachments, pictures, meeting requests and all previous email messages that you may have exchanged with that person (something like Xobni).

There’s a green add button that lets you “add that person to your online social networks from Outlook” but the service isn’t live yet. Until then, you can use these add-ons to make your Outlook more social.

Important: Before installing Office 2010

1. If you are installing Office 2010 beta for the first time, the default settings will upgrade your existing copy of Microsoft Office. You can however customize this setting and install Office 2010 alongside an older version of Office.

2. If you already have Office 2010 Technical Preview on your computer, make sure you completely uninstall this edition before attempting to installing Office 14 beta. In case you still have trouble installing Office, use the cleanup utility to remove all traces of the previous version of Office from your system.

Related: Try Office 2010 Starter Edition

What’s New Inside Microsoft Office 2010

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

You’ve following this routine for quite some time and, as a result, a few hundred thousand photographs reside on your computer now neatly tagged and arranged in folders. But wait, do you have a backup plan for these "priceless" digital photos?

How to Backup your Digital Photos

There are basically four ways by which you can backup your photos at home:

1. Backup your photos on CDs and DVDs – This is a cheap and easy option but please remember that disks have a finite shelf life so pictures that you burn today on to a DVD disk may not be accessible after few years.

2. Use an external hard drive – You can get a portable 500 GB drive for less than $100, they connect to your computer via USB (or Firewire) ports but again, you can’t expect an external hard drive to last forever.

3. Use Network Storage – If you have pictures across multiple computers, you can use a network attached storage (NAS) device like HP’s MediaSmart Home Server* or Apple’s Time Capsule to automatically backup all your digital content in one place.

[*] The HP device can transfer files to Amazon S3 so you have an added layer of protection.

4. Use an online backup services – You can use photo-sharing websites (like Flickr) or an online backup service (like Mozy) to put your photos on to the "cloud" and access them from any other computer.

For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.

Online Backup for your Digital Photos

There are again four different routes for online backup:

#1. Online backup services like Mozy that offer unlimited storage and allow not just photographs but files of all types.

#2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that allow you to store both photographs and video clips online.

#3. File-synchronization services like Dropbox, SugarSync or Windows Live Mesh.

#4. Online storage services like Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive.

Also see this comparison of Windows Live Mesh with SkyDrive.

What should you use?

Well, photo-sharing sites allow you to visually browse pictures in the web browser itself while a backup service like Mozy will first require you to download the photos on to the computer before you can show them to your visiting grand-parents.

File-synchronization services like Live Mesh not only provide online backup but they also save a copy of your digital files (pictures in this case) on to your other computers so even if your main hard-drive suffers a crash, you can quickly retrieve files from the other computers.

The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos

If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to for a paid version.

Now here’s a visual graph that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your priceless photos.

Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB (bad for professional photographs who shoot in RAW – see comments).

Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.

Live Skydrive is the best online storage service – it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.

Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up  (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.

SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.

Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is very reliable (their SLA promises 99.9% uptime) turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.

Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).

Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.

Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on a third-party hacks to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.

Related: Never use your Web Host for File Backup

Backup Your Photos Online & Preserve Memories Forever

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Other than hardware devices, you can also read .epub books on your desktop or mobile phone using free e-reader software like Stanza, Mobipocket, FBReader (for Linux), Aldiko (for Android) or Adobe Digital Editions.

[*] Amazon Kindle uses a proprietary format (AZW) and cannot read ePub files directly though you can use the free Stanza desktop application to convert an ePub ebook into AZW (or even PDF), a format that your Kindle can understand.

Download Books in ePub Format

O’Reilly, Shortcovers, Sony Store are some popular book publishers that provide ebooks in ePub format but if you are looking to download classic titles to read offline, the best place is Google Books (select the “public domain only” option).

Google Books has more than a million public domain (out of copyright) books in the EPUB format that are completely free and they aren’t protected by DRM so you can read these ebook titles on any device / computer without restrictions.

Project Gutenberg and FeedBooks are some other useful sites that offers most of their titles in the EPUF format.

Read ePub e-books inside Firefox

Firefox users can download EPUBReader, a free add-on that lets you read the contents of any ePub book right inside their favorite browser without requiring any special software.

ePub is basically a zip file that contains a collection of text files and images. This add-on will simply uncompress that zip file and display the contents inside your browser.

In regular course, if you click on a link that points to an ePub file, Firefox will prompt you to to save that file onto the hard-drive but with this add-on installed, the ebook will directly open inside your Firefox tab like any other web page.

Additionally, you can open any ePub file that’s on your desktop using the File -> Open File menu in Firefox. All the ebook are automatically stored in your Firefox profile under a separate sub-directory. Thanks Paul Biba.

How to Create ePub eBooks

If you want to publish your own books or blog in ePUB format, the easiest option is that you compose the text in Word (or Google Docs), save it as an RTF file and then you use Amazon’s Stanza program to convert that document into an ePUB ebook.

Before publishing, you should also use the EpubCheck tool from Adobe to make sure that the markup in your ePUB file is valid after conversion.

Alternatively, you may use the free Calibre program to convert virtually any document format into ePUB in a batch. Calibre is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. And for editing ePUB files, you should try Sigil -  a WYSIWYG editor that also runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and support the.

Download Google Books with Sony Desktop Reader

While you can download ePUB books directly from the Google Books website, Sony offers an excellent desktop application (for Mac and PC) that is nice integrated with Google Books and you don’t have to own the Sony Reader for using that application.

You can then search public domain titles on Google Books directly from the desktop and save them to your local library in ePUB format.

Related: BlackBerry as an Ebook Reader

The ePUB Format for E-Books – Everything You Wanted to Know

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

While it has always been possible to convert Office documents into PDF using Google Docs, the new export feature makes it even easier for you to batch convert Microsoft Office and OpenOffice file formats into PDF (or HTML) in three easy steps.

Batch Conversion to PDF with Google Docs

Step #1 – Create a new “input” folder in Google Docs where you’ll upload all your documents and presentations that are to converted into PDF.

Step #2 – Now select the Upload Document option in Google Docs, set the destination folder to the one that you created in Step #1 and upload* all your documents.

Google Docs officially supports the following file formats though you may also upload images:

• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).
• Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).
• Microsoft Excel (csv, .xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

[*] You may also use the email option to upload documents onto Google Docs but that would put everything on the main folder and managing documents can therefore become a issue especially when you have too many files.

Step #3 -  Once all files are uploaded onto Google Docs, open the dashboard again and select the “input” folder from the right sidebar. Select all the files in this folder and choose “Export” under “More Options”.

Here’s select “PDF” (or HTML) as the output format and all your Word Documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. will be instantly converted into PDF.

And if you are converting a large batch of documents into PDF, you don’t have to wait in the browser for the conversion to finish as Google Docs will automatically send you an email once the processing is over. The email will have a link from where you can directly download all the PDF files in one large ZIP.

Useful stuff. For more tricks, check out the Adobe PDF Guide and Google Docs Guide.

Use Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.