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Zoho Challenge Lets You Create Online Tests Easily

rpsingh — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:05:06 +0000

Zoho Challenge is a nice little web application intended for making online tests for students. It provides a user friendly interface for preparing tests and even naive users can find it easy to set up an online test. Zoho Challenge is ideal for Schools, Teachers, Coaching Centers and Organizations to quickly and efficiently administer tests for students, employees and candidates.

It also provides its huge collection of questions in its question bank and in various categories. Features like time restricted online tests, coded tests, automatic evaluation, rank ordering, candidate performance profile making it even more appealing.

To set up an online test, you need to make an account which can be done in less than a minute. After you register, Log in and then hit New Question Bank. In the editor that opens, you can select the type of question you want such as – Mutiple Choice, True/False, Fill the blanks etc.

After adding the questions, just hit Create Test. It also provides options for restricting access to the test by IP addresses or by certain email ids, by default it is open for all. The availability of the tests can also be restricted and pass percentage can be set.

In short, if you are a teacher or work in some coaching institute, do give this application a try.

Gmail Unveils new feature – Prioritize your Inbox

rpsingh — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:56:46 +0000

Gmail has announced a new feature which can come handy to those that receive a huge number of mails on the daily basis. With its new feature, users can prioritize their emails as important, less important or junk. At the top of the inbox there will be two buttons – one for imprtant and other for not so important. The mails you have marked important will be used as a signal by Gmail to mark the future mails as important or not so important.

Gmail also uses other signals such as the emails you reply to often, the people you email to very often and emails you read regularly. With time, the categorization will beome even more smarter and you will only need to read the email that are marked as important by the Gmail. This feature can serve as a great time saver especially for those getting thousands of mails daily. This feature will be available in few days and you will see a “New! Priority Inbox” link at the top right of Gmail.

[Via Official Gmail blog]

Gmail Improved – Now Manage Contacts in Easier Way

rpsingh — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:52:33 +0000

Gmail developers have modified the looks of the Gmail slightly and have included few changes in the way you manage your contacts. The top left of your Gmail has a list containing three elements – Mail, Contacts and Tasks. By Default, you are in your familiar Mail browsing view.

To view your contacts, click on the Contacts link and you’ll have a list of contacts. In the sidebar at left, you can easily see the most contacted, Friends, Family contacts. You can also easily sort the contacts by First name and Last name by going in the dropdown menu under More Actions.

Besides these changes, few shortcuts have also been added to improve the accessibility like the ‘?’ to view full list of all contacts. You can also write notes about your contacts and add custom labels for Phone no. and other fields.

Via

Blackberry Phones Face a Dark Future in India

rpsingh — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:16 +0000

Blackberry services such as SMS’s, e-mail and Internet browsing are highly encrypted and cannot be easily monitored by the Government security agencies. The Government’s concern is that this technology can be used by the terrorist groups and other anti-national agencies.

Earlier, in January 2008, Government had asked Blackberry to reduce the level of encryption while delivering messages over its network, to let the security agencies monitor the user’s activities. But there has been no reduction in the level of encryption so far.

Two Gulf countries UAE and Saudi Arabia have already announced to shutdown the BlackBerry Service in their countries due to the same concern. India may also follow suit, if there is no action taken by the Blackberry Authorities and the services may be discontinued, which may affect a large number of Blackberry users in India.

Gmail Now more Secure With HTTPS

rpsingh — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:51:02 +0000

Earlier back in 2008, Gmail gave the option to its users to Always Use Https as the mail travels between the browser and server and it was up to the user to decide if he wants to use Https or not, but now it has made Https default for everyone. Https is used by Banks and Credit Card companies to prevent unauthorized access.

Https increases the level of security by encrypting the information, but makes the mail transfer a little slower. If you are already using Https, then there will be no change but if you don’t want it on for performance reasons, you can turn it off in the Gmail settings.

The use of Https will help those using unencrypted wireless connections and are recommended not to disable this setting.

Via Official Gmail Blog

Firefox Throttle Controls Firefox bandwidth usage

rpsingh — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:04:42 +0000

Firefox Throttle is nice, little plug-in for firefox that might come handy for some people that have limited data plans. It keeps a check on the download and upload rate for all open windows/tabs and downloads. You can check the data usage in the current session and also the total data usage.

It also has the option for some IP addresses that you do not want to throttle in the form of configurable lists. In addition it has Traffic stats, Status panel with current bandwidth utilization indicators and English and Russian User Interface.

Download Firefox Throttle

13 Best Sites For Downloading Free Legal MP3 music

rpsingh — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:30:42 +0000

Music resides in every heart of the world and every heart loves free music and if it is legal to download too, you can’t ask for more. Here are the 13 best sites on the internet to download free and legal music.

1. Jamendo

Jamendo allows users to download songs from various artists that are absolutely free and legal. The users can listen, share and download music in a easy way. You can also publish your own music and can earn money by building your fan base. There are about 700,000 active members with 28000 published albums.

2. MP3.COM

MP3.com is the most comprehensive archive for free music downloads. It is so popular that it also attracts some of the big performers. On MP3.com the users can find new talent and artists can promote their own music. Free MP3 downloads are available from thousands of artists.

3. SoundClick

SoundClick appears to be adding over 40,000 songs each month. This portal also claims to offer over 1 million free tracks. There’s certainly a goodly selection of free mp3 and WMA tracks available for download and streaming in a wide range of genres.

4. Amazon

Amazon is little known for providing free MP3 music but it does have some really nice songs in its store. You have to hunt around the site to grab the goodies on offer. You need to be US citizen and to have a US Amazon account in order to download the songs. This is the music resource for US citizens only.

5. FreeKidsMusic

FreeKidsMusic is a dedicated website for children’s music. This is a great place for finding free music for kids. The site offers no guarantee for the time that a particular song will be available. It also has a traditional music category in which the songs are sorted alphabetically.

6. Epitonic

Great selection of stuff from all sorts of predominantly modern genres. Be sure to check out all the similar artist selections and streams. The site can help you explore new genres with short audio guided tours.

7. Last.Fm

Last.fm offers some great free songs to download including songs from Jaydiohead, Peter Björn and John, The Thermals, White Lies, John Lennon & Yoko Ono. There are about 250 tracks to download on last.fm. Basides these free songs the site also gives you recommendations based on your music taste.

8. 7Digital

7Digital offers free MP3 songs from categories such as Rock, reggae, Hip-Hop, Various and Audiobooks. The Free songs are updated weekly so you get to hear all the latest music you want. It has a very clean looking interface as well.

9. GarageBand

At GarageBand you can listen and download tracks belonging to various genres such as Folk, hip hop, Alternative pop, punk, rock, rap etc. It features track of the week, top songs and sponsered songs.

10. FreeMusicArchive

FMA has a big library of some really nice songs. And as they say its not only free its good music. At FMA, you can browse the songs by curator, by genre, recently added highlights or most interesting highlights.

11. PureVolume

PureVolume is a website for the discovery and promotion of new music and emerging artists. Each artist has a profile that typically contains basic info, updates, photos, shows and music for streaming. Artists have the option of making each of their songs available for free download. Listeners and fans can also create profiles to interact with artists and each other, as well as track and share music they like.

12 Archive.org – Live Music

Archive.org has a huge collection of downloadable concerts. It has some massive sized file downloads (SHN), although some streaming/downloadable mp3 too. The concerts have been categorized alphabetically in the form of a Etree live concert download service with explicit permission from the bands involved.

13. Spinner MP3

Spinner.com has a MP3 of the Day category under which you can find free MP3 songs to download. The songs are updated frequently so you get to listen all the latest stuff. It has currently around 850 tracks to download, certainly not a huge collection but the songs are really cool.

Backup Your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter Accounts With Backupify

rpsingh — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:40:40 +0000

It is always a good idea to backup your important and useful data so that in case of a disaster you can recover it from the backups. Backupify is a new kind of application that allows a user to backup his cloud data i.e Gmail, Facebook, Twitter etc. Backupify can be useful when one of your online accounts get hacked and you lose all your uploaded photos, videos and more.

Backupify is a freeware apllication and it currently allows backup for these online services – Twitter, WordPress, Delicious, Gmail, Facebook, Zoho, Flickr, Photobucket, Google Docs. The backups are needed to be setup only once, after that it will automatically perform the backups.

This service is free for a limited time (Until 31 Jan) and after that you might have to give some extra bucks to register.

12 Free Web Services to Download Any Video on The Web

rpsingh — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:03:31 +0000

It can be quite useful sometimes to download the videos that matter to you the most. Although you can always watch them on the internet but sometimes due to connection problems or other reason it might be useful to download the videos to your computer. Here is a list of free web services that will make downlading the videos really easy for you :

1. Zamzar

Zamzar is a dynamic web service that lets you download the videos easily and also gives you the option to convert the video to the format you want. Zamzar is not only the place where you can download the videos but you can also download and convert any kind of file like audio, doc, pdf etc.

2.Vixy.net

Vixy.net is another service that let you download and convert the videos in the popular formats.When you submit a URL, it will download and convert to the video format, and then you can download the converted file. This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube’s videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online.

3.KeepVid

KeepVid.com is a website where you can download the video files quickly and easily. It also features the Top video section where you can select the most watched videos around the web to download.

4.DVDVideoSoft

DVDVideoSoft allows downloads from youtube and Google video. It also offers free softwares to download and convert videos from the web. It also offers free tools to burn, rip and edit video and audio files.

5. Clipnabber

Clipnabber is the quickiest and easiest way to download videos from around 100 video sharing sites including the popular sites like youtube,dailymotion, Veoh, Megavideo etc. It also features the video category section that you can use to download or watch the video from a particular section like gaming, enterntainment, automobile etc.

6.Media Converter

Media Converter is an online service to download and convert videos, audios from a URL but you can only do it five times and also you cannot download video greater than 100 MB. If you want to download more you need to make an account. The free account supports the following sites :blip.tv, break.com, dailymotion.com, facebook.com, livevideo.com, metacafe.com, myvideo.ch, myvideo.de, veoh.com, youtube.com.

7.KcoolOnline

Kcoolonline currently works for over 269 streaming video sites, and more are being added every week. Supported sites include many popular stream sites including MySpace, CollegeHumor, iFilm, etc.

8.DownThisVideo

DownThisVideo.com is another simple to use web service to download the videos from a URL. The main feature is the tag cloud from where you can select a popular topic for videos. It also has wordpress plugin(WPvideo) which you can use to insert videos into your posts in a easy way.

9. HeyWatch

HeyWatch comes bundled with a lot of services to encode the videos in various formats including HD,Flash Video, H264, MP4, WMV, Divx, mobile, iPhone / iPod, PSP. You can also encode and transfer a video to a FTP server or to online storage. The only annoying thing is that it is not fully free.

10.VideoDownloader

VideoDownloader is a firefox extension plus a web service to download the videos from the internet. It supports download from all the major sites plus a lot of other cool but less popular sites on the internet. It also features a best video section which has the most popular videos from a number of sites and you can download the videos in just a single click.

11. YouconvertIt

Youconverit supports downloading videos from youtube,google video and metacafe.com. You can also convert the video files to a number of formats like 3GP, AVI, MOV, MP4, ASF. After converting the files it will send the files your email address. It also offers sending files from you PC to any e-mail address.

12. VidMetro

Vidmetro supports downlading video files from youtube, google video, metacafe, dailymotion, break.com. It also has top video category which has popular videos from around the web.

Green Robot In Gmail Chat For Android Phones

rpsingh — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:43:39 +0000

The new feature in gmail labs called Green Robot has been released that shows you a “robot icon” next to people who are currently using Android phones for Gmail chat. The main benefit that these icons provide is that you can tailor your chat messages according to the type of device the chat friend is using.

When your chat buddies log into Gmail, their presence icons will revert to the traditional red, green, and orange status bubbles. And in case if your friend is logged in through both Android and gmail then the traditional status icons will be displayed.

This feature might not be approved by everyone as it can cause some privacy issues as you can easily know which user is using Android phone for chatting.

[Via]