Okay, I have hundreds of pictures to arrange into a collage. I’m too lazy to arrange so many of them into a collage. What do I do?

Solution:

I download this free software that automates the process of creating a collage from number of pictures. Leaves absolutely nothing for you to do and gives you a finished professional looking collage. It’s called shape collage. One great feature of Shape collage is that you can make the collage in a desired shape. The software also has an online version, that allows you to work directly on the cloud.

Some great features:

Create picture collages in less than a minute with just a few mouse clicks

Create collages in the shape of a Rectangle, heart, circle, letters, or even draw your own shape.

Adjust the collage size, size of the photos, number of photos, and spacing between photos

Change the background, the colour of the border, and more

Edit the final image in Photoshop by saving it in PSD format.

[Shape Collage]

Make sure your computer has java runtime environment installed.

Audacity is one of the best sound editing softwares around. It is very flexible and allows you to do choose from a number of automated processes. It also allows you to save to mp3 format using the lame_enc.dll. It is available for download at [AUDACITY] and did I mention it is open source.

The following process demonstrated removes vocals from most of the songs. Works best with stereo mp3s.

Some times you experience slow copy and load times on your computer. This could be a problem with your hard disk. Hard disk problems on your computer need excess attention. A crashed hard disk takes away a lot of important data on your computer that you cannot afford loosing.

Signs of a hard disk going down:

1. Long copy and load times. Copy times are measured with data like simple video clips, music and pictures. Software installations and other such folders that contain huge number of files take long times.

2. Click sounds from a hard disk.

3. Spin up and down sounds from a hard disk. constant spin retries

4. Folders take long time to open. Computer gets slow (you can’t think of any other problem).

5. Temperatures more than 55 degrees is a danger sign. Check temperature with HD tune. Ideal temperature depends on the room temperature.

6. Frozen computer, with no mouse activity.

7. Millisecond loops in media (music and videos).

HD tune is a free hard disk benchmark tool that can help detect problems. The normal graph on it should look like the screen shot below. Nature of graph is always going down and no major sudden deviations in the middle. If the transfer rate drops to a very low value frequently, you have something to worry about.

A list of  10 plugins and a brief description I use with Chrome.

Google Mail checker: Checks for new mails in your Gmail every 2 minutes.

Translate: Translate pages to the desired language with Google translate. It is a simple translator that lets you translate pages with just one click

Google reader notifier: Notifies you for any new feeds from your subscribed feeds.

RSS subscribe: Instant, one click RSS feed subscribe.

Aviary: Capture visible area of the browser on your screen and edit it in the desired application. great tool for bloggers.

Facebook for Chrome: Facebook plugin for Chrome.

Chrome bird: Twitter client for Google Chrome. Easy and slick interface that has almost all important features that a twitter client must have.

Similar pages: Find similar pages using a click with Google similar pages.

Docs viewer: Automatically preview Docs in Google docs. Formats like pdf, ppt, doc, docx etc.

URL shortener: A Google shortener button in your browser as a plugin.

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Benchmarking games is the best way to analyze how good your PC can perform. You can thus push the graphic settings in the game to optimum level. Usually the minimum playable frame rate on games is around 25 frames per second (FPS).

Fraps is a perfect benchmarking tool for hardcore gamers. It can overlay the real time FPS on any corner of your screen when you are playing a game. After you finish playing the game, Fraps generates a detailed report. You can use the report to discuss or write your own reviews.

Not just the frame rate, Fraps also lets you capture and save instant screen shots from the game. You don’t have to worry to paste it in an image editing program after pressing the set hotkey.

The full version of Fraps (not free) can capture high quality videos without any watermarks. It can also capture screen shots in various formats like jpeg, gif, tga etc. The full version of fraps once bought will let you upgrade to a new version also. Thus a small fee of 37$ is worth the software if you are too much into gaming.