Add smileys and colors to your Facebook Messages

Facebook as we all know is one of the best Social Networking site but it lacks animated smileys and colors while updating status and comments.

Faceplus is a Google Chrome extension which integrates itself into Facebook and changes your Facebook experience. This extension adds 30 smileys and ability to add color and BBCode to your Facebook messages (Color, Bold Italic, Underline).

Download and install Faceplus for Google Chrome

Once installed, whenever you want to update your Status, you will see a Style panel using which you can add smileys and change the colors and BBCode of your message.

The messages containing smileys will be displayed as animated in your News Feed once this add-on is installed.

Conclusion
Faceplus is a nice addon to make Facebook more entertaining.

Zoom Facebook images on mouse hover

Everyone likes uploading and checking photo albums on Facebook. Whenever a new image is uploaded by your friend interests you, you feel like watching it zoomed. To see the zoomed images you need to go to the Photo album and check it.

Facebook Photo Zoom is an extension which helps you watch the zoomed images in your News Feed itself. It is a simple, light-weight extension that integrates directly into Facebook so you can see larger images of photo albums, profile photos and more whenever you hover over a zoomable image.

Facebook Photo Zoom integrates itself in Facebook making it simple to turn it On or Off. Simple click the toggle button at the bottom of Facebook page to toggle it.

Conclusion
This is a great extension to make Facebook more interactive.

Download Facebook Photo Zoom

Know what should be read in Google Reader with PageRank for Chrome

We subscribe to many RSS feeds and Google Reader is one of the best RSS reader used widely. We tend to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds getting lots of material to be read. PostRank Extension for Google Chrome helps you find which topic matters and should be read first. It aggregates engagement activity from social networks, ranks stories based on how much engagement each has received and marks their priority.

Download and Install PageRank extension for Google Chrome

After installation you will find a dropdown for PageRank on Google Reader from where you can select the Rank of posts to be listed and read them. By doing this you are sure about reading the articles which are being discussed the most by people over internet.

You can also enable PostRank for Google Search Results, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News etc from Extension settings.

Conclusion
PageRank is a good extension to save your time reading only the articles which are most popular and relevant.

Set image as wallpaper for Google Chrome

Google Chrome has been missing the functionality to set the image as wallpaper on right click context menu. This is possible now using Set Image as Wallpaper extension for Google Chrome. Currently this is only supported for Windows machines and the support for MAC and Linux will be provided shortly.

Download and install the extension by clicking here
Restart Chrome for the extension to get enabled and start using it. Now, whenever you like an image on web and want to set it as your wallpaper just right click on the image and select Set image as wallpaper.

Clicking Set image as wallpaper starts up a new tab. Select whether you want to stretch, tile or fit the image in center of your desktop. Once done, click Set wallpaper to set the image as your wallpaper.

Additionally you can click Options to configure the extension.

Now explore and listen to Hindi Songs using Google

Google Labs has come up with Google Music using which you can listen to thousands of full hindi songs. Google has partnered with In.com, Saregama and Saavn which holds rights to thousands of Indian tracks ranging from old and new Bollywood hits to Indian Classical Music.

Users can search for a particular song, album or artists.

Clicking the results opens up a pop-up in which the song gets played.
Now there's no more search needed to listen to Hindi songs online. Google does it great way for us.

Visit Google Music at http://www.google.co.in/music

Screensaver scans your PC using Microsoft Security Essentials

I had written about Disk Defrag screensaver for Windows PC which was a great utility to utilize PC's idle time to defrag the disks. Similarly DevianArt has come up with a Screensaver which scans your machines for malware and viruses when the screensaver runs. It uses Microsoft's excellent tool Security Essentials to run the scan.

The screensaver has two modes: Graphical and Non-Graphical. In Graphical mode a Microsoft Security Essentials logo is displayed on the screen whereas in Non-Graphical mode a blank screen is displayed when the screensaver runs.

You need Microsoft Security Essentials installed as a pre-requisite to make this screensaver work. Microsoft Security Essentials is a freeware from Microsoft and can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials

Click here to download the screensaver

The ZIP file contains Security Screensaver.scr (Graphical) and Security Screensaver NG.scr (Non-Graphical)  files. Just right click any one of the files depending on your choice and click Install to get the screensaver started.

Conclusion
This is a great Utility to utilize machine's idle time to get it scanned for Viruses and Malware. Today, everyone is mostly connected to internet increasing the chances of affecting with viruses and malwares and this kind of utilities are real help to protect machine from viruses and malwares.

Securely receive files to your Dropbox using DropItToMe

Dropbox has become an essential part to store, organize and sync your files between computers. If you are still not aware of what Dropbox is continue reading Organize, Synchronize, Share, Backup files using Dropbox.
With all the great features Dropbox has, one of its wonderful feature is integrity with 3rd party applications which gives developers a chance to build on applications to extend Dropbox.

Similarly an application named Drop It To Me has extended Dropbox using which people can store files in your Dropbox. It is completely secure as you need to supply the password for Drop It To Me application to your friends and not for Dropbox. Your friends can only upload files to that location but can never see the contents of that location which makes it secure enough.

The application can simply help us avoid sending emails with large attachments, pictures, videos, etc. and simply uploading them to friends Dropbox folder.

Start using Drop It To Me

Just type in http://www.dropitto.me/ in your web browser and hit Enter

Click Register to create an account with Drop It To Me and link it to your Dropbox Account.

Click Get Dropbox if you do not have a Dropbox account. Considering that you have a Dropbox Account just hit Register button to connect DROPitTOme to your Dropbox account. On the next screen after clicking Register provide your Dropbox login details.

 The application needs permission to connect to your Dropbox. Click Allow to grant permission to the application to interact with your Dropbox account.

Once you grant the permission, create a login id and password for DROPitTOme. Note the password and username can be different than yout Dropbox account.

You get a URL after registering with DROPitTOme which can be used to upload files to your Dropbox. Make sure you note down the URL so that you can share it with your friends.
You also need to provide the password for DROPitTOme account to your friends for them to upload the files using the URL mentioned.

Just navigate to your Drop It To Me URL and insert the password and hit Login.

Upon successful login, users can simply click Choose File, select the file to be uploaded and hit Upload button to start uploading.

A success message gets displayed once the upload gets completed. Do not close the browser window till you do not receive the Success message.

You can check the uploaded files using Drop It To Me in your Dropbox Account under DROPitTOme folder.

Conclusion
Dropbox has always been a great application to share, sync, organize your files and DROPitTOme adds on to its capabilities wonderfully. It just adds one more option to send large files to your friends instantly.

Fifa 2010 - Wear your team on Firefox - Firefox Cup

Its Football Fever and team at Firefox has been affected with it too. Firefox has come up with Firefox Cup where you can support your favorite team by wearing the Persona.

The team with the most number of fans (number of people wearing Firefox Persona) wins at the end.

So what are you waiting for. Log on to Firefox Cup and dress your Firefox with your Favorite Teams color.

Detect Blocked and Open Ports - Port Detective

It happens when you need to find out the reason behind things not working on your machine whose possible reason could be with the port being blocked. At such times we need to first make sure whether the port is actually blocked and if yes what is blocking it. Port Detective does this work simply for us.

Port Detective uses the latest in Internet technology when it comes to figuring out what ports on YOUR
computer or router are Blocked, In-Use or restricted. Port Detective is much different from other port
scanner programs. Typical port scanners are designed for scanning other peoples ports (Computers other
than your own), or they only tell you what ports are open on the local host (Your Local PC, Not your ISP too).

Port Detective gives you the Plain and Simple results on what ports are open, blocked or in use by your router or firewall. It can even detect what ports are blocked by your Internet Service provider!  This free service allows Cable modem or xDSL users to instantly get an idea on what ports their ISP may block, so they know what Internet Services they can run.

Starting with Port Detective
1. Download and install Port Detective (link below)
2. Once you have it installed, start the application and click Ok on the Warning message displayed

3. After clicking the Warning message, Port Detective automatically starts scanning the default ports and displays you with the results. You can additionally add a new port or start scanning for the ports again using the Action menu.

Conclusion
Port Detective makes it real easy for you to find out the ports issue by displaying simple result after great analysis.

Download Port Detective now

Fifa 2010 Live Score - Firefox Extension

GoodReflex has come up with a simple Firefox addon which displays live Fifa 2010 matches score right in Firefox. It adds a toolbar between bookmarks and Address bar where the scores are displayed. The extension is not yet reviewed by Mozilla but I haven't had any issue using it.

Its a good to have add-on when you cannot watch the match during office hours.

Click here to download and install the add-on for Firefox