For those of you who already had an Apple ID that doesn’t necessarily be an email address you might be in surprise to see that activating your iCloud service needs an Apple ID that’s an email address. I was a victim of this.

So I went ahead and gave my @gmail.com email address and everything went well. I was even surprised to see that it took my old password that was associated with my non-email Apple ID. The bummer was that iCloud would need to verify your email address before you can start using it. This wouldn’t be an issue with other email providers I guess but with an @gmail.com email address there seem to be some delivery issues. The verification email essentially would never come in.

There is a workaround to get things moving so you can start to make use of iCloud using your @gmail.com email address. The trick is to add a dot to your email address if you don’t have one.

Visit id.apple.com and sign-in to your account with your existing Apple ID. Then on the “Name, ID, email addresses” tab on the left hit the “Edit” link on to the right and give your email a dot decoration (have a dot somewhere on your email address, for example, johnappleseed@gmail.com could be john.appleseed@gmail.com) and save. Hit the “Verify now” link and this time the verification email would come through.

The only compromise is that I now have to use my email with the dot but that’s no big deal given the fact that Gmail delivers all your emails to the original email address even if you decorate your email address with extra dots.

So, that solved my problem and I hope it helps someone who is facing the same issue. Give it a try and share what you find.

For those of you who are wondering what’s going on with DemoGeek since there are not much updates lately I just wanted to quickly chime in and give you a quick update.

DemoGeek was started off to demonstrate some of the intricate technical details of dealing with day-to-day computer usage. We stuck to our guns for a while and have produced some decent content that are indeed helpful (for example, our how to add custom iPhone ringtones post) and demonstrated what we stood for. As things have changed in this landscape and there are a few blogs (read How-To-Geek) that do an extremely good job of bringing in some really good content that demonstrate the details I thought it’s time to change the content strategy of this blog and am working on it.

Soon you will see a newly revamped DemoGeek.com that still helps people with their technical shortcomings but does that in an interesting way and simpler way. Just hang in there for few more days and we will start a new chapter on DemoGeek.com.

Thanks for all your support all these days and if you have any suggestions on where you wanted to see DemoGeek.com go please feel free to let us know at thegeek@demogeek.com

DemoGeek

WinX BluRay DVD iPhone Ripper is free for download until Jan 10, 2011.

WinXDVD is giving away its WinX BluRay  DVD iPhone Ripper software for free. It allows you to rip homemade and protected Blu-ray DVD content to iPhone, iPod, iPad and Apple TV. It helps you watch your favorite movie on Apple video player.

The giveaway is valid until Jan 10, 2011. The catch is that there is no free update or technical support for this giveaway. If you are not much concerned of the free update to latest versions and technical support this would be a great download, given the fact that there is no cost involved. Also, keep in mind that this works only on Windows.

Download WinX DVD iPhone Ripper for free.

Download DivX+ software for free.

NewEgg.com is offering DivX+ software for free. Download it before it expires.

Use this simple command to disable the feature where you MacBook wakes up when you just open the lid.

I don’t know if it’s a convenience or not but your MacBook, by default, wakes up when you just open the lid. Sometimes it’s cool to just let it wake up just by opening the lid but many times it’s a hassle.

It’s a hassle if you lug your MacBook a lot. I’m sure you must have faced it; you open your backpack to see you MacBook running screaming hot. Many times what happens is that just by the motion of your travel itself your MacBook would sense the lid being open (there could be a slight chance the lid is a tiny bit open in movement) and wakes up by itself. Since the backpack is a closed environment the machine could easily heat-up a lot quicker.

Mac OSX don’t have a simpler way of (re)setting this behavior. But it can be done with a simpler command if you know how to use Terminal.

Open up Terminal.

Use QuickSilver or Spotlight or just go into your “/Applications/Utilities” folder.

Just enter this command at the command prompt,

sudo pmset -a lidawake 0

That’s a zero at the end of the command.  Enter your password when prompted and your MacBook would not wake up from now on when the lid is just opened. Instead you have to press the “Return” key to wake it up.

If you think this has become a hassle for you and you like the convenience of the lid awake feature, no problem, just run the same command but this time use ONE instead of ZERO and that would effectively reset the feature.

I hope it helps you protect your MacBook from overheating especially when you travel with your MacBook.

Use this simple trick to suppress the bodiless email dialog that pops up when you try to send an email without any body text in Gmail.

When you try to send an email without any body text using Gmail you’ll be prompted with a dialog that warns you about empty email body. Many times you might be intentionally sending emails without any body text if the message can be communicated on the subject line itself.

If you are annoyed with the dialog and wanted to bypass the dialog there is a simple trick that you can use. Just end the subject line of your email message with “(EOM)” (without quotes) and Gmail won’t show that nagging dialog.

Windows n Mac United themepack makes it real easy to make your Windows 7 look like Mac OSX.

Earlier we have mentioned about transforming your Windows Vista into Mac OSX look. This time it’s for Windows 7.

Make Windows 7 look like Mac with Windows n Mac United Themepack

Windows n Mac Themepack is a full package themepack that completely transforms your Windows 7 into Mac OSX look and feel. It comes with 5 Mac OSX wallpapers, cursors, shellstyles, and sound schemes. Windows n Mac United is a free themepack with less overhead to make your Windows 7 look like Mac OSX. Just in case if you don’t want to mess with your system files you can create a Windows restore point to rollback your computer, in case, if you run into any issues. With the restore point created it’s more safe to give this themepack a try.

Give Windows n Mac United Thempack a try.

By controlling the login items on your Mac you can easily boost the performance of your Mac a little bit.

Similar to other operating systems Mac OSX also starts certain applications when it starts up. By limiting the applications your Mac starts up you can gain a slight performance boost. Who else don’t want to miss that, right?

Start by launching “System Preferences” and then get into “Accounts“.

Once there click on the “Login Items” tab. Your Mac will list the applications that will be opened automatically when you log in to your Mac. Click on the “Hide” checkbox to hide the application from starting up.

Hiding doesn’t really stop the application from starting but rather would hide the application icon from showing up on the Menu bar. If you really want the application to not startup at all then you should select the application first and then use the “-” remove button to remove the application from starting up altogether. You can also add your favorite application to automatically startup using the “+” Add button.

Take a few minute to go through this list to make sure you only want the applications that you are most interested in starts up when you login to your Mac. Hope it helps you gain a little bit of performance improvement on your Mac.

Easily convert web pages into printer friendly pages with the PrintFriendly service.

In the pursuit to make web pages pretty we normally end up with web pages that doesn’t look good on print. One way I used to print the content is to copy/paste the text portion into a text editor and print it from there. Even that involves quite an overhead in formatting and removing the images and unwanted text etc.

Not any more! PrintFriendly is a simple service that converts web pages into printer friendly format. It does that by overlaying the converted page on top of the current page and gives some neat options to control what exactly you wanted to print. If you don’t have a printer connected to your computer you can also save the converted page as a PDF for later printing/reading.

There are 3 ways you can use PrintFriendly,

• Using the browser bookmarklet
• Using the PrintFriendly button on the websites  that have the button implemented
• Using their website where you can enter the URL of the page to make it printer friendly

Of these the simplest is the browser bookmarklet. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and you are all set to make any web page (literally) printer friendly.

Once you hit the bookmarklet you’ll presented with an overlay of the page that’s printer friendly. PrintFriendly will reformat the page, make the text more readable, realign the images on the page etc. to make it look more printable and readable. You’ll have the option to remove images from the overlay. You can also print the formatted page, convert it to PDF for later reading or printing. You can email the page or tweet about the formatted page.

Even more cool is the  way PrintFriendly allows you to trim the page. When you move your mouse over the formatted text it allows you to delete the section that you think is not a good fit for the print. You can trim off the images this way and reduce the final print output. That’s a pretty neat feature that make you feel you have the control of what’s getting printed.

If anything goes wrong while you try to trim the page you can undo the changes very easily. Finally when you are ready, you can print or convert the formatted page to a PDF or email the formatted page.

PrintFriendly also has a button which can be adopted by the website creators to let their readers print the page in a friendlier way.

If you don’t want to use the browser bookmarklet and if don’t see a PrintFriendly button on a web page you can use their website. Just key-in the URL of the page that you want to make it printer  friendly and PrintFriendly  will present you with the formatted page ready for print.

So far, on my usage I feel PrintFriendly is a really useful service and that makes me read more (especially with their PDF and email options). Having said that there are few more features that’s missing currently that would make this a really useful service.

• Allow us to format the page even better. Instead of deleting paragraph of text  it would be better if we can choose what precisely need to be trimmed off, like selecting a block of text in the middle of a paragraph etc.
• Allow us to specify the font that’s used on the formatted page.
• For registered users keep a history of what’s getting converted so we can easily get back, kind of like a Instapaper meets PrintFriendly.
• Offer some predefined print layouts. Not everyone has a sophisticated printer that can print double sides or booklets. This option would make the page itself formatted to those formats.

I’m sure the service would evolve with some nifty features to make it even more usable. As of what exists now, PrintFriendly is very usable and something that I keep invoking when I want to take some reading material from the web with me.

Give PrintFriendly a try.

These 10 beautiful and colorful vector wallpapers will surely brighten your desktop.

Who wouldn’t like those beautiful wallpapers on their desktops? It’s inspiring and sometimes bring the mood to get something done at your computer. People would go to the extreme to automatically rotate their desktop wallpapers from their beautiful collection. If you wanted to build a collection like that or would simply like to have a bunch of these awesome vector wallpapers on your desktop I hope these wallpapers have a place on your desktop.

Go ahead and download all of these wonderful vector wallpapers and spruce up your computer desktop.

Chrome Access extension allows you to quickly access all the about configuration pages of Google Chrome.

Google Chrome has this powerful hidden feature called “about pages” where you can tweak the behavior of Google Chrome in great depth. The only problem that you have is to remember all those pages which  as of now count to at least 11. If you don’t want to remember the lengthy list of about pages Chrome Access extension can help you.

Chrome Access is a simple Google Chrome extension that provides quick access to all the hidden “about://” and “chrome://” pages with a dropdown menu.

• ‘about:net-internals’ –  gives an overview of network status and usage.
• ‘about:memory’ –  gives an overview of chrome memory usage, by tab and in total.
• ‘about:dns’ –  gives an overview of stored DNS data.
• ‘about:plugin’ –   lists all the plugins Chrome is using (such as Flash, QuickTime etc.).
• ‘about:cache’ –  displays all the items in the browser cache.
• ‘about:sync’ –  displays bookmark sync data if you have bookmark sync enabled.
• ‘about:histograms’ –  displays low-level performance data (this is only useful to the techies).
• ‘about:version’ –  displays a detailed version page with the Chromium, WebKit and V8 builds currently being used.
• ‘about:credits’ –  lists the (open-source) software and API’s that Chrome uses and links to their respective websites.
• ‘about:about’ –  lists all of Chrome’s about pages.
• ‘about:flags’ –  allows you to enable/disable some of Chrome’s experimental features.

It also provides quick access to some of the “chrome://” pages,

• extensions
• history
• downloads
• bookmarks
• settings

If you used to tinker with some of Google Chrome’s settings you’ll find Chrome Access a handy extension to keep it around on the Chrome toolbar.

Install Chrome Access.

Namechk can quickly let you know if a username is available across many of the social media sites.

Deciding on a business name but wanted to make sure the name is available across the major social media sites? Thinking off venturing into the social media websphere but don’t want to deal with multiple usernames? Well, NameChk is a simple answer.

Enter your preferred username and NameChk can easily let you know if the username is available across the major social media sites. The current list includes 72 services but I would certainly expect that to grow over time.

NameChk is a simple service that does one thing and does it well. Give it a try.

Firefox helps you tag your bookmarks so you can get back to them easily.

If you don’t use any of the online bookmarking services but rely on your browser’s bookmarking capabilities for all your bookmarking needs then you might like the way Firefox allows you to leverage your bookmarks. When you save a bookmark in Firefox it allows you to add tags to the bookmark. Once tagged you can just type the tag on the URL box to get to the URL very easily.

Start by bookmarking a page or organize your bookmarks.

Once the Edit This Bookmark page pops-up, name your bookmark and choose the folder where you want to save the bookmark. Before you hit the “Done” button type-in the tags for this bookmark; separate them with comma if you want to assign multiple tags to a bookmark or choose from the list. Once done hit “Done”.

From now on, you don’t have to remember those lengthy URLs; instead you can just type the tag name to locate the bookmarked URLs. I think it’s very handy to have this shortcut to get to the many URLs that I have bookmarked in the browser itself.

These awesome Windows 7 themes will certainly spruce up the way your Windows 7 looks.

Windows 7 is out there for a while now; which means, you must have gotten tired of the beautiful interface Windows 7 came with. Well, it’s time to keep up with the Windows 7 spirit and certainly these 7 beautiful Windows 7 themes are here to help you experience Windows 7 with a slight UI twist.

Deep 7 Theme for Windows 7

Forst Aero Windows 7 Theme

Shine 2.0 Theme for Windows 7

Windows 7 Blend Theme

Tequilla Visual Style for Windows 7

Vista Pink Pastel Theme

Mac OSX Theme for Windows 7

I hope you like these awesome Windows 7 Themes.

Carry all your Google Chrome bookmarks, extensions and themes with you on to all your computers with Google Chrome Sync.

Even though we have delicious and a bunch of other tools to make our bookmarking life a lot easier there is nothing that can beat the simple bookmarks bar on the browser itself. I use it to keep the most frequently visited sites handy.

It’s not just the bookmarks; Google Chrome does come with some extra goodies, extensions and themes, for example. I’m sure you hate settings these things up on all your computers. You don’t have to. In fact Google Chrome does come with a feature called “Google Chrome Sync” which allows you to keep all your bookmarks, extensions and themes synced across your computers.

To make use of it,

Click on “Tools” (the wrench icon on the far right on top) and hit “Options“.

Navigate to the “Personal Stuff” tab and then click on the “Set up sync…” button.

Chrome will open up a dialog asking you to enter your Google account information. This is the key that it uses to keep your Chrome features all synced. So enter a Google account that you want to use across your computers to keep things in-sync.

Then you will be asked to configure what needs to be synced. You can choose to keep everything synced or you can pick and choose the individual data elements that you want Google Chrome to keep it synced.

Let Google Chrome do its job and once done it will inform you about the status and if all goes okay then you’ll see Chrome reloaded with all the data elements that you indicated to be synced.

That’s all it takes to keep all your Google Chrome bookmarks, themes and extensions synced across all your computers.

Revoke access to third-party Twitter apps from your Twitter account with this simple trick.

With the announcement of OAuth as the only authentication mechanism Twitter supports from now on, your Twitter password is not at risk anymore. But the third-party Twitter applications that you have granted access to can still do some damage to your Twitter stream. If you suspect a Twitter application to be misbehaving you can easily revoke access to the app by following this simple step.

Sign-in to your Twitter account and click on the “Settings” link.

Once the Twitter Settings page comes up click on the “Connections” tab. You should then be able to see all the apps that you have granted access to. Very handily you should also be able to see a “Revoke Access” link for each of those apps. Clicking on that link will revoke access for that app; the app would then need to ask you permission for further access.

It would be a wise thing to do to visit Twitter Connections tab once in a while to cleanup access to all these third-party apps. Believe me, it could grow into a mammoth list if you are curious in trying out a bunch of these apps.

I told you…it’s that easy!

BlackHole is a simple application that can help you clear out any sensitive information that you have on your Mac.

Think about this, you use your Mac and in that process you leave quite a lot of sensitive information, either on the clipboards or on your browsing history or on the recent items list etc. What would happen if someone else get a hold of your Mac or if you let others use your Mac. These sensitive information would then be available to them as well.

One thing you can do is to run through a list of tasks you have to do at the end of day and that would include quitting some of the applications, clearing out your clipboards, your recent items list, your browsing history, emptying your trash etc. But that’s not practical. Instead, you can just use a simple tool like BlackHole to do those tasks for you automatically.

BlackHole is a simple tool that takes care of doing some of the more mundane tasks related to your personal information security. BlackHole can,

• Quit applications for you. If the app won’t quit after a certain amount of time BlackHole can Force Quit them for you.
• Clear out the File > Recent Items list that most Mac applications support.
• Empty the trash even if the files inside are locked.
• Unmount volumes, let it be a Mac or Windows share, a USB key, an external hard drive or a mounted disk image file etc.
• Clear the Clipboard.
• Delete files and folders. It can even bypass the trash.
• Close Safari tabs. It even let you close tabs or windows based on the keyword that’s on the title of the window.

Download BlackHole.

If you are willing to pay a little bit you can easily purchase some nice ringtones using iTunes on your iPhone.

Earlier we have mentioned about how to add your own ringtones to your iPhone. We even walked you through how to add multiple ringtones to your iPhone. To add to that mix we listed a list of useful applications to create your own custom ringtone. But there are so many comments that paint a picture that for some of you it’s not that easy to add your own custom ringtones to your iPhone. If you are one of those few and if you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own custom ringtones then iTunes on your iPhone can help you.

With iTunes on your iPhone you can easily purchase professional ringtones for your iPhone. The price is not that expensive, comparatively but it’s not free. If you are willing to spend a couple of dollars for your favorite ringtone then using iTunes on your iPhone to purchase ringtone is the easiest way to get custom ringtones to your iPhone.

If you are not familiar with iTunes on your iPhone just launch the iTunes app on your iPhone. Search for it if you couldn’t find it.

Once launched tap on the “Ringtones” tab at the bottom. You should be able to see all the featured ringtones for that day.

You can also view the Top 10 ringtones or you can see the ringtones based on genre.

Once you locate the appropriate ringtone that you like iTunes app on iPhone allows you to listen to the tone before you buy.

Just tap on the ringtone name to listen to the ringtone.

Once you decide to buy a ringtone tap on the price and it turns into “Buy Now” that allows you to buy the ringtone.

It is as simple as that, browse, listen and buy. If you don’t want to mess with adding a custom ringtone to your iPhone you can use the iTunes app on your iPhone to purchase ringtones easily. Enjoy your newly found ringtones!

Some nice high definition wallpapers for your Zune player.

If you still have a Zune media player with you then these wallpapers might spruce up the Zune player a little bit.

Hope you liked a few of these.

Learn how to display Administrative Tools menu option on Windows 7 Start Menu.

Administrative Tools in Windows hosts some of the system level tools that a normal user won’t need in their day-to-day usage. But if you are a power user or you know what you are doing with your computer you might need to get to the Administrative Tools to accomplish certain tasks like viewing system events, configuring data source, performance monitoring, task scheduling etc. If you are a power user you might already know this trick but if you are someone who is following a guide to accomplish certain tasks and would like to learn more about Windows in that process, this tip is for you.

Since these are tasks for advanced users Windows 7 does not come with the Administrative Tools option turned on. You have to do that manually and it’s pretty simple to do.

Right-click on the Windows “Start” button and click on the “Properties” menu option. Windows will open the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog, click on the “Start Menu” tab and then click on the “Customize” button.

When the “Customize Start Menu” dialog comes up scroll down to locate the “System Administrative Tools” section. Click on either the “Display on the All Programs menu” option or the “Display on the All Programs menu and the Start menu” option depending where you see fit. Once enabled Windows will now display an “Administrative Tools” menu option on the Windows Start Menu which is a simpler way to get to the administrative tools.

Increase or decrease your Mac’s speaker volume more precisely with this simple trick.

When you increase or decrease your Mac’s speaker volume using the Volume Up or Down keyboard buttons, by default your Mac will increment or decrement the volume in a fixed block size.

For example, as you can see above there are the standard 16 blocks and when you increase or decrease volume each block of volume gets incremented or decremented.

If you are not comfortable with the standard block of volume increments and would rather prefer to have better control you are in luck. When you hold down the “Shift” and the “Option” keys together while you increment or decrement your Mac’s volume your Mac will increment or decrement the volume in much smaller blocks. To be precise each of the standard volume blocks will be further sliced to 4 blocks each and so you’ll get 4 increments or decrements per standard volume block. That effectively gives you a total of 64 volume control blocks instead of the standard 16 blocks.

Keep in mind that having more volume control blocks doesn’t physically increase the volume of your Mac to a super crazy level but rather you get more control of controlling your Mac’s volume.

Use these simple Gmail search queries to find all the unread emails in your Gmail Inbox.

Do you have hundreds of thousands of emails in your Gmail Inbox but a few of them, dated way back, are still unread? Going back one page at a time is not practical to locate those unread emails. Even worst if those unread emails are spread over a period of time. How do you get to those emails that are still unread?

Well, since Gmail is a product of the search giant Google you can obviously expect Gmail to support some nifty search features, didn’t you? Gmail has got some simple search query operators that can help you locate your emails a lot easier than you’ve thought.

To display only those emails that are still unread in your Inbox use the search query “label:unread in:inbox“. That would only display those emails that are still unread in your Gmail Inbox. You can substitute the word “label” in place of the word “in” to find all unread emails within a specific label.

That’s a quick tip to help you locate only those unread emails in Gmail.

Google Alarm Add-on can notify you when a website pings any of Google’s web properties.

Have you ever had a feel that the mighty Google might be tracking what you are doing on the web? Given the fact that majority of the websites these days use one form or the other of Google’s web properties including Analytics, Adsense, Maps, YouTube Videos and the list goes on and on…you got the point. 

Have you ever thought you might change your browsing behavior a little bit if you know a website is informing Google passively about you browsing their website? If that’s the case then Google Alarm, a simple Firefox and Chrome add-on, can help you find out if a site is informing Google about you being there on their website.

Google Alarm is a very simple plug-in that pops-up a red color Growl type notification indicating the Google’s web properties the site is communicating with for various purposes. Realize this, these are not those websites fault or Google’s; but a way for Google to track your IP address, the time you’ve spent on the site, the links you’ve clicked, the videos you’ve watched etc. If you think that’s passively invading your privacy you can leverage Google Alarm add-on to get a feel of what is being communicated to Google.

When Google Alarm warns you of the communication that’s happening between Google and the website you are on it plays a weird alarm audio. If you are in a workplace and don’t want to hear the audio you can install an audio-less version of the Firefox and Chrome extensions.

Learn more about Google Alarm.

Use these techniques to stop your Windows 7 computer from automatically waking up from sleep which can be quite dangerous sometimes.

Windows 7’s Sleep Mode is pretty slick and useful especially when you are on the move with your laptop. It comes off of sleep pretty quick and restore itself to an earlier stage without much fuzz. If you have been actively using Windows 7’s Sleep mode you would have faced this annoying problem where your Windows 7 computer automatically wakes up from sleep without you doing anything.

That’s no big deal,  let it wake up…what’s wrong? Right? Well, if your laptop (this problem is more annoying on laptops, BTW) wakes up by itself and drains the battery by itself unnecessarily then that’s a problem, especially if you expect your laptop to be ready for use when you ask it to wake up. You’d be clearly surprised to see that your battery is all drained out by the unnecessary wake up.

The good news is that you can easily stop this behavior. Most of the time it’s your network card that wakes up your computer from sleep. To stop your network card from waking your computer up you need to tweak a few settings.

Start by searching for “Device” on your Windows Start menu Search Bar. Under the Control Panel section you should be able to see “Device Manager” listed. Click on it to launch Device Manager. Alternatively you can use the Control Panel to navigate into Device Manager.

Once Device Manager launches navigate to the “Network Adapters” node and expand and right-click on your network card and click on “Properties”.

When the network card Properties window launch navigate to the “Power Management” tab and make sure to uncheck the “Allow this device to wake the computer” option. Once done dismiss all the open dialogs to accept the settings.

Sometimes automatic Windows Update can wake up your computer from sleep. This is not the majority of the case but could be a culprit and wouldn’t hurt to check and make sure.

On Windows Start menu search for “Update” and click on “Windows Update”. When Windows Update screen comes up click on the “Change Settings” option on the left side of the screen.

When the Windows Update Settings page opens up make sure you have a reasonable time set for Windows to install new updates. You don’t want to pick a time when you are sleeping or when you are driving. Pick a time when you can either be on the computer or could get to the computer in case if you notice the computer being turned on.

If you are curious to know what device woke your computer up from sleep the last time you can run this command to find out,

powercfg -lastwake

You can also use the command

powercfg –devicequery wake_armed

to find out the list of devices that are capable of waking your computer up from sleep. Once you have the list of devices you can use Device Manager to disable those devices from waking up your computer from sleep.

If you are experiencing this automatic wake up issue you need to focus a little bit to get this fixed especially if you are using your laptop. When you keep them in the bag and when it get woke up your laptop could heat up pretty quick and pretty bad. So do focus on this issue to resolve it if you are experiencing automatic wakeup from your Windows 7 computer.

Adjusting the Virtual Memory settings could literally speed-up your computer.

Virtual Memory is a medium that doesn’t exist as a physical memory but rather it’s a technique to mimic a storage device as physical memory. Physical Memory is the RAM module that comes with your computer and are limited in size even though those modules are getting cheaper and cheaper these days. To make things perform faster your Windows PC leverages virtual memory where in a portion of your hard disk would be used as a volatile memory. By leveraging this extra space your computer can perform things faster than it can with just the physical memory.

If for some reason you started experiencing slower computer performance but there is no way for you to either spend on expanding the memory module or if you have maxed out on your system memory capacity you can tap into adjusting your computer’s virtual memory setting to see if you can squeeze out a little more performance juice out of your computer. Adjusting your computer’s virtual memory setting is easy.

Start by typing “System” into the Search Bar. Click on the “System” link under Control Panel. Alternatively you can launch Control Panel and open up the System applet.

It would give you a screen where it displays basic information about your computer. Click on the “Advanced system settings” link on the left side of the dialog.

You’ll then get the System Properties dialog. Click on the “Advanced” tab and then click on the “Settings” button under the “Performance” section.

Windows will open up the “Performance Options” dialog. Navigate to the “Advanced” tab and click on the “Change…” button on the “Virtual Memory” section.

You are then presented with the Virtual Memory dialog where you can adjust couple of things to specify a custom virtual memory size that you feel comfortable. If the “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” is checked make sure to uncheck the option. Everything else will enable by now and change from “System managed size” to the “Custom Size” choice. You’d then need to specify the initial and maximum sizes for the virtual memory. If you know what you are doing you can pick your number but if you don’t then a range of 3,000 for the Initial size and 6,000 for the Maximum size would be a safer bet. This is more important, once done make sure to click on the “Set” button to set this new size. Otherwise things wouldn’t work. Once done click on the “OK” button to dismiss the dialog (make sure to do it only after you click the “Set” button). You might want to restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

Now your system should be on the extra gear to give you the maximum performance possible.

Leave a comment and tweet about the free software giveaway to enter for a chance to win 1 of the 5 free TidySongs licenses.

Earlier we have written in detail about TidySongs and how you can use TidySongs to easily and nicely organize your music collection. As your music library grows TidySongs will help you keep full control of your music collection by removing duplicate songs, finding album artwork, fix misspelled song information, fill-in missing artists and genre information and much more. And TidySongs does all these for you automatically without you getting involved much.

If you try it once then you’ll realize the potential of having a software like TidySongs in your computer, be it a Mac or a PC. If you’ve been following DemoGeek.com you must have realized that we don’t promote any software by giving it free unless it really helped us and worked for us. TidySongs is something that really worked for us manage our huge music collection in a lot better way and we want you to experience the same.

In that regard DemoGeek.com is giving away 5 free licenses of TidySongs software. All you have to do to enter for a chance to win a copy of TidySongs is to leave a comment here at DemoGeek.com on why you need a software like TidySongs. We have 5 free TidySongs licenses to giveaway. Here is how we are going to give these free licenses,

• 2 licenses would go to the commenters with the most compelling reasons
• 1 license would go to one of the tweeters who tweet about this free software giveaway (make sure to include #demogeek and #freesoftware hashtags)
• 2 licenses would go to those of you who just leave a comment here in general

You have until August 6, 2010 to enter for a chance to win a free license of TidySongs. On August 7, 2010 we will announce the winners. So, don’t wait…download the trial version of TidySongs and give it a try and leave a comment here and tweet about it for a chance to win a full license of TidySongs for free. Good Luck!

Download TidySongs and give it a try.

————————————————–

And the winners are,

@milandroid – a DM has been sent to you

Garth

Swiftman

Lloyd Mullican

Paul

Congratulations to the winners! You were all notified with the appropriate license code. Thanks everyone for participating in this giveaway. Keep checking DemoGeek.com for free software giveaway like this in the future.

Writing an Audio CD with the free ImgBurn software is a bit trickier than the more traditional CD burning software.

ImgBurn is a totally free and a great CD burning software. It has got a whole bunch of features that many of the leading free CD burning software doesn’t have. Even though it boasts a lot of useful features, burning an Audio CD using ImgBurn is not a straight-forward thing. Even though it’s not that complicated you certainly need to follow certain steps to burn Audio CDs using ImgBurn.

Once you launch ImgBurn you need to switch to the Write mode. For that click on the “Mode” menu and click on the “Write” option.

Once in the write mode you then need to create a CUE file. According to Wikipedia “A cue file is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out”. To create the CUE file click on the “CD-like” icon as shown in the above screenshot.

You’ll then be presented with the “Create CUE File” dialog. Now you need to browse for the audio files that wanted to write to the Audio CD. Click on the “Explorer” like icon to browse for the files. Add as many files as it can fit into a CD. ImgBurn will inform you if you overrun the CD space. Once added you can then use the up/down arrows to organize the tracks the way you want to go into the Audio CD. Once done click on the “OK” button to dismiss this dialog.

Now you are all set to write the audio files to an Audio CD. As you can notice on the above screenshot the sectors, size and time information has been calculated to indicate that it’s ready to be written. Click on the big button as indicated above to write the tracks to an Audio CD. Let ImgBurn do its job and in a matter of minutes you’ll have all your audio songs written into an Audio CD.

Even though it’s not straight-forward certainly writing Audio CD with ImgBurn is not that complicated, especially when you get used to it couple of times. If you have any other ways of writing Audio CD with ImgBurn please let us know.

Follow these simple steps to learn how to add rich text email signatures with images on to your Gmail messages.

With the announcement of Rich Text Signatures in Gmail Google has brought Gmail one step closer to the mainstream email clients. You can now have a custom email signature in Gmail with rich text and images.

Creating rich text signatures in Gmail is very simple and straight-forward. Just go into “Settings” and on the “General” tab scroll down to locate the “Signature” section. Choose the email account to which you want to add rich text signature.

Gmail will display the rich text editor and on that type the signature as you wish and format it using the toolbar buttons. If you would like to insert images to your Gmail signature you have to click on the little “Insert Image” icon that looks like a photo frame.

Currently Gmail only supports images from the web which means your image needs to be hosted somewhere and you need to provide Gmail with the URL to the image. Once done make sure to save changes.

Now, when you try to compile new email messages you should be able to see the rich text signature being added to your email message.

The ability to add images and rich text to Gmail messages is a really sought after feature. I hope Google improves on this to allow us to upload the images from our computers and help us define a custom size to the image being used  in the signature. In the mean time enjoy images and rich text in your Gmail messages.

Google Maps Labs has got some nice features that would certainly improve your Google Maps experience.

Google Maps has revolutionized the way JavaScript has been used in web development. Apart from the technicality improvements it certainly has improved the way we looked at maps and directions. Even though Google Maps currently has features that would make you use it comfortably without complaining too much there are certainly room for improvements.

Have you ever faced a situation where you zoomed into a map location a bit too much where it said “we don’t have imagery at this zoom level”? Instead of displaying that message to disappoint/annoy us how about if it zoomed only to a level where there are images available and stopped us zooming in any further? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

That and many other features are what Google Maps team is working on and they have put out some of the features for the public to test on their Labs section. Some of these features that I handpicked would certainly improve the way you’ve used Google Maps.

Distance Measurement Tool

With this feature you can easily measure distance between two points on the map. You don’t have to get to the Directions tab anymore to find out about the distance between two places on the map. With the Distance Measurement Tool, just a simple drag and drop would give you the distance between the two places.

Short URL

Ever wanted to share a map with your friends and don’t want to send them that lengthy, garbage URL that you normally would? Try this feature and you can send a lot tiny URL that your friends can even remember (in most cases). This feature uses Google’s own URL shortener Goo.gl to shorten the URL.

Drag and Zoom

If you are annoyed with using the zoom sliders or double-clicking on the map forever to zoom in to a place in Google Maps you would love this feature which lets you zoom in to any section of the map with just a drag. Click on the Drag and Zoom button and start dragging and Google Maps will automatically zoom into the place without you doing much.

What’s Around Here?

If you are travelling to a place and ever wanted to know in advance what that place has to offer in terms of interesting places around that place? With What’s Around Here feature you can easily find out some of the interesting and useful places around any place in the map.

Smart Zoom

Many times when you zoom in too much into a place in Google Maps and when there are no images available Google Maps annoys you with the message that there are no images available at that zoom level. With Smart Zoom feature enabled you won’t get that message anymore instead you would only be able to zoom in to a level where images are available.

I’m sure you must have realized by now how much of a better experience you would get out of Google Maps when you enable these Labs features. Keep in mind that you would have to click on the “Labs” icon at the top right hand corner of the Google Maps page and then have to “Enable” the above features to make use of them.

These Gmail Notifiers can help you keep an eye on your Gmail account without keeping it open all day.

If you ever wanted to conserve some memory or a tab in your browser which usually was dedicated to Gmail then you should try some of these Gmail notifiers that would certainly help you keep an eye on your Gmail account without having it open all day in a browser.

1. Gmail Notifier for Mac

Apart from notifying new Gmail messages with a quick preview of the message subject Google Notifier for Mac also gives you timely reminder of your upcoming Google Calendar events. It stays in your menu bar and tells you of any new message arrivals.

2. Gmail Notifier for Windows

Similar to the Gmail Notifier for Mac but for Windows with one less feature; that is Gmail Notifier for Windows won’t give you timely reminder about your upcoming Google Calendar events. It stays in Windows System Tray and notifies of new message arrivals.

3. Notify

Notify is a tiny little (~15MB) Mac OSX application that stays on your OSX Menu Bar and tells you of any unread emails in your Gmail Inbox. It goes one step further to show a glimpse of those unread emails so you can decide if you want to open Gmail or just focus on what you are doing. It uses Growl to notify you of any new messages as it arrives in your Gmail Inbox.

4. GAlert

GAlert (Google Alert) is an easy to use and high performance skinnable Google notifier supports Google News, multiple GMail accounts, label filters and automatic login. It brings clean, easy and elegant look to the way people check their new message.

5. Gee!

Gee! is a nice little Atom Feeds notifier that sits in your OSX menubar. It was specifically written to read the Atom feed provided by Google for their Gmail service. Their feed lists the number of new emails a user has in their inbox. The icon in the menubar displays the number of unread messages inside a cool blue icon. Gee! will not only work with Gmail’s atom feed but with any atom feed.

6. Google + Growl

If you are annoyed with the “new message” pop-ups of other Gmail Notifiers then you would love this nonintrusive Growl notification provided by Google + Growl.

7. Mail Checker

Mail Checker is a simple OSX Dashboard widget that displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail or Yahoo accounts. If you have more than one email account you can add each widget for each account.

8. GmailGeiger

GmailGeiger is a lightweight and customizable mail notifier Yahoo Widget for the Gmail service. It supports multiple Gmail accounts, custom themes, themeable icons, adjustable check times etc.

9. Gmail Notifier Browser Extension

Allows checking for new Gmail messages for multiple Gmail accounts directly from the browser’s UI. A status bar item will show once installed, and a toolbar item can be added by customizing the toolbar. Supports Mozilla 1.4+ (all platforms), Firefox 1.0+ (all platforms), Firefox 1.0+ (all platforms) and Flock 0.7+ (all platforms).

10. Gmail Counter

Gmail Counter is a Windows Sidebar Gadget that checks your Gmail account or Google Apps email account and displays the number of new mails you have. Clicking on the gadget then takes you to your inbox. If you have more than one account you can use multiple copies of the gadget and use a different colour per account.

I hope you find some of these Gmail Notifiers useful to your needs. Please let us know in comments if you know of a Gmail notifier that’s better in terms of use but not listed here.

Use this simple trick to add all your favorite PDF files to iBooks on your iPhone or iPad.

With iOS4 comes a handy little application called iBooks. With iBooks you can read all your favorite eBooks at the comfort of your iPhone or iPad. But you would be surprised to know that can also read all your favorite PDF files using iBooks on your iPhone or iPad.

Adding PDF files to iBooks is relatively simple and straight-forward.

First, make sure you click on the Books folder on iTunes so it is selected. You might see the sample eBook on your Books folder. Keep it or you can delete it, your choice.

Find the PDF file that you wanted to add to your iPhone. Drag and Drop the file into the Books folder on iTunes.

If you wish to add some metadata about the PDF file you can do so by using the “Get Info” option when you right-click on the PDF file in iTunes. It’s an optional step but would certainly help if you have a lot of books on iBooks and wanted to identify them quickly.

Now that’s been added to Books on iTunes you need to make sure that new PDF get synced into your iPhone or iPad. Go into your iPhone folder and click on the “Books” tab. Make sure “Sync Books” is checked. If “Selected Books” is checked then make sure to check the PDF file that you wanted to get into your iPhone. Once done, hit the Sync button.

Your new PDF should show up on your iPhone. You might be surprised to see that it’s not showing up by default. Once in iBooks you need to tap on the “PDFs” tab to see your PDFs.

Now that you know how to load all you favorite PDFs in to your iTunes you might need to make sure couple of things,

• Do not load PDFs that are huge in size.
• Do not load PDFs that are in violation to any copyrights.
• Do not load PDFs that would be hard to read on the tiny screen of your iPhone.

I hope this helps you make use of all the valuable PDF files that you have in your computer. I certainly started reading a bunch of my favorite PDFs otherwise would have never bothered to read.

TrashMe helps you do a complete uninstall of applications on your Mac with just a few clicks.

Earlier we have mentioned about a simple uninstall software for your Mac, AppCleaner. Along the same lines of AppCleaner comes another useful little software TrashMe.

With TrashMe you are guaranteed pretty much when you uninstall a software from your Mac you are truly removing the software from your Mac. TrashMe figures out all the related files for the software that you are trying to uninstall and after you acknowledge will trash all those files as part of the uninstallation process.

When you launch TrashMe it shows you the home screen where you can drag an application from the dock or from a folder to uninstall the application.

If you are not sure about the application and wanted to find the application you can use the “Applications” link on the sidebar.

Apart from completely uninstalling applications (softwares) TrashMe can also uninstall or remove widgets without any traces. Along the same lines you can use the “Plugins” link to uninstall or remove any installed browser plugins.

If you’ve uninstalled applications before using TrashMe to uninstall applications you can use TrashMe to remove the orphan files that you’ve must have got by uninstalling it manually.

If you ever wanted to see the history of applications that you’ve uninstalled using TrashMe it keeps a nice little history log.

There are 2 advantages that I could see TrashMe has over AppCleaner, the ability to show the complete history of what has been uninstalled through TrashMe. And also the multi-language support. TrashMe currently support English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and more.

Download TrashMe for all your uninstallation needs on your Mac.

Handy Backup is one of the most stable, effective and easy-to-use data backup and disaster recovery software.

Those of you who have gone through it would certainly realize the importance of having a consistent data backup plan in place. For those of you who take it easy on putting a decent backup plan in place it’s just a matter of time when your computer’s hard disk crashes or you accidentally purge important files or your computer gets infected by viruses or for the worst you lose your computer. You would then realize that it is one of the worst procrastinations that you have ever did.

Either if you are already using a backup solution or you are on the look for one Handy Backup from Novosoft could be a fantastic backup solution that you should certainly consider. It’s a really useful data backup and synchronization software for home and small to mid size businesses.

Handy Backup provides ability to perform full, incremental and mirror backup types, in addition it allows you to synchronize data between computers including computers in remote locations.

It has no limitations on quantity of files which you can backup and restore with it in one task. It claims that some developers and users have successfully tested the program to backup more than 1 million files in one task. Again it’s a claim that I couldn’t validate but given the feature-set and the quality of the product I can trust their claim.

Handy Backup also supports such necessary features for up-to-date backup such as backup scheduling, backup data compression and encryption, as well as time stamps, email notifications and much more.

Handy Backup can backup files and folders, Desktop, Windows registry, backup email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express and others, backup program settings and other simple things, which importance couldn’t be overestimated, when it comes to make our everyday life a bit more comfortable.

Advanced users can use a rich set of features including disk image backup and database backup. Database backup is the salt that makes Handy Backup software unique. The program can easily handle advanced database management system backup and restore operations. Graphical user interface is simple even novice PC user can backup and restore MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, or any other ODBC-compatible databases with all tables, indexes, triggers, settings, passwords and other elements.

One of the cool things about Handy Backup is the fact that it not only allows you to backup your hard disk but also helps you backup preferences and settings of a wide variety of applications using plug-ins. Free plug-ins are available to backup Outlook, Photoshop, Winamp, Windows Media Player, Sykpe, Yahoo Messenger and much more. If you are an application provider and you want your users to backup your applications settings and preferences using Handy Backup you can support Handy Backup in your application by writing your own plug-in for your application.

Handy Backup supports virtually every type of storage devices, media and data transferring protocols. It can:

• Copy backup to external drives (including all types of USB backup and FireWire backup)
• Record backup to CD discs with the options of data spanning and backup verification
• Burn backup to DVD, Blu-ray, HD DVD discs (with a separate engine and the same options as CD)
• Transfer backup to FTP, SFTP (in Professional edition), or place backup to network share.
• Use Novosoft Remote Backup Service and store your data to a reliable online backup server located in an underground shelter in the USA.

It works with a variety of Windows platforms including Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000 on the home and personal use side to Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server on the business and server side.

Handy Backup comes in 3 flavors,

• Standard – costs $39 – for home and small office environments
• Professional – costs $99 – for small and medium size businesses
• Server – costs $599 – for network backup including emails and databases

With the latest release of Handy Backup 6.7 version you can create data backup tasks using Windows Explorer’s context menu (the menu that comes up when you right-click on a file or folder). That would surely make it even more easier for you to blend your data backup tasks with your every day Windows use.

If you ever get stuck with a problem in Handy Backup you can get in touch with the support personals as all customers of Handy Backup are entitled to unlimited free support via phone, Skype, email or IM.

Download a free 30-days trial version of Handy Backup and give it a try and I’m sure you’ll realize the importance of having Handy Backup as part of your data backup plan.

iOS4 for iPhone 3GS doesn’t come with the increasingly popular iBooks app. Follow these simple steps to get iBooks on your iPhone 3GS running iOS4.

iOS4 for iPhone has quite a lot of feature enhancements that makes it worth upgrading. Even though the feature set becomes miniscule if you are not using it on iPhone 4 it still is worth upgrading.

Part of iOS4 is a new app for iPhones called iBooks. iBooks is your mobile bookshelf where you can stack all your favorite eBooks from iTunes book store and can read them wherever you are. Certainly a pretty handy app to have on your iPhone.

Even though it’s advertised that iOS4 comes with iBooks, it’s not really unless you have iPhone 4. For iPhone 3GS and 3G users you have to download the app on your own. Getting iBooks manually is not that hard.

All you need to do is search for iBooks on AppStore and install it the regular way (it is a top featured app as of now).

Once installed you can shop for eBooks on iTunes bookstore. Keep in mind that iBooks comes by default with only one sample eBook and so you might want to stack up your iBooks shelf with the books that you like. Just tap on the “Store” button at the top and that will take you to the iTunes bookstore.

Similar to apps, once you pick a book you’ll be presented with the details where you can get the eBook for whatever the price listed.

If you are not sure about the book you can try a sample of the book. Sample books are marked with the word “Sample” in your bookshelf.

The above is a screenshot of a sample book when opened to read. Initial observation is that the font and text and clear and comfortable enough to read on the small device.

If you are ever wondering where iBooks is after you’ve upgraded your iPhone 3GS to iOS4 I hope this guides you in the right direction. Feel free to leave your comments below.

NewsMap makes it a lot more interesting to see what’s breaking the news in the places of your interest.

Traditional news sites serve the purpose but most of the time the news, because of the way they present, become so boring that many times we tend to ignore. It’s the presentation that makes it less attractive to keep a tab on.

NewsMap is an Adobe Flash based website that tries to present the news with a slight twist. It presents the news headlines of your interest with big bold letters so you can visualize what’s happening in the news media.

When you visit NewsMap home page you are presented with a nice layout of top news of the day. The most breaking news are visually enlarged to make it stand out. The news are color coded based on various categories including World, National, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment and Health. Countries are listed along the top of the news page. The cool thing about NewsMap is the fact that most of these are customizable which means you see what you really wanted to see.

If you are just happy with the default settings, by all means, go for it. But if you prefer to preserve the custom settings just register your email and password with one of the simplest of the registration forms out there.

Once registered and signed in you can customize the way news is presented to you in NewsMap. Click on the “Settings” link at the top left side of the page. You can set a home view so when NewsMap starts it uses your home view to present you with the news that matters to you.

You can also customize fonts and colors. You can choose to hide the clicked articles which means more fresh content. You can also choose to preview popups.

You can also customize the sources of news that you want to show on your home view. Choose the countries you want to see the news from.

Once customized the home view news will be tailored to fit your needs. In my testing even though the tailored news approach was not much reliable it was working for the most part.

One of the best uses of NewsMap could be to present news on a big screen TV on a living room or reception or lobby halls. NewsMap can really make viewing the news more interesting.

Give NewsMap a try.

Even though it’s slightly different than other browsers Google Chrome does have a simpler way to handle pop-up windows.

Everyone agrees, pop-up windows are one of the annoyances of the world wide web and that’s the reason all modern day browsers come with the default setting to not allow pop-up windows, which is a good thing. But at times you might visit a site that intentionally wanted to pop-up a legitimate window. For these circumstances you would have to configure your browser to allow pop-up windows.

Handling pop-up windows in Google Chrome is slightly different than other browsers, you would have to look in a different place to set this up.

Go to Chrome “Preferences” (“Options” if you are on Windows).

Click on the “Under the Hood” tab. Under “Privacy” click on the “Content settings…” button.

Then on the Content Settings dialog click on the “Allow all sites to show pop-ups” option. If you leave this option open to all the sites then just be careful to turn it off once you are done.

On the other hand if you wish to allow pop-up windows for just one or few websites then you can use the “Do not allow any site to show pop-ups” option and then click on the “Exceptions…” button to add websites that you wanted to allow pop-up windows.

Even though the settings are slightly different Google Chrome has a simple way to handle pop-up windows. Make use of it.

Learn how to setup your HP Photosmart printer to scan your documents directly to Evernote.

One of the coolest features of Evernote is its ability to recognize the characters on images (using the OCR technology). To put this feature to good use you can scan all your paper documents to Evernote and search for keywords in your documents when you need to find them. If you have one of the HP Photosmart series printers that has the scan capability then you are half way there. All you need to do is to configure your printer’s scan destinations to scan to Evernote directly.

Before setting up your HP printer to scan directly to Evernote make sure you have,

• one of HP’s Photosmart printers with Scan capability
• an Evernote account (premium account is preferred)
• a Mac
• wireless network

Setting up your HP printer to scan directly to your Evernote notebook is easy.

Download and install the software for your printer. You might wanted to be careful to follow the instructions to not connect your printer until prompted, otherwise things might not work the way you expect, I’m a victim of it.

Once installed, launch the “HP Scan Destinations” application.

Click on the “+” button at the bottom of the screen to add a new destination.

When prompted to add a new destination choose the “Picture Editing Application” choice and hit the “Next >>” button.

We wanted to setup our printer to scan single and multiple sheets. Let’s start with single sheets.

Type in a name (for example, Evernote – Single Sheet) and choose the “Evernote” application for “Select Application:” box. Choose “JPEG” for document format and click the “Finish” button.

Next, we’ll setup our printer to scan multiple sheets.

Hit the “+” button again to add a new destination.

Enter a name (for example, Evernote – Multiple Sheets, this time) and choose the “Evernote” application. This time choose “PDF” for document format and click on the “Finish” button.

Once done, move the newly added “Evernote” destinations to the top of the list so you don’t have to scroll down to select it when you scan the document.

Dismiss any open dialogs by saving the changes when prompted. That’s it, you are all set to utilize your printer’s scan capability to scan documents directly to Evernote.

The next time when you use your printer to scan your documents choose to scan to your MacBook (or your Mac computer where you have configured HP Scan Destinations) and then choose “Evernote – Single Sheet” or “Evernote – Multiple Sheets” based on what you are scanning and your document will be scanned directly to your Evernote account.

I hope you find these instructions easy setup your printer to scan your documents directly to Evernote. If you have any questions on this please ask in comments.

Camouflage makes it a lot easier to show or hide the desktop icons on your Mac desktop.

If you have been using your Mac for a while I’m sure your desktop must be as cluttered as mine and many times that’s inevitable. If the clutter is preventing you from enjoying the beautiful wallpaper that you have on your desktop or you wanted to take a screenshot of your desktop without that clutter then you should definitely try Camouflage.

Camouflage is a little Mac menu-bar application that allows you to easily hide your desktop icons.

You can either use Camouflage’s menu to “Hide Icons” or you can use your preferred hotkey to show or hide the desktop icons.

To set the hotkey go into Camouflage preferences and hit the “Change” button to set the hotkey. While there you can also configure to launch Finder with a single-click or double-click on your desktop.

Camouflage takes around 10 MB of memory but given the usefulness of the application it is going to stay on my Mac menu-bar. Would you keep it on yours?

Download Camouflage.

Use this simple trick to restore Visual Voicemail on your iPhone.

If you are using the internet tethering hack on your iPhone or if you have tried to tether your iPhone you must have ended up with a broken Visual Voicemail on your iPhone. Since Visual Voicemail is one of coolest features of your iPhone, many times you don’t want to sacrifice that.

If you are willing to trade-in internet tethering for Visual Voicemail then follow these simple steps to recover Visual Voicemail on your iPhone.

Go into your iPhone Settings. Scroll down to locate the “General” settings item and tap into that.

Once on the General settings page scroll all the way down to locate the “Profiles” item. Tap on that to open up your iPhone network profiles.

If you’ve tried internet tethering or have been using it you should be able to see multiple profiles. The focus here is to remove any profiles other than the carrier profile, in this case “US AT&T“. Go ahead and tap into the “Enable Tethering” profile in this case, if you have the same profile listed.

When you see the detail about the profile you can hit the “Remove” button to remove the profile. You might be prompted to confirm the removal.

Once you remove all the hacked profiles from your iPhone, your Visual Voicemail should start to work again. Leave your iPhone for a couple of minutes for it to restore the Visual Voicemail capability. If it doesn’t restore automatically go ahead and restart your iPhone. Visual Voicemail capability on your iPhone should be working by now.

Windows 7 provides a comprehensive set of tools to restrict and keep an eye on the computer usage of your kids.

Earlier we have mentioned about how to make use of Windows Vista’s Parental Controls and also a little primer on Mac OSX Parental Controls. It’s time to take a look at what Windows 7 has to offer in this regard.

Before you setup parental controls on your Windows 7 machine you need to make sure you create appropriate user accounts for each user of your computer. And also make sure you grant the Administrative access to a trusted account.

Once you have these setup you can then move on with implementing parental control setting for your family computer. With Windows 7’s Parental Control capabilities you can set limits on the hours your children can use the computer, the types of games they can play and also the applications they can run on a computer. Implementing parental controls on Windows 7 is easy and straight-forward.

On the Control Panel click on “Set up parental controls for any user” link under “User Accounts and Family Safety”.

You can also get to Windows 7’s Parental Controls if you go into Internet Explorer Options and then on the “Content” tab you can see “Parental Controls” button.

Once in there, choose the user you want to set parental controls for. The user cannot be an Administrator of the machine, as a kid account is not supposed to have Administrator privileges.

On the User Controls dialog enable Parental Controls by checking the “On, enforce current settings” option under Parental Controls. Once you enable it you should be able to see 3 different settings that you can use to restrict how your kid can use the computer,

• Time limit – this option allows you to set time limits on when your children can use the computer
• Games – this option allows you to set  the type of games your children can play on a computer
• Allow or block specific programs – this option allows you to restrict the programs your kid can use on a computer

Start by trying to set time limits on when your kid can use the computer.

You can “left-click and drag” your mouse over the time columns across the days to block the time when your kid can’t use the computer. The cells would turn blue to indicate that those time are blocked from usage. White cells indicate the time the computer usage is allowed. Make sure to hit the “OK” button.

On the Game Controls section you can indicate whether your kid can play games on this computer or not. If you allow your kid to play games then there are some more restrictions that you can use to block the type of games your kid can play. Either you can restrict the games based on ratings or by specific games.

If you choose to set restrictions based on ratings you can set to allow or block games with no rating. Also you can set a wide variety of ratings to allow or restrict the type of games your kid can play on this computer.

You can also restrict the games by the type of content like animated blood, comic mischief, drug reference etc. There are a whole bunch of options out there for you to consider.

If you want to restrict specific games you can do so by setting the “Always Allow” or “Always Block” options next to the game name. Keep in mind that this might not be a great option if your kid installs new games or when you don’t actively maintain this parental control setting.

Lastly, you can also choose to restrict usage of certain programs/applications. This would be a handy thing to have as in most cases you might have an application that you don’t want your children to get to for various reasons. By allowing your kid to use only certain applications you can keep your computer stable.

Even though parental controls on Windows 7 provides some decent control it is certainly not the most extensive. For most of day to day computer usage of your children this would provide a decent way to keep a tab on them.

Bodega helps you find interesting and useful applications for your Mac OSX.

Ever wonder where to find those gorgeous applications for your Mac? Bodega could be the best answer. It helps you find paid and free applications for your Mac as easy as browsing through a bookshelf of apps.

It categorizes applications into a wide variety of categories, I mean a truly large category of apps so you can drill down easily to the app you were looking for.

If those categories are too much for you, you can use the many filters available to keep up with the flood of apps it lists. You can filter it by “New Releases”, “Shopper’s Picks”, “Top Free Downloads” and “Top Paid Downloads”.

If you browse through the categories the apps are listed alphabetically.

If you choose a free app it allows you to download the app right with Bodega itself. If you choose a paid app it allows you to try the app before buying it or if you are convinced it allows you to buy the app right from Bodega itself.

When you download or buy apps through Bodega it keeps track of the app updates and lists any new available updates for those applications. If you’d like to update an app all you have to do is to hit the “Get” button to get the update. It just makes managing installed apps so much easier.

Hopefully, by now, you would have realized the potential of Bodega and the numerous ways you can find new and interesting Mac apps with minimal effort. Give Bodega a try and I’m sure you’ll love to get back to it once in a while.

Download Bodega.

Learn how easy it is to add multiple custom ringtones to your iPhone.

Earlier we have walked you through how to add custom ringtones to your iPhone. On that post we demonstrated adding just one ringtone to your iPhone. It was not intentional but happened to show only one ringtone as an example. From the many comments on that post it’s clear that many of you have trouble adding multiple ringtones to your iPhone.

In this post I’ll walk you through how to add multiple ringtones to your iPhone. The process is quite simple and is pretty closer to the way you add single ringtone. There are couple of things that you might need to make sure (which I’ll mention later).

First, follow the instructions on the how to add a custom ringtone to your iPhone post to add the second ringtone to your iPhone. Do as many as you want but make sure you can see multiple ringtones on the Ringtones section of your iTunes application. Follow the steps on that post until it asks you to Sync. Before you sync your iPhone you need to make sure couple of things.

Click on the iPhone item on the left side of iTunes and make sure the “Manually mange music and videos” option is unchecked.

Then on the “Ringtones” tab, make sure the “Sync Ringtones” option is checked and then the “Selected ringtones” option is selected. Also, make sure to choose more than one ringtones that you would like to sync.

Also, one another thing to make sure might be to keep your ringtones music length to less than 30 seconds. Apple claims to allow up to 30 seconds but I would try to keep it as small as possible. The sample ringtones used for this demonstration are 9 seconds and 12 seconds.

At this point of time, you are good to sync your iPhone. Once sync completes you should be able to see multiple ringtones on your iPhone if you go into “Settings” > “Sounds” > “Ringtone”.

As you must have realized adding multiple ringtones to your iPhone is not that complicated. There are couple of things that you need to make sure and follow the above instructions. I’m sure some of you might run into issues doing this, if you do please let us know in comments.

Windows can suggest preferred settings based on your physical condition so you see, hear and use your computer with ease.

If you have a physical condition that demands some special needs when using your computer you’ll certainly love to hear that Windows can recommend optimal settings for you so you can see, hear and use your computer better.

Getting Windows recommended settings is a lot easier than you think. Just answer 5 simple questions and follow the recommendations.

To get started, launch Control Panel.

Click on the “Let Windows suggest settings” link under “Ease of Access”.

Windows will start to ask 5 simple questions starting with “Eyesight” related questions. Answer the one that’s most appropriate to you.

In the next screen you’ll be asked about “Dexterity” related questions.

In the following screen you’ll be asked questions related to “Hearing”. Again answer the ones that are most appropriate to your condition.

In the 4th step you’ll be asked about your “Speech” related questions. Answer the ones that apply to you.

In the last and final step you’ll be asked “Reasoning” related questions. Answer the ones that’s appropriate to you and hit the “Next” button.

Windows will then reveal an elaborate report detailing what could be done to improve your computer so you can see, hear and use it in ease. All these recommendations are optional and so if you don’t like to turn on a recommendation you can feel free to do so. But if you have a physical condition that you answered yes to some of the questions it is highly recommended to follow the suggested settings.

Basket Buster can help you find the best price for the product you are shopping for.

Earlier we’ve mentioned about InvisibleHand, a very helpful browser extension that helps you find the best shopping deals without you doing much. Along the same lines but with a slight twist, Basket Buster informs you about better shopping deals available than the one that you are currently looking at. In simple visual indication Basket Buster notifies you of any available better shopping deals.

Basket Buster comes in as an add-on for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you’ll see an icon that turns colors when you visit product sites.

– indicates that the site you are currently viewing has offers available

– indicates that the current site don’t have any offers but similar sites do

– indicates no offer available for the product you are viewing

When the icon changes to Amber color and when you click on it a sidebar opens up to reveal the deals that are available for the product. This way you don’t have to leave the site you are on but still be aware of the better deals available.

If this looks a bit vague to you here is a video that can visualize it better.

Basket Buster is in closed beta testing as of now. You need a password to install the plugin. If you really really want to try Basket Buster send them an email and they will set things up for you.

Note: I apologize for the slow posting schedule for the last week and a half. Still things are quite busy but should get better and so you can expect a better posting schedule. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Special thanks to those who emailed and asked.

Use this simple trick to find out more information about what is occupying your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I’m sure you might be familiar with the above iTunes section. When you use iTunes to sync your iPhone or iPod Touch we all know that iTunes reveals some really useful information about the space your media files are occupying on your iPhone or iPod Touch. By default iTunes displays this information in terms of size (MB/GB).

But if you find it hard to digest these sizes you can use this simple trick to get the same information visualized a bit different. All you have to do is to click anywhere on these blocks. With each click iTunes cycle through 2 other display formats, one revealing audio and video occupancy in terms of days and hours and the other revealing information in terms of the number of items.

This is a simple trick that help you visualize the stuff that occupies your iPhone or iPod Touch a little better.

These 5 useful Safari plugins would certainly enhance your browsing experience using Apple Safari.

Firefox is the king when it comes to browser extensibility, no doubt about that. But the bloated feel of Firefox always make me stay away from it as much as I can. And I’m sure people have preference for other browsers too. My next best browser is Apple Safari. Even though it is not the most extendable browser out there it is certainly slick and quick enough to get me the page.

I was on the lookout to find some plugins that could enhance the browsing experience with Safari. And I did find these 5 plugins really help enhance the experience.

Glims

Glims is a very powerful plugin that does quite a lot of interesting things in one package. Instead of me going over each one here is a list of features that Glims support (from the plugin site),

• Adds thumbnails to Google.com search results
• Adds thumbnails to Yahoo.com search results
• Adds search engines to the default Google search tab
• Adds full-screen browsing capability
• Adds Favicons to tab labels
• Adds keyword search from address bar
• Undo “Close Tab” (cmd-z)
• Re-opens last session when Safari starts
• Auto-Closes download window
• Adds new tab position option (right/left/leftmost/rightmost)
• Adds tab closing using middle mouse button
• Focus last selected tab
• Always open links in a new tab
• Type-ahead support (auto cmd-f)
• Sets the focus on the search field when opening a new window
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Google.com search results
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Yahoo.com search results
• Adds a “Max Window Size” menu item to resize the Safari window
• Forms autocomplete always on
• Autocomplete search phrase
• Adds bookmark separator
• Adds bookmark actions
• Dated download folders
• Localized to Japanese, French, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Korean

Cooliris

Cooliris is a plugin that brings a whole different experience when it comes to browsing photos and videos from the web or your desktop. Instead of navigating photos page by page Cooliris makes it a seamless experience scrolling through the stream of photos from Facebook, Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Kodak Gallery, or any supported site. It’s a gorgeous plugin to slideshow the pictures from your desktop or the web.

Greasekit

One of the beloved Firefox extension was the ability to extend custom page behaviors using custom scripts (mostly from GreaseMonkey). If you dearly miss the capability in Safari Greasekit is for you. It fills the user scripting hole in Safari.

ClickToFlash

We all know by now that iPad was not well received because of its lack of support for Adobe Flash. That’s at least one of the reasons. Even though Flash is useful in many instances it ruins the browsing experience many times and it’s a resource hog. I dread watching YouTube videos these days as I get scared of seeing the CPU usage graph shoot up and my remaining physical memory goes down to the lower 3 digits. Many people agree to the reason given my one of the iPad engineer for not supporting Flash technology in iPad. If you are one of those who would love to have a way Flash can be disabled on Apple Safari ClickToFlash is for you.

TabExposé

Dealing with many tabs on the browser is always a nightmare. Many times we have to take a guess to look around for the correct tab we wanted to navigate to. At the same time we all love the handiness of Mac’s Exposé feature which displays a great thumbnail preview collage of all open windows. TabExposé does the same for all the open tabs in your Safari browser. If you can’t get rid of the habit of keeping at least 20 tabs open then TabExposé is your best rescue.

I hope these 5 plugins help you have a better browsing experience using Apple Safari browser.

Note: I apologize for the slow week last week here at DemoGeek.com. Got caught up with many other things and don’t want to write something just for the sake of writing that may not be useful to you. So until things settle back, DemoGeek.com would go through a slow posting schedule for the next week or two. Thanks for your understanding.

Use this simple trick to reveal hidden files and folders in Windows.

Windows, by default, hides system files and some other important files for security reasons. Which means you won’t be able to see those hidden files using Windows Explorer. That doesn’t mean you cannot see those files forever. All you have to do is to tweak a Folder setting to reveal those hidden files.

Launch Windows Explorer and click on the “Organize” menu. Then click on the “Folder and search options” item. If you are using Windows XP then you might want to use the “Tools”  menu “Folder Options” item.

Navigate to the “View” tab and locate the “Hidden files and folders” item under “Advanced Settings”. Choose the “Show hidden files, folders and drives” option and hit the OK button.

From now on you should be able to see all hidden files and folders using Windows Explorer. If you are looking for a file that you know it exists for sure but couldn’t locate it then you might want to turn this option on and see if you can locate it in your computer. Make sure to turn this off when you are not using it. If you leave this option on forever you might accidentally delete files that are important to your system. So use this option only when needed.

Use these simple tricks to base your search on different countries using Google, Bing and Yahoo.

It is a very simple and straight-forward thing to do search on the country you are in. In other words, by default, all the leading search engines try to present you with search results that are specific to the country you are in. But what if you wanted to search stuffs on different countries? What if you do those searches quite frequently and wanted to keep a shortcut to get to it quickly?

Here are some tricks that you can use on the 3 leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing to base your search on different countries.

Google

There are 2 ways to do country specific search in Google. If you know the 2 letter country code you wanted to base your search on then you can use the URL hack to get to the results quickly.

Search as usual using Google.com. Once you are on the search results page you can append &gl= and the 2 letter country code to the URL to get to the country specific search results. Try to remember the parameter “gl” as “geo-location” and “&” is of course needed to append any parameters to the URL.

If you don’t know the country code you can use Google’s “Language Tools” link on the home page (next to the search box) to choose the country you wanted to base your search on. Here is the URL in case you couldn’t find it, http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en. Scroll down to the “Visit Google’s Site in Your Local Domain” section.

Bing

Again, there are 2 ways to do a country specific search on Bing.com. If you know the 2 letter country code you can append ?cc= to the home page URL to do a country specific search.

Visit Bing.com and append ?cc= to the URL along with the 2 letter country code. Try to remember “cc” as “country code” for example. Once you do the search you can notice a new option next to the search box like “Only from Australia” to include results only from Australia for example.

If you don’t know the country code you can click on the country link at the top of the Bing.com page. You’ll be presented with a list of countries Bing.com supports and you can easily choose from the list.

Yahoo

Yahoo does things slightly different. You have to use their “Advanced Search” options to search on a different country.

Do a Yahoo search as usual. On the search results page click on the “Options” button next to the “Search” button and choose “Advanced Search“.

Scroll down to locate the “Country” section and choose the country you want your search to be based on.

If you ever wonder what those 2 letter country codes that I’ve been talking about, here is a list of country codes http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements.

As I said, these tricks would be really helpful if you do a fair amount search outside your country repeatedly. I hope you find it useful.

AlternativeTo can suggest you applications that you may not know otherwise.

Finding it hard to find some great applications for your Windows, Mac or Linux computers? AlternativeTo could be your answer.

AlternativeTo is a service that lists some of the best and useful softwares for your computer based on popularity. It uses a voting system similar to Digg to find out about the popularity of those applications. You can use AlternativeTo to find applications for all 3 of the major platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux. It also has a “Online” tab where you can find some useful web apps.

On the home page you can sort applications based on most viewed, most liked and recently added applications which gives you enough choices to drill-down the long list of applications.

You can click on the app name to see more details about the app including screenshots if available.

You can use the “Find alternatives to…” link to find applications of similar nature. The details would include a description, screenshots, delicious bookmarks about that app, statistics on how well the main app stack against some of those alternatives etc. These information would certainly give you an idea of whether the app is worth occupying your hard disk real-estate.

If you know an app that’s not listed at AlternativeTo, you can suggest applications to AlternativeTo so others can benefit out of.

I’ve discovered couple of useful applications using AlternativeTo, both for my Mac and Windows computers and thought of sharing it with you. I hope you find it useful as well.

Find new applications with AlternativeTo.

Logitech’s Touch Mouse iPhone app can make your iPhone be utilized as a wireless mouse and keyboard for your computer.

Here is a new way of putting your iPhone to another good use. Given the form factor of iPhone it perfectly fits in as a mouse for your computer. Logitech jumped in to leverage the iPhone form factor so it can be used as a mouse and keyboard. All you have to do is, download the iPhone app to your iPhone and an equivalent server app to your computer. Let them establish a connection over Wi-fi and there you have a wireless mouse and a keyboard.

First, download and install the “Logitech Touch Mouse Server” app from Logitech’s website. It supports the Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OSX platforms. Download and install the appropriate version. Launch the app on your computer and leave it open.

Then, download and install Logitech “Touch Mouse” app on your iPhone (iTunes link).

Launch Touch Mouse and wait for it to identify the devices on the network. If it doesn’t identify your computer (it didn’t identify my Windows laptop!) you can enter your computer’s IP address to let it connect. Tap on the computer name and wait for it to establish the connection. Once done, your iPhone can now be used as a keyboard and mouse.

Even though I like the idea of using iPhone as a mouse it really is a not a great idea to use it as a keyboard. But a common use case is that if you connect your computer to your TV then you don’t have to worry about keeping an external mouse and keyboard. You can just leverage your iPhone as an input device. Good idea!

(some images from Logitech)