Technolism

3 Great Bluetooth Games on Android for Free

Amelia — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:13:06 +0000

There was a time when Bluetooth was one of the most important and popular services in phones. I remember some 4-5 years ago we used to compare phones on the basis of presence or absence of Bluetooth and bought only those phones that had this “super feature.” Now Bluetooth isn’t that popular any longer, but it still can be very useful if you want to play some multiplayer games on your Android phone.

Here are the Android games I like most of all. They can all be played via Bluetooth, and the best thing is – they’re all free.

1. StrikeFour

I personally love puzzle games a lot, so the first game in my list of best Bluetooth games for Android has to be a puzzle. And no, it’s not Sudoku, though I really love this Japanese game, too. The game I’d like to talk about will probably awaken a feeling of nostalgia in almost any person, since we’ve all played similar games on a piece of paper when we were in school. Yeah, I’m speaking about StrikeFour – a wonderful puzzle game similar to Connect Four and Four in a Line. Just as the name hints, your goal in this game is to be the first to strike four hollow circles in a row or in a column.

You can play this game against the AI or against one of your friends via Bluetooth. You can also find opponents online if there are no friends with Android phones around and you don’t like the AI.

2. Shogun Battleship

The second multiplayer game you can play via Bluetooth is Shogun Battleship – a really nice game where you have to find and sink the 4 ships of your opponent on a 10×10 grid and not let him get rid of your ships first (I used to play this game, too, on a piece of paper when I was a child! It was really nostalgic to find its Android version). There are many battleship games on Android Market similar to this one, but I think Shogun Battleship looks very good and has the best graphics among them. Just like the first game, this one can also be played via Bluetooth or against the AI.

3. RPS Lizard Spock

Just like strike four and battleship games, I guess we’ve all played Rock Paper Lizard – the offline version of Lizard Spock – in the past. Now this funny game has come to Android, and you can play it against one of your friends via Bluetooth or against the AI again.

This famous game on the Android platform allows you to go back to the childhood days and play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock with multiplayers.

I hope you like this list of free Android Games which can be played in the multiplayer mode over the bluetooth.

This is a guest post by Amelia Hunter.

Getting Started with Facebook Timeline

LauraBackes — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:59:39 +0000

Facebook is constantly changing ever since its initial launch in 2004 and it continues to go through facelifts. The newest update is probably the biggest and it is called Timeline. Your profile page layout completely changes, with one large picture at the top acting as a banner and the rest of your information (posts, pictures and statuses, etc.) reading like a cool website for yourself. You can go as far back as when you first logged on or to when you were born. Timeline acts almost as your life scrap book and is great for those who love to reminisce.

Initially Facebook Timeline was only made available to developers for which we wrote a tutorial in no time for you to get access to the Timelime before everybody else does. But recently, this Facebook feature has been made available to all and you can activate it as described below.

Getting started is really easy: type ‘Timeline’ into the search bar at the top of your home page. Feel free to watch the video to get a better idea what Timeline is all about. Click Get Timeline. Once you are here it’s pretty easy to just follow the flow of the page to set it up how you want it. You will receive a message letting you know that your Timeline profile will not go live for 7 days so that you have time to perfect it.

Lets get started: Add a Cover

First things first add a cover; a cover is a large photo you choose to act as the banner of your profile page: You can choose from your Facebook photo albums any photo or upload a new one. Next step is to add your Life Events; this is what builds your timeline. You can do this by visiting the left side of your page under your banner picture where you can set your status. You are given these Life Event categories and sub categories to edit:

Work & Education

New Job
Retirement
New School
Study Abroad
Volunteer Work
Military Service
Other life event

Family & Relationships

First met
New relationship
Engagement
Marriage
New child
New family member
New pet
End of relationship
Loss of a loved one
Other life event

Home & Living

Moved
Bought a home
Home improvement
New roommate
New vehicle
Other life event

Health & Wellness

New eating habits
Weight loss
Glasses, contacts, other,
Broken bone,
Overcame an illness
Quit a habit
Other life event

Travel & Experiences

New hobby
New instrument
New language
Tattoo or piercing
New license
Travel
Achievement or award
Changed beliefs
First word, kiss, other
New sport
Other life event

Once you edit all of these you slowly start to see your life build before your eyes. You and friends are able to scroll through past years and enjoy memories. Now that you know how to get started, be prepared for your time to be taken up by this virtual scrapbooking. Embrace the new change and have fun with it, Happy Facebooking!

[Facebook Timeline Cover Credit]

Google Releases “Currents” – A Flipboard Like App for iOS and Android

Amandeep Singh — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:52:09 +0000

This is a cross-post from iTechApple, our blog dedicated to Apple related stuff.

Yesterday, Flipboard was released for the iPhone. Flipboard which is a famous iPad social magazine app, comes with some iPhone exclusive features like “Cover Story” and Speed. These features will make their way to the iPad in near future. You can read more about the Flipboard App for the iPhone.

Google released a brand new app called “Currents” in the US App store today. Like Flipboard, Google Currents is also a social app which offers a magazine-like interface for your favourite websites and Google Reader.

Google Currents which has been released for both iOS and Android platforms, is surely an attempt by Google to build up on the success that social apps like Flipboard have achieved. We now have to wait and watch what users prefer – Flipboard or Currents?

Google Currents delivers beautiful magazine-like editions to your tablet and smartphone for high speed offline reading. Editions are all free and include:
* Publisher editions – Publishers such as Forbes, TechCrunch, Saveur, Popular Science, Good, 500px, Fast Company and more have produced hundreds of editions including in-depth articles, videos, fine photography, slideshows, live-maps, and social streams.
* Google trending editions – Google Currents uses Google search technology to hourly build a set of editions tracking the five most recent trending stories in categories such as world, entertainment, sports, science, and more. Each story is presented through a fresh edition of articles, videos, and pictures.
* Your favorite blogs and feeds – Instantly, turn your Google Reader subscriptions, or any of your favorite blogs/feeds into a beautiful edition with a magazine feel.
Each edition is available for high speed offline reading, and provides quick-touch sharing. Google Propeller self-adapts to differently sized phones and tablets, with your subscriptions synchronized across devices. Google Currents – a reading experience not to be missed.

Below is an overview video for Google Currents.

Google Currents is currently available only in the US App store. Well, sorry for that!

We need to wait for this new social app from Google as it is not available for us in the UK store also. Stay tuned and we will update you once it makes to the App stores worldwide.

Have you downloaded this App to your iGadgets? Do share with us your review comments and feedback below.

[Originally posted on iTechApple]

Reasons Behind Facebook Porn Attack Explained

Amal Murali — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:38:36 +0000

You should know about the P0rn attack that spread through your Facebook newsfeed. P0rnographic images and videos were spreading through newsfeed. It appeared as your friend posted it, but the interesting part is that, your friend didn’t even know what happened when you ask him.

There is no details on who was behind this attack. Anyway many people think the hacking activists group Anonymous did it. Now Facebook identifies that this spam attack was the result of a browser vulnerability. It was not done by Anonymous. The people behind this attack worked out a self XSS attack through a browser vulnerability. XSS is otherwise known as Cross Site Scripting. This is a security hazard that enabled hackers and crackers to interfere with browser logic by inserting their own logic and thus creating a vulnerability.

A java script code will be executed in your browser, that is capable of taking full control of the website you’re accessing. In this case, this turned out to be Facebook. The traditional copy-paste-js trick worked here too. When the user pastes the JS code into his browser’s address bar, the java script is injected and this JavaScript will start controlling your Facebook account with all the privileges. And the worst thing is that, people will mistake that it is you who is posting these porn content over their newsfeeds.

Most probably, the scammers hid the “like” button behind an image, such as a YouTube Video Image with a playing button. Users clicked this ‘disguised’ danger to light the fire to a sequence of unhealthy posts over their friend’s walls.

Facebook team is working hard to fix this vulnerability the soonest, and till then Facebook users should take care, not to click any untrusted links, or images, or videos, even if it is posted by your best friend. Because if you do, you are risking your account and moreover social image.

This is a guest post from Amal Murali, who blogs at ActiveNerds.com.

Mark Twain’s 176th Birthday Celebrated with Panoramic ‘Tom Sawyer’ Google Doodle

Amandeep Singh — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:46:24 +0000

Today is Mark Twain’s 176th birthday and Google has given a great tribute in the form of a colourful panoramic Google Doodle. Mark Twain was a famous American author and humorist. Read more about Mark Twain here.

The latest Doodle is a successful attempt at rendering the world of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, who famously cajoled friends to whitewash a fence for him. Today’s version sees the lads painting the wall with the letters G,o,o and l of the Google’s logo, then celebrating having completed the job.

The Doodle is a panoramic logo featuring the boyhood Missouri pals from two of Twain’s best-loved books: 1876′s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and arguably the greatest American novel, 1885′s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

I you haven’t already had a look at the colourful panoramic Doodle, direct your browsers to Google homepage now and do subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated of the latest doodles in future.

How to Add Your Blog to Windows LiveWriter

Amandeep Singh — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:30:20 +0000

If you are a serious blogger, you would already know about this great blog publishing tool called Windows Live Writer. It is a very easy to useful tool which makes your life easy as a blogger. Well, it makes mine at least!

Check out more WLW features at the Windows Live Writer Official page.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to add your existing or a brand new blog to WLW which would ease the publishing process for your. I love wordpress and I use it for all my blogs and in this post as well, I am going to show you the process to configure a wordpress blog. I am using the WLW version 2011 and even if you are using an older version, the process is almost similar to this one.

Step 1 – Options

Click on the Main Menu icon in the top left corner and click on Options.

Step 2 – Add a New Blog Account

Click on Accounts option in the left and then the ‘Add…’ button on the right.

Step 3 – Select Your Blog Service

Make a selection as desired from the below screen. In this example, as I am setting up a wordpress blog, I selected WordPress. Then, click on ‘Next’ button.

Step 4 – Add Your Blog Details

Enter the details of your blog on the next screen and click on ‘Next’ button.

Step 5 – Blog Settings Detection

Clicking on ‘Next’ above will set up your blog account by detecting your blog settings, blog categories and other details into WLW.

Step 6 – Detect Blog Layout

In the next step, WLW would show you a dialog seeking permission to publish a temporary post on your blog and remove it immediately. This is to pull the layout of your blog into WLW which allows you to see how your posts will look like online when you are editing your post in Windows Live Writer.

Note: If yours is an established blog and you do not want to disturb your readers with this temporary post, I suggest you should use Feed Pauser plugin which would stop publishing the temporary post to the feed.

Step 7 – Blog Setup Success

Enter a nickname for your blog and you are done. You may start publishing and editing posts in Windows Live Writer and make your life easy as a blogger.

I hope you like this simple tutorial on Setting up Your WordPress Blog in WLW. If you face any issues while setting up your blog in WLW, feel free to contact us via the comments section below.

Do share with us how shifting to WLW saves your time as a blogger as personally, I find the WordPress dashboard quite uninteresting to post from and use only WLW.

Hostgator Black Friday Sale – Flat 50% Off all Hosting Plans

Amandeep Singh — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:57:52 +0000

After last year’s killer Black Friday offer from Hostgator, this year again Hostgator, a world leader among internet website hosting providers, is back with one of the amazing deals with a flat 50% discount on all its hosting plans.

This year they have kept the things simple with a flat 50% discount on its range of hosting services unlike last year where they had divided the discounts into time slots offering 80% OFF EVERYTHING initially and then dropping to a discount of 50% OFF EVERYTHING. This led to a lot of fuss last year.

This years offer is quite straight forward and simple. This 50% dicount offer applies to ALL Accounts and ALL Term Lengths.

This includes Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting and even Dedicated Servers! But, for VPS and Dedicated servers hosting, the discount applies to only the first month. Hence, as per my advice of you are looking to but a shared hosting, now is the time to do that.

This comes as a real great offer for the bloggers who are planning to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, and also for the ones who are yet to start a new blog and enter the world of blogging or simply want to change your hosting provider.

Below are the effective prices that you will get as a part of this Great Black Friday Sale from Hostgator:

Shared Hosting – $4.95/month AS LOW AS $2.48/month

Reseller Hosting – $24.95/month AS LOW AS $12.48/month

VPS Hosting – $19.95/month AS LOW AS $9.98 First Month

Dedicated Servers – $174/month AS LOW AS $87.98 First Month

As you can see, this is an absolutely CRAZY DEAL and one thing to remember is, this offer is only running for 1 DAY on Black Friday. Don’t miss out on this incredibly LUCRATIVE offer.

So check out the below link this Friday and make huge savings on your Webhosting.

Link to Sign Up for Hostgator

Subscribe to our email newsletter now and we’ll make sure that you do not miss on any such events and promotions coming in the markets!

Top 6 Missing iPhone 4S Features

Tanya83399 — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:20:02 +0000

Apple launched iPhone 4S at the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event held in October this year. The Apple fans were quite disappointed as everyone was expecting the launch of iPhone 5 with loads of new features and a overhauled design. While Apple added a number of new features like SIRI, iMessage and iOS5 in Apple iPhone 4S but it failed to add some features in iPhone 4S. Here, I have listed some missing features in the iPhone4S.

Still the Old 3.5” Display:

Apple didn’t change anything in display. It has got quite a small screen compared with other smart phones. It has same 3.5 inch 960 x 450 Retina display as already available in iPhone 4 which was released in 2010. But LG has announced that their latest Android phone model has 4.5 inch 1280 x 720p HD. So, Apple needs to develop the display from 3.5 inch into 4 inch or more than that.

No 4G compatibility:

The Apple iPhone 4S does not support the 4G. It does not support fastest HSPA+ network. It only supports the HSPA+ network at 14.4 Mbps on the downlink. But there are some Android smart phones which have introduced fastest HSPA+ network or WiMax or LTE. So, Apple needs to concentrate on 4G also.

No Changes to the iPhone 4 Design:

The iPhone 4S comes with the same design as its predecessor, iPhone 4 which had a glass surface. Due to this, there is more chance to break when dropped and lot of chances to crack and shatter the display. To avoid this, metal surface or any other surface which is not easily breakable would be a better choice. But Apple didn’t take any step on this issue.

NFC-integrated technology (NFC):

NFC application is absent in iPhone4S. This technology enables customers to make mobile payments at retail stores. Meanwhile Google, Visa, MasterCard, RIM, Verizon, AT&T are all going to give NFC based mobile payments. We have heard that Apple is working on NFC, but we would have to wait and watch when it is revealed – maybe we get to see it in the next version, iPhone 5.

Standard Based Technologies:

Apple does not follow the Industry Standards. For example, the International telecommunications Union has announced that all Mobile phones use the Micro USB port for charging and data transfer. But Apple iPhone 4S uses a connector which is made by apple. This means the customers need to buy a connector, they are not supposed to use old cable. It also didn’t add HDMI port which is used to share with HDTV. So if you want HDMI, you have to spend extra money on the Apple TV and stream the content wirelessly.

Battery Life:

Apple iPhone 4S has not helped in any way, to improve the battery life. As claimed by Apple at the “Lets Talk iPhone” event, iPhone 4S was expected to have at least the same battery life as the iPhone4. But, to the users’ nightmare, it was further worsened for which Apple found that the issue is with iOS 5 and released iOS 5.0.1 to fix this issue, but did not help many people. We expect iOS 5.0.2 now to be released soon.

Due to these missing features in Apple iPhone 4S, it clearly allows other smart phones to attract the customers but are you going to be influenced by those? Do comment with your choice below.

This is a guest post by Tanya who is a web addict and freelance writer and loves to write about softwares and software programming.

Special Face Detection Features and Bright-ups on Your iPhone

Amandeep Singh — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:14:13 +0000

The new release of the special features for your iPhone now concerns the photography. All of us has at least once dream about a nice picture of the beloved one, and lost a lot of nice pics for the lack of proper focus. Same goes about any accidental shots you might want to get as well. Also the modern society craves for the various photo designs, and that is what manufacturers took care of. The Halftone 1.6.5 offers a lot photo effects, including the popular vintage effects. Still the best feature about it is the brilliant face detecting system. It is also suitable for iOS 5. Here you may resort not only to the standard effects, but also to the bright marks like getting the picture surrounded by balloons or getting the automatic position speech.

The very last updates offer also the brand new iOS 5 built-in Twitter. Its perfect functionality enables you to share you pics really fast with your friends and comrades. Feel free to post photos on Facebook, sent through e-mail or use any suitable printed with the function of an AirPrint.

The mentioned Halftone is able to share pics with various programs like Camera, Instagram, Color Splash, FX Photo Studio and any other link compatible with PhotoAppLink you find suitable. This way you may feel free to use all the variety of tools and effects to get the perfect image as the result.

Apple has considerably selected Halftone as the best application of the week; the results are valid for both Canada and the UK. Over 750 thousands users took part in the choice, offering the 4 ½ rating stars in the official App Store. This got the following application in the TOP100 of the photo-apps in the whole world.

The popular Halftone is much more then just a simple “photo filter’ you might consider it to be. It offers a lot of vintage effects for your picture to get the look of the real old photo. For this over 25 versions of paper will be offered to your choice. The countless layouts, balloons and speech effects are available. Here you will also get at least 25 stamps you can place over the picture. This include also the words of the sound effects and lot of shapes like coffee beans, bar codes, swooshes, explosions etc. The comic effect is within your easy reach now with the special comic fonts.

This is a guest post written by Svetlana T., who is a known person among the leading software programmers. Taking part in the various activities along with the java programmers as well, she is able to present the most popular tendencies of the digital iPhone world, and that’s what she gladly does.

For more iPhone related stuff, head over to iTechApple, our brand new blog focussed on Everything Apple.

Install iOS 5.0.1 Now to Resolve Battery Life Issue on iPhone 4S

Amandeep Singh — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:21:38 +0000

Apple has finally released iOS 5.0.1 which promises to fix a couple of issues on its Mobile OS which caused the battery drain issue reported by a large number of iPhone 4S users. This issue affected not just iPhone 4S users though, but anybody using iOS 5. Apple eventually figured out that there were bugs in iOS 5 that were causing the battery drainage.

iPhone 4S was launched at the Apple Let’s Talk iPhone event held in October this year and became available to the first set of countries on the 14th October, including UK. As I am currently in the UK, I was lucky enough to get my hands on to the latest iPhone 4S. We also covered the unboxing video of iPhone 4S at Technolism.

While using iPhone 4S, we noticed that iPhone 4S’s battery was performing badly as compared to the iPhone 4. Initially, I thought that there might be some issue with the handset that we received, but soon came to know from Apple Forum discussion that there are a majority of users being affected by this issue.

Apple has now reportedly fixed this issue with iOS 5.0.1, the first update to iOS 5, which bought a bundle of new features to Apple’s mobile OS like Notification centre, iMessages, Location based reminders, iCloud, Newsstand, Twitter integration, and is the first version of iOS to introduce Over-the-air software updates.

In addition to the battery drain fix, this update contains improvements and other bug fixes, including:

Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation

Products compatible with this software update are iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad, iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (3rd generation).

So, upgrade your iOS device to the latest version iOS 5.0.1 by connecting to iTunes or directly via over-the-air iOS update feature in iOS5. Do let us know if you notice any improvements in the battery life with this update.