50 Free Apps We're Most Thankful For

http://lifehacker.com/5698593/50-free-apps-were-most-thankful-for

All windows XP commands

All windows XP commands

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts

Yummly - The best site for recipes, recommendations, food and cooking

Yummly - The best site for recipes, recommendations, food and cooking

Free Video Converter | Software to convert video, burn DVD, upload to YouTube

Free Video Converter | Software to convert video, burn DVD, upload to YouTube

20 Ways to Send Free SMS in India and worldwide

Free Individual SMS in India:

Unlike group messaging (covered on the bottom section), using individual SMS services you can send SMS to only one person at a time. But that’s ok when you need to send some messages to a single person, isn’t it? So here we go with the list of free SMS providers in India:

1. FooSMS: No wonder Foosms has topped in the list of about 20 free SMS providers. It is one of the best free SMS provider with quick and assured delivery of text sent to Indian numbers. The best part is, unlike others, you need not sign up with them to send free SMS. Just visit Foosms.com, enter the mobile number and text (within 120 chars.) and hit ‘Send’. Voila, you are done.
2. Way2SMS: Send free SMS in India upto 140 characters
3. 160by2: Supports individual and group SMS in India and few other countries upto 80 characters
4. MySMSIndia
5. SpiceSMS
6. Free SMS8
7. SMS7: Option to schedule SMS, but you are allowed to send a maximum of 50 SMS per account per day.

Sending Free SMS Internationally:

1. SendfreeSMS: Send free SMS to over 50 destinations outside India
2. Free SMSix: Yet another service like foosms, that doesn’t require any registration or login and claims to send free SMS to over 40 countries, though it did not seem to work during our test.
3. Sea SMS: Works for both India and out of India
4. Jungle SMS
5. Free SMS Tous: Ability to send free SMS only to the US
6. SMS Free 4 All: Yet another service for free International SMS
7. Wadja: Send SMS to over 500 networks and 200 countries
8. Send Free SMS: Canada Specific
9. CBF SMS: UK Specific
10. MobiK: Supports many countries including US & India.

Sending Free Group SMS in India:

Group SMS/messaging is a service, using which you can send a common text to a group of people via SMS and such services are proved to be best when you need to communicate with a group of people simultaneously. Here are the best (free) group messaging services available for India:

1. Way2SMS: A simple interface to send group SMS to a specified group. Text limit remains 140 characters though.
2. Google SMS Channels: Helps you to send customized SMS to a group of people. It is one of the most popular and reliable SMS service by Google (India). The basic advantage of using this product is, you can feed your SMS group with an RSS feed as in we used to do it for receiving Orkut scraps as SMS for free. The only downside of this service is, you cannot add anyone to your group (it reduces spamming though), rather the people who wish to join your group will have to join in by sending a specified text.
3. SMS GupShup: Called India’s Twitter on mobile, this service is similar to Google SMS channels
4. MyToday: Among the few first entrants in this field. Though it could not manage to win the hearts of many Indians because of lack of developments and inconsistent service.

Free Group SMS worldwide:

• 160by2: Send individual or group SMS (upto 10 recipients at a time) to India, UAE, Saudi, Kuwait, Singapore, Philippines & Malaysia. The concept behind 160by2 is, the total 160 characters is divided into 2 parts, 1 is used for free SMS text and the other part for advertisement.

Do let us know if you find anything similar to share here (proper credits will be given) or if any of the above service stops working for you, via the comment form below.

TAG Heuer, Swiss Watches and Chronographs - TAG Heuer swiss avant garde since 1860

TAG Heuer, Swiss Watches and Chronographs - TAG Heuer swiss avant garde since 1860

Twelve Awesome Afternoon Projects for the Extra Day of Your Long Weekend

Looking for a cool project you can tackle in an afternoon on your extra day off? Here's a quick roundup of some of our favorite afternoon projects you can squeeze into your long weekend.

For many, a long Memorial Day weekend means mastering your grilling techniques. But if you're not much of a grill-master or you've exhausted your grilling for the weekend, make good use of your day off with one of these awesome afternoon projects.

Photo by meddygarnet.

Looking for a cool project you can tackle in an afternoon on your extra day off? Here's a quick roundup of some of our favorite afternoon projects you can squeeze into your long weekend.

For many, a long Memorial Day weekend means mastering your grilling techniques. But if you're not much of a grill-master or you've exhausted your grilling for the weekend, make good use of your day off with one of these awesome afternoon projects.

Photo by meddygarnet.

• Turn your $60 router into a $600 router
  Assuming you've already got the right router, a quick bit of firmware upgrading will get you some serious upgrades for your router. One of our favorite and most popular how-to guides of all time, and if you don't like the DD-WRT version (linked above), you may want to try installing Tomato on your router instead.
• How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista
  If you've got a trusty XP or Vista installation that you're still using—and you're just not quite ready to jump head first into Windows 7—dust off that as-yet-unused Windows 7 disc and set up a dual-booting PC.
• Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD
  Got some digital video memories or ripped movies sitting around your hard drive that you'd love to put on a disc and send off to a friend or family member? Use this guide to burn that less-than-DVD-friendly video type to a DVD.
• How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password with BackTrack
  Check the security and integrity of your Wi-Fi network's WEP security with this guide. (If you have the option, we'd recommend using WPA encryption to avoid the relatively simple WEP cracking in general.)
• Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks
  What better to do on a day off than play a few harmless practical jokes?
• Hack Your Wii for Homebrew without Twilight Princess
  You haven't begun to enjoy everything your Wii is capable of until your hack it for homebrew. This guide makes it simple, and once completed, you may also want toback up and play your Wii games from an external hard drive.
• Copy Music from Your iPhone or iPod to Your Computer for Free
  If you've had a recent hard drive meltdown and now the only place keeping your carefully cultivated music library alive is your iPod, this guide will get your music safely to your new computer from your device.
• Make a ringtone from any MP3
  You've got plenty of ways to turn an MP3 into a ringtone for your cellphone, but this classic method uses our favorite open source audio editor, Audacity. iPhone users may prefer using one of these iTunes-friendly guides for Windows or Mac.
• Plan Out Your Big Purchases for the Year
  Got a big purchase in your future but have enough flexibility to plan around the best times to buy? Check out our guide to the best times to buy anything all year and plan out your purchases.
• Turn Your Point-and-Shoot into a Super-Camera
  If you've got a supported point-and-shoot and the courage to do a little hacking, you can seriously beef up your camera's capabilities using the CHDK camera firmware.
• Track Down Anyone Online
  Want to catch up with a long lost friend or loved one? Take the afternoon to track down anyone using these free tools.
• Build a Home FTP Server
  We've highlighted countless ways to share files over the years, but running a simple old FTP server on your home computer is a great way to add files to and access any files on your computer from anywhere.

Turn Windows upside down

On many windows computers (I don't say *all*, but It's worked on all the one's I've tried it with) hitting CTRL + ALT + Down Arrow will flip their screen upside down. Causes a great deal of confusion...

To reverse it, just hit CTRL + ALT + Up Arrow.

Hack Attack: Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD

by Adam Pash

Putting any old video file - like the DivX/Xvid-encoded videos you've downloaded with BitTorrent - onto a DVD to play on your TV can be a daunting task. There's plenty of software that tackles this sort of thing for a price, but as a lover of open source software, free's always my first choice.

Luckily for all of us, authoring playable DVDs from just about any video file has gotten a lot easier in the open source community. This week I'm going to show you how to burn thosedownloaded TV shows to a DVD you can play in your living room using the free (as in speech), open source application, DVD Flick.

NOTE: DVD Flick's almost embarrassingly simple to use, but since it's a subject that can be confusing for people who haven't authored many DVD's, and it's a question we've been asked about several times before here at Lifehacker, we thought DVD Flick deserved a quick guide.

In a few simple steps, here's how to burn almost any video file on your computer to a playable DVD.

Step 1: Download and install DVD Flick

DVD Flick is a free, open source DVD authoring tool that will take care of pretty much all of the legwork involved in authoring your DVDs. So thank the gods of open source and go download it here.

In order to make a DVD that you can play on your DVD player, your video files need to be encoded in MPEG-2 format. What makes DVD Flick special (aside from the fact that it's free) is that it handles all of the necessary transcoding of your AVI, MPG, MOV, and WMV files (among others) to MPEG-2, and then authors and burns your DVD all in one fell swoop - meaning it's very simple for anyone to use.

Step 2: Configure your project settings

The DVD Flick interface is very no-nonsense - everything you need to access is available to you through the 7 buttons in the toolbar. Before we add videos to your DVD project, let's take a look at the settings and make sure everything's as you want it.

Click the button labeled Project settings. By default you probably won't have to change anything, but I do want to point out a couple of things.

The General tab lets you set the size of your target media (i.e., the capacity of your DVD). If you're burning to a standard DVD-R, you'll want to keep the default 4.3GB setting. However, you can also set your target size to Dual Layer DVD, Mini-DVD, CD-R, or your own custom target size.

The Video tab lets you set the format of your DVD player - namely whether your DVD should be NTSC or PAL-formatted. If you live in the US, NTSC is your pal. Most of Europe and Asia, on the other hand, use PAL. You can also set the encoding quality in the Encoding profile drop-down. If you feel that the quality of your authored DVDs isn't high enough, you might want to try upping the quality and ensuring the "Second encoding pass" checkbox is ticked. If you're more than happy with quality but you want to speed up the encoding process, you can lower the quality and get rid of the second encoding pass (you probably won't want to do this, but just in case, there it is).

Also of note, the Burning tab lets you set the options for the final product. If you don't have a DVD on-hand for burning, for example, you can tell DVD Flick to create an ISO image that you can easily burn to a DVD later on using a tool like ISO Recorder or ISOBurn.

Step 3: Add titles to your DVD

As I said above, DVD Flick lets you add nearly any type of video file to your DVD project. The easiest way to do this is to open up the folder holding your video files and drag-and-drop the files into DVD Flick. The yellow bar on the left of the app shows you how much space you've used. The amount of video you can fit on one playable DVD will vary by length and quality, so keep an eye on your space.

DVD Flick is pretty no nonsense at this point; you can't build any fancy menu screens. [1] Instead, the DVD you author and burn will simply play each file as a chapter in the order you add them to the project by default. If you want to add chapters to individual video files, select the video/title and click on Edit title... and change the method of chapter creation. You can create chapter points every so many minutes, create a set number of chapters per title, or leave your video chapter-free.

Advanced users can add extra audio tracks (like commentary) and subtitles through the Edit title menus as well.

Step 4: Create your DVD

Before you start, pick the directory that the transcoded files will be saved to while DVD Flick works. You'll need to have a drive with a fair amount of space, so keep that in mind. You'll also want to keep that in mind so you can remove those files after the process is complete so you don't end up with a hard drive full of pre-burned DVDs.

Now that you've got everything set up how you want, click the button labeled Create DVD. DVD Flick will now start transcoding the video files and authoring the DVD while you sit back and browse the internet. If you've never done this before, you'll learn quickly enough that video transcoding takes some time and CPU horsepower.

If you don't want DVD Flick to eat up precious CPU cycles while you're working on your computer, it's sometimes useful to save this sort of operation for when you're away from the computer. Tick the checkbox labeled Shutdown when completed and you can leave DVD Flick to do its business overnight and shutdown your computer when it's finished. When you get up the next morning, you'll be the parent of a newly authored DVD!

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who likes his DVD creation to be dead simple. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Footnotes:

[1] If you're looking for a free solution for authoring DVDs with nice menu screens, check outDVD Styler. The downside to DVD Styler is that it doesn't handle all the transcoding that DVD Flick does, meaning that you'll need to transcode your video files to MPEG yourself.

http://lifehacker.com/232322/hack-attack-burn-almost-any-video-file-to-a-playable-dvd