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TECH TONIC
WHERE TO GO ONLINE WHEN YOU WANT TO...
watch BoxTV
If you want to watch movies and TV shows, BoxTV has plenty to offer for a monthly subscription of 199. Most of its content is available in HD quality too, and can be streamed as many times as you want. So whether your taste is Scrubs and Community, or Mahabharata and Nukkad, Udaan and Golmaal or Stuart Little and Donnie Brasco – it’s all here.
• www.boxtv.com
Devour
We have been fans of Devour for a long time now. A team of editors sifts through the large amount of YouTube videos to hand-pick content that’s smart, entertaining, funny – or all of the above. Devour is the best place to quickly see that clip everyone’s talking about, or the trailer of the next big blockbuster.
• devour.com
ViralViralVideo
If you’re always the last one to know of videos that are trending, then make haste to Viral Viral Video. This site – categorized by themes such as animals, classics, crazy, funny, music, nerd and spoofs – puts up every conceivable clip that can go viral, or already has. Bookmark right away for the inside dope on what’s going to be hot on the interweb.
• viralviralvideos.com
The Kids Should See This
Rion Nakaya, a mother of two, collects the best kid-safe videos across the web and puts them on this page. “There’s just so much science, nature, music, technology, art, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven’t seen,” she says.
• thekidshouldseethis.com thekidshouldseethis.com
listen Gaana
This free music-streaming site hosts a huge collection of Indian and international tunes, which you can search, or browse through using categories such as New Releases, Most Popular, Playlists, Artists, Genre, etc. All you need is a good internet connection.
• gaana.com
BC Radio
Be the Change Radio is all about showcasing Indian musicians. Choose a ‘radio station’ (Heavy Metal, Rock, Regional, Progressive or Electronica) and the site starts playing an endless stream of songs by local artists and bands such as Junkyard Groove, Parikrama, Agnee, Them Clones, Demonic Resurrection and more.
• bcradio.in
Music Maze
Key in the name of an artist or band you like (anything from Coldplay to Kishore Kumar) and one of their songs will start playing, while also displaying a tree of six similar artists/bands. Click any of the artists to listen to their songs and get a new tree; or let Music Maze automatically choose one and take you on an endless journey of music discovery.
• www.musicmaze.fm
This Is My Jam
This Is My Jam is a musical social network that also lets you connect it to your Twitter and Facebook friends, so you can see what your friends are listening to and show them your favourite tunes. Find others with similar tastes, write what makes a song special to you, and enjoy the great interface.
• www.thisismyjam.com www.thisismyjam.com
read Longform
The internet has seen a resurgence in long form journalism, and here’s an entire website dedicated to aggregating the best of these, typically taking pieces that are over 2,000 words long. The site doesn’t restrict itself to new articles, but digs through the histories of major publications to find great stories. And yes, it’s all free.
• longform.org
The Browser
What are the best articles written in the past few days? Head to The Browser to find out, as its crack team of editors pours through hundreds of stories, from publications around the world, to come up with “must-reads” every day. Each piece includes its word count and a short summary by the editors.
• thebrowser.com
East of The Web
If you are a fan of short stories, there is perhaps no better site on the internet than East Of The Web. The portal has been around for over 10 years – and although it has expanded into interactive stories and games, it remains the best resource for short stories. You can browse through the latest submissions, check out a random story, and go through the most popular ones. And of course, if there’s a writer in you, don’t forget to click that ‘submissions’ button.
• www.eastoftheweb.com
Five Chapters
This is a unique approach to story-telling, but once you get hooked to it, there is nothing like Five Chapters for your daily dose of fiction. Each week, the site publishes a new short story in five parts – one for each weekday. So far, there have been around 400 stories by 340 authors, spanning a wide range of genres. Unfortunately, the resource doesn’t have a way to browse its archives by category. But the joy of finding new reading material in your inbox every day is reward by itself.
• www.fivechapters.com
play Armor Games
Our favourite Flash-based games site, Armor Games is updated daily with new titles, sorted by latest games, the most popular ones, and by category including adventure, action, MMO, shooting, strategy, sports, puzzle and skill. It’s all free, so let the gaming begin!
• armorgames.com
Tiger Woods Golf Online
The online Tiger Woods Golf game has beautiful graphics and smooth gameplay. Check the wind, pick your shot or clubs, zoom-in on the target, see where you’re hitting on a map, and control the power and speed – all in real time. Whether you’re new to golf or not, you’ll love this one.
• tigerwoodsonline.ea.com
Arcademics
You aren’t going to be able to stop your kid from wanting to play video games, so why not introduce them to stuff that’s both fun and educational? Arcademics turns subjects like mathematics into fun pastimes. Take, for example, Penguin Jump, where your kid will be in a race with three others; solving a mathematical equation to jump to the tile that matches the answer. Come to think of it, this isn’t bad for grown-ups either…
• www.arcademics.com
Travian
This is a browser-based, multiplayer, strategy game. You can play either as the Gauls, the Romans, or the Teutons – each with its own strengths and weaknesses – to build a prosperous village and an army that can either defend against attacking hordes or one that can plunder and loot your neighbours. Gameplay is all about striking allegiances, cooperating with teammates, and working towards ultimate domination of everyone else. Travian is addictive and a single game lasts for months.
• www.travian.in Text: Mihir Patkar
SUPERCHARGE YOUR BROWSER
HOW TO USE YOUR BROWSER TO...
WE use the web for everything – from entertainment, in the form of online videos and games, to working with documents and databases in the cloud, and even keeping in touch with friends and family through our social networks. It’s no wonder then that our web browsers are the most important pieces of code on our machines today. But did you know that you can add extra functionality to this software in the form of free plugins and extensions?
1) Download YouTube videos We all love watching online videos. But did you know you can download your favourite videos using browser plugins? People who use Internet Explorer can use IE Download Helper. Get Version 3.3 of the software because the new 3.5 version puts a limit on the size of the video file for free users.
www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Download-Managers/ IE-DownloadHelper.shtml
For Firefox, we suggest Video DownLoadHelper (available on the Firefox extensions page). When you access a web page with embedded videos in it, this extension processes the links from where the video can be downloaded in either FLV, MP4 and 3GP formats in resolutions of up to 1080p.
Chrome users can use YouTube Downloader. This works best as it creates a download button under the video you are watching. And it even works with sites like Vimeo and Dailymotion.
www.chromeextensions.org/utilities/chrome-youtube-downloader
2) Control music playback Do you listen to music while browsing the web? Download FoxyTunes. This plugin allows you to control audio playback from within your browser if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox (version 18 or lower). After you install it, you can change volume settings, skip tracks and pause songs from your browser window, without switching to your media player running in the background. FoxyTunes manages this feat by mirroring your playback software in a toolbar under the browser’s URL bar.
www.foxytunes.com
3) Read lengthy articles and take notes Whenever you read an article on the web, you are often plagued by sponsors who’ve placed advertisements – in the form of links, images and pop-ups – around that piece. Evernote Clearly is an extension that strips a web page of all that distraction and leaves behind just what you want to see. You can select between light and dark themes – and if you have an Evernote account, you can even clip the article or highlight portions of it for future reference.
EC is available to users of Firefox and Chrome from their respective extension pages. Those who use Internet Explorer can use Evernote Web Clipper after installing the Evernote program on their PC.
evernote.com/webclipper/
4) Manage multiple tabs Incredibly powerful and yet easy to use, TabMixPlus (available on the Firefox extensions page) is a tool that helps you manage open tabs within Firefox. Once installed, you can use it to group tabs, view them as thumbnails, lock them in a position and recall pages after closing – and most of these features can be accessed with a right click inside an open web page.
For Chrome users, there’s TooManyTabs (available on the Chrome web store) that comes with similar functionality.
Play Angry Birds Yes, you can play the world’s favourite mobile game in a browser. Chrome users can simply install the game as an extension and play it not only when they are connected to the web, but also when they are offline. Firefox and Internet Explorer users, however, can play the game on www.chrome.angrybirds.com. This will make the office a little less boring. Just keep an eye out for your boss.
CHROME Attachments.Me : This is a nifty tool that allows you to quickly save files from your Gmail account onto online services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box or Skydrive. The extension, which also allows you to attach files from cloud storage, creates several easy-to-use buttons within Gmail’s compose and view windows. And users are also provided with an overview of all their files saved across the services.
HootSuite: This is a full-featured extension of HootSuite, a program that allows you to track your social networks using a single window. Install and connect it to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. After that, you can use it from within the browser to keep an eye on your social media feeds, as well as tweet or post status updates.
SplitScreen: This is a great tool for when you work with two pages simultaneously. After you install this extension, click on its icon to open a single Chrome page with two windows; each with its own URL bar. By default, however, one half serves as a blank notepad, allowing you to take notes. These can be saved as a local file, or cached automatically so that when you open SplitScreen the next time, your data is intact and you can start working from where you left off.
MagicActions for YouTube: A “must-have” for video junkies, this extension adds several features to YouTube – the most important being its cinema mode that puts the clip inside a black box and removes all distractions from the page. And you can also use it to auto repeat your favourite song so that it plays repeatedly in a loop. Other options include sharing videos on Facebook; choice between a light and a dark theme; and volume control through your mouse scroll wheel. All Chrome plug-ins can be found at ‘chrome.google.com/webstore/category/home’ and can be installed directly within the browser.
FIREFOX Thumbnail Zoom: With TZ, you don’t have to click on an image to view it in full size. Simply hover over a thumbnail to see it in a floating window. This not only saves time, but also helps you keep your browsing session neat and tidy. By default, this extension works with over 15websites including Facebook, Twitter and Imgur.
CopyPlainText: If you’ve ever copied text from the internet and pasted it directly into a rich editor like MS Word, you’ll know what a mess its formatting can create. Most users therefore prefer to paste into Notepad before copying and pasting into an email compose window or MS Word. CopyPlainText strips away the troublesome formatting from web text and helps save some time.
FireTube: Install this extension to turn YouTube into your personal radio station. It adds a tiny toolbar –complete with fast forward, rewind, pause, and volume controls buttons – at the bottom of the page from where you can search a song on the video service and stream it as an MP3. But that’s not all. If you want, you can even download the file in MP3 format.
Feedly: Now that Google Reader is dead, you can use Feedly to manage your RSS subscriptions. Or if you are not into RSS feeds, you can use it to just browse fresh daily content from websites like New York Times or CNN. This extension adds a Feedly button near the back and forwards buttons and clicking on it opens a tab with the news of the day. Feedly is also available for Chrome. Firefox extensions can be installed directly from ‘addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions’
INTERNET EXPLORER ieSpell: IE 10 has an inbuilt spell checker, but if you’re running version 8 or 9, you should download ieSpell. This tool is a boon to those who compose emails and blog posts in their browser. Once installed, spell check can be accessed in the contextual menu that pops up after right-clicking. With ieSpell you can also highlight a word and look for its meaning on the Merriam Webster web site.
www.iespell.com/download.php
iMacros: With iMacros you can record the actions that you perform on a web page to complete a task. For example, to access Twitter you first typetwitter.com into the URL bar, hit enter, then login using an id, hit tab, enter in your password and hit enter again. With iMacro, you can record these actions, and subsequently log onto Twitter by simply replaying the macro. You can use this tool to record as many macros as you want.
download.cnet.com/iMacros-for-Internet-Explorer/ 3000-12512_4-10586882.html
ALOT Radio: This toolbar is easily one of the best there is for music lovers because it allows easy access to hundreds of international radio channels. It even has a Facebook tab that allows you to keep an eye on your feeds; an eBay tab tobrowse through products you may want to buy; a YouTube app for video search; and a weather tab for local forecast.
download.cnet.com/ALOT-Radio-App/ 3000-12512_4-75147660.html
Google Toolbar: We don’t usually recommend the use of toolbars, but this one adds several features to IE: It allows you to carry out an internet search without going to www.google.com; automatically translates text whenever you encounter a web page in a foreign language; and if you give it necessary permissions, it also gives you one-click access to your Google services including Google+.
www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html IE plug-ins have to be installed on your PC before they can be used within the browser.
