FolderMaker is a simple and useful app for you to quickly change the Windows folder icons to your liking. Features of FolderMaker The FolderMaker app may look simple but comes with quite interesting and useful features: FolderMaker can color-code or image-code your folder icons to keep them organized and also makes it very easy to spot them in a bunch. The Pro version of FolderMaker comes with Work in Distributable mode so that the icon changes stay intact even when you move or copy the folder from one computer to the other or even when you reinstall your entire operating system....

Comix is an open-source and lightweight comic viewer that runs on Linux, BSD and virtually any other UNIX-like OS. At its core, it is basically an image viewer with support for comic library and is able to reads ZIP and tar archives natively. Installation To install Comix in Ubuntu, you can easily install it via the Ubuntu Software Center, Synaptic Package Manager or type the following command in the terminal: For other non Ubuntu-based Linux distro, you can download the source file here, extract it and run the following command in the terminal: Note: Thanks to Johann for pointing it out, Comix has been updated to MComix....

Zoho chat currently supports Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, ICQ and Jabber. Once you sign in to Zoho chat, you can easily add the corresponding IM accounts which you like to use and sign in to the respective IMs. There is also a setting for you to change your background picture according to your mood. Features of Zoho chat Chat with multiple logins of same client Zoho chat allows you to login with two accounts of a same IM client at the same time, i....

Cortina is a simple wallpaper changer for the Gnome desktop. It does not come with any fanciful features that other wallpaper changing app don’t have, except that it is pretty lightweight and perform all its task quickly and swiftly. Installing Cortina In Ubuntu Karmic/Lucid/Maverick, you can install via the PPA: For other distros or other versions of Ubuntu, you can download the deb, or tar file in the download page....

While iTunes might be the most well-known music player available for Windows and Mac, it’s by no means the only one. Given the appeal of customizing iTunes, it should come as no surprise that other players exist and use this type of flexibility as a major selling point. Winyl is one of these players, and the name relates perfectly to the evolution of music’s availability, going right back to the older vinyl records....

Lately companies and websites are working hard to educate users to use a strong password, and they are also using restrictions to force users to make stronger passwords. Thankfully, with so much news about accounts being hacked and an emphasis on using a strong password, almost everyone knows that they should use a strong password. However, the questions still remains, what is a “Strong” password? In this article we’ll tell you what is a strong password and how to create one....

Creating a basic Linux partition layout with CFdisk Here’s how to make a basic Linux partition scheme right from the command line. The first thing to do is open your terminal. Once you’re there, you’ll need to identify what hard drive you’re looking to change. This can easily be figured out with one simple command. Once you’ve run lsblk, you should get a detailed list of each hard drive currently on your system....

If you happen to perform the aforementioned tasks a lot of times and do not want to hear those sounds every time, you can have them disabled on your Mac. That way they will not play and will remain muted no matter what action you are performing. Here’s how you can go about turning off the sound effects on your Mac. Disable Sound Effects on Your Mac There are two ways to do the job....

Many power users who prefer speed over attractive content might want to disable images in their browser. In this post we will show you how to disable images in Chrome, Firefox and Opera. How Disabling Images Speeds Things Up and Why It’s Better In my experience, I have found many advantages and disadvantages to disabling images. Advantages As far as the speed is concerned, images eat up bandwidth, as they are much heavier than plain text....

Super MP3 Download is one great software (for Windows) that allows you to do what you love best: download MP3 for free. And yes, you can find the Top 40 Hits here, and songs from many other genres and categories. In fact, there are more than 100 million songs available for you to search (and download), so there is a very high chance of you finding the songs you want....

The Seesmic desktop app is a free cross platform Adobe Air based application. This very usable Adobe Air based desktop application was designed by the same folks that made Twhirl. If you have used the Twhirl app before, you should definitely give the Seesmic app a try. It is a happy medium between having too many features which can make it hard to use, and too little features which would make it not very helpful....

By default, the Favorites section will be activated in Finder and is filled with a general list of folders on your Mac, such as the Applications folder, Documents folder, the Desktop, etc. If you’re planning on using the list frequently, you’ll want to add/remove some items to your liking to fully customize the list. Adding / Removing Shortcuts from the Sidebar Adding and removing items in the Favorites sidebar, is in fact quite easy....

“Simple, beautiful, and ad-free.” This has been Ello’s punch line. I find the first two adjectives as common and hyped as product descriptions, yet the third one served as the right hook for a budding social network site: ad-free? How can that be? Most websites have been thriving through ads, and of course, a no-brainer is Facebook’s advertising business model where it’s collaborating with third-party data mining companies such as Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon....

Onion routing (through Tor) has been one of the most popular ways of accomplishing this. At the end of October developers released a new service that runs on top of Tor that allows for anonymous chat/messaging. Here’s a condensed run-down on what you should know about this service. How It Works If you’re unsure of how Tor works, I’ve already written a piece here on MTE that explains it. On top of Tor, the messenger system will work by connecting you through the OR protocol first, then adding your chat service of choice’s protocol as another layer on top of it....

A slightly more contentious issue is the information advertisers get from you without your explicit knowledge, especially when they track you across different sites. As far as Facebook goes, though, you do have an option that doesn’t involve deleting your account: Facebook Container, a Firefox add-on that keeps Facebook’s tracking strictly inside its own tab and disables its trackers on external pages. Container Tabs The basic concept for this already exists: container tabs....

I learned long ago that these files aren’t really gone. It was once explained to me that our hard drives are like old record albums. When we save a file it spins around and finds space on the record album. When we delete files, they aren’t really deleted even though they say they are. They’re really still on that record album but are hidden. They stay there until they are overwritten by new files....

There is a third scenario where a truly innovative app comes into the market and makes some breakthrough in the Tech world. This is the case of FireChat, an iOS app that has recently hit Apple’s App Store. Why? Because it is the beginning of a new generation of communicators, promising to provide communications between phones without needing an Internet connection or any other data connection. Let’s take a deeper look at how it works....

A note about terminology – The official Google products for the browser and OS are Chrome and Chrome OS, respectively. The open source versions are Chromium and Chromium OS. As they’re essentially the same thing, this article will use the terms Chrome and Chrome OS. What is it? As mentioned above, Google took the Linux kernel to use as the foundation for their new operating system. This makes perfect design sense, as it gives them a stable, mainstream, open and well-supported foundation on which to build....

1. Search Everything Search Everything is a portable tool that comes with a minimal interface. When you start it for the first time, you will see a bare white window with only a search field. Search Everything will build an index of all the files and folders in your computer but it does this very quickly. I bet you will not even know it when it is building its database. Your first search will be somewhat slower (due to the indexing), but after that, Search Everything will give instant results....

This time I’m sharing a similar tool called AppsBar. It also adds an iOS-type multitasking functionality to the Mac via a launch bar. However, AppsBar displays your recently closed apps at the top of the screen, as opposed to the bottom. It also uses very few resources and does not engage the discrete GPU, so you won’t have to worry about it slowing down your computer. Here’s how to get quick access to your recently closed Mac apps with Appsbar....