About Saikat Basu
Saikat Basu is the Deputy Editor for Internet, Windows, Productivity, and Work & Career. After removing the grime of an MBA and a ten year long marketing career, he dabbled in web development, networking, and SAP. After joining MakeUseOf in 2008, he rose from the ranks and now manages four high-growth sections while stealing time to write. You will also find his contributions in web publications like GuidingTech, GoSkills, OnlineTechTips, and Lifewire.
More Free Google Search Tools You Might Not Be Using So Much
Each filter and operator on Google Search is designed to be a crosshair on a scope mounted on that ‘canon’. You need to use them appropriately for the relevant search result. So, I am advancing this article with the assumption that you don’t use most of the search tools as much as you should every day. Let’s explore a few neat search tools which we miss in the flurry of typing in the queries.
The IMDb App For iOS Is A Moviegoer’s Best Friend For The Latest In Movies, TV, & Celebrity Info
Is IMDb our portal into Hollywood? By the seventh month of this year, the IMDb mobile app for iOS and Android had logged 40 million downloads. So, it could very well be. IMDb is the de facto encyclopedia when it comes to movie information. The good thing is IMDb is not just a dull warehouse of entertainment information, but a powerful discovery tool also. There’s a lot to discover when the Amazon owned website keeps all the news on over 2 million movie and television titles.
Go Back To The Blackboard And Play The Bouncing Game All Day With Chalk Ball Lite
I have fallen victim to time and Chalk Ball Lite. You can find it recommended under the Puzzles/Logic category on our Best Android Games page. It was less puzzling and more hair-wrenching, if you ask me. It is a game where you have to keep bouncing a ball around just for your survival. It reminded me of the perennial favorite, Pinball. So is it simple? Not really.
Stick Cricket Brings The World’s Most Popular Cricket Game To Your Pocket [Android]
One of the main reasons this game has stayed on in my Android is for its sheer addictiveness. You may not understand cricket in all its nuances, but if you love hitting a ball out of the park with a bat, you just might love Stick Cricket. Stick Cricket is perhaps the most popular cricket game in the Google Play Store. Again, the reason is simplicity.
Travel With GlobeConvert For Currency & Unit Conversions On The Fly [iOS]
Phileas Fogg would have had a problem as he went traipsing around the world, but not you. Why? Because these days you can easily lay your hands on unit converters and currency converters to carry around on your smartphones. Just such a travel companion is GlobeConvert that goes perfectly with your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. GlobeConvert is a free application that easily converts common units of measurements to the ones you are used to.
Stumble Your Way To New Content & Stretch Your Reading With The StumbleUpon For iOS
StumbleUpon hardly needs an introduction. But if you have just come back from Crusoe’s island, associate it with the term “serendipitous discovery”. What this article aims to do is take aim at StumbleUpon’s iOS app and see if it can be our own wheel of fortune when it comes to discovering cool websites and useful tidbits of information. Let’s stumble.
Take to Social Recommendations and Tagging for Discovering Android Apps With Hubbl
What if a great app is lying undiscovered in the shadowlands of the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store? What if you need just this sort of app? Thanks to app discovery engines, there are now more than a few ways to search for a good app for Android or iOS. Each comes with its own unique ways of rating and ranking apps. Hubbl goes for word of mouth and hashtags.
Secure & Really Simple Note Taking With Simple Notepad [Android 2.2+]
The search for productivity in the easiest (or the laziest) way possible always makes us take a second look at any note taking app in the market. From my own personal experience I can tell you that I have rarely stuck to one. Maybe Evernote and OneNote for the computer; but when it comes to free Android apps, I have always had the Zen to experiment.
How To Check For Service Disruptions Of Your Popular Online Accounts
Service disruptions can be due to various reasons - from local problems in your computer or the national Internet node to some glitch on the servers along the way. There are ways of course to figure out if a website is really down or it is some other error. But apart from these third-party services (I would also add Twitter to the list), there are the official status pages of online services too.
YouTube Options For Chrome Could Be The Best Way To Watch Videos Without Annoyances
If you take a walk through MakeUseOf.com, you will come across many a reader either asking or discussing the best way to watch YouTube and its ocean of videos. Granted that YouTube is the Mecca for video watchers, but it is crowded, chaotic, and cacophonic. More often than not it doesn’t make for the best of viewing. As I like to explain YouTube annoyances – if the clutter of ads doesn’t get you, the cataract of comments will. And these are just two of the irritants on YouTube.
Keep An Eye On The Best Deals With The eBay Extension For Google Chrome
While it is always advocated that you compare prices and discounts across multiple online shops, it is also true that some of the best deals can be had on eBay. After all, (with due apologies to Amazon) it is the great online bazaar of our time. With all the jostling that goes on eBay, you need an extra edge. Don’t miss a deal with the eBay Extension for Chrome.
Hide The Pictures & Videos You Don’t Want Anyone To See With Hide It Pro [Android]
Our cell phones are supposed to be private devices. But in the real world they often change hands. It could be a video of a drunken night or a JPEG of a scanned document. Privacy is sacrosanct. There are security utilities for Android which helps you create your own Fort Knox for hiding pictures, videos, and other sensitive files. Let me introduce you to Hide It Pro.
Get The Image Properties Context Menu To Find Out Everything About An Image [Chrome]
Being a blogger and an editor there was one feature I missed. Firefox has a default image properties feature that gives you the basic dope on any image on a webpage. It is as easy as right-clicking on any image and selecting View Image Info. It is not even an add-on. Strangely, Chrome lacks this feature, or let’s say that Chrome’s Inspect Element isn’t actually user friendly and is lacking when it comes to straight-up information. So, I guess it's time to run to an extension.
Forget Bookmarking! Save Pages to Read Later Offline With Read Later Fast [Chrome]
Read Later Fast has come riding back into the frame and I am happy to say that its second innings is going just as well as its first. Nearly 300,000 satisfied users and not a bad word between them is always a clue that this extension is worth a tryout in your Chrome browser. Read Later Fast has also been recommended by our readers and so is featured on our Best Chrome Extensions page.
A Word A Day In 140 Letters Or Less: Follow These Twitter Dictionaries To Be A Logophile
You might think that 140 characters just doesn’t cut it when you have to pick a word apart, and get to its meaning and usage. But let’s leave some room for surprises because Twitter and the Twitter dictionaries bring real-timeliness into learning new words. Here are a few usual and a few unusual dictionaries on Twitter. Follow them and wax lexical.
Who Needs Photoshop? Amazing Image Editing Feats You Can Do With MS Word
If you don't want to face the steep learning curve of Adobe Photoshop but you still want to conjure up some imaging magic, you need to look elsewhere. Have you considered using Microsoft Word?
Take Back Control Of Your Day & Your Life Projects With Weave [iOS]
We have all been there (and continue to be) – a feeling that the day is out of control, and there’s no direction. Thanks to the richness of productivity apps in the marketplace, we can rein in the monsters that are leading us astray. Weave for iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad pops its head with an elegant interface and price that reads zero. I am always game for the next best productivity app that’s out there, especially if it's free.
10 Internet Fads That Took The World By Storm...Briefly
Poodle skirts could become a fad in the 60’s when there was no Internet. Today, the World Wide Web helps a fad go ballistic within a blink of an eye. We capture it on smartphones and YouTube videos, and wild memes spread the fire. Here’s taking a look at 10 Internet fads that took the world by storm. Some briefly; some for a few years more.
It’s Time To Organize Your Music Collection: Tag & Rename Them With TagScanner
I don’t like to see things out of place. Lately, my music collection has been. Thankfully, there are many music organization tools that can ease the spadework if one is falling behind. MP3Tag was my tool of choice till now. Just to perk up my motivation, I thought I would try out TagScanner and see how friendly it could be with my haphazardly organized MP3s.