Top 10 Antivirus - 100% free direct download!

Top 10 Antivirus for your computers
        With rising number of viruses and malicious codes out there that aim to sabotage your computer, steal data, delete your documents or crash your system in a way that it won't start up, you, as a home user must be aware of ways you can defend yourself. Most organizations have high quality bespoke anti virus solutions along with other advanced software to safeguard their data, but a typical home user is often left with over priced antivirus packages or at times, has no clue what he needs and ends up leaving the system vulnerable. A word of caution, please do not download "cracked antivirus" software as they are prone to malicious code themselves and often do not receive virus definition updates from manufacturer server since the keys you used are probably blacklisted. So that said, here is top 10 packages that you can download directly by clicking on them!

Avast! 100% free for Home users
Back in the days as a home user, i had been using Avast for quite a long while and I must say, this package coupled with a good firewall kept my system safe for years! The package is free to download, comes with a great looking User Interface and 100% free updates as well.You might be asked to register with an email ID initially. Premium version available for a 30 day trial.

Avira Free Antivirus
Quite popular among home users worldwide, Avira has an easy installation setup and is light on the system. Premium version available for a 30 day trial.

 AVG antivirus
No antivirus listing goes complete without mentioning AVG antivirus! Tried and tested personally, AVG does a decent job of securing your files from viruses and malware.

ESET NOD32 antivirus
A pretty good antivirus made by the Slovak, allows server deployment and live monitoring of access files. A must try! 100% free with live installer and updates.

Comodo antivirus
A decent antivirus from a popular Firewall manufacturer, comodo is light on system and does the job perfectly. Comodo Antivirus quotes itself as the "Best Antivirus on the Market. Guaranteed." Try it!

Microsoft Security essentials
For the uninitiated, its a myth that microsoft sucks at security. Be proud that inspite of a hundred million viruses trying to break the Microsoft Windows OS, the company still stands firm and will stand as well! So try their security product too to go along with your windows.



Panda Cloud Antivirus
Panda offers its anti virus protection as a service over the cloud. A very minimal installation is required on the client machine. The software is not standalone and requires active internet connection. Not recommended to be used as a standalone but does a great job of complimentary protection. Must try if you have an unlimited internet and talk the cloud language! 

Bitdefender Free Edition
A quite a popular antivirus manufacturer, now offers a free edition for home users. A few manufacturer accompanied advertisements, but that doesn't disturb the job! 


Immunet Antivirus
A less popular antivirus package that is teething and growing. A good enough interface and timely updates. Worth a try.

Digital Defender Antivirus
Another lesser known antivirus package, new to the market. They quote that their product is the future of security! You'll never know unless you try it.

Enjoy 3D movies and Games at no extra cost!!

Of late, there's a lot of mojo going on around '3D' movies and 'in-your-face' gaming experience. Here's how to enjoy all that, at almost no extra expenses on your part!

First issue of community photography magazine is out! Finally!!

Hi all,

Here's what you have been waiting for. A 15 page magazine, showcasing purely your pictures! btw, watch out for the next month magazine, did I tell you we have some special articles coming up? ;)

Open publication - Free publishing - More tips

You can view and download from here

http://issuu.com/llmag/docs/sept2010

Like us at Facebook Fan page here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lights-and-lens/129471330437597

Epic Browser: How epic is it??

Few hours ago, Hidden reflex, a Bangalore [India] based Software firm rolled out its first internet browser titled "Epic" based on Mozilla Open source code.

Browse pictures online in style

This news is a bit old but then again, I thought I should blog about it ;)
I would like to introduce you to a great FREE plugin/addon to your browsers called Cooliris. This application resides within your browser [Internet explorer, mozilla firefox, google chrome] and loads up a neat 3d interface when you are viewing pictures.

try windows mobile 7 on your PC right now

Microsoft sure is busy with its best mobile OS yet - The Windows Mobile 7. Its slated to release sometime late 2010, maybe sooner or maybe a bit later. A few prototypes of the phone were showcased in major international technology conventions and a lucky few got to try it too! But for the rest of us folks who never had an opportunity to be there at the event, here's how you can try windows mobile 7 on your PC right now!!

To get started, you need a few pre-requisites:
1. The Visual studio express edition for Win mob 7 [here]
2. The Windows mobile 7 rom [here]
3. A Windows PC (XP's not supported)

After you have downloaded your developer studio, proceed to install it. It will give you options for XNA or Silverlight based developer environment, leave them at defaults or choose the one that suits you best. A system restart is recommended after the full installation is complete.

Now fire up your Microsoft Visual studio 2010 and you will be shown the workspace.

Choose "New Project" and it doesnt matter if you choose either XNA based or Silverlight based template. Once all your compiler libraries are loaded, hit F5 on your keyboard or the tiny green play button above to enter debug mode. In short, we are executing the ROM in windows phone emulator environment. You should see something similar to this.

This is the Windows Mobile 7 emulator which tries to simulate the look and feel of the actual Windows phone 7. But the catch is, Microsoft has totally ripped off nearly 80% of the applications from this ROM.,but we do have a workaround!

Now that we have confirmed that its loaded and running successfully, close down the emulator. Exit the Visual Studio 2010 and proceed to unzip the windows mobile 7 ROM that you have downloaded earlier. The extract process should give you a *.BIN file. This is our compile phone ROM. We need to replace this with the Visual Studio 2010's inbuilt Windows mobile ROM.

Navigate to the following Location. "Root" is your primary boot hard drive. Its usually C:\

Root:/program Files/Microsoft SDKs/WindowsPhone/v7.0/Emulation/Images

There should be a single BIN file inside, just rename the extension to something like .BAK. Now copy your downloaded custom ROM to this folder, rename it exactly as the old one, it should be WM70C1.bin

Now start Visual Studio 2010 again and start a new project. This time, the IDE should load the New ROM we provided instead of the old one. Hit F5 and enter the emulator mode. Within seconds, you should have the Windows phone 7's UI loaded and ready to play! Hope you had fun with the new windows phone :)

Here's a youtube video that I uploaded of Windows phone 7


Reference source Gizmondo

Round up: 50+ Awesome photoshop plugins for FREE

Adobe Photoshop is a great piece of software but albeit with a linear learning curve. The application comes with huge set of native filters and some thousands more from third party developers. Just install and one click with these filters could take your images to a whole new level and make your image manipulations lot easier!
Here's some of the finest filters for your application. FREE!!

Fotomatic: Traditional photography filters
A collection of 8 plug-in filters, very useful to those beginning photography and are interested to simulate image results of traditional photography techniques.

Download Fotomatic 1.3v







Chromagic: Chroma key software
If you need to extract a single colour from an image background then it doesn't get much easier than this! Just open a photo and click on the colour you want to extract and Chromagic will automatically make that colour transparent.
Download Chromagic 1.0


Image Inc.: Blending photos made easier
The purpose of this utility is to blend existing images in a very fast and easy way, using a layer mask for transparency. The process is simple ... load the base picture followed by a top layer image, then add a mask and the program automatically merges everything together.
Download Image Inc. 1.2


Create realistic water ripples
This plugin can create realistic reflective water puddles in your images with perspective correction. Try it out!
Download here

Photowiz BW styler
Convert your images to black and white with more precise options for contrast points and highlights.
Download here

 OptikVerve Labs: preset collections
A large number of photography image manipulation filters, from lighting to mood, fog effects and more.
Download here

ThePlugin site's image and video manip collection
This site is one huge resource depot for free photoshop plugins! Nearly listing about 100+ photo effects, frames, borders,environmental FX,  this site caters a wide variety of audience.
Download them here

Bleach Bypass effect
BleachBypass is a Photoshop-compatible plugin filter designed by Red Raw Media to digitally simulate the traditional film "bleach bypass" technique. You would have seen such effects in movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Three Kings"
Free and Paid available, the pro version gives tighter and advanced adjustments.
Download here

Hot Pixel: Remove digital noise from your photos
Red Raw Media's come up with an award winning digital noise removing software totally for free! One step process to remove those glowing and unwanted noise pixels from your images.
Download here

Image Beautifier: High key softfocus filter
One more quality filter from Red media, this Create flattering soft-focus, high-key and infra-red simulation effects... and do it all for FREE!
 Download here

Red Media Process FX [worth 30$ - now FREE]
This is a very useful filter if you would like to get the look and feel of a antique Lomo camera.  You can digitally simulate traditional film cross-processing techniques, creating skewed color effects that range from the subtle to the extreme.

Here's what the developers say "The best cross processing filter available anywhere, in use by professional photographers and imagemakers the world over!" 

Download Here




Loads of thanks to the Original Developers!! 

Hope you enjoyed this round ups. Have fun using them! Leave some comments below or maybe a thank you, so that i'll know if these filters helped you :)

An evening with Microsoft Tag reader

Microsoft's officially launched their "TAG" application on May 27th 2010. I had a free evening that day and thought I should try it out, you know, just to see how the stuff works. I kinda liked the appz. So here's how it all began.


7:00pm - in front of my PC
I navigated to Microsoft Tag homepage and I was required to login with my live account before i could play around with the tag creator. Upon logging in, i was taken to a really neat layout that had three simple functions, create, track or edit Tags. Nice!

7:10pm - setting up my windows mobile
You need a reader + internet connection to be able to read the tag informations as all data is relayed from their servers. After going through a few "about tag" pages on their website, i bumped on to the reader...Atlast! I got the *.cab file and proceeded to install it. It was around 300kb, so it was all done in a jiffy.

7:12pm - Creating the tag
Creation of tag was pretty straightforward and simple, so i created this test tag to see if it works the way it claims. I clicked on create, and the wizard asked me a couple of questions like a title to the tag, a link or text, and the type of layout i wanted. After keying out the info, it took a couple of seconds and suggested me to print it out. I opted to save my tag as a Jpeg, as this is a test tag, just for sake of convenience and green environment! ;)

7:15pm - Tag! You are mine!
I fired up Tag reader on my windows mobile 6.1 (yes its kinda outdated) and it asked me approve a set of EULA agreements. The appz initiated my camera mobile along with a onscreen cross mark that said requested me to point at any tag image. I pointed it at the jpeg that i created few minutes earlier. For a few seconds nothing seemed to happened as there was no status indicator. I thought it might have been buggy and as i was about to take away my phone from the tag image, suddenly a msg poped up quoting "Tag scanned successfully" and executed the function i embeded in it. I actually had it say "Success, your appz reads tag" ;)
 I had my pocket pc connected to wifi network at my place so the whole process was lot faster than our Indian GPRS networks ;)

I am starting to like this tag application. I took a print out of couple of tag images and stuck them as notes all over my desk! lol it was fun.
Could have some true potential but I'm not sure how far would this go in terms of productivity. We gotta wait and see!

7:30pm - some wicked ideas creep into my mind 
I googled for some tag images made by others and woah, loads showed up! I am gonna go on tag scanning spree to see what info they hold!!  


Click here to see if you mobile reads microsoft Tag images. As a prerequisite, you should have the tag reader installed in your mobile. You can get it here. All major mobile OSes are supported.

And here's the tag to madzindia blog. If you feel generous, just take a print out of this one and stick it as a note in your desks ;)

Update: Consolidated tutorial on using Microsoft Tag

* Visit http://tag.microsoft.com and login to your live account.
* Click on create a tag on your dashboard
* Key in required details (sample below)

*create and render them in any format you see fit
*You are all set! Have fun and spread the word!

Quick Charge your Apple Iphone Ipod or iAnything!!

Asus has come out with a piece of software called the ASUS AI charger.  They claim that the software can take any average Personal computer [PC] and convert it into an intelligent and a flexible powering station for your iPods, iPhone and such.

Here's a quote from ASUS

Ai Charger turns any PC into a flexible power-up station for popular Apple devices through a simple USB connector, extending their usability and benefit in every lifestyle. Charging goes up to 50% faster* and smoother while you do your work or have fun – whether at home or on the go.

 Sounds interesting. Download here. Cant wait to try it out!

PS: I would love to read your comments on the charger, let me know. And, I kinda like this," iAnything!" term.. Nice! ;)
 Source: Click here

100% free stock photos

If you are looking to work with stock photos in your projects but dont wanna buy them or download them illegally, here's a round up of good stock photography site for you. All of them feature pretty good quality images and are 100% free and legal. The main contents come from amateur,professional and semi professional  photographers who contribute to the site under creative commons. Well, that apart, check out these sites.
 I will add more as i keep digging out good ones...

http://www.stockvault.net/  [my fav] [sample img above]
http://www.free-stockphotos.com/category/free-images/
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ [paid but low res free ones]

free ebooks in all categories

Into reading? Looking forward to fill that shiny new Apple iPad of your's with loads of ebooks in every possible genre you could think of?? How about a library of over 30,000 legally downloadable free ebooks sound? Interesting right??
Head over to Project Gutenburg, who are generously offering over 30k content of pdf, ebooks and html formats of all popular books! No, there's no catch, all are free!
Here's a list of popular authors on Project Gutenburg

1. Twain, Mark (10549)
2. Dickens, Charles (10169)
3. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir (9513)
4. Carroll, Lewis (8760)
5. Austen, Jane (8306)
6. Shakespeare, William (6746)
7. Verne, Jules (5088)
8. Aesop (4874)
9. Baum, L. Frank (Lyman Frank) (4368)
10. Wilde, Oscar (4181)
11. Burroughs, Edgar Rice (3847)
12. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir (3312)
13. Poe, Edgar Allan (3238)
14. Conrad, Joseph (3228)
15. Doré, Gustave (3201)
16. Stevenson, Robert Louis (3166)
17. Wells, H. G. (Herbert George) (3014)
18. Dumas père, Alexandre (2960)
19. Grimm, Wilhelm (2906)
20. Grimm, Jacob (2906)
21. Homer (2803)
22. Tolstoy, Leo, graf (2756)
23. Joyce, James (2686)
24. Jacob, P. L. (2660)
25. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (2496)
26. Dante Alighieri (2491)
27. Balzac, Honoré de (2482)
28. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (2417)
29. Lang, Andrew (2416)
30. Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) (2403)
31. Vatsyayana (2396)
32. Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud) (2351)
33. Indrajit, Bhagavanlal (2282)
34. Bhide, Shivaram Parashuram (2282)
35. Defoe, Daniel (2260)
36. Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville) (2248)
37. Swift, Jonathan (2244)
38. Hugo, Victor (2188)
39. Kipling, Rudyard (2184)
40. Stoker, Bram (2167)
41. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (2139)
42. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (2136)
43. Emshwiller, Ed (2136)
44. Pope, Alexander (2126)
45. Maspero, G. (Gaston) (2092)
46. Potter, Beatrix (1978)
47. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel (1973)
48. London, Jack (1970)
49. Kafka, Franz (1962)
50. Melville, Herman (1914)
51. Sunzi 6th cent. B.C. (1886)
52. Plato (1840)
53. Thomson, J. Arthur (1834)
54. Haggard, Henry Rider (1823)
55. Litchfield, Frederick (1790)
56. James, Henry (1785)
57. Eliot, George (1770)
58. Alcott, Louisa May (1761)
59. Brontë, Charlotte (1724)
60. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1715)
61. Garnett, Constance (1703)
62. Library of Congress. Copyright Office (1664)
63. Davis, Richard Harding (1647)
64. Beard, Charles A. (Charles Austin) (1645)
65. Beard, Mary Ritter (1645)
66. Cary, Henry Francis (1635)
67. Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry) (1618)
68. Widger, David (1615)
69. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1603)
70. Hardy, Thomas (1600)
71. Collins, Wilkie (1599)
72. McClure, M. L. (1591)
73. Berens, E.M. (1587)
74. Jowett, Benjamin (1573)
75. Giles, Lionel (1551)
76. Darwin, Charles (1550)
77. Speed, Harold (1549)
78. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1511)
79. Scott, Walter, Sir (1506)
80. Boccaccio, Giovanni (1497)
81. Hutchinson, Woods (1487)
82. Maupassant, Guy de (1474)
83. Roget, Peter Mark (1471)
84. Andersen, H. C. (Hans Christian) (1432)
85. Buckley, Theodore Alois (1427)
86. Piper, H. Beam (1422)
87. Burnett, Frances Hodgson (1422)
88. Wyllie, David (1418)
89. Thoreau, Henry David (1411)
90. Miles, Alexander (1393)
91. Thomson, Alexis (1393)
92. Payne, John (1390)
93. Ibsen, Henrik (1384)
94. Barrie, J. M. (James Matthew) (1379)
95. Butler, Samuel (1368)
96. Dick, Philip K. (1359)
97. Guizot, M. (François) (1335)
98. Marriott, W. K. (William K.) (1310)
99. Maude, Louise Shanks (1300)
100. Shaw, Bernard (1296)

A safer windows home PC

http://wlplanet.com/mysafepc/

     You had probably heard or read about Microsoft's "My safe Pc" campaign announced in mid april 2010? It aims to provide basic home users a safer and a more stress free enjoyable computing experience.
Just for the records, here's what CERT says:

Facts on Online threats

• In March 2010 alone, 900 Indian portals have been defaced

• 3286 Indian websites hacked in 5 months, Jan – June 2009

• $10mil losses reported through Phishing incidents from Apr- Dec 2008

*Source: CERT–In 

Of course most of us advanced users have enough experience to be aware of all malicious activities going on in the online world and are able to safe guard ourselves optimally. But its often the home users that seem to fall prey to untold number of virus infections, hacked accounts and more. Microsoft has taken one small step to provide a little more safeguard to such users. 


Here's what Microsoft quotes:

. The campaign is focused on providing a suite of free and comprehensive cutting-edge software - Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) + Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) + Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) through channels easily accessible to consumers, and is aimed at ensuring a safe and secure computing experience for PC consumers across India.

You could get my safe PC cds as supplement from leading technology magazines or maybe download your copy here at  http://wlplanet.com/mysafepc/

Free downloads section

Hi,
   This channel will host free downloads from Microsoft and Third party developers as well. Will be updated periodically. Please keep checking once in a while. Thank you.