Saikat Basu

It is a sign of our times that we are more known by our digital identities than our real ones these days. Digital identity theft is a clear and present danger.

As the old cliché goes, music is a universal language. And more than any other language, it manages to convey emotions better. Perhaps, that’s what explains the keenness with which we share music on social media sites like Facebook. Come the sp

One look at Facebook and I know photography is very much back in vogue. Or let’s say, photography and sharing . Is it any wonder then that camera majors like Canon, Nikon, and even non-traditional camera companies like Samsung are jumping on the

Here’s a pretty normal scenario – an email client on the desktop, maybe one in the cloud, and a few smartphones on hand. Managing and syncing contacts across all these devices could be a cause for repetitive stress disorder at the worst of times.

We all like to listen to music and we always find ways to do so in unique ways. Creating your own music is a different matter altogether. Sandwiched between the two is your own penchant for identifying good music. So, you have to ask yourself one

Google tracks all those keywords you put into the search field (for instance, across all Google services like YouTube and Maps) and the sites you visit in more than one way. The immediate one is Google’s Web History . Google Web History does not h

You can discover a lot about a person from his handwriting. But handwriting is almost rare with the coming of the digital age and emails.

Google Search has got better and better with some nice algorithm tweaks. But when it comes to real-time search , Google still lags behind in the field where Twitter is the uncrowned king. Google did have a spell with it, but by July 2011 it lapsed

It could be a pen drive with just 2 GB of data, or it could be your iPod with your entire music collection . Heaven forbid, but the error message that flashes – USB Drive not recognized – has all the potential to send you up the wall. You do

As you might have found out by now, Google Maps is not only about directions. Google Maps is composed of different layers, each a composite of rich information. Zoom into a site (i.e. a location point on a map), and you can search for specific marke

Sometimes we focus so much on English that we forget the world speaks other languages too. The desire to learn a new language is almost on everyone’s wishlist . Then what is it that stops us? The daunting learning curve? The lack of resources? O

Facebook has emoticons of its own and so do a number of online web services. But you just might feel that they fall short sometimes, just when you need to express a special emotion to someone across the chat program or email. So, in our hunt for an

Using a landscape or a cute picture of a kitten as desktop wallpaper is so old-fashioned…and you just might also call it boring. Everyone does it. But you don’t need to because a cool new web application allows you to create desktop backgrounds

What’s your preference? Do you like jazzed up, shiny themes to dress up your Firefox browser, or do you like to cut back and go for something that’s more minimal? If you are anything like me, I guess you would go with your moods.

Firefox and its “about:config” feature is well documented. It allows you a peek into the features of the browser and set some for yourself. Chrome has its own version and you can access it by typing – chrome:about in the Omnibox (address bar).

You might not have come across this quite often, but Google has a search operator called AROUND. It is classified as a proximity search operator and it helps us to search with a combination of keywords and get results which demonstrate a certain rel

Thanks to the image editing features in PowerPoint 2010 (and also in 2013 which is due to arrive soon), you really don’t need to look elsewhere to handle graphic jobs.

The Find and Replace feature of Microsoft Word is a huge productivity booster because it allows us to do even massive text replacements with a single click. But what if you don’t want to replace a text string, but add something after it? There ar

When you open a PDF document on a website and load it on Adobe Reader, the Reader usually downloads and displays the document one page at a time. Page download continues in the background even as you start reading from the beginning. You may not kn

Sometimes there are important emails which you need to print out. To properly format it, old habits meant copy-pasting the email content into MS Word and then hitting the Print button. If you are using Gmail, there’s a quicker way. You can enable t