I was experimenting with my Windows Vista based Ferrari 5000 laptop when I ran across this site: Windows Marketplace

They have a huge archive of games for download, some paid but lot of them are free! you can sort by price to get the free ones come up on the top.

I downloaded my childhood favorite game: Mario Bros and am enjoying it on my laptop.

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There has been a steady stream of sites coming up with online classes for the public which spread awareness around PC, technology, web, electronics etc.

The ones that I have come across and have found useful are:

• CNET: It provides online courses on topics related to technology and electronics. They have a team of SME (Subject Matter Experts) which answers questions in the online classrooms. The questions are more in the comments format with the comments available publicly to view. You need to create a free account with them to undertake the courses but the login helps you keep track of courses you enrolled in. Some of the categories in which they have courses are:
• At Work
• Digital Camera and Design
• Home Entertainment
• Mobile
• Home PC
• Software
• HP Online Learning Center: This learning center from HP provides free online courses in the following areas:
• Software and technology
• IT Professionals
• In-house marketing
• Business skills

With a free account you can keep track of your courses.

• Microsoft ELearning: 24/7 online courses are available and lot of them are absolutely free. This is obviously dedicated to Microsoft technologies but has some cutting edge stuff.

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Having problems with Windows Vista and/or Windows XP? Do not know what to do? Try Tech Support Guy Forums where you get free help for Windows Vista, XP and much more.

It is a forum where you can register for free and post your troubleshooting or general question(s) and get answers for free. The quality of answers is pretty good.

You can also browse the Microsoft Vista Support Forums for answers to your questions or post your questions. Assisted vista support from Microsoft (email, chat, phone) is also available, some of which might be free depending on your Vista license and when it was purchased. They have a tool which takes the product identification number of your OS and tells you if you qualify for free support.

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I had a huge collection of books (had because I had to sell and donate most of them when I moved from US to India) and I had to sell them off on a very short notice.

I went through the pains to create a an excel sheet with the ISBN numbers of all the books I had. This helped me a lot as most of the used book sites accept a list of ISBN numbers (An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number. Every book sold anywhere in the world should have a unique ISBN, meaning you can find any book in the world simply with that one number. This number can be generally found at the end cover page of any book).

Some of the sites which I decided to use are:

• Barnes and Noble Sell Used Text Books: This is the best site (rate wise) but you have to enter ISBN numbers one by one. Another problem is that they accept very few books. Try this site for your important books. For the ones it does not accept, try other sites. Free shipping by media mail is provided. They send the check in mail on book delivery.
• Cash4Books.net: they gave me a decent rate and free shipping by media mail. They pay you by PayPal or check (I prefer PayPal)
• Some others I looked at: http://www.abebooks.com/, http://www.ecampus.com/buyback.asp (you have to manually enter each isbn and does not accept a list of ISBNs)

You can always sell your books and get best value on amazon and half.com but then you have to wait for someone to come buy from you. The above mentioned sites give you immediate price quote and buy from you (so you don’t have to wait).

Good luck selling your books!

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I am in the process of moving back to India after having studied and worked in US for about 7 years. The blog is not getting updated that frequently but will be as soon as I settle down in Bangalore, India. I will share my moving experiences over here soon.

I was trying to sell my used books and came across this interesting message on campusbooks.com, here check it out:

DID YOU KNOW:

• The year that read the same upside down was 1961. That won’t happen again until 6009.
• A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time. It is 1/100 of a second.
• It has been estimated that at least 33 percent of blondes in the U.S. are not natural.
• The world’s fastest racquet sport is badminton. Shuttlecock speeds approach 200 mph.
• Elephants and short-tailed shrews get by on only two hours of sleep a day.
• Pablo Picasso was born dead. His midwife left him on a table. Picasso’s uncle brought him to life with a lung full of cigar smoke.
• Camel milk is the only milk that doesn’t curdle when boiled.
• A racehorse averages a weight loss of between 15 and 25 pounds during a race.
• The only food that does not spoil is honey
• China only has one time zone.
• A queen bee can lay 800-1500 eggs per day.
• Every day, 8.5 million tons of water evaporates from the Dead Sea, on the border between Israel and Jordan.
• During the Christmas/Hanukkah season, more than 1.76 billion candy canes will be made.
• There are more than 200 different types of Barbie® dolls.
• The legs of bats are too weak to support their weight, so they hang upside down.
• The largest fish is the whale shark- can be over 50 feet long and weigh 2 tons.
• 90% of all garlic consumed in the U.S. comes from Gilroy, CA

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Recently lee in a comment on the article Let The Computer Read PDF Docs For You wondered how nice it would be to have blog postings read out loud (may be mp3 on a CD). I thought may be I should try and work on it. I wrote a rudimentary application to which you can feed any valid RSS feed and it will read the feed to you (yes you will hear sound!)

For this application I used ASP .NET 2.0 along with Microsoft Speech API.

Here is the main snippet of code:

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Wouldn’t it be nice if IE7 provided more control over how you want to use your tabs, had an ad filter like AdBlock Plus for Firefox, allowed crash recovery, move the IE menu bar above the address bar, may be even allow mouse gestures for navigation, and how about “find as you type” (nice to have).

Well, that is not a lot to ask and guess what, you can have all that now and much more (capture a webpage as an image, view page info, save flash/video, custom User Agent, “Open in New Tab” in context menu when Drag & Drop URL; new Tab from search bar etc.) with this free tool called IE7Pro.

IE7pro is an add-on for Internet Explorer 7 which adds lots of features and extras that make your IE easier, more useful, more secure and more customizable.

This tool brings Internet Explorer experience to a much higher level and much closer to Firefox 2.0 but I wish they could integrate few more must have tools - spell checker, session restore, a better RSS reader - in this bundle. You can request features here.

It is a very handy tool to have and I sincerely hope they keep working and providing more features in time. Security in IE is something which Microsoft is really committed to and I think they are on the right path. Read security comparison of IE7 and Firefox here.

Download IE7Pro | Read IE7Pro User Guide | Seven Best IE7 Add-ons

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There are tons of software available for Windows out there but today I came across a site which lists the best free and open-source software for Windows, aptly named Open Source Windows. 

What I also liked was their six point advice on how to increase downloads of your software:

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Popularity: 4% [?]

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