The first method, I said above is called Soft Encoding, and the second is called Hard Encoding. It is quite a lengthy job to add subtitles into a video everytime you want to watch a movie. So, it’s always better to have videos with subtitles hard-coded.

AutoGK is a tool that helps you to hard-code subtitles easily. It is a small size freeware, with a simple interface. Apart from hard-coding the subtitles it has many other features, but I will be concentrating only on the subtitles part in this post. Here is the tutorial:

1. Download AutoGK.
2. Install it on your computer. While installing AutoGK, it asks you to install some other tools like VirtualDubMod, Xvid Codec etc. Install all of them.
3. Run AutoGK.
4. Select Input file and Output location.
5. Press Ctrl F8. You will get an option to add external subtitle. Select the external subtitle. It supports most of the formats like .sub, .srt, .ssa etc.
6. If you want to see a preview, click on the “Preview” button. Otherwise, click on “Add Job”.
7. Click “Start” to start the process. Many other tools will run in the background. Do not close them.
8. You can check the status of the process, in the log window.

That’s it! You can now play the video and see that the subtitles are hard-coded and you don’t have to select it manually. Do you know any other tool to hard-code subtitles? Then, please share here in the comments section.

P.S. It takes long time to hard-code subtitles. So, be patient while it is being done.

One good scenario I can think of, right now where this can be of immense help is, while you are editing a document in one window, say Window 1, by comparing it with an other document in Window 2. With this tool, you need not select the Window 2, to scroll everytime. You can keep the Window 1 active while scrolling through the Window 2.

Or another situation is, when you are watching a movie and reading a document. You can scroll through the document, without selecting the document window. That’s useful, right?

Okay, now about this tool, all you need to do is download it from the internet. It downloads a zip file, which contains a .exe file. There is no need of isntallation. It’s a 20KB file that runs directly on your computer without any installation. You can  hide this tool in the tray, so that it will not disturb you while working. You can also disable it when you don’t want by checking the “Disable Always-Wheel” check box.

So, what do you think of this tool? How can this be useful to you? Share with us through comments here!

[Download Link]

There are many reasons for invalid shortcuts:

• Sometimes when you uninstall software on your computer, even though the software is uninstalled successfully, it leaves some shortcuts that were created behind in your computer. These shortcuts do not work as the main software is uninstalled and hence becomes an invalid shortcut. So, it’s better to use tools like Revo Uninstaller while uninstalling software.
• When you abort an installation before it is completed, the shortcuts that were installed become invalid.
• Or, when you move a file or a folder to a different location, the shortcut to that file or folder becomes invalid as it still points to the earlier location.

So, here is the solution. A simple, small, freeware tool called Bad Shortcut Killer.

This tool finds all the invalid shortcuts present in your desktop and start menu and lists them. You can select or deselect the shortcuts by checking or unchecking the checkbox beside each shortcut. After selecting the shortcuts that you want to delete click on the “Delete Selected Shortcuts” to delete them all. Or else, if you want to check what’s wrong with those shortcuts, you can folow the link to each shortcut.

However,  it lacks some important features. First one, it searches only in desktop and start menu. Even though most of the times, you find invalid shortcuts there, it would have been better if  it could search the whole computer.

Secondly, the shortcuts listed have only the location of the shortcut. If it was hyper-linked, so that user could directly click on it to find the shortcut it would be more user-friendly.

Overall, nice tool to keep your desktop clean.

[Download Link]

The idea of the Spriting technique is, when you load multiple small images, every time a image has to be loaded, a HTTP request has to be sent to the server. So, when you have large number of small images, the load on the server increases and in turn the webpage slows down. When you sprite small images into one single image, even though the size of the image increases, the request is sent only once. Hence, the load on the server decreases and the speed increases.

For more information on CSS Spriting, you can visit w3schools.com or css-tricks.com

Generally spriting is done by adding chunks of CSS code into the stylesheet. But, here is a tool that reduces your work while spriting images on your website. Enter SpriteMe.

Features:

• finds background images
• groups images into sprites
• generates the sprite
• recomputes CSS background-positions
• injects the sprite into the current page

Using SpriteMe

SpriteMe is simple to use. First of all, you need to bookmark this link: SpriteMe. (If you are using Internet Explorer, then right-click and add it to “Favorites”. If you are using Firefox or other browsers, then drag and drop the link on the bookmarks toolbar).

Next, go to the website/page of which you want to sprite images. Click on the SpriteMe bookmark. A small window opens up, showing the suggestions for spriting images. As you can see in the pic below, it shows the URLs of the images that can be sprited. Also, hovering on those URLs displays images so that you can easily identify them.

Third step is to make sprites. To make sprites, just click on the button saying “Make Sprite”. It automatically combines combines those images into a single one and temporarily hosts it temporarily.So, first you have to download the images into your local computer and upload it in your own host.

The last step, is to get the code. After spriting all the images that you want, click on the button “Export CSS” button to get the code. A new tab opens in which the URL/s to the sprited images are provided along with the changes that are to be made to the existing CSS code. Change your CSS code according to that and your images are easily sprited without writing even a single line of code.

101 Free Tech Books is a website which, as the name itself suggests gives away free books related to computer and technology every month. It’s a 100% free giveaway as they take care of even the shipping charges. So, you just should have enough luck to win a free tech book, and you will get a book, for free effortlessly. You can increase the odds of you, winning this book by referring the site to your friends through different media (like I am doing right now). Please check out other details about this site here.

Don’t forget to share this with your friends! Go to 101 Free Tech Books

This is what the team says about its project:

Welcome to Giveaway of the day project, the new initiative in the software distribution world! Every day we offer for FREE licensed software you’d have to buy otherwise!

Our new initiative, Giveaway of the day, is finally open to its visitors and ready to present hot software titles and best software authors from all over the world.

The idea is helpful for both the developers and the clients. Clients can try out new licensed, legal products and enjoy full features. On the other hand, the developers get an opportunity to showcase their products and make it popular.

The site reviews a new product and gives the free download link for 24 hours. You can download that product within that time limit. After the time has expired, the download link will be removed, but the review of the article will still be present on the website.

This project, apart from giving licensed software, also gives out games everyday. These games are also licensed and full version ones, which if otherwise you have to pay to get them. Link: Game Giveaway Of The Day.

I just thought of sharing this link as I found it useful and interesting. Do share your comments on what you think about such projects and also about giveaways.

If you remember, we had also listed out a few tools that can help you to send/receive tweets via Gtalk/Gmail Chat. Check that out too, in case you didn’t know!

TweetByMail

This is one of the popular services known for sending and receiving tweets through emails. After the registration of your account- which is done by the usual OAuth process, you will find your “private” tweetbymail email address. I repeat, the address should be kept private as anyone can control your account through that email address.

The frequency of mails you want to receive can be set from the control panel and starting from there, you will start receiving the updates, @replies etc. to your inbox. Next, to send tweets you need to send mail to the “private email address” which you  got earlier, with your tweet in the “Subject” line. That’s it. Your tweets will be posted. You can check out some handy commands here which can help you to do many other things like following, unfollowing etc. through email.

TweetyMail

TweetyMail claims itself as an all-in-one email solution for Twitter and it stands to be one. There are two modes of access- Free Access and Full Access. Free Access mode is one with limited and common features. Full Access has pretty interesting and useful features but you need an invitation code to use them. However, you can get an invitation by clicking on the “Get Full Access Invitation” on the dashboard.  You can check the features on their homepage. (Link above)

Also Read: Post Computer Screenshots To Twitter With DesktopTweet

NutShellMail

This tool sends you notifications about the happenings on Twitter in a predefined interval of time. For example, if you have set the frequency of receiving notifications, one hour, then you will receive a single mail consisting of all the latest updates that have happened in one hour. You can check out a sample of how your email looks here. Check out their video too.

TwitterMail

TwitterMail is a tool from the  TwitterCounter service. To use this tool,  you have to create a seperate TwitterMail account here. While creating you have the privilege to select your own “secret email address” which cannot be guessed by anyone (as I said earlier). You also can select which part of the mail you send should be tweeted. Like, the body part, subject part or both. You can also send pictures through the mail. This needs your Twitter account password to access TwitPic.

That’s it. These were some of the good tools that I could find. Please share any other tool that you know by leaving comments below.

In such cases, there are many tools that can help you to shrink all your URLs into a single, shortened URL, neat and tidy to share. In this post, I am going to list out a few tools that can help you to combine multiple URLs to a single URL.

Link Bunch

A small text box and fewer ads is what that defines LinkBunch. It has a very simple interface. You just need to put all the URLs you want in the box provided and click on the “Bunch” button. It will generate a new URL which leads to the page containing all the URLs you had entered into the text box. Here is an example: http://linkbun.ch/unum . If you feel this URL is longer, you can further shorten it by other shortening services.

Krunchd

Unlike the tool I mentioned above, this tool is a little more advanced. This tool helps you to see the actual pages of the URLs that you had “krunchd” in its own page. With easily navigable “left-right” buttons you can navigate through different URLs. It asks you for your email id, but it is not mandatory. You may skip that step. Check this out!

1Link.in

It has similar features as the above tools but one unique feature in this tool is the password protection to your links. You can set your own password to the URLs. This helps you to share confidential links online with your friend alone.

ShareTabs

ShareTabs is a tool similar to the LinkBunch. This tool copies all the URLs you wants into a page and generates a new short URL. This new short URL redirects you to a page where the links you have given are arranged in “tiles”. Example: http://sharetabs.com/gdv

MultiURL

Apart from the features similar to the above tools, this tool gives us an option to name each link. Also, this tool helps you to name the whole group of links and also set a password for that group. You can track the number of clicks on your URL too.

Also Read: 5 Tools That Help You To Tweet From Gtalk

EasyDeskTicker is a freeware application for Windows that allows users to have a news line at the bottom of their desktop. The news is carried from various websites and blogs on the web through feeds.

How Can This Be Useful To Me?

1. If you are a blogger, like me then you will be having an eye on the trending topics to blog about. This application delivers the trending feeds right onto your desktop.
2. If you’re a business man, you can use this to get information about fluctuations in the market immediately.
3. Well, even if you are a typical computer user it is important to be updated with news around the world. So, this can be useful for everyone.

Features:

This application has plenty of customizable options. You can change the look and size of the ticker/news line that runs at the bottom of the screen. You can customize the feeds you want to view and also add your own feeds. You can also control the speed of the ticker using a slider.

You have two languages to view the feeds, German and English. It has a few presets for the placement and look of ticker. If you didn’t like any of them you can set your even have the privilege width and height

While the ticker is running you can click on it to view the complete news. The link will open in your default web browser. Coming to the size of the application, it is very tiny. It just occupies about 3-4 MB of your hard disk space.

Overall, this is a nice application to use if you want to be updated with the news happening around the world right on your desktop.

Did you like this post? Please leave your comments below and give me your feedback on this post. You can subscribe to my blog here for more such good reviews!

SEO I Did To This Post

SEO Title: Get Live News On Computer | Live Cricket Scores, Stock Market Updates, Hot Trends

I researched on this title. There was not enough search volume for most of the titles I gave. However, I got a little good response for the title above. So added it.

SEO Excerpt: Get live news on computer desktop. Live cricket scores, stock market updates and hot trends right on your desktop with EasyDeskTicker.

I included the keywords like cricket scores, stock market updates and so on. This might get me some traffic. However, I am not sure because there is a tough competition with these keywords.

SEO Tags: get live news on computer, live news feed on desktop, live cricket scores on desktop