Download music legally from Flyte Music(Flipkart) for FREE

Flyte MP3, also called as Flyte Music is Flipkart's digital music store where you can legall buy music  and download it across all your devices - your PC, your android mobile, your iPad and literally any device with an internet access. The main advantage of buying digital music online is that the MP3 will be tagged with proper information unlike the songs downloaded via "not-so-legal" means. You also get the satisfaction that you bought the album legally.

Flyte has a very good collection of songs and it is cheaper too (as low as Rs.6/song). This February 28th, flyte is going to complete 1 year since its launch. As part of the "Birthday celebrations" (as they call it in their facebook page - Flyte Music), they are giving away around 100 albums for FREE everyday. All you need is a Flipkart account. You don't have one, worry not. Your facebook/google account will do. 

Head over to the facebook page of Flyte Music, you will find a link to their promotional offer page. I hope this offer runs till February 28th, which means 100 new albums everyday till 28th. If you want more free regional music, download the Flyte Music App for your device. This will give you access to more free regional music than the ones listed on the website. See the screenshot from my android mobile showing free regional albums for Tamil. 

Flyte Android App - Free Tamil Albums

Now go ahead and grab those all those FREE music. Thanks to Shankar Ganesh (Killer Tech Tips) for providing a heads-up about the offer. 

Enable HDMI audio in Ubuntu 12.10 with open source ATI driver

If you have recently made the switch from the proprietary ATI drivers to the open source ATI drivers, you will notice that the HDMI audio is not working when you connect it to an external HDMI device like TV. In my case, I switched to open source drivers because Ubuntu 12.10 uses xorg 1.13 which is not supported by the latest (and proabably the last) proprietary driver provided by ATI (legacy 12.6).

HDMI audio support is still experimental in open source drivers and is disabled by default. However it can be enabled by adding the parameter "radeon.audio=1" to the kernel command line in your grub list.

Follow the simple steps mentioned below to enable HDMI audio:

• Open the /etc/default/grub in a text editor.

  gksu gedit /etc/default/grub
  
  

• Add the parameter to "radeon.audio=1" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. For example, if the corresponding line is like :

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
  
  

  Then make it as :

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.audio=1"
  
  

• Now close the text editor, go back to command line and update your grub bu issuing the command below

  sudo update-grub
  
  

Restart your computer and check the sound settings. Your HDMI port should now be listed in the Output list. Select that port as output and you are good to go.

Know your battery level better with ChargeBar

Ever felt that the stock battery level indicator on your android phone is too tiny to give you a clear picture of how much charge is left ? Then, you should definitely give ChargeBar a try.

As the name suggests, this little app places a thin bar atop the android notification bar to show your battery charge level. You can also place it on the bottom of the notification bar or even at the bottom of your screen.

Notice the thin blue line on top of the status bar ? That's the ChargeBar. Pretty sleek, isn't it?

Since the bar stretches across the whole width of your mobile screen, you can easily and more accurately estimate the battery charge level . The app also provides options to change the size and colour of the bar. The charge bar can also be set to animate when you charge the battery.

The app works on any mobile that runs android. No matter , whether it is rooted or not. No matter , whether it is the stock android or a custom ROM.

To quote from ChargeBar's Marketplace info,

ChargeBar is a highly-customizable, completely-free MIUI battery bar application for ANY Android device on ANY ROM, with or without root

To put it short, ChargeBar is the perfect choice for those who are looking for a better alternative for the android's default battery bar.

Get it from the Android Marketplace - ChargeBar

Batch convert/resize images in Ubuntu using Imagemagick

Recently , I found myself in a situation where I had hundreds of high resolution photographs hogging up my hard disk space. Most of them were taken with high end cameras and each photo sized around 5 MB each. I didn't want to lose them all and didn't want them waste my hard disk memory either. So, I figured that resizing them would be the best option.

I'm pretty sure that almost everyone of us have had a similar experience. There are plenty of options to do batch resize images. But being a fan of command line, I wanted to get it done in a single line. That's when I came to know about Imagemagick.

Imagemagick lets you convert all your photos with a single line of command. If you haven't installed it already , do install it now by typing the following in your terminal (If you don't know how, take a look at this help page)

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Now , enter into the folder containing all the images using the cd command .

Eg:

cd /home/arun/Pictures/photos/

Then, issue the following the following command

mogrify -resize 50% -path resized/ *.jpg

With the above command, I have resized all .jpg images in the folderto 50% of their original resolution. You can specify a custom resolution for the '-resize' option. Also, you can change your output directory by varying the '-path' option.

Warning : Make sure you specify a '-path' option, otherwise your original images will be replaced. 

Google's Countdown timer to New Year 2010

Google.com features a countdown clock to welcome the coming New Year 2010. The clock counts down in terms of seconds. To see the clock , proceed to google.com (if your are using Google in other domains like co.in, co.uk.. , use the "Go to Google.com" on your Google homepage.)
Now without entering any search query, click the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You will see a countdown timer as shown in the image below.


Thanks @kv for your tweet and @ramanujam for sharing it.

Keep your desktop clean with Fences

Does your desktop always get messy , no matter whatever you do to keep it organized? Worry not , because Fences is here to take care of your desktop.

Fences is yet another powerful tool from Stardock that keeps your desktop icons and files in an organized manner. It creates so called “Fences” which are essentially a icon group. You can use the default groups provided when the initial run or you can create your own Fences.

The layout can be altered as per your need. One of the cool features of Fences is Quick Hide. With this feature, you can make your icons disappear by double-clicking anywhere in the desktop. In the same way. they can restored with a double click. Above all, the software is available for free.

Download Fences