Love it or hate it, Internet Explorer is here to stay and Microsoft is gono keep on pushing it into every possible hardware on earth. Its new incarnation Internet Explorer 8 has been doing beta testing rounds for quite a while, but its officially available as of today.

Microsoft has put some real effort this time, I can easily say its by far the fastest Internet Explorer ever. Besides that lots of security and performance issues have been wiped out.

Features Overview:

• Faster Internet Explorer 8 is more responsive with new pages and tabs, opening up fast and reliably. You can now get to the information you care about most, in fewer steps; one click access to your webmail, favorite news sites or other online services.
• Easier Reduce the steps to accomplish many common tasks, and automate your access to real time information updates. You can keep track of your favorite sports team, news, weather with a single click.
• More Private Helps protect your privacy and confidential information where ever you go on the web.
• More Secure Helps protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC, and makes it easier to detect when a website is an imposter.

IE8 is available for Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003 and 2008. I don’t see any links for Windows 7 but it works on it without any problems.

Download Internet Explorer 8

You can download Internet Explorer from the download page link given below.

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/worldwide-sites.aspx

MergePDF is a quick and hassle-free online tool for combining your documents in case you don’t have Adobe Acrobat or other PDF manipulation tools. Users who are in need of a quick PDF merge this tool is a good option though it has some small limitations. You can only work with ten files that are 5MB or less for each merge you perform. After finishing the merge you download the document, the original files will be deleted. This process isn’t as fast if combined them on a local computer with professional software but fine nothing the less.

If you don’t mind these smalls limitations, its a pretty decent solution for everyday use.

via Lifehacker

Adobe Air applications are one of the most beautiful applications you’ll ever see, mainly because the interfaces look handsomely wicked. This free Adobe Air application Flump lets you download all the photos from a user-specified Flickr account to your hard drive. All you need to do is provide it with the username or the Flickr ID, no passwords of-course and specify it where to save the pictures and after that click Start Flump. It’s quite similar to FlickrDown and Flickr AutoDownloadr. But it beats them down with the simply great interface and the simplicity of get it work, moreover its the only cross-platform app. Flump is free, works wherever Adobe AIR does.

Flump [Google Code via Digital Inspiration]

Ever wonder how to make your iPhone and iPod Touch’s decent storage capacity for something worthwhile. DiskAid enables owners of iPhone and iPod touch to use them as an external hard drive. Just install DiskAid and plug in your iPod touch or iPhone and after detecting your device it lets you copy files. Other cool features include renaming of files and folders, creation of folders. A very handy application as it makes your iPhone and iPod into a very reliable external drive.

DiskAid does not require you to jailbreak your device. DiskAid is a freeware download for Windows and Mac OS X.

DiskAid via Lifehacker

Wondering how to upload all your office documents in your mac to Google Docs at one go! Gdocsuploader is tiny little application that lets you upload your office documents to the cloud in one click. Gdocsuploader is awesome because of the cool drag and drop documents. It snuggly fits into your Dock, Finder sidebar, or desktop. Gdocsuploader is still new and as expected quite buggy. Except some trial and errors before it works properly. Gdocsuploader is a free download for Mac OS X only and its certainly not OS X Tiger friendly.
gdocsuploader [Google Code via VinodLive]

Amic Email Backup is an ease-to-use email backup solution that works with wide variety of email accounts, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, IncrediMail, Opera Mail, and more. Currently it only works with desktop-based mail clients, Amic backups almost all your data from email accounts info, address book, sender lists, stationary, message rules, and more .

Besides being simple to use, it also features to Wizard driven mode and customizer mode for tweakers. The Wizard mode will walk you through creating, restoring, and/or scheduling your backup. While the Standard mode is for the tweakers and the customizers. Also scheduling features are great addiction.

Amic Email Backup is a free download for Windows systems only.

Amic Email Backup [via Shell Extension City]

photo credit: kolix

Nothing’s worse for a photographer then seeing the dreaded “Card Corrupt” or a similar message on your camera’s LCD. A lot of us have gone through that, most of the time you can’t do anything besides crushing the card manufacturer.

Recovering photos from corrupted cards usually impossible. Yet still with some photo recovery programs there’s still a possibility.

Before you use these photo recovery tools I would suggest 3 steps before going through the inevitable.

a. Don’t Panic

Don’t start panicking and start doing things that could further damage the photos. Take a deep breath and slow down. Take the card out of the camera and try it in another camera. Sometimes reinserting the card does the trick in most cases.

b. Don’t format your card

Most of us freak out and hit the format button. Normally corruption occurs because the Table of Contents(TOC) messes up. The error scanning mechanism of windows also known as Scan disk can also be use to fix it, do so.

c. If nothing works, try software recovery

Before using software recovery tools, I would recommend duplicating the corrupt disk. dd is a duplicating program that will copy your disc block by block, making an exact duplicate of your disk so that you could restore to it again if something goes bad with the recovery process. After making a backup we can now proceed using this few tools to recover your data.

Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery recovers files like gif, jpeg, tiff, crw(canon raw data), cr2, orf etc from hosts of media types like CompactFlash, MemoryStick, SmartMedia and so on.

Flash File Recovery can recover any previously deleted image file. Plus, it is capable of salvaging pictures from damaged or corrupted flash drives, which includes camera’s built-in memory.

Flobo Recovery is another cool application for recovering files and images from office, files and other removable.

Restoration is an easy to use and straight forward tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows, and it is also able to recover photos from a Flash card that had been formatted.

PhotoRec is free; this open source multi-platform application that lets you lost files including video, documents and archives.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery lets you recover files from Flash Card, Smart Media, Memory Stick, Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card or any other data carrier for digital cameras. It supports almost all file types ranging from jpeg, to raw files of different camera manufacturer.

RescuePro is a java based recovery solution for digital media from, guess what SanDisk themselves.

PhotoOne Recovery is easy-to-use and powerful image recovery software designed exclusively for digital camera users. PhotoOne Recovery recovers deleted, formatted and lost digital photos, images and pictures from almost any types of media cards used by digital cameras.

MediaRECOVER lets you easily restore deleted photos, files and home movies, there are two versions Pro costs around 49.95 and the standard cost $29.95.

If you do have a favorite photo recovery program, please let others know by posting in the comments section at the bottom of the post, we all benefit from the interaction.

Wanna send SMS’s via Outlook. SMSOfficer lets you send text messages from your Outlook 2007. Only thing you need to do is signup for free and verify at SMSOfficer’s site. After installing the addon you’ll get a new menu item in Outlook. Now select New->Text Message, now type over the phone number you wanna text and hit Send. The lenght of the message is limited to 160 characters if you write more it get’s split into multiple texts.

With the free signup you get 10 SMS credits for free at the time of joining SMS Officer. Once you finished it, you need to buy additional credits in order to send messages, say $20 will get you 250 texts. SMS Officer operates with almost all cellular operators in US and other international countries including India.

SMSOfficer [via Digital Inspiration]