You must have come across many online avatars that resemble the person, but with a twist — it’s a cartoon and not the original photo of the person. It looks cool and — even more — it lets you stay anonymous while showing the world the same features that you have in reality. Here’s how you can create your own cartoon avatars for free.

Enter FaceYourManga.com. It’s a simple web-application that lets you create your cartoon avatars for free. You can choose from a variety of features — face, nose, mouth, hair, beard, glasses, even tattoos and piercing!

Once you’re done creating the avatar, you have to enter your email in order to get the download link. You can even buy and print the image in high-resolution digital format for €1.50.

Tip: If you don’t want to share your email with web-applications that claims to share download links via email, you can use 10 Minute Mail. Once you enter this site, it gives you a unique email ID valid for only 10 minutes. It is accessible only by you. Mails are automatically loaded. So you don’t need to refresh the page. If you don’t receive the mail within 10 minutes, you can extend the time for another 10 minutes.

Over the last weekend I developed a nifty jQuery form plug-in, which lets you interact with various form elements based on user inputs. The item is up for sale at CodeCanyon for $3. You can check out a demo here.

Consider the following situation. You have a form where user updates his/her profile. If the user has a website, he/she can enter the URL field of the form. But he/she does not have a website (or does not want to share), the URL field is disabled. So, you want to enable that field based on user input.

While you can achieve the same by writing some amount of JavaScript for each such field, this plug-in makes it a breeze. It takes only two parameters and does the same for you in just one line of code. :-)

Demo

On a standard US keyboard layout, Capslock is probably the least used key. Most people use the shift key to type in uppercase letters. Google’s own netbook, the Cr-48 has replaced the capslock key with a dedicated “Search” key, enabling users to search the web just by hitting the button. I made some quick coding on Autohotkey to get the same functionality on Firefox and Google Chrome.

It does three things:

• If no web-browser instance is active, it starts the Windows Explorer search.
• If Google Chrome is active, it opens a new tab and lets you search the web.
• If Firefox is active, it puts the cursor to the search box on top right.

You can use any of the following two methods to use the functionality on your Windows PC
1. Install AutoHotkey and on your favourite text-editor paste the following lines.

; Hit Capslock to search
Capslock::
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Google Chrome or Firefox
Send, {F3}
IfWinActive, Google Chrome
Send, ^t
Send, ^k
IfWinActive, Firefox
Send, ^k
Return

Then, save it with .ahk extension. Just double click the file (after you have installed AutoHotkey) and your capslock is remapped to the new search button.
2. If the lines of code look daunting and you don’t want to install AutoHotkey, at all, I have good news for you. Just download the zip file at the end of this post and fire up the “capslock_as_search.exe” file. And there you go.

Bonus

Although it’s a personal choice, I find it great to have the backspace key around my left hand. “Try it, use it for a week, you'll never turn back” (@hiway) Just in case if anyone finds it useful here is the code:

; Hit Capslock to backspace
Capslock::Backspace

As earlier, if you don’t want to use and install AutoHotkey, you can just download the zip file at the end of the post and fire up “capslock_as_backspace.exe”
If you’re on Linux system, this post may help you.

Download

See also:

• 5 Windows 7 Shortcuts You Can Use in Windows XP
• 5 Portable Applications to Instantly Boost Your Productivity
• 6 Notepad++ Tricks That Just Works

LastFM is the Facebook of music. You can discover and listen to new music, find “real” people who listen to the same kind of music as you do. You can even “scrobble” songs (much like a Tweet, except that you update with the song you’re listening to).

What if you can download the MP3s that you’re playing there? Although, LastFM does offer free songs from time to time, you can’t download songs from radios, play-lists and recommended play-list. Here are three of the best applications that let you download songs right from LastFM’s server.

TheLastRipper

TheLastRipper records songs from LastFM’s radios and brings them to your hard-drive. It also adds tags and downloads album arts for each song. The MP3 files are organised in the following fashion: Artist > Album > “SongNumber - track name” (you can customize this pattern too). This means that songs are organized in a deep folder structure. You can even tune into a LastFM radio simply by entering the URL.

LastFM Downloader

This tiny little application doesn’t need any installation. Just fire it up and start downloading. Last FM Downloader only supports tuning in via URL. You can restrict the number of songs you want to download. Downloaded songs are organised in deep folder structure. Since you can only download after you tune in through URL, you might have to play around with the structure of LastFM URLs. Not recommended for average computer users.

LastSharp

LastSharp is probably the best downloader. It downloads a play-list of 30 tracks. You can select which of these songs you want to download, unlike LastRipper and LFDownloader which continue to download. It lets you choose which of the artists’ songs you want to download, leaving aside the others. The songs are organised in deep folder layout which can be customised. It also includes a built-in audio player to play downloaded songs. One of the interesting features is that it doesn’t download songs that are already downloaded, even if the play-list repeats the songs or a different play-list has the same songs.

Here’s comparison of the features.

Disclaimer: This blog and its author(s) do not condone software piracy. The above post is for information only and should not be taken as a promotion of copyright infringement.

It’s been 5 years since this blog started. First it was by the name “Cyberbuff’s Blog” and later by “AbhiTech”. It was crying for a makeover. So, I thought about buying new domain and giving it a professional “look.” So here we are.


Although the look remains the same, a lot has changed with this update.

• Apart from getting a new web-address, Technabled now has a logo that’s a mash-up of the power button and the Latin T.
• Et Cetera, a Tumblog, is now a part of Technabled. Et Cetera is updated almost everyday with interesting links from around the web. Do subscribe to the feed to keep connected!
• Twitter profile for Technabled offers tips, tricks on daily basis. Do follow!
• Facebook’s fan-page now has a “vanity” url -- http://facebook.com/technabled You can tag our page by adding @technabled in your updates. “Like” our fan-page to get updates on Facebook!
• If you want to contact me, please do so at abhisek@technabled.com I would love to hear from you.

The content remains the same -- technology. Enjoy your stay here! If you any suggestion, criticism (or any other feedback) to share, please do so in the comments section!