Where a few years ago there were just a few services, now there seems to be a new one launching every month. Here’s a look at five of the best, from old standbys to new trailblazers.

Tip : Music Players to Get High Quality Sound in Laptops

Best Free Websites for Listening to Songs Online for Free

1. Grooveshark

Of all the services, Grooveshark is probably the easiest to get started using. No sign up, nothing to download, just search for a song or artist and get started listening. The range of music available through the service is impressive, and it has just signed new licensing deals allowing even more music to be featured. Grooveshark is free, with an optional subscription.

 2. Pandora

One of the older, more established providers, Pandora has been steadily gaining popularity throughout its existence. As one of the first services to use the radio paradigm, Pandora drew in users with its ease of use and kept them with its large variety of music. Pandora is only available in the U.S., offering a free ad supported service or optional ad-free subscription.

3. Spotify

Possibly the fastest growing streaming music service, Spotify is rapidly gaining momentum. Focusing almost entirely on the social aspect of the music industry, Spotify requires a Facebook account to sign up, and shares your music activity on the popular social networking site. Its recently added radio feature now allows Spotify to compete more directly with Pandora. The one caveat is while Spotify’s basic features are available for free, many features are only available with a premium subscription.

4. Last.fm

Along with Pandora, Last.fm has managed to entrench its position as a mainstay of music streaming services. Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler lets other media players to send your listening habits to the service, allowing Last.fm to offer personalized music recommendations based on your preferences. The service is free, with a subscription unlocking various features depending on the user’s home country.

5. We7

One of the newer services available is the UK based We7. It offers 6.8 million tracks in the UK and Ireland, with limited content available outside of those two countries. In June 2011, We7 secured additional funding, hoping to expand its range within Europe. We7 is completely free, but registration is required for many features.

► Being in India, I noticed that Grooveshark, We7 and MusicUO.com are the only among the top sites which stream all types of songs and albums free. Enjoy…

From absolutely free to pay-to-play, these streaming music services offer a wide variety of options for music lovers. Whether you’d prefer to launch a desktop client or simply browse to a website, chances are one of the above services has something to offer you. If you haven’t found exactly what you’re looking for, keep on searching, because these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Also Try :  Stream and Play MP3 Songs in your Dropbox Account

[image : credits]

Design needs to hit people correctly and stick in their heads to be effective; which involves a good understanding of psychology of human behaviour. With most people getting information solely from the web using mobile devices you will need to gain knowledge of web design, CSS, and HTML.

Learning all of this information while creating effective design can seem like a daunting task. Many people struggle to break into the graphic design world because they feel they need to learn absolutely everything. Here is some advice on how to kick start your graphic design career:

Attending an Online College

By conducting research and choosing the best online school that fits the needs of what you want to know, you will develop essential art skills and learn how to apply theory to your work. Attending an online college will not only be a solid foundation for your graphic design career, you will also build a portfolio to showcase to employers and clients. Attending a design college online will allow you to pursue your degree at your own pace and give you time during the day to work.

Finding the Best Tutorials

Most people think their education ends after they complete college. Usually you can find these people stuck in entry level jobs or even not working in their field at all. Doctors, lawyers, psychologists, even salesmen need to keep up-to-date on the latest tactics and technologies.

By visiting sites like DeviantArt and TutsPlus you will have access to the best tutorials to keep your design mind sharp and learn new tricks and tips. Check out our review of site that teach you how to draw cartoons, anime manga or the human body in different poses.

Stick to a Niche

While it is important to be a jack-of-all-trades in order to have the best job opportunities, you should also stick to a specific field in order to master it. There are several subsections of the graphic design community; you could find yourself working on websites in a downtown loft all day, doing page layout for a newspaper, create graffiti designs or even working in a screen printing factory.

Extras

When using advanced graphic design programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, you might find yourself overwhelmed by all of the features available. After getting used to the interfaces and all of the cool stuff offered, you will eventually master their functionality and want more advanced options. There are countless sites on the Internet that offer free photoshop brushes, filters, screens, and textures to give your designs a truly dynamic feel.

Seek Out the Best Images for Manipulation

With the increased need for realism in advertising, a lot of your graphic design work will involve high-quality photography. It is an excellent idea to invest in a good digital camera in order to take your own photos with high pixel counts so they remain sharp when you increase their size. Taking your own photos will allow you edit your photos in any way you want that suits you best.

If you can’t afford a brand new digital camera or just don’t want to purchase one, Stock Exchange and iStockphotos are excellent sources for finding royalty free images for your designs. If you choose to use Google for photo searching be sure to change the settings to filter out images that are smaller than 1024×720 so you can display high quality material in your portfolio.

These are just the basic steps needed to break into a lucrative and rewarding career in the graphic design industry. The most important parts to becoming a good designer are hard work, artistic vision, and determination.

Get Updates, Find and Read Leading Publications on any Topic

Guest Post by Alok.

NewsDrink (www.newsdrink.com) has really opened the floodgates – it’s like iTunes for your news but it’s free. Featuring an impressive pre-aggregated 30,000 sources on over 2000 topics, it is the perfect tonic for all the varied news junkies out there.

What I found really impressive with the site was its friendly and sleek user interface as well as its vast gamut of topics. Whether you’re a knitter or a fan of Arsenal or an automobile junkie, NewsDrink has already aggregated dozens of top blogs & more.

Once you visit the homepage click on the ‘Come On In’ button, to browse the list of categories you can subscribe, read at NewsDrink:

Since I’m a big fan of the recent Anna Hazare ^[+] movement, lets see how I can look at the Indian newspapers to see the latest happenings of the saga.

Click on Newspapers, and you will see that they have publications from 7 different countries. Select India. Then, there’s a wide array of languages, but I’m going to stick to English Newspapers.

There are many selections to choose from in this section. I chose to select Deccan Herald because while I have The Times of India delivered to my house everyday to complement my morning tea, my friends tell me that the Deccan Herald is of high calibre as well.

Once I click Deccan Herald, I can individually select the sections I want. For the moment, I’ll take News, National and Sports. If I want to get news from other Indian newspapers, I can always come back and add sources.

Next click on "Go to Step 2" . I created a free account in less than ten seconds then started reading my news.

Here’s what the homepage looks like after you sign up: As you can see, I now get my fill of the happenings regarding the Lokpal Bill. When I click the read more button, NewsDrink directs me to the official page of Deccan Herald where I read the whole story.

NewsDrink also sends you an email everyday with all the new news from your sources – this all-in-one email sounds like it can cure inbox-overload for a lot of people. Right now, NewsDrink’s website, all-news-in-one-email and Android app are live. Their iPad, iPhone, and Blackberry apps will be launched soon as well as content for more countries.

While at first sight, I thought that it was just a fancy RSS reader, but NewsDrink has some neat variations. There’s a cool feature to see what your friends are reading and share your stories to them. This makes the entire experience more interactive and engrossing.

► Check out NewsDrink : www.newsdrink.com

If you haven’t already collected dozens of newsfeeds for an RSS Reader, don’t bother – NewsDrink will save you a lot of time since they’ve pre-aggregated just about news source you’ll want to read. They also have by far the best-looking UI of any news aggregation service I’ve seen. Reading your news on many devices and via the optional email is also really handy.

I think just about anyone who reads news online is going to find it useful but tell me how you use it and what you think !

Also See : Cool Screensaver that Shows Breaking News All Around the World

Sharing a flat, apartment has its advantages but it comes with a tedious task of tracking expenses and how to split the share of expenses for each person. As the number of bills and list of expenses along with the number of individuals, housemates increase, calculating the share of the expenses per person might be a very difficult and time-consuming task.

Split that Room Rent, Apartment Bills Easily with your Friends

SplitTheRent is a free online app. that helps you keep track of shared expenses of the rented apartment, so that bills (and housemates) get paid on time. With email alerts, forms for single payments and frequency (whether monthly, weekly, yearly, etc..) Reports etc.. everything becomes easy to register every bill paid and track finances easily no matter how many tenants live under one roof.

Each tenant, roommate can make an account and log in to help manage bill-tracking and calculate the fair rent split between other roommates.

One can also organize and track bills shared on food, internet expenses, electricity etc, or even to help put a fair selling price value on an old furniture bought by sharing the money.

► Go to SplitTheRent.com

From the Developers : "We realized that what people wanted was a way to keep track of all kinds of expenses around the house: rent, bills, and other random transactions. Everyone has their own way of tracking debts between housemates, with notes on the refrigerator and complicated Excel spreadsheets". And here’s a better solution from them.

Btw, the site uses $ as the currency (if you use rupees or any other) but it’s the numbers that matters right ? Hope this app. helps.

Also See : Calculate the Cost of Living in any City with Yours

Some unknown designer created this site which creates a dynamic version of TechCrunch into 4 different designs which look like the New York Times (NytCrunch), Google+ (Crunch Plus), Hacker News and the Old TC Design.

► Go to http://tcfast.com/choose

and choose the design that suits you. I found the Google+ theme particularly useful because just like your News stream in Plus, you can filter posts by category, author etc (thanks to WordPress) and the creative coding by whoever created this site.

The older version <link> works flawlessly and the site looks just like the one before redesign. Similarly, NYT and the Hacker News versions have their own perks.

On viewing the source you will see that the site pages have  noindex, nofollow meta tags on every page so they are not stealing content from TechCrunch, so I don’t think TC will have a big problem with this site… though their ads are not visible here.

You can also check out services like Tidyread that serves the minimal version of a website, which loads easily and your bandwidth is not wasted on loading ads, widgets etc.

Tip : 5 Useful Technology Blogs

After Vista, Window 7 comes with inbuilt voice recognition support which you can use to your advantage to enter text via speech input while typing in notepad or word documents etc. But you can also enable speech input in your chrome browser without launching windows speech recognition.

Tip : Listen to Selected Text on WebPages

Use Speech Input in Chrome Browser

Chrome has already enabled HTML5 speech input into chrome from their 11.0 version onwards. But it works only on Google search input box and as a input feature in Google Translate. But you can’t use speech input elsewhere.

Fortunately with the help of chrome extensions you can enable speech in your browser and use voice to type text into input boxes in most webpages easily.

Voice Search extension allows user to search by speaking. Just click on the microphone icon and say "puppies" to search for puppies. If you specifically want pictures of puppies, say "google images puppies". Want to learn more about World War II ? Say "wikipedia world war two".

Watch the video below to get an idea of how it works…

Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the following default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo etc. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates speech input buttons for text fields on all websites.

Speechify is an similar extension, with it, many of the search boxes you encounter while surfing the web will have the little microphone icon. Clicking it allows you to speak and input your search term into the search box. It works on Google, Bing, YouTube, Hulu — a ton of sites and it works well.

Another extension is TalktoType. To type into text box use the mic icon while speaking and it populates the text box automatically. Test all the 3 extensions mention to see which one works best for you.

Also See: Softwares to Write What You Speak : Convert Voice into Text

It’s easy to start: Log in, or register with your Facebook account, and set up a profile by adding your personal information.

Click on the “Broadcast” link to start your show, and think of a snappy title for your show. Then select what category your show falls under.

Click on “Broadcast” and  the DJ console will load. Choose to go live or record a podcast.

Start recording! From here you can start your radio show by clicking on the circular button in the “Broadcast section”. Prepare an intro, or improvise on the spot for a more casual feel. Conduct interviews, respond to callers using Skype, and take in requests from listeners using Spreaker’s instant messenger.

Share your show on Facebook, Twitter, embed on your personal blog, and elsewhere. Get your friends’ attention and gain listeners with every broadcast.

To make your show more enriched and personalized manage media files and commercial breaks:

Populate your tracklist. Click the add button pick out some music tracks from the the Music library, or  you can add your own media by clicking on “upload.” Drag and drop the track over one of the mixing decks.

Add sound effects. Use the effects pad to browse available sound effects or upload your own. Add laughter, applause, and other quirky sounds to give your show some panache.

Take Commercial breaks. The Commercial break countdown tells you how long before the next break starts, or trigger commercial break before the counter reaches zero so you can manage your show more easily.

Spreaker is the perfect platform for casual podcasting. You can add a new episode of your podcast from everywhere and it becomes immediately accessible to your audience (they can listen to you live or play the recording afterwards) as you can also embed your shows in blogs, websites. You can also embed in your facebook fan page.

Easy, fast, and fun. You’re on the air in 3, 2, 1…!!!

Guest Post by Anna Piazza, Spreaker’s American Rep.

Also See: Best Free DJ Softwares,Tools to Mix Songs Like Pros

Diagram.ly is an online diagram drawing application which let you create professional looking for workflow, BPM, org charts, UML, ER, network diagrams. Its completely free and requires no login or registration and the let you to save the diagrams locally.

# Go to www.diagram.ly

The site has a collection of vast array of stencils, clip arts, graphics which you can drag and drop into your diagram to add them and supports Visio import and real time diagram sharing.

You can drag objects into the drawing area just by dragging across the interface from the collection of onscreen palettes, and you can choose from available flowchart shapes as well as various clipart graphics to help explain your ideas visually. It supports connecting lines with different types arrows and flow lines so that you can show connections and process, data flow.

Once you’re finished with the diagram, you can save your work in its native XML format, as well as PNG, JPG, or SVG images. And in case you need to make changes, just re-import your saved XML and you’re ready to go to re-draw from where you left.

You can also check out Simple Diagrams which is a simple desktop application that helps you express your ideas diagrammatically, it keeps the visual expression clear through the simple design with its cool library of stencils, pencil drawn like items and backgrounds.

If you are specifically looking to create UML and DFD diagrams the try Diagram Designer. It helps users to quickly design simple data flow charts, UML, DFD etc which should appeal to software designers and application programmers.

Also See: Create Toys from Trash: Make Science Projects from Junk

SketchHeroes (Link) is a cool website which has a collection of lot of drawing tutorials. Just sign-up for a free account and you can access all videos, articles which will teach you how to draw your favourite super heroes, cartoons, anime manga characters, funny animals and anything else you have in mind. You can also create your own tutorials and share it.

The site provides a wide range of interesting animated tutorial flash videos that shows how to draw step by step on a particular subject. Choose a character and watch the corresponding video guide of how to design it from scratch. For each tutorial there’s a permalink and the animation video can be added to your webpages using the embed code.

(check how to draw an anime girl)

In order to watch all kinds of tutorials just click on the "tutorial" icon at the top of the page. If you wish to choose a tutorial by categories, you can choose the category you like from the "categories bar" at the right side of the page, for example, if you wish to watch "How to draw animals" tutorials, press the Animals icon. If you are searching for specific tutorial, use the search option at the tutorial page or at the category page.

I also found some useful free resources like a free ebook (Link) which has some awesome tutorials and covered almost all basics to expert lessons on drawing anime and cartoons. You can also check this site Bakaneko (Url) which has some awesome drawing tutorials for you to learn to draw cartoons, manga with proper proportions like a pro.

Also See: Learn to Draw Human Body Step by Step in Different Poses

Tip: Check if an Image is Photoshopped

Top Websites for Free Photoshop Textures

1. Grunge Textures (url)

It is a place where you will find all sorts of grunge textures. With over 1400 textures sorted in 21 categories the site is a good choice for those designing in this style so appealing. provide quality background textures that can be used free of charge for digital artwork, 3D rendering, web design and print projects. They specialize in weathered and worn surfaces.

2. DeviantArt (url)

deviantART is a platform that allows emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their digital art works within a peer community dedicated to the digital art.There you will find a wide variety of designs including photoshop textures uploaded by members. It is undoubtedly one of the best sites to find textures, background styles.

3. Shizoo (url)

It is notable for its unique textures which are really interesting and original. There are also a number of other useful resources for your designs like brushes and icons.

4. Amazing Textures (url)

If you are looking for free textures for Photoshop in an orderly and then classified Amazing Textures is a great option and should give you a ride. Among other things, the site lets you upload your own creations. Their texture library has hundreds of free textures to download, high-resolution textures, images, backgrounds, wallpapers and texture maps.

5. Texture King (url)

Download free high resolution, high quality textures for personal and commercial use from TextureKing. The textures range in subject from house insulation to cracked marble to paint-splattered concrete. The categories include Concrete, Grunge, Wood, Metals, Stone/Rock, Fabric, Paint, Rust, Dirt/Sand, Plastic, Liquids, Plaster, Glass etc.

6. Star Textures (url)

Startextures.com provides quality high resolution textures, that can be used in any kind of digital and design artwork. It is a gallery of high resolution, quality textures classified into several categories with creative and unique content and really useful for those who want to make quality designs. All the textures are free to use in any kind of computer graphics, games, printed material, movies, website design and 3D models.

7. Texture Warehouse (url)

The site offers textures ideal for those who want to experiment with 3D design. They offer free, high resolution textures to designers and 3D artist. The images are licensed under a Creative Commons Licensed. The textures are updated frequently.

If you want to add some of your favourite sites to the list leave a comment. I hope this list will be useful for your photoshop design work.

Also See: Fix Blurred Images Taken by Digital Camera without Photoshop