This is a quick video tour of the new Facebook homepage that I think is now available to all users of Facebook.

One of my favorite features in the redesigned Facebook site is the new Games and Applications dashboard that you may use to discover interesting Facebook apps and Games that are currently popular among your circle of Facebook friends.

The dashboard can be accessed from the Facebook sidebar or you can use the following direct links:

• Friends’ Recent Activity – Games
• Friends’ Recent Activity – Applications

The Facebook platform, according to official stats, has more than half a million applications and games. It’s a long list but the dashboard just makes it easy for you to discover new and interesting games without much effort.

A small warning here. If your boss is your friend on Facebook, you may immediately want to hide your “Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards” else he’ll easily get to know about all the Farmville sessions and Mafia Wars that you’ve played today during office hours.

Go to Privacy Settings –> Applications and Websites -> Customize and type the name of your boss to hide all your games activity from him /her (see screenshot).

Facebook Games That Are Popular With Friends

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan — who is not just a Bollywood icon but also an avid blogger — has now launched a new voice blog called Bachchan Bol where he plans to regular record the latest happenings in his life using his own voice.

Fans of Amitabh Bachchan can dial (022) 505678910 from their mobile or landline phones to hear the actor speak or they can even record their own voice comments. Amitabh Bachchan told the BBC that he would record at least twice a week for his “vocal blog” and that he’ll continue to write his (massively popular) blog just as before.

Bachchan Bol is a premium mobile service so you’ll have to pay around Rs. 6 per minute. This may also mean that phone users outside India currently won’t have the facility to dial into Bachchan’s voice blog.

How Bachchan Bol Service Works

You can think of Bachchan Bol as a pre-recorded podcast. The only difference is that you need a computer with an Internet connection to download podcasts but in the case of Bachchan’s phone blog, all you need is a phone connection which most people in India already have.

Here’s a quick video (in Hindi) that explains how the Bachchan Bol service works .

Amitabh Bachchan Launches a Voice Blog [Demo]

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

There are a couple of reasons why you want to install the novaPDF driver on your system. For instance, it can automatically append the PDF output to an existing PDF file — this comes quite handy when need to collection snippets from multiple web pages / documents into a single PDF file.

If you intend to share PDF documents on the web, you’ll find novaPDF useful since it lets you add meta information (like title, subject, etc.) to PDFs that will ultimately help in improving the search rankings (SEO) of your PDFs. The generates PDFs have embedded fonts so they will look the same everywhere even if the fonts are missing on the other computer.

novaPDF works with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows including XP and Windows 7. Unlike other free PDF printers, novaPDF offers a standalone installer so you don’t have to install extra software (like GhostScript or the .NET Framework) for generating PDFs.

How to get novaPDF PDF Printer for Free

Here’s how Digital Inspiration readers can receive a free license of novaPDF:

1. Go to this page and request a license key for the software.

2. Once you receive the registration details via email, download the installer from novapdf.com [direct link to .exe file] and install the application.

3. When the setup has completed, you will have a printer called novaPDF in the Devices and Printers page (or ‘Printers and Faxes’ window depending on your Windows version).

You can now access this PDF printer directly from the Print menu of any Windows application that supports the Print feature.

For more PDF tips and tricks, check the detailed PDF Guide.

Free PDF Printer for Digital Inspiration Readers

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Opera, hoping that Apple will change their policy, has developed a version of the Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and they’ll showing a preview of this iPhone App during the Mobile World Congress that happens in Barcelona next week.

An email from Opera PR says:

“We are thrilled to offer journalists and partners an exclusive preview of Opera Mini for iPhone during the year’s biggest mobile event,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software.

Safari vs. Opera for iPhone

Opera says Opera Mini for iPhone offers up to six times faster download speeds than Apple’s own browser, and up to 10 times smaller data traffic.

The Opera Mini for iPhone will only be shown to members of the press but Apple will have to approve the app for everyone else to experience Opera on their iPods and iPhones.

That may not happen anytime soon as Opera is yet to submit their Opera Mini iPhone App to the Apple App Store for approval.

Opera Browser Coming to iPhone

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Google has added an interesting face morphing app in Orkut. The app takes your profile image from Orkut and smoothly morphs it into your friend’s profile image while filling the path  with public images of other Orkut users who have matching faces.

The application, known as People Hopper, is part of Google Labs but for some reason, it didn’t work with my Orkut account. Contrary to what you may think, face morphing in Orkut doesn’t due “face recognition” and is just a simple matching to find similar pictures.

First, faces are automatically detected in public profile images and normalized for improved contrast and size. Then, for each image, we find other publicly available profile images that are similar to one another. Then, when you pick a friend you want to be your end match, we just hop along similar public images, step-by-step, until the connection is made!

If you don’t want your Orkut images to show up in another person’s morph, you can click here to exclude your Orkut profile from the Google experiment. For extra fun, you can extract the individual images from the morph sequence and turn them into an animated gif.

Google Brings Face Morphing to Orkut

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you haven’t participated in the contest yet or want to submit another entry for the contest (yes, that’s allowed), please click here.

We’ll pick one winner every week (for the next three weeks) and one grand winner (at the end of this month) who will get a Core i5 powered laptop computer.

For detailed terms and conditions, please click here. Should you have any queries, please send me an email at amit@labnol.org.

The Winner for Week 1 of the Intel Contest..

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Linking AdSense with Analytics is fairly easy (see video) but consider a slightly different scenario:

You are maintaining two separate Google Accounts – your first Google Account (say adsense@gmail.com) is configured with AdSense while the other account (say analytics@gmail.com) is associated with Google Analytics.

How do you then link these two accounts so that you can track AdSense and Analytics data from the same dashboard?

If are facing a similar issue, here’s a simple solution courtesy Akanksha Shukla:

Step 1. Login to your Google Analytics dashboard using your existing Google Account (analytics@gmail.com).

Step 2. Create a new user in Google Analytics from the User Manager. Set this user’s email address the same as your existing AdSense account (adsense@gmail.com) and select the Access type as “Account Administrator.”

That’s it! You will now be able to login into Google Analytics using your Google AdSense Account and can also track the performance of ads from the same dashboard. You can only link one AdSense account to one Google Analytics account.

Linking Analytics with another AdSense Account

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

This works nicely but there’s one area where Google is still lacking – image search.

Steve Jobs introduced the much-awaited Apple iPad to the world on January 27, 2010. The news was covered by almost every blog and news website, millions of tweets were written for the iPad and thousands of images and videos from that Apple event were shared on sites like Flickr and YouTube.

With so much excitement around the device, the disappointing part is that though a week has passed since we saw the first iPad unit, Google Images still has no clue about the existence of this Apple device.

Try a simple search for “iPad” on Google Image search and you’ll only see mockups but none of these images represent the official Apple gadget. Move to page 2 and you’ll find that the story is no different.

In this quick test, Bing did manage to find some images of the Apple iPad on the first page of search results but the top slots were still occupied by mockups.

The surprise winner here was Yahoo. It not only returned the best results for “iPad” but also had a section called “Recent Images” that pulled the very latest photographs of iPad from news stories. Google seriously needs to implement something similar for their “real-time search” as well.

Screenshot 1: iPad search on Google Images

Screenshot 2: iPad on Bing Images

Screenshot 3: iPad according to Yahoo!

The Problem with Google Image Search

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The app, aptly named as Memorize Now, works something like this.

You copy-paste the text passages that you want to remember in the space provided and then hit the “memorize” button. The app will then replace certain words from the passage with blank spaces and you are required to recall the hidden words. You can always hover your mouse over a black space to reveal the hidden word.

If it sounds a little confusing, watch this quick screencast from Molly that explains all the good features of Memorize Now visually.

The Memorize Now app was initially created to help people memorize Bible verses but you can use it to memorize virtually any kind of information (including the plays of William Shakespeare).

On a related note, here’s another excellent video that shares some very practical tips to help you memorize lines. My favorite tip is the one that says — “Memorize your lines on an empty stomach; that’s when the hormone dealing with memory is most active!”

Related: Memorize Text with Tachistoscope

‘Memorize Now’ Can Help You Memorize Long Pieces of Text Quickly

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Nokia Diagnostics is a free utility that can help you troubleshoot and resolve common problems with your Nokia phones.

For instance, when you need to configure your Nokia device on a different Internet Connection (like moving from one Wi-Fi network to another), Nokia Diagnostics can automatically identify the right Internet settings for you.

The utility can also help you test the phone’s battery charger, the loudspeaker and even the earpiece.

Nokia Diagnostics works with all S60 5th edition devices (like the N-series, Nokia 5800, etc.) while support for 3rd edition devices is expected soon.

Related: Test your BlackBerry Phone for Problems

Troubleshoot your Nokia Phone Problems with Nokia Diagnostics

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.