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This one is just for making noise ! It has a variety of Sirens and Horns which you can play at will, for fun, entertainment or just to irritate a friend !
What you will find here are ambulance sirens, police sirens, different types of bugles, Air Raid, Air Horns, etc. etc. Each of them is an actual, high quality, loud sound which is fully realistic. The sounds are updated often for your hearing pleasure, with new ones being added periodically.
If you press and hold a particular link, you can set a unique horn/siren ringtone to a contact, set it as the default ringtone or create a unique sound for notification or an alarm.
Have some fun and let nobody accuse you of being the silent type !

For phone and tablet, this application includes Currency Converter, Loan, Loan Comparison and Refinance Calculator, Compound Interest Calculator, Credit Card Pay Off Calculator, Regular Calculator, Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator, IRR NPV Calculator and Percentage Calculator. It is like an all-in-one for Calculators.
It also allows you to edit and prioritize the list of calculators for easy access.
So forget the complex, old-fashioned Calculators – you have a winner here for all types of Financial Calculations. Available free on the Google Play Store.

Download the Magnifier app for free on your phone. And what does it do ? It just magnifies !  This simple app uses the in-built camera of your phone to magnify the material to which you point and displays it on your screen  – pretty cool for older people and also reading the fine print for the not-so-old !  You can adjust the zoom with the help of the on-screen slider or with the Volume Control buttons on your phone. It also has a built-in sensor, which senses low light – if you are trying to read something in poor light, it will also activate the flash of your phone, so you can read it like normal.

Everyone has heard of the Amazon Kindle – a book reader which costs about Rs. 17,500 on which you can read a zillion books by downloading them, some free and some paid for. Your smartphone can double up as a Kindle Book Reader. Just download the app and you are ready to use your Smartphone as a book reader ! Apart from reading a variety of books, you can bookmark the pages, increase / decrease the fonts, highlight portions of text and add your personalised notes to any section ! Further, if you want to know the meaning of a word, you can look up the dictionary right there. You can Search for words or phrases within the book, in Wikipedia or on the Web, right from your reading page.
As I said earlier, the books can be free or paid for. So how does one reach out for free books available on Kindle ? Head straight to http://www.hundredzeros.com and you will get a list of hundreds of books at zero price ! So go ahead – HAPPY READING FOR FREE !

Many times, one needs to make simple unit conversions without wading through a complex calculator. The Simple Unit Converter does just that ! Once you download and run the app, you are presented with a simple screen with the following options : Length, Volume, Weight, Temperature, Speed and Others. Just tap on any one, based on your need and choose the units to and from. Voila ! You get the conversions instantly. A must have for those who have children abroad, who quote the temperatures in Fahrenheit and go crazy trying to figure them in Centigrades !

How I work – 5 – Conjure

I have more than 100 apps on my phone and it is quite a bother to find the right one, especially when you are in a hurry. Just start conjure and find your apps by name. It’s that simple. You can find contacts by name or number. Call, view, or sms contacts in one touch. You can even adjust Android’s volume or toggle wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode, silent mode, and vibrate mode.

If you want to type less and search with ease on your Android smartphone to reach your goals faster, try Conjure and write to me and share your experiences.

How I work – 4 – Google Calendar

If you are a regular user of GMail (425 million active users – why not you ?), I have a bunch of productivity tools lined up for you. One of the most used is the Google Calendar. It helps you organize your life seamlessly !
Simple Calendar options are there by default. You can also set it to send you SMS reminders for your appointments, on your phone for FREE ! (Don’t ask me how they manage to do it). If someone sends you a mail which has the time date and place for a possible meeting, you have the option to directly add it to your calendar from your Inbox itself – no need to manually add it to your calendar. Recurring appointments and reminders are a breeze. Many more features are inbuilt for you to explore, but then I would run out of space here !  Google Calendar is also now available as an App for download on Android devices – and it remains synced always.

Just try it, I’m sure you will be hooked – don’t tell me you were not warned !

Write to me at yazdi@on-lyne.com if you would like to have more GMail productivity tools and I will cover them in my future columns

How I work – 3 – Irfanview

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREE graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.  Extremely light and easy to instal (www.irfanview.net) and does not interfere with any other software.

In addition to viewing files, it has an elementary photo editing option, which allows you to crop files, change the brightness / contrast, etc. If you want to resize your files, you could do it one at a time or in Batch Mode. This feature is extremely useful for resizing multiple files before you email them or upload them on your favourite photo album like picasa or flickr.

I find it extremely useful for my day to day photo handling – so will you !