When it comes to iPhone, the worst yet funny part is the enabled-by-default Auto-correct feature. The nifty feature, which apparently is “intelligent, tries to “correct” words you type frequently and store them in memory for future use.

The feature corrects your errors, but sometimes, no matter how many times you tap the “x” button, it looks like the feature never understands the difference in meaning. This, however, can be a definite annoyance.

Thanks to the auto-correct feature and its “dirty mind”, if you ever send a text message too quickly, it could turn your message into something funny and dirty. A website called Damn You Autocorrect features such hilariously  funny auto-correct mistakes, which we had featured in our Friday Fun section some time back.

Also Read:  Best Funny Responses from Apple’s Siri

Having gone through few other sites, we have gathered a collection of the best funny auto-correct mistakes in iPhone -

If you don’t want your iPhone to auto-correct your text message at all or if you find the feature too annoying, you always have an option to completely shut it off.

To do so, follow the steps mentioned below -

• Click on “Settings” and find the “General” option
• Next, select “Keyboard”
• You will be displayed with several options to turn on and off. In the “Auto-Correction”, move the slider from ON to OFF. This will disable the auto-correct feature.

Apparently, Sonny Dickson, a tech enthusiast, found an improvised spell-check feature lying inactive in the iPhone’s iOS 5. He posted stating the improved feature comes with an Android-like autocorrect keyboard bar.

Users can enable this suggestion bar for their phone by adding a simple code. To do so, download iBackupBot  and backup your iPhone/iPod in iTunes. Load the created backup using iBackupBot and find the file – com.apple.keyboard.plist located in Library/Preferences. Open the file and add the following code

<key>KeyboardAutocorrectionLists</key><string>YES</string>

Save the modifications, and then restore from backup from within iBackupbot.

Apart from being known for its impressive doodles, there are a number of gags and hidden messages within the search engine giant, Google, which are popularly called as Easter Eggs. An Easter egg is a hidden feature that the developers or “geeks” have intentionally put in their software, often for their own amusement, and when it comes to Google developers, they have implanted several Easter eggs in their software, ranging from Google Earth to Google search to Google Reader.

We had earlier compiled a list of awesome Google Search tricks, including the hoax page that Google had created on April Fool’s Day. We also saw that searching for the phrase “do a barrel roll” became a viral sensation last week, when users found about it and posted tweets and blog posts. However, if you liked “do a barrel roll” Easter egg, then I’m sure you would love the other hidden ones as well. And if you haven’t liked it, here’s something which will make you laugh –  Click here

So here’s a list of Google’s best hidden Easter eggs and gags -

Reader Ninja

Go to Google Reader and type in the famous Konami code: up up down down left right left right B A. This will bring up a ninja on the left side of the Reader with the text “Ninja!” written in the search box. Interestingly, this works with the new Google Reader design.

Askew

Type the word “askew” in Google’s search box and voila! This is more like a command which tilts your search results slightly towards the right. It’s pointless, but it’s all fun.

Steve Irwin wrestling with a Crocodile

Do you remember the late wildlife expert and adventurer Steve Irwin? Of course you should. Everybody knows about him. Well, go to Google Earth and spin around to the waterfront side of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. What do you see? Well, its Steve Irwin wrestling with a crocodile.

Chat with Martin in Space

Google Earth 5 allows users to explore the Red Planet, Mars and along with that, you can chat to locals too. Well, sort of. Type “Meliza” into the search box and you will be transported to Meliza’s dusty domain, where you can strike a conversation with the chat bot. However, Meliza isn’t as funny as Apple’s Siri ;)

Google Earth Flight Simulator

Google has this very interesting Easter egg hidden in Google Earth. Using the flight simulator, you can fly around the globe in Google Earth by simply pressing Ctrl + Alt + A. This activates the flight simulator and allows you to fly an F-16 fighter jet anywhere in the world. This, however, was originally inserted as an Easter egg but now has become one of the official features of Google Earth.

Play Snake on YouTube

Snake is one the most popular mobile phone games, which you can also play on Google’s YouTube player. When you are viewing a video on YouTube, press the up arrow key when the video is loading or buffering. However, Gmail has a Labs feature called “old Snakey”, which allows you to play the game inside Gmail.

There are several other Google  Easter  eggs, which are mostly known. However, if you think that I’ve missed something, then please do share it with us by  adding  your comments below.

Halloween is celebrated in many countries across the world. While many associate this holiday with ghosts, witches and goblins, a lot of us think it’s just a great time to get together and have fun. If you have a computer, tablet or smartphone, you might want to add something to it that helps you get into the fun Halloween mood. Below are some links to a few of our past Halloween articles and some new stuff as well.

Screensavers

If you enjoy using screensavers on your Mac or Windows computer, you’ll find a nice collection of Halloween screensavers at NewFreeScreenSavers. Here are some screenshots of these great free screensavers. You can download them on the Halloween page.

Phones

Get Ready For Halloween with Halloween Android Apps  - also with wallpapers, themes, and ringtones.

Halloween Theme for Nokia and Symbian Smartphones

Top 5 Halloween Apps For iPhone/iPad

Computer Wallpapers

Download High Quality Halloween Wallpapers – for the PC, Mac and Linux

High Quality Halloween Wallpapers For Your Desktop or Mac

25 Places to Get Creepy Halloween Wallpapers

Web Browsers

Halloween Personas for Firefox  (themes)

Phantom of the Opera: Special Edition Opera Browser for Halloween

Apps, Themes and Extensions for Google Chrome Browser

Even More …

We have even more stuff for you to look over. Just follow this link to a Halloween search of Techie-Buzz.

Android is an incredible mobile operating system, and there’s no doubt about that. Google has managed to ship over 107 million units in Q2 of 2011, and no wonder it has created a buzz in the mobile market.

With the increasing number of  Android powered devices in the mobile market, there has been an effective increase in the amount of apps developed and downloaded in the marketplace. The  Android Market, the official online software store, has more than 250,000 applications, with more than 6 billion downloads as reported in July 2011.

Android powered devices come with decent cameras on them, and of late, phone photography is gaining tremendous popularity among amateur photographers. There are several Android photography apps available in the Android Market which will help you process your images and enhance your phone photography.

Here is a complete round up of the Best Android Photography Apps (Free and Paid) that you may require for all your photography needs

Free Apps

Adobe Photoshop Express

Are you used to processing photos in Photoshop? No worries. Adobe Systems have developed an app exclusively for Android smartphones. Adobe Photoshop Express not only allows you to edit your photos, but also allows you to share them with your friends. You can access all your photos directly from your Photoshop.com account.

Install App

Camera360 Free

Camera360 lets you add amazing HDR effects to your photos, even better than iPhone HDR. It also has tilt-shift and color-shift mode that allows you to view your photos at different angles. Camera360 gives unique funny effects to your photos like Surrealistic B&W Paining, Vertical/Horizontal Left Symmetry, Vertical/ Horizontal Right Symmetry and Ghost effect.

Install App

Little Photo

Little Photo adds film and retouch effects to your photos. There are over 50 effects and tools including Lomo film, B&W smooth, B&W film, Heavy, Instant film, White story and many more that you can experiment on.

Install App

Lightbox Photos

Lightbox lets you enhance your photos and quickly share them with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. It enables you to add filters/effects like Black & White, Lomo, Portia, Sepia, Fisheye and much more.

PicsIn Magic Effects

PicsIn Magic Effects have several effects such as Stenciler, Cartoonizer, Sketcher, Orton, Lomo, Vintage, Cross Process, HDR, Fattal, Pencil, Holgaart and more!

Install App

Camera Fun Free

Camera Fun is an app that provides point and shoot effect lens for your Android camera. You can view live previews of photo effects on the screen before you take a picture. The free version comes with 6 lens effects – Canvas, Color X-Ray, Mirror, Pinch, Sepia & Sketch.

Install App

Camera Effects

Camera Effects is yet another great photography application. The app allows you to capture great photos and turn your photos into art by adding amazing photo effects. It includes effects like Holfa, Lomo, Balck & White and many more. The app also allows you to preview the effects instantly. After you are done editing the photos, you can share them with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The developers of the app claim that Camera Effects is similar to Instagram.

Install App

Paid Apps

Camera360 Ultimate

Camera 360 Ultimate provides LOMO, HDR, axis shift, draft, ghost, etc. and multiple styles.

Vignette

The Android app allows you to add film and camera effects to your photos. There are over 84 effects & 59 frames, LOMO/Diana/Holga toy camera styles, Polaroid/instant camera styles, Cross-process, tilt-shift, photo booth, double exposure and more. It also supports full resolution capture, digital zoom, self-time, time-lapse and geo tagging.

Install App

Retro Camera Plus

With Retro Camera you’ll take delicious old-school pictures which your friends will drool over. It has over five sets of vintage effects, film scratch, black & white and cross processing effects. It is inspired by the Lomo, Holga, Polaroid, Diana, the toy cameras and Hipstamatic.

Install App

Pro HDR Camera

This app allows you to automatically create stunning full-resolution HDR images with just a single tap on your Android phone. Please note that this app has been tested to work properly on Motorola, HTC and most Samsung phones. However, if you have a LG, Sony, or other device, the HDR capability may not function properly.

• Manual in-app photo capture, where you get to choose the exposure of each image in your HDR
• Proprietary image alignment algorithm that precisely aligns full-size images in seconds
• Take pictures using hardware buttons (volume up/down or the shutter button if your phone has one)
• Silent capture (mute your shutter sounds for quiet capture)
• Save HDR images at the full resolution of your camera, up to 8 megapixels
• Seamless background processing that renders your HDRs while you keep on shooting
• Share your HDRs with the world with e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, and more

Install App

Fast Burst Camera

Fast Burst Camera is a great application that allows you to capture 5 to 10 pictures per second. It also supports flash, focus and zoom. Just hold the shoot button for continuous burst, or tap for fast single shots.

Install App

PicSay Pro Photo Editor

The app lets you edit your photos with features like sharpen, remove red eye, crop & straighten, distort, insert cut-outs of other pictures, paint, make color splash out of black-and-white pictures, add text, word balloons, apply effects like Cross Process, Lomo, Vignette, faux HDR, Tilt-shift, Pencil Sketch, and much more.

Install App

DSLR Controller

DSLR Controller lets you control your Canon EOS DSLR from your Android phone through USB. The app lets you control most of the functions of your DSLR camera like auto focus, zoom control bulb capture, aperture, ISO speed and so on. Here’s an article on how it actually works.

Install App

Are you an iPhone user? Well, we have compiled a list of carefully selected iPhone photography apps that will easily capture/edit your photos and share them with your friends.

There are over hundreds of photography-related iPhone apps available in the iTunes app store and it’s quite hard to decide which app is the best. Here’s a list of carefully selected iPhone apps that will easily capture/edit your photos and share them with your friends.

Free Apps

Instagram

Instagram lets you take quick photos or use photos that already exist in your iPhone, apply creative filters and share it with friends on Flickr, Facebook or Twitter. You can also tag your photos with location using your foursquare account.

Instagram has over 11 different custom filters you can apply to your photos.

PicPlz

PicPlz is similar to Instagram which allows you to quickly snap photos and share it among your online friends. In competition with Instagram, PicPlz also introduced filters to add some effect to your photos. You can view a live thumbnail preview of what your photo will look like with different filters.

Old Photo Pro

With Old Photo Pro you can make your photos look old as if you captured them years ago. You can manually edit the photo or let the application do all the work.

Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express app is developed by Adobe and comes with some handful of features. You can quickly edit – adjust color, crop, straighten, rotate and flip your photos and share it with your friends.

Top features:

• Basics: Crop, Straighten, Rotate, and Flip
• Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White, and Contrast
• Filters: Sketch, Soft Focus, and Sharpen
• Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, and Soft Black and White
• Borders: Rectangle, Rounded, Oval, Soft Edge, Vignette, Rough Edge, Halftone, and Film Emulsion

Picture Effect Magic

Picture Effect Magic can transform your photos into retro photo or a picture drawn by a pencil or paints, or done in a Modern Art style by tap of a button. You can add cool filters like Vertical Quad and Subtense which you cannot find on any other app.

Paid Apps:

Camera+

Camera+ shooting modes and high quality effects brings in the DSLR feeling. Camera+ has key feature like a stabilizer timer and take photos in burst mode. It has 6× higher quality zoom with ability to adjust photos by flipping, rotating and cropping it.

Camera+ lets you share your photos on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and even email.

The app is available for $0.99

Magic Shutter

Magic Shutter focuses on leaving the camera shutter open and easily take long exposure and repeated exposure photos.

Here’s a video tutorial shared by Anistar App Studio

Magic Shutter costs $2.99

ToonPAINT

ToonPAINT allows you to easily create awesome looking cartoon-paintings with your photos and give them a fun animated look. The app offers the ability to change colors by double tapping on the color splat.

It costs $1.99

Pro HDR

This app allows you to shoot an auto HDR just like the Apple built-in version, but allows you to capture 3 or more photos. Pro HDR captures images exposed for the highlights and another exposed for the shadows. It then merges the images to give you a 3- or 5-megapixel HDR image.

The app costs $1.99

360 Panorama

Panorama is very popular feature on most digital camera. This feature allows you to take multiple photos of a horizontal landscape which are later combined together to form one picture.

Its usually very difficult to capture multiple pictures and combining them together. This iPhone app makes your life easy. It automatically combines all the pictures for your and generates the final picture.

It costs $0.99

TimeLapse

TimeLapse is the professional choice for automating the iPhone and iPod’s camera to help create time lapse photo sequences. It is used to create HD videos on your iPhone and store full size, GPS tagged, photos in the photo library for later downloading.

TimeLapse is available for $1.99

Here’s a example Time Lapse video

The Angry Birds addiction is now overflowing towards the Angry Birds merchandise. There is a variety of merchandise up for grabs at the Angry Bird store and elsewhere. Here is a list of some cool and great Angry Bird merchandise available at the online store.

T-shirts

Sesame Street Parody T-Shirt

Help Me

Failed

Bomber Face

The Nest

Girly Face

Red Face Hoody

Bird Faces

Laptop and iPhone Skin

Laptop Skin

iPhone Skin

Plush Toys

Blue Bird

Red Bird

Green Pig

White Bird

Yellow Bird

Shoulder Bags

Green Shoulder Bag and  Black Shoulder Bag

Key chain

Blue Key chain Collection and  3D Key chain

Flip-flops

Red Flip-flops and Green Flip-flops

Case

iPod Case and iPhone Case

Twitter is source for news, place to – get real-time updates on what happening right now, promote your site and interact with popular bloggers and great twitter users, if you’re using Chrome to access Twitter here are the extensions that might helpful to you.

Chromed Bird is the best twitter extension allows to follow your timelines and interact with your twitter account. You can able to compose, reply, RT, share, favorite and delete tweets which you can do on web twitter.
With Chromed bird you can follow your timelines (including @mentions, lists, DMs and favorites). This twitter client notifies you of about new tweets, offers preview for shortened URLs before you click.

Twitter Refresh Are you vexed with refreshing twitter again and again to see new tweets in your timeline, Twitter lacks auto refresh of tweets. Twitter Refresh extension for Chrome works with web twitter and refreshes your timeline automatically when there are new tweets.

Slipstream and Proxlet extensions for Chrome allows to block, filter and hide annoying Foursquare and Paper.li tweets in your timeline. All you need to search for 4sq.com and Paper.li tweets and create filters with the help of these extensions to block them. Twitter won’t be noisy place from then onwards.

Linkpeelr extension for Chrome is URL expander for a shortened link shows long URL  in a tooltip when you hover mouse pointer over it in Twitter. Linkpeelr helps to avoid visiting malware and dangerous sites, works with any website with any link or URL shortening services like bit.ly.

Social Translate extension for Chrome Here and then you may get tweets from people you following in a language other than English in your timeline, Social Translate extension automatically translates tweets and events streams and friends on comments on social networking sites.  For accurate results, select Translation Qualityfor Social Translate extension options as Aggressive.

==== About the author ====

Venkat is founder and owner of Techdows , Technology blog covers Tips and Tricks, Tech News, Web Apps, Free Apps, Troubleshooting and much more. You can follow him on Twitter at @techvenkat

The iPhone has built a reputation for being the thinnest smartphone with the highest resolution ever. Apple has made the iPhone a stronger model with its stainless steel band and chemically engineered (recyclable) glass, to protect and prevent scratches. It boasts a 5 megapixel camera with a built in LED flash, for producing stunning and crisp images. With a Multi-touch display, it is perfect for those that enjoy the thousands of game apps available to the iPhone.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

A modern way to store thousands of books is with the new Amazon Kindle. This upgrade now stores up to 3,500 books, with 480,000 titles to choose from. With built in Wi-Fi and a high contrast 6 inch screen, it is a simple and practical way of carrying your book (or a thousand) around.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FI73MA/?tag=techiebuzz-20

Panasonic’s 3D glasses enhance the way that we watch movies. These are available to both adults and children with their adjustable fit. Made with a liquid crystal glass, an auto power off function and a lithium battery this gives up to 75 hours usage.

http://panasonic.net/avc/viera/3d/

A revolutionary way in which we can now watch videos, listen to music and surfing the web is through the large multi-touch screen iPad. Available with a 16gb, 32gb or 64gb flash drive there is mass storage available for many apps out of the 250,000 around to download. Providing up to 10 hours of watching videos on a 9.7 inch LED backlit screen with a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution, it is definitely a practical product to use and carry anywhere.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

The PSP GO is now a pocket sized console available with a 3.8 inch LED screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Portable, with a built in microphone, this makes it more than just a games console. It offers the Skype application giving accessibility to talk to other Skype users around the world.

http://us.playstation.com/psp/systems/pspgo.html

The new release from Windows comes available through HTC, Samsung and LG phones. The HTC HD7 Windows phone comes with a 3.8inch touch-screen and a HD video and 5MP camera. Producing up to 6 hours talk time and 15 days standby time this Windows phone makes it a must for all aspiring movie makers.

http://www.htc.com/www/product/hd7/overview.html

The Wii Motion Plus, is the new remote control available to the Nintendo Wii. With the new built-in motion hardware, this gives a sense of realistic movement and control and enhances the Nintendo Wii games experience.

http://www.nintendo.com/wii/console/accessories/wiimotionplus

Apple has produced the new iPod Nano with a 1.54 inch multi-touch color display. This strap is the new and fun way to carry around your IPod in the style of a watch. Available in a range of colors this makes a perfect little gadget to accessorize your iPod Nano with.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/16/griffin-gets-in-the-ipod-nano-watch-game-with-colorful-protecti/

The Nintendo Wii comes with a motion control technology and has brought back the classic Mario games through a modernized and compact design. Offering a unique experience with its wireless controls with an inbuilt speaker and rumble feature, this is an exciting new way for everyone to enjoy the active and nostalgic games that Nintendo has produced.

http://www.nintendo.com/wii

The Macbook air is the recent laptop available from Apple with a very light and slim design the thickness coming in at only 1.7cm. This produces up to 5 hours wireless productivity and up to 30 days standby time. The elegance of this product makes it a definite buy for those that need a practical solution to portable computing.

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

To commemorate Banned Books Week, the Internet Archive has opened access to 74 banned books which can be downloaded for free in different formats such as PDF, HTML and sometimes ePUB and Kindle formats. The Banned Books Week is celebrated in the last week of September every year, and this year, it stretches from September 25 to October 2. Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign that celebrates the freedom to read, draws attention to banned and challenged books, and highlights persecuted individuals. It highlights the importance of The First Amendment in the USA and draws attention to the harms of censorship worldwide.

Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. People challenge books that they say are too sexual or too violent. They object to profanity and slang, and they protest against offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups–or positive portrayals of homosexuals. Their targets range from books that explore contemporary issues and controversies to classic and beloved works of literature. — bannedbooksweek.org

Banned or censored books in different topics such as evolution, literature, fiction, freedom, economics and a number of children books have been made available. The books can be downloaded for free and read on a computer, laptop or portable devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad.

» Internet Archive’s Collection of Banned Books

Most web searches for free icons will lead you astray. You will often end up at sites that offer a few free icons, just to show off their paid icon collections. Other times you’ll find that the icons have license restrictions that don’t allow you to use them online or for business use. Do you need a good source for free icons?

I discovered that the free icons at the Open Icon Library are not only free, but are free to use anywhere for any purpose. Here’s what they say about their collection:

A free and open Icon collection. Over 5000 Unique Icons. Free for anyone to use on you computer, website or any other project. The library is not a theme. Its a centralized source for icons to cover all your needs. The goal is to cover all common apps, operating systems, mimetypes, devices, and country flags.

You can easily browse the Open Icon Gallery by using the three main categories of Flags, Icons and Pictograms. If you don’t have time to look through them all online, you can always download the entire collection to your computer. There’s also an additional collection of icons specifically designed for use on web pages.

If you need even more free images, be sure to check out these pages:

IconArchive, Christmas Icons,  OpenClipArt, MorgueFile and Wallpapers.