There’s no doubt Google has a sense of humor — its excellent April Fools jokes are a testament to that. But there’s a wealth of funnies that can found any time of the year too. Here we pull together a handy list of Google “Easter eggs” that you can uncover right now.

Bearing in mind we’re working up another list covering surprises that can be found in Google Maps, Earth and Street View, have we missed any other tricks from those crazy Google funsters? Do share in the comments below.

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We have already told you how to install Amarok 2.3 Beta 1 in Kubuntu. However, we have not really written anything else about what new features and improvements will come with Amarok 2.3. However, the Amarok team has very conveniently revived the Amarok Insider. So, here is whats new in Amarok 2.3 from their own words as published in the 14th issue of  Amarok Insider:

Microsoft — or perhaps someone else whom Microsoft definitely pays — has created howsoftwareisbuilt.com, where Microsoft apparently tries to promote itself and ‘embrace’ the FOSS world (here is the latest interview). In the homepage, the site also links to the company’s anti-GNU/Linux pages (“compare” site). How demeaning. Notice the footer which clearly states: “How Software is Built is sponsored by Microsoft Corp.”

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Freenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store. Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity. Freenet works by pooling the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve various kinds of information. (via Wikipedia)

The following tutorial will explain how to extract all text from PDFs (including text in images), by using a combination of Ghostscript and a command line OCR tool calledtesseract-ocr. This is yet another guest post by StoneCut.

First we need to convert our PDF to individual image files (TIFF) so we can then OCR-scan them again. We need Ghostscript for that. It’s probably already installed on your system but just to be sure you can run:

Read more here.

When Google indexes so many billions of web pages that it doesn’t even bother listing the number any more, it’s hard to imagine that much lies beyond its far-reaching tentacles.

Beneath, however, lies an online world that few know exists. It’s a realm of huge, untapped reserves of valuable information containing sprawling databases, hidden websites and murky forums. It’s a world where academics and researchers might find the data required to solve some of mankind’s biggest problems, but also where criminal syndicates operate, and terrorist handbooks and child pornography are freely distributed.

Read more here.

In some new builds of Google Chrome a bug has been reported which makes it the browser hang when it is used in KDE but it works fine in GNOME. In Google Chrome, the bugs results in the tab hanging after a page has been loaded. After sometime a pop-up usually comes saying some thing like “Some problem has occurred. Close or reload the page.” The problem happens only in KDE and Google Chrome works fine in GNOME.

How do you improve upon something as good as 3G ? Simple, move on to 4G. Without any doubt,3G was the next best thing in mobile data communication after EDGE/GPRS.  I mean with download speeds as high as 7mbps, 3G redefined the way we thought of mobile broadband connectivity. But everything that has a beginning has an end and 3g’s short lived life eventually paved the way for 4g broadband.

With almost every other person making their own websites nowadays, knowledge about the various web site hosting services available today is very important. All the web-hosting services available gives detailed informations about the various plans that they provide. However, considering the sheer number web-hosting services available, it can sometime be a real task trying to decide which service to choose.

In such cases, Web Hosting Geeks can help you out. Web Hosting Geeks is a website which has been giving web hosting reviews, ratings and awards since 2004. In Web Hosting Geek, you can find rating sorted by various categories like Top 10 Web Hosting – which gives an overall rating of the best web hosting provider under $10 a month, Multiple Domain Hosting – which gives a list of the best services which allows you to have multiple domains. They also provide reviews by webmasters as well as users. A very interesting rating list that Web Hosting Geeks provide is the Green Web Hosting, which is for the environmentally conscious.

Next time when your Mom asks you so as to why you waste your time sitting in front of the computer all the time, you should show this list of billionaires to her. All the persons listed below are some of the world’s youngest billionaires, possibly in the shortest possible time scale, ever. And all of them made all this wealth – courtesy the Internet and the World Wide Web.

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Choqok is a micro-blogging client for KDE and in my opinion, one of the best at that. Recently, the Choqok team released the first beta towards Choqok 1.0. It has various improvements like:

• Actions to subscribe/unsubscribe and block a user, added to User menu.
• Support to attach a file (like image) to a dent in StatusNet/Identica(>0.9).
• Ability to select which timelines we like to have in one account.
• And 2 new timelines for Twitter and Statusnet/Identica accounts: Public timeline and Favorites
• Optional ReTweet/ReDent prefix.
• And some new plugins.

In this article we will tell you how you can install Choqok 1.0 Beta 1 in (K)Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

Paint.NET is a photo editing tool for Windows system – small in size but heavily loaded with features. You can almost term it as the layman’s Photoshop. Although, Paint.NET has support for almost all famous file formats but it cannot handle other file formats such as the PSD (Photoshop Document – Adobe Photoshop’s Native Format). In this article we will tell you how to open or edit Photoshop PSD files in Paint.NET.

Many open source fans consider Apple a friend. But revelations about Apple’s previously secret agreement with iPhone developers show that when it comes to iPhone apps, Apple is an enemy of open source. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) goes so far as to call Apple a “jealous and arbitrary feudal lord.”

Read more here.

Along with the new theme, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is getting a new ubiquity slide-show. What is Ubiquity slide-show? It is the slide-show you see when the Ubuntu installation is taking place.

The new slide-show does indeed look very good in keeping with the new theme. So, here are the slides: