Computer Tricks and Secrets

You are reading a web page, say a longform article published in The New York Times , and would like to share it with your friend. The article is lengthy and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the parts that you really want him to read. How do you thus focus his attention to the most interesting stuff on the page? Genius and TLDRify are useful web apps that that let you annotate web pages much like the yellow highlighter pens that you would use on the printed page. The services let you highlight any paragraph or specific sentence on a web page and create direct deep links to the highlighted text. When people click the shared link, they see the original page but with the annotated text. How to Annotate and Deep Link Web Pages Genius is a music lyrics website but they also provide a web annotator to help you add context and commentary on any web page. The best part about Genius is that you don’t need to install any bookmarklets or browser extensions to use t...

Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for a trending #hashtag, or an old tweet , or your brand name, and all the matching tweets get saved in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. And this archive would just update itself in the background as new tweets arrive. Meet Twitter Archiver , the simplest tool for saving tweets, forever It is a Google add-on that takes 5-minutes to setup (watch video tutorial ) and will easily capture all tweets that match particular search terms in a Google Spreadsheet automatically. You can use the tool to monitor tweets around any conference hashtag, learn what people are saying about your brand, track popular search terms, save tweets from any geographic location and more. Save all kinds of tweets with the Twitter Archiver How to Save Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet To get started, install the Twitter Archiver and it will create a new Google Spreadsheet. Go to the Add-on menu, choose Twitter Archiver and select the Authorize menu. All...

Your Android mobile phone includes a built-in app to help you visually monitor the battery usage pattern. Go to Settings > Battery (the app’s location may vary for your version of Android) and you’ll see a history graph detailing which apps have been consuming the most battery power and how long you can use the device before the battery is completely drained off. If you observe the Android battery graph more closely, you’ll find some other interesting details as well. For instance, you’ll know the pattern of your mobile signal strength, how often apps running in the background ‘wake up’ your sleeping device and so on. This is the main battery graph and is easy to interpret. If there are any breaks, it indicates that the device was powered off during that period. If there are any red or yellow lines over the graph, it indicates that the charge was critically low during that period. The gray area represents the approximate remaining charge. Related Tip: Do not let your phone’...

ether you are creating a website, writing your resume or designing a presentation, the fonts or typeface you choose can make a notable difference. The Google Fonts directory offers a myriad of choices but how do you pick the correct font for your digital projects? Should you go for Serif fonts or Sans Serif or a combination of serifs and sans serifs? Typography is an art and with 100s of fonts available, it is obviously difficult for non-designers to find that perfect font combination. Need help? Here are some useful font pairing websites where type masters have already done the hard work and all you can do is follow their recommendations to pick the most elegant and gorgeous Google fonts for your web and print projects. 1. Beautiful Web Type ( hellohappy.org ) – Chad Mazzola has created a beautiful showcase of high-quality typefaces from the Google Fonts website. You’ll discover some creative usage of fonts here though they haven’t updated the site for quite some time. 2. Typ.io ( t...

Want to know where you friends and colleagues are? The all-new Map My Contacts app will help you quickly visualize the location of your Google contacts on a world map. It reads the postal addresses of people from your Google Contacts and puts them all in a Google Map using a simple Google script. Create a Google Map with your Google Contacts Publish a Map of Google Contacts It takes one easy step to turn your address book into a Google Map. If you are Google Chrome user, you can install an add-on or you can click here to directly access the “Map My Contacts” web app in any other browser. The app will require authorization because it needs to read the addresses of your Google Contacts and it needs access to Google Drive for saving the generated map. It is an open-source Google Script and you get find the entire source code on ctrlq.org published under the MIT License. Once you have authorized and granted access, the app will run for a few minutes, depending on how big your address boo...

This step-by-step guide describes how you can add a second wireless router to your existing home network and extend the range of the Wi-Fi signal. The router will work as a Wireless Access Point. The wireless range offered by your Internet router will vary depending on which Wi-Fi standard it supports (802.11n routers are better than Wireless-G routers) and also the router’s physical location. You may have bought a new Wireless-N or Wireless-AC router but if there are any thick walls around, they will obstruct the Wi-Fi signal. Expand your Wireless Network Range with a Spare Router The 802.11n routers, also known as Wireless N routers, offer a higher Wi-Fi range but even if you get one of these, the wireless signals may still not reach certain areas of your home because of all the physical obstructions. What should you therefore do to ensure that the Wi-Fi signals are available in full strength in every corner of your house including the lawn outside? There are quite a few option...