Computer Tricks and Secrets

In the beginning of the New Year, if you are planning to buy the best gaming laptop either for you or for someone else. Then, it is vital to take a look at following top 10 best gaming laptops that we compiled for you in a single platform. Ranked 10# Lenovo Y50 Touch 4K It is a high-performance gaming laptop that supports multitouch up to ten fingers that provide some excellent visibility to the keyboards. CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ (quad-core, 6MB cache, up to 3.4GHz with Turbo Boost) Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M (4GB GDDR5 RAM); Intel HD Graphics 4600 Operating System : Windows 10 Home 64 RAM: Up to 16GB PC3-12800 DDR3L SDRAM 1600 MHz Screen: 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 FHD, LED anti-glare backlight Hard Drive ( Storage ): 1TB HDD (5,400 rpm with an 8GB SSD cache) Ports: 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, combination mic/headphone jack, HDMI, 4-in-1 card reader, Ethernet, SPDIF Connectivity: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160, Bluetooth 4.0 Camera: 720p HD webcam Weight: 5...

How can a software company like Automattic make money when they are giving away WordPress blogging software for free? WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg shared how WordPress makes money: 1. Web Hosting – WordPress offers web hosting services to big brands like WSJ’s All Things D, CNN, TechCrunch, Time.com and more. The pricing for WordPress VIP Hosting starts at $15,000 per month. 2. Google AdSense – Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google AdSense ads and the ad revenue goes to WordPress. The Google ads will only appear if all the following three conditions are met: The visitor is not using Firefox browser. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So if you land on abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com, you won’t see any Google Ads. Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as they do aro...

Amazon owned Junglee.com is probably the biggest price comparison website in India. Unlike other comparison engines that mostly focus on “popular” online sellers, Junglee lists prices from smaller stores as well that aren’t well-known brands but may sometimes offer better deals. Get email notifications when prices drop What some may not know is that Junglee offers price alerts, a useful feature that is not even available on its parent Amazon website. You can add one or more items to your watch list on Junglee and the site will send you an email alert whenever the price of a monitored product drops by 300 or more. To set your price alert, open any product page on Junglee – like this listing of iPhone 6 – and click the button ( screenshot ) that says “Price too high”. Next click the “Set alert” button and the product will be added to your watch list. You can manage all your price alerts from this page . Junglee’s price tracker is reliable but a downside is that it will not show prices f...

Go long. Go wide. Go big. Google recommends that AdSense publishers switch to wider ad formats as more Adwords advertisers target these ad sizes, more competition among advertisers leads to higher eCPMs thus translating into increased earnings for the website owner. The statistics suggest that the best performing banner sizes are the 336×280 Large Rectangle and the 300×250 Medium Rectangle. In addition to standard IAB units, the AdSense program now supports custom-sized ads which may serve even bigger rectangular ads. Will they perform better than the standard ads? There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and what is working on my site may or may not be the most optimized solution for some other website. As a publisher, you need to run A/B tests on your site for about a week and only then you can you reach a conclusion based on the CTRs and CPMs of individual AdSense ad units. Split Testing isn’t a new concept for most AdSense publishers but with the introduction of asynchronous responsiv...

The computer keyboard creates “dumb” punctuation marks that may not be acceptable in printed work but are common on web pages. It outputs straight quotation marks (") while your writing may require curly quotes. You can only type hyphens using the keyboard while an em or en dash may have made your text look more elegant and professional. HTML Entities for Punctuation HTML Codes for Punctuation Your keyboard lacks the keys for inserting the correct punctuation marks but there are simple HTML character codes, on entities, that you can use to mimic the typography of printed books on the web. Here’s a quick guide to using HTML codes for inserting typographically-correct punctuation marks in web writing. Hyphens (-) Hyphens, or half-dashes, are most commonly used to join together two or more words. You can type a hyphen directly without using any HTML codes. The next-generation iPhone is expected to become available in mid-September. The word email contains no hyphen but there’s on...

We use cell phones thousands times a day and can’t even imagine our life without this tool. It helps us to be in touch with lots of people in any country, to make business and to have a fun. Sometimes you face up the problem of missed calls because of a bad mobile connection.   W hy the mobile signal is weak? The construction materials used at the process of building of the house or office the main cause of a bad signal inside. Some kinds of them can block the mobile signal. The mobile net structure with lots of towers located far from each other that can be the cause of a bad connection at the time of changing zones when you’re driving. Bad mobile service of your operator can be the main cause off missed calls. You’re situated in the area with a lack of inhabitants where the mobile signal is very low. Your mobile phone has a damaged antenna. How to cope with a problem of a bad signal? If your house or office have become a cause of a bad cell signal it’s better to find ...

If I will give an option to you to choose an Email address from firstnamelastname@gmail.com and firstname@lastname.com then which one you will choose? Definitely the second one. Its Cool, looks professional and brand-able. These are called professional Domain names which you can setup easily once you Register a Domain name from any Domain Registering Site. You can setup your Brand-able Email address at Outlook.com . You can get free personal storage from Microsoft’s Skydrive where you can store your Important files secured. Guide to Setup a Custom Domain Name- You can make a Custom Domain name from Outlook.com by configuring your domain’s MX and TXT Records. MX record will tell your DNS (Domain Name Server) that you will be using Microsoft Mail server and TXT will verify that you are the Owner of the Domain. 1- Goto Windows Live Admin Center and click on Sign In . 2- Enter your Domain name on the next page. 3- On the next page If you have a Microsoft account then login through it ...

You have been using Google Alerts for keeping track of anything new and interesting on the web around your topics of interest but did you know that there exists a plethoro of other email alerting services that are again very useful and do not cost a penny. Let me just dive right in. Follow your World – The is a Google service that allows you to track satellite images of various locations within Google Maps and Google Earth. You’ll get an email alert each time Google releases new and updated aerial imagery for the various locations that you are tracking. Newsle – The service tracks news websites and alerts you when any of your friends or people in your social network appear in news stories. It analyzes your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts to determine your friends and colleagues. Brook – Your Twitter timeline is a never-ending stream of tweets and sometimes good tweets get lost in the noise. Brooks sends you a daily email digest of the five best tweets from your favorite tweeter...

I have written a new web app that should make it extremely easy for you to embed the new version of Google Maps in your website or blog. Available at ctrlq.org , the apps lets you add basic road maps, satellite imagery or even maps with Street View Panoramas to your website (see video demo ). Getting started is easy. Search for a place and pan or zoom to make sure that the Google Maps area you’d like to embed is visible inside the browser window. The embed code, available in the lower left corner, updates automatically as you move around the map. You may be wondering why would anyone need another code generator when the map embedding options are available on the Google Maps website itself. Well, there are two reasons. One, Google Maps does not offer an option to embed Street View panoramas. You could do that in the old (classic) version of Google Maps but that feature is no longer available. With the ctrlq generator, you can add interactive street views panoramas just like regular Goo...

You meet this person at the gym everyday and one fine morning, he sends you a friend request on Facebook. What do you do? You have exchanged a few conversations with him, he seems like a genuinely nice person but still you don’t know him enough to approve that friend request. How do you deal with these unwanted friend requests on Facebook coming from office colleagues or old classmates who are acquaintances but not really friends? When you receive a friend request from someone who you do not wish to be friends with, you can either politely reject the request or ignore it and the request will appear as pending in their timeline. Or when you have no option but to approve that request, you can click “Confirm” to add that person to your Facebook but put him or her in your Restricted list. When you put someone in the Restricted list, they will be listed as your friend on Facebook but they’ll only see your photos and other posts that are public. In other words, they can only see stuff that y...

A new web called  GIFDeck  helps you convert any presentation hosted on SlideShare into an animated GIF file. All you have to do is specify the deck URL and the app will fetch the individual slides as images and stitches them all together in a single GIF that will auto-play and auto-loop. Here’s a sample GIF created from a SlidShare presentation on Steve Jobs. The app only converts the initial 10 slides, probably to keep the size of GIF within limits, but you do have an option to queue all the slides of a deck for conversion. While SlideShare does offer an HTML5 based option to embed presentations on external websites, the GIF based approach will still come handy in many situations. For instance, you can send your presentation in an email message – just drag the GIF in your Gmail compose window – and recipients will be able to scan through the deck right inside their email client. Similarly, you can tweet the GIF or post it on Tumblr and the people can quickly view your slides in any b...

Do you know that you can restart your Android phone in safe mode much like your Windows or Mac computers? Press and hold the Power / Sleep button on your phone and you’ll be presented with an option to Power Off the device. Tap and hold that option and you will now be able to reboot your phone in “safe” mode. When the phone is in safe mode, you’ll see the words Safe Mode in the lower left corner of the screen. Apparently I am very late to the party – the safe mode feature has been available in Android for many years – but it does seem to solve two problems: If your Android phone freezes or crashes on startup, or randomly restarts, you can force restart your phone in Safe mode and uninstall any of the recent app(s) that may be preventing your phone from working correctly. Now when your phone is in safe mode, you would only see the factory-installed apps on the phone but you can still go to Settings -> Apps to uninstall any apps that you have recently downloaded. If your Android p...

When you open any page inside Google Chrome, it connects to the Internet, fetches the latest version of the page from the server and displays it on your screen. If your computer is offline, Chrome will display an error message with a dinosaur* image saying it is unable to connect to the Internet. Internet Explorer and Firefox offer an offline mode that auto-saves a copy of web pages as you browse the Internet and displays this local copy when you are not connected to the Internet. Thus, if you are offline in a flight, you can still open and read websites that you accessed while your computer was online. Offline Browsing inside Google Chrome The recent versions of Google Chrome also support offline browsing though the option to easily access the cached version of any web page is hidden deep inside the settings. While inside Chrome, type chrome://flags/ to access the experimental features page and search for the “Enable Offline Load Stale Button” option. Click “Enable” against the optio...

What do you do when your Google Drive is running out of storage space? You either add more storage or the inexpensive option is that you clean up your Drive and delete the large files that are hogging up the bulk of space. But how do know where these big files are hiding in your Drive? Google Drives lists the file size but without the sort option. If you switch to the List View in Google Drive (the list icon is near the Settings gear), it will show the sizes of all your files but unfortunately there’s no option to sort that list by their sizes. Also, Google Drive doesn’t support a Gmail-style size search operator so, unlike your emails, you cannot search for big files in Drive. There’s however an easy workaround. While you are in Google Drive, go to bottom left corner and you’ll see a link that shows how much storage space you have used. Hover your mouse over that link and then choose Google Drive. Voila! The list you now see is sorted by size and the largest are listed at the top. Yo...

You can now use the WhatsApp messenger on your Mac or Windows PC provided you have the WhatsApp app running on a mobile phone that is not an iPhone. Go to web.whatsapp.com on your desktop, scan the QR code on the screen with WhatsApp on your phone and you can instantly send or receive messages to any of your WhatsApp contacts from the computer. WhatsApp supports desktop notifications in Google Chrome so you can read your messages even if the WhatsApp web app is open in some background tab. The other benefit is that you can send pictures from your desktop or the DSLR SD card without having to transfer the bulky file to your mobile. There’s no support for sending audio or video files though. The other limitation is that your mobile phone should be connected to the Internet for you to use WhatsApp on the web. If you right-click on the profile picture of any WhatsApp contact, you’ll get a link that looks something like this; https://web.whatsapp.com/pp?t=s&u=919760008596 Here the blue ...

If you need to make changes in an existing PDF file, you need to get hold of the original document that was used to create the PDF, make the edits in the source document and export it as a PDF again. This is the best option since the document’s layout and formatting will be preserved in the new PDF file and you don’t even need an external PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat. However, if you do not have access to the source document, you can still edit your PDF files in the browser using the free Word app. It may not be able to handle PDF files with complex layouts, or PDFs that are mostly comprised of charts and images but for text based PDF, Word is a probably a good options for fixing typos or manipulating text and images in PDFs. See example . Edit PDF Files with Word Online Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can edit the content of PDF files inside the Word web app. Go to onedrive.com and sign-in with your Microsoft account. While you are logged in, drag a PDF file from the deskto...

The bank sends me monthly credit card statements as password-protected PDF files mostly because they contain personal information. I archive these PDFs into Google Drive but, because these files are protected with a password, the text isn’t searchable inside Drive. Also, each PDF file has a different password so it’s impossible to remember them and takes just too much to find these PDFs later. Removing Password from a PDF File Since the Google Drive is already protected with 2 layers of security – password and 2-factor authentication – it should be OK if we remove the password protection from PDF files before uploading them to Drive. Is there any software program available that can remove password protection from PDF files? One that doesn’t cost a dime and works on both Mac and Windows? Well the answer is yes and that too is already installed on your computer. It’s called Google Chrome. Google Chrome has a built-in PDF reader* and a PDF writer and we can combine the two features to rem...

A Friend has a book publishing business and have customers across the country who sell these books. They are old-school businesses that always relied on paper-based forms and fax for sending orders but now that they have WhatsApp on their mobile phones, they write their requirements on paper, snap an image and send it via WhatsApp. On this side, the received WhatsApp images are saved to the computer, printed and sent to the respective departments for processing. The problem with the workflow is that there are quite a few steps involved after the WhatsApp image is received. Since WhatsApp neither offers a desktop client and nor does it allow integration with services like IFTTT or Zapier, the incoming images have to manually transferred from the phone to computer for sending to the printer. Is there a way to automate these steps? Yes. When a photograph, or any media file, is received inside WhatsApp, it is automatically saved to the phone’s physical memory. The media is downloaded witho...

Your mobile phones, tablets and laptops have rechargable Lithim Ion batteries that lose capacity as they age but with good care, the batteries may last for 2 to 3 years or even longer. What can you do to increase the overall lifespan of your gadget’s battery? Should you keep your mobile devices charged or wait for the charge to drop to 0% before charging them again? I recently scanned the websites of consumer electronics companies, including HP , Asus , Apple ,  Dell  and also Battery University  – for their recommendations on how to maximize the battery life and here’s a quick summary of what I learned: 1. Avoid deep discharge meaning you should not continue using the device until the battery drains down to 10% or below. The optimal charge level for Li-Ion batteries is suggested between 40% and 70% and, if possible, charge your device in short bursts multiple times a day. 2. If you are not planning to use a gadget for long periods, like more than a month, charge them to around 50% ...

Notice some suspicious activity on your wall? Well there some simple security settings built into Facebook – some of these settings are new while others have been around for some time – that should help you quickly detect if any other person is secretly logging into and using your Facebook account. Go to Facebook.com -> Account -> Account Settings -> Account Security.  Here you’ll see a list of all computers and mobile devices that have logged into your Facebook account and when. You can also see the approximate geographic location of the device, based on the IP address, that was used to access your Facebook account. If you come across an unknown device / location in the list, say you are Mac user and the device listed is IE on Windows, just click the corresponding “end activity” link and it should immediately log you out from that machine. For extra safety, you may also choose to receive email and SMS alerts if someone else tries to log into your Facebook account from a previ...