Computer Tricks and Secrets

The Evolution of CyanogenMod to LineageOS CyanogenMod, once a popular custom firmware for Android devices, has evolved into LineageOS. This evolution ensures that users continue to receive the latest Android updates and security patches. One of the major concerns for smartphone users has been the Stagefright MMS exploit, which posed significant security risks. Android 14 Integration with LineageOS Enhanced Security Features With the latest update, LineageOS has successfully integrated Android 14, bringing a host of new features and enhanced security. Android 14 introduces robust security measures, effectively addressing vulnerabilities like the Stagefright exploit. Users can now enjoy greater control over their data and device security. Improved Performance and New Features Android 14 on LineageOS offers improved performance and battery optimization. Users will experience smoother device operation, even with resource-intensive applications. Additionally, Android 14 introduces intuitive...

The Evolution of Facebook Applications: What’s Trending in 2024 Facebook remains one of the most popular social media platforms globally, with billions of users. Many people maintain personal profiles and manage business or interest pages. One of the reasons for Facebook's enduring popularity is its wide array of applications, which enhance user experience and engagement. With the rapid growth of technology, Facebook application development continues to be a thriving field. Below, we highlight some of the top Facebook applications that are capturing users' attention in 2024. Top 5 Facebook Applications in 2024 1. Candy Crush Saga Still a favorite among Facebook users, Candy Crush Saga has evolved with new levels, challenges, and events that keep players hooked. Its engaging gameplay, combined with social interaction features, makes it a timeless classic. 2. TripAdvisor As the ultimate travel companion, TripAdvisor remains essential for travelers. The app provides up-to-date r...

Facebook’s Free Basics has been on fire in India since its inception. First it started with internet.org but even it got a lot of negative response from experts all over the country as it was violating Net Neutrality. And now again Facebook has come up with Free Basics in collaboration with Reliance. Again all the experts started firing Free Basics as it was violation Net Neutrality in the country. If you are new here is everything you need to know about Net Neutrality . In an attempt to save Free Basics from getting banned in India, Facebook came up with this strategy by sending notifications to all the people and signing up in support of Free Basics. What does the notification say? This notification is very persistent, and it comes whenever one of your friends signs up without his/her knowledge. A regular internet user who doesn’t has much knowledge about Net Neutrality and Free Basics tend to fall for it and signs up in support of Free Basics which you shouldn’t. When you click on...

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...

Whether you are adding titles in the lower third of a video or creating text captions to be placed on top of a coloured photograph, the text should be readable irrespective of the color of the background image. If you have been struggling to find the perfect text colours for your video or image, try this simple rule. Set the fill colour as white and use a thin black outline and your text captions will be clear readable over any other colour and brightness. This is exactly the reason why most meme generators on the Internet, including the one available on Google+ and Cheezburger.com, use a white font with a black outline for the text to be readable over any background. And if you enable text captions for any YouTube video, you’ll find they also use the white colour with a black outline and a little amount of drop shadow. Thus the titles ill display well in the foreground even if there are different colours used in the video. The source is unknown . One more thing. Prefer using Sans Seri...

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 WordPress ecosystem has grown exponentially in the last few years and there’s a never ending supply of WordPress themes coming from independent developers and marketplaces. With so many choices available, how do you choose a WordPress theme? Should good design and typography be the only criteria or are there other things you should look for before picking a theme? Tips for Choosing a WordPress Theme Design is obviously the most important factor but not the only one. Most WordPress theme developers have a demo website where you can thoroughly evaluate the various features of their themes and these live demos can help you decide whether a theme is worth having or not. How often is the theme updated?  Look for the changelog where theme developers detail new features that have been added to the theme and the various bugs that have been fixed over time. Don’t go for themes that are elegant but haven’t been updated in past six months or ones that aren’t compatible with the most recent ve...

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...

Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at these cinemagraphs and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs. These are animated GIFs created using frames of classic movie scenes that play in an endless loop. How to Create GIF Animations? There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr – not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do. This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay. Step 1: Download FFmpeg and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. The .7z files can be unzipped using the 7-zip utility. Step 2: Now we’ll extract the frames from our video file. The command* is simple. c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi img-%03d.gif If your...

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...

The CSS files of your website may have several redundant rules that are no longer used by any element on the web pages. For instance, you may have added a site search box on your website and associated styles went into the stylesheet. Later, if you decide to remove that search box, the styles may continue to exist in your CSS though they aren’t being used anywhere. These unused entries in your CSS files increase the page load time of your website and also affect the site’s performance as the browser has to do extra work parsing all the extra rules. And even if the impact on performance is minimal, it would make your task of maintaining CSS easier if the files are kept clean and well-structured. Opera and the Firefox browser have a popular add-on called Dust Me that scans your current web page and lists all the unused CSS rules that are defined in the stylesheet but not used on the page. Google Chrome users however do not need to install any add-ons as the Developer Tools built inside ...

It is now easier than ever before to sell your music to a worldwide audience. I’ve been a musician since childhood, and while education, travel and then working for a living got in the way of my dream of becoming a guitar hero, I have never given up hope. Indeed, I’ve spent the last couple of years writing and recording an eclectic mix of songs. The next obvious step was to find some way to get them heard, which is where the advent of social media came into its own. Where to Sell your Music Online While MySpace is something of a musical backwater these days, despite Justin Timberlake’s intervention, it is still a place to post one’s songs and updates for a musically oriented audience. Much stronger and with a better sense of community though is SoundCloud . I began uploading instrumentals and songs to Soundcloud several years ago, but then opted for a paid account to get more comprehensive statistics as well as pretty much unlimited space for audio files. Followers on SoundCloud are co...

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...