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...

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...

A class teacher needs her students to submit homework at the end of the week. A company wants designers to send the mockups and design drafts for review. A news organization is asking public to upload documents to their website. An event organizer is requesting attendees to send any photos or videos that they may have taken at the event. What do you think is the easiest solution for all these use cases? Yes, e-mail. People can send you files by email and you can then use the Save Attachmentsscript to automatically download these files to your computer. The big problem is that you cannot receive big files via email and second, it does take some work to organize stuff that arrives in email. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could create a public folder on the Internet where anyone could go and simply upload the files instead of sending them to you as file attachments. Students can upload assignments, designers can upload mockups and your friends can upload photographs. Let Anyone Upload Files...

The English edition of Wikipedia Encyclopedia contains around 5 million articles and if someone were to print the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia into a book, the size of the printed book would roughly be equivalent to 2000+ volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica ( source ).Wikipedia Available as a Printed Book Rob Matthews, a graphics design student from UK, converted 5000 pages of Wikipedia into a printed book in 2012. He downloaded few hundred featured articles from Wikipedia and bound them together in a physical book that was almost 1’7″ thick. Rob’s website (rob-matthews.com) has been taken over by domain squatters but the pictures of the printed Wikipedia book have survived. If the entire Wikipedia Encyclopedia were available as a physical printed book, it would span 7500 volumes. And someone is just trying to make that happen.   While Rob limited his printed book to the featured articles, Michael Mandiberg’s team has a more ambitious plan. They’re working on making the entire...

Touch typing, or the art of typing with your 10 fingers, can do wonders to your productivity. Most technologically literate people know a bit of typing but if you can type without looking at the computer keyboard, you can get work done faster and gain an edge. Touch typing is also a useful skill to have for mobile and tablet users because when you perfectly know where the keys are, you can “Swype” faster. Master the Art of Touch Typing I learned the basics of typing on an old typewriter. Two decades later, I am busy hunting a good typing software for my kid and the number of choices that are available on the web now is mind-boggling. I’ve shared my research here and, whether you are a beginner looking to learn typing or typing to improve your typing speed, this list should help you. If you are just getting started, the BBC’s Dance Mat Typing should be your go-to resource. It is a browser-based game for kids where each lesson touches a different set of keys and there’s a game at the en...

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...

With Android L, you can easily record high resolution videos of your phone or tablet’s screen without having to root the device. Android Kitkat too allowed screen recording but with Lollipop, the process has become almost as easy as recording screencasts on your desktop – you launch an app (there are several alternatives to choose from), hit the record button and everything that’s on your screen, including touches, will be captured as a MPEG-4 video. The Perfect Screen Recorder for Android A quick search on the Google Play store returns a dozen Android apps that support screen recording for Android v5 or later. Some apps are free while others are paid but they mostly offer a similar set of features. You can record the screen as well the on-screen touches so the viewer has a better idea about how you are interacting with the apps. They can record the external microphone audio but none of the apps I tried allowed recording of internal system audio. Maybe that is a limitation of the Andro...

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 ...

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...

Google Contacts is Google's contact management tool that is available in its free email service Gmail, as a standalone service, and as a part of Google's business-oriented suite of web apps Google Apps. You can export your Gmail Contacts list into a .csv file prior to importing them into FullContact (to have a backup) using these steps: Sign in to Gmail. Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts . From the More actions drop-down menu, select Export... . Choose whether to export all contacts or only one group. Select the format in which you'd like to export your contacts' information. Please note, some of these formats can lose some contact information. To transfer contacts between Google accounts, use the Google CSV format. This is the recommended way to back up your Google Contacts. To transfer contacts to Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or various other apps, use the Outlook CSV format. To transfer contacts t...

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 ...

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...

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 And...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 i...