Computer Tricks and Secrets

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...

When John sends an email message to Elizabeth, the IP address of the sender (John’s computer) is included in the header of the outgoing email message. The receiver (Elizabeth) can then perform a simple geo-lookup against that IP address to find the approximate geographic location of the message sender How to Find the Sender’s Location in Gmail Both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail include IP addresses in outgoing message headers but if John is sending an email address using Gmail, or Gmail for Google Apps, his IP address won’t be included in the message. IP addresses can be considered sensitive information. As such, Gmail may hide sender IP address information from outgoing mail headers in some circumstances. If the IP address of John is not available, because he is sending email using Gmail, how can Elizabeth determine John’s geographic location? There two options: Option A: Gmail may include the IP Address Gmail doesn’t include the IP address of the sender when the sender is using Gmail’s we...

You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation forward, you would like to do some research on the Internet to know more about that person. How do you do this without directly asking the other person? Google is the most obvious place for performing reverse email lookups (just Google for the email address) but if that person doesn’t have a website or if they have never used their email address on public forums, Google will be of little help. No worries. If you only know the email address of a person and nothing more, here are some ways that may help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender. Find the Person Behind an Email Address #1. Find the sender’s location Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “ Received: from ” and are followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry. Now paste the IP addre...

It happens all the time. You are sitting in a restaurant with friends or driving to work and there’s some beautiful music playing on the FM radio station. You would love to buy a copy of that music album for yourself but the problem is that you didn’t get the lyrics so how do you find out the name of that song. “What’s the name of that song ? I don’t remember the lyrics” Search engines like Google or Bing won’t be of much help unless you know a couple of words from the song lyrics or have some clue about the name of the artist or the band. How do you then identify the name of that lovely song? Well, here are some of the best music recognition services that can help you discover song names without having to know the lyrics. You may use them to identify music playing from the radio, TV, Internet or that CD playing in the bar. Find the Song Name Without Knowing the Lyrics 1a.  Shazam  – Shazam is a mobile application that you may use to find song names from your iPhone, BlackBerry, Window...

How to Find iPhone Manufacturing Date Finding manufacturing date of your iPhone is not a straight forward as you have to identify it from its serial number. You can know the year and date of manufactured for your iPhone by looking at it’s serial number. iPhone serial number is made of six(6) items, you have to decode the iPhone’s serial number, look out for:  FM Y PW UID CL S FM  = Factory and Machine ID (1st and 2nd digit) Y  = Year (3rd digit) PW  = Production Week (4 and 5th digit) UID  = Unique Identifier (6,7 and 8th digit) CL  = Color (A4=black) and (9 and 10th digit) S  = size (S=16GB, T=32GB) (11th digit) So just by looking your serial number you can know that when your iPhone was born