Computer Tricks and Secrets

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...

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 to Appl...

There are two types of PDF documents – those created by sending Office files, images, etc. to an Acrobat like PDF printer and those created by scanning physical paper like pages of a book, legal documents, etc. Google could always index PDF documents created by conversion but now they also recognize text from PDFs that are generated by scanning paper documents using OCR software. This is a scanned document and this is the html text view of that same document converted by Google. Since scanned PDFs are nothing but images, don’t be surprised if Google adds a "search by text" function to their Image Search engine similar to OneNote or EverNote. That will surely be huge. Convert Scanned PDFs to Text Now if you have bunch of scanned PDF files on your hard drive and no OCR software, here’s what you can do to convert them into recognizable text. Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links ...

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...

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...

Would you like to know how much traffic (or page views) other websites in your niche are getting for competitive analyis? While it will be difficult for any third-party to accurately measure the traffic of a site, there are a bunch of traffic estimation services that can give you a better understanding of the popularity of a website. Here’s a list: 1. Alexa – Enter the website’s domain and Alexa will reveal the ranking of that website based on a combined measure of unique visitors and page views. The rank isn’t based on a site’s traffic alone but is relative to the traffic of all other sites that are monitored by Alexa. Webmasters are often skeptical of Alexa number but they the rank is still a good indicator of a website’s popularity over time. 2. Compete – You can use Compete to estimate the total US traffic (unique visitors) for nearly every site on the web. Compete uses data from ISPs, their own toolbar and other data sources to measure the traffic. It offers other metrics like P...

e Royal Family of UK has selected Google as the web hosting provider for Prince William’s official wedding website. The site, available at officialroyalwedding2011.org, contains news updates, photo galleries and videos and everything is hosted on Google App Engine. What’s new here? Web developers have long used Google App Engine to host web apps in the cloud – see Sleeping Time and Tall Tweets for example – but this is probably the first time that Google’s infrastructure is being used to host a ‘static website’ of an event that will get plenty of press attention and web traffic in the coming days. Host your own website on Google App Engine There are quite a few advantages with hosting websites on Google App Engine. First, it should be more reliable since your site will get served through Google’s own data centers. Second, if you have a low traffic website, it is highly likely that you won’t have to spend a penny for web hosting. You get 1 GB of free storage space for hosting your im...

If browsing speed is important to you—and it should be—you'll probably be interested to know that there are ten simple flag modifications you can make in Google Chrome in order to achieve the fastest browsing speed possible. Speed Hacks That'll Make Google Chrome Blazing Fast Step 1: Access Chrome's "Secret" Settings Chrome allows you to use unofficial browser features called "flags" while they are being tested or are generally unstable. These features are strictly experimental and may break or disappear at any time. In other words, take advantage of them while you can. To access these secret settings, simply enter chrome://flags into your address bar, aka the omnibox. Hit the Enter key, and you will be brought to the flags page and shown a short warning.   It's okay. These features can all be disabled later if you notice any glitches. Step 2: To Make Things Simple, Open "Find…" These flags aren't very organized, so to save you from sc...

Your contacts are often scattered across multiple email accounts and social sites. For instance, you may have switched to Gmail but some of your contacts may still be stored in the old address books of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Then there are places like Facebook and LinkedIn that store personal and professional details of your contacts (including profile pictures) but fetching this information into your main address book is often a tricky thing. Use Google Contacts as a Unified Address Book If you find it a hassle to maintain multiple address books, a possible solution is that you consolidate them all into a single cloud-based service like  Google Contacts . Here are some ideas on how you may go about doing this: Step 1: Bring all address books into Google Contacts Go to  Gmail Settings  and click the “Import Mail and Contacts” button to bring all the existing contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, and your other email accounts into Google Contacts. Next download your a...