Computer Tricks and Secrets

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...

What do you do when your mobile phone has limited storage and there’s no option to add an external SD card? How do you carry all your videos and documents where there’s not an iota of space left on the device? Yes, you do have cloud-based services like Dropbox or Google Drive that add virtually unlimited storage to your phone but you’ve to be connected to the Internet to access your files. A Wireless USB Stick that Expands your Phone’s Storage This week I’ve been testing a wireless USB stick from Sandisk that adds storage to your phones and tablets much like a regular USB drive. To get started, you plug the USB device into your laptop or desktop computer and let it charge for about an hour or two. You can also transfer the files to the stick from the computer through Windows Explorer or Finder on Mac. Once the device is charged, you tap the little power button on the stick to turn it on. Now install the Sandisk Connect app on your mobile phone, go to WiFi settings on your phone and con...

Ten years ago Facebook was just cresting as the cool new social media site that helped you keep in touch with the people you didn’t actually like in high school. We fed it our thoughts and feelings, shared our meals and locations and our top ten movie lists, kept it up-to-date on our relationship status, political views, favorite links, and personal information — all in the name of staying connected, and all without a thought to our security. But with a decade of questions regarding how Facebook makes money  now answered, and a general understanding of how sharing information online can be dangerous (while the platform constantly updates its security protocol ), we continue to use it anyway, even though many of us are just checking in as ritual and have threatened our exit from Facebook for years. Of course, screen time in moderation is, for the most part, perfectly acceptable, and social media can offer a few genuinely beneficial uses. But before you log in or tap that app on your sma...

When you have nothing interesting to watch on TV, you can always switch to the Internet for an unlimited supply of videos ranging from television shows, podcasts, music, full-length movies, news and even live concerts. Your computer screen is not always the best option to watch web videos, especially if the whole family wants to join in so let’s look at some devices that will let you enjoy Internet TV on your widescreen television without requiring any complicated setup. Bring The Web To Your Living Room Enjoy Internet Videos on your TV [caption id="" align="alignright" width="120"] Bring The Web To Your Living Room[/caption] Apple TV  – Connect the device to your TV using a HDMI or component video cable and you’ll be able to download movies, TV shows, podcasts and music from iTunes’ vast library directly through your TV. You can also use Apple TV for watching YouTube videos, for listening to Internet radio stations and for viewing photos that are on your...

The problem : You have documents, photos, music and other important files on the home computer. How can you “remotely access” these files from your office computer or, when you are travelling, from your mobile phone? The solution : The simplest solution would be that you copy all your data from the home computer on to a portable hard drive and carry it around but this is obviously a bit cumbersome approach as it requires you to manually sync the home computer and your portable disk. Access Files on your Computer from Anywhere There are couple of ways by which you can retrieve files stored on your home computer from anywhere else using a regular Internet connection. Option 1: Using Online Backup You can use an online backup service like  SugarSync ,  Carbonite ,  SkyDrive  or even  Dropbox  – they provide desktop utilities that will automatically upload files on your home computer to the Internet and you can then access these files through the web browser of any other Internet connected...

If you have to share a large file with someone over the Internet, there are generally two options – you can either put the file in an email message as an attachment or, if the file is too big to fit inside email, you can upload it to an file hosting service and then share the download links with the recipient. Best Services for Sending Large Files over the Internet Web email services like Gmail and Outlook allow you to send files up to 25 MB in size. For sending even bigger files, you can use a file-splitting utility like HJ-Split that will break the large file into smaller chunks of 25 MB each and you can send these in separate email messages. The recipient can download and join these parts to restore the original file. You can use online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive for sending really big files. Microsoft OneDrive lets you upload single files up to 2 GB in size while the individual size limit is 1 TB (yes 1000 GB) in the case of Google Drive. For even bigge...

This week I have been testing the various online backup services, both paid and free, and here’s a summary of how these service compare against each other. Why use an online backup service? While it is easy to create a  local backup  of your computer, the physical media where you are storing the backups, like the DVDs or external disk, may not be very reliable in the long term. The other disadvantage is that local backups don’t always happen in real-time. It is therefore recommended that you switch to an online backup service – these are inexpensive and will automatically copy your computer’s data over the Internet to a more secure off-site location (aka the data center) in near real-time without your involvement . Which Online Backup Service Should You Use? If you only have a limited amount of data (< 2 GB) on your computer that you want to store in the cloud, any of the following backup services should solve your problem without you having to shell out a penny. All the above onlin...

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...