Computer Tricks and Secrets

In the beginning of the New Year, if you are planning to buy the best gaming laptop either for you or for someone else. Then, it is vital to take a look at following top 10 best gaming laptops that we compiled for you in a single platform. Ranked 10# Lenovo Y50 Touch 4K It is a high-performance gaming laptop that supports multitouch up to ten fingers that provide some excellent visibility to the keyboards. CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ (quad-core, 6MB cache, up to 3.4GHz with Turbo Boost) Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M (4GB GDDR5 RAM); Intel HD Graphics 4600 Operating System : Windows 10 Home 64 RAM: Up to 16GB PC3-12800 DDR3L SDRAM 1600 MHz Screen: 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 FHD, LED anti-glare backlight Hard Drive ( Storage ): 1TB HDD (5,400 rpm with an 8GB SSD cache) Ports: 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, combination mic/headphone jack, HDMI, 4-in-1 card reader, Ethernet, SPDIF Connectivity: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160, Bluetooth 4.0 Camera: 720p HD webcam Weight: 5...

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...

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...

How do I contact the owner of a website? Where is a particular website hosted? What other websites are hosted on that same server ? Is the site using WordPress or the Drupal platform? What ad networks are they using to monetize a site? Is the site accessible from China? The best tools to know everything about any website. Picture credit: Flickr Here are some of the most useful online tools that will help you know each and every detail of any website. Let’s get started. just-ping.com — Use Just Ping to determine if a particular website or blog is accessible from other countries. Unlike other online ping services that have service in a couple of locations, Just Ping has 30 monitoring stations across the world including Turkey, Egypt and China. If the ping results say 100% Packet Loss, most likely the site is inaccessible from that region. who.is — If you like to know the contact address, email and phone number of the website owner, this free whois lookup service will help. This is ...

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...

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...

Your mobile phone has a globally unique number associated with it, called the IMEI number, that uniquely identifies your device within the mobile network. If your phone gets lost or is stolen, you would need to provide this IMEI number to the law enforcement agencies and the telecom operator for them to blacklist your device and prevent anyone else from using your phone on their wireless network. As you probably know, it is relatively easy to find the IMEI number of your mobile phone. While there are apps that will help you retrieve this number with a tap, you don’t really need one. Just open the phone dialer, call *#06# and the IMEI number will be displayed on the phone’s screen. Alternatively, you can open device Settings – About Phone – Status and long-press the IMEI number to copy it to the clipboard. If you have however lost your phone but did not record the IMEI number beforehand, you can still retrieve the number from your Google Account. Just go to google.com/settings , sign-i...

When you embed any YouTube video on your website using standard IFRAME tags , you’ll be surprised to know how much extra weight that YouTube video will add to your page. The web page has to download ~0.5 MB of extra resources (CSS, JavaScript and images) for rendering the YouTube video player and the files will download even if the visitor on your website has chosen not to watch the embedded YouTube video. The embedded video is making your page heavy and the visitor’s browser will also need to make multiple HTTP requests to render the video player. This increases the overall loading time of your page and thus affects the page speed score. The other drawback with the default YouTube embed code is that it isn’tresponsive. If people view your website on a mobile phone, the video player would not resize itself accordingly. Load YouTube Video Player On-Demand Google Plus uses a clever workaround to reduce the time it takes to initially load the YouTube video player and we can incorporate a ...

The Learn to Code movement has picked up momentum worldwide and that is actually a good thing as even basic programming skills can have a major impact. If you can teach yourself how to write code, you gain a competitive edge over your peers, you can think more algorithmically and thus can tackle problems more efficientlyThe Best Websites to Learn Coding Online . Don’t just download the latest app, help redesign it. Don’t just play on your phone, program it. — Obama . There’s no reason why shouldn’t know the basics of coding. You can automate tasks, you can program your Excel sheets, improve workflows, you can extract data from websites and accomplish so much more with code. You may not be in the business of writing software programs but knowing the basics of coding will help you communicate more effectively with developers. Gone are the days when you had to enroll in expensive computer training classes as now exist a plethora of web-based courses that will help you learn programming a...

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...

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...

Here are some of the most useful websites on the internet that you may not know about. These web sites, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can memorize thus saving you a trip to Google. And if you find this list useful, also check out the expanded version – The Most Useful Websites – which now offers a collection of 150+ undiscovered and incredibly useful websites to enhance your productivity. The Most Useful Websites and Web Apps ctrlq.org/screenshots – for capturing screenshots of web pages on mobile and desktops. dictation.io – online voice recognition in the browser itself. zerodollarmovies.com – find full-length movies on YouTube. screenr.com – record movies of your desktop and send them straight to YouTube. goo.gl – shorten long URLs and convert URLs intoQR codes. unfurlr.come – find the original URL that’s hiding behind a short URL. qClock – find the local time of a city using Goo...