Saturday, 4 May 2013

windows 7 tricks and hacks

1. Use Keyboard Shortcuts

Using the mouse, you can drag-”˜n-dock windows to either side of the screen, or drag it to the top to maximize it. These keyboard shortcuts are even faster:

Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow dock the window to the left and right side of the screen
Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximize and restore/minimize
Win+M minimizes everything
Alt+Up, Alt+Left Arrow, Alt+Right Arrow navigate to parent folder, or browse Back and Forward through folders in Explorer
Win+Home minimizes/restores all open windows except the active window
Alt+Win+# accesses the Jump List of program number ‘#’ on the taskbar

2.Rearrange System Tray Icons

You can rearrange icons on the taskbar as you wish and start new (or switch to running) instances of the first ten taskbar programs using Win+1, Win+2, and so on. The cool thing is you can also rearrange system tray icons. Reorder them on the tray or move them outside or back in the tray. Take control of what you want to always keep an eye on, and from which apps you’ll require notifications.

3. Access Jump Lists with the Left Mouse Button

Jump Lists usually show up when you right-click on a taskbar icon. However, they can also be accessed by holding the left mouse button and dragging upwards. If you’re using a laptop touchpad or a touch screen, this is convenient because you do not have to click any button to access a context menu.

4. Add Any Folder to Favorites

You can add any library or folder to the Favorites section in Windows Explorer. To add a folder, navigate to it in Explorer, right-click Favorites in the left navigation pane, and selectAdd current location to Favorites. Now you get quick access to your favorite folders in allFile->Save As dialogs!

5. Pin Frequently Used Folders to the Taskbar

Right-click, drag, and pin your favorite folders to Windows Explorer on the taskbar. They will now show up in the Jump List when you right click on Explorer giving you quick access to your favorite folders.

6. Pin Control Panel to the Taskbar

You cannot pin the Control Panel to the taskbar via the Start Menu or by drag and drop. Open the Control Panel and right-click its taskbar icon to pin it to the taskbar. An advantage of this is that Control Panel’s Jump List allows quick access to recently used functions.

7. Create Keyboard Shortcuts for Programs

You can create keyboard shortcuts for any program in Windows 7. Right-click the program icon and select Properties. Select the Shortcut tab, click in Shortcut key, to set the keyboard shortcut for that program.

8. Open Command Prompt in Any Folder

Like the command prompt? Miss the “˜Open Command Window Here’ Windows XP power toy? Press “˜Shift’ when right-clicking on a folder to get that option in the context menu. This also works on the desktop. No power toy required!

9. View Expanded ‘Send To’ Menu

Press Shift when right-clicking on a folder to get an expanded Send To menu.

10. Adjust Screen Text with Clear Type

Use Clear Type Tuner for the best look on your LCD monitor or laptop screen. Run “˜cttune.exe‘ from the Start Menu search box, or go to the Control Panel Display applet, and select Adjust ClearType Text from the left.

11. Get Exact Colors On Your Screen

If you are an artist or you work with colors, use the Calibrate Color option in the Control Panel Display applet or run dccw.exe from the Start Menu search box. You can adjust gamma, brightness, contrast, and color balance, ensuring that colors are displayed correctly on your screen.

12. Customize the Power Button

If you restart your computer more often than you shut it down, change the default Shutdownpower button to Restart. Right-click on Start, select Properties, and choose the Power button action that you use the most.

13. Customize Number of Items in Jump Lists & Start Menu

Right-click Start, select Properties, click Customize and choose the number of recent programs to be shown in the Start Menu and the number of items displayed in Jump Listsfrom the Start Menu Size section below.

14. Search Internet from the Start Menu

Enable Internet search from the Start Menu using your default browser. Run GPEDIT.MSCfrom the Start Menu search box to start the Group Policy Editor. In the left pane, go to User Configuration->Administrative Templates->Start Menu and Taskbar. In the right pane, right-click to Edit and Enable Add Search Internet link to Start Menu.

15. Add Videos to Start Menu

Windows 7 does not place a link to your videos on the Start Menu by default. To add a link to your videos on the Start Menu, right-click Start, select Properties, click on Customize. In the Videos section at the bottom, choose Display as a link.

Did you like these tips?

Posted by Editorial Team on 06:53 in

10 Cool Firefox Extensions

There are hundreds of Firefox Extensions on the web. Here are some cool Firefox Extensions which make your browsing, downloading and navigation in Firefox as easy as possible, while harnessing the full power and features of Firefox.

Fasterfox - Speed up Firefox. Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with Fasterfox’s unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing. Also tweaks many network and rendering settings.

FlashGot - Handles single and massive downloads with several external Download Managers.

Linky - Lets you open or download all or selected links, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows.

GreaseMonkey - Install user scripts and change the behavior of any web page

All-in-One Gestures - Merges the popular following extensions for management of mouse gestures, scrolling and power navigation. (Mix of Mouse Gestures, Rocker navigation, Tab scroller, History scroller, Link tooltip and Autoscrolling extensions)

Adblock Plus - Is an enhanced version of Adblock. Block ads, applets, flash, embedded-media etc.

SwitchProxy - Lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. You can also use it as an anonymizer to protect your computer from prying eyes.

FoxyTunes - Listen to music while surfing the Web, and control your favorite media player without ever leaving the browser.

Gmail Manager - Allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays your account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.

gTranslate - Translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. Uses the Google translation services.

Posted by Editorial Team on 06:07 in

The Back Button Hack In Firefox To Reduce Memory Usage

Sometimes Firefox becomes quite slow because it uses caching to increase the speed of browsing while you click the back button. This actually results in using more memory. You can disable this feature by doing the following:

1. Start Firefox and type about:config and hit enter.
2. In the Filter column enter “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers” and instead of the -1 setting, change it to0 and hit Enter.
3. Restart your browser, now as soon as you start go to a particular site and then just check the Firefox memory usage, you’ll see the difference.

Enjoy a faster Firefox experience :)

[via BizznTech]

Posted by Editorial Team on 06:05 in

Stop the cell phone thieves

Here is something worth knowing if you have a mobile phone …

Have you ever wondered why phone companies don’t seem interested in trying to prevent the theft of mobile phones? If you have ever lost, or had one stolen, and if you are on a plan, you still have to pay the plan approximately up to 24 months, and you have to buy another handset and enter into another contract. This is more revenue for the phone company. There is a simple way of making lost or stolen mobiles useless to thieves and the phone companies know about it, but keep it quiet. To check your mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following on your phone:

star-pound-zero-six-pound ( * # 0 6 # ) and a fifteen digit code will appear on the screen.

This is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it in a safe place. Should your mobile phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset, so even if the thief changes the sim card, your phone will be totally useless.

You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either. If everybody did this, there would be no point in stealing mobile phones.
You may want to share this with those friends who have cell phones.

Posted by Editorial Team on 06:04 in

How to Fix the “Unable to create directory” Error in WordPress

If you are seeing any of the following errors when you try to upload/import media into WordPress’s media library then this tutorial is for you. It will show you how to fix this annoying error.

Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads
Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads/ Is its parent directory writable by the server?
Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2013/02

I personally faced this issue a while back and wrote a quick fix tutorial on this subject. However, a lot has changed since then so it is time to publish an updated version of the tutorial.

There are a few different possibilities for this error to show up. I will try to cover all the possibilities so hopefully one of them will help you fix the issue.

Fix #1: Update/Change the Uploads Directory Settings

This is the easiest option to try and solve this error so you should try this one first.

Log into your WordPress admin dashboard
Go to Media Settings menu (Settings -> Media)
Enter wp-content/uploads in the “Store uploads in this folder” text box
Save the changes by hitting the “Save Changes” button and you are done

The important thing here is to make sure you only enter the following in the “Store uploads in this folder” field:


wp-content/uploads

Fix #2: Manually Change the Folder Permission

If the above fix doesn’t work then try this option. This method requires you to change the file/folder permissions on your server. If you don’t know how to do this then read the tutorial on how to change permissions.

Change folder permissions on the wp-content directory to 775and try the upload again
If it fails, change the permissions to 777 and try again
if it still fails then do step 1 and 2 for the “wp-content/uploads” directory too

Once you can successfully create the folder and upload the media, be sure to return the permissions on wp-content directory to 755 (your folders should have a permission of 755 for security reasons).

Fix #3: Use This If Your Server is Using Ubutu

The webserver (Apache) runs as user www-data and group www-data by default on a Ubuntu system. If the files/folders are not owned by this user (www-data) then the webserver will be unable to write changes to them.

Change the filesystem permission on the folder (where the web application wants to write to) to the “parent directory” as mentioned in the error message.

For example, do (prepend with sudo if you’re not the current owner and need to elevate your own permissions in order to do it):


chown www-data /path/to/directory

to make www-data the owner which makes it writeable usually, or another approach via groups:


chgrp www-data /path/to/directory
chmod g+w /path/to/directory

Fix #4: Try This If Running PHP in Safe Mode

If your server is running PHP in safe mode then know that it won’t allow you to create files or directories if your PHP scripts and upload directories belong to different users. So try one of the following solutions:

Change the owner of scripts and upload directories (your hosting provider can do this for you)
Disable PHP safe mode (your hosting provider can do this for you)

Fix #5: Use This for XAMPP (LocalHost Installs)

If you have installed XAMPP to run WordPress on your local PC for testing and you are seeing this error then try the following.

Reset the ownership of the WordPress instillation to nobody. You can do this by running the a command in the command line/terminal.

Windows System: Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt
Mac: Applications ->Utilities -> Terminal

The command you need to run is the following (change “wp” to the actual directory name in your installation):

sudo chown -R nobody:staff /applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs/wp

Hopefully one of the above solutions should help you fix the unable to create directory error in WordPress.

Please feel free to share any other techniques/fixes for this error in the comment section below.

Posted by Editorial Team on 06:02 in

Computer application buying tips

Introduction

Purchasing a software application or program can be a big consideration, especially when purchasing advanced and usually expensive programs such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. When considering purchasing these programs it is important that you or your staff be familiar with the program and are sure it's going to be capable of what you need it to do.

On this page we've listed several different considerations to think about before buying a computer software application

Considerations

Competition

Before buying any application make sure there is not a competing program that may be cheaper or even free. If available and something that's capable of doing what you want it to do this could save you hundreds of dollars.

A good example of such a program is OpenOffice and Corel WordPerfect that would be a competitor to Microsoft Word. Both programs are an excellent choice for a word processor but can be a considerable price difference. In the case of OpenOffice, it's 100% free.

Documentation

Make sure proper documentation is included. Many programs today will include on-line documentation that is more than sufficient. However, it is also useful to obtain a manual or user guide for the software program or application.

Licenses

If you are a company who plans on having software programs used by its employees (more than one person), you will need to consider licensing options. It is required that for each computer a product is installed onto that it have a software license. If a company purchases the program and shares it with all its employees without the proper licensing, this would be illegal and can cause your company to face a criminal lawsuit.

Price

Look at your overall price and shop around. Because a software price can change often, you can sometimes save hundreds of dollars on expensive software. If possible, do not purchase directly through the company; many times, the company's price doubles a retailers price.

Be cautious of OEM software. Many resellers will sell a program as OEM, which requires you buy a computer or motherboard. OEM software is software that is included with large manufacturers' computers and will only include either just a CD or a slim manual and CD. This is not what you would find at a retail store. This option is not a bad option, it is only important that you are aware of what you are getting.

Package

Look at the overall software package. How many CDs or diskettes are included, what inserts and documentation is included, and is there any bonus or extra software included?

Media

Today, the majority of software is included on CDs and DVDs. When looking at a program, make sure you have an acceptable drive that's able to read the media, While not common today, an example of why this is important is it's better to receive one CD instead of 32 floppy diskettes.

Posted by Editorial Team on 06:00 in

Top 10 Facebook tip

Below is a listing of our top 10 tips for the popular social networking website Facebook.

Hide users, games, polls, etc.

It quickly gets annoying seeing some users posts, game invites, polls, etc. Hovering your mouse to the right of the post and clicking the Hide button as shown below can hide any post. Once this button is pressed you'll be prompted with the option to hide that user or in the case of a Facebook application the option to hide that application from ever showing up on your profile.

To unhide someone or unblock an application click the Edit Options link in the bottom right corner of the news feed as shown below.

Greasemonkey and FB Purity

Although Facebook does not allow the ability to hide friends getting new friends messages, friends becoming fans of something, and some application messages they can still be hidden with browser add-ons. If you're running Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari we suggest installing the Facebook Purity add-on.

Update your privacy settings

Click Account in the top right corner of the Facebook window and then click Privacy settings to adjust who is capable of seeing what on your Facebook profile. We highly recommend going through all the privacy settings to verify your privacy is properly protected.

Anything that is not set to friends only or friends of friends can be seen by anyone searching on the Internet. Below is a few things we recommend for most users.

Under Search in Privacy settings uncheck Public Search Results. This will prevent users from finding your account and profile picture in search results such as Google
Under Application settings, make sure you're only allowing applications you want to have access to your information. Applications that you grant rights to can have access to your Facebook profile information.

If you're curious to see how a program or web page connect to the Facebook API can see your profile see Tip135.

Use the Facebook top bar for navigation

Knowing how to properly navigate is vital if you want to get the most out of Facebook. Below is a brief description of each of the available options in the top bar as shown above.

Home (facebook logo) - Clicking this logo will take you to your wall (News Feed) that shows all friends recent posts.

Friend requests - If any friend requests are waiting to be approved this icon will show a notification of how many friends are waiting for approval. This icon can also be clicked when you want to view any friend recommendations or search for friends on Facebook.

Messages - This section allows you to send and receive private messages between one or more people you're friends with.

Notifications - Any time a friend or Facebook application creates a new post you'll be notified in this section. Clicking this icon will show all recent notifications. If you wish to change what is capable of sending you notifications including any Facebook applications or games click the See All Notifications link at the bottom and check or uncheck what you want to be notified on.

Search - Finally, the search box in Facebook can be a powerful tool that can be used to quickly find any current friends or people on Facebook. In addition searching for terms such as a company name, product, sports team, music band, etc. will find fan pages and groups that can be joined.

Modify your account notifications

Keep your e-mail and your cell phone clean by updating or eliminate Facebook notifications or keep more up-to-date by adding new notifications. Facebook notifications can be added and removed by clicking Account link in the top right corner, then Account Settings, and then clicking the Notifications tab.

Friday, 3 May 2013

Add a Recycle Bin to your USB Flash Drive:::..

We all use USB flash drives to carry our data with us. We also use these flash drive to work on other people's computer. While working on other computers using your own usb flash drive, if you delete a file it will be sent to the windows's recycle bin. What if you wish to recover that file when you are not on the same system. Sometimes, this type of conditions can be panic.
Having a recycle bin in your flash drive is a nice idea which will store all the data deleted from the flash drive.
iBin is a nice tool which create a different recycle bin in your flash drive. Download this file and put it in the flash drive. When you are working on some other person's computer, Run the ibin.exe file from the flash drive. Now delete files by pressing the Windows Key + Delete. Remember the shortcut keys. It is important When this shortcut key is pressed, any deleted file will be sent to the Flash Drive Recycle Bin instead of the Windows Recycle Bin.

If you press delete button only. files will be sent to the window's recycle bin. So it is important to take care of the shortcut keys.
You can access all deleted files inside the iBin folder in Flash drive. You can also access those files by opening the iBin container folder to display a window::..

http://www.autohotkey.net/~FirstToyLab/project_iBin_download.htm

Posted by Editorial Team on 09:25 in

ACTIVATE FACEBOOK's NEW LOOK
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes you can, For this you should have Google chrome browser,Just One chrome extension and everything is changed. As we all know Facebook makes changes time to time, In this post i will show you how to give a brand new and awesome look to your facebook account.

Just Follow these steps to change Facebook layout.

Step 1: Click Here And get the NewGenBook Desktop extension for your google chrome browser.

Download Link-
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newgenbook-desktop/cjclccgcpfkfemddeefkbepaagjfgbeg

Step 2: Now on the right hand side top you will see Add To chrome Button, Click on it and For confirmation click Ok again.

Step3: Wait a few seconts to install the extension to your google chrome browser.

Step 4:Thats it now open Facebook and experience the whole new look of facebook.

Posted by Editorial Team on 08:59 in

How to Test the Working of your Antivirus – EICAR Test

Have you ever wondered how to test your Antivirus software to ensure it’s proper working? Well here is a quick and easy way to test your antivirus. The process is called EICAR test which will work on any antivirus and was developed by European Institute of Computer Antivirus Research. This process can be used by people, companies and antivirus programmers to test the proper functioning of the antivirus/antimalware software without having to deal with the real computer virus which can cause damage to the computer. Here is a step-by-step procedure to test your antivirus.

1. Open a notepad (New Text Document.TXT) and copy the following code exactly onto it, and save the notepad.



EICAR Test code

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

2. Rename the file from New Text Document.TXT to myfile.com

3. Now run the antivirus scan on this myfile.com file.

If the antivirus is functioning properly on your computer, then it should generate a warning and immediately delete the file upon scanning. Otherwise you may have to re-install your antivirus.

NOTE: Most antivirus will pop-out a warning message in the Step-1 itself

You can also place the myfile.com file in a ZIP or RAR file and run a scan on it so as to ensure whether your antivirus can detect the test string in the compressed archive. Any antivirus when scanning this file will respond exactly as it will do for a genuine virus/malicious code. This test will cause no damage to your computer even though the antivirus will flag it as a malicious script. Hence it is the safest method to test the proper functioning of any antivirus.

Posted by Editorial Team on 08:41 in

Domain Hijacking – How to Hijack a Domain

Domain hijacking is a process by which Internet Domain Names are stolen from it’s legitimate owners. Domain hijacking is also known as domain theft. Before we can proceed to know how to hijack domain names, it is necessary to understand how the domain names operate and how they get associated with a particular web server (website).

The operation of domain name is as follows

Any website say for example gohacking.com consists of two parts. The domain name(gohacking.com) and the web hosting server where the files of the website are actually hosted. In reality, the domain name and the web hosting server (web server) are two different parts and hence they must be integrated before a website can operate successfully. The integration of domain name with the web hosting server is done as follows.

1. After registering a new domain name, we get a control panel where in we can have a full control of the domain.

2. From this domain control panel, we point our domain name to the web server where the website’s files are actually hosted.

For a clear understanding let me take up a small example.

John registers a new domain “abc.com” from an X domain registration company. He also purchases a hosting plan from Y hosting company. He uploads all of his files (.html, .php, javascripts etc.) to his web server (at Y). From the domain control panel (of X) he configures his domain name “abc.com” to point to his web server (of Y). Now whenever an Internet user types “abc.com”, the domain name “abc.com” is resolved to the target web server and the web page is displayed. This is how a website actually works.

What happens when a domain is hijacked

Now let’s see what happens when a domain name is hijacked. To hijack a domain name you just need to get access to the domain control panel and point the domain name to some other web server other than the original one. So to hijack a domain you need not gain access to the target web server.

For example, a hacker gets access to the domain control panel of “abc.com”. From here the hacker re-configures the domain name to point it to some other web server (Z). Now whenever an Internet user tries to access “abc.com” he is taken to the hacker’s website (Z) and not to John’s original site (Y).

In this case the John’s domain name (abc.com) is said to be hijacked.

How the domain names are hijacked

To hijack a domain name, it’s necessary to gain access to the domain control panel of the target domain. For this you need the following ingredients

1. The domain registrar name for the target domain.

2. The administrative email address associated with the target domain.

These information can be obtained by accessing the WHOIS data of the target domain. To get access the WHOIS data, goto whois.domaintools.com, enter the target domain name and click on Lookup. Once the whois data is loaded, scroll down and you’ll see Whois Record. Under this you’ll get the “Administrative contact email address”.

To get the domain registrar name, look for something like this under the Whois Record. “Registration Service Provided By: XYZ Company”. Here XYZ Company is the domain registrar. In case if you don’t find this, then scroll up and you’ll see ICANN Registrar under the “Registry Data”. In this case, the ICANN registrar is the actual domain registrar.

The administrative email address associated with the domain is the backdoor to hijack the domain name. It is the key to unlock the domain control panel. So to take full control of the domain, the hacker will hack the administrative email associated with it. Email hacking has been discussed in my previous post how to hack an email account.

Once the hacker take full control of this email account, he will visit the domain registrar’s website and click on forgot password in the login page. There he will be asked to enter either the domain name or the administrative email address to initiate the password reset process. Once this is done all the details to reset the password will be sent to the administrative email address. Since the hacker has the access to this email account he can easily reset the password of domain control panel. After resetting the password, he logs into the control panel with the new password and from there he can hijack the domain within minutes.

How to protect the domain name from being hijacked

The best way to protect the domain name is to protect the administrative email account associated with the domain. If you loose this email account, you loose your domain. So refer my previous post on how to protect your email account from being hacked. Another best way to protect your domain is to go for private domain registration. When you register a domain name using the private registration option, all your personal details such as your name, address, phone and administrative email address are hidden from the public. So when a hacker performs a WHOIS lookup for you domain name, he will not be able to find your name, phone and administrative email address. So the private registration provides an extra security and protects your privacy. Private domain registration costs a bit extra amount but is really worth for it’s advantages. Every domain registrar provides an option to go for private registration, so when you purchase a new domain make sure that you select the private registration option.

Posted by Editorial Team on 08:40 in

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