Disable restart after Windows Automatic Updates

The Windows Automatic Updates feature is great, however those nagging reboot reminders can drive you crazy. I can only recommend to turn this off.

Usually, this restart now/restart later pop up appears when I am doing something important or when I have some remote connections open. I also like it if Windows rebooted automatically during my lunch break while several virtual machines are running.

In my view this feature doesn’t bring in extra security. All these pop up windows warning about security issues are more or less useless. People get used to them, and click on them automatically. In this way these pop-ups might even decrease security. If there ever is an important security message, the user will just click away without really reading it because he is trained to do so.

So here is how you can turn off the restart reminder of Windows Update:

1. Click Start -> Run
2. Enter “gpedit.msc”
3. Go to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
4. Double-click on “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Update installation”
5. Disable it! Enable it!
6. Reboot the computer

You can also change the default setting of “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” to remind you once a day, or so if you can still stand these pop-ups. If you want to change this for your whole network, you can use Group Policy. For security reasons, I recommend that all computers should be turned off after work or office hours.

Disable "Your computer might be at risk" Popup in Windows XP SP2

Since upgrading to XP SP2 a long time ago, I constantly get nagged by a popup message that tells me my computer might be at risk because I don’t have an antivirus software installed. Here’s how to turn off that annoying message.

Note: You should probably have antivirus software installed.

You will want to open up your control panel, and then open the Security Center icon.

On the left hand side of the security center window, you will see a resources section. Click the bottom link, “Change the way Security Center alerts me”

You can choose which alert to disable here. Since I don’t have antivirus software, I unchecked the bottom checkbox.

No more annoying popups!

How to Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required – just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.

Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to "Protect my Updates".

Let’s get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

How to Send Commands to the Remote Computer

Now that your basic configuration is done, it’s time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.

By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer. (Also see: Post to Twitter via Email)

By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.

By IM: Add the Twitter bot – twitter@twitter.com – to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.

By Web:If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

Download Files, Capture Remote Screenshots & more..

While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well.

For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home.

Here’s a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC – they’re case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.

Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I’ve come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what’s happening within the confines of your PC when you’re not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web (see example).

ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.

Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.

GetFile : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don’t know the file page, use the command GetFileList to get a list of file folders on that drive.

GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You’ll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.

Conclusion:

TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there’s scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it’s not "instant". The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour.

And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.

Turn Your Home Computer into a Web Server in 2 Minutes

You may find this technique useful even if you are not a very tech-savvy user.

Before getting into the actual process, let’s look at a couple of real-world situations that explain why you may want to turn your home computer into a web server.

Situation #1. Say you have music MP3s, documents and other important files on the hard drive of your home computer. If you turn this home computer into a web server, you will be able to access all these files from office or any other Internet connected machine including your mobile phone.

Situation #2. You have some personal photographs that you want to share with other family members. You can either upload these pictures online to a site like Flickr or better still, just convert the computer into a web server. Now you can connect the camera to the computer, transfer the digital pictures to some designated folder and they’ll instantly become available to your friends and family anywhere in the world.

Situation #3. You want to host a website on the internet but the web hosting jargon like FTP, DNS, etc. is way too complex for you. The workaround therefore is that you setup a web server on your home computer (it’s easy) and then host a website in seconds without spending a single penny on external web hosting services.

Now if any of the above reasons look convincing enough, here’s how you can convert your Windows, Mac or Linux PC into a web server in less than two minutes – no technical knowledge required.

Go to labs.opera.com, download the Opera Unite software and install it. Congratulations, you are now running a web server on your machine and just need another minute to configure local file folders that you want to share with others over the internet.

Here’s an illustrated screenshot of the configuration panel – nothing technical here again.

Start the Opera Web browser (yes, that’s also you web server now) and enable the Opera Unite service from the lower left corner. Now double click the File Sharing link and select the folder whose content you want to share on the web. Any file or folder inside this folder can now be accessed over the internet – you can either use a public URL or specify a password for private sharing.

The following screencast video has more detailed instructions on how to get started with Opera Unite or you may refer to the User Guide if you get stuck somewhere.

Opera Unite looks pretty useful but there are other services around that can also do pretty similar stuff. For instance, both PurpleNova and Dekoh Dekstop enable users share content on the Internet directly from the hard drive without having to upload it anywhere.

Update: It’s important to note that your computer must be in running state and also connected to the Internet for others to download files and web pages since Opera Unite streams content directly from your machine – it doesn’t upload or caches anything to its own servers. Give it a shot. [flickr]

Best Ways to Reduce Printing Cost of Documents, Photos, Webpages

The following tips should help you save money by reducing the total cost of printing on Inkjet, Bubblejet or Laser printers. The tips apply to color printers as well as black-n-white printers.

Before moving to the tips, here's some advice for people who are yet to make a decision between an Inkjet and a Laser Printer. Generally, the price of Inkjet printers is less than the price of Laserjet printer but in the long run, Inkjet printers prove a bigger burden to your pocket as the cost of toner cartridges is very high.

My suggestion would be to take the Laser option if you plan to print more than 8-10 documents per day. With Laser printers, the cost of ink consumed is much less, and the print speed as well the print quality is much better. However, if you are on a budget and need to take prints of your colored digital images, a Inkjet printer would be more suitable.

When printing Webpages:

Option 1: Most web pages have a "Print This Page" link that reformats the current webpage by removing all the banner ads, graphics, etc. Else save the webpage as text and then print the text file by opening it in Notepad.

Option 2: If the above option is not available, you may still select the portions with your mouse that you want to print and paste them in Notepad or Microsoft word. You'll save on paper as well as ink.

Option 3: This is my favorite trick - Get the Aardvark Firefox Extension. It is the best way to remove or hide any object from a webpage including HTML tables, div elements and images. Start Aardvark, hover the mouse over webpage areas that you don't want to print and press E (erase). Highly recommended.

Option 4: This is for geeks who are aware of HTML. Save the current webpages as HTML on your hard-drive, open that HTML file in Nvu, Dreamweaver or even Notepad and delete the HTML tags, content that you don't want to see in the printed document. Once you have cleaned up, open the file in IE or Firefox and print from there.

When printing Office Documents like XLS, PPT or DOC:

For Powerpoint: Print Handout and not slides. Use Grayscale or B&W mode rather than the default Color mode.

For Excel: Instead of printing full spreadsheets or the entire active spreadsheet page, select the areas (or cells) that you want to print and choose "Print Selection". Reduce the print quality (dpi) from the Page setup window and also deselect the option to Print Gridlines. If possible, use the Draft Quality mode.

For Word: Click "Options" button in the Print window and choose "Draft output" in the Printing options. Specify the page numbers that you want to print instead of printing the entire document. That will save your printing time, paper as well as ink.

When printing Photographs or Web Images:

Printing colored pictures on a home computer consumes the maximum amount of ink.

For many inkjet printers, printing a color photo can use as much as 30 times more ink than printing a standard page of text. The best bet is that you take the digital camera to the nearest photograph printing lab rather than print those jpg files at home. That may actually cost cheaper than printing on your personal printer.

If you still want to print images at home, get a good photo editing software like Photoshop or Gimp or even Paint.NET. Resize and Crop the picture to make it look more interesting. For best results, use photo paper recommended by the printer manufacturer as non-standard quality paper may jam the printer rollers or may even repel ink. I personally prefer a photopaper with a Matte finish than a glossy paper.

If you print too many digital photos at home, consider investing in a dedicated Color Photo Printer.

Tips for Inkjet Printer Owners:

A common business model for inkjet printers involves selling the actual printer at or even below production cost, while dramatically marking up the price of the (proprietary) ink cartridges.

Most inkjet printers have three print quality modes: best, normal, and draft but many printers use almost the same amount of ink when printing in best and normal modes. The main advantage to normal mode is that the page is printed more quickly. Draft mode, however, will significantly reduce your ink consumption. The tradeoff to using draft mode is that you often get results with very poor print quality.

For inkjet users, I would highly recommend Ink Saver 2.0, a amazing printer addon that gives you more control over the Print Job and significantly reduces the overall cost of printing while mainting the print quality. Before setting up, you can print a sample InkSaver page that illustrates how documents will look when printed at various ink reduction settings. You can choose ink savings from 0 to 75%.

Happy Printing.

10 Email Addresses That Will Be Useful When You No Internet Access

Have you ever come across a situation where you don’t have access to the Internet but can send or receive email messages? With email and no Internet, how do you read websites and blogs or check the current stock prices, or find what’s the top story on CNN homepage.

Well, you can do a lot of interesting things over email without a web connection – you can read any webpages over email, maintain your task list, convert documents, upload photo and videos, get dictionary meanings of words and more.

Just make sure that you have added the following address to your email address book:

10. pdf@koolwire.com – You have an Office document or a picture on your computer or mobile phone that you wish to convert into a PDF file. Just email that file an email attachment to the above address and it will soon return to your Inbox as a PDF file. [koolwire review]

9. ..@photos.flickr.com – Flickr provides a unique email upload address here – you can send your photographs to this email address as attachments and they’ll show up in Flick Photo gallery almost instantly. The subject line of email becomes the photo’s title while the body of the email becomes the photo’s description.

8. e@xpenser.com – This is like filling data in a travel spreadsheet through email. You can use this address to gather and record your travel expenses while on the road. [xpenser review]

7. go@blogger.com – You can use this address to post pictures on any Blogger hosted blog. Any picture that you send to this email address will appear as a new blog post in your mobile blog. You can also use this service to post regular text entries to your Blogspot blog. In that case, the “Send to Blogger” email address is available under Blogger Dashboard.

6. upload@upload.slideshare.net – If you have (one or more) PowerPoint Presentations and PDF documents that you quickly want to share with friends, just email the files to Slideshare and they’ll instantly turn them into a web slideshow. [Slideshare upload options]

5. …@mms.youtube.com – YouTube member can create an MMS profile here – if you have a video clip on your mobile phone or comptuer but no access to YouTube website, you can easily upload that video file to YouTube through that email address. [Details on Youtube Email upload]

4. pdf2txt@adobe.com – Send a PDF document to this email address as an attachment and it will come back as a plain text file. Handy when your don’t have a PDF viewer to open the PDF document. Alternatively, you can send the PDF file to pdf2html@adobe.com for conversion to HTML format. [Extract Text from PDF]

3. ..@prod.writely.com – Google Docs provides a unique email address here – you can upload your documents, spreadsheets and presentations to Google Docs through this address and read them on your mobile phone using the just launched Google Docs mobile at docs.google.com/m. [Google Docs Upload]

2. …@rmilk.com – When you signup for Remember The Milk, you are assigned a unique email address. Emails sent to this special address are automatically converted into tasks and appear in your Inbox. Click on Settings -> Info -> Inbox Email Address. Very handy for keeping a track of your unfinished tasks and getting things done while on the move.

1. wsmith@wordsmith.org – Get the dictionary definition and synonyms of any word by sending a blank email to this email address. Make the subject line as: define myword

And now the most useful email address that will help you read webpages through email without requiring a web connection:

0. www@web2mail.com – Send an email with the URL of the web page in the Subject field (e.g. www.cnn.com) and you’ll soon find a copy of that web page in your Inbox. A perfect option when there’s no Internet access in the area or access is restricted (for instance, you want to read the BBC homepage in China).

Another similar service is www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it – it will also fetch websites for you through email though in this case, the site address should go in the body of the email message.

These web-to-email services will come extremely handy for receiving on-demand Stock quotes (for the current Google stock price, type finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GOOG), weather updates, currency exchange rates (for USD to INR, type finance.yahoo.com/q?s=USDINR=X) and more.

Upload Photos from a Mobile Phone to your Facebook Album

You captured a bunch of photos using the camera of your mobile phone – now how do you upload these pictures directly to Facebook without having to transfer them to a desktop computer?

There are basically three ways by which you can send photos from a mobile phone to the Facebook website – MMS, Mobile Phone Apps and Email. Let’s look at each of these options one by one.

Facebook Apps for Mobile

If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or Nokia (with Ovi Store), you can visit m.facebook.com using the internet browser of your mobile phone and download the Facebook application for your device. These apps will often integrate with the camera function of your phone and provide an option to directly upload pictures to Facebook right after they’ve been taken.

If there’s no official Facebook app available for your mobile platform, you may also check the mobile app at Shozu.com – Shozu is available for a large number of mobile phones and allows uploading photos/videos to Facebook in addition to most other social sites.

Facebook MMS

Now if you are not carrying a smartphone but still want to move pictures from the phone to Facebook, you can use picture messaging or MMS. Here’s how it works.

Compose a new MMS message on your mobile phone and attach the image file that you want to post to your Facebook stream with the MSS message. Send that MMS to mobile@facebook.com (email, not phone) and Facebook will send you a confirmation code (via text) to associate your mobile phone number with your Facebook profile.

The MMS option looks like a nice technique for upload photos from old phones but the problem is that it may not always work as expected and secondly, sending MMS messages per picture (depending upon your carrier plan) can sometimes turn out to be an expensive proposition.

Facebook Email

Luckily, there’s another option provided your mobile phone can send email. Go to facebook.com/mobile and note a special "upload" email address that has been assigned to you by Facebook. Any photograph (or video clip) that is sent to this address via email will instantly get posted to your Facebook page.

Much like Flickr, when you send a photo to this "unique" email address, the subject of your email message will be used as the photo caption. And these photos will get saved in the "Mobile Uploads" photo album of your Facebook account visible to all your Facebook contacts. You can consider changing the privacy settings of your "Mobile Uploads" folder to change the default viewership of photographs upload from a mobile device.

Another tip – the email address assigned by Facebook can be quite long and complex so you may want to save it to your phone address book beforehand for easy access.

Facebook + Posterous

When you send photos to Facebook via the email option, all pictures are published to the "Mobile Uploads" folder by default and unfortunately, there’s no option to change that setting. However, if you want Facebook to create separate photo albums for each of your batch uploads, you can consider using Posterous.

It works like this. First link your Facebook account with Posterous. Then go to your Posterous Autopost settings and set the minimum Facebook gallery size to either 1 or 2. Now when you send an email message to facebook@posterous.com with 2 or more photos, they will be posted to their own albums on Facebook so it becomes more easy for you to manage / sort pictures later.

How to Manage Your Collection of PDF Files

Whether you are downloading ebooks, gadget manuals, research papers or your monthly bank statements, chances are that all these documents are available as Adobe PDF files.

That’s because PDF is probably the only format that can retain the original formatting and can be read across all platforms or even on the web if you don’t want to install any desktop software for reading PDFs.

Organize your library of PDF documents

Here are some useful web apps and software tools that will help you better manage your collection of PDF documents with any real effort. The objective is that you should be able to locate files quickly and also access them from other computers.

1. Mendeley Desktop – If you need access to your library of PDF documents on other computers, get Mendeley Desktop – it’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Mendeley is an awesome desktop software cum web application that not only indexes your local PDF files but can also upload them online so you have read these files anytime, anywhere. The service offers 500 MB of free online storage space and it will also synchronize tags, notes and other meta-data associated your PDF files.

You can add documents to your Mendeley library manually or there’s a watch-folder concept (like your Windows Media player) so any document added to the watch folder automatically becomes a part of the Mendeley database.

2. Google Desktop – If you are looking to find that one PDF document from a pile of thousand, consider taking the help of Google Desktop Search. The software can index the full content of all PDF documents on your hard drive and can make this information searchable as in the screenshot above.

Google Desktop Search shares the same search operators as Google’s web search so use the filetype:pdf operator to limit your search to PDF documents. Google Desktop can only index unprotected PDF files and it won’t help you find scanned PDFs that require an OCR engine (more on that later).

Windows Desktop Search too can index the content of PDF files pretty much like Google Desktop but the latter offers two extra advantages – Google Desktop is available on all platforms and second, it’s possible to search PDF files stored on the home computer from your office computer (and vice-versa) using the “Search Across Computers” feature.

3. Copernic Desktop Search – While both Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search offer some excellent PDF search capabilities, they still have one major limitation – they’ll tell you if a particular word or phrase is present is some PDF document but you won’t know where that phrase is located and how often does it occur in the document. Copernic overcomes that limitation.

Copernic can highlight all occurrences of the search term in the document (similar to cached web pages in Google search) and you can also navigate through the found document from Copernic itself without requiring an external viewer. The downside – Copernic is free for home use only so you can’t the free version for your office documents.

4. Scribd – Let me show how you can use Scribd as an online PDF organizer.

Create a free account at Scribd (if you haven’t done so already), install their desktop uploader software (available for Windows and Mac) and upload your entire PDF library online. Make sure you check the “Keep Private” option before hitting the upload button.

Once your documents are online, you can not only access them from other computers but the other big advantage is that you can search through your uploaded PDFs right from the Scribd website. Like Google Desktop, Scribd too allows full text search so you aren’t just searching titles but the actual content of your PDF documents.

Other services like SlideShare, Issuu, Google Docs and even Office Live Workspaces too offer PDF hosting but with Scribd, you can upload as many documents as you want, though each document should less than 100 MB in size. And then there’s search.

Scanned PDF Files

None of the options discussed above can index your scanned PDFs as these are essentially images and therefore require an OCR software that can recognize as well as extract text from the scanned pages.

If you are looking to search through a bunch of scanned PDF files, the premium version of Evernote could be a good choice though it costs around $5 a month.

The other alternative is Google OCR – put your files on a public web server, let the Googlebot index your PDFs and then use the site: search operator in Google to search inside the scanned PDFs. This option is not recommended for private documents that you don’t want to share with the world.

How to Write Your Own Facebook App in 5 Minutes

Do you know that the Facebook Apps Directory now contains more than 350,000^ Facebook applications for their 300 million users.

Whether you are looking to embed presentations in your Facebook profile or want to share your favorite books and movies with friends or just want to spend time playing a word game with strangers, chances are that there already exists a Facebook app to solve your problem.

However if you are feeling a little more adventurous and want to develop your own Facebook App that works the way you want* and doesn’t carry any third-party branding or advertising, here’s a an easy tutorial to help you get started.

[*] Check out apps.facebook.com/digitalinspiration.

[^] For comparison sake, the Apple iTunes store is relatively bigger as it has about 85,000 apps for their 50 million iPhone + iPod Touch users worldwide.

How to Write a Facebook Application in 5 minutes

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The Plan: We’ll write a basic Facebook app that will have links to our social profiles and a Google site search box. Later, you can expand the idea to build slightly more complex applications that contain RSS feeds, video clips, etc.

Things you need: You don’t have to be a "geek" for writing basic Facebook Applications. All you need is some knowledge of web programming languages and some free space on a web server where you’ll host your Facebook app (which are nothing but simple PHP files).

OK, let’s get started.

Step 1. Assuming that you already have an account on Facebook, add the Developer application to your Facebook profile and then click "Set Up New Application".

Step 2. Give your new Facebook App a name, agree to the terms and then upload some image for your application logo.

Step 3. From the Application settings, choose Canvas and set FBML as the rendering method. The other option is IFRAME but we’ll use FBML for the moment to keep things simple.

Step 4. Using any WYSIWYG HTML editor (or even notepad), write the content that you want to display inside your Facebook application.

In this example, we are adding just two hyperlinked images with a Google search box and therefore the code looks something like this:

Step 5. Log in to your web server where you’ll be hosting the Facebook App and create a sub-directory called "facebook". So if you domain is example.com, the Facebook app can be accessed from example.com/facebook.

Under the facebook directory, download (wget) the application template and rename the file to index.php. Replace the API Key and the Secret key in index.php with real values and also copy-paste the HTML (that you created in Step 4) into the index.php file.

Step 6. While you are inside the "facebook" directory, download the Facebook library (through wget) and extract the files in this archive via gunzip and tar. Now execute the following command to move facebook.php and other library files outside the facebook-platform subdirectory.

$ mv facebook-platform/client/facebook*.php .

Step 7. We are almost done. Go back to your Facebook Application page in the browser, click "Edit Settings" and set the values for Canvas.

• The Canvas Page URL – choose a nice vanity URL for your Facebook application.
• The Canvas Callback URL – location of the web service where your files are hosted (in our case, this will be example.com/facebook).

That’s it. Anyone can now add your Facebook app to their profiles either in the Boxes tab or in the sidebar of the main profile page.

Check the "Stay Connected" box on this Facebook page for a working demo.

Extend your Facebook Apps

We just created a basic app but you can make it more useful with simple modifications. Some ideas:

#1. You can incorporate RSS feeds in your Facebook apps though a feed parsing library like SimplePie.

#2. You can track your Facebook application usage via Google Analytics. Just add the following code in the PHP code.

#3. You can use the same CSS Styles and color schemes for your Facebook Apps that are used on the main Facebook site.

#4. If you want to embed YouTube video or Slideshare presentations in your Facebook apps (as shown here), you should use the <fb:swf> tag.

#5. Instead of using a plain search box, you should consider using the Google AJAX search API (see example) as that will let you customize the look and feel of search results to match other elements on the Facebook page.

Connect with your Extended Family on Facebook

Facebook has made it easy for you to connect with other family members who may or may not be part of the social networking site yet. You can go to this page and create a private group on Facebook open that’s only for the extended members of your family.

Unlike other Facebook groups, this will be a super secret group and won’t even show up in the profiles of your other family members.

How to Rebuild your Computer and Reinstall Windows from Scratch

If you are planning to rebuild a ’slow’ computer by reinstalling Windows (XP or Vista) from scratch, here’s a pre-installation checklist + some time saving tips. You existing data on the Windows PC will not be affected even if you do a clean install instead of repair or upgrade.

Fix Problems by Reinstalling Windows

As a tech blogger, part of my job involves reviewing software which is so interesting but frequent installation (followed by un-installation) of software programs also tend to slow down the computer.

To deal with this problem, I did a clean installation of Windows last weekend and re-installed all the important software programs from scratch. As expected, the boot-up time has reduced and the computer’s performance has improved significantly. Luckily, this task is not as complex as it may sound but here are a few things you should remember before taking the plunge:

Pre-Installation Checklist

1. Get Magical Jelly to retrieve a list of product keys that were used to install Windows and Microsoft Office on your computer. Print this information. (Also see: Determining Windows version)

2. Get Belarc Advisor to create a detailed report of all software programs, hotfixes and hardware devices available in your system. Print this report as well.

3. Uninstall all software programs that had to be activated at the time of installation (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite, Dragon Naturally Speaking or Microsoft Office). It’s important that you do a proper un-installation of these programs through Add/Remove Programs because simply deleting the folder from Program Files directory will not free up the license on the manufacturer’s activation server.

4. Install Driver Max to create a backup of all device drivers currently installed on your system. This will come handy after reinstallation incase you are not able to locate the driver installers on the vendor’s website.

5. Create a backup folder on c: (say c:\old_files) and add the following files to this folder

i. Your Outlook pst file that has all the mails, contacts, tasks and other Outlook items.
ii. If you have purchased any custom fonts, copy the relevant ttf files from the c:\windows\fonts folder. c. All documents, Live Writer drafts, pictures, music and videos from your My Document folder.
iii. Backup your custom dictionaries from Firefox, Microsoft Word, Live Writer, etc.
iv. Export all browser bookmarks and copy them to the backup folder.
v. Open your Firefox add-ons window, take a screenshot and paste that image in the backup folder. This is a good way to remember your favorite Firefox extensions.
vi. Export your podcast subscriptions in iTunes as as OPML (XML) file.
vii. Product keys (serial numbers) of all licensed software.

6. If you have a partitioned hard drive (say C: and D:), just copy* the backup folder created in step 5 to the D: drive. If you don’t have a partitioned hard disk or if the size of partition is small, install Live Mesh, add c:\old_files folder to your Live Mesh account and wait until all the files are uploaded on to the web. Mesh offers 5 GB of space and it may therefore be a good idea to burn all the heavy files (like videos, music, etc) onto a DVD instead of transferring them online.

*You can copy large folders across drives through Windows Explorer or the xcopy utility.

Re-Install Windows from Scratch

Now is the time to do a clean installation of Windows. This is probably the easiest part. You can either boot your computer from the original Windows installation CD** or, while you are running Windows, pop-in the installation CD and run the setup.exe program just like you would install any other Windows app. Always choose “Fresh Installation” instead of “Repair”.

**If you installation media doesn’t include the latest service packs, try creating one yourself. Windows XP with SP3 is available as a downloadable ISO while you can slipstream SP1 into Vista fairly easily.

Post-Installation Tips

It can take around 30 minutes (or more) for the whole installation to finish. Now jump to the Windows Update website and let your browser download all the hotfixes, security updates, driver updates, etc. If your computer is unable to connect to the Internet, chances are that your computer doesn’t have the proper network drivers. No problem as you can easily get the drivers from the dump that you created using DriverMax utility.

If your display is acting funny or there’s no audio, just install the right drivers from the vendor’s website (preferred approach) or use your backup media. Once all the patches are installed, Windows Vista users can free up few gigabytes of disk space by making SP1 permanent. Windows XP users may skip this step.

Now turn on the Firewall and install all the other software programs and associated updates in any order. The next important step is to clone your disk image via DriveImage XML (free software), Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. Windows Vista Ultimate also comes with a “Backup & Restore Center” that you may use to create a complete backup image of your entire computer to another drive, external disk or a DVD.

These disk images will come very handy after few months when your Windows PC get slow again. You won’t have to repeat the rebuilding exercise as the PC can be easily restored to the original state through these disk images.

Don’t experiment on your main PC

If you are tech enthusiast who loves to try new software / browser add-ons, I would strongly recommend that you don’t install these software on your main system – instead get Virtual PC (it’s free), create a Windows XP / Windows Vista virtual machine and use that environment as your new playground.

Another recommendation – do get a cane of compressed air to remove all the dirt from components inside the computer case. Sometimes software may not be the reason behind your slow and slugging PC – the culprit could be the dust sticking on the CPU heat sink.

The Simple Things Missing in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a beautiful web browser with some very innovative features. This month, Google also launched a brand new version of the browser (Google Chrome 3) to celebrate the first birthday of their baby.

Interestingly, Google Chrome is the only Google product that shed the beta label just months after the first public release while, for comparison, Google Docs stayed in beta for 3 years and Gmail took 5 years to graduate from the Google Labs.

What’s Missing in Google Chrome

Google Chrome has been around for more than a year with three majors releases but there are few very basic features that should have been there from day one but are still missing in Chrome. I am not talking about extensions or toolbars here, just the very simple stuff:

1. Subscribing to RSS Feeds – If you are reading a blog inside Chrome and wish to subscribe to that blog inside Google Reader, you either have to install bookmarklets or need to manually copy-paste the URL into Google Reader. There should be a simple way.

2. Shortcut to Exit Google Chrome – Like all other Windows applications, Chrome supports the Alt+F4 keyboard shortcut to help you close the current Chrome window. However, if you have two or more instances of Chrome running simultaneously, the only way you can close them all is with your mouse (click the Tools icon and choose Exit). A shortcut key to access that tools icon would be great.

3. Email a Page or Link- The good old email is still the most preferred mode for sharing web pages on the Internet yet Chrome offers no native option for sending pages or hyperlinks by email.

4. View Image Properties – Unless you know how to interpret HTML, it’s hard to find basic properties like the dimensions or the file size of any image that’s displayed on a web page inside Chrome. Google is probably trying to keep the contextual menu in Chrome simple but a menu item like "Image Properties" is extremely essential.

5. Creating Bookmarks – You have a bunch of tabs open in Chrome but have to close the browser so that someone else in the family can use the system. How do you save all your bookmarks to a folder so that you can easily resume work later?

6. Reading Blog Feeds – It’s not uncommon to find search results in Google that point to RSS feeds. Opera is brilliant at rendering raw RSS feeds, Firefox will auto-open the feed in your default RSS reader, IE will show a formatted view of the XML file but raw feeds in Chrome are often difficult to understand.

7. Get the Page Title – In IE or Firefox, if you ever need to copy the title of a page, you can simply do a right click and choose "View Page Info". A similar feature is available in Chrome but it would only tell you about your last visit to that site. How do I get the title of that page without looking at the HTML source?

8. Web History – If you look at your browsing history in Chrome (Ctrl+H), the sites are listed in the reverse chronological order with the most recently visited pages listed at the top. The information is however not grouped by date or domain so how do you determine what pages on the xyz.com domain did you visit last Friday?

9. Download Manager – While Google Chrome removed the status bar to save expensive screen estate, the built-in download manager takes up much more space in the status-bar are. There should be a way to run downloads in the background or the download bar should disappear automatically once the downloads are done.

10. Confusing Tabs – If you are a power user and open too many tabs in Chrome, it becomes extremely difficult to figure out what’s there inside each tab because Chrome will hide the favicons and shrink the existing tab to make space for more tabs.

Perform OCR with Google Docs – Turn Images Into Editable Documents

Google Docs can now perform OCR on digital images. You can upload an image containing typewritten or printed text (like a fax document or a scanned newspaper clipping) to your Google Docs account and it will turn that image into editable text.

In the following example, Google Docs successfully extracted all the text from a scanned book page and converted it into an editable document.

The OCR feature in Google Docs is not part of the standard UI yet but you can use this sample form to upload scanned images to your Google Account and the server will automatically try to extract text from these images provided the image resolution is good and that the text inside images is written using Latin character sets.

The OCR feature can also extract text from noisy images as well (like this WSJ clipping) though the recognized text is not very accurate and the document formatting is lost (see conversion results).

If you are a developer, you can add the ocr=true parameter to your upload request and Google Docs will automatically scan that image for text patterns. You can also upload images to Google Docs without the OCR parameter but in that case, the image will be converted into a new Word document sans OCR.

Like Google Docs, Google Search too includes OCR features but the difference is that while Google Docs can extract text from images, the OCR in Google Search works only with scanned PDF files.

October 1, 2009 Submit a Complete Sitemap of your Blogger Blog to Google for Better Indexing

Sitemaps, in simple English, are text files (see example) containing a list of all web pages that exist on your site. It is important that you create a comprehensive sitemap as it will help Google and other search engines crawl your site better and that might mean more traffic coming your way in the long run.

The Problem with Blogger Sitemap Files

Ideally, the sitemap file should contain all URLs of a site but if your blog is hosted on blogspot.com (or if you are using a self-hosted version of Blogger with a custom domain), you’ll be surprised to know that the default sitemap file (see example) contains only the 26 most recent pages of your blog.

That’s a bad thing because some of your older blog pages, that are missing from the system-generated sitemap file, may never get indexed in search engines. There’s however a simple solution to fix this problem.

Generate a Complete Sitemap for your Blogger Blog

Step 1: If you haven’t done this already, sign-in to your Google Webmasters account and add your blog. For details, check this video tutorial on how to add a blog to Google.

Step 2: Once your blog is added to Google, open the Sitemap Generator and type the full address of your blogspot blog (or your self-hosted Blogger blog).

Step 3: What you get is list of sitemap files that contain each and every page of your blog. You now just have to ping Google, Yahoo and Bing to inform them about these XML sitemaps.

As shown in the video screencast below, you need to manually add each of the sitemap files into your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard but for Bing or Yahoo, you can simply click blue hyperlinks and these search engines will automatically download the relevant sitemap files from your blogspot site.

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Once all the Sitemaps are added, your Google Dashboard should look something like this.

TELENOR EP! Guess n win Ipod from Telenor upcoming service/product I have guessed :)

Telenor is coming up with a new service/product in a new way. Before they actually raise the curtains of it they want everyone to guess what it could be about. It is called Telenor EP.

I have guessed it. Let me help you with it.

The website says, it’s about providing convenience anytime and anywhere. It also shows that it involves Tameer Bank along with Telenor which have partnered together earlier this year to promote mobile banking.

A is for anytime, B is for branchless, C is for convenience, EP is for….its easy now. Give it a try and get a chance to win iPods :)

Can Facebook Replace Web Email ?

WSJ – In August Facebook began allowing its users to send messages from their Facebook accounts to regular email addresses by typing the email address into the box where they normally type the name of a fellow Facebook user.

Mr. Divvela grew up with email but now spends less time on it, using Facebook as an email replacement. He especially likes one Facebook feature: When he pastes a link to an interesting article in a Facebook message, Facebook automatically fetches the article’s headline and any photos that ran with it and attaches them to the message. When he sends a link to an online video, the recipient can watch the video within the message without having to click the link.

Some social-networking executives say what draws people to their services involves more than just email and messaging services with user profiles bolted onto them. Facebook users can indicate which of their friends are pictured in a photo they have posted, and Facebook automatically notifies those friends about the photo, for example. Users can also keep track of their friends’ social calendars, alongside their own. Link.

5 Reasons Why You Must Create a Blog

1. Share your thoughts and opinions with the world Got something to say about the deteriorating political system of India? Or the performance of Indian cricket team? Or have an opinion on a topic like abortion or child marriages? Well, blogs are a perfect place to pen your thoughts online.

2. Preserve memories for great-grand children Anything you blog, be it a story or a photo or a video clip, is saved forever on the Internet. Now imagine your great grand-children and their children reading your blog when they grow up. They'll almost feel like having a conversation with you.

3. Show your expertise, help people or even get a new job A Blog instantly tells the world how knowledgeable you are on a particular topic and establishes you as an expert. You can also use your skills to help people online through the blog. Some companies even do head-hunting through blogs.

4. Stay connected with friends and family If you have friends and family members spread in different parts of the world, a blog is the best way to keep in touch with everyone. For instance, if there's a family function at your home, you can upload the pictures to your blog and others can see view and comment on them instantly. No need for emails.

5. Make money from your blog It's true that you can make a comfortable living from your blog provided you write consistently and work hard. Blogs won't make you rich overnight but if you follow some simple rules, chances are that blogging will definitely help you pay some of the bills.

Create a Virtual Machine of your Existing Computer With a Click

Whether you are a tech newbie or a geek, you’ll probably enjoy using this.

Virtualization, in simple English, is a interesting technology that helps you run multiple operating systems on the same machine.

For instance, if you are running Windows Vista on a computer, you can create virtual machines for Windows XP or Ubuntu and run these operating systems on your existing Vista machine just like any other Windows application.

How to Create a Virtual Machine

Windows Virtual PC, Virtual Box and VMware Workstation are some popular applications that allow you to create new virtual machines on a Windows PC but the only problem with these programs is that they require you do everything from scratch.

That is, if you want to create a new virtual machine, you will have to install the whole operating system first using the original installer DVD and then configure it with your favorite programs. This can be both time consuming and difficult.

What if you could use your existing Windows computer, that already has all your favorite programs installed, and turn into a virtual machine?

Convert your Computer into a Virtual Machine

While it has always been possible to convert an existing hard drive into a virtual machine, the process was difficult and often required expensive programs.

Well, not anymore. There’s a new utility from Microsoft that makes it both simple and free to convert an existing installation of Windows into a virtual machine ready to run on any other computer.

Microsoft’s Sysinternals team has released a simple application called Disk2vhd, that lets you easily migrate an existing computer to a virtualized hard drive (VHD). It’s a tiny utility doesn’t even require instillation.

Create Virtual Hard Disks with Disk2VHD

When you run Disk2vhd, it will immediately show you all the drives and partitions on your computer that it can migrate to a VHD. Simply select a drive that you wish to create a VHD file from and click “Create.” Disk2vhd will convert the hard drive into a VHD file even if the computer /drive is currently in use.

When the Virtual Machine VHD file is created, you can run it in any desktop virtualization program including the free Windows Virtual PC, Virtual Box, or VMware Player. You can also mount the virtual machine as a standard hard drive in Windows 7, and can even boot from it if your computer is running Windows 7 Ultimate.

You may use Disk2vhd to create virtual machines of your Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and higher machines, including x64 systems.

Usage Scenario

Let’s say you have a computer that is already running all the software programs you frequently use, but you now want to move to a new computer or upgrade your operating system. You can then consider creating a virtual machine of your old machine using the Microsoft utility and this will help you use all your favorite programs (with the same settings) on the new machine.

You can also use virtualization to create a ghost image of your hard drive in a single file and this will be handy in the event of a disk failure.

Disk2vhd is an useful tool that will make it much easier for you to enjoy the benefits of virtualization without being too technical.

Find Emails with Large Attachments in your Gmail Mailbox

This article describes how you can free up space in your Gmail mailbox by removing bulky email messages and large file attachments. If you are on Windows (2000, XP, Vista or Win 7) and use Google email, this may be worth giving a shot.

The Gmail Advantage

While Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail offer POP3 access to your email, GMail (and Google Apps for Email) is probably the only free web mail service that also provides free offline access to your email messages via the IMAP route.

The benefits of using IMAP4 far outweigh POP3 – the primary feature being instant synchronization of the action with the mail server. As an example, if you have configured Outlook or Thunderbird with your Gmail account using IMAP4, you can delete messages in the local client and they’ll get moved to the Trash folder in Gmail as well automatically.

Free up Space in Gmail via IMAP – The Strategy

Now the more interesting part. Let’s see how we can free up some important disk space in our Gmail inbox using a simple strategy:

Step 1: Track down bulky email messages in your Gmail inbox that contain large file attachments.

Step 2: Save these attachments to the local hard drive.

Step 3. After the attachments are saved locally, remove them from the online mailbox without deleting the corresponding email message(s).

Unlike Outlook, Gmail doesn’t offer a “sort by size” feature so you would normally assume that to implement such a strategy, one may have to configure his desktop mail client with Gmail’s IMAP, perform the operations locally and then do a sync. Well, that’s not required anymore.

We’ll use a portable (meaning it doesn’t need to be installed) and freeware utility called IMAPSize – at the outset, let’s be quite clear – this isn’t an email client per se. This Windows only application has been created solely to perform maintenance tasks on any IMAP mailbox from the desktop.

Find space-hogging Email Attachments in Gmail

Let’s start off by adding a GMail or Google Apps for Domains mailbox.

Usually, on first starting the IMAPSize program, a dialog box pops up asking if you’d like to add a new email account. If it doesn’t, one can always add an account from the Account > New menu option.

To configure your Gmail account, fill in your email address as the username and your Gmail password. Enter imap.gmail.com as your server and the port number as 993. Be sure to check the SSL secure connection option so that data sent between your computer and the GMail server can’t be intercepted.

If you are a Google Apps user, please enter username@your_domain.com for the username field.

You’ll now see a tree indicating the size of individual Gmail folders (labels). Even with the exceedingly generous storage quota offered by GMail, if you have an IMAP account with another provider like FastMail.fm, VFEmail.net, 1and1.com or RackSpace, it might be worth noting which folders in particular are occupying the maximum space.

Now the next step – double-click any Gmail folder in the tree to see all message within that folder. IMAPSize will only download the headers and not the entire message so the wait may not be that long.

Once your message list is available locally, invoke the “Advanced Search” function to filter out large emails (or ones that contain huge attachments). You need to specify the size in kilobytes so 500000 would filter out emails that are larger than 0.5 MB or 500 KB.

Go through the filtered list and select emails messages that you either want to remove completely or just need to detach the attachments. You can do that by right clicking the selected messages and choosing “Save Attachments locally” – this will save of copy of file attachments to the local drive.

Now use the Delete Attachments option for the same selection. This will make a copy of the original email in same the Gmail folder buts sans the attachment while the original message is moved to Trash after you choose “Expunge this mailbox”. (Outlook has such a feature by default).

All this happens without the main body of the email getting downloaded thereby saving on bandwidth as well as on time. And this may be neat option for saving those images and media files for offline use when GMail is not available.

Last, but by no means least is an option to backup your IMAP account to your local disk while preserving the folder structure. Use the Account > Account Backup [CTRL+B] option to select the folder you want to backup – most GMail users would be better off backing up the All Mail folder to archive everything locally.

Naturally, expect a great deal of time to elapse if you have lot of messages and a slow Internet connection. Incremental backup is an in-built feature, so your next backup shouldn’t take as long as only the changes made to the mail account will be taken into consideration.

For Desktop Mail Clients

If you are already using Outlook or another desktop client with Gmail, seee this guide on how to reclaim lost space in Gmail using a similar approach. And if you aren’t happy with speed, here’s another guide on improving Outlook performance with GMail IMAP.

By Shahrzaad M Parekh.

Use Facebook Chat without opening Facebook.com

Facebook includes an awesome chat feature that lets you instantly start conversations with your Facebook buddies without installing any IM software but the only small issue is that you need to be on the Facebook.com website in order to use Facebook chat.

If you find this a bit inconvenient, here are some good workarounds that will let you chat on Facebook from anywhere without even having to open the Facebook site in your browser.

Facebook Chat Inside the Web Browser

If you have Google Chrome or Prism for Firefox, you can open this address in your browser address bar and then create an application shortcut to Facebook chat on your desktop.

Firefox users may bookmark the above link and set the "Load this bookmark in Sidebar" property to true in order to use Facebook chat from the Firefox sidebar.

If you an IE user or hate to use Facebook chat from the sidebar, try Gabtastik – this is a minimal desktop client for Facebook that looks exactly like the web version of Facebook chat but will also send you notifications of new messages and chat requests from the system tray.

Meebo, the very awesome web based instant messaging service, now supports Facebook chat as well. You can connect your Facebook account with meebo via the Facebook Connect service (so there’s no need to share your Facebook credentials with anyone) and instantly chat with your online buddies inside the web browser.

There are two advantages here – you can use Facebook chat even if the main Facebook.com site is blocked in your office and two, you can simultaneously connect with friends on other IM networks from the same website.

Facebook Chat Clients for your Desktop

ChitChat – If Facebook were to develop a standalone messenger on the lines of Yahoo! or Google Talk, it might look something like ChitChat.

ChitChat is a Windows-only desktop client for Facebook that provides a tabbed window to make it easy for you to talk to may friends at once. It will also show notifications in the tray when your friends go online or when they have signed out. The application is in RC stage so expect a few bugs.

Digsby – This is again a very useful all-in-one app that helps you stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and other online accounts.

If you have multiple accounts on Facebook (like you and your spouse), you can associate all of them with your Disgsby messenger and chat with the combined buddy list simultaneously. Facebook doesn’t allow audio or video calls but Digsby indirectly brings that feature to Facebook Chat via tokbox.

There were reports (1,2,3) that Digsby’s installer can add some crapware to your computer but that should not hold you back as there’s an alternate installer (direct link) that will bypass the non-essential stuff.

Adium – If you are on Mac, Adium is probably the best choice for you to chat with Facebook friends from the desktop.

Like Pidgin and Digsby, Adium too supports multiple IM networks, including Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AOL AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Twitter and Jabber (XMPP). And it uses the same Facebook Chat plugin that is available for Pidgin users on Google Code.

Pidgin – While Facebook Chat is not officially supported in Pidgin, there’s a free plug-in that lets you connect to the Facebook chat server from Pidgin. And like Digsby, Pidgin too would let you chat with buddies on multiple Facebook accounts from the same interface.

Pidgin vs Digsby – Pidgin is purely for instant messaging while Digsby will also display notifications like when a friends sends you a message using Facebook email or if he or she writes something on your Facebook wall. Some people in the comments say that even Pidgin displays notifications but at least that doesn’t work in Windows 7.

Pidgin will show all your Facebook contacts in one giant list (see update) while Digsby will group contacts under logical "Friends list" just the way you have them on the main facebook.com site. Update: The new version of Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin displays your online friends under groups just like Pidgin.