Sharninder

Sharninder is a programmer, blogger and a geek making a living writing software to change the world. His tech blog, Geeky Ninja, is where he shares his wisdom. For free !

Recent Posts

5 Easy Ways to Schedule Your Tweets

By | March 26, 2010 |

Twitter Bird LogoTwitter has taken over the Internet by storm. In the last year and half, Twitter has become one of those companies that even the mainstream media keeps track of. Not even a single day passes by without a mention of Twitter either in the news or in newspapers.

Twitter is the darling and a poster child of the new real time web and in some ways, it is the service that actually started the real time web phenomenon.

It is no wonder, then, that from journalists to students, housewives to techies, from company CEOs to marketing gurus, everyone is hooked on to twitter with different people using it for different purposes.

Whatever your purpose for using twitter is, if you’re too tired keeping up with the real time natures of tweeting, and you still want to “keep your timeline alive” throughout the day, we’ve got some really neat twitter schedulers lined up for you.
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[Mac] Resize Images Automatically Using Automator

By | March 5, 2010 |

automator iconWe’ve written about Automator multiple times here at Make Tech Easier not only because we think it is an easy and fun tool to work with, but also because we believe that it helps in saving a lot of time for the average computer user.

Apple has spent a lot of time in making this tool extremely easy to use for the beginner and at the same time incorporating enough bells and whistles for keeping the power users happy. For a blogger and a mac user, Automator can be quite handy if used correctly.

Now, resizing images is something that almost everyone with a digital camera has to do these days. Whether you’re an average computer user looking to share your photos on Facebook or a blogger looking to upload screenshots of an application to your website, resizing images is a necessity. Considering how important this small function is, it’s actually surprising that modern operating systems don’t come with a built-in feature to automation this task.
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Setup a PHP/MySQL Environment on Windows The Easy Way

By | December 31, 2009 |

WAMP LogoPHP is probably the single most popular scripting language on the Internet. Thousands of high profile websites including the likes of Facebook, Yahoo and WordPress.com are built using PHP. When used with MySQL, the PHP/MySQL combo is also an extremely popular stack for designing database enabled websites.

One of the best things about the PHP/MySQL stack is that they almost seem to have been made for each other, ie. if the configuration is correct. A lot of people, though, end up moving on to other things when they can’t configure the stack correctly.

We’ve written about setting up a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment earlier on an Ubuntu machine. We’ve also talked about using OS X to install and test WordPress by setting up a MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server.

So, have we been ignoring Windows over here?
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Improve Your Efficiency With Mac 10.6 Services

By | December 27, 2009 |

Before Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6, was released, how many of you actually remember using the services menu for anything ?

I don’t.

Services is a little used but extremely useful feature of Mac OS X that has been around since a long time but only recently with the release of 10.6 became useful enough to be used by regular users like you and I.

What has changed with the release of OS X 10.6 is that Apple has now made the services menu context aware. So, for example, if you have a line of text selected in TextEdit, only the services for working with that selected piece of text will be visible. Similarly, if you have a file selected in the Finder, only the services useful at that point will be visible.
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How to Delete your Social Networking Accounts

By | December 14, 2009 |

The social media BandwagonSocial networks have taken the Internet by storm. Almost everyone these days has an account on Facebook or is obsessed with Twitter (or both). And while bloggers like us love social networks, not everyone can keep up with all services they sign up with.

Take me for example, I used to be an avid Orkut user (Yes, yes, I liked Orkut .. sue me!), but have almost stopped visiting the site since I joined Facebook. I also had an account on Myspace and hi5 before Orkut (and then Facebook) pulled me away. And of course, I use Twitter !

Oh and when I say I moved over to Facebook, that only means that I don’t log-in to hi5 or Orkut anymore. I still have accounts there, though. And I’m reminded of that fact every couple of days when I receive an email from them asking me to “reconnect” with some of my lost buddies.

If you, like me, are sick of such reminder emails, I think it is time to delete your profiles on those social networks that you don’t use anymore.
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Cross Platform Screencasting with Screenr

By | December 2, 2009 |

Screenr LogoAs a tech blogger, I often have to take screenshots or make screencasts of software that I’m reviewing.

Now, screenshots are easy and most operating systems have built-in methods of doing so and then there are excellent freeware applications also to edit images. If nothing else, a simple “Print Screen” works almost always.

But, screencasts are a totally different ballgame. None of the operating systems that I know of come with software to create screencasts and the third party solutions are either expensive or simply not worth the effort. Videos are also difficult to take, edit and store and that is probably one reason why we don’t see too many bloggers making use of this awesome medium.
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Make Your WordPress Blog iPhone Compatible Using WPtouch

By | November 17, 2009 |

WPtouch DemoI’m sure most of you would agree with me that the iPhone is the world’s most popular smartphone. Even if you don’t agree with that statement per se, you’d definitely agree that it is the world’s most popular smartphone for accessing the Internet.

There was a time when web pages had to be written specially for mobile devices and most devices available in the market just couldn’t display regular web sites designed using HTML.

The Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod touch devices is responsible for more than half of the world’s mobile Internet usage and it doesn’t look like that uptrend is going to change soon. The reason behind this popularity is that, unlike other smart phone browsers, mobile Safari can display regular webpages as well as desktop based web browsers.

But, while the iPhone and iPod touch browsers display almost all websites perfectly, using a mobile specific theme you can offer a lot of advantages to your visitors.
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Mac: Load Flash only when you want to with Clicktoflash

By | November 14, 2009 |

ClickToFlashAdobe’s Flash technology is pretty much THE standard when it comes to delivering video over the Internet. A number of high profile sites like YouTube, hulu and metacafe use flash to display content to their users and the flash plugin is quickly becoming a must have for every computer user.

Flash is not being used just for videos, it is also used around the Internet for creating casual games, advertisements and pretty much anything that you can think of.

In spite of all the advantages of the Flash platform, the problem with flash is that other than Windows, it really doesn’t run well on any other platform. Flash is also a notoriously heavy user of your system’s resources.

If you’re a Linux or OS X user like I am, you can forget about timely updates and can also expect your browser’s memory and CPU usage to go through the roof if you like visiting flash heavy websites. In my opinion, that is reason enough to get rid of Flash.

So, what do you do if you’ve had enough of the flash advertisements and videos making an appearance on every website that you visit ?

You give ClickToFlash a try !
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How to Install and Test WordPress on Your Mac

By | November 10, 2009 |

Wordpress logoWordPress is without a doubt the most popular blogging platform around. Not only is it a good piece of software but what makes it the best tool for the job is the awesome community that is associated with development of not only the WordPress core software, but also the various themes and plugins.

For all it’s simplicity, a lot of people still shy away from using WordPress because installing and maintaining it requires a certain level of technical knowhow. Specifically, the knowledge of installing and managing a PHP/MySQL stack and dealing with all the problems that can happen with a botched WordPress installation.

So, without further ado, we’ve written this post that’ll not only teach you how to install a complete PHP/MySQL stack on your Mac but also teach you to install and configure a fully functional WordPress install, all without leaving the comforts of your own computer.
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Unlock Hidden Mac OS X Settings With Secrets

By | November 1, 2009 |

Secrets logoMac OS X is a wonderful operating system with one of the best and easiest to use graphical interface among mainstream operating systems. It is amazing to see how much thought the designers of the OS have put into each element of the interface striving all the while to make it easier for the user to use the computer without bringing in any complexity, and retaining the ability to configure the computer as the user wishes.

But, there is still so much more that OS X is capable of and it is not always possible to harness all that power from the Graphical interface, and that is where our application of the day, Secrets, comes in handy.

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