The spiffy interface is itself a relief to the eye as compared to the dull Paypal interface. In addition, the tool also offers a nice interactive way to browse through your PayPal transactions. The reports are categorized in a considerable manner so that you can sort your transaction in all possible ways you might need to. There are 5 types of filters you can choose from to look out for transactions you wish to find:

1. Type of transaction: Here you get to choose from various types of transaction you have carried out through your PayPal account. Options are bills, currency conversion, payment, recurring payment etc.
2. Status of Payment: The payment status is an useful feature to check on pending transactions.
3. Currency: Intelligent way to track currency conversion rates to your country currency used by Paypal for different transactions.
4. Time period: A monthly or quarterly report can be generated with this time span feature.
5. Additional filter: You can type in a keyword or a payee name to accurately search any transaction.

All the transactions are neatly tabulated with key attributes which include timestamp, type, email, name, transaction ID, currency, status, amount, fee and net payment. Clicking on the transaction ID opens up a popup with details of the element. You can also sort the transaction based on all the aforementioned attributes by clicking any of them. There is also an option to download your PayPal account history in CSV format which is useful for having better insights on your business by creating better charts with the data.

When it’s money or data, security is a major concern. And being online means you will do everything to protect your online money transactions. So you might be a little concerned if SlowPal is reliable or not. The tool is completely built on PayPal API and all your data on PayPal is imported using SSL. You can rest assured your data will be in safe hands. Nevertheless you can always revoke the permission from Paypal (My Account -> Profile -> My Account Settings -> More account settings -> Service providers -> Click remove beside the service you wish to stop authorizing). SlowPal is for companies or individuals with a lot of transactions to monitor. However, I would recommend general PayPal user to use the in-built account history manager as long as you don’t desperately in need of a faster way to browse through your transaction history.

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How To Use Present.me

1. Create a free account (you can use Facebook or Google to sign up). Once you are in, you can upload the content by going to the Create menu (at top).

2. Choose from the types of content you wish to upload and proceed to the next step.

3. You can choose files from your Google Drive (Docs) or upload presentation, PDF etc. I uploaded a PDF document.

4. Once the document is uploaded, you will get a choice to record a video by letting the service access to your computer’s camera. You can also upload a recorded video, but that will require you to upgrade to a paid account.

5. Now you can record the video and use the slides from the presentation the same way you would present it to someone in front of you. Once finished, publish the new presentation for the viewers to enjoy. The new kind of presentation can also be embedded into a webpage.

Pricing

The service has a free account that allows you to upload 3 presentations (each not exceeding 15 mins) per month. The paid plans offer you more choices and an ad-free interface. The free plan is worth a try considering the usability and engagement it offers to any presenter.

After you get all the facts right, curate it in a way that’s consumable, what, according to you, is the best way(s) to present the information? So far you used to have three choices. You can create a presentation, a Youtube video or an infographic. Each one has a specific purpose. An infographic is best for representing a survey or study over a large margin in concise form. Whereas a video or presentation is good for demonstrating and present a report. Now that you have a richer medium to present data or explain something, do you think it will be a better choice for you? We are eager to hear your opinion.

Present.me

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Go to LeFeed and sign in with Facebook. As always, it will ask for some permissions. Choose what you want to approve and what not and lastly allows the application to connect with your Facebook account.

As you get into the service, you will land onto the Settings page where you can configure the way you wish to use LeFeed. I would recommend not to change anything as of now. Hit the Save button and move over to the Home screen. Once you figure out how it works, you can always fine tune the performance by going to the Settings menu.

Content Based Feeds

Now as you go to the home screen, there will be five feeds to choose from:

Overview – This is where you see all the updates including the activity (or notification) from your Facebook feed. Good thing is that there will be no app updates.

Recommendation – This is the feed that LeFeed curates for you based on your activity on the app. As time goes by, you will see things relevant or similar to what you have liked earlier on the feed overview.

Link – This one accumulates the links posted on Facebook by people you befriended (or subscribed) and pages you have liked.

Photo – It fetches the photos from your Facebook news feed, a good way to scan through them if you are particularly interested with photos.

Status – The plain text updates from your Facebook friends are shown here.

Video – The videos that were posted on Facebook by your contacts are listed here.

The Plus and Minus button:

This is something that makes the app better understand about what you like and what you detest. Use the “+” on anything you like and minus on anything you choose to avoid. With time, the app will learn and henceforth filter your feed and only show items you like. Based on your interests, the app will also recommend you newer items from Facebook that you would have not otherwise discover on Facebook.

Now if you choose to mute any of the above feeds, go to the Settings option and uncheck the option. You can also setup the app to Like items on Facebook on your behalf once you hit the + button for them.

I’m thankful to the lists in Twitter and with Facebook, I am more used to the Interest lists these days. It serves me great finding what people who share my interest shares. Lately it has helped me discover great stuff without the annoyance of the app updates. However, I had definitely missed out on some bland buddies (who mostly uses Facebook for apps) whom I adore otherwise. With LeFeed, I can now choose to see what they share other than those crappy app notes. Also it does help me find people who shares an interest or two with me. Although you will need to give the app some time until it starts understanding your taste and cater content you admire.

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Double-clicking the tray icon opens the InSync folder. If you have multiple Google accounts connected to the InSync profile, you will find a folder for each of them within the InSync folder. Each of the folders will have the name similar to that of the Google account you had connected. Open each folder and browse the files/folders within them. You can upload new documents, pictures, video clips and files of any type to the folder which will be auto-synced to the respective Google account once the computer is connected to the Internet. You can also edit existing documents and once you save the changes, it will get auto-updated on your Google Docs account.

Now the debate burns down to why should we prefer Google Docs storage with InSync and not the already popular and feature full Dropbox? The plain and simple answer is in the post header itself. The former is a cheaper option, to be precise, 8 times cheaper. Now, money doesn’t matter always, buyers are always looking for better products even though they put a hole in their pockets. Here are a few reasons I think the InSync way is way better than Dropbox.

Why InSync is Better than Dropbox

1. The Dropbox client only allows you to connect to one Dropbox account at one time and we have to use a hack to connect to multiple accounts. With InSync, you can add multiple Google accounts and thus a large amount of storage space can be monitored from a single tool.

2. If you are someone who wish to pay for cloud storage, Google Docs storage is a better choice since the price is cheaper and affordable than Dropbox.

3. The file size limit is another thing to consider. Dropbox desktop client lets you add files of reasonably high file size, however, the web interface adds a limit of 300MB. Google Docs lets you add files with filesize as high as 10GB which is quite high even if the Blu-ray movies are to be considered.

4. Individual file sharing is not allowed in Dropbox. Only folder sharing is available. InSync lets you share a single file and a folder as well.

The obvious reason that Dropbox still has an upper hand on Google Docs is the free storage it offers is more than the latter. Well news doing the rounds that the internet giant soon entering the cloud storage market suggests that the free storage is going to change. With endless possibilities with Insync, I’ve already jumped on the Google Docs bandwagon. What are your plans?

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1. Pinpuff – Influence Metrics for Pinterest

Being social is a necessity for you, what’s more important is what influence you have on your network. Enter Klout a tool to measure you social influence across popular social networks. Now gradually as the social aspect is changing and with the advent of Pinterest, new tools are emerging to measure your influence on Pinterest aka pinfluence. One such tool is Pinpuff. Just provide your Pinterest username and you will be provided with insights that reflect how you rank on the network. Intelligent and it also figures out the average economic value for a single pin on your boards/profile.

2. PinReach – Pinterest Analytics

If your marketing strategy involves Pinterest for promotion. Here is a nice tool to collect and analyze your Pinterest stats. Nice tool to better design your plan of action based on real user data. Previously named Pinclout but renamed after being threatened by the popular social media influence tracking service Klout. Analytics provided by Pinreach include repin stats, popular boards etc. The boards are analyzed to provide a cumulative view on how they are performing and what kind of user engagement they are receiving. The app rates you with a score that reflects your reach on Pinterest. There’s also an interesting section that shows influential Pin-ers who follows you. Use it to build relations, grow influence.

3. Pinerly – Pinterest Scheduler

Having a socially active profile is as tough as being only one responsible for saving the world. Heck it gets tough to provide news for followers from such a variety of time zones. Kudos to Hootsuite and lately Buffer (watching my back all the time) that people can schedule their updates at any future time. Sadly, Pinterest is still out of their scope. Hopefully, Pinerly akin to the previously mentioned service will help you pin things in future. However, you have to wait for a while as this tool is in beta and you need to wait for an invite in order to use it.

Pinterest is getting immense user engagement and got an iPhone app to let people PIN even on the go. Pity that there is still no app for the Android users. Frustrating, but it does not necessarily mean that you can’t use Pinterest on your Android. There are numerous third party tools that you can choose from. However, so far none has been better than the HTML5 Pinterest mobile site. So what are you waiting for, if you have something worth sharing, go ahead PIN them, who knows, they might go viral. And if they do, you have the tools of the trade to better utilize its reach.

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The fact that we are almost nobody without a Facebook profile is yet again proved here. Why?? This very tool that offers to audit your offline life and does so by evaluating your Facebook activities. You need to have a Facebook account to use SLA. Your social rating depends on how circumstantially you share your real life on Facebook. The more the merrier. No wonder I failed miserably.

SLA is powered by the Face.com’s facial recognition API to analyze the photos related to you (uploaded, tagged or liked/commented). Once you are recognized, the game begins to roll in the more obvious direction. Your moods, the number of people you are with, the number of people from opposite sex you are seen with and even the mood of those people are considered as parameters. Based on the observations made, the algorithm estimates your score and comments on your social behavior.

The service serves a better purpose when it comes to evaluate location based services (or check-ins). Facebook check-ins are compared with the popular Black-book listings to find out whether you have been hanging out at the right place or hanging out at all. Well my result was even worse, my city was not even listed (and I was instructed to move to a city with improved social life, such a bummer, although it’s normal for any average town).

Apart from auditing your own social life, you can get a glimpse on your friends social engagement too. Search for a (Facebook) friend by typing in his name and you will get a comparative view of friends social rating matched to yours.

The observations made are not close enough (not because I failed) for those who uses Facebook as a promotion/marketing tool, or people who are strictly aware of the Facebook’s privacy concerns and refrain from sharing their real life in full detail. However for most of the Facebook generation, the results can be considered to be near perfect (for some I know personally, it does). The app seems to rely too much on Facebook. Images speak a thousand words, true, but if images were to be considered to evaluate somebody, there are other places/services where people love to share their life in pictures, such as Instagram or Flickr. It would be better if more location based social networks like Foursquare or interest based services like Path or Pinterest gets considered in the scoring system, as in current scenario people (and a notable smartphone population) tend to share their life here too. Overall, the app does a great job based on a unique idea but fails to seal the opportunity. So worry not if you fail here, better put your efforts on getting a life out of Facebook, that’s what the SLA is here to remind you.

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A few words about Markdown:

Markdown is a markup language from John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. This also serves as a text-to-HTML conversion tool. You can get a taste using Dingus, an online Markdown editor from the developers. Since Scriptogram uses Markdown markup language for generating pages, you will need to learn a thing or two to get started with it. Move over to the syntax page to find a detailed documentation on how it is written. The markup language is well optimized for blog posting. Apart from the common tags (for any markup) you get the likes of  Published, Type, Title, Slug, Tags, Excerpt which are meant to define the similar entities necessary for a blog post. This language is quite easy to read and write once you are done writing a couple of pages with it.

Setting Up Your Scriptogram Blog:

1. Use the Dropbox Connect button to provide Scritogram access to your Dropbox account. Login to your Dropbox account and press Allow when prompted.

2. Personalize your blog by giving it a unique username, your real name and a description to your Scriptogram blog. The username will be appended to “http://scriptogr.am/” and acts as your blog URL. The real name will be used as your blog title. The description serves as a brief intro to what the blog is about.

3. After you are done, press Finish and you will be redirected to the blog you just created with a sample post that illustrates on how to use Markdown to create your blog posts for your Scriptogram blog.

Formatting Your Blog:

Once you are done setting up your blog, you can fine tune the blog by going to the Admin section, which can be also be accessed using the Scriptogram icon to the top right corner of your blog page. You can modify the layout with the HTML and CSS editors, choose from available themes or even use a custom domain name if that really matters to you.

When You should consider Scriptogram?

1. If typing is something you really enjoy, Scriptogram is for you.

2. If all you just love to share with the world is TEXT, go for Scriptogram.

3. If you are tired with the heavy duty blogging tools/interfaces and all you seek is the dead simple notepad to convey your writing prowess, Scriptogram is all you have been waiting for.

On an ending note, Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress still remain my favorites while recommending someone a tool to blog. However, if you are planning for a text blog and are keen on keeping things really simple & old-school, Scriptogram is a nice tool to start with. Three simple steps and you have a place to share your words. Easy peasy.

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You don’t have to go through the tedious form-filling process that those older online radios welcomed their users with. You can start right away by logging in with your Twitter or Facebook account.

Once you are in, you will be presented with a wall full of tracks trending across the network. The interface is quite a nice looking one with clear indications to the user about what it has to offer. As you click on any song thumbnail, it will start buffering and in time will start playing. Also the whole list (the Overall Trending for this one) will be added to the song playing queue. All you need to do now is sit back and enjoy the music. Hover over the title and you can browse through the trending tracks based on other choices.

Exploring Music

Choose the Explore tab from the left hand navigation, you will land onto the “Site of the day” section where the service promotes a site depending on popularity, freshness etc. Look out for the play button to tune in to the songs from the site.

Now notice the top navigation where other options are available to browse music on Ex.fm. The genres menu has all the common ones and also includes some less-used ones (dubstep, shoegaze etc) too.

Just like the featured website, you can extend your exploring with the featured album. Similarly, when you click on any song, the whole list (the featured album in this case) is added to the playlist.

“Tastemakers” in true sense, are the people the site thinks has a good understanding of music. And if you wish to find what they refer, scroll down the list and follow the folks of your choice.

Monthly Mixtape again is a featured section showcasing a mix created by a notable Ex.fm user (probably someone who features in the Tastemakers list) . Check out the mix if you are too lazy to go and create your own playlist.

“Latest loved” section displays a list of songs loved by users across the Ex.fm network.

A Player for Music blogs

If you are an webmaster and want your pageviews to be more musically pleasing, you can offer your visitors with embedded media player that plays the songs you loved or some randomly chosen by Ex.fm. The fact that the player has a plugin for WordPress (and support for Tumblr and Blogger) is even more satisfying. You have the options to customize the look and feel of the player to match your theme. There are badges to show off your ex.fm madness.

As I had already said, the service is quite visually pleasing. The streaming is seamless unless you have a really slow Internet connection. As the web interface enthralls you, the iPhone and Android Ex.fm apps will keep the music going even when you are on the go and the browser extensions just fill in the gap. Sharing being the new cool thing, you get one click sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Last.fm. Most of all, your music browsing experience is bound to get new dimensions. I know you are enjoying already, aren’t you? Put in your thoughts.

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I am always plugged into new songs on my portable iPod or desktop computer, regardless of whatever I am doing. However, I also enjoy finding new songs that are still missing from my iPod playlists. In such situations, Internet Radio saves the day.

Radio channels streamed from the internet is a great way to listen to latest tunes as well as old classics. Things are pretty random with radio streaming, so if you are looking for a tool that will let you enjoy online radio stations from all over the world, try Nexus radio.

With a collection of over 15 million tracks and 11000+ radio stations listed, you will never get bored with music streamed with this free application.

Download Nexus Radio and install the tool on your computer. You will need to sign up for a free account to get started with it. Once you have successfully registered for a free account, use the login credentials to sign in.

NOTE: If you are using Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the program may crash several times. It is recommended to start the player in administrator mode, to avoid the annoyance.

There are 17 tabs that you can use to control different parameters of the radio player as well as use it properly. I took a quick look at the tool and listed below are the most needed tabs along with the tasks that are included within them:

1. Music Search: This tab lets you search individual tracks, there are four sources to choose from and the count of the tracks is more than 15 million. Once the search is complete, choose the song and use the playback buttons to play, pause or stop the track. This is a great way to look for tracks you just can’t live without.

You can also use the “Save Song” button to download any selected song to your computer and listen it offline.

2. Stations: This tab lists more than 11000 radio stations from all over the world and all of them are categorized as per genres. Click a genre from the left tab and select the station from the middle pane. Use the play button to start playing the channel.

Use the “Quick Record” button to record the currently streaming radio station. There are an overwhelming number of radio stations available, so finding your favorite one is not a problem at all.

3. Record: This is one of the great features of the tool that lets you record live radio stream on a scheduled time. Choose a Genre from the dropdown at the top of the middle pane. Select the radio station, choose date and time from the left pane and hit “Save” to save the recording schedule.

4. Filters: If you are want to record a specific song or songs from a specific artist, creating filters will help you.

Go to the filters tab and click the “Add/Remove” button (just above the playback controls) and select “Add Filter” and enter the artist or song name. After you have added a filter, you will be prompted to activate it. You can also turn it off/on from the “Options” button located beside the “Add/Remove” button.

5. Equalizer: The tool has a built-in 10 band equalizer to adjust the sound quality of the radio stream or the songs playing. The equalizer worked perfectly for me and the sound quality can be optimized to great level to soothe your ears.

6. Effects: Next to the equalizer tab, there is an “Effects” tab which complements the equalizer effects, by letting you control the pan, speed, echo and reverb settings of the songs played.

7. Tagger: The tag editor can be found under this tab and can be used to edit the ID3 tag info of any track on your PC which is quite neat if you are using any portable device to sync songs with your computer. Although I feel a bulk editor would have been better.

8. Trimmer: The tool’s inbuilt trimmer can be used to cut selected portion of any song on your computer. There are times I need to change my cell phone’s ringing tone. Till date I have been using some dedicated online tools to get this task done. I’m glad to find another reason to stick with this free tool now.

9. Options: This tab contains all the additional options relevant to the tools working methods. You can set to start the tool as Windows starts, change the default download location or hide/unhide song pop ups within this tab.

The other tabs included in Nexus Radio can be used for visualization during playback, see top 100 song charts, watch music videos, install or uninstall plugins, see history and many more other things.

By far, I am more than satisfied using the program considering its all in one usability. Barring the case of crashing on several occasions, the tool worked just as fine otherwise. Do try Nexus radio once and let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

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If yes, then ManyCam is a brilliant webcam application which you will love using.

ManyCam lets you use your webcam with multiple applications simultaneously. After you have installed ManyCam, you can stream the video capture to multiple applications or devices.

Let’s say you are recording a video from the webcam and want to stream the same video recording to one of your Skype friends, parallely. Normally, only one application is allowed to access the webcam hardware at any given instance of time.

ManyCam acts an intermediate between the webcam and the applications accessing it, allowing multiple applications to use the webcam at the same time (supports Yahoo, MSN, CamFrog, PalTalk, ICQ, Skype, YouTube and more). You can also add text, colors and other graphical effects to the webcam video window.

Download Manycam and install it on your computer. The program is a free download and works with Windows and Mac. Once the installation is completed, run the application and  double click the system tray icon to launch the “Options” window.

From the Options window, you can configure the tool as per your requirements. This includes adjusting the webcam brightness, contrast, color depth. Following is a set of features that I thought makes the tool a complete solution for every webcam problem and enhancement.

To control the webcam parameters, go to “Properties” -> sources -> cameras -> choose camera -> properties“.

Here you can zoom the webcam to get a clearer view if you want to show something on the webcam. The flipping options are useful when you have your webcam showing inverted videos due to some faulty configurations with the device. Should you want to use your laptop’s inbuilt webcam and a USB webcam parallely, ManyCam will let you choose and switch webcams with the touch of a button.

Although Manycam selects your webcam out of the box, there are quite a few other things which you can share as your webcam video.

• You can stream movies as a webcam video – simply open the video file in ManyCam window and your friends can directly see the video clip streamed from the webcam window.
• You can take snapshots with your webcam and they can be set as your webcam’s output.
• You can share your desktop for a video demonstration. To do this, choose the source as “Desktop” and then select the portion of the screen which you want to be streamed as your webcam video.
• ManyCam also supports playlists, all the above streaming options can be combined produce a unique video streaming effect.

What’s impressive regarding ManyCam is the Effects panel which lets you add a wide number of color and graphic effects (found under the Effects tab in the Options window). Here are some example effects I applied to my webcam window using ManyCam:

You can add date, time and even draw on your webcam’s video stream. You can configure it to start as the Windows starts or if you choose, it will only be launched once any application is requesting for a webcam access.

All in all, ManyCam is one of my favorite applications for adding effects to the Webcam window, playing with graphics and custom texts and using the cam with multiple apps at any given point of time. Give this a try and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Whether you are planning to launch a new website, write a blog, develop a web service or establish a start up company – the domain name is one of the important factors which decides the success or failure of your online venture. Choosing the right domain name for your business or organization is necessary because there is no undo button, when you have registered one.

Almost all the domain registrars have their own domain name suggestion tools, but there are basically two problems with them. First, the domain name suggestion tools are self promoting, which means that you are shown only those domains who comes at the cost of high price. The tools will randomly match common terms with your keyword and provide alternate domain name suggestions which might not relate to your business plan at all.

The second disadvantage of using domain name suggestion tools is that some of the registrars reserve your keywords and suggest the available domain name to other prospective buyers. Let’s say you devoted 2 hours of time and found a very unique domain name e.g laptopcasesforstudents.org. Feeling very happy, you went to bed thinking – “I will buy this domain name when I have transferred the money from my bank to the Paypal account”.

When you come back to register the domain, you find that it has already been registered by another person. The result: your research was wasted just because the registrar showed your domain suggestion to someone else.

In this article, we will discuss some of the best domain name suggestion tools on the web and how you can use these services to find creative domain names

1. Bust A Name

Bust a Name offers an intuitive way to find creative domain names. Just type in the words that you prefer to have in your domain name and the tool finds you all the available domain names using the keywords of your choice.

You can also edit other settings like adding suffix, prefix or pluralize nouns. The listed domain name extensions are .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz. The app also shows options for domain names that are there for sale on the resale (Afternic) marketplace.

The good thing regarding the tool is that there are a wide range of options e.g checking with a hyphen, pluralizing the nouns, dropping the last vowel from any words and so on. The panel on the far right allows you to temporarily save a domain name which you may want to review later. No registration or signups are required to use the service.

2. Domainr – Find peculiar Domain Names

This is one of the best tools to find peculiar domain names which resemble the structure of a URL shortening service. Just type in any word and Domainr will put a dot in the middle of the characters, thus suggesting domain names with uncommon TLD’s.

If you are looking a way to get a domain name that matches your name or a short URL, Domainr is the best place to search for it. The site also has a neat iPhone app for the domain name finder.

3. Domize

Domize is also a yet another great tool to find out available domain names based on your search. The search results are shown instantly, as soon as you type.

Using Domize you can look out if an domain name was registered before or is available for a resale. You can also set the default domain registrar, so if you click the buy link you will be redirected directly to the registrar website.

4. Domain Typer

Domain Typer shows the domain availability as you type a hint for the domain name search. The domain name is searched for three most popularly used domain extensions.

Although you can add more extensions to the search, TLD (Top Level Domain) names are also shown as alternative suggestions. Domain name registrars like Godaddy, Netfirms are listed with the domain name prices. The site does a good job in showing shirt domain names, similar to Domainr (discussed earlier)

The advantage of Domain Typer over other domain name suggestion websites is that their price approximation is fairly accurate.

5. Suggest.Name

Suggest.name is the one I liked the most. This actually serves the purpose of suggesting a domain name using custom prefix and suffixes of your choice.

You add prefixes and suffixes from the predefined sets, combine them and choose the ones you like the most. Once you have selected the names of your choice, press the “Check” button to search for the domain names. The domain name availability is checked using Dotster.

6. Dot-O-Mator

Dot-O-Mator performs exactly like the previous one. So you add your prefix and suffix choices and combine them to get probable names, select some (or all of them) from the combination to check their availability using Dotster. One added advantage for this tool is that you can use the Web 2.0 Domain name Generator to get random suggestions for domain names.

The list of domain name suggestion tools is possibly  endless but we hope the above list will be useful, when you are trying to find a unique domain name for your online venture. Do check out these tools and let our fellow readers know any better alternatives through the comment section.

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The Problem With Disk Clean Up Techniques

There are different ways to free up some hard drive space on the primary Windows partition. This includes:

• Cleaning up the temporary files, browsing data, thumbnails of websites and emptying the temporary internet files folder
• Deleting Windows hibernation files / shadow copies
• Compressing files and folders to save disk space
• Removing Log files and system generated temporary files during installation of a specific program.

All of the above methods work perfectly fine but the problem is that only a small amount of space can be recovered.  You perform each of these steps one by one and can be rest assured that only one gigabyte of space can be freed up (maximum)

What if you want to free up some more space ? How about moving the installed programs to another drive and freeing up disk space on your computer’s primary partition (usually the C drive).

In this article, we will discuss a free tool called JunctionMaster which can be used to reallocate the installed applications from C drive to another hard drive partition. Using this technique, you would be able to free up a good amount of disk space on the primary windows partition.

How to Change The Installation path Of A Program using JunctionMaster

1. Download Junction Master and install it on your computer. The program is available for both 32 bit as well as 64 bit machines.

2. During installation, be sure to keep the “Shell Integration” option selected.

The tool is a standalone app as well as provides shell integration making it easier to create NTFS junctions for folders.

3. When the installation is complete, open up “C:\Program files” and locate the installed application folder.

4. Create a new target folder in another Windows partition e.g ‘E:\Program files\Audacity”. This is the folder where the junction files will be created and original files from the C drive will be moved.

5. Fall back to the Junction Master program window and right-click the folder, choose “MOVE and then LINK folder to …”.

6. The tool will warn you about the risks of using junctions. Click “Yes”

7. In the next dialog box, you will find the original folder (that you wish to move and right-clicked on) already selected. All you have to do now is choose the “New backing drive/folder” and hit the button “Move and Link” or OK.

8. Very Important: If you are trying to move system files or files that are in use, you may be barred from creating the junction. Hence do not move any system folder or any folder that appears in C:\Windows. Use the utility to move application folders only and be sure no running application is currently accesing the installed files.

NOTE: I was sure about not using any of the files within that folder. It turns out that Window 7 stopped me from moving the system protected folder. I tried gaining back control and then failed too. Finally after a few repeated tries the junction creation was successful. And I got this following message:

9. You can verify the junction creation by opening both the virtual and backing folder. As you can see from the following screenshot, the virtual folder only contains a shortcut whereas the backing folder contains the main folder.

10. That’s it, you have just  moved all the core files of an installed application from the main Windows partition to another hard drive partition. You can run the program from the new location and check whether the application is executing normally as before.

11. Do not delete the folders from C:\Program files\Application. This is because these folders contain the shortcut files and act as a pointer to the new location (E:\Program files\Application folders), deleting the original folders will cause in application malfunction and the concerned application will not execute at all.

Removing NTFS Junctions

One thing to note here is that if you delete the virtual folder link, the backing folders will also get deleted. So in any case you wish to get rid of the virtual folder link, follow the instructions below:

1. Open the standalone Junction Master from start menu. Once it is opened, locate the virtual folder and press “Scan”. As the junction shows up, select it and use the button as shown in the screenshot below.

2. When you remove a junction, the virtual folder gets deleted while the backing folder stays.

Hence everything falls back to the previous state, this is useful when you want to create a new location for the junction files and start the reallocation procedure from scratch. Simply delete all the junction files, create a new reallocation folder on the D drive (for example) and continue with the Reallocation procedure.

I tested the application on my lapotop running 32-bit Windows 7 and there were no problems as such. Do try this tool and let us know your ideas and thoughts in the comments below.

Image credit: chispita_666

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Ever wished you could upload photos to multiple social sites from a central location? Ever wanted to cross post photos from your MySpace account to your Facebook account, without having to find an app, download some extension or sign up for yet another service ? Meet Dropico

Dropico is a brilliant web application which allows you to share photos across multiple social sites instantly. Dropico utilizes a very intuitive drag and drop interface so that you can easily transfer, upload and share photos from one social network to another.

Let’s quickly learn how to set up Dropico.

Getting Started With Dropico

1. First, you have to create an account with Dropico which takes only 30 seconds. Once your account has been created, login to your Dropico profile and you will be taken to the “Connection wizard”, as shown below:

2. Hit “Next” and connect your existing Social Networking and Photo Sharing accounts to your Dropico Account in the following step.

3. When you hit the “Connect” button for a social website, you have to grant all the required permissions so that Dropico can post photos to your profile. As an example: for your Facebook account, you have to click “Allow” in the permission window page.

4. As soon as you have connected a social website with your Dropico account, the “Status” of that social website will be “ON” as shown below:

You may turn off the status of a particular social website to “OFF” at a later point of time. This is a very useful feature which lets you choose the social networks where you want to upload a selected group of photos. Simply toggle the status from “ON” to “OFF”, select the sites where you want to upload or share photos and it’s done.

5. When you are done connecting all the social sites to your Dropico account, hit the “Next” button and you will be given a unique Dropico MOBI email address, as shown below:

The Dropico MOBI service allows you to upload your photos to Dropico from any mobile device with an internet connection.  All you have to do is send it as an e-mail to your special Dropico MOBI E-mail address. Every photo sent to this e-mail address from your phone will be saved to your Dropico account

6. In the next step, you can enter your email credentials and invite friends from your email contact list to try out Dropico (optional step, you may skip it).

7. All right, you are done with the setup and ready for the Dropico experience.

How To Use Dropico And Upload Photos To Multiple Social Sites

When you login to your Dropico account, simply drag and drop the social widgets from the right top in the upload panel. Dropico will automatically load all the photo albums of the corresponding social networking site, as shown below:

To upload a photo, drag and drop the image from your desktop to the corresponding widget. All done, now Dropico will upload the image to your social profile automatically.

You may also specify the photo albums where the target picture is to be uploaded and the application will upload the photos to that particular album. You may further choose to create a new album and upload the images or choose to drop them in the “Dropico uploads” folder.

It should not be a big deal, because you can always move the images from one album to another at a later point of time.

Dropico also features Photo Tagging (title, description and tags) and album management tools such as creating a new Album, removing photos from selected albums etc. Hence, you do not need to fiddle around in all the social sites and manage your photo albums recursively, let Dropico take all the hassle of uploading your photos and managing them.

Editing Your photos Using Dropico’s Photo Editor

Dropico’s web based photo editor can be used to edit your photos on the fly. What this means is that you can edit your existing photos on any social network using Dropico’s web based photo editor and the changes will be reflected in the original photo that’s stored in your Facebook account, for example.

The images can be edited in three modes:

• Pixlr Express mode – for quick fixing.
• Pixlr Editor – for advanced editing options
• Pizap Editor – to make funny photos.

To start the Dropico photo editor, click the “Edit” button next to any photo and choose the mode, as shown below:

This will load the photo in Dropico’s photo editing app, you can apply basic photo fixes, add text, crop, pan, zoom, fix colors and other attributes of an image. These are pretty much self explanatory, all the basic and advanced photo editing tools are provided so that you can modify an image the way you want.

When you are done modifying the image, Dropico will post the changed photo to the corresponding social networking account. Isn’t that great ?

Overall, this is one of the best photo uploading and sharing apps we have discovered in recent times. You don’t need to download a desktop tool, any browser extension, bookmarklets, java plugins etc, Dropico works universally from any platform or mobile device.

Do you know any better alternative of Dropico for managing photos across all the social websites? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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All of these services allow you to shorten a long link, so that you can use the shortened form of the longer URL and share it on social websites like Facebook, Twitter, IM, Email and so on. Some of these URL shortening services also allow tracking features so that you may know how many users clicked a link, which is great !

One of the major limitation found in almost all the URL shortening services is that none of them allow you to shorten multiple URL’s and combine a group of shortened URL’s into one single link. Quite recently, Bit.ly announced Bit.ly bundles but shortening multiple web addresses and combining them into one single link has always been a missing feature among all the URL shortening services.

What if you can shorten all the URL’s and merge them into a single web link so that your friend can view an online slideshow of the links, one by one. BridgeURL is a new URL shortening service which attempts to fill this gap.

Using BridgeURL is fairly simple, head over to the homepage and enter all the links in the “List URL’s” text box. You may also want to associate a title and a description to the list of links, as shown below:

Be sure to add a meaningful description because the words used in the description field will be used to create your BridgeURL link. When you are done adding all the links in the “List URLs” text box, hit the “Create Link” button and BridgeURL will shorten all the URL’s to a single Bridge URL link.

On the following page, you will be shown the long BridgeURL link as well as a shortened Bit.ly version of the Bridge URL link, as shown below:

Now you have two options. You may either copy and use the long Bridge URL link or copy it’s shortened Bit.ly form, so that you can share it on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and so on.The Bit.ly link will automatically redirect to the same Bridge URL link so sharing any one of the above link will work just as fine.

When other users or your friends click any of the above links, they will be taken to the first page which you added to the list. Here is how the interface will look like:

Note: Bridge URL might not work with links that  do not support the iframe html tag.

As you can see, every webpage shared using BridgeURL will have two sliders – one at the left and another at the right. Users can use these slider links to browse through the group of URL’s one by one. Should you want to open a particular link and compare it with another, simply hit the “Arrow” icon placed at the right top of the page.

Usage

You may use BridgeURL for a variety of creative purposes, other than aggregating links at one place. As an example – you may enter the links of your social profiles one by one and then share the shortened Bridge URL on your Twitter or Facebook profile. If you are a blogger, you might create a Bridge URL of most popular blog posts of your blog and then share the shortened link on your Twitter stream, instead of sharing all the links individually one by one.

To get an idea of how BridgeURL works, watch the following video demonstration below:

If you are a developer and want to use the BridgeURL API in your applications, be sure to read their API documentation here.

Overall, BridgeURL is one of the easiest ways to assemble a group of links and shorten all of them in one shot. The service is ad free and there aren’t any registration or sign-ups required.

Try BridgeURL today and if you know of any better service for shortening multiple links, share them in the comments section.

Image credit: chrisdlugosz

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If you are the type of person who uses the computer just for browsing the web, sending emails, connecting with social friends and other works related to the web – you don’t need an operating system installed locally in your computer.

This is the basic idea behind Chrome OS, which attempts to remove the hassles of managing the local operating system, tweaking the OS settings again and again. Forget the files and program installations – it’s all up there, in the cloud.

If you haven’t heard about Chrome OS yet, this article is a good start. We will discuss some of the very basic things regarding Google’s new operating system which includes Chrome OS, the Cr-48 netbook, the chrome web store and more.

What Is Google Chrome OS ?

Chrome OS is nothing but an entirely new operating system from Google meant to be run in netbooks. We have discussed about the Chrome Operating system when it was unveiled in 2009, you can click through the following links and read them one by one:

• First looks at Google’s new operating system – Chrome OS
• How to Run Chrome OS the easy way
• How to build Chrome OS for your own netbook

In easy English, Google’s Chrome OS is nothing more than a browser that runs only web apps. There are no installations required, no settings which you can tweak, no files or folders which you have to manage. Everything is downloaded from the web (i.e your Google account) and it doesn’t matter whether you are working from your Chrome notebook or someone else’s.

If your Chrome netbook gets lost or damaged, there is no need to panic as no data will be lost. Everything is kept safe in your Google account, this includes emails in Gmail, photos in Picasa, documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs, browser preferences in Google Chrome and so on.

What is Chrome CR – 48 Notebook ?

The Cr-48 Chrome Notebook is the official device from Google that runs on Google Chrome OS. Here is how the Cr-48 notebook looks like:

You can’t order a Cr-48 notebook, because it’s not available for sale and won’t be make available to the public. U.S citizens may fill out a form at Google’s Pilot program and request for a sample copy of the Chrome notebook for test drive.

Here are the complete specifications of Chrome Cr-48 Netbook:

• The Keyboard does not have caps lock and function keys – the caps lock key is replaced by a Google search key.
• The battery can withstand eight hours of continuous usage.
• 12 inch LCD display – ideal for users who love working on a small screen.
• The Cr-48 netbook weighs 4 pounds approximately.
• Built in Wi-fi and 3G systems are provided, the service is run by Verizon wireless.
• The Chrome netbook does not carry any sort of branding.

The following video shows the working methodology of a Chrome Cr-48 netbook briefly. You can also check the Chrome OS website for more information

What is Chrome Web Store ?

Chrome web Store is an open marketplace for paid as well as free web applications that run only in Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS. You can say that the chrome web store is a fancy name for Google Chrome extensions, both work in a similar fashion.

To install applications from Chrome web store in Google Chrome, you need to install Google Chrome version 8 and above. To know whether you are running the correct version of Google Chrome, right click the small “Wrench” icon from the top right of Google Chrome and choose “About Google Chrome”.

In the following window, check the version number of Google chrome as shown below:

When you have got the required version, you are ready to test and install web applications from Chrome web store. If you are a developer who loves to develop web applications, make sure you read the documentation from Google on creating and selling apps from the Chrome web store.

How To Install And Uninstall Applications From Chrome Web Store

Installing your preferred applications from Chrome web store is fairly easy, head over to the Chrome web store page and enter the name of the application in the search box. In the search result page, click the app icon and hit “Install” on the next page.

There are a wide variety of applications already available in the Chrome web store. This includes apps for communication, education, email, social networking, blogging, utilities, productivity and so on. When you have installed an application, open the Google Chrome new tab page and you will see the App icon listed, as shown underneath:

Clicking the application icon launches the app in a new browser tab. Here is how the Chromedeck app (Tweetdeck for Google Chrome) looks in my computer:

Uninstalling Chrome web apps is also easily achieved, open the new tab page, right click the app icon you want to remove and choose “Uninstall”. That’s it.

Why Use a Chrome Web App ?

There are two main advantages of Chrome web aps e.g Tweetdeck for Chrome over a regular desktop application. First, they are tightly packed with your browser, you don’t have to install applications separately from different websites, download the updates and manage each and every application individually. Once the corresponding Chrome web app is installed, everything is accessible directly from your browser.

The second advantage is better usability. There is less clutter, less number of open windows and the most important part – auto sync app settings with your Google account. Hence, you don’t have to remember the username and passwords required for each and every application, just install it’s chrome web app and be sure to sync the app settings from “Chrome -> options -> personal stuff -> sync”.

To make the best out of Chrome web apps, be sure to read our earlier article on how to make the best out of Chrome web apps.

Are you using Chrome web apps yet ? What are your favorite applications? Share your ideas in the comments section

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In such situations, it would be wise to perform an internet speed check on your computer and see whether you are getting the correct upload and download speeds from your Internet service provider. You can also compare your internet speed with other users across the globe and see whether your current ISP is at par with other ISP’s across the world.

There are lots of desktop tools as well as web based applications available for performing an internet speed check. One of my favorite sites to check internet speed is Speedtest.net

Note: This article discusses how you can measure the upload and download speed of your internet connection. If your internet connection is very slow, we highly recommend switching to Google public DNS server and speed up your internet connection.

Checking Your Internet Upload / Download Speed

To start the speed checks, head over to Speedtest.net, the site will automatically detect your current geographical location and represent it in a world map, as shown below:

You will be shown your IP address and the name of your Internet service provider at the left bottom corner of the page. This is useful, when you are browsing the web on a public computer or a Wi-Fi network connection and want to know the service provider of the network to which you are currently connected.

Hit the “Begin Test” button to start the test. The website will download a sample file to your computer’s temporary folder to check the average download speed of your internet connection. When the tests are complete, you will be shown the results:

As you can see, the current download speed of my Internet connection is only 0.62 Mb/second. While the upload speed is shockingly low – 0.12 Mb/second. It would take 1 minute to download an MP3 file ( ~5MB) while a video file (~35 MB) would take 8 minutes to download.

Speedtest.net also has an iPhone app, hence you can use it to check the speed of your wireless internet connection as well.

A good idea to complete your internet speed test checks is to choose multiple speed checking websites and see whether you get the same results or not. Another good resource is Speed.io – pretty much all the same functions with a different interface. I performed the same checks and here are the results:

According to Speed.io the upload speed of my Internet connection is 190 KBPS which equals to 0.18 MBPS. This is close to Speedtest.net’s results which turned out to be 0.12 MBPS.

The download speed came out to be 481 KBPS which equals 0.46 MBPS. This is again similar to Speedtest.net’s results which turned out to be 0.6 MBPS. The added advantage of Speed.io is that the site also tells you the number of simultaneous connections your computer is allowed to make, in my case, it’s 320.

Pingtest.net – Take The Ping Test

Pingtest.net is a free broadband quality analyzer designed to complement Speedtest.net. This troubleshooting tool grades your connection on how well it is likely to handle things like voice services (VoIP), streaming music or video, telecommuting or online gaming. The site checks how much time it is required by your internet connection to send a packet of data from your computer to a remote computer and then send the same data packet back to your computer.

Head over to Pingtest.net, hit the “Start test” button and wait for a few minutes till the site checks the “Ping” and “Jitter” speed, as shown below:

My internet connection’s “Ping” test came out to be 394 ms while the “Jitter” test came out to be 26ms. You will also see the average grade level of your internet connection (mine came out to be “D”) and the amount of average packet loss data.

Your Internet speed test results are automatically archived at the results page, you can grab the link or embed code and add the speed test result to your own website or blog.

Have you checked your Internet connection speed? Which tool or website do you use for the same ? Drop your ideas in the comments below.

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When the client enters the same username, password or URL in his browser, the remote connection is established. Now the host and the client are connected via the remote desktop connecting software and both users can share their computer screen with each other. Not only screen sharing, but they can exchange instant messages, send files, share control and do a lot of other tasks.

There are lots of remote desktop sharing applications available for Windows, Linux or MAC. Some of the very popular programs are Teamviewer, Logmein, Yuugu and so on.

But one of the very simplest and easy to use web based remote sharing applications is Join.me

Join.me is a new yet impressive way to share your desktop with anyone. Since it is a web application that works directly from the browser, the users do not need to download or install anything and it supports all platforms – Windows, Linux and Mac.

Start A Remote Session Using Join.me

1. Start your web browser and open the Join.me home page. next. Click the “Share” button as shown below:

2. Now you will be asked to save an executable file (~ 1MB) on your computer. Save the executable file and install it on your computer.

3. When you are done installing the Join.me executable, you will see a simple widget placed at the top of the desktop.

This is your Join.me widget which will copy a Unique Join.me URL in the text box ( e.g http://join.me/456-286-391 ). Copy this URL to Windows clipboard and send it to anyone with whom you want to start the remote desktop session.

When the user clicks your Join.me URL, he will see a complete view of your desktop in his browser. Here is how the host desktop is supposed to look in the client’s browser, when he joins your remote desktop session:

As you can see, the client is using Windows XP while the Host is using Windows7 in the above example. The host computer will see a notification near the system tray as shown below:

Working On The Remote Session

When the remote desktop session is established, you can do a lot of useful tasks : share instant messages, request or allow control, start a voice conference and so on.

To start sending instant messages, click the small “Chat” icon (second from the left) , type in your message and hit “Enter”

The client user will immediately receive a pop up message on his screen, he can simply type in his message on the Join.me chat widget and hit “Return” to send the message.

Similarly, you can start a voice conference using the “Call” button at the far left.

Requesting Or Allowing Control

The best thing regarding a remote desktop session is the ability to control the client’s system from your computer. Both you and the client user can request control of each other’s system and control the remote computer as if you were sitting just next to the remote user and controlling it. You can open any folder, move files, delete files and folders and do each and every possible task that is possible from the native system.

Let us suppose you want to allow the remote user the ability to control your computer. Click the “Allow Control’ button and then choose “Yes” as shown below:

The client user will immediately receive a notification as “Do you want to control the host computer?“. When he chooses yes, he will be allowed complete control of your computer. He can then open Windows explorer, browse to any specific folder, copy, move or delete files and perform any other possible task (including system shutdown or Restart)

This is a really great way to provide tech support to any user, provided he/she is connected to the internet. Join.me also allows multiple people to connect through a remote desktop which is useful when you are working as a team and need to show other members a view of your desktop.

The basic version of Join.me is free but if you need more features, you can upgrade to the pro plan. The Pro plan allows users to get a personalized Join.me URL, schedule and lock meetings in addition to all the goodies available in the basic version. The pro plan costs $29 a month or $299 a year.

Have you ever used a remote desktop sharing application? Which is your favorite? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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Followupthen is a simple web service with a brilliant concept. The site lets you set up scheduled email reminders on any of your email account’s e.g Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, Hotmail and so on. You can define a future date or hour in any email message and your reminder will hit the inbox on the scheduled day or time. No registrations or sign ups are required in order to use the Followupthen service.

What’s impressive about Followupthen is that you can not only send the reminders to your email, but you can also auto forward them to any other recipient of your choice. Hence, you can automatically ping a particular email address at a future date, which is great!

Getting Started With Followupthen

Following are the steps involved to start setting up scheduled email reminders using the Followupthen service:

1. Open your email inbox and compose a new email message. Type “1minute@followupthen” in the “To:” field and add any text as the subject line or in the body of the message.

2. Hit “Send” and wait for a minute. You will soon receive an invitation email from Followupthen which looks like the following:

3. Click the confirmation link and fill up a captcha on the next page to confirm your account. Next, select your local time zone from the drop down selection box, as shown below:

It’s very important to select the correct timezone setting, otherwise your scheduled reminders won’t reach your email inbox on proper time.

All done, you have successfully set up your Followupthen account.

The Reminder Syntax Of Followupthen

When you want to set up an email reminder, compose a new email message and specify the time interval in the “To:” field. Then enter a subject line, a message body and send it to time-interval@followupthen.com.

For example: Let’s say you want to get the reminder email exactly at 8 pm tomorrow evening. In that case, you have to use the following format, as illustrated in the image below:

Here are the most common time interval syntax which can be used with Followupthen:

• 2pm@followupthen.com – This will send a reminder at 2pm (local time). If  you are setting the reminder after 2pm today, you will get the reminder tomorrow.
• 3amtomorrow@followupthen.com – This will send the email reminder at 3am tomorrow.
• 3minutes@followupthen.com – This format can be very useful when you want to set up quick “day specific” reminders. The reminder email will hit your inbox exactly after 3 minutes.
• 7days@followupthen.com – This format can be used to get the reminder email after a certain number of days.
• friday@followupthen.com – This is again a very handy format which can be used to set up email reminders for specific weekdays. The reminder email will hit your inbox in upcoming Friday. If by coincidence, the current day of the week also comes out to be Friday, you will get the reminder exactly on the next Friday.
• Jul15@followupthen.com – This format can be used to set up email reminders for a specific date. Very useful when you want to remember a specific event, a date or may be something else.

You can visit the Followupthen documentation page to learn more on other reminder formats.

Using the CC: Field With Followupthen: Say you just received an email from one of your clients and want to follow up with him 3 days later. When you have composed a reply to the client’s email, add a “CC:” field and forward it to 3days@followupthen.com

Then send the reply as usual. After 3 days, both you and your client will get the email reminder which will contain the earlier message threads. This is really a very easy way to automatically follow up important messages, or to set up email reminders for multiple people who work in a team.

Have you used any email reminder service ? What technique do you use to automatically follow up on important conversations ? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

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Do you know that the WordPress administration area can be customized according to your needs? You can hide the features you never use, change the logo in your WordPress login screen and do a lot more creative things right inside your WordPress blog’s backend.

There are some advantages of customizing WordPress’s admin section. First, you can remove the features that are not at all required and get rid of unnecessary UI clutter. Second, you can handle permissions and access of sections more easily, if you have more than one user associated with the blog (multi-authored blogs are a good example).

Here are some useful WordPress plugins which can be used to customize your WordPress’s blog’s backend:

Ozh Admin Menu

The problem with WordPress’s default navigation structure is that the links are not quickly accessible. You have to click through the small arrow beside each section to expand it and then click the link of the page you want to go to.

If you prefer simple things and want a minimalist navigation in WordPress admin area, install the Ozh Admin menu WordPress plugin. This plugin changes WordPress navigation structure such that all admin links are available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves a lot of screen space !

Adminimize

If you are the administrator of a multi-authored blog, there are some sections which you may want to hide from specific users or authors. For example: You might want to hide the Post URL slug in the Write Post panel for all authors. The Adminimize plugin let’s you completely customize which sections, widgets and panels are available to specific users of your blog.

There are 5 different roles available e.g Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. You can select the required checkbox against any link of the WordPress admin area and choose to hide or show it to that specific user role. Should you create new roles later, the selection checkbox for that specific user role will appear in the Adminimize option panel.

Overall, this is a great plugin to customize which functions are available to different users of your blog.

Admin Quick Menu

The Admin Quick Menu plugin lets you add external links within your WordPress dashboard. You can define a set of custom URL’s which you want to access without having to leave your WordPress blog’s backend. Typical examples may be Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, Feedburner, Twitter and so on.

The best thing regarding this plugin is that you can choose which user levels have the ability to access the custom external links. For example: You can choose to let only the administrator have access to the external links, pretty handy when you want to keep an eye on external services directly within your WordPress administration area.

Pre Publish Reminder

The Pre publish reminder plugin adds a sleek reminder column in WordPress “Write Post” panel. This can be used to notify blog authors about important points, notes that they should follow before publishing an article. You can always edit the reminders and format the reminders from “Manage reminders” section of WordPress admin area

Disable Specific Dashboard Widgets

The first thing which users notice after logging in to WordPress admin area are the dashboard widgets. Although, a user can hide a widget from “Screen options” but you can use the following functions to completely remove dashboard widgets within WordPress admin area:

function remove_dashboard_widgets(){

global$wp_meta_boxes;

unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']);

unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']);

unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_primary']);

unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);

unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);

unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_secondary']);

}

add_action(‘wp_dashboard_setup’, ‘remove_dashboard_widgets’);

Just paste the above code in your theme’s function.php file and the dashboard widgets will be hidden from all users of your blog. You can refer to WordPress’s official documentation article for more information.

Replace The WordPress logo With your own

If you want more branding options, it’s a good idea to replace the WordPress logo with a custom logo of your site. Simply paste the following code in your theme’s functions.php file:

add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘my_custom_logo’);

function my_custom_logo() {

echo ‘<style type="text/css">

#header-logo { background-image:url(‘.get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’).’/images/custom-logo.gif)!important; }

</style>’;

}

Remember to save your custom logo image in the theme’s image folder e.g wp-content/themes/theme-name/images and name it it custom-logo.gif.

Further reading on WordPress customizations:

• 11 ways to secure your WordPress blog
• 8 ways to improve your WordPress blog’s loading time
• 9 Plugins which new WordPress users must install on their blogs

Do let us know your favorite WordPress admin customization in the comments section.

Image credit: [lee]

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After you have set up the network connection, you can move files and folders between two computers from the “My Network Places” folder in Windows. But what about Windows clipboard data ? How do you share copied data from one computer to another, when both of them are not connected to a home network? How do you share screenshots, URL(s) and copied text with a remote computer?

Ybex Clipboard is a free application for Windows which lets you share clipboard data with a remote computer in just one click. You can also capture screenshots, annotate your screen area and share the image with other systems.

The idea behind Ybex clipboard is that whatever you copy and share with the Ybex application is immediately uploaded to your Ybex account. Then the same data can be accessed from a remote computer, provided that it is already connected to the internet.

Setting Up Ybex Clipboard

Here are the steps that needs to be done:

1. Download Ybex Clipboard and install the application on one of the computers from where you would be sharing screenshots and windows clipboard data.

2. Once the application is installed, run the program and sign up for a free Ybex account with any of your email address.

3. Once you have signed up, you will see a system tray balloon popping up on the host computer, as shown below:

4. All set, your host computer is ready for sharing clipboard data, screenshots etc. Now install the application on the remote computer – when you are asked to login, provide the same email address which you provided in the host computer. The setup procedure is complete.

Sharing Clipboard Data Between Two Computers

To share clipboard data between the host and remote computer, all you have to do is copy the text you want to share, right click the Ybex system tray icon and choose “Share Clipboard”.

This will immediately open a balloon notification requesting you to copy the required data within 30 seconds. If the data is already in your Windows clipboard, hit the “Already in Clipboard” button.

All done, the data will be immediately sent to your Ybex account. When you want to access the same text on the remote computer, simply select “Manage Shared” from the system tray icon. This will open your Ybex account on the default web browser with a list of recently shared items (images or text).

All entries are automatically sorted according to their type and the date of sharing. Hit the last item and this will open a new browser tab, containing the entire data shared from the host computer. Select the text, right click and choose”Copy”.

That’s it – the clipboard data of the host computer is now sent to the clipboard of the remote computer. It’s ready to be used anywhere e.g a word document or a browser address bar etc.

This is very useful when you want to send a URL, a paragraph or other clipboard elements to another computer without having to email everything. Just keep the application running in both computers and share every clipboard information with a simple right click. Neat!

Sharing Screenshots Between Two computers

In addition to text, Ybex also supports sharing screen mock up’s and annotations between two computers that are not connected through a home or office network.

To do this, right click on the Ybex icon from the system tray of host computer and choose “Annotate and Share Area”

This will open a custom toolbox over your computer screen which you can use to annotate any part of the screen, add markers and custom notes. Following is an example showing how the screen annotations can be done using Ybex:

When you are done annotating the screen, hit the “upload” button and the image will be sent to your Ybex account.When you want to see the screen mock up on the remote computer, click “Manage Shared” and choose the link from your browser.

Here is how the screen mock up will look like in the remote computer:

All in all, Ybex clipboard is one of the best tools to share clipboard data and screen mockups between any two computers connected to the internet. There are no limitations on the number of shared items that you can keep in your Ybex account.

One of the downsides of Ybex is that the application does not allow you to share files with the remote computer (luckily you can easily do it with Dropbox). Otherwise, it’s a pretty decent little tool which every web worker should make use of. If you are looking for more window clipboard tools, check out our earlier article – 5 free clipboard managers for Windows.

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