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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

If you are new to Dropbox and haven’t tried it yet, we suggest you read our earlier article on how to make the most out of Dropbox.

Dropbox gives 2 gigabytes of free space to all users which is sufficient if you want to sync only a few folders between multiple computers. However, the 2 GB limit is not enough if you want to sync or backup a large collection of music albums, MP3′s, video files etc.

In this article, we will learn some tricks to increase Dropbox storage space and how you can use referral sign-ups to get up to 8GB of Dropbox storage space, all for free.

Get 250 MB Dropbox Storage Upgrade By Completing the Dropbox Tour

Not many users know that Dropbox gives a free 250 MB storage upgrade to all users if you just complete the Dropbox tour by logging in to your Dropbox account. There is no need to wait for the referral sign-ups to complete, all you have to do is log into your Dropbox account and carry out the following steps:

1. Go to the “Get Started” tab and complete the steps of the introductory Dropbox tour.

2. Install the Dropbox client on your computer, you can skip this if the client is already installed on any one of your systems.

3. Put some files in your “My Dropbox” Folder.

4. Share a folder with your friends or colleagues.

5. Invite some friends to try out Dropbox for free.

When you have completed all of the above steps, you will get a bonus 250 MB of added storage space in your Dropbox account.

To check whether the bonus storage space has been added or not, simply go to dropbox.com/account and check the amount of space allotted to you.

Get 768 MB of Free Dropbox Space By Connecting Your Social Networking Accounts

Dropbox has recently introduced a social sharing concept where you get a whooping 768 MB of added Dropbox space by simply connecting your social networking account’s with Dropbox. It works like this – for every completed action you get 128 MB of added space, you can always choose to complete only specific actions or choose to complete all of them.

Here are the steps that needs to be done:

1. Login to your Dropbox account and go to Dropbox.com/free.

2. There are 6 actions available, completing each of the action will earn you 128 MB of free storage space. These actions are:

• Connect your Twitter account with Dropbox – 128 MB
• Connect your Facebook account with Dropbox – 128 MB
• Follow @Dropbox on Twitter – 128 MB
• Give some feedback why you love Dropbox – 128 MB
• Post the feedback message to your Facebook profile – 128 MB
• Post the feedback message as a tweet to your Twitter profile – 128 MB

When you are done connecting all your social account’s with Dropbox and have sent the small feedback message, your account will be upgraded with 768 MB of added Dropbox space. Great !

Earn up to 8GB of Dropbox Space By Referring Friends

Dropbox has a nice referral scheme which lets you earn up to 8GB of added Dropbox space by referring anyone to sign up for Dropbox. It works like this – you grab the referring link from your account’s referral section at dropbox.com/referrals. Then you can send this link to your friends and followers via email, IM or post the link on social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and so on.

When your friends click the referring link and sign up for Dropbox, both you and your friend get a 250 MB storage bonus. This is a win-win situation for both parties and you should use your referring link to invite more friends to sign up for Dropbox.

The best thing regarding Dropbox referrals is that you can invite your email contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL email address and send automatic email invites directly from your Dropbox account. There is no need to copy paste the referring link in every email message.

Do you know any other way to earn some free Dropbox space ? Share your tips in the comments section.

Note: Please do not include any Dropbox referral link in the comments. They will be deleted immediately.

We have earlier discussed some useful tricks on performing country specific Google searches and some other special Google search tricks. Just a couple of days ago, Google launched yet another service called Google Hotpot which allows users to discover local search recommendations from your social circle.

According to Google, HotPot aims to make local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy. Everybody have their own likes and dislikes and Google HotPot aims to understand your liking and offer relevant places suggestion, which are personalized by you and your social circle. In short – Google HotPot is nothing but a local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends.

To start using Google Hotpot, go to google.com/hotpot and you will be asked to set up your public Google places nickname and upload a profile avatar.

Hit the “Start Rating” button and you are all set discovering new places using the Google Hotpot service. In the next page, you will see that Google has automatically detected your current location, as shown below:

Searching Locations Using Google Hotpot

Type relevant search terms on the Google Hotpot box and you will be shown local search locations.

Note: you must be signed in to your Google account in order to see the personalized recommendations.

Example: I searched for “Hotels” and here is what I was shown:

There are a few things worth noting here. First, only those search results which closely match with your location and the typed terms ( keywords used for search) are shown. Next, the search results are ordered according to user ratings, this means that recommendations of a particular place from your social friends will appear higher in the search results. Third, you are shown a small preview of the location so that you can quickly decide which location you are interested in.

You can click through any result or open it in a new tab to get the complete location information, street address, reaching directions and in some cases phone number or email address of the organization.

Should you want to save a preferred location for later reference or want to discard it, just click through the required option on top of the search result. Clicking the “Not Interested” button will immediately remove the result from your HotPot result and it won’t appear if you perform the same search later.

You can also write a review of a place, location, hotel, restaurant, historic place etc. This is useful, because your friends will be able to read your feedback if they perform the same search on the same location.

When you are done rating at least 5 or more search results, Google Hotpot will try to understand your liking and will show personalized search results matching within your HotPot social circle.

The next step is to add friends to your Google Hotpot profile. You can invite friends from your Google profile, by clicking the Friends tab on the left sidebar and then selecting “Add Friends” button as shown below:

Once you have added all or selected friends, you are all set to receive personalized “Place recommendations” directly on your Google HotPot profile. Whenever any of your friends rate or review a place, you will be able to see it from the “Friends” tab in the left sidebar. Since the service has been launched only a week ago, don’t expect the recommendations right away. But as more and more people start using Google HotPot, I am sure it will be the Go to option to get personalized location based information.

You can read the official blog post on the Google latlong blog for more information.

What’s your take on Google Hotpot? Have you started using yet ? Do share your ideas in the comments.

Chatting with Facebook friends is again another addiction seen among most users. Some people have an overwhelming number of friends and this is where it gets all complicated.

Say you have just began chatting with your girlfriend on Facebook and suddenly some random stranger starts sending instant messages. In case of strangers and people whom you don’t know, you can always ignore the instant message and continue chatting with the person you were chatting with. But the situation gets worse when some close friend starts sating “Hello, how you doing” and you are busy fixing a date with your girlfriend.

You can’t ignore the person in the first place while at the same time, you don’t want to chat with him because you are busy chatting with someone else.

So how do you decide which of the Facebook friends you want to chat? Should you delete the annoying friends or unfriend them? Should you create another Facebook account just for the sake of chatting with specific people? Should you use anonymous chatting rooms ? The are a long list of alternatives to consider.

The good news is that if you want to appear offline to specific friends on Facebook or if you want to ignore instant messages from selected Facebook friends, you don’t need to delete them from your friend list and neither you need to create another Facebook account. All you have to do is create a new Friend list just for the sake of “Chatting” or “Instant Messaging”.

Note: Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows live messenger and other chat clients do not yet have this function. You can’t use this same technique with other social networks and Instant messaging providers.

Appear Offline To Specific Facebook Friends

1. Log into your Facebook account and look for the “Friends” link in the left sidebar.

2. This will open the “Find Friends” page where you can import the contacts list from Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live messenger and so on. Ignore that section and click the “Edit Friends” link.

3.On the next page, click on “Create a List”. Enter a meaningful name such as “offline list” or “Ignored Contacts”

4. You may also take a different approach. Rather than creating an “Offline contacts” list, you can instead create an “online contacts” list. When you start chatting on Facebook, simply turn this list setting as “ON” and keep every other list as “OFF”.

This is recommended if you chat with only a couple of friends or family members. However, if you chat with a large number of friends and want to ignore only a few contacts, go for the earlier option e.g the “Offline list”

5. When the list has been named, select the friends to whom you want to appear offline by clicking the profile thumbnails in the browser overlay window.

When you are done selecting all the friends, hit the “Create List” button. You can always add more people to this list or remove existing friends from the list from “Friends -> Edit Friend” lists.

6. All done, now open the Facebook chat box placed at the right bottom of your browser and you will see a new list appearing. Here is an example:

When you want to appear offline to selected Facebook friends, simply click the “Chat Visibility” button next to the “Always Offline” friend list created earlier. Clicking the button will change your IM status to offline to only those friends who are in the “Always Offline” friend list. The button turns Grey from Green and you can continue chatting with all other friends who are not in that specific chat list.

If friends from that specific chat list try to send you an IM, they will receive the response

“Your chat message wasn’t sent because Mr. X is offline. (Send as a message)”

If you wan to go the other way and prefer creating an “Online chat” list, simply turn that specific list “ON” while turning “Off” all the other chat lists.

This is a very simple yet effective way to keep your Facebook chat list in shape and do not have to deal with unwanted messages popping up every now and then. This chat list will continue to work with desktop Facebook clients as well.

Do you like the idea of creating a dedicated chat list for hiding specific Facebook friends? What techniques you use to manage your IM buddies on Facebook? Share your ideas in the comments section.

RockMelt is a new web browser, backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, which aims to bridge the gap between social sharing and web surfing. The browser is build around your social circle, feeds, search results and friends.

Request an Invite To Download Rockmelt

Rockmelt has recently entered a public beta but you will need an invitation to download the application. To request a free invite, head over to the RockMelt website and connect your Facebook account.

You will soon receive an email invitation with a link to download RockMelt for free. Once the setup file has been downloaded to your computer, double click to launch the web installer – yes you will need an internet connection to install Rockmelt (just like Google Chrome).

Getting Started with Rockmelt

When you run the browser for the first time, you will be asked to sign in with your Facebook account and grant all the required permissions.

The browser will continuously check your Facebook news feed among other connected sites, hence you should not revoke the permissions later.

Rockmelt completely mimics the look and functionality of Google Chrome. The browser has three main panels – one each to the right, left and top. The right panel is for connected sites, the left panel for social friends while the top panel is for search results and feeds.

Your Facebook Friends Panel in Rockmelt

The left panel of Rockmelt revolves around your Facebook friends, you can create a list of favorite Facebook friends, read their latest status updates and do a lot of other interesting things.

Clicking a friends thumbnail shows you more options – you can start a chat right away without logging in to your Facebook account. The person need not necessarily be using the RockMelt browser, he will receive your chat message on his Facebook profile or any desktop client he might be using.

There are other useful options as well, navigate to the “Recent Activity” tab and you can see the recent links shared by your friend on his profile. You can click through any shared link, image, video and it will open in a new browser tab.

Double click the profile thumbnail to open your friends Facebook profile on a new tab. You may hit the “Write” button to write a message on your friends wall or send a direct message.

You can again “Like” an update or post comment directly from the RockMelt window, it’s very sleek and fun to play around with.

The browser will also show live desktop notifications near windows system tray, whenever there is a new status update from a friend or someone sends you an IM. These desktop notifications can be turned off from the browser’s preferences and you can completely customize which notifications you want to see.

Should you want to take a quick look at your Facebook news feed, simply hit the Facebook icon at the right of the browser window. This will open a small pop up  with all the links, posts, videos and images shared on your Facebook wall.

Adding Connected Sites And Feeds in Rockmelt

Social media is not only about people but also about the websites you visit on a regular basis. If you read a lot of articles on blogs, RSS feeds and watch YouTube videos – RockMelt’s connected sites panel will come in handy.

The connected sites panel is on the right side and lets you do a few important things. First, you can add RSS feeds from blogs, websites and other sources and read them one by one on an overlay window. You may also add your other social networking profiles e.g YouTube channel, Twitter account or Friendfeed lifestream and then read the corresponding updates in their own overlay window.

For example: I added the Maketecheasier RSS feed as one of the sites and now I can read the recent articles in a new overlay window:

Agree this is no alternative of a full featured RSS reader like Feeddemon or Google reader but can be useful if you follow a handful of blogs and want to read the updates directly from the browser’s sidebar. The social sharing options are also tightly integrated, hit the share button next to any feed item and the blog post is shared over your Facebook wall, with your custom comment of course.

Whenever there is a new update on any of your connected sites, a notification is shown in another overlay pop up. This differentiates the connected sites panel with your bookmarks toolbar, which sadly never shows any notification or recent updates.

Using RockMelts Search Bar And Sharing Features

One of the nice things about RockMelt is the ability to preview search results directly from the browser’s search bar. Type a keyword or a phrase and hit the return key to preview Google search results on a browser overlay, as shown below:

You can again use the “Share” button place just right to the address bar to share any webpage on your Facebook wall. The webpage can either be shared as a link or can be sent as a message to selected Facebook friends.

All in all, RockMelt is a must used browser if you do a lot of social sharing and use Facebook as the primary medium for online marketing. It doesn’t get better than this – from surfing websites to sharing links to getting instant notifications, RockMelt will keep you ahead of the curve.

Try out RockMelt today, if you do not have an invite yet – ask some of your Facebook friends because chances are that they have already given RockMelt a try.

There are tons of task management apps available for free but Process Hacker seems to be the most feature rich and popular among PC users. The best part of the application is that it’s portable and thus can be used from a removable drive on multiple computers without installation.

Why use another Task Management Program ?

Process hacker provides some unique features which are not present in the default Windows task manager. Some of the important features are listed below:

• View a hierarchical tree view of running processes – not present in Windows task manager.
• Restart a particular process, without ending it and running it manually from command prompt or from “New Task”
• More control on the affinity and priority of a process.
• View process heaps, DEP status and other environment variables.
• Use different methods to terminate running processes.
• Bypass different forms of process protection.

There are more features too, if you are a power user and want more control on how the running processes are handled, how much memory is allocated to each program and other parameters. Process Hacker is the way to go.

Usage

Once you have downloaded the package, extract it and open the X86 or X64 folder – this depends on the ID of your operating system. Then double-click the ProcessHacker.exe file to launch the Process Hacker task management window. Here is how it looks like:

Managing Running Processes

All the running process are listed in the process tab in a tree view – thus listing all the sub processes in hierarchical manner. Right clicking a process gives you some useful options -

• Changing the process priority – high, normal, low, real-time, above normal, below normal and idle.
• Terminate the active process or the whole process tree
• Bring the application window to front, minimize, maximize or restore it.
• Changing the affinity controls – determining which CPU threads are allowed to execute the process.
• Create a process dump file
• Run the process for a separate user, determine the I/O priority or completely detach it from the debugger

The best part is the “Properties” window which shows a graphical view of the process performance. You can know the memory consumption and CPU performance for a particular process, along with the Input Output threads the process is currently handling. This feature is not available in default Windows task manager.

Another advantage of using Process Hacker is that you can know which applications will immediately close if you terminate a system process. This is because all the applications or programs using that process will be listed in the tree view.

The Services Tab

The services tab shows a list of Windows services installed on your computer. Most of these services are either drivers or important updates installed from Microsoft Update.

There are some useful pieces of information available next to each service.  Here are some common examples:

• You can know the exact installation path of a running service by right clicking a service -> properties -> Binary path
• Know whether the service auto starts with Windows or not – from the “Start Type”
• Know for which user account the service is triggered.
• Know whether the service is a driver, a shared process or a registered Microsoft service.
• Which DLL files are associated with the concerned service.
• Which permissions are granted to the running service – switch to the “Security” tab and check the “System Permissions” section.

All these details are not shown in Windows task manager, if you are really interested in knowing the inner details of running Windows services – Process Hacker will not disappoint you.

The Network Tab

One of the most impressive features of Process Hacker is the ability to know detailed information about incoming and outgoing network connections. You get to know about the network protocol associated with a particular process, which local address or remote address the process is using, what is the current state and the remote port of the running process.

The details get updated in real-time and whenever the state of a process changes – a highlight is automatically reflected, an example is shown below

This is very useful when you want to know which programs are transferring data to the internet through your computer’s network connection.

There are other useful features as well, this includes searching for a process by name, viewing the pagefile history, showing all the hidden processes or filtering file handles and shared DLL’s. This program is definitely not for novice users, geeks will find it extremely useful.

What’s your favorite task management utility for Windows? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

One of the problems with Emails is the ability to share it publicly or to share it with strangers who are not in your contact list. Say you are a web developer and received a project deal, which you want to forward to your team members. You can either add a Cc or forward it to the group of people. But the problem here is the email message is not public and only those people who have received a forwarded copy can read it.

There are some workarounds in these situations. You may copy the entire email message and publish it as a webpage. Then shorten the URL and share it on your website, blog or social profiles. Another alternative would be to use Cc:everybody – a web service which allows you to share email messages publicly.

How Cc:Everybody Works

When you create a new account with Cc:Everybody, you will get a public email address e.g “yourusername@Cc:Everybody.com“. When other people send messages to this public email address, a copy of the message will be forwarded to your real email address – the one which you used to sign up for Cc:Everybody.

When you want to share an email publicly with anyone, just send a reply to the email message at yourusername@Cc:Everybody.com. That’s it – your message will be published as a publicly accessible webpage which anyone can view. You can further share the webpage on your social profiles e.g Facebook, Twitter and so on.

When readers read your public email, they can respond to it and the message will be sent to your original email account. You post a reply and your reply is again made public at your Cc:Everybody.com profile page. All published emails will be available on http://cceverybody.com/username- this is your public inbox.

Setting Up Your Cc:Everybody Public Email Inbox

1. First, head over to the Cc:everybody and sign up for a new account. Be sure to associate your primary email address where you receive important emails.

2. You will receive a confirmation link to your email address. Click that to activate your account.

3. Once your account is activated, you will get a public email inbox. Here is how it looks:

4. Right after this, you will receive a demo email from the Cc:everybody team. Simply send a reply and your message will be published on your Cc:everybody  mailbox page.

5. Head over to your Cc:everybody profile and you will see the email conversation as a public webpage. Here is how it looks:

6. Now that you have familiarized yourself with the working of Cc:everybody, go to the settings page and  customize your settings. You can change your account password, toggle approving comments and replies, connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to auto publish replies and more.

Working With Cc:Everybody and Sharing Email Conversations

Starting a new conversation:

If you want to start a new public conversation with anyone, click the “New Conversation” link at the sidebar. This will open a small WYSIWYG editor, where you can compose your message, add images, links and publish it. The message can also be forwarded to individual email address(s) and the discussion will be sent in your Cc:Everybody profile page. Here is an example:

Alternatively, you can send a new email to “postoffice@cceverybody.com” and the message will be published at your Cc:everybody profile.

Now this is very useful because your friends who have not joined Facebook or Twitter yet, can take part in the conversation. They don’t have to sign up or register for a new account. All they have to do is head over to the conversation page and submit a new comment using the Discus comment box.

Request User’s to Send you a Direct Message

If you want other users to email you without knowing your email address, Cc:Everybody is just as capable of acting as an email alias. When user’s go to your Cc:Everybody profile page, they can send a direct message to your original email address. This is useful, because the email address is not shared with unknown people and you can still receive a reply from them.

Adding Contacts, Managing Labels, RSS Feeds and Deleting previous Threads

You can create a contact list in your Cc:everybody inbox. This contact list is accessible only to you and not made public, unlike the email conversations.

Individual messages can be labelled for quick search and you can delete previous messages to keep your public inbox in healthy shape. Other user’s can subscribe to the RSS feed of your public emails and get updates directly from their feed reader.

Overall, I am really impressed with the concept and implementation of a public inbox. Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Example: Suppose your friend has messed up her Windows network settings and can’t connect to the internet. She needs your help, but she is unable to understand the textual instructions, articles and the step by step procedure that needs to be done.

In such situations, either you have to go to her home to solve the problem or you can record a step by step screen video, explaining how to fix the issue. That’s when you need screen recording tools and one of the easiest ones out there is IORAD.

IORAD makes it very easy to create step by step instructions on just about anything. If you have developed an application and want to create a visual demonstration, explaining how to use the product amongst other features, IORAD is a tool worth checking out.

How to Create Step by Step Application Instructions Using IORAD

1. First, head over to the IORAD website and sign up for a free account.

2. Once you are in, hit the “Go to application” button, as shown below:

3. Depending upon your browser’s and Windows firewall settings, you may get a prompt as “The application’s digital signature could not be verified”. Choose “Always trust content from this publisher” and hit the “Run” button.

4. This will open the IORAD project application window on a new browser tab. You will see the following interface:

Enter a name and description of the project which you are going to create. This will be useful, when you want to edit or search for the same recording at a later point of time.

4. Once you hit the “Create” button, the application editor will open, which looks like the following:

5. You are ready for the screen recording session. To start recording, hit the “Capture” button on the left and the application will ask whether you want to record the whole screen or just a part of it.

There is another drop down menu which will list all the currently open applications. Select the application which you want to record and hit the “Start Capture” button.

6. As soon as you hit the “Start Capture” button, IORAD will load the same application window in it’s recording frame. Hit the “Record” button and the app will record a complete snapshot of the application window you had defined in the “Window” dropdown above.

When you are done with recording the first screen, hit the “Done” button and a snapshot will be loaded in the IORAD app editor. Now you may add other instructions e.g highlight a section with an arrow, adding custom texts, labels, adding rollover texts and so on. Here is how the interface looks like:

7. This is only the first step of your screen recording. To add more steps, simply hit the “Capture” button again and the app will record the application window of your choice and open it in the same editor.

Once you have edited and added custom instructions to the second snapshot, it will be linked with the earlier snapshot. The same procedure continues with any number of slides that is required for your tutorial.

8. When you have finished the entire screen recording procedure, hit the “Deploy” button to save your Project. That’s it, your screen recording is ready to be viewed by anyone.

Now you have three options:

• Share the direct link of the recording with anyone.
• Embed the recording in your blog or website.
• Download a PDF, .DOCX or PPT version of the recording on your computer.

Hence, IORAD makes it really easy to create a step by step application usage recording and supports easy sharing. Agree there are screen recording applications like Camtasia Studio, ScreenToaster etc but then again, you will need to upload the video on YouTube and then share the video with your friend.

Another problem with videos is that you can’t add so many effects that easily and the videos can not be edited at a later point of time.

Apart from providing tech support, IORAD can also be used for a variety of other purposes. If you have a blog and want to show the most important sections of the website to your visitors, it would be a nice idea to create a screenshot tour using IORAD and embed the sideshow on your blog’s “about” page.

The company is fairly new and promises to add more features and improvements in the coming days. Give IORAD a try and let us know your ideas in the comments section.

When you leave the public computer after checking your email, the hacker may gain access to your Windows live account by retrieving the username and password recorded by the keylogger program.

This goes out not only to a Windows live account but is applicable to other email services as well. This is where the concept of single sign on code comes in, which needs a little introduction.

What is a Single Sign on Code and How do I get it?

A single sign on code is nothing but a token which can be used instead of your email account password. A single sign on code can be used to sign in to your email account and is provided by your email service provider.

The single sign on code is destroyed immediately after the first sign in and can be used only once. Thus, if the keylogger program records the sign on code, it will not work the next time it is used to access your account. Unfortunately, Gmail and Yahoo does not yet support signing in via a single sign on code, but Windows live has lately implemented this security feature.

Activate the Single Sign on Code for your Windows Live Account

1. Go to this link and sign in with your Windows live account. You will be taken to the account overview page, which looks like the following:

2. Under the “Password Reset information” section, click the “Add” link placed just next to the Mobile Phone. In the next page, select your country and add your mobile phone number, as shown below:

Note: The single sign on feature is available only in a few countries which include United States, Australia, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, France, China, Japan, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Columbia, Guernsey, Isle of Man and Jersey.

3. Click the “Add” button and you are done verifying your phone number with Windows Live.

Request a Single Sign On Code While Signing in to Your Windows Live Account

1. To request a single sign on code, go to the Windows Live login page and enter your username in the respective text box. Do not enter the password yet, because this will defeat the entire purpose of using the single sign on code for your Windows live account.

Instead click the link which says “Get a single use code to sign in with”

2. After clicking the above link, the page will refresh as all the previous cookies will be deleted. You will see the following screen and will have to click the “Get One Here” link as shown below:

3. After clicking the “Get one here” link, you will have to enter your Windows live ID and the phone number associated with your account. Also remember to choose the appropriate country, as shown below:

4. Next, hit the “Send text message” button and an SMS message will be sent to your mobile phone immediately. The text message will read like the following:

Windows Live Single-Use code : XXXXXXX. Reply STOP or HELP for help.

Note: If you do not want to use this specific code, you can reply back by texting STOP and the code will be permanently destroyed. You can get a new code anyway!

5. After getting the single use code, type it in the appropriate text box, as shown below:

That’s it, you have successfully signed into your Windows live account without revealing your password. If the computer has a keylogger program installed, it will trace the single use code successfully but the hacker won’t be able to use the same code again. This is because, the single use code is destroyed immediately after you sign out from your Windows Live account and will not work the next time anyone (including you) uses it.

Gmail users would love to read these security tips and we hope other email providers will implement the same feature in near future. Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.