Website Archives • Computer Tips And Tricks, Gadgets, How-To, Life

February 29, 2012March 7, 2017

What to do About Pesky Toolbars?

Toolbars are the source of so many problems that users complain about for their computers. Here is the lowdown on what toolbars are all about and what you can do about them.

What are toolbars?

When you use your internet browser, do you notice that the size of the pages keeps on reducing and there are half a dozen search boxes on top? Toolbars are a simple bar below your browser’s address bar which contains a search bar and a bunch of icons for downloads functions and links to other websites. Depending on what kind of websites you visit, you will have anywhere from one to a dozen toolbars on your browser.

The search bar offers custom search engines. You can type in search terms on them and get results just as you do on Google, Yahoo or Bing. The icons placed by their side allow you to download things like MP3, screen savers, wallpapers etc.

Where do they come from?

Toolbars can be installed on to your browser from a variety of courses. The most common source is free download sites that you go to for downloading things. You may have been to a site that gives you a free photo editing service or maybe even dating service. These sites automatically install toolbars inside Internet explorer or Firefox.

Toolbars can also come from software that you install on your computer. Many a time, when a website gives you software for free, you are asked whether to install custom toolbar. Although, you don’t require it, you may forget or ignore to uncheck the boxes. This leads to many of the toolbars that magically appear without you even knowing about them.

Why they are bad?

The most visible trouble with toolbars is that they drastically reduce the screen space to view web pages. They make you scroll more than usual just to read content. Another bad thing that happens to your browsers is that they get really slow as there are more and more toolbars. Not only that they take ages to just start and even slow the computer down while the browser is running.

The worst part of toolbars however, is that they often contain links to malware. They download all kinds of viruses, spyware, and key loggers etc., which can track your private data and use them for malicious purposes. Needless to say, unless you know that you want a toolbar from a trusted source, it has no place on your browser.

How to remove them?

If you use Internet explorer, toolbars come installed as separate applications. Use your preferred uninstaller to do this. You can use Revo Uninstaller to complete remove all traces of toolbars as well as other software. If you don’t want to install yet another application, try Iobit Uninstaller, which is a simple executable that you can run even from flash drive.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, toolbars typically are installed as extensions. You can go to the extensions section and then remove them from there. The best solution is to not let toolbars be installed on your PC in the first place. Install an add-on like WOT for both Firefox and Google Chrome. It will give you a warning when you visit a suspicious website.

September 26, 2011March 7, 2017

Domain’s Demystified

For most people, choosing the perfect domain name for their site/blog is incredibly difficult. A good domain name can mean the difference between a thriving site, and a dead one which inevitably translates to: revenue and no revenue.

So how do you choose a good domain name? How do you increase traffic and ensure that your site is higher ranked on search engines? Well read below for a few tips and explanations on the various features of domains.

Different types of domains – .com, .ca, .org, .net, etc.
If getting traffic to your site is a top priority for you then using a .com domain name is essential. The increased price is due to the fact that many people realize that when someone does a google search the .com domain names are generally higher up in the Google search listing as apposed to others. .org and .net however are two other domain types that fare well on Google.

Where to buy cheap domain names
There are numerous places that allow you to purchase and register your domain name, but finding the best one, at the lowest price, can be somewhat of a hassle. The trick with buying a .com domain is to look for specials that the leading sellers are having.

One of the more reliable sites is www.GoDaddy.com. They have sales throughout the year and can offer .com domain’s for as low as $1.99. Some other great places to purchase domains are www.active-domain.com and www.domain.com.

My favorite place to pick domains is www.namecheap.com . Unlike GoDaddy, you’ll not be bombarded with confusing and deceptive adverts, and is very easy to navigate once you are logged in to your account.

Tips on picking an effective domain name
First step to picking a successful domain name for your site/blog is to look at other successful sites. You will notice that most of those domains are short, simple, and something memorable. Long domain names have a huge disadvantage so you want to keep yours as short as you can but not too short.

Another issue you may run into is hyphens. There are some pros and cons when it comes to hyphens in a domain name and you need to carefully evaluate your site needs and see which will be more beneficial to you.
Pros – Your non hyphenated name may have been taken so adding a hyphen means you’ll get the name you want. Also, this makes it easier for Google and other search engines to utilize key words in your domain so it ranks higher.
Cons – How are people supposed to spread your website through word of mouth? Having a hyphen in your domain name will make it really difficult for people to not only remember, but advise for others. If people forget the hyphen they will end up at your competition’s site.

Premium Domains
On sale the cheap .com domains will only be a few bucks, but usually you can find them for under ten dollars at any time. However, when you are looking at domains you will see that some domains are premium. These mean that it is a high traffic domain and will get your site ranked higher up on Google just by the domain name itself. These quality domains can lead to thousands of dollars in revenue but can also cost a pretty penny as well. Here are a few ‘premium’ domain names so that you can get a glimpse at some of the money used to procure a decent domain.
Aboon.com
$8,650
AdoptALion.com
$250
accentonlanguage.com
$46,200
addisonparkapar….com
$770
adventurescanada.com
$2,900
aiontrquest.com
$580

September 19, 2011

Difference Between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

WordPress is the top blogging site on the internet and has almost 60 million users! In fact, you are currently reading a blog hosted on wordpress open source CMS right now!

WordPress is a unique (and free) open source CMS (content management system) that is used by millions as an application to publish their blog. WordPress utilizes PHP and MySQL and can be altered depending on which WordPress you use.

One of the biggest confusion for newbies is the difference between ‘two types‘ of WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org . When it comes to setting up your blog site you need to carefully examine the features of each of these before you continue as they have striking differences.

WordPress.com

The basic difference between WordPress.com and WordPress self hosted solution (downloadable from WordPress.org) is that your blog will be hosted on the servers provided by WordPress (an organization started and run by Matt and wordpress is free) and you can enjoy all of the preset templates, easy to use control panel, and efficient blogging tools as you create your own site. Below is a list of the main pro’s and con’s for WordPress.com:

Pros

Free and easy to set up with tutorials and guides available.
WordPress automatically backs up your blogs, updates itself, guards against spam, and has a secure login.
You host on WordPress servers which is much easier since you don’t have to maintain it.
WordPress uses hundreds of servers so your blog will likely never go down.
You can get additional traffic from various features on WordPress such as ‘blogs of the day’ and more.

Cons

You can’t install plugins (plugins are an EXTREMELY useful tool and add limitless customization and personalization).
You have to pay a significant amount of money for a ‘premium’ account.
Your domain name will be a sub-domain, so the URL will look something like : <subdomain>.wordpress.com , which may not suit you if you are planning to start the blog for official / professional intent.
And yeah, you cannot have ads on the site, not even Google Adsense.

WordPress.org

The downloadable WordPress package from WordPress.org is for people who are a bit more technically savvy and have their own means of hosting. It is generally used by people who want a successful site and plan on using ads, and a lot of customization instead of the standard blog. Take a look at the pros and cons below:

Pros

You are able to download Plugins! These are an incredibly useful feature as they can literally have ANY function!
Limitless customization opportunities with downloadable themes, ability to completely create your own theme, and plugins that can add buttons, forums, and even customize each page.
You can use your own domain and rid yourself of the annoying ‘WordPress.com’ brand.

Cons

You have to host your site yourself which generally cost anywhere between $5-$12 a month or more.
You have to back up your blog and manage all of it yourself without the aide of WordPress
If you have a high traffic site then your private server might not be enough to handle it and will crash.
If you have no skill with computers and applications like WordPress you will likely mismanage your blog and it will fail.

As you can see there are significant differences between both WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Each one maintains strong positive features but you, as the user, need to identify your specific needs and choose one wisely. Whichever you decide will limit your blog in certain ways which could be good or bad.

June 8, 2011March 7, 2017

Resize Your Web Images With WebP encode

Reduce Your Web Images According To Your Choice

Google applications are more famous worldwide, as all the web programs developed by Google are very user-friendly and can be used by everybody, including non computer literate users too. Apart from Google being known as fast search engine, now Google has introduced one more innovation in the world of internet and announced a facility of formatting images that enable users to reduce the image bytes and size significantly on the web and it facilitate websites to load even faster than it was before.

The name of this new facility is WebP mostly pronounced as “weppy“, is a technique of compression of photographic images, which make an image more lighter in weight and it enables an image to upload or download more quickly. The WebP file reside in VP8 image data and is receptacle based on RIFF.

The WebP encode an image with prognosticate coding with same technology used at the time of compression in video by VP8 video codec system.

April 25, 2011April 22, 2011

Use Simple Webpage Capture With Auto Scrolling Feature To Easily Make Website Snapshot

Use Simple Webpage Capture With Auto Scrolling Feature To Easily Make Website Snapshot

Siteshoter is very common tool with which you could capture your favorite website’s screenshot. However, if you are looking for the advanced alternative solution then you must try this application. This free of charge and tiny utility is named as Simple Webpage Capture. This utility helps you in snapping any website or webpage with no consideration of its size and length for future reference.

After completing the installation process, you will be prompted with the simple GUI. At the beginning, you need to configure the destination location i.e. output location for all the screenshots that to be saved into for efficient file management. At the top, you can able to set the different image files formats based on the preference to be either in .gif, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .tif.

You simply need to specify the default browser into the browser window so that the entire webpage could be covered avoiding the hassle of manually selecting and snapping. The utility will auto scroll the length of the page for the same. One more additional feature is that you can configure the watermark settings for much more effective usage.

Simple Webpage Capture is portable app. It can greatly run in Windows OS such as 98, 2000, ME, XP as well as Vista. This application has the only one requirement that is; in order to work faultlessly, Internet Explorer 6.0 or advanced version of it.

Download

April 18, 2011April 16, 2011

Open Multiple Homepages In Firefox Browser

How To Open Multiple Homepages In Firefox Browser

It is very time consuming process for you if you need to open your desired and most frequent used webpage every time when Firefox starts.

What if your required websites set to default home page in your web browser? Now you can set multiple websites in Firefox browser home page. With this effect Firefox will open your desired website automatically when the browser launches. Firefox has this inbuilt feature. You just need to alter some settings to get this particular job done. It will really make your surfing experience more easy and convenient.

Steps to open multiple homepages in your Firefox browser

Launch Firefox.
navigate to Tools>Options>Main tab
Here in homepage tab you just enter URL of each websites that you wish to open. However it should be separated by “|” (Don’t include “”).
For Google, and yahoo website, type it as shown below
www.google.com|www.yahoo.com
Click on “Ok” button to save settings.
Finally you are done.

April 18, 2011August 26, 2011

Learn Hacking Tricks By Reading “The Secrets Of Hacking” Book

Learn Hacking Tricks By Reading “The Secrets Of Hacking” Book

It is an arguable issue if hacking is ethical or not. However many people truly believe that hacking is an immoral activity and the people conducting in it should be punished.

On the other hand some experts mention that hacking is not such an immoral activity. It depends on the individuals on how they use hacking tricks. Hacking is not immoral but use of hacking in a destructive manner is immoral. However it is still issue of debate.

Hacking can be used in both ways either constructive or destructive. Many people use hacking to defend themselves from being hacked. Therefore it is very important that you must know hacking tricks work in order to protect yourself, your mail accounts or websites from the evil eyes. There are many books and online books available that claim to teach you hacking tricks but not all of them live up to their promises.

You need to know hacking tricks from basic i.e. A to Z of hacking tricks. There should be a hacking tool kit which contains every thing related to hacking. However before having this book you need to keep one thing in your mind firmly, and that is you must never use hacking tricks illegally. There is a book named “The Secrets of Hacking” which contains every thing about hacking. There is a terminology in hacking ethical hacking. Here you will learn about ethical hacking tricks only.

This book will help you realize all the loop holes, and once you are aware of the techniques, you will be in a better position to understand the vulnerability and hence protect yourself from being vulnerable to hacks.

Find the book here

You will get tricks to protect your email addresses and websites from being hacked. This book is a package of tutorials. You will get two DVDs of tutorial guides. There is 1400 security tools i.e. setup files of security tools with 200+ hacking tutorials e-books.

You will get to understand these following points in elaborate manner

Introduction of real hacking
Hacking tricks to hack windows
Password hacking
E-mail hacking
Website defacement & Domain hacking
Computer and mobile hacking

Few Key features of this toolkit

How hackers get access your gmail,yahoo email accounts
How to hack windows, Linux etc
How to hack computer remotely through ports
How net-banking passwords and credit card passwords get hacked
How hackers get access to any restricted websites

These points pinpoint that this toolkit is the best tutorial ever regarding hacking tricks.

April 16, 2011April 15, 2011

Boost Your Firefox Browser

How To Boost Up Your Firefox Browser?

Firefox browser has become the number one browser with its unique features such as beautiful themes, various plug-ins, security features, and regular updates. It has already become a default browser in many computers. However there is a major drawback of Mozilla Firefox is that it runs very slow. In fact it consumes more resources, and that’s why it takes time to start and run slowly

There are some methods to speed up our Firefox browser performance instantly. All you have to do is disable those unusable programs that run continuously. The basic idea of disabling those programs is to increase system memory resources in order to boost up firefox browser performance.

You can disable many inbuilt options in firefox browser such as languages, website details, system compatibility etc. you can disable those plug-ins that are not in use frequently. These tips are really result oriented ideas that works.

There are many programs that run in background without you knowing about them. Therefore search for them thoroughly and disable all those programs temporarily. When you need to use those programs, you can enable those programs again. By applying these tips you will get rid of slow working browser and enjoy the new experience of surfing with high speed browser.

April 8, 2011April 8, 2011

Embed Higher Quality YouTube Video Clips On Websites or Blogs

Technique for Embedding Higher Quality YouTube Video Clips On Websites or Blogs

While watching video clips on YouTube website, you can choose to view the videos in higher quality of resolution. It is also possible that you make settings so that YouTube will playback the video clip with the same high resolution quality automatically.

But, when it comes to YouTube video clips which are embedded on web pages or blogs, there is no flexibility to upgrade or switch the video-clip playback to high resolution quality. However, bloggers or webmasters can embed a high resolution code onto the website so as to allow the visitors to view the videos in high resolution mode.

Webmasters can follow the below mentioned hack to embed a code for high resolution video streaming which will stream as MP4 (H.264 Video with AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio) and will be encoded at a resolution of 480×360.

This is very much similar to the hack used to view high resolution video clips on YouTube with &fmt=6 or &fmt=18 switch wherein the publisher requires to attach a suitable switch to YouTube embed code for the Flash Player to understand that the video has to be played with high resolution video streaming.

However, just adding the default flag “&fmt=18” at the end of the URL in the address bar won’t work. In the embed code, you need to add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” at the end of the URL of the video clip specified in “embed src” and “param value”.

You need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” at the end of the video clip URL “http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxxx&hl=en&rel=0” at two instances in the embed code, where, xxxxxxxxxxx is nothing but unique video ID.

For e.g. If the URL of the video clip is “http://www.youtube.com/v/_w0AwGCjqnw&hl=en&rel=0”, the embed code will look like:

Visitors will be able to enlarge the high quality YouTube video to the width equal to “480” without affecting the picture quality since the high resolution streaming video is been encoded at a resolution of 480×360.

With the arrival of High Definition (HD) era, YouTube is also able to playback the hosted videos at 720p HD picture quality resolution which is quite close to CD audio quality.