Facebook tricks, Windows trick, Google trick, Internet hacking, Ethical Hacking, gmail tricks, Technological news, Software Crack, Mobile Tricks, Blogging Trick, ebay Trick, Computer program, LAN hacking, WAN hacking, cookies stealing, Email Tracing
HP India today introduced CreateYourWalls.com, a do-it-yourself website where you can design wall murals and posters for your rooms in few easy clicks. The site has a good collection of readymade templates or you can create your own custom designs.
I tried their online design tool for some time (see video) and found it both intuitive and easy-to-use. You specify the exact dimensions of your wall and then drag objects – like doors, windows, power sockets, etc. – that are present on the physical wall. This is required because you can later reposition design elements on the wallpaper accordingly.
Once the canvas is ready, all you need to do is pick a design template and customize it to suit your wall layout. For instance, you can drag new objects (like that Zebra), delete existing ones (my kids dislike vultures), or reposition them anywhere on the canvas. Your wallpaper can either occupy the entire wall (also called wall covering) or you can opt for wall ascent which are like posters occupying only a portion of the wall.
The HP Wall Art website says that these wallpaper prints require almost zero maintenance and “have been tested to resist fading for 20 years.”
A wall covering for a standard 12’x8’ wall would cost around INR 15k and this probably includes onsite installation as well. However, onsite installation facility is currently available only in the Delhi NCR region. The other limitation is that while you can design your room wallpapers online, you’ll still have to call them for placing your order and it doesn’t have an integrated payment mechanism yet.
In October 2010, Google launched a music portal in India to help people find “legal” songs from Bollywood films and music albums. Google partnered with three music companies – Saavn, Saregama and In.com – for the content and itself played the role of an aggregator.
The music service is still available at google.co.in/music but it looks like Google has more or less abandoned the project.
The homepage of the Google India Music website hasn’t been updated for a long time now and a quick search reveals that none of the newer Hindi films – like Kahaaani or Agent Vinod – are available in Google Music though they are very much part of the online catalog of Saavn and In.com.
Another time-sorted Google search suggests that just one music album has been added to Google’s Music catalog this year.
Google has a revenue sharing arrangement with partners – the music player window shows regular AdSense ads – and the initial plan was to integrate music into their main search results. That never happened or maybe the advertising revenue wasn’t convincing enough for partners.
Google, as most would know, redirects Blogger blogs to country-specific domains. For instance, if you open example.blogspot.com in your browser, you might be redirected toexample.blogspot.in if you are located in India or to example.blogspot.com.au if you access the same blog from Australia.
The main reason why Google implemented country-specific redirection is selective censorship – they can now easily block a blog, or a particular page on a blog, in one country but still serve it in other regions.
Blogger and Country-Specific Domains
My traffic logs suggest that country-specific redirection in Blogger is now live in at least 15 countries. Here’s a complete list:
India [blogspot.in], Australia [blogspot.com.au], UK [blogspot.co.uk], Japan [blogspot.jp], New Zealand [blogspot.co.nz], Canada [blogspot.ca], Germany [blogspot.de], Italy [blogspot.it], France [blogspot.fr], Sweden [blogspot.se], Spain [blogspot.com.es], Portugal [blogspot.pt], Brazil [blogspot.com.br], Argentina [blogspot.com.ar], Mexico [blogspot.mx]
Prevent Blogger from Redirecting to Country-Specific Domains
This country based URL redirection does mean some negative consequences to your Blogger blog. For example:
The social stats – like Facebook Likes, Google +1s and Tweet counts – for your blog stories may be diluted as the URLs for the same story become different from different visitors.
You will have a similar problem if you are using an external commenting platform like Disqus or Facebook Comments.
Also, if canonicalization isn’t implemented properly, it may cost you some Google juice as external websites may link to your country-specific pages.
If you are not happy with the idea of Blogger redirecting your blog to a different URL, you can add the following piece of code to your Blogger template and it will always serve the .com address to your visitors irrespective of their geographic location.
Go to your blog inside the Blogger Dashboard and choose Template. Then click the “Edit HTML” button followed by “Proceed.” Next, copy-paste the following code into the template after the <head> tag.
<script type="text/javascript">
var blog = document.location.hostname;
var slug = document.location.pathname;
var ctld = blog.substr(blog.lastIndexOf("."));
if (ctld != ".com") {
var ncr = "http://" + blog.substr(0, blog.indexOf("."));
ncr += ".blogspot.com/ncr" + slug;
window.location.replace(ncr);
}
</script>
Click the Save Template button and now your Blogger Blog will always serve with the blogspot.com URL.
This simple script parses the domain name (document.location.hostname) of your blog page and if it includes a country-specific URL (like blogspot.in), it will force-redirect the visitor to the blogspot.com address using the /ncr switch.
The Times of India reports that Facebook helped Indore police crack a theft case where two students had picked up a motor-bike from a shopping mall in the city.
The news report says that the CCTV cameras installed in the parking area captured the image of thieves. The duo had done some shopping inside the mall and “guessing them as students, police tried to find out the accused on Facebook and traced them to Bhopal. “
The report doesn’t exactly say how Facebook helped the police catch the suspects. Did they use “face recognition” software to match the CCTV footage with the 900 million Facebook profiles? A Facebook employee told me that law enforcement agencies sometimes do approach the company for “image matching” requests – like those of missing persons – but such requests are politely declined.
The local Hindi edition of Dainik Bhaskar newspaper paints a much clear picture though.
It turns out that the duo had used credit cards to pay their shopping bills and that’s how the local police discovered their real names and addresses. The police then searched Facebook to find profiles with similar names and the profile picture of one of these Facebook profiles matched that of the person in the CCTV image.
Facebook did help the police confirm their initial suspicion but I think it’s the credit card payment that actually helped the cops nab the suspects.
Here’s a little tip that some educators and students may find useful. You can directly download the audio pronunciation files of English dictionary words from Google and practice pronunciation on the go.
A little background. When you use a search query like “define:word,” Google will offer the dictionary definition of that word and, in most cases, it will also provide an audio hint to help you learn how to pronounce that word.
Download Audio Pronunciations from Google
These audio pronunciation files are in MP3 format and you can directly access them without even using Google Search. Just use the following URL and replace WORD with any of the English words that you are still learning to pronounce.
Google Fonts is a collection of open fonts that you can use in your websites, documents and other design projects without any restrictions around licensing.
It takes a single line of code to embed any of the Google Font families into your website design. Just substitute the font family in the following code (line #2) with the name of Google Font and copy-paste it inside the <head> tag of your HTML template.
While Google Fonts can make your website look good, there’s one related problem – they increase the page load time of your website because the font files have to downloaded on the visitor’s computer and some of them, like the Cabin Sketch font, can exceed 100 KB in size.
There is however an easy workaround to help you reduce the file size of the Google Fonts so that they do not reduce the load time of a web page. Instead of using the entire Google font family, you can specify a limited set of letters or digits that are used in your text and Google will dynamically generate a new font file containing only the requested characters.
How to Reduce the Size of Google Font Files
All you have to do is add a new text parameter to the Google font request URL and value of this parameter will have all the letters that you need.
For instance, if I need to render the text Digital Inspiration in Cabin Sketch font, the modified CSS requesting the Google font file will look something like this:
The original Google font file was around 101 kb but with this limited text, the font file is reduced to 7.6 KB.
Google Fonts are commonly used to render the text of logos and and headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.) on a web page so you can modify the CSS accordingly. Alternatively, if you wish to request all alphabets and numerals in the Google Font but none of the extra glyphs, your font CSS will looking something like this:
The font file in this case is 37 KB in size and that’s still 64% lower than the original Google font file. Also, if you are wondering why I have included %20 in the text list, it represents the encoded space character. Similarly, you can add %27 and %22 to the list for single quote (‘) and double quote (") respectively.
Do you have a website? Would you like to receive alerts on your email address as soon as your site goes down or becomes inaccessible to users?
You can either subscribe to one of these website monitoring services to track your site’s uptime (and downtime) or you can build your own site monitor with the help of Google Docs. The one big advantage with Google Docs is that it can be configured to check your website status every minute and thus you’ll instantly know if your site is down. And it’s free.
Website Monitoring with Google Docs
It will take a minute to configure Google Docs as an uptime monitor for your website.
Assuming that you are signed-in to your Google Account, click here to make a copy of the Google Docs sheet.
Put your website’s URL in cell E3 and your email address in cell E5. This is the address where you wish to receive notifications for downtime and uptime.
Go to Tools –> Script Editor –> Resources –> Current Script’s Triggers and set a Time-Driven trigger for every minute (or 5 minutes).
Save the Trigger and Google Docs will show a big red warning asking for authorization. Just accept it and Save the trigger again.
That’s it. The Google Docs sheet will monitor your website in the background at all times and will send an email alert whenever it has trouble accessing the website. If the issue is resolved, you’ll get another notification saying “all’s well.”
Also, the downtime details (including the server responses) are logged in the Google Docs sheet itself so you can later analyze the downtime in greater detail. You can browse thesource code to understand how monitoring works behind the scenes.
One more thing. If you know a bit of programming, create a new Twitter app specifically for tracking your site’s uptime and Google Docs can then alert you through tweets and SMS text messages if your site is having problems.
If you don’t know the correct pronunciation of certain words or names and you are too embarrassed to ask, no worries as there are dozens of websites that can help you learn how to pronounce any word on your own.
The quickest option is Google. Use the define: search operator with any word and Google will show a little audio icon next to the word’s definition. Click the icon to listen to the audio pronunciation.
The pronunciation feature in Google is however not available for non-English words ornames of people but that is where YouTube videos can be of great help.
Let’s say we want to learn how to pronounce Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that disrupted air travel across Europe in 2010 for several days. Here’s what you can do.
Go to YouTube.com and search for any word followed by “,cc” – this is a YouTube search operator that will only show videos that have closed captions.
In YouTube search results, pick a video that has that particular word in the transcript. Then click the transcript button and jump to the line containing that word (see screenshot).
You can now hear the speaker in the YouTube video using that word and that should give you a good idea of the correct pronunciation. And since YouTube has users around the globe, you can use the same closed-captions trick to learn how a word is pronounced in different countries of the world – just pick a different video from the search results.
If you want to share a video pronunciation with a friend, just use the deep linking feature of YouTube to directly link to the spoken word.
Say you have a website that is printer-friendly but you are not too sure if people are actually printing your web pages. And if they are, you are interested to know how often they print pages and what is the kind of content that users are most likely to print on your site.
There are basically three ways to print any standard web page (see above screenshot):
Experienced users may press the Ctrl + P keyboard shortcut (or Command-P on a Mac) to send the current web page to the printer.
Some web pages have a dedicated PRINT button on the page itself.
Other users may prefer to print web pages from the File Menu that is standard across all browsers.
Because there are multiple ways to print the same web page, it is difficult to use JavaScript based event tracking in Google Analytics to track print usage.
A simple workaround is that you add an invisible tracking image (like the ones used for read receipts in email) only in the printed version of a web page. Thus when a user prints a web page, through any route, that tracking image will download on his / her computer and you can easily track the print (and print preview) action.
Track Print Usage with Google Analytics
That was the boring theory but you can safely skip the technical details and get right into implementing the actual tracking code.
All you have to do is copy-paste the following code above the closing </body> tag in your website template. If you are on WordPress, you can simple paste it in your footer.php file.
Please remember to replace REPLACE_ME in the code with your actual Google Analytics Profile ID which looks something like this – UA-12345-89.
Once the tracking code is live, wait for a day or two as as Google Analytics may take time to process usage data. Then log in to your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Content –> Site Content –> Pages and set /print/ as the search filter.
You’ll get a complete list of web pages that have been printed in this duration while the Pageview column will reflect the the number of times a particular page has been printed . Set the Secondary Dimension in the report as Browser or Operating System or Country and you’ll get additional details about the users who are using the Print function on your web site.
Here’s a sample print usage report generated with Google Analytics.
How Print Tracking Works?
Should you be interested in the technical details, here they are. The JavaScript code adds the following CSS rule to your HTML webpage while it is rendering in the browser.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
<style type="text/css">
@media print{
body:after {
content:url("GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_TRACKING_IMAGE")
}
}
</style>
This is simple print only rule that will add an invisible tracking image to the printer-friendly version of your page (body:after). When a user prints the page, the tracking image downloads on the user’s computer and this is registered as a page view in Google Analytics as shown in the above report.
The above CSS rule is only activated when the users invokes the print or print preview command. Some PDF writing programs also use the Print stylesheet when saving web pages to PDFs and thus, the same tracking code will work in those cases as well.
PS: If you have a PHP enabled web server, you can simple copy this PHP file on to your own server as index.php and replace ctrlq.org/urchin in the above JavaScript code with your own web server’s address.
