How to Turn Your Home Computer into a Web Server

Before getting into the actual process, let’s look at a couple of real-world situations that explain why you may want to turn your home computer into a web server.

Situation #1. Say you have music MP3s, documents and other important files on the hard drive of your home computer. If you turn this home computer into a web server, you will be able to access all these files from office or any other Internet connected machine including your mobile phone.

Situation #2. You have some personal photographs that you want to share with other family members. You can either upload these pictures online to a site like Flickr or better still, just convert the computer into a web server. Now you can connect the camera to the computer, transfer the digital pictures to some designated folder and they’ll instantly become available to your friends and family anywhere in the world.

Situation #3. You want to host a website on the internet but the web hosting jargon like FTP, DNS, etc. is way too complex for you. The workaround therefore is that you setup a web server on your home computer (it’s easy) and then host a website in seconds without spending a single penny on external web hosting services.

Now if any of the above reasons look convincing enough, here’s how you can convert your Windows, Mac or Linux PC into a web server in less than two minutes – no technical knowledge required.

Go to labs.opera.com, download the Opera Unite software and install it. Congratulations, you are now running a web server on your machine and just need another minute to configure local file folders that you want to share with others over the internet.

Here’s an illustrated screenshot of the configuration panel – nothing technical here again.

Start the Opera Web browser (yes, that’s also you web server now) and enable the Opera Unite service from the lower left corner. Now double click the File Sharing link and select the folder whose content you want to share on the web. Any file or folder inside this folder can now be accessed over the internet – you can either use a public URL or specify a password for private sharing.

The following screencast video has more detailed instructions on how to get started with Opera Unite.

Opera Unite looks pretty useful but there are other services around that can also do pretty similar stuff. For instance, both PurpleNova and Dekoh Dekstop enable users share content on the Internet directly from the hard drive without having to upload it anywhere.

Update: It’s important to note that your computer must be in running state and also connected to the Internet for others to download files and web pages since Opera Unite streams content directly from your machine – it doesn’t upload or caches anything to its own servers. Give it a shot.

SEO Basics: Creating a Google Friendly Website

Your website could sport a very professional design but unless that site is not ranking well in search engines, it may be tough for new and potential customers to discover your business on the Internet.

Therefore, when planning to create an online presence for your brick and mortar business, it is extremely important that your site layout and content is optimized for search engines.

If you are wondering why the title says “Google friendly” where there are exist so many other search engines on the Internet (including popular ones like Yahoo!, Ask and MSN), that’s because Google has the reach like no other.

Most website owners would agree that Google alone drives 90-95% of traffic to their websites.

There are basically two ways to drive visitors from Google to your website – one, you buy ads that show up on Google results pages for certain keywords (using AdWord) or two, work hard to get good rankings in search results (organic traffic). While the former method costs money, organic traffic is free but requires effort and understanding of how search engines work.

We’ll focus on techniques and guidelines that will help improve the rank of our web pages in organic search results. And though we mention only Google, the techniques do apply to all other search engines as well. Let’s get started:

Always write clean and descriptive titles – When people scan (nobody reads word by word) the different results on a search page, that first thing that will catch their attention is the title of your web page. Similarly, if X is looking for “yellow bananas” on Google, web pages that contain this term in the title are likely to rank higher. A good title could look something like “Yellow Bananas | Green Grocery Store”

Construct keyword rich URLs – Like Titles, search engines always favor web pages that contain relevant keywords in the URLs of the web page. Continuing with our previous “yellow bananas” example, a URL like abc.com/products/fresh-yellow-bananas.htm or abc.cm/products/yellow-bananas.htm will always perform better than something like abc.com/products?id=232 or abc.com/products/232.html

Use Meta Tags – Meta tags (keywords & descriptions) were important in the good old AltaVista days but not anymore since they were so easy to abuse and search engines devised better algorithms to rank web pages. However, good descriptions in Meta tags can really help bring search traffic because they appear as short snippets in search pages beneath your page title. If a meta tag is missing, Google could display some other text page from the web page that may not always be very relevant.

Win Incoming Links – Other than quality content and a good site structure, incoming links from other websites are also essential for your site to rank high in search engines. And the best way to get those links is to write content that’s informative and adds value. For instance, not many people may know but bananas can be used to remove scratches from old CD and DVD disks. Such tips can easily go viral in the web community and may win you lot of incoming links.

Google Sitemaps – You can also consider creating a sitemap of your website and submit that to Google Webmaster Central – the advantage here is that Google will be able to discover and index some web pages on your site that exist but enjoy no link love and hence search bots cannot discover them during regular crawling.

Text, Text, Text – Web page elements like Flash animations, images and videos clips could make your site look very attractive but the problem is that all search engines can only read text. If you avoid using text, search engines will never know the actual context of web pages and that will affect your rankings.

Underground SEO practices – Do not participate in link exchange programs and never buy links with the purpose of inflating your PageRank. Also, avoid stuffing irrelevant keywords in your web pages as all these “SEO tricks” may lead to penalties or even a site being removed entirely from the Google index.

Duplicate Content – Always make sure that all pages on your website have unique content. When you serve two or more pages with similar content to search engines, they will have trouble deciding which page should rank higher than the other and it could therefore dilute your search rankings.

The Official Prices of New MacBooks in India

Apple has upgraded their existing MacBook Air and MacBook Pro line of notebooks and also introduced a new 15″ MacBook Pro notebook with Retina Display. The new machines will ship with Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8).

The following table lists the current prices of various MacBook models in India including the all-new Retina-display MacBook Pro.

MacBook Prices in India

MacBook Air 11″	MacBook Air 13″	MacBook Pro 13″	MacBook Pro 15″	New MacBook Pro 15″
1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor 4GB RAM 64GB flash storage Intel HD Graphics 4000	1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor 4GB RAM 128GB flash storage Intel HD Graphics 4000	2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 4GB RAM 500GB hard drive Intel HD Graphics 4000	2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 4GB RAM 500GB hard drive Intel HD Graphics 4000 NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 512MB of GDDR5 memory	2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 8GB RAM 256GB flash storage Intel HD Graphics 4000 NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
67,900 (64 GB) 74,900 (128 GB)	81,900 (128 GB) 99,900 (256 GB)	81,900 (2.5 GHz i5) 99,000 (2.9 GHz i7)	122,900 (2.3 GHz i7) 152,000 (2.6 GHz i7)	152,900 (2.3 GHz i7) 192,900 (2.6 GHz i7)

See apple.com to know the various configuration that are available for these models. All the above prices are courtesy Gautam Mahtani.

One more thing. If you are planning to buy a MacBook in India, or any other Apple product, try to go through an authorized reseller and not the Apple Store as resellers can almost always offer a better deal. And if you have a college-going student in your family, they can help you secure a 6% discount on all Apple products in India (except for the iPhone I think).

Buying a TV? Here’s What You Should Know

Our 32" Sony Bravia LCD TV wasn’t really old but felt a bit obsolete. There were no USB ports, the TV wasn’t network-capable meaning it cannot connect to the Internet or the home network, the 32" screen looked rather small in the living room and, most important, the TV didn’t support full HD.

It was therefore time to upgrade to something bigger and more advanced.

I am no expert to offer you any advice on buying TVs but I’ll still try to summarize the key things I learned from thevarious websites and my Twitter friends while researching for my own purchase.

A Buying Guide for TV

There are several points to consider before buying a TV. What screen size should you choose? Is LED better than LCD or Plasma TVs? Which ports should you look for in a TV? Is it worth paying extra for networking related features? HD (720p) or Full-HD (1080p)? Which TV brand should you go for? And finally, is 3D necessary?

LCD, Plasma or LED?

There are basically two types of TVs – LCD and Plasma. The other category, LED, is actually a type of LCD but one that is slimmer (looks matters) and consumes less electricity than regular LCDs. I haven’t had a chance to compare the picture quality of equivalent LED, LCD and Plasma HDTVs side-by-side but most online material seem to suggest that Plasmas offer the best picture quality.

The other point in favor of Plasma HDTVs is the viewing angle. LCDs and LEDs are best viewed from the front but if your room’s seating arrangement is such that people may have to watch TV while sitting at either sides, Plasmas may be a better option as the have a wider viewing angle. That said, if your TV room is brightly-lit or has too many windows, the Plasma screen may carry glare or reflection. LCDs have a matte screen and thus don’t have the reflection problem.

Size of the TV Screen

HDTVs are available in various sizes and the one you should choose depends on two factors – the length of your room and obviously your budget.

As a rule of thumb, the ideal size of the TV screen should be anywhere between .3x and .6x where x is the distance between your sofa and the TV. For example, if the viewing distance is 6 feet (or 72 inches), you can go for a 24" – 48" screen.

TV Input Ports

Most newer TVs have HDMI and USB ports but what’s also important is the location of these ports. If you are planning to wall-mount the TV, make sure that there are enough free ports at the sides of the unit because, once you mount the TV, it will be inconvenient, or rather impossible, to use the back ports for connecting your gadgets to the TV.

Screen Resolution – 720p, 1080i or 1080p

The next factor is the screen resolution where your choices are 720p, 1080i and 1080p – also known as full HD. Unless you are getting a small screen TV – like 32" – go for 1080p resolution and here’s why. More and more TV channels are becoming available in high-definition, the HD picture quality is vastly superior but you need a 1080p TV to experience the difference.

Jason Bonney adds – “Although I see no reason NOT to get a TV supporting 1080p, it’s currently only really needed for Blu-ray. Broadcast HD TV is only 1080i and most video games (XBox 360/PS3) are native 720p being upscaled to 1080. So you can get by with 1080i if need be. I had an HD DLP 1080i for years before upgrading recently, and for HDTV and my 360 games it was still great.”

3D or 2D?

All brands are working hard to sell you 3D-capable TV sets but is 3D worth the extra cost or should you just settle for the good-old 2D? It depends.

We have a joint family and the TV is placed in a common room so we mostly watch it together. In order to enjoy 3D content, one needs to wear 3D glasses. If there are four other people in the room, they also need to wear compatible 3D glasses. The glasses are expensive but cost aside, I highly doubt if folks at home would be willing to wear a pair of glasses for watching a movie or a TV program. Also, there’s isn’t enough 3D content available anyway – especially in regional languages – so we decided to go with 2D.

Network Connectivity

The other important feature to consider while deciding a TV is network connectivity. The expensive TV models often have built-in WiFi (or Wireless LAN) while others are WiFi-capable meaning you can attach an extra dongle, always old separately, to connect the TV to the home network or for watching web videos – like YouTube – on your TV wirelessly.

All Internet-ready TVs have an Ethernet port so if you can stretch the LAN cable from the router to the TV, you can go for the WiFi-capable model but without spending on the USB wireless adapter. Also look for DLNA support as it will become easy for you to stream photos, music and videos from your computer and mobile phone to the TV screen.

One more thing. TV vendors like Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and LG bundle various ‘apps’ to help you watch YouTube videos, Flickr photos and other web content on the HDTV. However, the number of apps offered by these vendors is still small, they have no built-in browsers, no web search and you are thus limited to a very tiny portion of the web.

So what we finally picked is a 50" Panasonic Viera Plasma TV, full HD, lacks 3D, Internet-ready but without built-in Wi-Fi. It is definitely not “razor-thin” but since the unit is mounted on a wall, you rarely notice the thickness. Also, Panasonic offers limited Internet apps but not that we have connected it to Logitech Revue (read review of Google TV), family members can access almost the entire web in the living room.

While everyone has different requirements or “wants” and there’s no such thing as ‘perfect’ when it comes it to buying electronics, the above points may help you make a slightly more informed decision and get more value for your money.

Get Email Alerts when New Aerial Images are available for your Area

If you are inside Google Earth or switch to the Satellite View in Google Maps, you can see aerial images of your home and most other places of our planet.

These images are updated every few years (or months depending on the area) and Google, in the long term, is very likely to switch to high-resolution imagery for most countries and regions. Now that Apple has joined the Maps business, providing high-quality imagery will be an even higher priority item for Google.

Email Alerts for Google Maps & Earth

If you would like to know when Google Maps (and Google Earth) is updated with new satellite and aerial images of your area, or any other point of interest, they have built a new alert system called Follow Your World that should keep you in the loop.

To get started, sign-in using your Google Account and mark one or more areas of interest. You can do so by either clicking the points in Google Maps or enter thelatitude and longitude manually.

That’s it. Google will monitor these locations and will send you email alerts as soon as updated satellite and aerial imagery data is available for these areas in Google Maps and Google Earth.