Beginner's Web

Hide Morning and Night Time in Google Calendar

2012-01-30T13:12:00.001+05:30

Google Calendar being a web service is actively developed by Google similarly to Gmail. Calendar has its own labs features, where the Calendar team tests out new features. One such new feature is to hide the hours before you wake up.

Every calendar shows all the hours which takes up lots of space. Also you never plan anything after you sleep or before you wake up. So make Calendar more smart, you can enable the lab feature.

Click on the cog icon at the top of the page and you can directly go to the labs section of Google Calendar. Enable 'Hide Morning and Night' in the labs. You can also Enable any other lab features which suite your needs.

This lab will modify the look of the 'Day' & 'Week' view of the calendar and not any other views. Below are the screenshots of Before and after pics of Google Calendar.

Before

After

As you can see the Time before 10 am are hidden.If you want to adjust the time, click on the date line and a slider pop up where you can adjust the time range. It will look something like this.

Have fun with the news labs feature. And if you haven't started using Google Calendar, give it a go, because a multi-calendar view never goes wrong.

LastPage: Chrome URL Shortcuts

2012-01-23T21:06:00.000+05:30

I always wanted a shortcut to the chrome pages (or option pages) in firefox. For those who have never used these before, type 'about:config' in a blank tab in firefox to get advanced options to customize your Firefox.

There are more such windows through which you can have some fun within firefox.
e.g. you can open up a whole new window inside a tab. try to open this link in a new tab.
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul and you will get something like this,

But when you want the settings page or the downloads page readily available, why not create a extension which gives you access to all these chrome windows readily.

This is where LastPage comes in. It is a restartless addon which gives you access to the most used options page. It can open the following pages.

+ Error Console
Restore Session
Troubleshooting Information
View Cookies
View Downloads
Manage About:Config…
Manage Add-ons…
Manage Library…
Manage Preferences…
Manage Search Engines…

Hope you like the addon. And if you want to play with more Chrome URL's visit this page.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Chrome_URLs

Difference between Torrent and Direct Download

2012-01-20T20:15:00.000+05:30

Many of my friends are starting to use Torrents these days, but are at a loss to understand how it actually works. I find it difficult to explain due to their lack of networking knowledge.

Take for example a Question i had to answer
Q: MegaShare is been shut down, hope it does not affect my UTorrent speed.

I can start to rant on many levels as to why this is wrong. But let me dive into explaining how all these protocols work.

How Do Computers Download Files from Each Other.

To understand how a file is downloaded you need to know how computers are connected. Let there be 2 computers A & B. To connect both computers so you can share files between them you need a Network. This network can be created using wires (i.e.using network cables) or without wires(i.e. using WIFI).

Once you are connected, computer A needs to know the name of computer B. This is possible through an IP address, which will be unique for each computer. IP stands for Internet Protocol, which are a bunch of rules which define who low level communication works. This consists of many types of layers and is itself an IT subject so lets now go into details. What you need to understand is there are certain rules which govern the communication.

When you need to download a file from computer B, you ask if computer B has the file? If it has it will directly send you the file in big chunks of data. e.g. You can downloading a 1Gb file from Computer B. Computer B will create a connection with your computer and keep on sending data till all 1GB are downloaded to your computer. If the connection breaks your data is incomplete hence the file would not work.

This is how a direct download works. And this is how MegaUpload used to work.

How does Torrent Download work?

Torrent or rather BitTorrent, is a peer to peer file sharing protocol. It means that it is a set of rules similar to IP (Internet Protocol). The main difference is Peer to Peer. In BitTorrent, any file which is to be transferred is available on many different computer, and your BitTorrent client knows this.

e.g. You can to download 1GB of data through BitTorrent. This 1Gb of data is available 100% with 5 computers, 30% with 20 Computers and 50% with 100 computers. When you start downloading 1GB of data through BitTorrent, i will pick chunks of data from each of the computers. It takes a part from the 100% computers, other from 30% computers.

This way it puts less load on each of the computer sending you data. Also because it has more computers to download from, it can acheive higher speeds

Hope this clears up the confusion about BitTorrent and direct Download.