Sometimes computer seems to start on its own without pressing power button. Like a delayed start. Sometimes it seems to work again fine.

Broken PC power button

At first I thought that power button was not working and broken and didn’t make good contact inside. I disassembled it and found that indeed printed circuit board was broken in half (probably when I tried to press it harder when no start condition began).

I replaced it with the new DIY button and it seemed at first the problem was solved, however it reappeared the next day.

Then I realized  that computer only starts with delay first time in the morning when I plug it back in the mains socket. (Yes, call me paranoid, but I disconnect power cord from all equipment every night when I shut down computer.)

Later in the day power button seems to be working with no problems. You can restart the computer how many times you want without a problem. So I thought maybe connector that attaches to the motherboard somehow loses connection and power button can not close the circuit to send starting signal.

PC Power Button Replacement

After several days keeping computer open on the table and wiggling power button connector in hope to make a solid connection I decided to go even further and solder 2 wires straight to the motherboard pins.

Power button is quite simple thing. One wire is ground and the other is signal with about 3.3V. When you press the power button it connects two wires and pull 3.3V signal to the ground making it 0V. Computer sees that signal going low and responds with starting up the system.

When I had 2 wires soldered straight to the motherboard then I could eliminate all connection problems because there is no better connection than straight soldering.

Only when I started testing voltages on the 2 wires I found the problem. When you first plug the computer in the mains, signal voltage doesn’t go up to 3.3V instantly. At first it rises to about 2.5V but when you connect it to ground nothing happens. You have to wait for another minute or so when voltage climbs to the proper 3.3Volts.

You can see in the  picture above that I’m running two wires from the PC computer as a replacement for power button that is not working at the moment. And you can see I hooked it to the multimeter which shows the signal voltage of about 3.4V. That is the voltage you have to see in your computer in order to eliminate or prove connection problem. To start the computer you have to touch 2 wires together and this shorts them out. Don’t worry because this is only a signal wire, which means current is very limited to maybe mil-thousands of an amperes.

So now you can see how the whole situation worked. When I connected PC to the mains in the morning and tried to start with power button immediately it wasn’t working because signal voltage was to low. If I left it long enough or didn’t unplug at all maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the problem.

So what does this mean? Probably one of the capacitors in the power supply unit gone bad and doesn’t do its job properly. Bad capacitors often bulge and swell and you need to replace them. However apart from this start delay I have no problems so far and maybe leave it as is for the moment.

Reasons why your computer power button might not be working:

1. Power button may be broken physically
2. Bad contacts in button or connection to motherboard
3. Too low signal voltage meaning failing PSU or motherboard.

I hoped this article helped in some way. You can write comments if you have any questions and I or other readers might offer a solution to your problem.

How to build best base defense?

Your base defense is very important because if you have none or very low level, then someone nearby can kill your base with one attack and you can’t even react. Bases are not permanently destroyed but you need to wait for 24hours before you can attack other players and lose alliance bonus.

If you need your defense build fast and strong, the best way is to use infantry based defense layout. This means buy as many infantry units as you can and alternate 3 different defense properties on each row:

air|vehicles|infantry| air| vehicles|infantry |

vehicles|infantry| air| vehicles| infantry |air

|infantry| air| vehicles| infantry | air| vehicles

You can see example below:

Tiberium alliances best cheap defense

The main advantage of this layout is that it is very cheap to upgrade (only crystal needed + power), they use only 5-10 defense points. This defense is balanced on every aspect of attack so it is nearly impossible to use detraction techniques and every attacking unit gets hit immediately or very short after he appears in the battle field. This defense works best for traditional armies that have equal amount of all 3 types of units because not all of them are best against your infantry defense and attacker will suffer great damage.

Weak points of this defense scheme is that when you encounter enemy with more ant infantry offensive units he can just brute force through your defense.

Apart infantry based defense you can start building traditional defense with many different structures but you have to constantly test your defense asking your alliance members to SIM (simulate) attacks and look for weak spots. Look at the bases you are attacking and take defense layouts from them.

Another very important thing is support structures they can deal great damage to the attacker and even deter him from attacking second time. Build defense structures in every of your base. And calibrate support on your main base in case of possible attack. There are 3 types of support structures and you should have equal amount of them ( for example if you have 6 bases, have 2 Fist Of Kanes, 2 Eye of Kanes and 2 Blade of Canes). Try to have all your bases in one area within 12 squares of you main, this makes yor support structures calibrate automatically in case of attack.

Other suggestion for defense. Never neglect your defense and from the start of the game upgrade it with the left over resources, you will reap the rewards later in war. Put you base, construction yard (CY) and defense facility in the top row of your base, because it is the most important to protect. If you lose defense facility your base will not rebuild defenses for next attack, if you have only scratched command center you cannot launch attacks until repaired.

Base layout

When you have more than 1 base your main base should be only for power because you can’t transfer power. Optimise the layout for you power plants to get the maximum amount of power. Usually if you don’t use funds, you will have surplus of crystals with tibs, but no power to upgrade army or buildings, so power is most important.

Your other bases should be only built for farming credits, so choose best base layouts (7 close tiberium patches) in advance with base scanner tool.

As mentioned in the defense section, place your buildings wisely on the base territory. CY, defense facility and command center at the top.

Look at you base from attackers perpective. If your war factory (NOD) gets destroyed, then you can’t repair vehicles, damaged support structure don’t help on defense and so on.

Try to upgrade buildings evenly, only giving priority to power plants, because you can suffer from low level specific buildings later. For example low level CY repair all buildings slower after attacks.

Offense

There is so much offence variables that it is impossible to write about all them so I just give some of my points.

· Try to have balanced army so you can attack all types of defensive structures

· When you attack bases, you should at least damage or destroy defence facility on first strike, because otherwise you have to use brute force (lots of repair time and command POints)

· Analyze your other alliance attacks and see what works for them, try to replicate

· Keep repair times low and equal, because if you build very powerful aircraft for example, you will suffer from high repair time

· If you prefer PvP build 2-4 armies, if you’re more of a PvE type player, then 1 army is enough. Armies are expensive to upgrade and if you have armies in all your bases they will be just mediocre. Having 1 army you can send resources to upgrade it even more.

· Always use combat simulation before attacking, you will save and gain much more. Don’t think that simulation is for weak players, because everybody use it and you can’t predict the battle outcome with your mind.

How to increase your ranking

Just one tip: join the alliance as soon as possible and better choose the stronger one. There are many benefits being an alliance member, you get bonus resources (crystal, power and tiberium), protection and offence boost, can kill stronger bases by cooperating with other players, etc.

Don’t jump alliances if you get invitation from other, people don’t like players who switch and run away for slightly better bonuses.

Don’t be fooled by ranking only, it is easy to associate higher ranking with more powerful player but that isn’t the case. Ranking is a cumulative points for all your upgrades (buildings, defense structures, army) so lower ranking member can have much stronger army than high ranking member if he tends to have more farming bases.

It’s better to upgrade everything evenly to avoid huge level mismatch on your base

Buy and use funds wisely

At some point you need to buy at least 5000 funds because with the standard repair time and CP (commant point) limits you can only play PvE (player versus environment). Even if you are stronger (higher level army) than enemy he can have 10 times more CP and repair time than you and beat your base with more attacks.

If you smell the war coming, better stack some repair time with cp limits capacity and start saving, because when enemy comes you will be a sitting duck without ability to strike back. Also when you get supply packages from beating outposts and camps don’t use them right away. Save at least 20-30 supply packages for Command Points.

Buying funds will help you to maximize the possible potential you can achieve because you don’t have to login at least every 10 hours to use CP.

<?php echo(exec(“whoami”)); ?>

Then view this file in your browser. If it shows for example “testuser” and in the ftp manager you see all files are owned by ” apache” then you should change the permissions of all wordpress files to “testuser”

There are many ways to change permission, one way is to use Webmin File Manager (if you control the server), another is to use any ftp program or control panel provided by your hosting. Below is a screenshot of how to change Wordress file permissions in Webmin.

The problem is when you change file and folders ownership that way all permissions are duplicated and files inherit 755 permission from folder settings.

Correct wordpress files permissions are 644 for all files and 755 for all folders (few exceptions might be with uploads folder)

You probably don’t think we have to change all file permissions from 755 to 644 by hand? :)

Of course not. Head to the Command shell to execute few lines of code:

At first you have to navigate to the wordpress installation root directory, otherwise you might change entire servers’ permissions.

It is easier to open some FTP manager at the same time to look the correct path to wordpress intallation, typical steps would be:

• cd /home [Enter]
• cd yoursite_folder [Enter]
• cd public_html [Enter]

• find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 0664

Last command is most important, what it does is it searches all folders deep down public_html folder and change all file permissions to 644.

Don’t forget to delete check.php file you created in the beginning.

I know it can look difficult at first, so if you have questions, you can ask them below in comment section.

To see whether an empty page has paragraph mark activate pilcrow menu (see below)

Paragraph mark looks like this

Select this paragraph mark (it should be highlighted) and start reducing font size from let’s say 11pt to 1pt. This trick makes paragraph mark smaller on the empty page and by some point it should jump back on the previous page under the table. When this happens empty page in word 2007 disappears

If this doesn’t help try one more trick. Select paragraph mark like previously and right click select paragraph properties. Indentation and spacing should be set to 0pt

Write in the comments if this helped you to delete the annoying empty page in word document.

i7 cpu load

After a while firefox RAM usage skyrocketed to more than 1,5Gb all thanks to this buckyball. I wonder how badly older computers that don’t have powerful processors will be slowed down. Not so long ago another Google’s doodle with pacman game also caused a lot of trouble for people who just wanted to use plain search and nothing more.

It would be nice from Google to have the option of opting out from such doodles in the future.

I could use the nameservers listed below to performe recursive queries. It may be that I am wrong but the chances of that are low. You should not have nameservers that allow recursive queries as this will allow almost anyone to use your nameservers and can cause problems. Problem record(s) are:

If you have your own VPS and Bind installed you can fix this issue by doing those steps:

1. Login to your webmin and go to Servers->BIND DNS Server
2. Select Miscellaneous options and there tick “Do full recursive lookups for clients?” to NO
3. Apply configuration or just restart Bind for changes to take effect

You can also disable recursive queries by manually editing /etc/named.conf file, just put directive “recursion no;” without quotes in options part:

Restart Bind server and reload intodns.com to check your site again and see that now it is correct.

But here are the good news for Gmail users. Gmail does pretty good job identifying spam emails but I’m about to tell you 1 trick how to identify spammers. It’s interesting to know which sites are using spam methods or selling your email. For example if you detect that new online shop use your email for spamming then you will know it’s better to keep your money for other e-shop.

So if you’re using Gmail simply use tracking ids when registering (creating a new account). For example you have joesixpackmail@gmail.com email and you’re creating new user on e-shop BestShoesExample.com, then simply in email field write this modified email: joesixpackmail+BestShoesExample@gmail.com. Notice that you added +BestShoesExample tracking id to your email address. Don’t worry you still be getting your emails even if someone send you a message on this modified address. Gmail simply ignores what is after + sign.

Can you see where is the trick? Let’s clear it out. Imagine you received a spam email about some cialis. Then you should look in “to” field. If there’s joesixpackmail+BestShoesExample@gmail.com
written then you can be sure that BestShoesExample.com site is fake because you only used your modified email once registering your account at BestShoesExample.com and you received spam at this email.

This is how you can identify spammers the smart way.

1. Hosting speed directly correlate with people’s patience. Do not expect someone to wait until your site opens after 20 seconds. Many visitors will not want to look around your site because your pages are loading too slow.
2. SEO. This one is quite fresh. Google announced that in 2010 loading speed will be one of the factors that determine your position in Search Engine Results Page. So those websites from overselling hosting providers will suffer from slow loading speed.

How to compare hosting speed?

There is one quick tip to measure the speed of the website. You don’t need any programs to install.

1. At first open your Run dialog (Start->Run.. or press Winkey+R) and type CMD. This will open black window where you can type various commands.
2. In CMD window type “ping www.example1.com –t” without quotes and hit Enter.
   
3. Soon you will see the ongoing process of pinging. What you have to look for is time=123some_value. The lower the value the better, it means the website you’re trying to ping is responding and opening pages very quickly. And the opposite. High response time suggests that hosting speed is very low.

Here are the screenshot of 2 sites from pinging perspective.

So in order to compare 2 hosting providers speed you need to ping websites from one hosting company and then compare response times with another site’s pinging times.

If you already have hosting, you can ping your own site and see if it’s time to change hosting provider.

• Open new Word 2007 document and go to STart->Word Options

• Go to save tab and here you should see the field to input desired time in which Word2007 would auto save your opened documents.

In  this window you can also change autosave folder location to desktop. It would be easier to find instantly the recovered document.

Recently I had to download a couple entire websites for offline browsing (because they were shutting down) and was searching for a decent program that can download all website html and other type of files making original file structure. I searched in Google for a bit and found “SurfOffline Professional 2” which could download entire site in a simple wizard style process. However there is a price tag from $39.95 to $120. And it’s no use spending money on software that you will use once.

Finding something on the internet takes more and more time because there is exponentially increasing number of information and products online. Google does a wonderful job helping people find what they need. But in order to find something you have to make the right query.

Here is another approach I used and found best Website Downloader and Offline browser. In my Firefox there’s an addon called Quirk Search Status. It displays useful information (Page Rank, Alexa rank, Compete rank, etc.) for the current page you’re browsing.

And here comes the interesting part. This addon also displays related pages for the current domain you’re viewing. For example, when you’re on yahoo.com it will show related domains msn, craigslist and others. So I went to the SurfOffline Professional 2 website and looked for related sites. And sure enough found other suggested related websites:

firefox addon

First from the left was SpadixDb site with completely free website downloader called BackstreetBrowser. It has done amazing job downloading those 2 sites that I wanted to browse offline.

So different approach to search saved some time and money for me just by having simple Firefox addon.

How to know if your hotmail account is hacked? Well there’s no universal technique to know that, but keep in mind that the infamous list contains primarily if not all accounts beginning with letters a and b. So it seems only a part of this list leaked into public.

Accounts ararat973@hotmail.com and blando2713@hotmail.com where the first and last usernames in a list.

Having in mind that it was not a hack in Hotmail system but more likely some gathered login  information via phishing or other web 2.0 applications which ask to enter your email address and password in order to do something (e.g. check who has blocked you in msn messenger and so on).

Another good thing would be to change the password to be on the safe side and not loose your privacy. Also don’t forget to check in Google your full email with quotes: “your@email.com” as it may show the locations where your email name is exposed and one of them might be that list with hacked Hotmail accounts.

At first I thought it was related to my theme, because I often edit in for various performance tweaks, but even changing through default WordPress themes the problem persisted and only one entry was showing in category although it obvously had more than one post in it.

So I started looking in my WordPress configuration and found that in Settings-> Reading sub panel it was an option called ” with value equal to 1. So I changed it to 5 and refreshed the category page. Sure enough it was it, now there was 5 entries displaying in my category.

So if someone else is experiencing this issue, at first check that parameter in your wordpress backend to save some time searching for problem in theme files.

By the way, the problem was on my other blog, but you can check some categories on this blog too :)

After searching for help on the internet I found nothing helpfull to my problem  so I decided to reinstall WordPress by uploading fresh files from clean WordPress setup folder and suddenly I saw .htaccess file in my wp-admin folder. Took a look and to my surprise I saw these lines:

deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xxx.xxx

A flashback came to my mind and the whole wp login problem dissapeared. These lines mean a WordPress admin folder protection. Nobody can access admin interface except user with the allowed ip. I have forgotten that I installed this security system on my blogs and paid an hour to solve that.

If you came here from Search Engines and haven’t found your problem solution at least implement this little wordpress security hack as it prooved to work considering my experience today.

Just create .htaccess file (or edit it) in your WordPress installation wp-admin folder with these lines of code:

deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xxx

where xx means your IP address. If you want to allow more IPs to enter your admin interface you can add more lines with “allow from..” or use IP broad match like: allow from xx.xx.xx

Hovewer, FRAPS makes huge files while recording gameplay because there is no time for processor to compress video. So even not long 1 minute video can take up to 700 Mb space on your HDD not to mention lagging while recording.

Today my example will be a short “Alone in the dark” gameplay clip, which takes 48 seconds and originally used a bit more than 451Mb of space. Keeping such huge files on your computer will certainly clog the entire hard drive so you need to shrink videos to a more manageable size.

Basically you will need 1  program and 1 codec: VirtualDub as video editor and XviD Codec for encoding Fraps AVIs.

• At first install Koepi’s Xvid Codec;
  
• Then start Virtual Dub and open your video file (File->Open video file…);
• Set compression ( Video->Compression) to Xvid MPEG-4 Codec:
  
  
• Now to start video conversion you need to go to File->Save as Avi (shortcut F7) and select the file save location.

This codec converts videos REALLY fast and the quality is simply superb. To make you believe below I added actual screenshots from 2 converted videos using some ffdshow codec that was installed probably by some codec pack earlier and the Koepi’s codec:

ORIGINAL VERSION: 451Mb

FFDSHOW CODEC: 15Mb

Koepi’s codec: 22Mb

Koepi’s codec did just the right quality and video size without any further adjustments. I think it’ll be my codec of choice for a long time.

You can make an html file (Logins->Print List->Save as html) with all your passcards gathered in a list but this is very time consuming to transfer passwords manually one by one.

Hovewer the solution to transfer Roboform passwords is quite simple. Just go to ../My Documents/My RoboForm Data/Default Profile and save this folder to a safe location for later use. You may notice that every passcard has its own file created in that folder so the backup proccess is to simply copy “Default Profile” folder over the new installation and you’re done.

“To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As… from the menu that appears. Choose a location on your computer to save your files, then click OK or Save.”

Anyone familiar with hosting would laugh reading this suggestion. Seriously, I can’t imagine who was so smart enough to come up with this idea of back up a website. If you’re looking for really outstanding hosting provider, check this one.

This can be easily bypassed by renaming the extension from .pps to .ppt. Now PowerPoint thinks that it is simple PPT presentation which you coul edit like you want.

I don’t know if .pps is different from .ppt file format only in the extension but it works.

The song starts with swinging sounds from left to right speaker but I listened with my old headphones that has no marks of R (right) and L (side) left,  so I couldn’t determine if the song starts on the right side or on the left.

So to quickly solve this problem use simple trick. Open your computer’s volume control panel and move “Volume Control” or “Wave” slider to the left or right direction while listening to some music. If you hear the sound on your right when the slider is  moved to the right, then it means you have put headphones correctly. If not, just switch the sides and you’ll be fine.

So to bypass comment filter on Youtube just revert your comment upside down. This not only will help you to pass link checks but also plays on people curiosity because upside down text stands out from other comments and looks interesting.

Post links on Youtube

To revert text upside down like this:

This is normal text with a link www.izitips.com (this comments will not appear on Youtube)

ɯoɔ˙sdıʇızı˙ʍʍʍ ʞuıן ɐ ɥʇıʍ ʇxǝʇ ןɐɯɹou sı sıɥʇ (This comment will bypass Youtbe filter)

go here and just type your comment normally. The conversion will be done on the fly with Javascript.

In fact there is no such thing like letters upside down, most characters are taken from Latin Extended and International Phonetic Alphabet charets. Also only lower case letters can be converted because of the lack of capital letters.

For example, when you install WordPress, there is a default Hello World post displayed on the front page and Google also indexes your important login page. This is all the stuff you don’t need to show to anyone.

One solution to prevent such case is to test your website on localhost on your home computer but reuploading files and databases from home to your hosting account can add up quite some time and you cannot be sure that everything go smoothly.

One good way to test a website and fine tune it before final launch is to use .htaccess file to allow see the content only yourself. This way ensures that nobody else including web spiders and robots can see the website until you allow.

To ban everybody from seeing your new unfinished site do:

1. Open (or create if it doesn’t exist) .htaccess file from the root directory of your site. (Root directory is where your main index.html file resides. If you are building new sites like addon domains on your main hosting, your root directory is that addon domain’s folder which is usually in /public_html/youaddondomainfolder)
2. Add this code at the end of the .htaccess file (it will deny everybody that tries to visit yournewdomain.com)
   

   Deny from All

3. Now Google for My Ip and copy your IP address. Then add more code to the .htaccess file
   

   Allow from “replace this with your IP address”

4. Save your .htaccess file and reload your browser with yournewdomain.com. You should see website as normally but other people will see this screen:

This trick works only if you have static IP address. You can allways unblock access to your website by deleting code above.

Finally there is a solid Youtube MP3 player available to play songs directly from Youtube. As you may know, Youtube is the largest song database in the world.

For example if you search for Beatles, you will get 137,938 results. Quite impressive.

Muziic Youtube MP3 player is very stylish and good looking program. Searching and navigation are very intuitive. If your internet connection is fast, i.e. you usually watch Youtube videos without lagging, Muziic will work perfectly.

Listening music from Muziic player is almost 100% legal. Youtube handles all copyright issues and some artists are paid for every listening from Youtube, so neither Muziic nor you are responsible for copyright issues.

Muziic screenshot above shows how easy is to find songs from Youtube. There are already large community supporting this project and you can select from favorite genres like House, Jazz, etc or just search for a favorite singer.

Muziic basically only plays sound from Youtube clip, but if you prefer to watch video, a small screen is provided on the top near timeline. Saving MP3 is not allowed.

This program is not limited to only playing songs from Youtube but also you can create playlists or upload your tracks and add album covers just by dragging files on the player.

Check it out, maybe some time in the future musiic will replace glorious Winamp player

Download Muziic free here.

Notice when you write a comment on Youtube video there is a small button on the right that says “Audio preview” When you press it, you can hear the pronunciation of the comment you typed.

Use this trick to your advantage and learn the correct pronunciation of english words. Correctly typed native english words are voiced by professional so this very quick and effective way to hear the pronunciation

Some of Gmail users were so desperate that you could feel their desperation from tearfull words on the computer screen.

One of them was even convinced that Google went down intentionally for him to ruin his life:

Twitter was also pumping messages with “Gmail own” in every 3 words.

This Gmail blackout demonstrates how we are all dependent on one service provider.

Some tips how to prevent future downs of Gmail.

1. Have an alternate email account where you can forward emails to. You can set up to forward your emails automatically and even if the front-end doesn’t work there is a chance that some services are still functioning.
2. Do not use Gmail for business. If you have a website, you must have your own domain email address. You can forward emails, but the opposite way: from @yourdomain.com to @gmail.com

From the description you could see that Hotmail is described as:

“Free web-based e-mail. 2MB e-mail storage, signatures, stationery, HTML compatible.”

In fact Hotmail offers 5Gb of storage which is only a few Gb’s lower than Gmail, but still, how many people can fill up even half of that space?

Searching for popularity of Hotmail vs Gmail I was quite surprised, because according to Google Trends, Hotmail is still almost as twice as popular as Gmail.

Hotmail popularity rises even faster than Gmail, so there won’t be one dominant email provider anytime soon.

Coming back to the topic, part of the responsibility for wrong description Hotmail should take itself because in fact there’s no meta tags defined on their home page. However from where then Google took that description only Google knows best.

Image by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten via Flickr

Heatmaps are very useful determining what is the hottest parts of your website. Looking at the heatmap you can see how to improve the layout for your website by placing most important buttons, navigation links or ads on the best visibility parts. To perform a real heatmap experiment with people for the site would be very expensive. Luckily there are web application at Feng-Gui that does all the job.

Feng-GUI Lab is a group of artificial vision scientists and interactive designers who joined together to gather resources and explore human vision to find out, where and how people look and what do they find attractive on the image they see.

This is a technology that empowers designers and advertisers to effectively analyze Attention and Attraction in Visuals. Find out how people see your website, photo or ad and which areas are getting most of the attention.

To this moment Feng-GUI heatmap service have served over 2 million images for 300,000 visitors.

Making your website’s heatmap

1. Make screenshot of your website and upload image to feng-gui.
2. Press Heatmap button and wait until heatmap is processed.

See what are the most attractive spots in my iziTips.com blog based on feng-gui application:

Website Heatmap

Seems that most attention is concentrated on the parts with images. Site logo, translation widget and 2 post images got the most attraction in the heatmap making process.

As a fun you can also upload your own picture and see what parts of yours are the most attractive (according to computer). Select skin detection option to enhance the detection process.

Related reading:

• Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye (googleblog.blogspot.com)

Now the updated details are that you have to put these coordinates in the search box on the left 41.731944, -49.945833, hit Enter and you are heading to the place where Titanic sunk.

I made a short video of exploring Titanic remains from Google Earth 5

Few reminders if you still can’t find Titanic on Google Earth. Make sure you enabled Ocean layer on the left sidebar (put a tick on it).

While searching for ways to join several mIRC servers at the same time I found the simple answer to that question. If you are using latest version of mIRC (currently 6.35) then simply execute mirc.exe second time and you can join second server and channel. There is non option to join another server from the same instance of mIRC client.

Usually good things aren’t in the same place. If you’re interested in advanced SEO and PPC stuff then you should check 2 channels #cakes and #mafia

mIRC channel

The first is on IRC server  irc.freenode.net ,join #cakes

The second: irc.krono.net ,join #mafia

Update:

Looks like there is a way to connect 2 IRC clients in the same window. Go to File ->  Select Server. Then select second server name you want to connect to and press select. In the new opened window make sure you ticked the New server window option, otherwise you will be disconnected from the primary server. Now hit connect and you’re connected on 2 IRC servers at the same time in the same window.

Titanic in Google Earth

This is weird. I tried to search for Titanic in Google Earth 5 but nothing found except some unrelated cities:Titanic, Pollard, Clay, AR 72456, Titanic, Harvey, Jefferson, LA 70058 and few more. But where is the real Titanic? Quite funny, the biggest ship accident in history and no search returns. Has Titanic sunk even in Google Earth?

Then I decided to find the exact wreckage location by putting latitude and longitude values. Several websites mention longitude and latitude values where the Titanic sank are:

latitude: 41° 46′ North

longitude: 50° 14′ West

The correct form to enter these longitude and latitude coordinates in Google Earth 5 is: 41 46′ N, 57 14′ W

It seems that Earth is of different opinion on where the Titanic sank because in reality you have to move  about 582 km to the right. Only there you will see Titanic remains icon.

There are few photos from the remainings of this great ship and a Youtube footage from Titanic expedition in 2004.

To measure the distance between 2 points on Earth having a longitude and latitude values is very easy. Open your Google Earth and navigate to the first point. Press Add Placemark icon on the upper menu.

When the new placemark window pops up copy longitude and latitude values into this web application at Movable Type Scripts. Go to the second point on your Google Earth program and do the same with placemark to get latitude and longitude values. Now you can get the distance.

Another option is to use Google Earth ruler and calculate distance using this tool. Go to Tools and select Ruler. Now make 2 points on the map and you instantly see the distance between two points in Brooklyn.

If you haven’t got Google Earth installed yet, download it here. This is an amazing application to explore the world from your desk.

These tricks will help you to find the distance between cities, two points, towns, countries like Alaska and Russia and around the Earth.

google trends

Only Joomla managed to outperform WordPress until last summer. WordPress goes opposite economical crisis and managed to double the supremacy against its rivals.

Why is that? Well, I have to admit that WordPress is so easy to use. Even novice bloggers can install WordPress with little knowledge because everything is made to simplicity. I had one website earlier made with Joomla but switched to WordPress after a year because if you don’t use Joomla for some time you can easily forget the many functions it has and you could spend more time trying to figure out what is wrong than writing content. WordPress is the opposite, whenever you log in everything runs smoothly. Plugins are easy to install with no issues most of the time. Friendly URLs can be selected and not configured touching the .htaccess file like with Joomla.

Knowing how to handle WordPress can be beneficial because there are many jobs for developers every day.

Even organisations are switching to WordPress instead paying huge money for custom websites and CMSs. To mention a few: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), etc.

Everyone loves WordPress, Google is no exception. Posts can be indexed in few minutes and appear in search results.

New version of CCleaner 2.16 was recently released with added support for Google Chrome to  files on your computer too.

In case you haven’t heard about CCleaner its a freeware program to optimize your system, enhance privacy and clean computer from bad files. The program removes unused files from your system. This allows Windows to run faster and as a result you will get more hard disk space. CCleaner also cleans traces your online browsing tracks like your Internet history, cache, etc. With CCleaner you can clean your registry too. This program is very fast and don’t take ages to perform a full scan. Best of all its totally free do download and use.

Program is very easy to use. Select from choices on the left menu to Clean Programs, Clean Registry or Tools. You could also safely uninstall unused programs with CCleaner which in my opinion is much easier to do than with a Windows add/remove programs window.

Don’t be amazed that you can find few Gb of data which can be removed from your computer. Fixing registry entries and cleaning unnecessary files can boost your computer’s performance.

Update: There is also one nice feature to export all your installed programs in a text file. This could be helpful if you want to reinstall windows so you won’t forget any program that was installed.  Select Tools and in the lower right corner you will see Save to text file button.

Just go to Firefox and open the blog page. Then right click and select View Page Source. You should look for lines that can mention the name of the theme. For WordPress blogs it is usually mentioned in the CSS file path.

Some custom themes won’t let you just look at the source code and detect the theme name. People could also change name of the folder where the theme is, so this is not a 100% way to detect/identify WordPress theme but could be a good start.

Although I mentioned Photoshop CS3 in the title the principles remains the same no matter what version of Photoshop you have. The method to remove watermark from the picture can be applied to any image editing program that has the same features as Photoshop.

In this tutorial we’ll use watermarked IPod speakers picture from Dealextreme gadget e-shop. You can find many great and cheap items here.

1. Removing Watermark From White Background

First load the image to Photoshop and select Eraser Tool (keyboard shortcut press E). Then erase all watermarked areas with white background. This is the simplest and quickest part of watermark removal procedure. To make things easier you can adjust the size of the eraser (right click) and try to zoom using Zoom Tool (Z) into more complicated parts of the image like curved edges near objects.

In the end you will get this image that has no watermark in white background.

2. Removing watermark from objects.

Now its time for more complicated removal steps. In the image below you see that watermark is clearly visible on the right iPod speaker.

Select Clone Stamp Tool (S) , now hold Alt key and press on area1. This takes a sample of area1 and you can paint the same sample wherever you want on the image. Off course we need to hide the watermark so we start brushing on the edge1.

The result is:

Repeat this step by taking other samples from nearby areas which could mask the watermark. If you go too far and want to go back just press Ctrl+Z command and start from the beginning.

Don’t forget to resize the tool by right click if needed for narrow areas in the image.

Tip: If you find difficult using Clone Stamp Tool then go to Help->Photoshop Help.. and type in Clone Stamp Tool. You can read more detailed version on how to use clone stamp tool in Photoshop here.

When we’re done with this part of the image it looks like this:

Almost no traces of watermark that has been before. Use Clone Stamp Tool to remove watermarks from other areas in the image the same way.

Smudge the Watermark

Sometimes Clone Stamp Tool may be difficult or time consuming to use. There is another trick in Photoshop to remove watermarks. It’s accomplished by using smudge tool.

Let’s take a look on the area where watermark is printed. It would be quite difficult to remove just using Clone Stamp tool alone. In this case we can use Smudge Tool to smudge the watermark away.

Select Smudge Tool (R ) and adjust diameter and hardness.

Now gently press on the watermarked areas and swing your mouse a little. We need to destroy those linear patterns that are visible on the image. After some time we get this result.

The final result with every watermark removed is:

Using those 3 simple Photoshop techniques you can master the watermark removal art. As I mentioned in the beginning you can use not only Photoshop but other image editing programs as well.

Google Talk

Google Talk was created few years ago as an attempt to give IM market a new participant. Every Gmail account holder can use Google Talk to chat with his friends and colleagues.

A new improved version of Google Talk you can now download is called Google Talk Labs Edition. New features are added which isn’t available in standard version. Those who use Google Calendar now will be able to receive notices of upcoming meetings and planned activities.

Recently, the company has released a trial of Internet Explorer version 8RC 1. RC means Release Candidate, and that this is the last test the browser before the final release version. If the developers and the browser beta testers won’t find serious errors, this will be the final version.

IE8 Changes

At first glance, Internet Explorer 8 looks very similar to the predecessor IE7. However, it is much improved now.
According to the testers it works much faster, and even reaches the speed of Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Some improvements were made to make IE8 safer to use. Now it has improved protection against phishing scams.

The new IE version will be more flexible with add-ons from Add-on gallery. It will also be possible to select and save a piece of the site and to follow its updates. You can download IE8 RC1 from the Microsoft’s website.

Some websites demonstrate their statistics for everyone by putting visible web stat counter on the sidebar or footer while others prefer to hide such information and rather use Google analytics, php scripts or other analog tracking applications.

A good way to measure how many traffic a site has is to use well known Alexa but it doesn’t give the exact number of how many visits a site has daily. Nor does any program will count you that number.

To help in estimating approximate amount of daily website visitors is a free StatBrain tool to track visits. You don’t have to use any code or tracking software, just simply enter the name of the website and wait some time while Statbrain gathers all the information available online (such as Page Rank, Alexa rank, indexed pages, backlinks, etc) and makes prediction of how many visits it gets daily.

The number that Statbrain analysis estimates is page visits. It can also be called visitor sessions which shows the number of visits that a website has. Keep in mind that this number is not the same as unique visitors.

If you own the site and see that Statbrain gives incorrect estimation you are able to write them. Statbrain will make comparison to other sites and adjust the estimation for better predictions in the future.

I noticed that searches at StatBrain are indexed by google so you get 1 free backlink (do Follow !) just by quering your site. Use this opportunity for SEO advantage.

Use Statbrain to evaluate your niche competitors and simply get 1 free backlink. You can use Force Google To Index Any Page technique to get results faster.

Incorrect Display with IE8

While developers are busy updating their websites for Internet Explorer 8, you can click the Compatibility View button to display websites that have not been updated.

1) By clicking compatibility button near address bar

Compatibility Settings

If this tip doesn’t help either, then try this microsoft help wizard to identify why web sites do not display or work correctly. Also remember that the page itself can have mistakes in the code so no compatibility view will help there. In this case switch to another browser (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) and see how it displays the page in question.

After “being lazy” and coming to my blog from Google typing “izitips” I noticed that the search phrase izitips became suggested keyword.

So the point is to keep accesing your blog or any website by using google search instead of address bar. This both can be faster and add a little SEO because someone accidentally may type something and your web address might show up which is a good possibility to increase traffic for your website or blog.

Amit uses Google to “find movie timings, spell checking, ego surfing, spotting grammatical errors in sentences, currency conversion, getting word meanings, for reading lost websites and for web search”. I can add that you can use Google to make your blog’s name a suggested keyword.

More about suggested words in Google’s Suggest FAQ.

• WordPress;
• Blogger;
• TypePad;
• Sharepoint;
• Windows Live blog;
• and some other

So WL Writer is a universal program that can speed up your article writing and save time.

When you install WLW it’s very easy to add a blog. The wizard automatically finds the login path so you don’t need to enter technical information.

Provide your Username and Password information and you’re ready to go.

Windows Live Writer interface is very tidy and intuitive. You can compose your posts in WYSYG (what you see is what you get) and Source (html code) modes. To preview your unfinished article instantly go to preview mode. This preview is better than native WordPress preview because:

1. It is much faster. You preview post on your computer without loading page from internet;
2. The preview is over the whole blog home page and not limited to the post itself. This way you can see better the position and matching.

What you can do more with Windows Live Writer besides the ability to write your posts offline:

• Add images and apply special effects like emboss, sepia, black & white, etc;
• Insert links and its attributes like title, open in a separate window, ability to select the rel value nofollow.
• Spell check;
• Tagging and categories;
• Video embedding from Youtube or SoapBox;
• and many more;

If you don’t like Windows Live Writer there are quite many other desktop blogging clients available. Some of them are totally free and some are commercial.

A list of blogging clients from your desktop:

• Qumana (Windows, Mac) – Free! (doesn’t have connection settings so you won’t be able to login if you use proxy)
• wBloggar (Windows) – Free!
• Thingamablog (Windows, Linux) – Free!
• Blogo (Mac) – Commercial
• ecto (Mac) – Commercial
• MarsEdit2 (Mac) – Commercial
• Blogjet (Windows) – Commercial

In my opinion Windows Live Writer is the best choice for those who want free tool to write posts being offline and then publish only with a few clicks.

Windows 7 inside DVD

A search for pictures found only 17 images and graphic files inside Windows 7 installation DVD. One of them are background which will probably be the default background when you install Win-7 OS.

Windows 7 background. Hit image to enlarge

It looks quite unimpressive, at least not as alluring as Windows XP grassland hill. Take a look at it bellow and if you like the new Windows 7 background you can set as your desktop background by right clicking on the image and selecting “set as desktop background“

SDXC

CES 2009 exhibition presented a new generation of SD cards – SDXC (eXtended Secure Digital Capacity). Although they at first glance are no different from the normal media, but the maximum capacity can reach up to 2 terabyte (2,048 gigabytes!) Thus, one SDXC card will be enough to store 100 high-resolution HD movies, 60 hours of HD video, or 17,000 standard high-quality photos. Impressive is the data read speed. In future it will reach the 300 Mb / s. At the beginning SDXC cards will be more modest. This year is expected to release 64 GB of storage media, which seek to speed 104 Mb / s.

PDF fact sheet is available at sdcard.org. This new generation SDXC card could be very strong competitor to SSDs and HDDs because of its small size, capacity and mobility. Imagine that you can carry whole shelf of DVD movies in your pocket. If the price would be relatively small we could expect to see lifelong human life recording. All your memories could be recorded onto this SDXC card and safely stored for later reference.

Price: undisclosed

Nicetranslator does the job for you by automatically finding what language you’re pasting and then you can set the output language to be your mother-tongue or english for better comparison.

To start using NiceTranslator at first select your native language from the add/remove panel. You can select as many languages as you want. Then copy and paste the unknown language in to the text field and after a moment you will get a “nice translation” for the pasted text.

Funny is that you still won’t know what language you have just pasted because there are only output language names shown. Maybe it will be a good future feature.

Windows-7

Microsoft officially introduced the new operating system Windows 7 a beta version, which should appear this summer. You can download it for free from Microsoft site (here you will also receive the registration code for activating Windows 7), and test your computer.

However you should hurry to download Windows 7 because Microsoft will allow only the first 2.5 million beta testers.  Experts commends the new Microsoft product. Windows 7 works faster and is more reliable than Vista. Windows 7 does not need a powerful computer. It will work even on 3-4 year old machines. The minimum requirements to run Windows 7 are 1GHz processor, 1Gb RAM, 16GB free hard disk space and 128Mb video card.

You can test Windows 7 and get free updates until 1 August. Microsoft plan to release a commercial version this summer. Windows 7 beta version upgrade to the full version of Windows 7 will not be possible.

The installation iso image for Windows 7 DVD takes 2.44 Gb.

Be carefull when installing new operating system because Microsoft does not take any responsibility for the system crash and data loss from the HDD.

A short list of automated things you can do with computer:

• Startup folder

Put your everyday use programs in the Startup folder (C:\Documents and Settings\[User name]\Start Menu\Programs\Startup). You could also drag program shortcuts while in the start menu. It can be programs like MSN Messenger, Skype, Winamp, Web Browser and so on. But be carefull not to put too many programs to autoload because this will slow down the computer a bit.

• Roboform – your logins and password manager

Get Roboform – a program that remembers your paswords and login information. You will acess ftp accounts, email, forums logins and all other protected areas of the internet with a click of a mouse. The time saving is enormous with this add-on which can be integrated in IE and Firefox browsers.

• WordPress plugins for saving time

For bloggers using WordPress there are many plugins that can speed up things. For example, WordPress automatic upgrade plugin can save about half an hour. Usual manual WordPress upgrade takes at least 15 minutes while this plugin enables you to upgrade just in 5 steps and you don’t need to remember any passwords. Another great time saver plugin is Seo Smart Links. It automatically inserts links to your predefined keywords and phrases in articles so you don’t have to care about interlinking anymore. You could both link to your own blog or other websites. One more great plugin is TinyMCE Advanced text editor which adds usefull text formatting features like Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu and other.

• Browsing the internet and saving time

Firefox has a huge list of usefull plugins that can automate your daily browsing routine. For example iMacros add-on can record and replay repetitive tasks thus saving your time. Firebug add-on save time for web developers by enabling them to play with source code.

• Gathering news into one place

Using RSS reader you can keep up with enormous amount of flowing information without visiting sites and blogs. Almost every site today has RSS feed. Subscribe to your favorite feeds and never miss updates.  Google reader suits perfect.

• Use search toolbars

Don’t limit yourself to only Google. You can add many other search providers like DealExtreme, Isohunt, Wikipedia, Ebay, etc. By searching from any page you will save several seconds for getting results. When you visit a site and it offers search service you could add a search provider from upper right corner on your browser.

search

• Create shortcuts

Create shortcuts on your desktop to your favorite music folders, video files and other. If you use ftp program and have several sites to maintain you can bookmark root folders to your sites and access with 1 mouse click.

• Learn keyboard-shortcuts

Learn basic keyboard shortcuts like copying (Ctrl+C), cutting (Ctrl+X), pasting (Ctrl+V), undo (Ctrl+Z), select all (Ctrl+A), save (Ctrl+S), change language (Alt+Shift), change active program (Alt+TAB), close program (Alt+F4). These will save some time.

• More reading about automation can be found here

It has built-in codecs so you don’t have to worry about installing them. It even has rare h.264 codec to watch digital tv in countries where H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard exists.

So to watch DVB-T with VLC media player you have to push Media->Open Capture Device. From Capture mode select DVB direct show

vlc dvb-t settings

Fore the card selection choose DVB-T.

However VLC isn’t very user frinedly and doesn’t provide autoscan channels feature so you have to put correct Transponder frequency and Bandwith values You can find those values from your included dvb-t player program or check dvb-t provider’s website for details.

Press Play and if the frequency is found you will see digital TV on your computer screen.

Tip: If you don’t see the channel instantly you could navigate to Playback->Program and see the list of channels from the same frequency. Some encoded channels will not display any window and thus looks like there is no signal.

vlc-settings

You can find your USB DVB-T tuner here:

On screen or virtual keyboard lets you type in important information with your mouse. You select symbols from virtual keyboard on your screen.

Some antiviruses like Kaspersky has its own  on screen keyboard to raise security levels but I bet majority of you didn’t know that Windows has a secret run command to bring up the onscreen keyboard.

Just go to Start -> Run and type in “osk” without quotes. And you instantly get a nice on screen keyboard from the Windows alone.

on-screen-keyboard

Use it to input secure data (like usernames and passwords) that is not to be revealed to hackers or snitches. It is also very helpfull to have on-screen-keyboard when your real keyboard is broken or for some reason you can’t use it (maybe you don’t want to make noise pressing the keys).

You could say “how I suppose to open the on screen keyboard if I can’t use real keyboard to type the run command”. The answer is simple. If you typed that command (“osk”) earlier you should be able to see it in the history of all commands. Just select it and press OK.

Top ten list of webcams are:

1. Microsoft LifeCam VX-700

microsoft-lifecam-vx-700

Excellent price and quality. It records 640×480 videos and make photos. Windows XP and Vista users don’t need any drivers. For the same price you will get earphones with microphone.

2. Manta Multimedia MM346

manta-multimedia-mm346

Has 1,3 Mpx matrix which can make 1280×960 resolution photos. Recording function makes 30fps 800×600 resolution videos. Device has built-in microphone and LED lights.

3. Microsoft LifeCam VX-1000

microsoft-lifecam-vx-1000

With only 0,3 Mpx matrix this webcam performs well and is a number 3 webcam in the list. Has usual parts (microphone) and comes with a whole bunch of additional software to make video better and add special effects to them

4. Philips SPC535NC

philips-spc535nc

It makes interpolated photos and records videos of 1280×1024 resolution, but has only 0,3Mpx matrix. Interesting feature is that it comes with VLounge program which can follow your face and adjusts focus for the best results.

5. Logitech QuickCam E3500

logitech-quickcam-e3500

On the webcam itself there is a buil-in button to take pictures and a microphone. Addional software to spice up your videos with some serious special effects.

6. SpeedLink Autofocus Webcam SL-6846-SBK

speedlink-autofocus-webcam-sl-6846-sbk

Has auto focus and regulates brightness depending on the ambience light.

7. Canyon CNR-WCAM613

canyon-cnr-wcam613

Makes really big 3200×2400 resolution photos. Has built-in LEDs. One of the cons are that this webcam doesn’t have the attaching parts so you can’t place it on the monitor.

8. Canyon CNR-WCAM413

canyon-cnr-wcam413

25fps 640×480 videos, 1280×1024 photos. Many additional programs for enhancing recorded videos.

9. Creative Labs Live! Cam Vista IM

creative-labs-live-cam-vista-im

Has very low 12fps with 640×480, maybe because of the USB1.1 Has built-in mic.

10. Manta Multimedia WebCam DIamond MM341

creative-labs-live-cam-vista-im

Can’t mount on the monitor. Fps 26. Doesn’t have built in microphone

Instead you can use simple trickprovided that you have Power Point installed.

Copy the image from Word document and paste it into the Power Point presentation. Now press right mouse button and you will see option Save as Picture. This is what we need. Now you can save the picture from document like from web page.

At first you must open any text editor (notepad fo exmple) and paste this line:

copy /b *.ts joined_files.ts

Now save the file with a name joiner.bat. Be sure that the end of the file is .bat and not .txt. Select save as type All files if needed.

Now the procedure is simple. Name you .ts files in a way that when sorted by name you get the desired joining sequence. 1.ts 2.ts and so on will do the job.

Place your just created file joiner.bat in the same folder where .ts files are and double click it. The joining process should start and after several seconds you will get one large file called joined_files.ts which contains all the smaller parts.

join-ts-files

If you join .ts files recorded from dvb-t tuner and the joined file doesn’t play properly this is probably the error in the file itself and not the joining method. You can try to encode .ts files into different format and then join with other video editing program.

VLC recordings

VLC program is very powerful and capable of recording DVB-T programs from your USB or other digital tv capture device. Hovewer its’ recording is not clearly specified and you have to search where the VLC recorded files go.

One inportant thing I noticed about VLC recordings that they are very large. Looks like those inbuilt codecs are not efficient enough to compress digital tv signal but for viewing VideoLan does a great job.

So if you still don’t care about the file size of VLC DVB-T recordings you can find recorded files at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data. Notice that Application data folder is hidden and you need to change folder view settings in order to be able to see its contents (Tools->Folder options->View->Show hidden files and folders)

Original snapshot from VideoLan

 For DVB-T recordings I recommend AltDVB program which is freeware but needs some adjustments to work.

How your site works

Your web site is made up of a group of files and directories, much like your Documents folder on your home computer. Only in this case, everyone in the world can see some of your files. To give you an idea of how the directories and files work, we’ll look at a view of the file manager.

Contents of /home/user/.

Above, you can see an example of the files and directories in your site. There are three main directories to be concerned with:

/home/user/ – This is your home directory. All of your files are stored within this directory. Files placed directly in this directory will not be visible on the internet. You will start out in your home directory when connecting by FTP, Web Disk or the File Manager.

/home/user/public_ftp/ – This is the directory used for anonymous FTP access. Any files in this directory can be downloaded by anyone if anonymous FTP access is enabled.

/home/user/public_html/ (www) – The public_html directory contains the files for your site. Files in public_html and any subdirectories of public_html will be able to be viewed by anyone on the internet.. (/home/user/www/ is the same directory as /home/user/public_html/).

When someone views a directory in your public_html area, they will see the index page for that directory. When creating your index page, you should use one of the following names (the first one found will be shown if the visitor doesn’t type in a specific page in their URL):

• index.html.var
• index.htm
• index.html
• index.shtml
• index.xhtml
• index.wml
• index.perl
• index.pl
• index.plx
• index.ppl
• index.cgi
• index.jsp
• index.js
• index.jp
• index.php4
• index.php3
• index.php
• index.phtml
• default.htm
• default.html
• home.htm
• index.php5
• Default.html
• Default.htm
• home.html

 Warning: When adding files to your site, it is important that you add them in the right place. For example, you will need to place files that you wish to be visible on the internet in public_html or a subdirectory of public_html. If you placed them in / for example, no one will be able to view them.

Getting Files to your site

For your visitors to be able to visit your site, you will need to add some files to it. You can add files through the File Manager and the Web Disk.

The File Manager

The File Manager allows you to view the files in your site as well as to upload new files and modify existing files. You can access it on the main screen of your interface through the File Manager area. Once inside the File Manager, you can click on to upload files to your site.

Web Disk

If you need to move a lot of files at a time, or find yourself often making changes to your site, you can set up a web disk to easily access your site. A web disk allows you to add a link to your home computer’s desktop that goes to our web site’s files. This means that you can view the files on your site just like you would the files on your home computer. The next step will allow you to create and set up your web disk.

FTP Accounts

You can use FTP to upload files to your site. To do this, you will need to create a FTP account to access your site with. You can do this in the FTP Accounts area which is linked on the home page of this interface. Then, you will need to download a FTP client that works with your operating system so you can connect to that account.

Web Disk Accounts

The Web Disk allows you to easily drag and drop files to your hosting account. Once your Web Disk is configured on your local(home) computer, you can then drag and drop files to it, edit files, or view file information, just like they are part of your local (home) computer.icon signifies your home directory which is /home/user.

Web disks are relative to your account’s home directory. The

Your Main Web Disk Account

This account provides access to your entire web hosting account. Click on “Access Web Disk” to set up the web disk on your computer.

To view file properties for a single file or a group of files you have to:

1. Select them;
2. Right click on them;
3. Select properties;

Hovewer this method is sometimes very time consuming, especially if you have installed many programs which has additional functionality while right click on the file.

To view file properties really quick just place a properties shortcut button in your explorers’ toolbar area.
 To do that:

1. Right click on the explorer toolbar and select customize;
   
2. From the available toolbar buttons select Properties button and add it to Current toolbar buttons;
   
3. Click close;

Now you have your own properties shortcut available everytime you have some file(s) selected. Just click on the file and that Properties shortcut and you will have properties window in moments not seconds.

If you cannot make it to the top and someone is to strong for you to compete in terms of SERP position you can try this little trick to make your page title stick out of the crowd.

Stylize your title text with symbols like ^ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ § ¬ ° ± º ø þ « and attract more visitors to click thus increasing your CTR (click through rate) from SERPs (search engine result page).

Stylized titles with symbols will stand out and your prospect visitors will see the difference. Make those symbols appear on the left and right of your title. Your Google rankings should not be affected. I tested it and my page title appeared with added symbols other day Google indexed it and the position didn’t change.

See my page in the SERP with the title spiced with “»” “«” symbols.

old-seo-trick

 Try this SEO trick on some or all of your pages and see if it works for you to increase the CTR and traffic volume.

P.S. You can use codes: &raquo; and &laquo; to get symbols » « Type them in the title area in your wordpress blog and it will automatically convert into those symbols.

It also seems that only Google displays special symbols in the SERPs while MSN and Yahoo ignores them. Off course you could use special symbols not only in the title but also in the description.

Are you familiar with the situation when you see the html, php or any other language code on the screen but can’t copy it because it’s an image?

So typing the code down by yourself isn’t the best idea. At first you will waste your time instead of understanding more of the material.

You need some kind of OCR (Optical character recognition) software. Scanner isn’t needed because you already have the picture on your computer.

One way to extract code (or text) from the image is to use Microsoft Office OneNote program. It’s a great tool to keep your notes in one place and it has both the features to make a screenshot with one click and extract text from the image.

So to quickly get code text from the image or player screen:

• Locate image in the middle on your screen.
• Switch to OneNote program (Alt+Tab) and press Clip button.

• Right click on the image screenshot OneNote just created and select Copy Text from Picture option.

• Then right click again in any white place in the OneNote and select paste.

Take a look at the screenshot above. It’s a comparison between original image taken from video PHP tutorial and how OneNote extracted code from it. OneNote has done pretty good character recognition failing only on special characters and some letters. But you can proof read and fix it faster than rather typing it all letter by letter.

I suppose you have your primary website running on Hostgator and now you want to open another great forum, e-shop, blog, etc.

Let’s start by buying a new domain name. I personally use Namecheap.com for my domain purchases and will use it as an example in this post. Go to www.namecheap.com and search for your website name if it’s available:

I won’t explain buying steps much because it is standard routine buying online. Just be sure to use a coupon code at the checkout stage and save some money. Retailmenot always keeps updating latest coupon codes for namecheap.com

 So you paid by Paypal or Credit card and now have fresh domain name ready to be launched. Go to namecheap dashboard Manage Domains section and click on your new domain.

A menu list should appear on your left with an option called: Transfer DNS to Webhost 

A page ENTER YOUR CUSTOM DOMAIN NAME SERVER INFORMATION appears. It is now VERY important to enter exactly the same DNS names as it is on your primary hostgator domain. If you forgot or don’t know your primary domain nameservers it’s better to use Hostgator support and ask them. You could also search for these nameservers on your welcome email to Hostgator.

Ok, you know your nameservers now. Paste them in the first 2 lines and click Save Changes.

You are done with Namecheap.com for now. Let’s switch back to Hostgator.

• Login to your cPanel and click Addon Domains

• Fill in the form with your domain name (write only domain name without www). “Username/directory…” field is a folder name where you will store your new website files. It is automatically assigned using your domain name but you can change it if you like. Enter your password and click Add Domain! button.

Your new domain should be working now. Well at least some time is needed for nameservers to propagate around the world but you could start upload your files immediately.

Where to upload files for my new website?

You should log on to your FTP and search for new folder which appeared in the  public_html directory. It is named like in the field explained above.

Use Hostgators’ File Manager to get to your new websites’ folder.

To test if your new domain is working, create simple index.html file and uplaod it in that folder. Load your new website, should be working.

Starting with baby package you can have unlimited domains under 1 account at Hostgator.

Go to “thumbalizr” and paste the link in box. You can take a screenshot or whole page from the top to the bottom. Select your choice and press “thumb it” button.

After a few seconds you will get a link to download images of the webpage. You could save it in various resolutions up to 1280 pixels width.

This is another way to visit a page without being noted. You can look at the page from the picture and your IP only would be logged in the thumbalizr site and not in the site you are looking at.

youtube

Youtube screenshot being thumbed with thumbalizr. As you can see flash content hovewer cannot be thumbed and possibly  javascript content also.

Update

You can also unmask redirected and forwarded links by tinyurl or other sites by checking links on Linark.

It will tell you the real link location and you can check what’s behind the scene (page).

dvb-t-usb-stick

I have some noname USB DVB-T tuner which fails to work with Alt-Dvb program, after some research I found the solution how to fix it.

If you try to run AltDvb program and it crashes with this error: BDA:Missing IID_IBDA_DigitalDemodulator try to fix it by downloading this additional BDA driver: alt-dev_bda2driver. Extract it’s contents and copy Dev_Bda2Driver.int and Dev_Bda2Driver.cfg files into AltDVBDevices folder.

Then restart AltDvb and in the select device window choose new BDA driver:

This should let you open Alt-DVB program and use your DVB-T tuner for watching high quality digital TV programs for free.

Further reading:

How to avoid key loggers?
How to save images from MS Word to your desktop?
Copy text from images to notepad
Connecting 2 Skype accounts on the same computer
Watch GEO limited video free [part 2]

Good e-shop where I found my USB DVB-T tuner:

Checking every bookmark by hand would be time consuming operation and very inneficient. You could use software to do that for you. AM-deadlink is a small freeware program released by Aignes and can scan all your bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera browsers

AM-DeadLink will detect all dead and duplicate links in your browser bookmarks. The program scans the list of bookmarks in chunks and writes the result of checking. It can be OK, error, redirected and other responses for a page. You can easily delete all dead links and clean your bookmarks.

Additionally you are able to download FavIcons for all your Favorites and Bookmarks. With favicons your bookmarks will look more colorful and more interesting to navigate instead of just plain default IE favicons. Backup option is also included to preserve all your bookmarks and favorites in zip files for later recovery if needed.

Download AM-Deadlink program here.

Adding statcounter code into your wordpress blog is a one minute task.

• Just copy the generated code into clipboard (Ctrl+C).
• Then open your WordPress dashboard and go to Design tab.
• Here click on theme editor and you will see all files associated with the active theme.
• Find Fotter (footer.php) and open it.
• Paste the statcounter tracking code just above closing body tag (see screenshot)

• Save the footer.php and reload the home page of your blog to see it’s working.

Notice. If you try to paste statcounter code like text widget under design tab you may notice that Statounter doesn’t track from where visitors come from and for all visitors “No referring link” message is displayed.

Some improvements look like a try to even service with Gmail and other email providers. For example it is said in the footnote in gray letters that storage is growing along your with account age but it is not said how much space exactly Hotmail users will get. Meanwhile Gmail is still counting enormous space for you emails. As of today it is more than 7Tb.

Speed is most advertised feature for the new soon to be Hotmail. However who will notice 70% increase in signing-in, opening or viewing emails. This amount of increase would be huge improvement about 10 years ago when internet connection was slugish and there were no broadband connections for the majority of internet users.

Auto completion of email while typing in “to” field is cool but seems like it should be done years ago. Strange that such Ajax features were not implemented sooner.

The most interesting feature for me is the ability to start IM conversation right from the Hotmail page.

The page itself is a Web Monitoring service where you can track changes to your website pages. At www.changedetection.com you can track the changes to any page on the internet without manually checking/refreshing every page you want to track. An email is sent to your inbox when a page content changes.

You will get a link to log page where all changes over the period will be visible in a concise way.

So basically put some links of your blog or other website in to changedetection monitor page submission form and wait until Google sees you website and count a backlink.

Good thing is that all monitored sites in the front page of ChangeDetection.com and all previous pages are without rel=”nofolow” attribute. Hovewer this isn’t true on log pages. If that would be true then you could use another SEO technique of my previous post about indexing any page fast.

It is wise to have some dynamic elements in your site (such as random quotes) that changes on every pageload. This assures that page change alert will be triggered any time ChangeDetection.com monitors it.

See yourself that this Javascript is working by testing it right now. Click the

page to show how bookmarking works with IE and Firefox

link and check with Firefox and IE browsers to see that it brings the bookmark window.

ie-bookmark

How to put “Bookmark me” button to your site?

• At first download this javascript file functions.js and save where your page containing “bookmark me” button resides.
• Add this code line just before </head> tag in your html, php or other type web page.<script type=”text/javascript” src=”functions.js”></script>It shoud look like:

• Anywhere in your webpage (or blog template) place this piece of code:
  <a href=”javascript:favorite(‘Text, representing your website’, ‘http://YourSiteAddress.com’);”>Any text inviting your visitors to bookmark! </a>
  This will create a link with javascript function attached to it and open browser’s bookmarking window.

Tip: The example above will bookmark your home page. You can make the link of exact page visitor is viewing by putting a variable in Javascript file.

As you know mod_rewrite is used for rewriting URLs at the server level. The best example would WordPress permalinks, where you decide how url of your blog look like. By default it would be yourblog.com/?p=123 but with a help of mod_rewrite you get something like this: yourblog.com/post-about-this

How to check if mod_rewrite works on your Apache server?

I noticed that opening phpinfo page (create file phpinfo.php with this source code:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

and load via localhost) isn’t enough to determine whether mod_rewrite module works. You should test this by practicaly trying to change url.

• At first create .htaccess file with the code:
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^first.html$ second.html
• Create 2 html files named first.html and second.html and write 1 or 2, or first and second in them so that you could easily distinguish that in first.html a word “first” is written. Put those 2 files in the same folder where you put .htaccess file.
• Load first.html via localhost. Your mod_rewrite works if you see first.html in the address bar but word “second” displayed in the page. Otherwise you need to enable mod_rewrite module.

Enable mod_rewrite module

• Open httpd.conf file (locate it in start->apache program menu or go to apache installation directory and conf folder) and search (use ctrl+f) for #LoadModule rewrite_module string. Uncomment this line, i.e.
  line #LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
  becomes LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

• Find and uncomment Options Indexes FollowSymLinks line
• Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All

• Restart Apache server and check again if mod_rewrite works

At first make sure if your webserver (hosting or personal machine) supports GD library. Download this gd-test file. Extract and upload gd-test.php to your site’s root and access it through localhost (or http protocol).

If your browser shows image with word: works, then as you can guess your php installation has GD library enabled.

gd-image

If this is not the case, then you have to manually enable GD library.

Open your php.ini file, which normally is in C:\WINDOWS directory and simply uncomment (remove “;”) the necessary line.

So line

;extension=php_gd2.dll

extension=php_gd2.dll

In this tutorial I’ll show how to download, install and configure Mysql.

1. Download the latest version of mysql from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ It is enough to choose Windows Essentials but if you want the full package you can grab Windows ZIP/Setup.EXE package.
2. Start installation. Choose next-> custom (if you want to change Mysql installation path)
3. Once the basic installation is over, you are prompted to configure your Mysql.
4. Press next->detailed configuration ->developer machine -> multifunctional database -> decision support -> leave port number as is and enable strict mode-> standard character set ->
5. Choose Install as a windows service and you can uncheck Launch the MySQL Server automatically if you plan to do web development occasionaly. Otherwise MySQL will occupy some of your computer’s memory every time you start a computer.
6. 
7. Enter root password or leave it blank. You can also uncheck Modify Security Settings to create password later in MySQL command line.
8. Press execute and wait until MySQL is configured.

If you selected to run MySQL manually in the configuration options.

To start MySQL service manually:

1. Go to START
2. Right click on My Computer
3. Select Manage
4. Computer Management window opens. Select services in management tree on the left
5. Find MySQL service and press Start

Hotspot Shield (HS) is a program which creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your computer and american based internet gateway. HS runs on Vista, Xp, Win2000 and MacOs systems. It not makes your computer look like it is in USA territory but also prevents snoopers and hackers from viewing your email, instant messages, credit card information or anything else you send over the network.

Download Hotspot Shield and install. You’ll get a shortcut  on your desktop which launches Hotspot shield. Open your browser and you will see a connect button in a separate window. Click it and you will be assigned an VPN IP address.

The only dissadvantage of this is you will get a sidebar at the top of the browser window which will display various ads. But this is acceptable because now you can watch many great shows on hulu.com and other video-on-demand only for US citizens sites hassle free.

some banners are displayed

Apache installation

Go to http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi and download latest apache version. As of the day writing this post, the version you need to download is Win32 Binary without crypto (no mod_ssl) (MSI Installer):  Just be sure it’s msi installer.

Start the installer and do the usual steps until page Server Information. Put localhost for Network domain and Server name fields. Type any email you want for Administrator’s email address. Press next.

In the next window choose Custom to change the installation directory to D:\webserver\apache (create new folder “apache”)

Press Next and Install.

Once apache is installed you can set up php support. Open httpd.conf file from Start->Apache…->Configure apache server->Edit…

Apache uses this text file for configuration. Scroll down until you see many LoadModule lines. Write a new line:
LoadModule php5_module d:/webserver/php5/php5apache2_2.dll
This enables php5 for Apache server

Then find (Ctrl+F) DirectoryIndex and add index.php in the line (see screenshot)

Finally search for line AddType and add this line: AddType application/x-httpd-php .php  like in the screenshot:

Save the changes and restart apache to make effect.

Now check that your php is working properly.

Open Notepad and paste this code:

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

Save the file with name phpinfo.php (make sure no .txt is added at the end of this file; choose Save as Type = All files in Notepad when saving) and put it in D:\webserver\apache\htdocs folder. This is where all your webfiles will be stored.

Open any browser of your choise and type http://localhost/phpinfo.php in the address bar. If you see a big page full of php information this means php works and was installed correctly.

PHP5 INSTALLATION

Go to http://www.php.net/downloads.php and donwload latest php5 binary (zip package).

Extract zip package in to D:\webserver\php5 (you can choose another location on your computer but it is better to have everything installed in one place).

Copy libmysql.dll and php5ts.dll to C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder

Find a file called php.ini-dist and make a copy of it. Rename that copy file to php.ini and move into C:\WINDOWS folder.

Go to C:\WINDOWS and find the file php.ini you’ve just moved here. Open it with notepad. Php.ini is a configuration file for php5.

Press ctrl+f and type extension_dir to find the line with that phrase. Change “./” with “D:\webserver\php5\ext” (change path according to your own settings if needed) This tells php where to find various extensions which can provide functionality. One of these extensions allows php to communicate with mysql databases.

Scroll down the php.ini file until you see a long list of extensions. Notice that semicolumns mean that this extension is disabled. To enable extensions in php you have to remove semicolumns on that line. To enable mysql delete semicolumn on the line “;extension=php_mysql.dll”. Do the same for line “;extension=php_mysqli.dll”

Scroll down until line ;session.save_path = “/tmp” and delete semicolumn (” ; “) Then instead “/tmp” write D:\webserver\php5\temp This tells php where to store temporary files. You can type here any folder you want. Save the file.

You have succesfully installed PHP5 on your computer. Now it’s time to install apache and configure it to use php5.

I found this great tip in the bluhateseo irc chat. And by using it, you can force Google to index your newly created page and as a bonus also get a backlink. All you have to is to submit your page into Kaboodle.

Kaboodle is a social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products. Everyone can submit links to product pages and you may guessed right – we are going to use Kaboodle for submitting any page you want and get it indexed.

At first you have to create an account and then you are free to submit your pages to Kaboodle. The easiest way to submit a page is to install Kaboodle Plug-in for Internet Explorer.

kaboodle

When you get it, you simply open the page and press Add to Kaboodle button on your browser (IE only).

You are then redirected to Kaboodle Add to list page and here you can fix the details. Select a list to categorise your submissions. Then you can spice up your Kaboodle page with keywords in the comments and item tags fields.

Kaboodle needs at least one image on your page to add it as a product image, you can select from the list of images found on your page if you press “Fix details” button.

add-to-list

After you adjust all the details on the ad to list page press Submit and wait until Googlebot comes to your site. Kaboodle is always monitored by googlebot because it is constantly changing user generated content site so when it finds your submitted page it follows the links found on that page.

Here you can find old versions of Firefox and many other programs if you feel that older version was better.

I also noticed that this new Firefox 3 was running slower that previous version, maybe because of some extensions. But even the menu bar was lagging to open its’ windows.

Here is a screenshot showing some of my extensions which wasn’t supported in Firefox3

My Firefox add-ons not compatible with Firefox version 3

For example “Michael Jordan” Wikipedia article is just below the official NBA page so it should get a great amount of clicks.

In this page http://stats.grok.se/en/ you can check how many times per day particular article is being viewed by global visitors. The image below shows that in June 2008 there were a total 369064 visitors who viewed Wikipedia article about this legendary basketball player.

Statistics can be gathered by a monthly basis. There is support not for english version but also french, german, spanish, etc.

Viewing Wikipedia statistics can display a rough picture of how popular search term is.

WordPress needs MySql support and some free space. At first create a new database for your WordPress blog with phpMyAdmin or hostgator’s MySQL Account Maintenance.

Notice at the creation success message that your database name has a prefix, which is your account’s name at Hostgator.

You can create new user for your WP (WordPress) database or exploit existing one, but for security reasons it’s better to have a dedicated user.  Don’t stick with your usual password for the user because you won’t need it to type in very often so it’s better be complicated to add more security to your WP blog.

Don’t forget to Add User To Your Database or else your blog won’t work.

Assign user to the specified database

Now you have to upload all the files from wordpress-2.6 installation folder to the public_html folder of your account at hostgator or a folder, created to store your blog. You can save some time by using Hostgator’s File Manager.

File manager

Use the feature upload files and upload zipped folder of WordPress installation. Then select the upladed file and extract in place pressing command on the right side of the window. All wordpress file a now extracted.

Last step in the installation is to configure your wp-config-sample.php file.

Edit your wp-config-sample.php file

You can edit it localy on your computer or use File Manager from cpanel. In this case select wp-config-sample.php file and press edit file in the right menu.

Edit your wp-config-sample.php file for database setttings

Fill the necessary fields. Enter the name of your database you’ve just created and username with password. This file will be used by WordPress all the time to connect to the database and retrieve or write information to it.

Don’t forget to rename wp-config-sample.php into wp-config.php and save it.

You’re about done installing your WordPress blog. Now Open www.example.com/wp-admin/install.php in your browser. This should setup the tables needed for your blog. If there is an error, double check your wp-config.php file, and try again.

Note the password given to you and change it immediately after first login.

The steps above are more or less the same for all WordPress installations on all hostings not only Hostgator.

Login and start blogging!

ERROR! Profile does not exist, loading default Profile instead. (PL_DEFAULT_PROFILE)

Read some suggestions experienced by me on how to fix it.

At first this error could be thrown because SQL patch was installed incorectly. Try to at first install this module on your local machine at localhost and see if everything works.

I have 4 different Zen Cart stores set up for testing purpose and here is what I noticed. In 2 Zen Cart sites SQL patch was succesful when all code from pricelist-3.sql was copy-pasted. But these Zen Cart installations were plain and without any other modules. On my main Zen Cart site there is some other modules like Google XML sitemap and other installed so maybe something is interfering there and when I tried to copy paste SQL from pricelist-3.sql, Zen Cart resulted in message: Failed.

Although in readme.txt it is forbidden to use upload feature but this is what worked for me to update database correctly. So if copy pasting SQL from pricelist-3.sql doesn’t help you, try to upload that file and see if this works.

Uploading pricelist-3.sql or copy-pasting code in the window saves you from manually changing/adding table prefixes if your database’s tables for Zen Cart use prefixes like: zc_categories.

Another option for running SQL query not from Zen Cart is to use phpMyAdmin. Navigate to your Zen Cart database and press SQL in the  middle top. Then copy paste SQL code from pricelist-3.sql and hit GO button. You should see succesful message.

sql-code in phpMyAdmin

 If you uploaded all files from includes folder and installed SQL patch correctly you should see new line in the Configuration drop down menu: Printable Price-list; Price-list Profile-1; Price-list Profile-2 and Price-list Profile-3. Here you can adjust many options of the price list for your store.

printable-price-list-categories

price-list-configuration

Hovewer you can not simply launch another instance of Skype like Word document. So you either have to turn it off and switch to another account or use the following technique and 2 Skype accounts working at the same time.

Let’s begin.

In 1 sentence, all you have to do is to have more than 1 user account on your main computer and force Skype to work on that account. If you don’t have more than 1 user account you will have to create one and your Windows welcome screen should look similar to this:

• One important thing is that you must create a password for that second user account. If not, this trick won’t work.

When you have both accounts set up, you can launch another Skype window by right clicking on the Skype.exe (which is normally in the C:\Program Files\Skype\Phone\skype.exe) file and selecting Run as

In the pop window select The following user and enter all the details: user name and password. This should start another instance of Skype program. (From the above Windows welcome screen you should enter skypeuser as User name and password that you created for that account )

By doing this you can have 2 or more skype usernames online at the same time from 1 computer and can even talk or call to yourself.

Update: As far as I know, this trick only works with older Skype versions, 2 or 3 maybe. If you need multiple skype accounts at the same time, you should consider installing older version from here.

There is one easy way to bypass these regional restrictions. You have to use a proxy which gives you IP that is located in US territory. Try to search Google for something like “free proxy usa” and you’ll find some proxy lists for this trick. Remember that proxies are on a constant change, so if one stops working then search for another.

Here is quick 3 proxies if you want to see instant results and don’t want to search.

• 12.150.97.75:80
• 169.229.50.16:3128
• 35.9.27.26:3124

These proxies works at the time of writing this post but if they don’t, try to search for other.

So you have a proxy with US IP. One last step is to configure your browser to use this proxy.
For Internet Explorer (IE) follow this:

1. Press Tools -> Internet options -> Connections -> Settings
2. In the proxy server area input Proxy addres and port number ( for 12.150.97.75:80 Address is 12.150.97.75 and port is 80 )
   

For Firefox (FF) use the following metod:

1. Press Tools -> Options -> Advanced-Network
2. Click Setting and choose manual proxy configuration. Then enter proxy details and port number like in the previous example
3. Click ok and you’re done

By changing proxy you will be able to watch most of the US websites video services.

Related posts: Watch Hulu, Aol, Abc and other Only for Americans Sites

Press start conversion and wait until the conversion process ends. So now you have .iso file. Good news, .iso files can be extracted very easily with free programs like Winrar or MagicIso. That’s it. You have extracted .daa file.