PC Geek Blog

Is it worth upgrading your router to increase your broadband speed?

2012-09-01T22:41:00.001+05:30

With broadband speeds set to get even faster in the coming months, it’s difficult to know whether you should upgrade your router. However, routers which are sent free as a package by your ISP are often at the lower end of the price-scale, so it could be worth an upgrade if you’re experiencing slow speeds.

This is especially true if your router is getting on a bit, age-wise, as technology these days moves so fast that your router may at least need a firmware update. Whilst this may be the case, not all users are comfortable with delving into the inner workings of their router, but it may be worth taking a look before you splash the cash on new hardware.

If your router is an older model, then it may be worth upgrading; the most common type of router is a wireless-G (802.11g) and if you’re thinking of replacing it, then you should chose a wireless-N (802.11n) router, which will up your speed and is backwardly compatible with older external equipment such as your network adapters (dongles, network cards etc.).

However, if you’re going to upgrade, you may as well go the whole hog and replace your network adapters too. This just means buying wireless-N equipment to go with your faster router and will further increase speeds.

For desktop computers, this is a fairly straightforward and inexpensive upgrade and you can either opt for a wireless adapter that plugs into your USB port, or purchase an internal wireless network adapter and fit it yourself, or get it done in an independent computer repair shop.

For laptops, although the Wi-Fi adapter is built-in to the device it can be disabled and a USB wireless-N adapter used as the default.

Wireless-N is twice as fast as wireless-G, so this could really make all the difference. While you’re installing, think about positioning too, as this could be impacting speeds. Place the router in as central and clutter-free an area as you can; if you place it right next to a wall then remember that you will need to adjust the antenna so that’s it’s pointing more towards the devices that are receiving the signal.

Before you buy a router, it’s really essential that you look around and study the market for options. I’d recommend looking at sites like CNET and others.

Author Bio: Kerry Butters writes this article on behalf of the consumer advice website Broadband Genie. For even faster internet, check out BT infinity.

Making the most of Google Drive – Tips and tricks

2012-05-13T11:00:00.000+05:30

Google Drive is an amazing service, but installing the app on your system and then synchronizing your data is the very first step you have to take here. In this article, I am going to list down some of the important tricks and tips that will help you make the most out of Google Drive, both on the Web and on your system – whether you are considering synchronizing your files with your Drive or make use of the additional features available to you on the site.

As a matter of fact most of the tricks and tips will also be working with SkyDrive by Microsoft, and various other services available over the Internet. Google’s Drive incorporation with third-party web based applications is an exclusive feature, though.

The Send To Menu Option

You can easily add Google Drive option to your Windows send To Menu and send required files to your drive from any location on your system. The Send To menu essentially displays the contents of a particular folder, and you will also be able to create your own shortcuts.

Encrypt Sensitive Data

Google Drive being a cloud storage service happens to be a great approach especially when you are considering keeping copies of important files all safe and secure. However, when you are uploading important data files, it is vital that you encrypt them with a password. In case your account has been compromised, you will be sure of the fact that no one will be able to have access to your files without the password; in fact Google itself will not be able to view the encrypted files. You need to make sure that you are using a program that has a strong encryption support. The best option in this regard is 7-Zip, which is also available for free.

Move All The User Data Folders

You can even move your user folders such as the Downloads, Videos, Music, Pictures, and Documents folders by simply right-clicking and using the Location tab option on them. You can get your folders moved to your online storage feature and also can be easily synchronized between your systems.

Empty the Recycle Bin

You need to be aware of the fact that files or data in the recycle bin take up your storage capacity. Soon after you have deleted the files, you are also required to empty the trash of your online drive so that you can easily regain your storage space. The trash can be easily cleared from the Google Drive page.

Restoring to Prior Versions

Google Drive is useful in storing the prior versions of your data for 30 days or 100 different revisions – whichever comes first here. Although you will not be able to view these from your system, you will be required to visit the site, click over the file and then select an option ‘manage revisions’. Keep this point in mind that the prior versions also cluster up your storage capacity, you can easily delete these versions in case they are taking too much of space on your online drive.

This is a guest post by Russel Browne from Test4Prep. If you are looking to obtain from professional IT certifications, he’s the guy!

Gmail Tips for Advanced Users

2012-05-12T23:45:00.001+05:30

Gmail is probably the best email environment there is. While it doesn’t really have much of a learning curve to it, learning a few additional things could just make you more efficient, especially if you are a power user. The following Gmail tips and tricks for advanced users, like you, can help you if you would like to improve your productivity levels during the week.

1. Use the advanced search functions in Gmail to find those old messages that contain vital information. Instead of just searching for some keywords in a message, try using search filters such as “from” and “label:” to narrow down your search results. When you are able to limit your search to a certain set of emails, it will be much easier to find what you are looking for right away.

2. Try formatting your Google Talk messages for more emphasis on your words. For example, if you put asterisks around a word, it will make that word show up bold in the chat. Another example is putting underscores around a word to make it italicized. Lastly, hyphens around a word will put a line through the word after it has been sent.

3. Sync your Google account with Google Chrome. For many people who work on their computer during the day, instant responses to emails and other messages is vitally important to their success. By syncing your Gmail account with the Google Chrome web browser, you will be able to get popup notifications for new emails or Gtalk messages in the bottom right corner while you are browsing other websites. To sync your Gmail account in Google Chrome, simply hit the wrench button in the top right corner of the browser and click “Sign in to Chrome…”

4. Add an option to see when a message was only sent to you or was actually sent to an entire mailing list. When you turn this option on under settings, you will see a “>” when the message was sent to more than just your email address. Anything that has a “>>” next to it will have only been sent to you.

5. Learn the basic Gmail shortcuts. If you are going to work faster and get things done more quickly, then keyboard shortcuts are always going to be one of your main priorities. Hitting “c” will open up a new message to be composed. You will be moved to a newer conversation when you hit “k”, and you will be moved to an older conversation when you hit “j.” You will have to enable keyboard shortcuts under settings for these to work on your Gmail account.

By using this list of five advanced Gmail tips, you will be able to look through your emails at a faster rate and stick to what really needs to be done right at that moment. There is no use in wasting your time while you are in a Gmail window because most of your real work is going to be done on another site or another application on your computer. As long as you take these tips to heart, you should be able to use your email like a pro, moving faster, and being more productive so that you aren’t wasting precious time. Remember, these ware only a few top Gmail tips for advanced users; this is just the start of how you can be more proficient and productive.

This is a guest post written by Kate Willer from antimalware doctor.

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 available now

2012-04-25T14:58:00.001+05:30

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 just shed the BETA tag and has been made available for download to all users. While you may not notice a lot of changes in this version except for subtle UI improvements, there’s been quite a few changes under the hood. Grab the download link after the break. Those who don’t update manually will most probably get it via Windows Update.

Download Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 (via Ninite.com)

Source : The Verge

How to make links to files and folders on Dropbox?

2012-04-23T20:42:00.001+05:30

Dropbox has newly added a feature by which you can link someone to any file/folder that you have in your account. This doesn’t mean that they get to edit the files (as in shared folders), but the recipient can view the contents of the folder that you are linking him/her to. Here’s how you can make a link to a file or a folder.

Log into your Dropbox account.
Now, hover the cursor over the folder that you wish to share and click on ‘Get link’ as shown in the screenshot. The same applies to sharing a specific file as well. Here’s a sample of a picture from my Dropbox.
Share the link that you find.

You can find the option lurking around on your desktop and mobile version of Dropbox as well.

Hope this helps!

Unroll.me Beta Invites Giveaway

2012-04-18T00:44:00.000+05:30

If you've always had to wade through hundreds of promotional emails from various sites to get to the stuff that matters, you'll probably want to keep reading this.

Unroll.me is a service that pledges to make your life simpler by accessing your inbox and presenting you with a list of sites which you can review and unsubscribe if you have to.

In my opinion, having to click the 'unsubscribe' button every time you open an unwanted mail isn't very seamless and something like this could save you tons of time while helping you have a cleaner inbox in the future.

Coming to the giveaway, I have 5 invites which is good for anyone using a Gmail account. To get an invite, all you have to do is tweet this blog post while mentioning @pcgeekblog and I'll select 5 people at random. Also, this whole thing ends on the 22nd of May, so tweet before that!

Tweet this.

How do I get back the old TweetDeck?

2012-04-08T14:44:00.000+05:30

I've received a couple of emails from readers who wanted to find out how they can get back the older versions of TweetDeck that runs on Adobe AIR and is a lot more capable than what we have now. I'm pretty sure quite a few of you are longing to get back to the older version, so here goes.

If you really want the old version of TweetDeck, you can get it from Oldversion.com. Keep in mind that you will need Adobe AIR for it to work, so install that before TweetDeck. While this does work for some users out there, you will face a lot of inconsistencies like undelivered tweets and such. Also, this version might have some flaws which will probably not be ironed out since TweetDeck is putting all their effort into their newer generation of apps.

So, you essentially have 3 choices,

You can either stick with the old version that I've linked to above and be prepared for all the issues that you may have to face (especially if there are big changes on Twitter in which case it'll stop working).
You can use the latest version of TweetDeck. While it doesn't have all the features that the old version has, they're constantly improving it and I'm pretty sure it'll get better in the coming days.
You can try out alternative apps. Windows users have MetroTwit (which I personally love), Janetter and other apps like Seesmic and HootSuite which come quite close.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend using the old version of TweetDeck and trying out the other apps that I've mentioned might just be the change you needed.

Firefox 14 to Get PDF Support Built Right In [Quick Update]

2012-03-24T17:54:00.002+05:30

Great news for Firefox fans! Firefox is finally getting built-in PDF support. This means, you don't have to deal with out-of-date browser plugins to be able to view PDF files from inside the browser windows. Chrome got PDF support back in November 2010 and from the looks of it, Firefox is still playing catch-up, but it's good to know that they're moving in the right direction when it comes to dealing with PDF files.

Via Ghacks.net

3 Useful Hotmail Organizing Tips

2012-03-24T01:30:00.001+05:30

For some people, organizing emails can lead to a major disaster. One of the reasons why they find it hard to manage their emails is because of the high volume of email arriving to their multiple accounts on a daily basis. This leads to some emails unopened and even forgotten.

If you are currently using Hotmail and are in the same boat with the kind of email users mentioned above, then read on. Below you will find sensible tips on how to organize your Hotmail account and make your emailing life more organized and systematized.

Use Categories Instead of Folders – Yes, folders are very helpful, that can’t be denied. But if you constructed a complicated list of folders that you used together with the filtering tool to route your emails to specific folders as they come in, make sure you used the filtering tool properly. Filters are rules that you can create to handle messages that comes in so you can organize them according to subject, sender or many other parameters.

Sometimes though you may not have created a “rule” for certain emails and you end up organizing them by sending them to specific folders that you created once you’ve read them and maybe replied to them. This is some kind of a micro-management of email and can be a waste of your valuable time if you do it to numerous emails everyday just because you created folders and wanted to use them. Hotmail provides a powerful email search functionality which renders the folder totally useless especially if a specific folder contains a lot of emails already which means you have to make a search within as well.

Hotmail has sensible Categories options which allow users to categorize emails accordingly without the hassle of physically moving emails from one folder to another. Built-in categories include Photos, Flagged and Shopping.

A good tip is to create one extra Category (aside from the built-in categories) called “Archive” wherein you will automatically send emails that you think you may need in the future. With Hotmail, you can just click the category column and choose the category where the email belongs. This will definitely help you categorize and organize your emails in a jiffy without building folders that may complicate your email management in the future.

Consolidate Email Accounts – If you are using multiple email accounts, it’s sensible to consolidate them in a single account or at least a smaller number of accounts. This can be done in two ways – on the device level or the email provider level. On the email provider level, you can either collect emails from other account to a main account or forward emails from several accounts to a main account.

To collect emails from other accounts to your Hotmail account, you can go to your Hotmail Options and click “Sending/Receiving Email from Other Accounts”. This will take you to a separate window wherein you can add email accounts to collect emails from directly to your Inbox or to a specified folder. The accounts where you will be collecting emails from should be POP-enabled first though but Hotmail can walk you through the process when you click the “Learn More” button which will take you to the Hotmail Help Centre.

To forward emails from your Hotmail account to another email accounts, you simply need to click “Email Forwarding” from your Hotmail Options page wherein you can specify email addresses to forward your emails to. If you want to forward emails from other email providers to your Hotmail account then you may have to see if other providers can give you this forwarding option.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts – Some people are keyboard-users while some are mouse-users. If you are the former than the latter, you may want to get yourself familiarized with the available Hotmail keyboard shortcuts to make your email organization faster. You can access the list of Hotmail keyboard shortcuts from their Help Centre here. One noteworthy shortcut that you should learn though is pressing “F” then “I” to go to the Inbox or pressing “/” to search for emails.

This is a guest post by May Avery who is a Computer Engineer. She also writes articles for PC Speed Up and teaches for a college in Hawaii.

How to Share Dropbox Files with Facebook Friends?

2012-03-21T00:00:00.001+05:30

Dropbox, the super-awesome backup service has always touted the feature where you can share a file with someone using their email address. Recently, they announced a new feature wherein a user can share files with his/her Facebook contacts. In this blog post, you can learn how how to do that!

After you log into Dropbox, right click on the folder that you intend to share and choose ‘Invite to Folder’ like you’ve always done.

In the dialog box that appears now, click on ‘Invite Facebook Friends’ and allow Dropbox to access your Facebook account.
After you’ve done the previous step, you should be able to type in the name of your Facebook friends in the invite dialog box simply by typing in their name.

If you still don’t see the ‘Invite Facebook friends’ option, don’t panic. Dropbox is still rolling out this feature and you should see it pretty soon.

5 Tips for a Cleaner PC Desktop

2012-03-14T16:38:00.001+05:30

Most of us have PCs where the desktop is more cluttered than our office and since quite a few users treat the desktop as a landing point for downloads and pretty much anything that’s copied into the PC, it’s inevitable that our desktops get cluttered very soon after setting up a new PC. In this blog post, there are 5 tips that’ll help you organize that cluttered desktop of yours and hopefully make it easier to work with!

Out of the five tips, the first three are all about using 3rd party software to help you organize your desktop and the next two tips are about using tools within Windows to help you achieve the same goal. If you aren’t really keen on installing new software, jump right up to the fourth tip.

#1. Use Deskcretary

This free application can be run manually or automatically whenever your desktop starts getting too cluttered. It goes through all the items on the desktop and creates archived (and searchable) databases that stay out of your way yet are easy to access. The program allows users to exclude key files from the archive process. As a result your desktop includes only excluded files and one Deskcretary archive folder. You can download the software here.

#2. Use Clean Desktop

This app, created for Vista and Windows 7, looks for desktop items that have not been used in the previous month. It then provides the user a list of these items with the options of deleting them, cleaning them, or restoring them. You can download the software here.

#3. Use Zum

A highly-reviewed application launcher, Zum can create a database of your videos, games, web browser, and much more. For our purposes, however, it is especially useful for its ability to move items from your desktop to its database. This insures that your desktop is cleaner and that, in the future, your applications remain more organized. You can download the software here.

#4. Create a Junk Folder

You can create your own version of Deskcretary by creating a generic folder on your desktop that can contain anything you don’t want openly displayed. Title this folder “Desktop II” or “Other Items” or something of that nature, and then drag any icon to it when you’re looking to cut down on clutter.

#5. Hide All Icons at Once!

Sometimes, it’s just too much work to spend hours trying to organize your desktop, particularly if you are inside your browser most of the time. In that case, the best way to clear up all the clutter while not having to delete the icons is to temporarily hide all the icon and make them visible whenever you need to take a look. Here’s how you can do it.

Right click on your desktop and choose View > Show desktop icons.

Doing this when icons are visible will make them invisible and vice versa.

Hopefully, some of these tips were helpful to you. If you’ve got some questions or tips to add to this blog post, feel free to leave a comment below.

This guest post was written by Amanda Green from Digital Reality Trust, Chicago – a company that provides storage solutions.

Moving on from Firefox 3

2012-03-10T23:31:00.001+05:30

Mozilla adopted the a rapid-release cycle last April and it has come out with Firefox v10 (starting with 3, this time last year). While the browser is mostly good, quite a few users out there are still clinging onto Firefox 3.x since the UI is familiar to them while compared to Firefox 4’s changes. If you’re still using Firefox 3.x.x, read on.

Firefox is on the verge of announcing v3.6.28 (found already at MajorGeeks and Mozilla’s FTP servers) and from the looks of it, this may be the last update to the v3 side of the browser. If you didn’t know already, Mozilla has planned to discontinue any kind of support to users of this older version of the browser after the 24th of April this year which means you’ll be prone to all sorts of security vulnerabilities.

From the discussions I find on the web, the new UI in version 4 is seen as one of the biggest reasons to not update. While it may be confusing for some users, How To Geek has a really helpful article on how to make your new version of Firefox look like v3. Read it up and move on.

If you aren’t really satisfied with the direction Firefox is taking up, you should probably consider trying out Google Chrome – it has improved a lot over these months and I’m pretty sure you’ll like it! The folks at Redmond have also done a pretty decent job with Internet Explorer and if you have a PC running Windows Vista/7, you should definitely give IE9 a try. The less popular, but really good Opera is also a potential candidate if you’re moving away from Firefox.

Viewing Pending Friend Requests on Facebook

2012-03-03T02:00:00.001+05:30

A bunch of readers mailed me asking if there’s a page where you can view all of the pending friends requests at once and take action – like deleting the request or otherwise and since quite a few people offline ask me the same question, I thought addressing it with a blog post would be ideal.

Firstly, there is NO page on Facebook where you can find the status of your friend requests (as of 3rd March 2012, at the least). But, you can always see the status of the request by visiting the person’s timeline where you can find one of the following buttons depending on the connection between you two.

Friends
Friend Request Sent / Awaiting friend confirmation
Add Friend

If you ever see 3rd party apps claiming to do so, proceed with caution.

Source : Facebook Help Centre

I’m Not Excited About Windows 8–Here’s Why

2012-03-01T00:36:00.001+05:30

Windows 8 Consumer Preview (or rather the public BETA) came out today and I’m not really that excited about it and I don’t think any desktop power user will be. This date, sadly, can be marked down as the demise of the desktop OS; while Microsoft isn’t the first to do any damage, their software is used by more users when compared to that of Apple’s. Here’s a glimpse at (what I think) happened and will happen.

Back in 2007, Apple launched the iPhone and a year later the App Store- a brilliant concept to fight piracy and to familiarize non-savvy users with the best apps for their platform (and yes, the ideology about Apple not inventing the App Store exists, but no one really copied it till after they came out with it). The eventual success of the iPhone led to others cloning the concept and coming back to 2012, most platforms have some kind of an App Store and this includes desktop operating systems as well. The bad news is these companies didn’t just take in the App Store concept, they’ve also taken the tablet-smartphone concept so seriously that they’re actually compromising their desktop operating systems to look and feel like their mobile counterparts.

Now, most of you would get back at me by saying how the iPad is brilliant and how you get all of your work done on it. Hold it! This isn’t just about getting your work done- it’s about safeguarding this thing we have here. Yes! The Open Web! I’m not going to rant about these companies being evil- no. I’m glad that these apps are around and how we all have yet another device in our bags. But, if you’d noticed the web hasn’t really infiltrated into these mobile devices. Just like how desktops were in the 90’s, you need an application for getting pretty much any work done and “open web” is almost non-existent. Contrast this to our current desktops where web apps are highly prevalent.

I’m not saying that touch devices are bad. They’re awesome and they have the potential to replace what we already have, but the web isn’t ready for it yet and the kind of momentum these companies display might just make matters worse.

Let’s put some things into perspective.

On Windows 7, to write a blog post, you’d probably go to WordPress.com and get started with what you had in mind. Today, WordPress.com has an app for the shiny new Windows 8 which prevents you from having to use the browser and the kind of user experience that you’re having isn’t going to be similar to the website or another platform and you’re just being locked down. All of this is okay with a mobile device, but when it invades our desktop space, something isn’t right.

Microsoft isn’t the only company going on with this model. Apple’s OS X, at this point pretty much looks like an iPad hybrid and with the notification center, app store and other iOS-like features, I’m afraid if they’d kill OS X and go on with a strategy like Microsoft’s where the tablet and the desktop run identical software.

This sleep-deprived rant of mine probably won’t matter much to you, but I’m definitely worried. The future, as @twitosh put it is pretty dark. We may not have an actual desktop OS that works effectively with a keyboard and a mouse and lets you access the open web where platform doesn’t matter.

On Desktops, we need operating systems to be more platform agnostic instead of making you invest in them- thereby locking you down.

Microsoft needs to strike a balance with Windows 8 if they’re looking for any success at all. They need to turn off the Metro UI depending on the kind of device the software is being used, so that the n00bs aren’t intimidated and the adventurous ones can try out Metro by manually turning it on.

Image Credit: Ashutosh Mishra

5 Great Tools for Distraction Free Reading

2012-02-27T15:55:00.001+05:30

Back in December I wrote a list containing some really nifty tools that help you write devoid of all the clutter on your PC and the best follow-up to that would be to help you read without any distraction. Without much ado, here’s a list of software for most browsers/platforms that help you get some reading done.

Evernote Clearly [Chrome and Firefox]

Evernote’s product that goes by the name Clearly is the newest kid on the block and it has managed to become everyone’s favourite in a really short time. It comes as a browser extension and it’s premise is very simple. You open up a blog post/article and click on Clearly’s icon to see a clutter-free, readable version of the same website that simply makes you WANT to finish reading whatever it is that you’re reading!

ViewText.org (Any Browser)

ViewText does one thing and it does it well. Just visit their home page and paste the link of the site that you’re looking to unclutter and you’ll be presented with a text-only version of the site for easy reading. We’ve already covered a Chrome extension that makes use of ViewText to get you results without you having to visit the page every time.

Instapaper (Any Browser)

While Instapaper is basically a read-it-later service, it helps you strip a web page of all clutter before reading something from your list with the “text” option. Since all of this happens on a webpage, you don’t need to install anything like a browser extension. Just sign up for an account and give it a try!

Instapaper also allows you to send articles directly to your Kindle where you can read on the go. There’s also an iPhone and an Android app which give you the same experience.

iReader [Chrome and Firefox]

iReader is pretty similar to Clearly and installs itself as a browser extension. If you don’t like iReader on Firefox, you can also try out Tranquility which is pretty similar.

Reader [Safari]

Safari users need not think about any other solution since they have ‘Reader’ a tool that unclutters pages built right into the browser. If you aren’t aware, you should see a button titled Reader as pictured above clicking which the current web page becomes more readable. This feature is also available for Safari on Windows.

That’s it from my side. If you know a similar service that’s worth being listed here, do leave a comment below and enlighten us!

A Fortnight with the iPhone 4S

2012-02-10T01:19:00.001+05:30

It has been over 15 days since I got my first ever iPhone (the 4S, 16GB) and my experience has been very much pleasant except for a few gripes which I believe will be cleared up in some time. To make it easier to read, I’m going to split up this post into many divisions like Apps, Camera and various aspects of the phone and explain how I felt about the same. Do keep in mind that this blog has primarily been about PCs, web apps and other stuff that’s limited to your desktop and with this post I’m slowly branching out to other devices since it’s inevitable that they’re becoming a part of our daily lives. So, my writing style might not be to your liking.

Why I bought an iPhone instead of <Insert your favourite smartphone platform here>? :

I’ve been a user of the HTC Desire for over 9 months and while the phone was initially very good, problems started cropping up after a few months – like the SD card getting unmounted at regular intervals, phone calls getting picked up/hung up automatically, automatic restarts and many other not-so-huge issues and frankly, I was getting annoyed at the phone and how even a Nokia might stack up to it because of all these issues. While rooting and flashing a custom ROM might have fixed most of these issues (if not all), my phone wouldn’t budge and I always failed when it comes to rooting the phone while I’ve helped others root their android phones.

With all the problems the platform had (apart from the really great operating system), I decided that iOS will be perfect for someone like me – regular updates for a really long time, good looking apps (I tend to give a lot of importance to design) and other factors and went on with the latest iPhone so that I can stick with it till its support runs out.

Apps:

While this might be more of a comment about the platform rather than the phone, iOS apps are generally more polished and well-designed and I strongly believe that these factors will make us want to use the device since we’re all humans after all. While I did face the occasional app crash and other errors, they weren’t frequent enough to make me want to complain.

Compared to Android, the number of paid apps are a bit on the higher side in iOS, but if you look properly in the App Store, you can definitely survive without buying a single app till the end by just making little compromises.

Since the iPhone 4S is the fastest iOS device out there, the apps were pretty fast and I did not notice any lag while using them. If you use a debit card which can’t be used for online credit card based transactions, you might have a tough time creating virtual credit cards for every app that you buy on the App Store, but that’s just me – you can always go get yourself a credit card and start treating yourself with apps.

Speaking of Apps, here’s my home screen.

Communication:

While I expected the iPhone to be average when it comes to handling actual phone calls and texting (with the on-screen keyboard), it did pretty well on both these departments. Phone calls sounded much better than they did on my HTC Desire and texting also turned out to be great. With iMessage, I’m now saving quite a few free texts on my plan which provides a paltry 75 per day.

Camera:

The camera, too is one of the best I’ve ever owned. My previous phone had a pretty average camera with messed-up controls that made it all the more difficult to capture pictures. The 8MP shooter on this phone manages to produce some impressive photos pretty fast. Here’s a couple of photos that I liked. Click on the photos to view them full size.

I still haven’t had the opportunity to make a video call/Facetime since most of my friends are on 3GS. But, the front camera is very decent nevertheless.

Battery Life:

This is one area that fell a little behind my expectations. The phone can easily last for 2 days with mild usage, while using a lot of 3G, Bluetooth and other features can quickly bring it down to half-a-day. My usage habits keep the phone alive for a day and that’s a whole lot better than my previous phone.

Siri:

While the concept looks futuristic, I do not see it being used practically (or at least in my case). Siri doesn’t have trouble with my accent/phrasing and it understands me quite well compared to any voice recognition system that I’ve used before. Again, the problem in this case is the design. While the app is ingenious, I just don’t feel like making use of it in my everyday life, except for using it as a conversation starter when talking to someone in a party. If you have a tight data plan, you might want to restrict Siri usage since it can hog your 3G pretty quickly.

3G Connectivity:

While Tim Cook promised faster 3G speeds compared to other iPhones/Smartphones, the bandwidth I received remained more or less the same compared to my old phone, here’s a speed test during peak time.

Music:

The music player is a dream to use (as always!) and the stock headphones are very good. While I expected the battery life to take a big hit while listening to music for prolonged periods of time, it was surprisingly going strong.

Apart from all of this, I find my iPhone to be a really good reading device and I enjoy spending time on apps like Zite, Flipboard, Twitter and Kindle. If you’re considering getting an iPhone, it’s definitely worth investing in a 4S and if you already have a 3GS+ device, I’d recommend that you wait till the next iPhone arrives.

Facebook now lets you hide the Ticker [Quick Tip]

2012-02-05T14:08:00.000+05:30

While surfing Facebook today, I discovered that you can now hide the ticker whenever you want by clicking on the little option over it, like in the picture below.

You should remember that this isn't showing up for all users and if you can't see it now, you should probably give it some time.

Clean Email Notifications with Notification Control

2012-01-18T23:19:00.001+05:30

We all hate the spam that we receive from the services that we sign up, and this doesn’t exclude Twitter, Facebook and other popular sites. They’re all around to monetize and by default, thrust you with emails to get you to their site. While it is possible to turn off email notifications by yourself, it can be a pain to have to navigate through tons of pages especially if you have a slow connection.

Notification Control lets you click on a link to a popular site (like Twitter, Facebook) to directly land on the email preferences page so that you can turn-off unwanted notifications by yourself.

If you follow this blog regularly, you’d also remember about My Permissions, a very similar service that provides you with shortcuts to app-permissions on popular web sites.

2012 is definitely turning out to be a year for aggregation-based like these which give the user with a shortcut to turn-off options which, otherwise can be pretty subtle.

Link: NotificationControl.com

Download Chromium Like Any Other Browser

2012-01-12T15:55:00.001+05:30

Chromium, the open source web browser based on which Google Chrome was built never really gained much traction like Chrome did. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that you simply cannot download Chromium like Chrome or Firefox and its download page is filled with tech jargon which is enough to shy away even savvier users. Thankfully, François Beaufort built a simple web-app from where you can easily download Chromium like any other browser.

The main advantage about using Chromium over Chrome is that you aren’t subject to Google’s Terms (which quite a few people aren’t happy with) and you get to use more recent builds which are already stable on Chromium.

Let’s embrace Chromium now, shall we?

Download Chromium (Source Francois Beaufort) (via TechDows)

Microsoft CES–Pogo Remix [Video]

2012-01-10T21:06:00.001+05:30

I usually try my best to not share videos on this blog, but I seriously couldn’t let this one pass. CES is a very popular event where tech companies participate and showcase their upcoming products and this year, Microsoft just gave their last keynote on a CES event, ever. The folks at MS put together this funny/awesome/weird pogo mix that comprises of some of the key moments in CES for the past 15 years. I’m pretty sure you’ll want to watch it more than once!

6 Great IFTTT Recipes

2012-01-10T01:25:00.001+05:30

Most of you probably know about IFTTT already and from the looks of it, many users have started implementing it in their daily life. For the uninitiated, IFTTT (If This Then That) is a free service that lets you integrate 2 different services to automate various tasks. For example, you can make IFTTT automatically add all the links on your Twitter timeline to Instapaper or Read it Later so that you don’t have to. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at 6 incredibly useful IFTTT combinations aka recipes.

While you can easily combine any two services on IFTTT and get your job done, there are quite a few ingenious combinations available ready-made. I’ve picked up some really good ones from for the purposes of this list.

1. Backup Facebook Photos to Dropbox

While you can update your photos on Facebook; it’s always nice to have a personal backup that you can look through even when you are offline. This is where Dropbox comes in. Using this particular recipe will ensure that any photo that you may have uploaded onto Facebook is automatically pushed to a pre-designated location on your Dropbox.

If you are also looking to save your tagged photos on Facebook, this recipe will come in handy.

2. Favorite Tweet => Instapaper

While it’s difficult to follow up on all the links on your Twitter timeline, you’ll always have that one article you want to read, but can’t. This is where a service like Instapaper comes in. Using this recipe, you can automatically push all your favorited tweets to Instapaper so that you can peacefully read all those articles whenever you want.

Read it Later users can make use of this recipe for the same functionality.

3. Find My Phone! [US Only]

Losing your phone somewhere in the house is very common problem and it becomes difficult when you don’t have a second phone from where you can call it up. With this IFTTT recipe, all you need to do is send an email with #lostphone to a particular address for a ring back in seconds. Sadly, any recipe involving phone calls work only inside the US for now.

4. Rain Forecast on SMS

IFTTT is a Godsend for those without a smartphone. You can easily receive notifications from all of your favorite services and even interact with them with just a text message. This particular recipe warns you if it’s going to rain in your location. I use a smartphone and I still find it pretty useful!

5. Email Attachment to Dropbox

This is for those who are stuck with corporate email accounts with very little/no space for email attachment. With this particular recipe, you can push all of your attachments to Dropbox, eliminating the need to archive them manually.

6. Send Link to Phone via GTalk

In spite of all the awesome web services that we have today, sending a link to your phone doesn’t seem all that intuitive. With this IFTTT recipe, it is. After you activate this recipe for your account, you’ll have to add the IFTTT bot to your Google Talk friend list. After you’ve activate both the channels, you can ping the bot with the link whenever you are trying to send it to the phone and you’ll receive a text message almost instantly. Unlike phone calls, this service works globally.

That’s it from me. If you are already using IFTTT, why don’t you leave a comment below mentioning the combos that you use often?

Get More Out Of Google [Infographic]

2012-01-06T20:45:00.001+05:30

While many of us don’t have trouble Googling, we often end up with results that are mediocre especially when we aren’t sure about the exact keywords. This graphic from HackCollege lists some great pointers to improve your Googling skills.

Created by: HackCollege

Get Free Unlimited File Sharing with ‘Share’

2012-01-06T06:26:00.001+05:30

BitTorrent unveiled a new service called Share that lets you share files with pretty much anyone you want. While the service itself isn’t innovative, its USP turns out to be the fact that there are absolutely no size limits at all. Once you choose your recipients and start uploading files the data is cached in the server from where the files will be hosted for download. All of your data will be removed from the server after the download or after sufficient number of people in your recipient group get it for seeding.

In addition to this, you get to choose the people with whom you are looking to share stuff instead of making the file public. Social features like commenting on files are also included as a part of the service.

Get it here.

Secure Online Accounts with MyPermissions.org [Quick Tip]

2012-01-03T23:56:00.001+05:30

Every now and then we give account access permission to various applications that promise to fulfil something on the spur of the moment and while this is pretty harmless in most cases, malicious apps can misuse this permission to post something on Facebook/Twitter or any other site through which you let them in.

To be fair, most of the apps that we include aren’t really necessary after a few minutes and we usually tend to forget about removing access to them. Any savvy user will know how to revoke permissions and will do so regularly, but the majority of users still don’t understand how to get it done. This is where MyPermissions.org comes in.

The site gives you the direct link to permission revoking pages of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram and Flickr. Merely clicking on the site links will take you to the appropriate page, provided you are already logged into the service in question.

While many of us don’t need this, it’s really nice to have all these links in one page without having to manually find out how to get it done. I’d suggest you bookmark this site and clean up your accounts at least once a month. Trouble remembering things? This ifttt trigger should help.

Site: MyPermissions.org

Get Facebook Messenger for Windows Now

2011-12-28T17:42:00.001+05:30

Some of you might have read a report back in November about Facebook working on a version of Messenger for Windows. The app itself is still in a private BETA, but the folks over at The Windows Club found a public link with which you can download and try it out.

If you have Windows 7 (not compatible with Vista/XP), you can download the app (direct link) and set it up on your PC. It’s behaviour is pretty similar to that of the website’s chat bar, but it’s definitely handy if you use Facebook chat often.

The app can be maximised to the side of the right screen (like you see on Facebook’s website and the screenshot above) while it can also work within a window like any normal program. This is the fourth version of Facebook Messenger after iPhone, Android and Blackberry.