(Disclosure: Killer Tech Tips received a free X-mini RAVE for the purpose of this review)

X-mini RAVE is a sexy little portable speaker from the team at X-mini. Besides playing all your music, RAVE also lets you tune into FM stations and has an amazing battery life. Read on to know what we think about it.

Great travel companion. The 6 hour playback time is simply worth the money you paid.

Amazing bass. Almost every one who heard it playing here agrees.

The radio is a big bonus – but it wasn’t working all the time in our tests. We doubt it’ll work when you’re on the move.

There’s a small display that shows the frequency of the currently playing radio station. Buttons on the left/right help you adjust the same. A slider to tune into radio stations would have made it easier.

Although Xmini RAVE remembers your last played radio station, the ability so save a couple of preset stations would have been even more useful. It’s a pain switching between stations.

The addition of a memory card slot would have made X-mini RAVE even more useful. However, it’s already feature-rich and we just realized that another X-mini speaker has support for memory cards.

X-mini RAVE looks a little less attractive when compared to other X-mini models, but it does grab people’s attention nonetheless.

If you’ve got a friend who enjoys listening to a lot of music on the go, or if his portable media player’s speakers suck for some reason, this should definitely be something you should gift him/her. Check out the X-mini site now!

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

Seven Things About X-mini RAVE

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If you receive a ton of email newsletters in your inbox and if your email folders are far from zen, here are four specific ways to get back control over the same.

1. Create a folder to make newsletters skip inbox

Every email newsletter that’s sent out has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and  you can use filters to divert those emails to a particular label or folder. The emails won’t clog up your inbox and you can check them later, at a time of your convenience.

All you need to do is set up filters to look for the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the body of incoming email messages, and make them skip the inbox when they arrive. Setting this up is pretty easy in Gmail, just see the screenshot above for a sample setup.

2. Manually unsubscribe at the sight of a newsletter

Actively look for the unsubscribe link in emails that you receive. Most email newsletters will have it at the bottom, while some emails do display the link on top.

You might just trash or archive the message because you’re lazy but spending a few seconds to consciously unsubscribe from the newsletter will save you from a lot of frustration and clutter in the future.

3. Get an unsubscribe button if you’re really lazy

If you really hate the routine of searching for the unsubscribe link, clicking on it, going to a page to opt-out and then actually unsubscribing, you just have to get the Unsubscribe button for your inbox. The moment you open a newsletter and feel like puking over it, just hit the Unsubscribe button that this addon adds to your email program.

You get automatically unsubscribed the moment you hit the button, and this is free for up to five unsubscribes. You can alternatively forward the email to mail@unsubscribe.com. Go here to get it.

4. Never subscribe. If you really have to, use a temporary address

Of course, the best way to avoid these emails is to avoid the temptation of giving your email address to every other subscription box that promises a freebie. If you really want to take a peek at what that coaching program offers specially for its subscribers, use a temporary email ID instead.

There are dime a dozen temporary email address generators available and you can use them every time you want to subscribe to an email list that offers a free PDF or a report in exchange for your email ID.

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If you’ve got tips to combat email newsletters, leave them in the comments.

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Four Ways To Combat A Newsletter-Overloaded Inbox

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Browsers have grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Super rich features, you see. They help you to be productive all the time. Here are three tips that will help you save time when you’re engaged in a busy browsing session. These are commonly overlooked, so make sure you bookmark these for later reference!

Save all open webpages in a jiffy

If you’re doing some quick research online with a myriad tabs open and if someone else wants to use your machine, you’ll have to close all open tabs. Reopening them is going to be one helluva task.

You can make use of the much-overlooked ‘Bookmark all tabs’ option from the tab bar in the Chrome window to save all open tabs in a new folder in your bookmarks bar.

To reopen them all when you start your browsing session, all you need to do is right click on the folder and choose ‘Open all bookmarks’. As easy as that.

Restore previous session completely

Long time readers of Killer Tech Tips would know that hitting Ctrl+Shift+T anytime during browsing restores the previously closed tab. If you accidentally close a tab, this shortcut could be pretty darn useful. (If this shortcut is new to you, you probably don’t know several others. See them all here)

Hitting the same shortcut key combination immediately after launching the Chrome window restores your previous session completely. Tabs from your previous Chrome session would reopen in a jiffy and you can start surfing where you left off, almost instantly. How cool is that? Chrome Session Saver, for you.

Use the browser’s address bar to remove text formatting

(Update: Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut can be used to remove formatting when pasting, ignore the workaround below!)

You might copy text from web pages into a word processor or a note taking application often for future reference. Doing this preserves the text formatting, and you might want to remove it before you paste the text into another application.

You can make use of the address bar to remove the formatting pretty quickly. First, copy the text you want to paste by pressing Ctrl+C. Go to the address bar (or hit Alt+D) and paste the text into it by pressing Ctrl+V. Select all the text in the address bar by pressing Ctrl+A. Now, hit Ctrl+X to cut the text from the address bar.

This copies the unformatted, plain text version of the passage into the clipboard. You can then paste it into any application of your choice by using the paste option from the menu or hitting Ctrl+V.

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If you’ve got a tip that will add to browsing productivity, share it with us in the comments. Of course, these tips work in most other browsers as well. We’ve just used Chrome to demonstrate.

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Three Quick Ways To Save Time When Browsing

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(By Ramesh)

Almost everyone has a smartphone these days. The most popular ones are Android handsets because they are available in all price ranges and provide you a ton of features. But are you aware of the shortcomings of Android? Read on to find out.

This article has been written based on observations I made while using an Android phone and how I had to replace it with the Apple iPhone.

1. Pathetic Battery Life

Manufacturers call their devices “the greatest smartphones in the world” but not one of them come with good battery life, which happens to be one of the most basic aspects of a cell phone.

Although we are promised several hours of 3G and EDGE usage, the numbers are far away form the phone’s actual longevity stats. The battery drains off when you surf the internet, when you play games, when you use GPS and even when you fool around in the menu. Is it just me or does that include all the reasons I bought the phone in the first place? Sigh.

What’s the point of supposedly having a bunch of features when your phone is just going to die on you in the middle of the day?

The iPhone on the other hand performs much better when it comes to battery life. It gives up to 40 hours of music playback, 15 hours of video playback and 12 hours on 3G with intermediate usage, which is more than we can expect in a smart phone. And what’s more, the apps that are dormant or minimized on the iPhone consume very little power (almost zero, according to Apple) which makes it ever more long lasting. Normal users can easily get through a day with the iPhone.

2. Apps are great. Are they?

Android supposedly has a lot of apps. Access to the Android market is supposed to get you ever-lasting fun. It might be true that there are a lot more free apps on Android but they come at a price – malware! Almost all the free applications you use are embedded with ads, especially when they require an internet pack. Apart from that, there are the following issues:

• Applications are not universal to all phones. Apps built for one device do not work with others.
• Apps are full of security holes.  You will notice it when all your data gets used up automatically by an app running in the background.
• Apps even if they work tend to be slow at times. Why? Because they were not designed to a specific architecture or model.
• Free apps are loaded with ads that bring down performance and make your experience worse

This means that out of the 300,000 apps available, most of them are not compatible with your phone and many will be loaded with malware. With what’s left, you will eventually get bored.

3. All that power gone to waste

Android phones are built on powerful processors, many of them having a clock speed of at least 1 GHz and 512 MB RAM. Some even have dedicated GPUs. Now, the technical specs sound great, but what’s the big deal if it is not going to be of any use?

Sure, there are several benchmarks that show Android phones doing great in the graphics department, but at the end of the day, will it actually convert to something? No.

A good example would be to consider the same games in both Android and iOS, like Fruit Ninja.

The game costs the same but looks better and runs better on the iPhone and also on Symbian. You might want to have a look at the videos of both games to get a better idea.

The iPhone comes out on top even when it is put up against a more powerful dual-core processor. It’s not just Fruit Ninja. High end games are few and rare on Android and only high-end phones will support them. Tegra 2 which is supposedly the most powerful Android GPU, has only about 15 games which do not work on any other phones, even if they are dual core.

Now, if you cannot play games on an Android even when it has a dual-core processor, what’s the point?

4. Android is cheap? Not really.

“My Android phone is cheap. I get a great camera with HD recording, 3G connectivity, GPS, video calls, games, applications for a great price”

Again, you have been fooled by marketing gimmicks. Your phone has some great features but there will be at least one device out there that doesn’t run Android which costs less.

For example, consider the following:

1. Motorola DEFY – 5MP Camera, 720p recording, HSDPA, GPS, 800 MHz processor
2. SE Vivaz U5i – 8 MP Camera, 720p recoding, HSDPA, GPS, 720 MHz processor

The DEFY costs INR 15,400 and the Vivaz costs INR 11000. I would say the latter is better. You get most of the features of the first phone and some kickass battery life. All you need to do is compromise on the Android factor.

Sure, there are cheaper Android phones that start at the price of Rs. 7000 but you will not get a good touch screen, and you won’t get Flash support in the browser. There won’t get a good camera, and you may not get to play games like Angry Birds. And suddenly all the plus points are gone.

5. Too much tweaking required

The Android OS is not perfect and it requires a lot of tweaking for you to get the most out of it. Official upgrades are few and rare and if you need to get things in line right away, you will have to root your phone and install a custom ROM which in itself can be really tedious for new users.

Memory management can be a issue on Android and there frequent crashes will leave you thinking if Windows is better.  So, unless you do some research and root your phone, you’re probably going to end up using a phone that will restart pretty often.

Conclusion – Why go to all the trouble?

You want a great phone. But don’t go for all the trouble just to use Android? Poor battery life, application incompatibility and OS crashes just make Android really less worthy.

If you are after the camera, you should know that you can get great digital cameras with full HD video recording for INR 8000. And the quality on your cell phone will never compare to that of your digicam.

At the end of the day, things will boil down to whether your phone has good battery life, has a decent camera and a good browser. You will be able to find all these in other phones as well. Games are not great in droids, and you must go for the iPhone if you are a serious gamer.

But the rest of you can have a look at Symbian phones or Bada phones that fall well into your budget and pack a lot of punch. At least they are good at what they do.

Sure, Android has its upsides, but they do not make up for the disadvantages. So, make a smart move before buying your next phone.

(By Ramesh)

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Get An Android Phone

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This is a guest post by fellow blogger Thomas Frank. Thomas is a junior at Iowa State University studying MIS and speech communication. In his free time, he runs his own blog that focuses on college tips. You should follow him on Twitter!

Out of all the blog platforms and content management systems jockeying for position in the world today, WordPress has established itself as the most popular one. If you’re a WordPress user, this is a very good thing; the platform’s popularity ensure that it has plenty of willing developers, timely updates, and lots of plugins and themes to choose from. However, always keep in mind that popularity is a double-edged sword. Just as many legitimate bloggers, developers, and webmasters are using WordPress for their own purposes, there are also plenty of hackers and other non-legit, shady characters out there trying to exploit it in order to destroy your work or steal your stuff.

These hackers are kept at bay pretty well, thanks to all the time and effort that WordPress developers put into making WordPress a secure platform and releasing frequent updates. Still, the platform isn’t perfect, and hacks do happen. So what can you do to avoid being a victim?

There are actually a lot of great things you can do to secure your site, ranging from trivial to technical. If you’re not an experienced coder or webmaster, you may have trouble performing some of the recommended security upgrades to your site; however, there is one thing literally anyone can do, and that’s installing plugins.

Fortunately, there are a lot of great plugins available that can help you batten down the hatches and protect your site. In this article, I’d like to take a look at three of my favorites.

Limit Login Attempts

The Limit Login Attempts plugin is easily my most recommended plugin for security; in fact, you’d be a fool not to have it or something like it. The plugin’s functionality is pretty easy to guess from its name; it simply limits the amount of times a certain IP address can attempt to log in to your WordPress dashboard.

The plugin operates by issuing two types of lockouts – I’ll just call them Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 lockouts are the first to be issued, and then a Level 2 lockout will be issued after a certain amount of Level 1 lockouts has been reached. When you install the plugin, you can go to its options page and set the amount of failed attempts it takes to be issued a lockout, as well as how long the lockout lasts. My lockout setup looks like this:

• After four failed login attempts, a Level 1 lockout of 120 minutes will be issued.
• After four Level 1 lockouts have been issued to the same IP, that IP will be issued a Level 2 lockout of two weeks.

You can set the plugin to be as strict and unforgiving as you like, but I’ll give you one word of advice: make sure you allow some room for your own legitimate typing mistakes. You never know when you’ll need to log in to your site at 3AM. While you could technically just FTP into your site and delete the plugin in the event that you lock yourself out, it’s best to just allow yourself some room for error. The difference between two and four allowed tries isn’t much for a hacker who has to completely guess your password, but it’ll help for that one time you realize that your fingers were accidentally shifted over a row

So why is this plugin so important to have? Well, easily the most common attack that your WordPress site will have to deal with is password-guessing bots. These bots simply roam the net searching for WordPress blogs, and when they find one, they head over to wp-admin.php and start trying to log in. If you’ve got this plugin installed, your site will send these bots packing after just a few tries, instead of letting them sit there and literally go through the dictionary.

Of course, you can further thwart these password-guessing bots by making sure your WordPress administrator account isn’t named “admin”, as that’s the username 99% of these bots will use in their guesses.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Ah, the classic CAPTCHA! This piece of spam-killing technology is embedded into almost every website you go to these days. There’s a reason why, though – it’s really effective at stopping bots. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam is a plugin that can put a CAPTCHA field on any part of your site that allows for user input. This plugin is especially useful at your wp-admin.php page, as it puts one more step in between the bots and your site’s backend. Of course, putting a CAPTCHA up won’t stop a human hacker, but it definitely helps keep the bots away. One nice thing to know is that failing the CAPTCHA will cause your Limit Login Attempts plugin to register a login failure – even if the username and password are right. That’s why these two plugins work really well in tandem.

This plugin can also be used in other parts of your site, such as your comment form. While Akismet should be pretty effective at taking care of spam comments, this can provide an extra layer of spam protection if you really need it. Of course, if you’re using a different commenting solution, this may not be applicable.

One thing to note here: when you set up this plugin, I’d recommend setting the CAPTCHA difficulty to the highest setting. Even at this setting, the CAPTCHAs that the plugin issues are still pretty readable. Since they’re easy to read, you might as well make it as hard for bots to get in as possible and crank up that difficulty.

Audit Trail

While it doesn’t actually help prevent unwanted intrusions into your site, Audit Trail is great security plugin nonetheless. This plugin basically logs any activity that happens on your site’s backend, including logins, changes to posts and pages, and more. Each time an action is taken, the plugin will record what the action was, the target page/post of the action (if applicable), the time and date of the action, the user who did it, and their IP address.

This is a great plugin to use in order to keep tabs on what’s happening in your site, and it’s also essential for looking into any incidents that do happen. For example, if you have a multi-author blog and something bad happens, you can easily find out what user did it. Furthermore, you can check the IP address to determine whether it was actually the user assigned to that username, or a hacker who had figured out the password.

These three plugins make WordPress an even more secure platform, and I highly recommend that you look into them. If you’re interested in making your site even more secure, check out this article on WordPress security over at Quick Online Tips.

This is a guest post by fellow blogger Thomas Frank. Thomas is a junior at Iowa State University studying MIS and speech communication. In his free time, he runs his own blog that focuses on college tips. You should follow him on Twitter!

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

3 WordPress Security Plugins To Keep Hackers Out In The Cold

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Last week, we promised to giveaway Evernote Premium accounts to five of our lucky readers. Scores of people participated in the giveaway to win a feature-rich Evernote account.

As you might have known, Evernote Premium comes with a ton of additional features that are not available in the free version: there’s PDF search, image recognition and a lot more!

We’ve chosen the winners randomly. Here they are:

• #2 Praval Singh
• #16 Rohit Nvv
• #27 Clinton Sexton
• #30 Ruthiehl
• #46 ckailash

You’ve all been sent an email with instructions on activating the premium features. Those who’ve won: congrats! Those who haven’t: watch out. There’s more coming in this space.

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Evernote Giveaway Winners

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We’ve previously written about a couple Google tricks that are unpopular but highly useful. You can do a bunch of things with Google, including checking websites for malware, reading articles without having to pay, searching photos based on region and locking safe search to prevent kids from viewing explicit content.

Here’s how you can do them all. These tips may come in handy some day, so don’t forget to bookmark this article. Do share the information by tweeting the post or sharing it on Facebook.

1. Manually check for malware using Google

Google’s search results warn you about suspicious websites that host malware so that you can avoid visiting them. What if you want to check a site manually for malware content? It’s pretty easy. Just append the site’s address to this URL and a Safe Browsing diagnostics page will pop-up like the one above detailing malware infections, if any.

2. Search pictures by region

If you want to search for photos of actors from India or a specific region, there’s a way to do it in Google Image Search. Just go to the advanced search page and choose a region from the drop down list on the page. You can also search for movie posters from a particular region, as Amit points out. This feature can serve many more use-cases.

3. Search for people’s profiles

Everyone’s on Google+ these days and if you want to search for people’s profiles, it’s not necessary that you have to go to Google Plus every time. Just launch Google.com in a new tab, do a name search and append &tbs=prfl:e to the search URL. This restricts search results to only people’s profiles.

4. Read articles behind a paywall

Business Insider mentions that you can use Google to read articles from sites like the New York Times where information is behind a pay wall. Just search for the article using its exact title on Google and it’d pop up in search results. You can read up to five articles every day on sites like the NY Times using this work-around.

5. Lock Google’s Safe Search

You might have enabled the Safe Search option from Google’s search settings to prevent explicit content from showing up in results. If you share your computer with your friends or kids, you can manually ‘lock safe search’ from the settings page to prevent others from changing it in your computer. Once Safe Search is locked, coloured balls appear in the search results page indicating that results don’t include explicit content.

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Do check out our previous list of less obvious Google search features if you haven’t done it already. If you’ve got an interesting tip to share, do tell us in the comments.

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

Five Useful Google Search Tips You May Not Know About

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At Killer Tech Tips, we’re big fans of Evernote and that’s no secret. We first put Evernote in the spotlight when they launched in closed beta, by distributing close to one hundred invitations for early adopters who wanted to try out the app. We’ve also written about some really cool Evernote tips that you might want to check out if you use Evernote everyday.

Evernote Premium gives you access to a bunch of new features that make it even more useful. In addition to image recognition and PDF searching, you can let others edit your notes (true collaboration for you!) and also upload up to 1 GB of content every month, as opposed to just 60 MB if you have a free account. And yes, there are no ads if you go premium.

The guys at Evernote were kind enough to offer five premium licenses worth $5 each for our readers. We’re giving them away. Here’s what you have to do to make yourself eligible for the giveaway:

1. First, like our page on Facebook by clicking on the ‘Like’ button below. If you can’t see the ‘Like’ box here, click here to go to our fan page and then ‘Like’ the page.

2. Either tweet this article or like it on Facebook by using the buttons below.

Tweet

3. Leave a comment below with a valid email address and tell us why you’d like to win an Evernote premium account.

Please make sure that you leave a comment, just doing #1 and #2 doesn’t get your entry registered.

We’ll pick five winners randomly and make an announcement in a week. If you’d like to keep an eye on the results, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed or get updates via email.

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Giveaway: Win 5 Evernote Premium Accounts

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If you’re a big fan of Google+, take a look at these sites that’ll help you discover new users and create a short profile URL for your Google+ profile.

See Top 100 Google+ Users

Google+ Statistics is a neat site that lists the top 100 people on Google+ with their follower count. You can use it to find profiles of the most interesting people on Google+. In addition, you can sign in with using your Google ID or type in your unique profile ID to have yourself included in the tracking. Visit Google+ Statistics

Get a short URL for your Google+ Profile

Google+ profile URLs are pretty long and it’s hard to remember them. On Plus.ly/GPlus.to, you can key in  your profile ID and create a short URL of the form plus.ly/username or gplus.to/username that redirects to your Google Plus Profile page. Visit Plus.ly or GPlus.to

Find new, relevant people to add to your circles

Think of RecommendedUsers.com like the WeFollow directory, but for Google+ instead of Twitter. You go to recommendedusers.com and click on one of your interests. The site will show you a list of Google+ users that you can add to your circle. You can also narrow down the list of users by using the left panel. It’s an easy way to find interesting and popular people to follow on Google+. Visit RecommededUsers.com

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Three Sites For The Google+ Addict

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If you’re using Windows 7 and if you’d like to get a taste of Windows 8′s interface and features, some third party programs can let you make Windows 7 look like Windows 8. These enhancements are definitely not top-notch, but they can still prove to be nifty nonetheless.

Let’s take a look at some free software that help you make Windows 7 look like Windows 8.

Get Windows 8-like Taskbar User Tile in Windows 7

Windows 8 comes with an enhanced taskbar that shows the current user’s picture near the notification area of the taskbar. Clicking on it, one can quickly access options to modify user account settings.

Taskbar User Tile is a neat little program that puts your user picture in the Windows 7 taskbar, just like it appears in Windows 8. The tile is displayed between the date/time area and the show desktop icon in the taskbar’s bottom right. In case you find the display of  the user tile buggy or just want to turn it off, just right click on the picture and choose ‘Close’ to make the tile disappear.

Add Windows 8 like Metro UI startscreen in Windows 7

Windows 8’s Metro UI is getting a lot of buzz and if you’re a fan, you can get the same in Windows 7 using Omnimo. It’s a Rainmeter skin that brings the Metro style widgets to Windows 7.

Download Rainmeter from here and then unpack the Omnimo skin. There are a couple of free Metro UI enhancements for Windows 7 but none of them match the level of professionalism and customization offered by Omnimo.

Get Windows 8 Aero Features in Windows 7 With Aura

Windows 8’s Aero glass color scheme changes based on your desktop background or active window icon. Aura does the same thing for Windows 7, and in addition, it lets you set the Aero color based on the icon of the currently active tab in Internet Explorer 9.

The changes will be noticeable only if you increase the color intensity from ‘Appearance and Personalization’ settings, as the Aura program advises.

Download the Windows 8 Transformation Pack for Windows 7

Previously reviewed Windows 8 transformation pack for Windows 7 makes a ton of changes to make Windows 7 resemble Windows 8’s interface. Besides just changing the start menu and window close buttons, the transformation pack also adds a slew of other features, including Metro UI and user tiles to the taskbar.

Read our review to know more.

In the next few months running up to Windows 8′s release, there are going to be a ton of free programs coming out that help you emulate Windows 8′s best features in other Windows editions, Windows 7 and may be even Vista and XP. Bookmark this post as we keep updating it with more interface enhancement apps.

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

Make Windows 7 Look Like Windows 8

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