Why I am using FireFox

FireFox is the leading Open source web browser and is my all time favorite browser. Previously I have used Google Chrome but as a blogger nowadays using the Mozilla Firefox web browser than any other software. Firefox gives you freedom and more options to configure your privacy settings. So today I will tell some useful features of Firefox because of which I am using it.

How to browse the internet when your Internet connection is slow ?

Consider you are using an internet connection where data usage is limited, or take the situation where you are paying for the ISP based on your data usage, or If you are using an internet connection which is very slow.
In these situations you can not load all the website elements in your browser which consumes a lot of data. So it is ideal to use what you need and leave unnecessary content like advertisements.
 Here are some tips to save your precious data which will be useful while browsing the internet in slower connection speeds

What is DNS ? Things you should know about DNS server settings

Recently World Wide Web has finished 2 decades.DNS is one of the main component of WWW. Many of us don't know about DNS. Recently I got to know some details of it.So If you got some doubts regarding DNS , then read this How to article to set DNS server settings in your computer. 

Domain Name Service is shortly known as DNS.
This system is in place to organize and identify domains. To make a simple analogy, DNS is the phone book of the Web. While a phone book translates a name like “My Friend” into the right phone number to call, the DNS translates a URL or web address (such as “www.google.com”) into the correct IP address to contact (for example “74.125.19.147”) in order to get the information that you want.

You Type in Browser                        where the browser actually looks

www.google.com               ----------->              74.125.19.147

Print what you like-best way to save your favorite web-pages for offline reading

There will be some situations where you want to access a web-page in offline mode. Say for example you are preparing for your university end exams and you have some important reading material available in a website. In this situation you may prefer to take printouts or save them in PDF format so that you can access them in your computer(offline mode) or on your tablet.

Printing a web-page as it is may waste a lot of paper and also it wont look good as websites display advertisements which are useless and distracting. So now  our aim is to remove the advertisements and save a webpage as PDF file so that we can read it offline or take a printout of it.

How to create a website easily (for a cheap price) with Blogger ?

Two of my friends asked me how I bought GeekyBrains.com website . They asked me whether it is very costly to own a website.

Actually it is very simple and cheap to buy a website on your name. Owning a website gives you unique on-line presence .You can also show your own website in your resume which gives more professional look. 
If you want to start your new website and if you ever got a doubt "how to start a website ?", Then read this simple guide to create a new website on your name.

Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide

People who are interested in web design must realize that building a website is a learning process. You have to learn it by making your hands dirty. Web designing is one of the art where you will learn from your mistakes.

Here is a checklist for getting started with Web Designing.

How can you learn from facebook pages

Facebook is built for a cause , not just to share photos and funny status updates but to share knowledge around the web.
Facebook not just a social media network. It is a smart network with curious people who shares awesome ideas around the world.
The Facebook pages are very resourceful which helps the users to improve their knowledge.
Just for example here is a story of a scientist cum professor Brian. Watch how he succeeded in his research using facebook pages and photo tagging.

  

Here is a list of some useful Facebook pages which can help you to increase your knowledge. Be productive while spending your time on social networking sites.

Try Facebook's redesigned Newsfeed

After Graph search Facebook has introduced it's newly redesigned News-feed which is simple and clutter free when compared to the old interface.
If you are a frequent user of Facebook then follow this article to know how to activate new redesign of Facebook NewsFeed in your account.

Best websites to boost your productivity

Productivity is nothing but making things simple for yourself.Whether it is office work or your personal task, there exists a best way to do it.
we are listing five best websites for making your things easy and simple. All of these websites are web services for improving your productivity.
You can bookmark these website to use them frequently to boost your day to day productivity.

Youtube tips

Youtube is the best place for watching on-line videos. Most of us spend some time on Youtube to enjoy some good videos.
But Do you know that you can watch Youtube in Fullscreen? or do you know that you can turn Youtube into a Disco mode with playing top 100 songs as a play list ?
Here I am adding a list of 5 useful tips(if you feel so!) which will help you to enjoy the Youtube videos. If there is a better tip known to you , then add a comment so that I can update it on this blog along with your name.

Number of files on the Internet

How many PDF files are present on the Internet ?

Have you ever got this doubt. 

I have got this doubt and Google answered me. But the answer is not through a direct question.You can not ask Google directly "number of files on Internet" . Even if returns some answer it may be a old number.

Instead of searching directly for the number of PDF files, we can use an operator search in Google.

enter "filetype:pdf" in Google search to find the number of PDFs available online.

Google-file-search

You can try this for other file types also like Jpeg,png images; Ppts; Google earth files etc.

So here are some statistics of number of files indexed on Google

• PPT   -10,100,000 files
• PNG  -10,800,000 files
• JPEG -1,310,000 files
• PDF   -723,000,000 files
• DOC  -83,600,000 files
• TXT   -40,500,000 files
• XLS     -15,300,000 files

This is just one of the usage of search operators in Google.

Know how to search the web with the power of Google

Do you know how many times you have visited a website ?

I am addicted to social networks and browsing the web after I started blogging. So I want to count how many times I have visited a website through my browser(I am a die-hard fan of Firefox).
There is a direct way in Firefox to count the number of visits to a particular website.

click on the globe icon(or some unique icon) present on top left corner of your browser

Go to any of your favorite website and click on the globe icon or lock icon(for encrypted websites) to get identity information of the particular website.
Now click on 'more information' option, which pops a window showing a bunch of info regarding the website.
Now you can see the number of visits to the website as shown below

see the number of visits to a website

Now go to your favorite website and try this cool feature. Try this on facebook to know whether socializing a lot or not.

Not only this alone, with this menu you can control your browser effectively for a particular website. Go to 'permissions' and choose your desired configuration for a website. You can stop a website from opening a pop-up windows(ADs), or ask a website not to store cookies(what is a cookie ?) on your website and many more.

PS: This works with most of the other browsers include chrome.Chrome can give the date when you visited a website for the first time.

See what others searching on Google with LMGTFY

Let me Google that for you is a best website for the power Google users. If you want to show your friend how to search for a particular query on Google, you can record it and send the link to your  friend (poor Google user !)
If you don't know about 'let me Google that for you' service, read it here

There is another tool on this website which shows the all queries entered by other people. This is not possible in Google as Google won't reveal any search data of others with you.
Where as in Let me Google that for you, We can see what others are searching for as a live-stream. This trick is implemented by taking the log files of lmgtfy.com search queries.

see what others are searching on google through lmgtfy.com

Do you want to try this now. Then go here to see what others are searching on Google while their friends are not able to do it easily.

How to choose a secure password wisely

Creating a password is 90 % psychological issue. In the other cases it is related to security as they are connected with money (like banking passwords etc.)

Why psychological ?

Say if you love XYZ person.So you keep the password as "ilovexyz"

but this can be cracked if the person name is too short. So you need to make a strong password from this sentence only for easily remembering the password.

HOW ?

• make each word's first letter capital. i.e. IloveXyz
• add your favorite special characters to the password. If I am using this password then i will turn it as ##IloveXyz##

Most of the time every on-line user will repeat his first password which he gave at the time of beginning his Internet usage.Usually every persons first password will be a simple and easy to remember kind of words only. If he continues to use the same password all the time then there is a maximum probability of keeping your on-line accounts in the hands of hackers.

To avoid this you can use a simple trick.

Add a word related to the website (where you are creating a password for the account) in your password.

choose different passwords for all your online accounts

Here is Mozilla, suggesting you to choose secure passwords with simple tricks.





If you are good at Ctrl+A | Ctrl+C | Ctrl+V  I will suggest you a weird idea!
Say your password is 'password1234' . I suggest you to change it as "password1234password1234". This will definitely increase your password strength.You don't need to worry about remembering it.All you need to do is type your password as you remember and copy paste it again.

Other ways to make your password secure and easy to remember

1. Use a password manager application on your PC, or note down a phrase of password in your mobile phone.Make sure you remember other phrase of your password.

2.If you are using Mozilla FireFox(Why do I use Mozilla?) then you can use a master password for all your on-line accounts. At the start of browsing session you will be asked for the master password which will automatically stores all the remembered passwords.


PS : If you are a hacker and if you are reading this post I have something to say with you.

"I DON'T FOLLOW ANY OF THE ABOVE RULES !!!
IT'S MY PASSWORD ! My own rules apply  !! This is just a post to give my readers an idea about choosing a strong password."

OPEN Wireles Movement - sharing the web

 Can you imagine a mobile phone without a SIM card in it ? No

In a similar way a Computer without Internet connection is unimaginable.

In countries like India many people are still unable to connect to the web.Compared to the western countries Asian countries have less resources towards Internet access.

The reasons for less resources for web access are

•     High price for  3G networks
•     undeveloped network infrastructure
•     more charges by internet service providers 

According to Cisco

Over 100 million smart-phone users will belong to the "gigabyte club" (over 1 GB per month) by 2012 and the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world's population in 2012.

 in order to serve all these mobile devices we need a huge network infrastructure.


                                                        
                                           click on the banner to know more
   
What OPEN WIRELESS NETWORK  ?

• It is simple. Sharing the Wifi over your neighbors. You need to remove the password for your wireless router and make it available to your neighbors.

Why should I share my Internet to others ?

• Its very simple. If you share something to others, they will also do the same for you. Imagine a world with free wifi available 24X7 every where. If you share your wifi at your home then you may access free wifi provided by some other guy like you, at a coffee shop. On one day free internet access will become ubiquitous. This is the dream of OPEN WIRELESS MOVEMENT.  

How can I join in this movement ?

• First of all make remove your wifi router password, and give an SSID name(network name) to it as "openwireless.org". This will suggest the users to visit the website of OPEN WIRELESS MOVEMENT 
• You can join the mailing list here

 The idea may looks crazy for many people, but there is a good intention of making the knowledge on the web available to every one at every place.
 Imagine a world in which, neighborhood by neighborhood, people stop putting password locks on their Wi-Fi networks and instead share their Internet connections with their neighbors, giving everyone in their community access to a fast and open Internet.

Lets hope for a better future web :) 

  

10 Ways to improve your Google search results

9 out of 10 times I open Google to start my web browsing. We are all addicted to Google search. As a result we are some times missing a part of beautiful web.While Google is trying to make the search more easily, we can still use some little tricks to improve our web search results.

 1. log in and search to save your queries : Google will save all your search queries if you log in and search. Go to google.com/history this will help you to recollect your past Google search queries.You just need to login into your Google account , it will show your past search queries.

2.use search operators to get exactly what you want : If you are an engineering student, then you might have know about the OR , AND operators in programming languages. The same can be applied in Google search too.

Try these in Google :  

noodles OR soup      ----> you will get the results from the webpages which have either noodles or soup as a keyword.

noodles AND soup   ---->  you will get the results from the webpages which have both noodles and soup as  keywords.

noodles -soup            ----> all the webpages with the keyword noodles and excluding the pages having the word soup

3.you can specify the file type in the results : This is very useful if you are particularly searching for a keyword in a specific kind of file. Google can search inside a file available on the web. So use this as much as possible to [re]search on a topic.

For example I am searching for "Mahatma Gandhi" in Google.Now I want to search for Mahatma Gandhi only in PDF files. Then I will type "Mahatma Gandhi filetype:pdf" (without quotes)in the search bar to get PDF files which contain information about Mahatma Gandhi.

You can replace the file type PDF with your desired file extension.

4.you can search within a website : We may face a situation where we need to search for a topic within a website. 

For example, you want to search the topic black holes.

Then you can search this as "black holes site:nasa.gov" which will return all the articles on "black holes" available from the NASA website.

With this you can get a quality content from the web as you will specif the website name which will be mostly trusted(by you)

5.Avoid unnecessary words from your search query : Google loves Web friendly words.Don't   complicate your search query with unnecessary words like "A", "the" etc. If you add words like these Google may include some unrelated pages to your search query.

Also there is another use of searching with strong keywords(important words related to your search topic)

Have you ever seen a url with unnecessary words like "a","the" etc. ? An intelligent web content creator won't use these general terminology to index his webpages in Google. So to get quality content from search results avoid using these general words

 

6.Use Google International version : Don't restrict your search results to your region.If your Google page is redirecting to your country specific domain then try google.com/ncr . 
Here ncr = no country specific redirection 

personally I use Google Global add-on for FireFox(Why do I use Firefox ?) to search in Google. This will enable you to show the results from different country specific Google pages. You can install this in Chrome also

7. Use Google to search in your Gmail and Google drive files  : Yes ! Google will directly display your Drive or Gmail content on Google search results page. This is an experimental trial which will be activated after some days of registration.To add this feature to your account visit this link

8.Search similar  websites using a search operator 'related' along with a url

try 'related:google.com' to find some other web search engines.

9. You can use Google to get answers for your queries other than conventional web search.

question Google with the following queries. 

ip address         ------->gives your ip address 

temperature      -------->know your current location's weather details

time USA        -------->know the time of your friends location

usd2inr             ------->currency conversion operator in Google

define               ------> instead of using a dictionary you can use Google to find the definition on the       Google search results page itself. try "define Oneirophobia" to know what it means

sin(45)+cos(45) ------> use Google as your calculator.

you can apply these methods with a number of operators like  flight
numbers, value of shares,earthquakes, world capitals, sunrise/sunset times, movies,music albums, sports scores,package tracking numbers(of FEDEX etc.), medical conditions, and medications.

Using operators is the most powerful way to explore the web through Google. 

Remember that you can always use a variety of operators at a time.

for example, I am trying to study on "corruption in India" 

So I used "filetype:pdf corruption in india OR indian corruption site:.org" to get a lot of pdf files on my topic. 

In this way you can experiment with Google to dig the web as deep as possible.

 Wait !!! I said 10 ways  !! where is the 10th way ?

Hmmm.....Usually Google will answer most of our queries. But if you are still hungry for more web content, then you should point your url to other search engines.

So what are they ?

                                 BING | DuckDuckGo.com | WolframAlpha | Blekko

Google image search redesigned

There is no doubt about the number one rank of Google in search engine market. Still Google is trying to improve it's user interface to display the search results in an easily navigable mode.
For the normal web search,Google didn't changed much the way it displays the results.
But I always disappointed with the navigation of image search results(not with the results !). You can not easily pass from one image to other . You always have to come back to the all search results page and select another image. This will bite a lot of time and sucks more data.

So because of this I used Bing image search sometimes which is far better than Google in terms of navigation (I am talking about image search!!). Bing will show around 25 image thumbnails on the top of a main image.Also there are some good of options to search for similar images and more sizes of same image.It will also show thumbnail images for related searches recommendation on the same page.

So will Google allow Bing to get more image search visitors like me?
No way ! Here is Google coming with the all new image search user interface. It is not yet released(while writing this article), but they have given the screen shot of the new Google image search in their web masters blog

New Google image search interface

ADVANTAGES OF NEW GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH

• We can now see a main image along with other image search results as thumbnails.With this we can easily flip from a set of image results.
• Users can easily navigate from one image to other using keyboard (arrow keys)
• The url is now click-able(previously it was only visible). 
• Google removed the iFrame(of image source website) in the background of the image. This will reduces the page loading time and also reduces the load on source website server.
• We can now directly search for more sizes of an image by clicking "more sizes" button.

with all these options Google is trying to make the image search more convenient for the users.

Hope this will reduce our effort while searching for beautiful images from the beautiful web :)

Happy Googling :) 

What is a cookie ?

  what is a cookie ?

A "cookie" is a small piece of information stored in your browser by a website you have visited.

Why does any website stores information on your browser ?

Usually a web browser requests the data from the website. Then the website responds to the  browser request and transfers the information. If you are visiting a website frequently, then the browser needs to request some of the common information every time. To overcome this ,the concept of cookies is introduced where a website will assign a unique ID to each of it's  visitors (for the 1st time). So this will help the websites to store your settings and preferences. 

What  information is stored in a cookie ?

information stored in a cookie

Will a Cookie store any personal information of a visitor?

No, A website doesn't store any of your personal information using a cookie. But there are other ways of using a cookie to target a  particular visitor.
Say for example you have liked a page on Facebook and commented in it. Then Facebook can  show an Ad which is related to that page. There is a maximum probability of clicking that ad  if it is related to your interest.In this way a website may get some advantage with cookies.
But not always cookies will be used for advertising only. Google may use some cookies to improve search results by storing the user settings like language and advanced search settings etc.
Facebook uses cookies to make your account more secure.It will alert you if your account is being accessed from a location other than your regular computer.This is why you will be asked to name a device for the first time visit to Facebook.

How can I delete my cookies stored in my browser ?

deleting cookies in Firefox and Chrome browsers

You can always delete the cookies if you think that your privacy is important than any other issues.
But do remember that most of the websites tries to improve them using cookies. So it is better to keep them for better browsing experience.

Graph search-Is this another money making way for Facebook?

After creating much hype on it's New product, Facebook has finally revealed it's new search tool named as "Graph Search". There is no need to tell about the social networking giant which went for an Initial public offering(IPO) last year.

Things changed for Mark Zukerberg after Facebook IPO listing. He always need profits and regular growth in his company which may not be an easy issue.
Facebook is now more interested in revenue generating. So it has to put ads on user walls. But at the same time they shouldn't occupy more space on user news feed.

So Facebook got an idea where it can show answers for user's queries about his network along with some ads related to the queries.Building Graph search is not a big issue for Facebook by having more than 100 billion user shared data with it.

Graph search may drag many people's attention since it is person based instead of mere information based as in other search methods.As a human being we are all very much interested in our friends and neighborhoods. We are all mentally attached to Facebook.This is why Facebook is thinking to go beyond news feed and status updates.

Of course Graph search may not overtake Google which is enjoying its number one position from the past decade. But Facebook will definitely take advantage of it's new product by injecting more Advertising campaigns in the Graph search results.
Currently Graph search is in beta version available only for US region. But you can join the waiting list to get updates about it.
If you are looking for more details about Graph search , Mark Zuckerberg is waiting Here to explain about his new product from Facebook.

Happy Facebooking :)

Generate your Facebook account report using Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha, Know as a Computational Knowledge engine is now giving you an option of creating your own Facebook profile report. 

Wolfram Alpha-Facebook Report

All you need is a free Wolfram Alpha account and linking it with Facebook account.Wolfram Alpha will access your Facebook account for 1 hour and deletes any accessed information from its memory.So this may not disturb your privacy.

Just now I generated my Facebook report and it looks very cool. Some of the highlights of this report includes :

• Posting activities (Status updates,Links,Photos etc) in neat charts
• Post statistics i.e. number of likes and comments on status updates,shares
• Gender,Relationship status and Age distributions of friends
• Friend network structure (college,family or workplace etc.)  

here is a small part of my Facebook report 

Facebook report showing gender,age and relationship status of friends

Besides I also liked the concept of weekly activities Facebook postings by user.If you frequently uses Facebook, then you must use this from Wolfram Alpha to explore your social statistics.
Be Social :) Be Curious :)