PC Tonic » Quick Tips

Create a Swivel View of Your Photos in Picasa Web Albums [GT Posts]

Ashutosh Mishra — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:32:29 +0000

…Generally speaking, creating an actual 360 degree view effect requires you to snap photos of the same object from numerous closely spaced angles, arrange them all together in proper order and queue them in a fast slideshow mode. And if you do happen to have a bunch of such photos lying around, you still need to be able to cook up some javascript work to be able to swivel through those photos.
Thankfully, Picasa Web makes the process of adding swivel effect a smooth one. It not only has the feature baked in, but also makes using it really easy…

How to Get a 360 Degree ( Swivel ) View Of Your Photos in Picasa Web Albums [Guiding Tech]

Bring Mac OS X Style Font Rendering to Windows with GDI++

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:07:22 +0000

Even though I’ve never used Apple’s famed desktop OS, there’s one thing about Mac OS X that has always made love it – the font rendering. A lot of people don’t get what’s with all the fuss about fonts, but for me it’s always been the little things that matter.

Ever since ClearType was introduced a few years into Windows XP, font rendering on Windows has undergone a huge facelift. ClearType is quite cripsy and sharp, but that’s exactly what I don’t like about it. The fonts look like thin swords cutting through a piece of fabric that is your PC screen. Compare that to the font rendering on OS X, which is like this creamy blending thing that creates more impact on your eyes and…..okay I’ve no idea how to describe it, so let me just say it looks tons better! Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two -

[source: lifehacker; click on image to view in full size]

Notice the difference?

Yes? Welcome to the camp! I don’t know which of the two you like, but for me it’s easily OS X.
No? It’s probably awesome you can’t make out the difference because then you won’t have to like one or the other!

Anyway, for those of you who do like the OS X rendering but are using Windows instead, there’s an easy way to get the former on your PC!

Enter GDI++. This tiny app, when activated, kills Windows’ ClearType font rendering and uses its own OS X-style rendering, which is based off the original gdi++.dll project.

To get started, download the GDI zip file from the link provided at the end of this post, extract the folder anywhere on your PC, and double-click the gditray.exe file to start the utility.

If the rendering doesn’t change immediately, right click on the gditray icon on your system tray, make sure ‘Enable’ is enabled, and click on ‘Apply Now’. Now, sit back and enjoy the magic!

If you want to make it start automatically with Windows, make a shortcut of the gditray.exe file and put it in the Startup folder.

Should you want your ClearType back, simply exit the gditray.exe file and everything will be back to normal.

Do note that GDI++ doesn’t work everywhere. For example, I can’t get it to work on Google Chrome and uTorrent, two of my favorite apps, for the love of it. The, err, chrome of Chrome gets rendered in gdi++, but not the webpages. Firefox has no problems.

Also, if you don’t run the gditray.exe file as administrator (right click > Run as administrator), it’ll naturally fail to render areas that require administrative privilege.

Overall though, I’m pretty impressed with GDI++. It does what it says, and it does that really well. Previously, the only way for me to enjoy the OS X style rendering was by using Apple’s Safari browser, which is otherwise a very clunky software on Windows. However with GDI++, I can enjoy the rendering system wide without taxing my processor in any manner (the gditray.exe process uses only about 1-3 MB of memory while running and almost zero CPU usage). Really, small things like this go a long way in making me a happier soul!

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Download GDI++ – Make Windows fonts look as smooth as Mac OS X fonts (look out for ‘Download GDI++’ in step 1).

All credit for me discovering GDI++ goes to the awesome Lifehacker readers, with the app itself being covered at LH way back in March, 2009! Read the entire comment thread on Lifehacker here.

Gracefully Save IRCTC Train Tickets To A PDF File (Or, Print Virtually Any File To PDF With DoPDF)

Ashutosh Mishra — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:07:57 +0000

Booking train tickets through IRCTC is a rage these days, with everyone and their dads being aware of the relatively simply procedure. The e-ticket format is obviously the preferred choice, as you can print the ticket yourself without having to wait for IRCTC to deliver it to you.

However, a lot of places don’t have printers. My hostel, for one, doesn’t. This is where all the mouth-clasping abilities of my not-so-tech-savvy friends kick in. The obvious problem is how to save the damn page, and carry it in a USB stick to the student store. Some will simply Ctrl + S it as a .htm file, which is quite convenient but looks extraordinarily disgusting. Others tend to follow their own routes, most of which can be best described by this:

[xkcd]

I take the more normal (for us!) route and print the page directly to a beautiful little PDF file that shows the ticket exactly as it should be seen.

It is almost painful to watch my friends struggle innovate while trying to pin down a stupid webpage to their USB drives, and hence this post.

Guys, all you’ve to do is install this free utility called doPDF, and print those web tickets as PDF files in future. doPDF adds a virtual printer to your system, which works like any regular printer, but prints to PDF instead. Once installed, you can click on that ‘Print ERS (English / Hindi)’ button on your e-ticket, and select the doPDF printer in the Print dialog box (actually, make it the default printer during installation so you won’t be bothered again!), and…voila! your ticket is now a freakin’ PDF! Carry it in your pen drives to the student store, print your proper looking tickets, and get your sticks all filled with crazy malware because the store guy won’t bother scanning his damn computer. Yo mama!

Ditch The Search Box In Firefox For The Address Bar [Firefox Starter Tips]

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 23 May 2010 17:26:02 +0000

Despite being a handy feature, the search box in Firefox is mostly unnecessary as most of its features can be accessed from the address bar. In this article, we’ll see how to remove the search box, and replicate its functionality in the address bar (also called Awesome Bar in Firefox). Before removing the search box, you should however save a list of your frequently used search engines, as detailed in a previous post.

Step 1 – Create Keywords

Before taking out the search box, we’ll use one feature to create different keywords for different search engines that you’ve got in Firefox. from the dropdown menu of the search box, select ‘Manage Search Engines…’ . You’ll able to see all your installed search engines in the new window that appears.

Now it’s time to create the keywords. Select any search engine, click on Edit Keyword and assign a suitable keyword to it. The shorter the keyword, the better (we’ll get to the reason later). For example, the best keyword for Google will be ‘g’, that for Wikipedia will be ‘w’, and so on. Of course if there are two search engines starting with the same alphabet, you’ve got to assign a two-letter keyword to one of them. Once you’re done click OK.

Step 2 – Remove The Search Box

There’s no more need to keep the search box. Let’s proceed to remove it from Firefox’s UI! Go to View > Toolbars > Customize, simply drag the search box into the Customize Toolbar window. I couldn’t find a good way to show this; here’s the best I’ve got :

Hopefully you get the idea! Once you click on Done, the search box will be gone from Firefox’s chrome[1]. Hurrah! You can always bring it back by reversing what you did above.

Step 3 – Use Your Address Bar As Your Search Box

Your search box is gone, and all you’re left with the obnoxiously big address bar. Lets put it to use. To use the search box, you had to select the required search engine, click inside the box (or press Ctrl-K), and type your query. Instead of doing that, now you’ve got to enter the keyword for the required search engine followed by a whitespace and your query, in your address bar. Keeping the keywords short requires you to type lesser characters, and hence saves time. For example, if you want to search YouTube for videos of Lady Gaga, type this and hit Enter :

y lady gaga

Of course, if you provided a different keyword for YouTube, you should use that instead. Similarly, say you want to look for the Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia; your search query would be this :

w large hadron collider

You get the idea! The search box is no longer required, and your address bar becomes a lot more like the one in Google Chrome.

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#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.

1. Chrome refers to the user interface of any software. Every element that is present in Firefox’s user interface, together constitutes its ‘chrome’. Don’t confuse it with the other Chrome, which is actually a browser from Google. Google Chrome also has a chrome (its own user interface)! I know, it’s crazy but that’s the way it is.

Sync Subtitles With The Video In VLC

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 23 May 2010 07:30:00 +0000

I can’t stress the usefulness of subtitles enough, especially when you’re watching a movie in a foreign language. I was watching Heavenly Forest, a Japanese romantic drama, a few days back. The movie was wonderful, but I wouldn’t have understood anything had it not been for those English subtitles. I even tend to use English subtitles while watching English movies, because you guys talk so fast (Americans) or so weird (British) that it’s hard for me to grasp!

Handy as they are, subtitles can turn extremely irritating if they’re out of sync with the video. They distract you, and you end up understanding even less than what you’d have without the subs. Thankfully, if you’re using VLC player to watch the videos, you can make use of a nifty feature in the program to sync the subtitle with the video! Do note that it’ll only temporarily sync the subtitles with the video, and the sync will be gone the next time you watch the video.

Anyway, lets get started with how to implement it. I’m assuming that you’ve already loaded the video and subtitle files into VLC (you can just drag them both into its interface). Now, carefully take a look at the video and the subs, and see whether the subs are lagging behind or running ahead of the video. If you’re watching a foreign movie, it may seem like a very difficult job, but just try a little hard and you should be able to make this out. For example, if you see a girl screaming and running around wildly, and the subs show “Help me! Help me!” 3 seconds after that scene, this means that the titles are 3 seconds behind the movie.

Once you’ve figured out the lag / lead of the subtitle, it’s time to sync it with the video. In VLC, navigate to Tools > Track Synchronization, where you’ll find the Subtitles/Video section. Now comes the important part – syncing the subtitle. If the subtitle is lagging behind the video, you’ve to provide a negative value to ‘Advance of subtitles over video’. Say the subs display 3 seconds after the video, the value you got to enter is –3.000 s. Note that you can adjust the sync time to upto a thousandth of a second, although adjusting to the tenths does the job in all cases. Similarly if the subtitle is ahead of the video, enter the required positive number of seconds. Hit the Refresh button at the top right corner of the window, and you should see the change immediately.

There’s another option called ‘Speed of the subtitles’ in there. Normally, the subtitles should run for the same time as that of the video. However in rare cases, if you do come across a subtitle that wraps up faster (or slower) than the video, you can make use of that particular option. If the subtitle advances too slowly (starts with proper sync, but then increasingly lags behind), increase the “fps” (frames per second) value to something above 1.0, the value depending upon the relative speed of the subtitle. Similarly for fast subtitles, decrease the fps value so that they’ll keep in pace with the video and won’t run ahead faster.

As I said, both these features are only temporary and last as long as the video is open in VLC. If you want a permanent solution, you should instead look for perfectly syncing subtitles. Sublight is one useful tool that’ll help you get them. Sublight even has a built-in syncing tool that’ll permanently sync de-synced subtitles with their respective videos.

Of course, if for any reason you cannot, or do not want to, use Sublight, VLC’s swift little trick has always got you covered.

Add Search Engines [Firefox Starter Tips]

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 16 May 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Firefox, like all other modern browsers, has this nifty search box from where you can search for stuff from different search engines and websites. Some of the usually available options (in the English version) are Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay etc. While these are usually the websites you’re gonna go looking for anything, they don’t cover everything that you’d be looking for. Maybe you want to search YouTube for a video. Or, maybe you want to look through Scribd for a free book or project. Going to those websites and searching for stuff is a lot more hassle than doing it directly from the search box.

Thankfully, Firefox lets you to easily add search engines from various websites to its search box. For example, to add YouTube search, all you’ve to do is visit youtube.com. Now click the downward pointing arrow on the search box, and then on Add “YouTube Video Search”.

Booyeah! You can now search YouTube directly from Firefox without visiting the website again.

This works for a lot of aggregating sites, like Scribd, Grooveshark, Torrentz, Dailymotion, Hulu, Flickr and so on. Just visit a website and check the search box if the website search can be added to Firefox. Do note that you need to have Firefox 3 or later for the feature to work. The latest Firefox version is 3.6, which you should be running anyway. Download it from here.

In a future post, we shall see how to create keywords for the different search engines that we added, so that we can just totally remove the search box and use the address bar instead.

#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.

Prevent Your Secondary Email Accounts From Being Deactivated By Using Digsby

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 09 May 2010 14:30:00 +0000

by Fletcher Prince

A lot of people, myself included, have this habit of creating multiple email accounts, and then abandoning one or more of them. This leads to removal of those inactive accounts by the email provider after a stipulated time (usually six to twelve months).

One wouldn’t normally expect this to be a cause for concern. Except that, it is. This behaviour is being exploited by hackers these days (read this & this) to gain access to their primary email address, contact details, complete chat logs, transaction information, and God knows what else. And so here’s the deal – never ignore your secondary email account/s.

But how? By nature we tend to avoid anything that doesn’t seem important enough. Your secondary account is not quite important (that’s why it’s secondary), so it’s natural you will either forget or not want to check it out every so often.

However, you can make the awesome Digsby to keep checking your mail inboxes at regular intervals, and hence prevent them from being deactivated. For those who haven’t heard of it, Digsby is a free Windows utility that can manage all your IM (Gtalk, AIM, Live Messenger, Y! Messenger, and more), email, and social accounts together. If you’ve not tried it out yet, go give it a ride (make sure you get the crap-free version).

Once you install Digsby and create an account, it’s time to add your email addresses to it. From the menu bar, go to Digsby > My Accounts, and click on Add Email Account. Select your email provider, and enter your account details. If your secondary account doesn’t receive a lot of mails, you can increase the time interval after which Digsby will check for new mail. Click Save, and then Done. Keep running Digsby every now and then (don’t forget to do that!), and it’ll make sure your secondary account stays active.

Why can’t I just delete my secondary email address?

It’s even more dangerous. If you read the email exploit article that I linked to above, you’ll know that the exploit is possible only when your secondary account is deleted and then taken up by some other person. While signing up for your primary email account, you must have provided your secondary email account. Hence any problem in your primary account will usually be mailed to the secondary account.

Why Digsby?

Sure, Digsby is not the only social client out there. Trillian and Pidgin also offer IM and email capabilities. However I prefer Digsby because of the way it separates your email account from your IM account. Both Trillian and Pidgin integrate the two – if you add an account, it will serve both as IM and email without choice (you can opt out of email, but not the former). It’s highly unlikely that you chat with people using your secondary account, so Trillian and Pidgin are both redundant in this respect. Moreover, Digsby allows you to do all sorts of stuff with your email right from its interface.

Email addresses contain some of the most sensitive information about yourself and your contacts, and hence you must take all steps to make sure that they don’t get deactivated or hacked.

HP Computer Owners : Swap Cyberlink YouCam for HP MediaSmart Webcam

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:43:04 +0000

Those of you who have purchased an HP Pavilion / TouchSmart computer, in the last couple years, must be familiar with the Cyberlink YouCam (version 2) software that is installed by default in those models. YouCam is, in my opinion, a darn good webcam tool. However it’s not free and ever since version 3 of YouCam was released, all v2 users have been getting nag screens to upgrade.

This is definitely not what you’d call a pleasant user experience, and therefore HP has proceeded to fix the issue. By partnering with Cyberlink, HP has released MediaSmart Webcam, which closely resembles YouCam but is completely free to use on HP laptops, desktops, and touch screen PCs. To get MediaSmart, you can wait for HP Update (which should be installed on your computer unless you manually removed it) to deliver it to you. Or, you can Google your computer model, proceed to the HP page for the model, select your OS (you should preferably be running Vista or 7), and choose MediaSmart Webcam from the list of downloads available. Here’s the required page for my laptop model running 32-bit Windows 7 – dv5-1006ax.

Running the downloaded file will automatically remove YouCam and install MediaSmart on your laptop, which can then be accessed from the Start menu.

MediaSmart will run only on HP hardware, though owners of other models can try and get gobsmacked in the face.

P.S. If you’re planning to purchase an HP Pavilion laptop in near future, here’s my advice – DON’T.

Use Chrome As A [VERY Barebones] Music Player

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:50:12 +0000

Here’s a very stupid trick for the die-hard Chrome fans out there : you can play songs right within Chrome! Chrome has a basic music player built right into it. It’s very, very basic. You can only play / pause and control volume in it. Anyway, to use Chrome’s, umm, music player, all you’ve to do is drag and drop a music file right into it. The tab will turn into a slick player with a black background and start playing your song!

The player supports only one file at a time, and you can do nothing in it besides listening to that one song. Having said that, we should also note that Chrome was never a music player, so its kind of cool to have this feature in the first place. So the next time you don’t feel like launching a full blown music player just to listen to that single track, simply drag it to Chrome, and continue with your job while it plays in the background.

Cool and minimal – that’s what you always get from the engineers at Google.

Note : I’ve no idea if this feature has been available on Chrome since day 1. I’m currently using Chrome 4.1 beta, and I’m pretty sure this would be available on both Chrome 3 and 4, which is what most of you guys must be using at the moment. Please verify this.

Note 2 : I’ve got only mp3 songs. No idea how many formats it supports.

Enable Smooth Video Playback in Windows Vista / 7

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:17:18 +0000

If you’ve a medium / low-end laptop running Windows 7 (or Vista), you may be facing the problem of high definition videos stuttering and lagging during playback. This happens because Windows 7 usually sets the power mode on laptops to be ‘Balanced’, which compromises on some of your system capabilities, one of them being optimized video playback, in order to improve battery life. So the next time a video doesn’t run smoothly on your laptop, all you’ve got to do is to switch to the High Performance mode and get rocking with your movie.

However, using the high performance mode isn’t always recommended. For one, it will suck up your battery life faster than you can say ‘Stop!’. Using this mode over a prolonger period of time may even lead to overheating (my own personal experience), as it makes every component inside your laptop to function at full capacity.

Fortunately, if all you want is better video playback, you can enable the feature in balanced mode itself! Here’s how :

Right-click on the battery icon on the system tray and select Power Options.
In the Power Options window, click on Change plan settings under the balanced mode, and then click on Changed advanced power settings.
From the various settings available, move to Multimedia settings > When playing video, and change the Plugged in option to Optimize video quality (it should be Balanced by default). If you want smooth playback when your laptop’s running on battery, also change the On battery option to Optimize video quality (this goes without asking that your battery will discharge faster). Click Apply and OK, and enjoy your high-definition movies without a pause!

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Install a Crap-Free Version of Digsby With Ninite

Ashutosh Mishra — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:49:49 +0000

Digsby, an otherwise phenomenal IM and social program, has been the victim of some major backlash in near past due to bundling crapware with its installer, and using your processor cycles for making money. While the Digsby installer has toned down a lot since, it still includes with an opt-in Ask toolbar, and checked-by-default options to change your home page and use your CPU.

A lot of PC users tend to focus entirely on the ‘Next’ buttons when installing stuff, and ultimately end up with unwanted bloat when installing Digsby and other similar programs. However, by making use of the afore mentioned Ninite, one can get Digsby minus the crap, without actually having to do anything!

Click on this link to grab the Ninite Digsby Installer ninite.com/installer/33b5013820f82e207c0539a89a8ef4a032583565. (if you want to get more software from Ninite, visit ninite.com instead)

Save the file to your computer, and launch it once its downloaded. Ninite will automatically download and install a clean version of Digsby for you.

So the next time your mom or your grandpa wants to get social media savvy, ask them to use Digsby, and mail them the link mentioned above.

Fix Hardware Issues in Windows 7 The Easy Way

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:45:42 +0000

A lot of you guys must have bought PCs with Windows Vista installed in it, and then upgraded to Windows 7 when the latter was released. Those who did it the recommended way, i.e. through your PC manufacturer, wouldn’t be facing any hardware problems.

The rest of you (and myself), who got a licensed copy of Windows 7 directly from Microsoft and installed it on your computer, might have run into some issues.

I was really unhappy with Windows Vista that came with my HP laptop. So the moment Windows 7 RC was released, I went for it. While the OS itself was pretty fantastic, there did exist some glitches – a new biometric technology in Windows 7 meant that my fingerprint reader stopped working. The memory card reader and the infrared receiver were also quite wonky. The situation stayed more or less the same throughout the RC phase, but once Windows 7 final hit the market, HP and the other PC manufacturers started releasing Windows 7 specific drivers, which were then pushed to users via Windows Update. However, not all drivers got updated that way. Actually, all three of my hardware issues continued even after installing a fully updated version of Windows 7 Professional. A quick glance at “Devices and Printers” confirmed this :

Thankfully, Devices and Printers does a lot more stuff than displaying your hardware components. You can actually troubleshoot the problematic components right from its interface! Simply right click on any component that has a yellow triangle on it, and select ‘Troubleshoot’.

Windows will start the required troubleshooter and, more often than not, come up with a solution for the problem.

Click on ‘View solution…’, and Action Center will show you all the required information for squashing the issue.

In my case, the Action Center redirected me to the required links for all my malfunctioning / absent drivers and I was able to fix the hardware issues.

Windows 7 has a LOT of neat features, and this is definitely one of them. If you’re facing hardware issues like me, hop over to Devices and Printers and have them fixed!

Block ads, flash and other annoyances with a few mouse clicks [Opera Trick]

Ashutosh Mishra — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 05:35:29 +0000

We’ve previously covered ad-blocking tools for all the major browsers :

IE7Pro for Internet Explorer
AdBlock Plus for Firefox
AdSweep for Chrome, Opera, and Safari

All these tools work great, but if you’re an Opera user you can actually block ads using the browser’s built in features! Let’s see how :

On visiting a web page that contains some obnoxious ads (say our own PC Tonic!), right click anywhere within the Opera window and select “Block Content…”

The entire page will instantly fade out except for the blockable items (ads, flash, images etc.). All you’ve to do is to click on the elements you want to block. This will add a filter and Opera will block similar elements from all websites. If you’d rather block a single item, hold the Shift button while clicking on it.

Considering there are a large number of advertising services (AdSense, AdBrite, Chitika, Widget Bucks…) it’ll take some time to build up a commendable list of filters. However once done, you can conveniently surf through websites without having to see those ugly, bandwidth-sucking ads or horrendous auto-playing flash videos. You can view all your blacklisted content through Tools > Advanced > Blocked Content…, where you can also add website URLs to be blocked.

Opera might be the dark horse of the Big browsers, but it continues to impress with it’s rich feature set.

Prevent your laptop from overheating with a simple arrangement

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 23 May 2009 09:48:00 +0000

Overheating is a serious problem that can greatly reduce the average life span of any laptop. The most common cause of overheating is the improper position of air vents, which doesn’t allow the hot air inside the machine to escape completely. I’m no stranger to this, as my HP Pavilion dv5 has got it’s air vents practically on the bottom side resulting in, um, you know.

However, this problem can be greatly alleviated with a simple arrangements that requires two somewhat-thick, and equal sized books! Here are two snapshots of my laptop on top of my Harry Potter books :

As you can see, the hot air can easily flow out through the air vents and the overheating problem will be reduced to great extents.

How do you keep your laptop cool? Say in the comments.

Make most of your night downloads

Ashutosh Mishra — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:06:00 +0000

A majority of the ISPs in India offer “unlimited” night-time download packages at very cheap prices, which means downloading anything in these free night-hours won’t count in your monthly download cap. With these packages, downloading large files is obviously possible only during the free hours. The problem (craftily created by the ISPs) is that the free hours mostly start after 12 midnight and last till 6-8 a.m. in the morning. Staying awake till late night to download stuff isn’t very healthy, and again you’ve to wake up early to stop the downloads after the free hours are up.

The above scenario may not seem very bright, but you can make it much better with a few tweaks and some dead useful software! With further ado, let’s take a look at how to make full use of your free night hours.

1.Go grab these software.

Before explaining anything, I’ll ask you to download and install these free and small software. All’s well if you use similar other tools and would rather stay with them.

μTorrent – for scheduled and fast torrent downloads

Free Download Manager (lite version) – for scheduled download of files through HTTP / FTP

AMP WinOFF – for automatic shut-down of your computer

2.Assumptions.

In this post, we’ll assume that

the free download hours range from 12 – 7 a.m.
your PC won’t get too hot and set your house on fire.

3.Torrent downloads.

A torrent is the best way to download large files (> 500 MB) from the Internet. Now you need a BitTorrent client to get files through torrents, and μTorrent is definitely the best in this category for Windows. This meagre 250 kilo-byte tool comes optimised for best download rates and has a wealth of useful features, including a scheduler. With μTorrent’s extensive scheduler, you can easily choose portions of a day when you want full-speed downloads, limited downloads, or no download at all. We obviously want our downloads to be full-speed during the free hours and limited (or zero) during any other time; so this is how we configured it :

Open μTorrent, and go to the Scheduler section through Options > Preferences > Scheduler. A table with all 7 week-days, and 24 boxes for each day, will appear. These boxes imply the 24 hours of the day. Select the “Enable Scheduler” option, and all the boxes will be coloured deep-green by default. You can change the colour simply by left clicking on the box multiple times. You can see the meaning of each colour code in the screenshot.

As you can see, I’ve created a thought out schedule which allows full download from 12 – 7 a.m., cuts off the transfer an hour after and before this period, and allows only limited transfer rest of the time. You can assign the value of max. download and upload rates during the limited schedule.

Create a schedule that suits you and μTorrent will take care of the rest.

4.HTTP / FTP downloads.

Using a download manager is a good idea for downloading anything other than torrents. And Free Download Manager is easily one of the best options for Windows users. FDM actually supports BitTorrent downloads as well, though it’s nowhere as good as μTorrent. You can therefore get the 2 MB lite version, which excludes BitTorrent support and a few other extra features. FDM also has a scheduler option, which can be accessed from Options > Settings > Downloads > Time limit. Here you can set the time period (00:00 – 07:00, in our case) within which FDM can start a download. Now, even if you add a new download at 9 p.m., FDM will start it only at 12 midnight.

You can also choose the time for a download to stop (7 a.m. / 07:00 in our case). Right click on the file to be downloaded, select Schedule > Stop, and set the stopping time to 07:00.

5.Save power!

Your PC is now completely ready to make full use of the 7/8 free hours that you get from your ISP. This also implies significantly larger electricity bills, unless you do your part to conserve max. possible energy. Here are some tips you could do with -

You don’t want your PC to keep running after the free download period. This is where AMP WinOFF comes in handy. Just specify a time (07:00) and activate this tiny app, and it’ll promptly shutdown your computer at that time. There are a bunch of other options in WinOFF, do what’s best for you.

Sometime, your downloads might finish well within the free download period, say at 5 a.m. Again you won’t want your PC to be running an extra 2 hours before it’s shut down by WinOFF. Thankfully, both μTorrent and FDM have options to shut down your computer once the downloads are over, as shown below.

Laptops are far more power efficient than desktops, but they can overheat if left running the entire night. If you’re using a laptop, make sufficient cooling arrangements.
Turn off the display of your monitor to save power. Most desktop monitors have a power button, while the “Power options” in Windows will help you for laptops. In Windows Vista / 7, click on the battery icon in the system tray and select “More power options”. Under your preferred plan, select “Change plan settings”. The window shown below will appear and you can adjust the settings to your liking. The values shown in the screenshot should be ideal for night time downloads. Do make sure that the option, “Put your computer to sleep”, is set to Never so that your laptop doesn’t sleep half way through the downloads!

The Internet is HUGE, go start your downloads ~~today~~ tonight! And if you’ve got your own downloading secrets, do share with us in your comments.

How to backup and synchronise bookmarks in different browsers

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:19:00 +0000

If you bookmark a lot of websites, it’s always a good idea to have them backed them up somewhere. The best backup place, of course, is the Internet where all your bookmarks stay safe from any possible hardware failures that may cripple your PC (let’s hope not!). In this post, we shall see how to effectively backup and synchronize your bookmarks in all the five major browsers – IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

Delicious for all!

Delicious is no stranger to us, being the largest online bookmark organising and sharing service. Meanwhile, Delicious also offers official add-ons for Firefox and Internet Explorer that keep the bookmarks in your browser and your Delicious account completely synchronized. If you’re using another browser, simply grab the Bookmark on Delicious bookmarklet and use it to save bookmarks in your Delicious account (rather than your browser).

Of course, Delicious isn’t the end of the world, and you can choose from various other options if you want to. Read on!

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer continues to be the most popular browser, and version 8 has really made this browser worth a second look.

Manual : Internet Explorer allows you to export all your ~~bookmarks~~ favorites, cookies, and feed items as an HTML file. To do so, click on the Favorites button and select the Import and Export… option.

IE7Pro : We’ve shown you all but half the goodies that IE7Pro brings to IE. This tiny tool has an “online service” that can upload your favorites to it’s servers and sync it automatically across all your other computers (running IE with IE7Pro). To enable this online service, fire up IE7Pro’s Preferences window (Ctrl + F7), move to Online Service, and check the Sync bookmarks automatically option. You’ll of course need an IE7Pro account, and creating one is child’s play from the interface.

Windows Live toolbar : Another way to sync favorites is by using the Windows Live Toolbar. Just sign in to your Windows Live account through the toolbar, and it will keep syncing your favorites with your online Windows Live account. The favorite links can be accessed online at http://favorites.live.com.

Mozilla Firefox

We all love Firefox. With over 6000 add-ons and counting, there are always more than one ways to get something done with this browser. And backing up bookmarks is no exception.

Manual : Like IE, manually backing up bookmarks in Firefox is dead simple.

Xmarks : Xmarks (previously Foxmarks) is a solid add-on that can sync your bookmarks and even passwords across multiple PCs. In addition, Xmarks can suggest tags for new bookmarks, and show information about your visited sites based on this bookmark database. Xmarks is also available as Foxmarks for IE 6 / 7 and Safari 3(Mac OS X only), though with significantly less features.

Opera

Opera is well-known for overcoming it’s lack of extensive add-ons by including a vast array of inbuilt features. So it should be no surprise that this sleek browser comes with the handy Opera Link, which can synchronise your bookmarks, notes, Speed Dial, history, and even searches across all your devices running any version of Opera. To enable Opera Link, select Synchronize Opera from the File menu, sign in / create your My Opera account, and select the items that you want to be synced. All these items can be accessed anywhere from your My Opera page.

Manual : Opera allows manual importing and exporting of bookmarks, feeds, and contacts. To export bookmarks as an Opera-supported list only, choose Export Opera Bookmarks…; else select the Export Bookmarks as HTML….

Google Chrome

Chrome is a relatively new browser, with less robust bookmark managing features than other browsers. Nevertheless, it does allow you to manually export bookmarks as an HTML file. Open Chrome, and press Ctrl + Shift + B to open the Bookmark Manager. Now select Export Bookmarks… under Tools option. If you’re looking to backup the complete profile including your history, bookmarks, searches etc., try the free Google Chrome Backup tool.

As of now, there isn’t any way to setup automatic online syncing of bookmarks in Chrome.

Safari

Safari hasn’t gained much popularity among Windows users, and there aren’t many useful add-ons available for it. If you do use Safari, you can manually backup your bookmarks through File > Export Bookmarks…

How do you organise, backup and sync your bookmarks? Say in the comments!

How to free up space on your hard-disk

Ashutosh Mishra — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:47:00 +0000

Three years ago, I would have run out of ideas on what to store on a 80 gig drive. Today, I’m practically running out of space on my 250 gig hard-drive. Internet is growing fast, and so are the number of stuff you simply can’t stay without downloading off it. Getting cheap external storage drives is really easy, but with a bit of poking around you can still squeeze out quite a number of gigs from your existing disk.

1.Remove unwanted System Restore points and shadow copies.

You’ll be amazed how much space the System Restore points can take up over time. Add to that the new “shadow copying” feature in Vista – ability to store previous versions of modified files – and you’re easily losing a good portion of your hard disk. If your PC is clean of any viruses and / or has no registry problems, you can safely delete most of these backups to free up some serious space. We’ve already shown you how to do that with Windows’ inbuilt Disk Cleanup, and also with the third-party CCleaner. Do note that Disk Cleanup will remove shadow copies, which CCleaner doesn’t.

I tried this after using my laptop for four months and recovered nearly 35GB space (almost 15% of the hard-disk space). Your mileage will of course vary depending on

your hard-disk size
how long you’ve been using your system
when was the last time you tried this method – the more frequently you try, the less effective it becomes.

2.Ditch that multi-GB game that you’ve already finished a dozen times.

Chances are you’ve completed some mighty big game/s a number of times, but haven’t cared about taking them off your PC. If so, proceed to Programs and Features (Vista) or Add / Remove Programs (XP) and uninstall these games from your computer. Considering the sizes of today’s games, you could recover a precious few gigs of space.

3.Go lean, go cloud.

As with games, you can also do away with any big-size software that you don’t use (like Dreamweaver and Photoshop). Do scroll through our “leanest PC pack” to pick up the smallest yet absolutely useful apps for your PC.

The ever increasing cloud storage can keep quite a bit of your data. For example, you could easily keep all your documents, photos, and even a lot of music in the 25GB space offered by Windows Live SkyDrive. Then there are these cloud services which let you do most of your daily job like normal applications : Google Docs is a serious office / student suite, Photoshop Express brings the organising goodness of Lightroom and editing basics of Photoshop together, and meebo lets you talk to all your pals from all possible networks.

4.Track down duplicate files and remove them.

If you frequently download TV shows and other big videos from the Internet, chances are you might have downloaded the same video twice or more. Detecting and deleting these duplicates can help, as videos usually take up quite some space. DoubleKiller is a nice utility that notifies you of all duplicate copies on your PC.

5.Dude, go get an external.

Whatever you do, you simply can’t store 50.01GB of data in a 50GB disk. Heck, you can’t actually store 50GB of data either. If your hard disk is being too small for your needs, go get an external disk; they can store terabytes of data and are damn cheap anyway. Good deals can always be found at NewEgg.com.

How much space did you carve out of your hard disk? Say out in the comments.

How to order a completely free CD of Ubuntu

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:27:00 +0000

Ubuntu is easily the most popular Linux distro of today, and one of the main reasons that has propelled it above other distros is that you can order a CD of Ubuntu from Canonical, completely for free. Yes, you read it right – an attractive looking Ubuntu CD at absolutely NO cost! If you didn’t know this before, here’s how you can order a free copy of the latest Ubuntu version now :

1. Go to Ubuntu ’s ShipIt! page. Click on the required link depending on whether you want a desktop CD or a server CD.

2. Now you’ve to sign in through Canonical’s Launchpad service. If you don’t have a Launchpad account, create one using the instructions.

3. Once you’ve filled up your details like display name and password, click on Continue and you’ll be taken to the CD Order page, where you’ll have to fill up certain fields like your name, address (of course!), phone number etc. Once done, select “Submit Request” and Canonical will book ONE Ubuntu CD for you. You can also make special requests for multiple discs, but these requests may take longer time to process or may even be rejected.

Orders for Kubuntu and Edubuntu CDs can be made from their respective ShipIt! pages. Kubuntu | Edubuntu

Of course, if you’ve a fast internet connection you can always download the image from torrents and burn it to a CD, as the free CDs can take as long as two months to arrive via shipping.

Ubuntu CDs can be used as live discs to explore it’s features, and can even used to install Ubuntu as an application in Windows (which can be removed like any other program)! So why not give it a try!

Access blocked websites and browse anonymously with Tor

Ashutosh Mishra — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:23:00 +0000

One thing that absolutely stinks about most educational institutes is that they block access to a ridiculously large number of websites (and nearly everything that we frequently use). Thankfully there are software available that can help you get past the nosy firewalls of your college.

Open source project Tor provides a network of virtual tunnels that allow you to browse any website anonymously. The complete software package installs four tools – Vidalia, Privoxy, Tor and Torbutton (for Firefox), which work in coordination to give you access all those blocked websites like Facebook, Orkut, or Digg.

Do note that Tor works best in fast network connections, and you may encounter lags in a slow connection.

Tor is a free download for Windows and Mac OS X.

Also check out the killer apps and resources for a rocking hostel life.

Windows Vista features you still might be unaware of

Ashutosh Mishra — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:26:00 +0000

Windows Vista is almost 2 years old, and will soon be overwhelmed by it’s successor – Windows 7. But there’s no denying the fact that Vista is HUGE, and there is a good chance you still might not have found out some of it’s hidden features.

Tablet PC Input Panel

Windows Vista included a cool new feature for Tablet PCs (handheld devices with a touch screen) called Tablet PC Input Panel . This feature is, however, available in desktop versions of Vista as well. This tool includes a writing pad, a character pad, and an on-screen keyboard. While not practically useful in desktops and laptops, you can still have fun fiddling around with it with your mouse. To access this feature, right click on the taskbar and select Tablet PC Input Panel from Toolbars.

Windows Vista Demos

Very much like the “Windows XP Tour” feature in it’s predecessor, Windows Vista includes a handful of video demonstrations designed to introduce you to personal computing and the operating system itself. To access these videos, go to Welcome Center under Control Panel, and select “Windows Vista Demos” under “Get Started with Windows” (you’ll have to click on Show all 13 items…).

Gadgets are removable from the Sidebar

Windows Vista included a new feature called Sidebar, where you can add from a given list of gadgets. Sidebar was an innovative feature, but it took too much of the desktop space and abusively ate memory, and has subsequently been discarded in Windows 7. 7 sports freely floating desktop gadgets, which run pretty independent on one another. However, you can actually detach the gadgets from the Vista Sidebar as well and place them anywhere on the desktop! Right click any gadget, select “Detach from Sidebar”, and drag it over to anywhere on the desktop. The gadgets will continue to depend on the Sidebar, but at least they WILL float freely around your desktop.

So here are the three Vista features that might have eluded you so far. What other Vista features do you think need more attention than they’ve received? Speak out in your comments.