My Internet Tips and Tricks

Search better on the Net

2008-04-14T15:26:00.008+05:30

Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post.

Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe

The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.

Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.

Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”

See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.

Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.

Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”

If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like :
"chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless"
Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.

Buy HP consumables on-line

2008-04-08T17:35:00.003+05:30

A few weeks back I came accross a link for purchasing HP cartridges/toners and other consumables on-line. This is the link : http://h50011.www5.hp.com/oac/index_in-en.html
You can place your order by selecting the printer or cartidge model and they are delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours and at worst 48 hours. The service is good and I was surprised to find that the prices were even better than what our regular vendor was already giving us. I would recommend this. HP also calls you to make sure the distributor has delivered in time.

Bookmarking on your PC & the Net

2008-03-30T10:50:00.008+05:30

What is bookmarking? It is the process of marking websites or blogs that you have visited for future reference so that you can visit them again.

Bookmarking on your PC :

In Firefox :
Once the web page is opened, you can click on "Bookmarks" on the menu at the top and then click on "Bookmark this page". You will see below all the web pages that you have bookmarked, so whenever you want to visit one of these web pages/websites again, you just have to click on Bookmarks and then click on the web page that you want to visit again.

In Internet Explorer :
Once the web page is opened, you can click on "Favourites" on the menu at the top and then click on "Add to favourites". You will see below the web pages that you have marked as favourite, so whenever you want to visit one of these web pages/websites again, you just have to click on Favourites and then click on the web page that you want to visit again.

Bookmarking on the Internet :
If you have bookmarked some websites on your PC at home and when you are working at your PC in office you might have wished you had access to your bookmarks on your home PC.
Now you have several bookmarking sites on the Net which allow you to do just that and then you have access to your "bookmarks" on any computer you might use in the whole wide world.

The following are just a few of the most popular bookmarking sites :

Propeller.com

Slashdot.org

Digg.com

Technorati.com

Del.icio.us

Stumbleupon.com

Twitter.com

Reddit.com

Tagza.com

Fark.com

Newsvine.com

Furl.net

swik.net

Connotea.org

Sphinn.com

Blinklist.com

Faves.com

Mister-wong.com

Spurl.net

Netvouz.com

Diigo.com

Backflip.com

Bibsonomy.org

Folkd.com

Linkagogo.com

Indianpad.com

Plugim.com

Myjeeves.ask.com

Buddy Marks

Connectedy

MyLinkVault

Google Bookmarks

Jumptags.com

Fetch

OYAX

A1 Webmarks

Bookmark Tracker

myVmarks

Mixx.com

Wirefan.com

Danogo.com

Symbaloo

Ximmy

Health Ranker

Ka-Boom-It.com

Virus : Use Internet Explorer you dope

2008-03-30T09:03:00.007+05:30

Have you ever got a message like "Use Internet Explorer you dope" or "I DON'T HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…" whenever you tried to use or install Firefox?

This worm/virus is doing the rounds and it comes through pen-drives. You may not be able to access Orkut and Youtube as well, you will probably get a message like "Orkut is banned, you fool, hahahaha" or "Youtube is banned, you fool, hahahaha".

To remove this worm just follow the following steps :

(1) Press the keys CTRL, ALT & DEL simultaneously to bring up the Task Manager

(2) Click on the "Processes" tab.
Look for svchost.exe under the image name.
There will be many but look for the ones which have your username (what you login with) under the username.
Press the DEL key to kill these processes. It will give you a warning, Click on the "Yes" button.
Look for more svchost.exe files with your username and repeat. Do not kill svchost.exe with SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE or NETWORK SERVICE as user name.

(3) Next, click on "My Computer".
In the address bar, type C:\heap41a and press enter. It is a hidden folder, and hence not visible if you try to view folders under C:\
Press "CTRL" and "A" keys simultaneously to select all the files in the folder.
Press the 'DEL' key - this will delete all the files selected.

(4) Click on "Start" button, click on "Run" and type "Regedit" without the quotes in the box.
In the menu, click on "Edit", then click on "Find".
Type “heap41a” without the quotes and press the "Enter" key.
You will see something like this “[winlogon] C:\heap41a\svchost.exe C:\heap(a number)\std.txt”
Select that by clicking on it and press the DEL key.
It will ask “Are you sure you want to delete this value”, click on 'Yes" button.
Close the registry editor.

The virus will have gone from your PC now.

(5) Lastly just make sure to delete the autorun.inf file and any folder whose name ends with .exe on any pen drive you may be using on your PC.

Save browsing time

2008-03-29T21:49:00.003+05:30

Have you been clicking on a link on a page and after the new page loads and you read all you want, you click on the "Back" button in your browser to come back to the main page?? If you have not been doing this, then this post is not for you else read on....

A link is something which is clickable.... it may be text or a picture and you know it is "clickable" if a hand image appears when you hover your mouse over it. Now if there are several links on a page that you want to open, like several instances that come up when you search for something in a search engine like Google or Yahoo, you can open each one by right-clicking on each and then clicking on "Open in new window". This way you can open several pages and by the time you[ve opened the 6th page, the first page will have loaded and be ready for reading.

Save typing time

2008-03-29T20:47:00.006+05:30

Tired of typing the same info like e-mail ids every day especially when you share the same computer with other family members? MemoKeys is a free software that allows you to program your keyboard so that typing your email id could be just pressing a combination of two keys. I've started using it a while ago and it really saves me some time and effort on a repetitive task.
You can download MemoKeys here.
Once you download and install MemoKeys, you will get something like below :

(1) First click on the 'F1' key or any other key of your choice in that row under "Control Keys".
(2) Next click on any key under "Second Key".
(3) Now in the white box below "Current combination", type whatever you need to type repetitively like your e-mail id.
(4) Next click on the "Set" button at the bottom. If you want to cancel this combination just click on the "Reset" button.

My example shows that I have used a combination of "F1" and "H" keys to type for me abc@hotmail.com. Now if you go to say http://www.hotmail.com/ and in the place where you are to feed the email id, you press the 'F1' and 'H' keys together, then the email id will automatically get saved. You will probably have numerous other texts like name, address, etc. that you need to type in on a daily basis especially if you register on sites every now and then.

A small icon for MemoKeys resides on the right side on your task bar at the bottom of the screen, so whenever you wnat to add more shortcuts, just right-click on the icon and click on "Manage shortcuts". Hope this helps you the way it helped me.

Why use Firefox

2008-03-21T12:34:00.011+05:30

How many of you have always used Internet Explorer (IE) to browse the Net and never really looked at any of the other browsers available? I have always used IE and have been quite comfortable with it until I found what Firefox has to offer.... and believe me it was worth the switch. I enumerate below some of the many plus points of Firefox and you can decide for yourself whether it is indeed worth the change.

The google search tool is incorporated in Firefox. In Internet Explorer (IE) you have to either download the google toolbar or perhaps set your homepage to google or add it to your favourites. On Firefox it is always available and the search is faster.
Tabs besides windows for quicker browsing : Allows you to open a link in a new tab or a new window. IE gives you the option to open a link in a new window only. Having too many windows open can be very annoying and time consuming. This facility of Firefox to have several tabs in one window is very good. It’s easy, quick and saves a lot of time navigating between windows; it’s faster navigating between windows.
If you want to open several bookmarks in one shot, you have to put them in one folder under bookmarks and open them in tabs. This is just not possible in IE – you cannot open several sites in a folder under “Favourites”.
It has it’s own batch download program. You can pause your download and continue it at a later time, something which is not possible with IE’s download manager. The download manager stores information such as file size and location of your downloaded file. When the download is complete, a small notification is displayed in the lower right side of the screen. In IE, if your internet connection fails you have to start from scratch all over again.
Security : Internet Explorer has some major security holes. Firefox has none.
You can drag and drop any link right into the top of the browser and it automatically adds a button.
No more Pop-Ups to annoy you. The default settings will allow no pop-ups but you get a message just above the web page displayed saying that popups from that website have been blocked. You can change the settings to allow for popups to be displayed for certain sites as the need maybe or not at all. In IE you need to use a third-party software to achieve the same thing.
Memory usage : Internet Explorer uses far more memory than Firefox.
Faster browsing so you spend less time waiting.
Firefox is free while IE is not.
Firefox is comparatively smaller in size and the download takes only a few minutes.
In Firefox you have more space as the History button is missing but you can have the sidebar for History (you will find it under View menu)
To search for any text on a particular web page, you would normally use Ctrl + F. Now you can do that even faster by pressing the "forward slash" key (it's the one that shares the key with the question mark on your keyboard) and thentype in what ypu want to search as usual. It's quick and easy!
Maintains HTML formatting : I copied some text from the left side of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and pasted it into notepad.

What I copied from IE is as follows :

Navigation
Main Page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article

What I copied from Firefox :

Navigation
* Main Page
* Contents
* Featured content
* Current events
* Random article

Now that you have seen all that Firefox has to offer, what are you waiting for?
Get Firefox with Google Toolbar now!!! Click on the square button below.