Using Web and Technology to Enhance Your Life

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If you download a lot from the internet, chances are you have DVDs and possibly hard drives lying around filled with music, movies, games and software lying around.

In such situations, when we finally need a particular movie or software, it can be difficult to remember exactly which DVD or HDD it was saved in.

The best way to avoid such a situation is to catalog all your DVDs using a Catalog software.

The best disc catalog software for Windows, in my opinion, is Cathy.

Screenshot:

Click here to visit the developer’s website.

What these software do is that they index all the files in your disc – save the names of the files and folders.

So the next time you are looking for a particular file or folder, you can do a quick search and find out exactly which disc the particular file was saved in.

e.g the other day I was looking to reinstall open office. So I did a quick search and found out that Open Office was burnt to DVD no 8. So, instead of looking through all the DVDs and HDDs, all I had to do look for DVD no. 8.

Now there is no dearth of Disc Catalog softwares, both free and paid, in the market.

But a common drawback among most of these is that they are bloated with too many unnecessary features, hence making them slow and laggy – especially on slower PCs.

Either their file indexing speed is too low or their searching algorithm is not efficient enough. Or they’re too expensive.

If you are looking for the fastest, cleanest, easiest and totally free software to catalog files and folders in Windows, you can’t go wrong with Cathy.

Do you know use or prefer any other disc catalog software? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Are certain audio files not loud enough?

Are you looking for a software to boost the volume of mp3 or audio files?

If so, I have just the solution for you.

One day I was listening to my music and found that my new headphones were not loud enough for me to listen to the track.

So I went about searching for something that would increase the volume level of that mp3 files that I was listening to.

And this is the best solution i that found: it’s called MP3Gain.

Not only is it free but it is also Open Source!

And it works perfectly.

I is able to increase the volume, without affecting the audio quality of the files. That is, its algorithm is completely lossless!

The details of how exactly it does this can be found on their website.

Here’s what they say about this matter:

MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear.
Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

But the only thing that really matters to us is that it works!

Click here to download MP3Gain.

You can also use MP3Gain to normalize the volume level of different mp3 files so that you do not have to change the volume for each track as they start playing.

I remember reading about this in some windows 95 magazine (lol), but a friend showed it to me again today. I guess this trick is still popular so I’m sharing it with you guys (although many of you might already know it).

You can use the default notepad in windows as a journal or a log.

Fire up notepad.

Write .LOG on the first line.

Press enter. Now save your file and quit notepad.

The next time you open it, you’ll see the date and time when the file was saved has been appended to the .txt file.

Write a new entry and you’ll see the same thing has happened again.

So if you want to, you can use notepad as a journal too. Just write your post, save it and close it. Notepad will automatically insert the date and time.

Have you ever been in a situation in which you wanted to open multiple links on a page in different page.

If you are using firefox, there’s an easy way to do this without multiple middle-clicking (btw did you know middle-clicking on a link in firefox automatically opens it in a new tab).

The way to open more than one tab simultaneously is by using a nifty little add-on called tab mix plus.

Click here to install tab mix plus. You’ll need to restart firefox after installation.

Now go to a page with multiple links.

Select multiple links with a simple drag selection.

Now right-click on the selected are and click on “Open Links in New Tabs”

Tab mix plus has some other nifty features too, but we’ll discuss those sometime else.

Or you can use the comment box to discuss them right now.

Whether you are stuck with using Microsoft Outlook or like using it, you can’t deny the fact that it is can get very slow and unresponsive at times.

This is especially true if you have a lot of items in the inbox or if you have e-mails with huge attachments (in terms of file size).

Instead of presenting you with a 2000 word thesis on MS Outlook, here I present you with 2 quick ways you can use to dramatically speed up Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007:

1. Disable all the add-ins.

On the menu bar, click on Tools -> Trust Center.

Click on the Add-Ins tab.

Near the bottom, click Go.

Say goodbye to the laggy and unresponsive user interface.

If you’re a Google geek like I am, I’m sure you use all sorts of different searches. I’m talking about various prefixes that you can add in front of your search query to get such results as per your requirements. I’m talking about using google search operators.

There are various such modifications that you can use. Some that I use are:

site: <sitename.com>

e.g site: shypy.com  -> this will display all the pages indexed by google for the domain shypy.com

allintitle: <keyword>

e.g allintitle: dog training -> this will display all the pages that contain all of the words in the search string, “dog training” in this example, in the <title> tag of the webpage

filetype: <.filetype> <keyword>

e.g filetype: .mp3 “Beethoven Symphony No.9″ -> this will display all the pages that contain mp3 files with the words “Beethoven Symphony No.9″ in the file name.

allinanchor: <keyword>

e.g allinanchor: best laptop 2010 -> this will display only pages in which the anchor text on links to the pages contain the words “best,” “laptop,” and “2010”.

But for me, someone who uses these kinds of searches extensively, it is very inefficient to to type out all the text every time I want to use them.

So if you’re lazy person like me, what you can do is at these searches as bookmarks in Firefox and assign a keyword to them. This will allow you to use these searches by just typing in the keyword in the address bar.

Here’s how you do it in Firefox.

1. Open “Organize Bookmarks” from the bookmarks menu OR press ctrl+shift+B

2. Right-Click in the bookmarks window and select “New Bookmark”

3. Type in any name you want (doesnt matter)

4. Type in the following string in the Location textbox: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:%s

You can replace link: with allintitle: allinanchor: cache: site: filetype: or a dozen other google operators.

5. Type in your keyword. This is very important because you will be using this keyword to perform searches straight from the address bar.

6. Click on and you’re done.

Now go to the address bar (Ctrl + L) and type in “all: amazon kindle” and you will be shown all pages with the words amazon and kindle in the page title.

This can be used in a variety of ways.

Maybe you are an internet marketer like me and need to perform different types of searches to gauge competition for different keywords.

Maybe you are an avid reader and want to see if the pdf version of your favorite book is available online. Just perform a quick filetype search.

Maybe you want to see all the pages in the website.

You can now perform different types of google searches directly from the address bar using a single keyword.

Thanks to Mardeg from #firefox @irc.mozilla.org for helping with this article.

I’m sure there’ve been times that you wish you could upload images directly from Windows.

Now there is a tool that you can use to do exactly that. All you need to do is right click on the image in your windows explorer or desktop and click on upload button.

The software am talking about is known as Rightload.

Click here to download Rightload.

It also has plug-ins for various image hosting sites like imgur, flickr, imageshack.

Now you can upload images to imgur directly from the windos context menu!

If you have a problem with Firefox showing garbled text on specific webpages and don’t know how to fix it, then I might have the answer for you.

It looks like the text is in a different language or font. This is what I’m talking about:

Note that this problem seems to appear on only certain websites. Also this issue does not appear in Internet Explorer.

This problem is due to the incompatibility of Helvetica font installation with Firefox. This might occur especially if you have acquired Helvetica by “alternative means”.

If your PC doesn’t have Helvetica installed, it should default to arial, but obviously that didn’t happen in our case.

But never mind, because this problem can be easily solved by removing Helvetica from a regedit.

Press Windows Key + R and type in regedit. Press enter.

Now browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts.

Right click on Helvetica and delete it.

Voila! Problem solved.

Here is a neat little trick to register domains for only 99 cents, thats right less than a buck, at Godaddy.com

Most of you might already have a godaddy account, and even though their customer interface sucks, I use them fairly often due to the competetive prices. To use this, you must have a credit card verified/certified godaddy account.

So here is how you register a .com (which costs around $10) for only $0.99 (plus ICANN fess).

1. Head over to godaddy.

2. Type in the domain that you want to register and proceed over to checkout as usual.

3. When you get to the “review your shopping cart” stage (see figure), use the promo code: test99.

4. Once you click on “Apply Code“, you’ll see the price updated to $0.99 + 20 cents ICANN fees.

5. Congratulations, you’ve just registered a premium .com TLD for 99 cents.

Make sure you take maximum advantage of it while it lasts. Who know, godaddy might disable the coupon code in a couple of days.

We’ve all had to do it sometime in our careers. I’m talking about creating headers images and logos for our sites and banners for advertisement.

Now I know some of you don’t like to get your hands dirty and outsource all the graphics work. But since I’m less of a designer/developer and more of a traffic broker, I don’t need super high quality graphics. Hence,  I do everything myself (well, alteast most of the time).

I use Photoshop CS3 and I like to think that I’m pretty good with it(I’ve tried to use GIMP too, and no, it doesn’t even compare(to Photoshop)).

We’re thus faced with the predicament of finding good quality, royalty free images that we can use for:

1. Website Graphics and 2. Blog Post Images.

Now I am not a kind of person that’d like to pay even a couple of bucks for an image, because creating designs is not what I make a living off. Either way, there are quite a few image sharing sites that provide roaylty free images for free. Here are my favorites, in no particular order:

1. Stock.Xchng – Thousands of images – many of them of very high quality. Unless you’re working on a really obscure niche (which is usually the case), this site alone will suffice.

2. Flickr – This is one of my favorite sites. Thousands upon thousands of highly imaginative and creative images taken by some of the best photographers in the world. The only problem with flickr is the fact that you can’t use the images without permission from the owner. Just send them a polite PM requesting the use of their photo/image in your website. Be courteous and very specifil – usually they let you use their image for free!

3. MorgueFile : Similar to Stock.Xchng. This is a good resource too.

4. FreeDigitalPhotos: Thousands of royalty free photos for websites, PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, forums, blogs, school projects and homework. Our images can also be used for artist’s reference, and video productions.

5. CreatingOnline Stock Photos: Very simliar to sxc.hu. Even though this has a relatively smaller collection, you can still find some great photos if you’re lucky.

There you have it – now you know where to head off for when you’re looking for that special photo for your banner and dont want to open your wallet.