Smashing Magazine has a well-written article on firewalls: A Comprehensive Guide To Firewalls. The writing must be comprehensible to anyone even if he’s not aware of the technical jargon involved. The writer does the trick by some similes that make sense.
A computer is like a big housing complex. Every computer on the Internet has a numerical address, known as an IP address. At each address are two very large blocks of apartments. Each block contains 65,535 individual apartments. The vast majority of them are empty, but a few, especially the lower ones, have very communicative residents. All communication is by mail.
If you are lost about firewalls or if your knowledge is limited, give it a read.
In each and every site you visit you get those large Facebook widgets, which are both ugly and take up your bandwidth. I was searching for some good Adblock rules and came across some rules to get rid of these widgets forever.
||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
To apply the rules, open the Adblock Plus options in your browser, go to the Customize tab, click on ‘Edit’ and paste the rules at the end of the rules list. And don’t forget to save once pasted. Worked in both Chrome and Opera, might work in Firefox as well.
UPDATE:
Found this post which links to a set of Adblock rules that will get rid of almost all social sharing widgets. Simply go to the Adblock options, go to Filter Lists and add the above URL as a subscription.
Last.fm has announced that it will be taking down its radio service from all countries except for seven. The exceptions are US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. Which is indeed sad news. This means that buying a last.fm subscription is no longer worth it for the rest of the world. Scrobbling is not affected anyway.
Of course this ain’t the end of the world but it should worry everyone quite a bit. If you’re addicted to online music streaming, what are your other options? There are a few other good streaming sites available. The popular ones include 8tracks and Grooveshark, both of which has last.fm integration, i.e. scrobbling support.
Seen in the #git freenode channel today:
circle : How do I find projects to work on in github?
bremner : fwiw, this is not a git question.
circle : true
circle : but people here would know any way
One wouldn’t go to #linux and ask them about a good keyboard to buy because everyone there use keyboards and are techy enough to know what keyboards are the best.
From Quora:
Am I the only one who thinks the phrase “Fork me on GitHub” sounds like it has sexual implications?
This is a genuine question. I’ve asked several people what they thought about the phrase and not many feel the same way I do. I started to wonder if I was the only one.
Did I think it had sexual implications? Not until now. -_-
I wanted to find some 600×800 images for the Kindle and learned that Google Images doesn’t let you perform this kind of search now. However, there’s a small hack that lets you do exactly the same. Append the following text to the end of the Google Image search URL:
&tbs=islt:2mp,isz:ex,iszw:600,iszh:800
This will return only the images that match the exact size. Like in this example. You may replace the 600 (width) and 800 (height) with whatever dimensions you need.
Source: seroundtable.com
The Kindle comes with some stock screensavers, but you soon get tired of them. You can’t change them as easily as you change the wallpapers in your PC. The process involves getting into the diagnostics mode, enabling USBnet, SSHing to a server and moving some files. It’s not as scary as it sounds though.
If you use Linux, the process is less messy. I followed this guide and everything worked fine, except the password mario didn’t work. However, I could generate a password by entering the serial number in Amazon Kindle root password tool. A directory called ‘screensaver’ gets created in the Kindle, to where you can copy any jpg or png files, preferably 600×800 grayscale images.
If you use Windows, the following two videos will guide you through the process:
Getting into diagnostics mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZEhsCKgMHw
Changing the screensavers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG_pGDMsAYo
I also created an album of Paulo Coelho Kindle Screensavers. You can view and download them from here: http://imgur.com/a/QRDq6
Or download them as a zip file from here: Dropbox link
As I’ve mentioned previously, n7player is one of the coolest music players in the android world. Been a fan of it since its beta stages, I was elated to find out that n7player 2.0 has been released yesterday.
The most noticeable improvement is the better playlist management options. It’s now even _fun_ to move the songs back and forth in the playlist. Now it’s possible to save custom playlists as well. There are improvements in the equalizer and there’s a Genre mode of which I’m not much of a fan. Perhaps it’s time to tag the missing genres in my library. That ain’t easy.
Note that the free version works for only 14 days. They’ve reduced the price of the unlock key now, at $2.
So I’ve finally got Gmail’s Insert Files using Drive feature, which lets you attach files from your Google Drive into mails. Drive gives you 5GB of cloud storage for free, so now you can attach files with size up to 5GB. Earlier the maximum size of an attachment was 25MB. To check if you’ve got the feature by now, click on Compose and see if there’s a Drive icon in the toolbar.
This is much easier than uploading to somewhere else, like Dropbox, and emailing the link, since you can do everything within Gmail. Still, I’m in favor of Dropbox for cloud storage. Drive is just for attachments and Google Docs.
I was emailing some documents to the Kindle and it turned out that some sections of gray colored text in these documents are not readable. The solution is to change the color of the gray text to black. One option is to select all text and set the text color to black. But I wanted to change only the color of gray text (i.e. keep the red, green text as is). How does one do that? How do you find text with some color and replace them with another?
The in-built Find and Replace functionality in both Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer can do this. If you use Microsoft Word, press Ctrl+H to invoke the Find and Replace dialog box. While the cursor is on the Find what text box, click on More. To the bottom of the dialog, a Format button will appear. Click on it and choose the font style you want to find. Now go to the Replace with text box and repeat the same to choose the style you want to replace with. Finally press Replace All.
Click to enlarge
If you have several documents that need this operation, you don’t have to choose styles again and again coz Word saves the last Find and Replace parameters. The method is almost the same with LibreOffice Writer.
