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How to Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required - just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.

Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to "Protect my Updates".

Let’s get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

How to Send Commands to the Remote Computer

Now that your basic configuration is done, it’s time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.

By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer. (Also see: Post to Twitter via Email)

By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.

By IM: Add the Twitter bot - twitter@twitter.com - to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.

By Web:If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

Download Files, Capture Remote Screenshots & more..

While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well.

For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home.

Here’s a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC - they’re case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.

Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I’ve come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what’s happening within the confines of your PC when you’re not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web (see example).

ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.

Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download <url> : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.

GetFile <filepath> : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don’t know the file page, use the command GetFileList <drivename> to get a list of file folders on that drive.

GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You’ll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill <process id> to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.

Conclusion:

TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there’s scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it’s not "instant". The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour.

And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.

Related: Twitter Guide: How to Do Everything with Twitter

How to Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Taking Full Screenshots of Web Pages Was Never This Easy!

Do you want to capture a full screenshot of a web page without installing any software or browser extensions?

Well, here’s a simple trick.

Open the web page that you want to capture, go to the address bar of the browser and type "aviary.com/" just before the http:// part of the URL.

For instance, if your web address is something like http://labnol.org, the new URL will become aviary.com/http://labnol.org - hit Enter and there you have an editable screenshot image of that page.

Or add this bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar and you can even save yourself from typing aviary.com every time you want to capture a screenshot.

You can save the image to the desktop or further add annotation using the Type Tool, freehand brushes, arrows and other tools available in the Aviary editor. It can’t get easier than this.

And it even works with the Flash videos of YouTube.

Another web services that allows screen capture of web pages in the browser is Kwout.com though it won’t do full pages. [via RWW]

Related: Capture Website Screenshots [with desktop tools]

Taking Full Screenshots of Web Pages Was Never This Easy! - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Stop Ignoring your Less Active Twitter Friends

The Twitter website and most desktop clients of Twitter present status updates of people you follow in a "River of News" format. That is, the most recent updates of your Twitter friends are always displayed at the top and these get pushed down as new messages arrive.

Why do friends get ignored on Twitter?

You are comfortable reading news in the river style but it present one major problem. Say you have two friends on Twitter - Mr. Active who sends a new tweet every 5 minutes and Mr. Busy who rarely tweets. Now in the current format, you are most likely to miss all updates of Mr. Busy because his tweets will continuously get pushed down by Mr. Active.

So you have no intention to ignore Mr. Busy but he is still getting ignored because your Twitter App is using the River format that naturally favors Mr. Active.

Twitter updates without the River

There are however some good solutions to this practical problem:

Twitter 100 - This app creates some sort of a collage of all the people you follow on Twitter (see example) - you can read their most recent updates in one go and the page will auto-refresh every 3 minutes.

Twitter For Busy People - The Twitter 100 mashup discussed above work great for people who follow only a few dozen people on Twitter but if you have hundreds of contacts on Twitter, check out Twitter for Busy People (see example).

This mashup displays a series of thumbnails of your Twitter friends in order of their most recent updates. You can then hover the mouse over any of these thumbnail images to read the most recent status update from that person.

Or click the "more" link to see the last 25 updates from the friend without closing that pop-up. Pretty cool. Thanks @ev.

For more tips & tricks, check out The Twitter Guide.

Stop Ignoring your Less Active Twitter Friends - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Want to See a Photo You’ve Taken on the Bing Homepage?

The homepage of bing.com features a new background image everyday - you can use the arrow buttons in the lower right corner to view images of the last 7 days or check this archive that includes every single image that has been showcased on Bing since its public launch on June 1.

While a majority of these photographs have been licensed from stock photography websites like Getty Images or Fotostock, Microsoft has also featured images (e.g., Patagonia) that were shot by their employees.

And now here’s an opportunity to get one of your own images featured on the official Bing homepage for a 24 hour period.

To participate, upload a photograph to this Facebook page - the guidelines suggest that photograph should be in horizontal mode and the composition should be such that main area of interest in the picture should not fall behind the Bing search box (or the non-grey portion of the above image).

The winning photo will be selected on August 3rd by a combination of user ratings on Facebook and evaluation by the Bing homepage editorial team. Also check this list of photos that have recently been submitted for the Bing contest.

Hide Bing Images:

If you like to prevent Bing from displaying the background image, just add rb=0 to the bing.com so that your new URL looks something like this - bing.com/?rb=0. Change that to value to 1 and the background will reappear.

Want to See a Photo You’ve Taken on the Bing Homepage? - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Import Google Images into your Office Documents

The Office Online website is an excellent resource to find high-resolution stock photographs, clip arts, GIF animations and other graphics that you can use in your PowerPoint presentations or Word Documents for free without having to worry about any licensing issues.

You can also search through this huge collection of images using the Insert -> Clip Art command available inside all Microsoft Office programs. These images can then be downloaded to the local hard-drive so you can quickly use them in other documents as well without having to search the Office Online site again.

The Microsoft gallery of images, though huge, looks miniscule when compared with Google Images which has a few billion images in its index (warning - not all images found via Google Image Search can be used in documents due to copyright issues).

However, if you limit your search to images that are either in the Public Domain or available under some sort of Creative Commons License, Google Images (or for that matter, any image search engine including Flickr) is a good place to find photographs and clip-arts for inserting in documents.

Offisync, a free plug-in that lets you open Google Documents in Microsoft Office, can now be used for importing images from Google Image Search into your Office files as well.

The image search feature of Offisync is pretty similar to the built-in Clip Art gallery search. Upon installation, Offisync will add a new Google Search option to your Office Toolbar - you can directly search for pictures and then insert any one of them into document or presentation that you are currently working on.

The plug-in won’t add any attribution related information but it shows the URL of the page containing the original image so you copy-paste that information into the document manually.

While Offisync officially works only with Google Image Search, here’s a simple tip that will help you search other photo websites via Offisync as well -  use the site: operator with your search query.

For instance, if you want to limit your search to Flickr, use site:flickr.com <query> and it will only display pictures that are on Flickr. Use site:gov with the query to search for US Government photos that normally don’t carry any restrictions.

Add Website Screenshots in Documents

Other than inserting images, you may also use the Offisync plug-in to add website screenshots into your documents or spreadsheets.

Use the web search feature to invoke the built-in web browser, type the full URL of the website in the Address bar (or use Google Search to find that website) and Clip. Drag the marquee around the area that you want to capture and hit the Insert button.

Related: How to Edit Clip Art in Office

Import Google Images into your Office Documents - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

A New Member In Our Family

We have a new member in our family - a baby boy!

It’s such a joyous moment and blogging / twittering will stay light for a few days.

Thanks for all your good wishes.

A New Member In Our Family - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Find Sites That Are Hotlinking to your Amazon S3 Files

Hotlinking, as you probably know, occurs when people embed files in their web pages that are otherwise hosted on someone else’s web server. Some photo sharing sites (e.g., Flickr) allow hotlinking as long as you link to the original source of the image but in most other cases, hotlinking sites will almost always increase the bandwidth use of the other site.

The problem becomes more serious if you using a service like Amazon S3 (or CloudFront) to host your images because Amazon charges a fee for every byte of data downloaded from their servers. Thus you’ll also have to pay for all sites that are consuming your bandwidth by hotlinking to your S3 hosted content.

Who is hotlinking to your Amazon S3 Images?

If you like to know about other sites or web pages that are linking your Amazon S3 files, there are two options:

Option #1 (Simple): Link your Amazon S3 (or CloudFront) account with S3Stat and turn on server logging for your S3 buckets - you can do this from the S3Stat web dashboard itself.

The service will regularly parse your Amazon S3 server access logs and will then prepare a list of referrer URLs that are accessing your S3 content (see example). If you spot a web URL that doesn’t belong to you, chances are that the site is hotlinking to one of your S3 files.

Option #2 (Free): The S3Stat service discussed above is pretty easy to use but costs about $5 per month.

If you are looking for a free alternative to monitor your S3 files, here’s a tip - download any of the free Amazon S3 clients (I recommend CloudBerry Explorer) and enable logging for buckets whose usage you want to track. Wait for some time for Amazon to create logs of your S3 files and then download all these log files to a local folder on your hard-drive (again using any of the S3 clients).

Merge the log files into one text file and import it into a spreadsheet program like Excel. Now convert the data into columns using "space" as the delimiter. If everything goes fine, the 17th column (or Q) will contain the HTTP Referrer headers and these are often the URLs of the linking or embedding page.

The following screencast should make the process more clear ^#.

How to Prevent Sites from Hotlinking

Unlike the Apache server where you can prevent other sites from hotlinking to your images through some .htaccess rules, such a feature in not available in S3.

Therefore the best way to deal with hotlinking on S3 is to send an email to the owner of the other site or simply move your images to another location and update the hyperlinks in your own web pages.

The other approach that you may also want to explore useses Signed URLs (see tip #2) - these are temporary links that automatically expire after a given time (similar to rapidshare). It may not be the right thing to do for static images but if you are hosting downloadable files like videos, ebooks or MP3s, time limited URLs could be a good option on S3.

Related: More Amazon S3 Tutorials

Find Sites That Are Hotlinking to your Amazon S3 Files - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Tips for Producing Better Video Slideshows with Animoto

If you are already using Animoto to create video slideshows of your photos, here are some tips for producing even better video.

Animoto is an easy tool for creating impressive videos out of your boring digital photos in minutes. Just upload your pictures to the Animoto website (or pull them directly from Flickr or Picasa), select a background music to play with your video slideshow, add some text (optional) and you’re done.

Check these pages on YouTube and Twitter to see some more video clips that have been created using Animoto.com.

The basic version of Animoto is free but it limits you to 30 second video clips that aren’t downloadable though you can upload them to YouTube. You can however sign-up for Animoto using this special link and it will give you the option to create one full length video on Animoto for free.

A full length video can be as long as the duration of the song and you can download the video as well though it’s not in HD format.

Animoto Tips for Better Video

While Animoto makes is super easy for your to create professional looking videos without any preparation, a little bit of planning can make your slideshows look even better. Here are some tips from Animoto:

1. When uploading photos to Animoto, always pick photos that have a landscape orientation as portrait photos can sometimes format oddly during the video render process.

2. Animoto will automatically determine the duration of each picture in the video slideshow but if there’re pictures that you really want to emphasize in the video, select the images in the video editor and use the spotlight button.

3. When adding text to your video, always make sure that their pictures on either side of the text slide else your text will lack any moving video in the background.

4. Your choice of music determines the transition speed. If you select a slow classical song, your music video will have slow transitions whereas if you select rock, the transitions will happen fast - go for the latter if you are looking to create MTV style video clips.

5. Animoto consumes around 15-20 images for their 30 second shorts. If you upload more images, they are likely to be discarded in the final video so pick the best shots before starting the render process. For full-length videos, you an upload upto 300 shots but the number of pictures used would really depend on the choice of your music - slow music means less pictures.

6. While most people use Animoto for creating fast slideshows, you can adjust the video speed to 1/2x for a more traditional slideshow.

7. If you want to brand your Animoto slideshows, make sure that the last image in the slideshow is not a photograph but an image of your logo.

Tips for Producing Better Video Slideshows with Animoto - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

All the New Features of Firefox 3.5

This screencast video has a great overview of all the new features that are part of Firefox 3.5.

The video is embedded on the Mozilla homepage using the HTML 5 video tag and should therefore play in Firefox 3.5 or Google Chrome even without the Flash Player.

Kevin Purdy too has a great rundown of all the new tools & features of Firefox 3.5 including the very useful option to clean Internet history selectively.

All the New Features of Firefox 3.5 - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Desktop Widget Reminds You to Shutdown the Computer

Do you turn off the computer when you are done for the day?

Great if you replied yes but if you aren’t in the habit of shutting down the computer at the end of the work day, you aren’t just wasting money (through electricity bills) but the laziness on your part is making an impact on the environment as well. From a 2009 report:

If 100 users remembered to turn off their computers at the end of their work day, this could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an amount equivalent to taking 2.14 cars off the road in a month.

If all of the PCs in the world are powered down for just one night, this alone would save enough energy to light up the Empire State Building for more than 30 years.

If the numbers ring a bell, you may want to try this desktop widget that quietly sits in the system tray and monitors your system usage like how frequently you turn off the computer and how long does the computer stay idle (powered on but unused) after working hours.

The widget then tries to estimate the amount of energy you may have saved by turning off the computer. It also includes a handy timer that will remind you to power off the computer one hour before the end of the work day.

Now the more interesting part. The widget also uploads your usage on a community website where everyone can see how frequently other widget users in different parts of the world are turning off their computer. It’s a social site so can you also see stats of your friends who too may have installed the widget.

The HP "Power to Change" widget in an Adobe AIR application so it should work just fine on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. The widget will not count time that a computer in standby or hibernate mode as idle time.

Another eco-friendly tip: Use Less Paper when Printing

Desktop Widget Reminds You to Shutdown the Computer - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)