डिजिटल प्रेरणा

Build a Cooling Pad for your Laptop

Eeshan Chatterjee was looking for a cooling pad to prevent his laptop from overheating. Being a student, he didn’t have the budget for a readymade cooling pad so he decided to create one on his own using some cardboard pieces and a USB fan.

Eeshan inserted thermocol pieces at the edges to adjust the height of the cardboard according to the fan. Now the continuous circulation of air below the laptop prevents the machine from heating up.

Here are some pictures of Eeshan’s home-made laptop cooling pad.

Build a Cooling Pad for your Laptop

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Give your YouTube Channel a Makeover with Custom Themes

Like Twitter, YouTube also supports custom backgrounds and color themes so you can completely change the look of your YouTube channel in minutes and make it stand out- see example.

The unique thing about YouTube is that it supports transparent backgrounds so you can be a lot more creative with your themes. And while there are no statistics to support this, people are more likely to subscribe to your YouTube videos if the landing page looks more professional.

Watch the following 101 video to see how easy it is to customize the theme and other parts of your YouTube channel.

How to Create YouTube Backgrounds?

If you are the creative type, you can build a custom background for your YouTube channel in three easy steps. I learned the trick from YouTube user Sammy.

Step 1. Go to you YouTube channel and log out of your Google Account so that you don’t see that “Edit Channel” bar on YouTube.

Step 2. Maximize the browser screen and press Ctrl-0 to remove zoom, if any. Then hit F11 to hide all the menu bars and the scrollbars.

Step 3. Press Print-Screen to take a screen capture of the maximized YouTube channel page and then paste this image from the clipboard into Photoshop or GIMP or Paint.NET or any other image editing program.

Step 4. That becomes your starting template. You know where the different elements of the page will appear so you can tweak the design accordingly.

If you don’t want to do all the hard work, just download Sammy’s readymade template (PSD). And you are looking for a slightly wider YouTube template to support bigger monitors, use this PSD instead courtesy YouTube user Joe.

Where Can I Download YouTube Themes?

Here are some of best sites where you can download YouTube themes for free. Some themes may use custom font names and color schemes so you’ll have to key-in those RGB values manually.

1. MyTubeDesign.com – The site has an excellent collection of YouTube templates neatly arranged in categories and you can download most of these templates for free. If you are a YouTube partner, MyTubeDesign has channel designs for you as well.

2. YTLayouts.net – This is another useful site with a good collection of YouTube layouts. Unlike MyTubeDesign, all designs on the YTLayouts website are free for download. The site also has a collection of Photoshop tutorials in case you want to do them on your own.

3. BackgroundTube.com – They do have some good templates for your YouTube channel but make sure you avoid the ones that require you to fill some sort of surveys before showing the download links.

Once your new design is ready, grab some YouTube buttons to promote your video channel. And if you know of any other site that offers YouTube backgrounds for free, please let me know in the comments.

Give your YouTube Channel a Makeover with Custom Themes

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Beautiful Photo-Mosaic Posters of Steve Jobs

If you enjoy using Apple products or are a huge fan of Steve Jobs, you’ll absolutely love these photo-mosaic posters.

The posters are a work of Charis Tsevis, a visual designer who is based in Greece. All Charis has used are icons of various Apple hardware and software product to create such wonderful portraits of the iconic Steve Jobs.

Charis says that he uses a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Studio Artist (Mac only) to create these photo-mosaics. He has also shared some of his brilliant work on Flickr under a CC license so you can use them for non-commercial purposes.

Beautiful Photo-Mosaic Posters of Steve Jobs

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

PayPal Problems in India Aren’t Over Yet!

PayPal has around 175,000 users in India so it naturally became a big issue when PayPal had to temporarily suspend part of their operations here due to enquiries from Indian regulators.

The issue was resolved after about a month but users in India were no longer allowed to use the PayPal service for receiving personal payments. That’s because personal money transfer via PayPal falls in the category of “inward remittances” and PayPal probably doesn’t have the license to run a remittance service in India.

That said, professionals, businesses, freelancers, and other service provides are allowed, like before, to withdraw money from PayPal to their local bank accounts as long as they can submit the right purpose code at the time of the withdrawal.

It now however appears that PayPal’s India operations are still under the scrutiny of government and if they aren’t able to satisfy the regulators, be prepared for another disruption.

Alpana Killawala, who is the Chief General Manager at the Reserve Bank of India, told Jaimon Joseph the actual reason why PayPal had to temporarily stop transactions in India:

All money flowing across Indian borders is subject to two major laws. The Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and the Payments and Settlements Act of 2007. According to those laws, organizations like PayPal should have submitted themselves to scrutiny by the RBI. They hadn’t, so they were pulled up.

The Reserve Bank of India has now sent a detailed questionnaire to PayPal that they are expected to answer by April 30, 2010. If PayPal is unable to satisfy the regulators, Alpana says, “their operations could be disrupted again.”

You may dislike PayPal for their high transaction fees or because they have their own currency exchange rates, but the fact is that they are more or less a monopoly and there aren’t too many good PayPal alternatives in India yet.

I just hope this tussle between the RBI and PayPal get resolved soon and that the government makes it easy for other online payment services to enter and operate in India so that we have more choices.

PayPal Problems in India Aren’t Over Yet!

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

A Very Short Version of Wikipedia

The contributors at Wikipedia use a few thousand words to describe Google. The simple edition of Wikipedia too has a page on Google that is slightly shorter but still runs into a few hundred words.

Now meet Ten Word Wiki, a Twitter style version of Wikipedia that only describes stuff in under ten words but they also add a pinch of humor to all their definitions. For instance, the definition of Google, in ten words, reads something like this:

The Centre of the Internet. They can find you anything.

Simple, funny and relevant! The Ten Words Wiki site is obviously not as vast as Wikipedia but it still has plenty of pages to keep you entertained for hours.

Here are some more tech related “ten word” definitions that I found extremely interesting. Thanks @leelefever for the tip.

» Mobile Phone – Once for calls and texts. Now music spewing spirit level.

» TV – Box with buttons and screen that blanks the mind.

» Internet – A series of tubes filled with porn and kitten pictures.

» Email – Electronic messaging medium for sending funny pictures of cats worldwide.

» Yahoo! – 1990’s website we used for search before we discovered Google.

» Wikipedia – A wiki project like Ten Word Wiki, but more verbose.

» Facebook – Website where children give out personal details, a paedophiles dream.

» Computer – Productivity tool used for anything but. Downloads porn from internet.

A Very Short Version of Wikipedia

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Prevent Hotlinking of your Amazon S3 Images

Let’s say you are using Amazon S3 to host images and other media files. Anyone can view these images on your website and you’ve also allowed other sites to use these images as long as they credit the source, that is, your site.

Now consider a different scenario. Someone like a picture on your site and posts a direct link of that picture to social sites like Digg, Twitter, etc. The image goes viral and within minutes, it gets seen by thousands of other people as in this example.

Hotlinking Images Means a Higher Bill

When people link directly to an image instead of the web page that is containing that image, others will see the image but without ever coming to your website and you’ll still have to pay Amazon for all the bandwidth that is consumed in serving that image.

If you are hosting files on a web server (say Apache), you can setup server side rules to prevent hotlinking but such a thing in not possible in Amazon S3. They do provide some kind of referral logs so can you figure out which other sites are hotlinking images but there’s no mechanism in Amazon S3 (and CloudFront) to deny requests based on the referral information.

How to Prevent Hot-Linking in Amazon S3

There’s a workaround that you may use to block hotlinking of selective images and files that you think are putting a major strain in your Amazon S3 budget.

When you upload a file to your Amazon S3 account, the service assigns a certain Content-Type to every file based on its extension. For instance, a .jpg file will have the Content-Type set as image/jpg while a .html file will have the Content-Type as text/html. A hidden feature in Amazon S3 is that you can manually assign any Content-Type to any file, irrespective of the file’s extension, and this is what you can use to prevent hotlinking.

Let’s say you have a page on your website called helloWorld.html that contains an image helloWorld.jpg hosted directly on Amazon S3.

If people are directly linking to the helloWorld.jpg image and you need a mechanism to redirect all that traffic to reach your original helloWorld.html web page, here’s what you should do:

Step 1. Create a new HTML text file on your desktop like the one below. You may change the URL in the code depending on where you want the visitor to go after he or she clicks on that hot linked image URL.

<html>
 <head>
 <title>Image has moved</title>
  <script type="text/javascript">
   window.location.href='http://labnol.org/helloWorld.html'
  </script>
 <link rel="canonical" href=http://labnol.org/helloWorld.html />
 </head>
 <body>
  <a href=http://labnol.org/helloWorld.html>Hello World</a>
 </body>
</html>

Step 2. Save this HTML file as, say abc.html, and upload it to the same S3 bucket that already contains the helloWorld.jpg file.

Now on the S3 side, first rename the old image file (to say helloWorld.jpg.bak) and then rename the recently uploaded HTML file (abc.html) so that it has the same name and extension as your original image (helloWorld.jpg).

That’s it! If people directly link to your S3 file, they’ll automatically land on your website – see example. Here’s a quick video illustration as well.

The logic is easy. When you uploaded the HTML file to Amazon S3, the content type was automatically set as HTML. When your renamed that HTML file on S3 to JPG, the content type remained unchanged and hence the file was served as a web page even though it had an image extension.

Since we are using the rel=canonical tag here, these ‘hotlinked’ image URLs will also bring to some Google juice to your website. You may use any of these free web based clients or the desktop clients to manage your Amazon S3 files without any coding.

Related: Amazon S3 Hosting Tips

Prevent Hotlinking of your Amazon S3 Images

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

How to Completely Clear the Web History of IE

You have cleared your IE history but some previously visited sites still show up in the address-bar of your browser. If you’ve got a similar problem, here’s a solution.

Clear the history of visited websites in IE

The more recent versions of Internet Explorer (IE7 and IE8) feature a pretty “smart” address bar. You type some word in the address bar and it will immediately show a list of matching web addresses that are in your browser’s history cache.

The auto-suggest feature in the address bar is a huge time-saver but a a privacy risk as well especially when you share the same computer with other family members.

Since you don’t want mom to know what searches you are performing on Google or what websites you are visiting, Microsoft added a handy “Delete Browsing History” option in Internet Explorer that will completely erase all your tracks with a click.

Why IE won’t delete my browser history

The only problem (see video) is that even if you clear the IE history and your Temporary Internet files folder, some of the previously visited website URLs may still show up in the address bar drop-down.

I have tried almost every possible method and that includes resetting the IE browser to factory defaults, removing the registry entries, running CCleaner to delete the stubborn index.dat, clearing the Temp folders manually, disabling add-ons (IE in Safe Mode) but, unfortunately, none of them worked.

Some previously visited websites continued to show up in the address bar and I was not the only one struggling with this strange problem. The Microsoft forums are filled with similar complaints from IE users. See some related threads:

• Cannot delete history of visited websites
• Cannot delete the browser history from Internet Explorer 8
• IE Browser history will not clear

In one of the threads, a Microsoft support engineer suggested running Windows after a “clean boot” that will load Windows with a minimal set of drivers and startup programs so that you can know if another background program is preventing IE from deleting the browser’s history and cache.

Luckily, the fix is simple and has actually nothing to do with IE’s web history.

The address bar in Internet Explorer is integrated with Windows Desktop search by default so even if you clear the IE history, the web entries that are stored in Windows search index will still show-up in the address bar. These entries appear in the same “History” group and hence users (myself included) confuse it with IE’s history.

To prevent web history items Windows Search from completely showing up in the IE address bar, go to Tools –> Internet Options –> Content –> AutoComplete and delete the option that says “Use Windows Search for better results.”

How to Completely Clear the Web History of IE

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Now Upload Videos to your Tumblr Blog

Tumblr, the most beautiful blogging platform, just got a little more powerful.

You can now upload videos files as large as 100 MB directly to your Tumblr account. The cool thing is that, unlike Youtube where you to wait for the system to finish transcoding, videos uploaded to Tumblr will instantly show up in your blog.

While the service is often seen as a quick-blogging platform for sharing snippets and web clippings, the company is working hard to become a full-feature blogging service. They’ve recently added support for Pages and their new Community feature looking like a good option for blogs who accept guest bloggers.

Coming back to video uploads, while can can embed a fairly large video file to your Tumblr blog, you are limited to five minutes of video per day. That looks like a small limit for sure but Tumblr fans still have another reason to cheer for. And there’s absolutely no waiting time.

Now Upload Videos to your Tumblr Blog

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Get your Office 2010 Upgrade Even if you are Late

The upcoming Office 2010 software will be available as a free upgrade to all users who have purchased a copy of Office 2007 on or after March 5, 2010.

However, if you are feeling a bit unlucky because you got yourself a copy of Office 2007 just days before the upgrade offer was announced and are therefore ineligible for the free upgrade, here’s something that you should try.

The Microsoft web store has a refund policy of 30 calendar days for all downloadable software. If you have bought the software in a box, it is also eligible for return within 30 days of the purchase date as long as you have the original packaging, including installer media and the product key.

So here’s the deal. Return the copy of Microsoft Office 2007 to the store and buy it again from the same store. This time however you’ll automatically become eligible for a free upgrade to Office 2010 when it comes out in June.

All software retailers have different return policies but ff you have bought Office 2007 from Amazon in the last few days, you are covered too as they also have a 30 day return policy for software – the condition is that you should return the box “in its original condition.”

This should work not just for Office 2007 but all the other Office programs including Visio, Microsoft Project, etc.

Related: How to Buy Software Online for Less

Get your Office 2010 Upgrade Even if you are Late

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Are Web Pages Not Opening in Google Chrome?

Oops! This link appears to be broken in Google Chrome

You are trying to open a web page in Chrome and all it gives you is this error message – “DNS Error – cannot find server.”

You hit F5 to refresh a page but the error persists. You then open an alternate browser, like Firefox or IE, and the website loads up without any problem. So its a Chrome specific issue and has nothing to do with DNS Servers or your Internet connection.

The support page on the Chrome website suggests that you clear your browser cache, delete the cookies and scan your computer for malicious software to fix the issue.

Well, that may not fix your problem because the issue is not “malware” but a built-in Chrome setting that’s possibly preventing certain websites from opening up in Chrome.

When you visit a webpage (like a search results page), Google Chrome will pre-fetch the IP addresses of all websites that are listed on that page. Since the browser has the IP addresses of all the links in advance, DNS pre-fetching ensures that any links that may you click on that webpage will load faster. However, when pre-fetching fails, something that’s not very uncommon, you may get the “link broken” error.

You are more likely to see such an error when you are trying to open a website that you have never visited before.

The fix is simple –  go to Tools > Options (or Preferences on a Mac) > Under the Hood and uncheck the setting that says “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance.” This might increase the loading time of certain pages by a few microseconds but you won’t at least see that misleading error message.

Related: When you cannot open a specific website

Are Web Pages Not Opening in Google Chrome?

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.