Digital Insights: Computer Tips & Tricks

If you have usb dvb-t stick and need some robust program to watch digital tv on your computer, then VideoLan is the best choice.

It has built-in codecs so you don’t have to worry about installing them. It even has rare h.264 codec to watch digital tv in countries where H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard exists. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you familiar with the situation when you see the html, php or any other language code on the screen but can’t copy it because it’s an image?

So typing the code down by yourself isn’t the best idea. At first you will waste your time instead of understanding more of the material.

You need some kind of OCR (Optical character recognition) software. Scanner isn’t needed because you already have the picture on your computer.

One way to extract code (or text) from the image is to use Microsoft Office OneNote program. It’s a great tool to keep your notes in one place and it has both the features to make a screenshot with one click and extract text from the image. Read the rest of this entry »

This post will explain How to setup multiple websites under Hostgator hosting account using cPanel.

I suppose you have your primary website running on Hostgator and now you want to open another great forum, e-shop, blog, etc.

Let’s start by buying a new domain name. I personally use Namecheap.com for my domain purchases and will use it as an example in this post. Go to www.namecheap.com and search for your website name if it’s available: Read the rest of this entry »

Have you got suspicious looking email or saw a link that seems to open a page fool of trojans or other malware? If you want to see how the page in the hyperlink looks like you can get a photo preview.

Go to “thumbalizr” and paste the link in box. You can take a screenshot or whole page from the top to the bottom. Select your choice and press “thumb it” button.

After a few seconds you will get a link to download images of the webpage. You could save it in various resolutions up to 1280 pixels width. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever checked your Internet Explorer bookmarks if they still work? Many bookmarks will expire over the years because some sites are shut down, others restructure their pages and forget to properly redirect. So you will end going to a page that does not exist anymore

Checking every bookmark by hand would be time consuming operation and very inneficient. You could use software to do that for you. AM-deadlink is a small freeware program released by Aignes and can scan all your bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera browsers

AM-DeadLink will detect all dead and duplicate links in your browser bookmarks. The program scans the list of bookmarks in chunks and writes the result of checking. It can be OK, error, redirected and other responses for a page. You can easily delete all dead links and clean your bookmarks. Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to take a look at highly glorified cms called snews and test it locally on my Apache2.2 server but struggled to enable mod_rewrite module in order to get my urls rewritten.

As you know mod_rewrite is used for rewriting URLs at the server level. The best example would WordPress permalinks, where you decide how url of your blog look like. By default it would be yourblog.com/?p=123 but with a help of mod_rewrite you get something like this: yourblog.com/post-about-this

How to check if mod_rewrite works on your Apache server?

I noticed that opening phpinfo page (create file phpinfo.php with this source code:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

and load via localhost) isn’t enough to determine Read the rest of this entry »

GD library allows you to write and use php scripts witch can manipulate images. It is used for such services as CAPTCHAS or image watermarking on-the-fly without modifying images itself.

At first make sure if your webserver (hosting or personal machine) supports GD library. Download this gd-test file. Extract and upload gd-test.php to your site’s root and access it through localhost (or http protocol).

If your browser shows image with word: works, then as you can guess your php installation has GD library enabled.

gd-image

If this is not the case, then you have to manually enable GD library. Read the rest of this entry »

Mysql is a free relational database which can work with php and apache on your computer. More than 11 million sites use Mysql as their database.

In this tutorial I’ll show how to download, install and configure Mysql. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a follow up article about how to install apache and php5 together. Earlier we installed php5 on Windows XP on local computer. Now let’s install and configure Apache to run locally on your computer.

Apache installation

Go to http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi and download latest apache version. As of the day writing this post, the version you need to download is Win32 Binary without crypto (no mod_ssl) (MSI Installer):  Just be sure it’s msi installer.

Start the installer and do the usual steps until page Server Information. Put localhost for Network domain and Server name fields. Type any email you want for Administrator’s email address. Press next.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post will explain how to setup PHP5 to run from your computer. It will not cover all-in-one packages which install php, apache and mysql with default settings. If you find it usefull, please bookmark this page for later reference.

PHP5 INSTALLATION

Go to http://www.php.net/downloads.php and donwload latest php5 binary (zip package). Read the rest of this entry »