Digital Insights: Computer Tips & Tricks

Recently I got email from them telling that Geocities closing date is October 26, 2009. Although I’m not using their servic anymore for a long time they still sent me an email informing about these changes. However, you may download your files this way [excerpt from Yahoo email]:

“To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As… from the menu that appears. Choose a location on your computer to save your files, then click OK or Save.”

Anyone familiar with hosting would laugh reading this suggestion. Seriously, I can’t imagine who was so smart enough to come up with this idea of back up a website. If you’re looking for really outstanding hosting provider, check this one.

When you try to open .pps file it instantly goes to presentation mode without allowing you to make any editing. Even if you try to load that document into PowerPoint program, it still runs in presentation mode.

This can be easily bypassed by renaming the extension from .pps to .ppt. Now PowerPoint thinks that it is simple PPT presentation which you coul edit like you want.

I don’t know if .pps is different from .ppt file format only in the extension but it works.

This tip came me while listening to new Moby song called “Shot in the back of the head”, which is available to download for free here.

The song starts with swinging sounds from left to right speaker but I listened with my old headphones that has no marks of R (right) and L (side) left,  so I couldn’t determine if the song starts on the right side or on the left.

So to quickly solve this problem use simple trick. Open your computer’s volume control panel and move “Volume Control” or “Wave” slider to the left or right direction while listening to some music. If you hear the sound on your right when the slider is  moved to the right, then it means you have put headphones correctly. If not, just switch the sides and you’ll be fine.

Here is a nice trick to bypass Youtube comment filter and insert links into comments. As you know, commenters are not allowed to post links on the comments because of possible spamming. Hovewer not every link is a spam and sometimes your link on Youtube comments could be appropriate. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are building new websites, like setting up new blogs, you probably don’t want to show Google or other visitors it before everything (templates, links, descriptions, meta tags, etc.) is completely set up.

For example, when you install WordPress, there is a default Hello World post displayed on the front page and Google also indexes your important login page. This is all the stuff you don’t need to show to anyone. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally there is a solid Youtube MP3 player available to play songs directly from Youtube. As you may know, Youtube is the largest song database in the world.

For example if you search for Beatles, you will get 137,938 results. Quite impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re learning english, you could sometimes come across a word with unclear pronunciation. And if your english learning program doesn’t provide pronunciation for words you can instead use Youtube. Read the rest of this entry »

February 24 was a black Tuesday for Gmail addicts. The panic that Gmail was down spread everywhere from IRC to Twitter back and forth.

Some of Gmail users were so desperate that you could feel their desperation from tearfull words on the computer screen.

One of them was even convinced that Google went down intentionally for him to ruin his life:

Twitter was also pumping messages with “Gmail own” in every 3 words.

This Gmail blackout demonstrates how we are all dependent on one service provider.

Some tips how to prevent future downs of Gmail.

1. Have an alternate email account where you can forward emails to. You can set up to forward your emails automatically and even if the front-end doesn’t work there is a chance that some services are still functioning.
2. Do not use Gmail for business. If you have a website, you must have your own domain email address. You can forward emails, but the opposite way: from @yourdomain.com to @gmail.com

At first I thought that Hotmail developers were so lazy and didn’t bother to change the description tag on their site but further SEO investigation revealed that in fact Google decided to demean Hotmail a bit. Here’s what you can see on the SERP for the keyword “hotmail”: Read the rest of this entry »

Image by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten via Flickr

Heatmaps are very useful determining what is the hottest parts of your website. Looking at the heatmap you can see how to improve the layout for your website by placing most important buttons, navigation links or ads on the best visibility parts. To perform a real heatmap experiment with people for the site would be very expensive. Luckily there are web application at Feng-Gui that does all the job. Read the rest of this entry »