Convert Files into any Format with Right Click using Cometdocs for Desktop

There are lots of file formats being used today, and every format has its own advantage. While we use PDF files where we wish to protect the data, we use images to capture some info. So what if you need to convert the same file you are using into some other format, you may go to the free online web services and get them converted or may be download and install a tool just for this purpose.

Meet a new tool called as Cometdocs for Desktop, and what this have in different from others is that it incorporates the converter right into the file context menu. This means, if you come across any file that needs to be converted into some other format, look nowhere, just right click on it and select the output format. The converted file will be presented to you in some time.

Cometdocs is an online file conversion site which has launched this desktop tool for Windows. While uploading large documents to convert them online can slow down your browser (thereby preventing you from working) or converting the document in the system can slow down your machine, this converter works in a different way. It still uses its old way of converting which is to upload the file from the client directly (without you doing it) and then downloading back to the machine and the same folder automatically.

Although this will use your data plan but will save the machine from getting slowed down. To be able to use this tool, you need to login into the cometdocs account which you can register for free anytime (simple email address and password is all it need).

You can convert the file into any format from the list present in the right click context menu and the conversion status can be seen in a separate window. If you think it is a really useful tool, then you can get it for free from the link below.

Download Cometdocs for Desktop

Scan End User License Agreements while Installing Software with EULAlyzer

Whenever you install a new software you come across the End User License Agreementalso known as End User License Agreementin short which lets you know what the software aims at and thus needs your acceptance for it. While most of the times, the EULA is genuine and doesn’t contain any bad intent but there may be some developers who wish to do something else. Therefore it is very important to go through the entire agreement before accepting it but almost everyone out there doesn’t do it.

In fact, I haven’t seen anyone till date who has gone through even a single agreement before accepting it, may be because these are generally too long or boring to read. Therefore, for all of the people who have this habit of not reading the EULA, here is a tool that can do it for you.

This tool is called as EULAlyzer and is actually an EULA Analyzer for Windows that scans the EULA for you and aims at finding out some of the interesting points in the agreement. Here are the areas that this tool aims to scan for you:

• Advertising
• Tracking
• Data Collection
• Privacy-Related Concerns
• Installation of Third-Party / Additional Software
• Inclusion of External Agreements By Reference
• Potentially Suspicious Clauses
• and much more…

How EULAlyzer works

You need to install this tool (you might want to go through its EULA too lol), and run it whenever you want to scan a new agreement. On the main screen you, then, need to click the Scan button to start a new EULA scan and then paste the entire agreement there.

You will then need to press the Analyze button, clicking on which it will scan the agreement and will present to you the results as a rating.

EULAlyzer can only suggest you if the software being installed is clean or not, based on the scan results, but its on you to abide the suggestion or not. The tool also stores the agreements as a database so that you can refer to it back at a later point of time.

Download EULAlyzer

Cover app for Android lets you Access right Apps at the Right Time

Whenever your phone screen is locked then you can’t use the apps before unlocking it. So in case you need to access any app instantly, you will have to go through the big process of unlocking the phone, finding the app and then starting it. However with the firmware 4.2 onAndroid, you have the option of placing the most used apps right on the lock screen so that you can run the apps without having to unlock the screen first.

Well there are many lockscreen replacement apps available for Android but today we are reviewing one such app called as Cover which is better than the rest. What Cover does is, it places the right apps on the lockscreen at the right time by learning your location and time so that you don’t have to unlock the screen to use that app. This way, you will have more options of the apps on your lock screen.

How does Cover work:

After installing the app Cover, you just need to set your home and work address and the rest it will take care. So say, you just woke up in the morning, what are the apps that you would need, likely news and songs etc. This is what it will do, place these kind of apps on the lock screen.

Now suppose you are in the car heading for your work, what are the apps you are likely to use, probably, maps, yelp and weather etc. Thus it will replace the earlier apps on the lock screen with these kind of apps.

Now suppose you are at work, you would probably use apps like Notes, Docs and Emails etc. Thus it will again replace the apps for you. If you are thinking, how does it know your location? Then may be you are forgetting that your smartphone now comes with lot many sensors like accelerometer, gyrometer and of course the GPS.

So if the app sounds fantastic to you, then you should head on to the app website and get the invite as it is right now available only on the invitation. However it is planned to be launched in the Android store soon.

Visit Cover for Android

Loop Complete or Specific part of YouTube Videos with Looper for YouTube

There are times when we all have played youtube videos on repeat for many times, whether those are song videos or something really funny. I mostly play the songs when I doing something on Youtube and like to put it on repeat but if you are not using any extension then you know we have to do this thing manually since Youtube doesn’t provide any button to auto repeat the videos.

Well there are many ways to do that, couple of which we have mentioned in the past too. But the reason why I am mentioning about one more way today is that not all extensions provide a way to repeat only a specific part of a video. Say if you just like to replay or loop only certain interval of a youtube video, there is no way to do so.

With the help of this Google Chrome extension called as Looper for Youtube, you get this additional feature. So now using this extension, you can either replay the entire video automatically, or even a small portion of the video set by you. Moreover you can also set the number of times the video should be repeated. Let’s see how this can be done.

After you have installed this extension in your browser, you will notice a button in the left part of the youtube video description called as Loop. Clicking on this button will automatically put the entire video on loop and will open more options about the video like Loop for specific time period and/or loop for how many times (all this can be seen in the screenshot above).

So why repeat the videos manually each time, just use this extension and have the entire or some part of the video replayed for any number of times automatically.

Download Looper for YouTube

Browse Internet together with your Friends using Channel.me

There are situations when you want to browse internet and websites together with your friends or family for instance, consider a situation when you want to book a trip ticket but want your friend’s view too who is sitting in some other country, or even a situation when you want to navigate through a website and show to your family member who don’t know how to do. In all these situations, you need an internet sharing tool using which you all can browse the internet together whatever be your location.

Here is a free web service called as Channel.me which lets you work together on the internet and that too without installing anything on your computer. This service is free to use and can be used by anyone.

Here is how Channel.me works:

• To start internet sharing, just visit this service and enter the URL to browse in this website.
• After you are done, click the button Start a new Session.
• A new session will be initiated and you will be provided a session number which you need to provide to your friend so that he can also join you.
• Your friend needs to visit Channel.me and enter the session number there and click the Join button to join you for the online internet sharing.
• Now you both can start working on the same internet session and whenever anyone of you click a link, or make any changes, you will be notified with a pop up informing the action.
• You can also make use of the online sticky notes or chat box to chat and inform other of anything that you need to highlight on the page.

Although there are more services like this available today, but why I like Channel.me is for the reason that it doesn’t need any installations and is pretty simple to use. Just visit the webpage and you are good to start.

Visit Channel.me

Protect your Kids from Online Adult and Inappropriate Content using eSafely

Internet is full of information; it can be useful or can be inappropriate. Whether we are working on internet or just using it for some entertainment purposes like watching youtube or social sites, we come across large number of anonymous users too who can be rude to anyone. I have seen much online content where people are debating and using inappropriate words to address each other.

Well it is not only us who are using the computer and the internet; our kids also need to use it for their study purpose. We definitely want our kids to stay away from these, don’t we? While we can’t always be with them to monitor their online activities, there are tools that can do so.

There are many tools for this purpose of online filtering but we are reviewing one easy and simple to use tool called as eSafely. eSafely is the only parental control tool designed to work seamlessly with your web browser to provide complete online protection for you and your family. This is available for free download and as browser extensions in majorly used web browsers namely Chrome, IE, Firefox and Safari.

Here is how it works:

eSafely protects your child from displaying any of the adult content, images, terms or conversations online from the following major websites: Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and Search. So in short what this does is, it block all the inappropriate images (images which are not kid safe) from appearing on the web page whenever your child is online.

eSafely on Facebook: Protects kids against bullying in chat and automatically removes harmful images to avoid accidental exposure. Moreover it doesn’t transfer any of the outrageous comment while chatting to the other side, rather display a message “Please be polite”.

eSafely on YouTube: Forces Safe Mode and disables option to view 18+ rated content on YouTube. It blocks all the adult videos and the option to view them. Moreover it also blocks any inappropriate comment to be posted.

eSafely on Wikipedia: Provides kid-friendly access to Wikipedia, with harmful images automatically removed.

eSafely on Searches: Delivers clean search results for searches performed on most major search portals. Moreover it disables Google search and other engines, to display the results from Clearch (Clean Search) which only displays kids’ safe results.

What’s more good about eSafely is that, you don’t need to set anything up, as just enabling the extension will enable all the protection by itself. Just make sure that your kid don’t disable it while working on 

Download eSafely

Monitor user logins, storage consumption and apps usage with the Admin SDK

Google have added a few new features to the Admin SDK Reports API to let you more easily visualize Google Apps' usage and security in your domain. These new features include:

Security Reports
Login audit: View all web browser based logins with IP information for all users in your domain. You can use this data to monitor all successful, failed, and suspicious logins in your domain.
Authorized applications: View a list of third-party applications that users in your domain have shared data with. Gain visibility into how many users are accessing each application. Revoke access to specific apps using the security tab on Admin console.

Usage Reports
Storage quota: View user-level quota usage. This is available both as total usage and split by Gmail, Drive and Google+ photos for every user in the domain. Monitor which users are nearing their quota limits and acquire more storage if necessary.
Google+ usage: View 1-day, 7-day and 30-day active Google+ usage in your domain. See the number of Hangouts attended by users in your domain.

Editions included: 
Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government

Organize your Tabs Vertically in Chrome with Veritabs

I still remember the days when we used to work without tabs on the browsers, whenever we need to open a new page we had to open a new window and open the link in it, thereby cluttering our taskbar and making it difficult for us to manage and surf the internet. Tabs have really changed the way surfing is done by making things easier.

If you are a person who like to open multiple tabs and keep them opened until for later time then you know it always aggregates and you end up managing lot many tabs at the same time (well this happens to me every time). While there is no issue in opening multiple tabs, it however makes us difficult to recognize which tab is for which site as it hides the title and also the favicon of the website.

A solution to this issue can be managing the tabs vertically in a sidebar with the Chrome extension called as Veritabs. The extension allows us to see what all tabs have been opened by us and that too in the sidebar of your screen. Imagine using the unutilized space of your widescreen computer. Moreover you would also be able to scroll through the tabs with your mouse wheel. In short, definitely useful than using the old style tabs.

There is one more advantage of using this extension, those who like to surf the internet in the full screen mode (using F11) know that it’s not possible to use the tabs however Veritabs still allow you to view and manage the tabs even in the full screen mode.

Although the extension does not provide much of the uses and features but if you feel that managing the tabs vertically is a good idea then you can go ahead and give it a try.

Download Veritabs

Uninstall all the Preinstalled Software in a Click with Decrap

These days when you buy a new computer, Windows comes with many programs preinstalled. The manufacturers do so, to reduce the installation later on but they don’t realize the fact that most of these programs are not necessarily required by everyone out there thereby making the system sluggish and consume space. While some of us are very particular in keeping only the useful software in our machines others tend to forget and thus waste their hard disk space.

These useless software that comes preinstalled in the system as also known as Bloatwareor crapware. Thus it sometimes becomes very important to remove all or at least most of the useless software which can be time consuming. This process can take hours or may be even days, if you don’t have proper tools and guidance for that.

Here is a tool called as Decrap (or Decrap my Computer) which works like a PC Decrapifier to remove all the useless programs preinstalled in your system. Using this program can be very helpful as it helps in uninstalling either all of the preinstalled tools or some of them in just a click. The biggest advantage of using this tool is that the uninstallation is batch oriented and you don’t even need to keep monitoring all the time.

How Decrap works:

Just download the tool, and run it after installation. On the next screen, the tool will show a list of the tools that are installed in your machine. You can either select all of them or keep the ones that you use and select the ones that you wish to remove.

When you click next, it will ask to create a system restore point which is a good option as to restore to the current state if something goes wrong. Now you can select the fully automatic uninstallation or manual to see and select some options.

The tool also removes the registries of the software completely and lets you choose the uninstall option for that too.

Decrap is a great tool to keep the system a fresh without having to remove all the tools manually one by one. This will also ensure that your machine don’t have any useless tool (or bloatware) and is in a factory state always.

Download Decrap

Switch any Chrome Tab between Normal and Incognito Mode with a Click

I have tried many browsers for my online browsing but the day I started using Chrome, I never went back to another browsers. This is because of the features that Chrome provides along with the ease of use. One such feature is the Incognito mode. The advantage of using Incognito mode is that you can securely browse your confidential data without worrying about clearing the stuffs later on.

While you can start the incognito mode anytime by going into the browser options, but what if you want to switch any tab that you have already opened to the incognito mode? And what if you want to switch more tabs to the incognito mode? I don’t think you would like to go through the process of copying and pasting the URL in the incognito mode manually.

Well here is an extension for that called as Incognito Tab Switch and what this extension does is, it adds the incognito button right on your Chrome browser toolbar so that whenever you wish to switch any tab to incognito window, you can just click this button. The button will allow you to switch back and forth from normal mode to incognito mode and vice versa in just a click.

So even if you have more tabs to view in the incognito mode, just press the button on each tab and the tabs will open in the other mode without any change in the tab contents and tab view. Moreover the tab will list itself in the already opened window with other tabs and will not open a new window each time you switch it to another mode. You will also notice that the incognito mode icon “man with a hat” turns black when in incognito mode and white when in normal mode.

Well there is one more use of the extension, you can use it to view the same web page content in another mode if the page is facing compatibility issues with the already installed extensions in one mode and hence is not loading. Since both the modes have different set of extensions, you can switch the tab in another tab to load it properly.

If you liked it, you can get it from the link below.

Download Incognito Tab Switch

Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Access on PC and Android with Kiwix

Wikipedia is one of the major sources of information on internet. Not even for the college or school students, for everyone looking for any kind of information, Wikipedia is the one best source. If the information you are looking for is anything relevant or famous it is bound to be present in the Wikipedia.

While searching the entire Wikipedia is not that difficult, as all you just need is an internet connection but suppose you need to travel for long time and would not be having the internet connection with you and want to pass time by reading the wiki pages, then how would you do that? Well you can have an offline library of the entire Wikipedia.

This also goes for some schools or colleges that want to show something to the students but might not have internet connection in the class, offline Wikipedia can help. Here is a tool for this purpose called as Kiwix that lets you download the wiki library on your computer or even on your Android phone so that you can access the information bank even being offline.

Kiwix is really easy to use. It provides a range of features which make the usage comfortable.

• Wiki search: Search the library like you are searching the entire wiki.
• Portable: Can be carried in the USB drive
• Support: You can use it with all main desktop operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Android, Apple Mac OSX and GNU/Linux compatible personal computers.
• Small and easy to use
• Library: Once downloaded, you can use the library anytime

The tool is really useful if you wish to use it offline and at your convenience. The tool works well on the phones too like Apple and Android, just be sure of the library size before downloading as it can get in GBs.

You can read more about Kiwix and give it a try from the link below.

Download Kiwix

Create Icons from Images using Quick Any2Ico

There are times when you need to create some icons for your own use. Whether you are a developer or some webmaster you might have come across some situations when you need to put some icons in some of the apps that you have developed. Creating icon files are not difficult and if you happen to know some image editing tool like Adobe Photoshop then it becomes very easy but if you don’t know any of the image editing tools then you might face some problem.

Well there is one more way to create an icon file; if you can’t create an icon you can convert it. Yes, you can convert an image file into an icon file so that you can use it for your own purpose. There are many image to icon converters available but here is one that can not only convert an image file into an icon but can also extract icons from executable files like exe, dll and ocx files.

This converter is called as Quick Any2Ico and is a free portable program that can create high quality icon files from any type of image file or from the resource of a binary file. So if you have an image that you wish to create as a icon file, just use this tool.

To be able to use this program, you just need to browse the image file (which can be jpg, bmp, png or gif), select the output destination and select the icon file size (out of the many available choices like 16 X 16 to 512 X 512) and then just click the Convert It button.

The output quality of the icon file depends on many things like the quality, resolution, size and shape of the input image, and if everything is just appropriate, the icon file would also be of good quality.

The program can also be used in the command line mode but that it only for the people who like working in the command line. If you liked the tool, it can be downloaded from the location below.

Download Quick Any2Ico

Have Android Notifications Read to you with Voice 4 Whatsapp Line Viber

One of the many great features in Android I like is the Notification Bar. As compared to iPhone, Android devices have a notification center which allows us to see any new message, email, text or anything without opening the app itself. Also the LED notification light helps us to know if we have missed on to that.

I am not sure if all Android phones have this feature or not, but in my Note 2 there is a feature of Driving Mode, which enables the user to listen to the incoming call (the number or the name) or text when you are driving so that you don’t need to check your phone. Similar to this feature, I came across an app for the Android devices that readsout your notifications that you frequently receive so that you don’t need to check your phone again and again.

The name of this app is called Voice 4 Whatsapp Line Viber (I know how weird it feels) and it is able to read out the notifications either in full or only the sender’s identity so that you know without even opening the app. The app is currently incorporated with following apps Gmail, WhatsApp, Line, SpotBros and Viber which means notifications apart from these apps, would not be read.

The app is not very difficult to configure and you can easily setup the app to listen to the notifications. Hearing the notifications can be easy and helpful sometimes but might not be safe if you are someone who is always surrounded by people say at work or at lunch as this might leak your private information to everyone.

If you feel that the app can help you say when you are driving or may be at other times, then do try it at the link below.

Download Voice 4 Whatsapp Line Viber

Find Detailed System, Battery and Sensor Information about your Android phone with CPU-Z

There are times when we need to know more information about the products included in our device, whether it is our computer or the phone. While every device has got its own way of displaying the information but the information is not complete hence at these occasions third party tools come handy. We have once written about this free tool calledCPU-Z (for computers) which is capable of displaying detailed information about the computer in an easy way.

If you have used this tool then you will be glad to know that CPU-Z has come to the Android area and you can use this app to view detailed information about your phone. The app is capable of displaying information about lot many items like SoC (System on Chip), System info, Battery info and Sensors info, which there is no way to find out otherwise.

CPU-Z for Android reports following information just by running the app:

• SoC (System On Chip) name, architecture, clock speed for each core
• System information: device brand & model, screen resolution, RAM, storage.
• Battery information: level, status, temperature
• Sensors: you will be amazed to find out the sensors that your phone has built in.

The information that the app shows is real-time that means the infoarmation can change every time you run the app depending upon the status of your phone, number of apps running in the background, memory consumed and other things.

CPU-Z for Android is free to use and can be downloaded from the link below. It only needs Android 2.2 or higher to perform perfectly.

Download CPU-Z for Android

Select Custom Size Screenshots on iOS with ScreenshotPlus

Screenshots are sometimes very important as they can help someone save time in not writing the entire text present on the screen, or just as a keeper of some important information. What if you are playing some game and need to save the high score to show it off to your friends? Simple, just take a screenshot. So whatever be it is, we all have taken screenshots some or the other time. These days almost every smartphone now provides a way to take a screenshot.

But the problem here is that it is only possible to capture the contents of the entire screen and not specifically any part of a screen. Suppose you need to capture only somecustom size area of the screen and not the entire screen, then it would definitely involve you to work on the image editing later on, thus wasting your time.

Although we all work on image editing like cropping, improving color tone but if given a choice to crop an image before taking a screenshot, I would definitely not waste time later on. If you are an iOS user, then here is an app for you that can help you capturing custom area of the screen in a screenshot instead of the regular full screen shot.

The app is called as ScreenshotPlus, and using this you can capture a screenshot as shown in the image here. However to be able to use this app, you need to haveActivator in your phone first as it will allow you to use the gesture feature of the ScreenshotPlus. To capture the screenshot, just give it a gesture (as set by you), and you will get a box to capture the shot. You can move and resize the box as per your needs and it will also give you the image size below so that you are able to make a perfect capture.

When you are done selecting the area to be captured, just press the camera icon and the image will be captured and saved as usual in your gallery. ScreenshotPlus is available to download in Cydia but it’s not completely free, but if feel saving time is better than editing an image later on, then you can get it for $0.99.

Use Right Click Context Menu to Upload Photos on Facebook

I remember those days when I wanted to share some of my pics with my friends or relatives and had not much of options with me. I had to either email them or use somephoto uploading sites like Webshots. However things have changed, and with almost everyone on Facebook toady we don’t have to think much of how to share the images. We can simply upload the photos to our profile and share with our buddies added in our list.

By the way, how do you upload a pic to Facebook? I guess, you login to Facebook first, go to your profile, select the album to upload and then browse the images to upload and lastly let Facebook resize your images before uploading, right? Well, for all you Facebookers, here is a simple and useful tool called as “Easy Facebook Photo Uploader for Facebook”.

As the name of the tool suggests, Easy Facebook Photo Uploader for Facebook is a simple to use tool that lets you easily upload photos on Facebook without having to login into your actual Facebook account every time. So how does this tool work? Find it below.

After installing this free tool you just need to authorize it to be able to access your Facebook account which is only a one time process and don’t have to be done every time.

1. So when you know which photo you need to upload, just right click on it and select the option of “Send your photo(s) to Facebook”, which will prepare your photos for the upload right from your desktop and without having to launch your browser.

2. After that you need to select your FB account to upload images on to (you can add more than one FB account too), and click Next.

3. Now select the albums you wish to upload the image into or you can create a new one too.

4. When you click Next, you will see a progress window which will do two things: resize the images into the upload able format and then upload it. This will save you some time as the conversion will be done on your system rather than on Facebook which will be slower.

The tool Easy Facebook Photo Uploader for Facebook is really useful if you are into uploading photos every other day and want to save some time in the process.

Download Easy Facebook Photo Uploader for Facebook

Monitor your Recent Login Activity on Yahoo

With more and more enhancements in technology we are seeing more and morephishing and hacking attacks on our personal accounts and profiles. These days I get to hear more hacking news than earlier and our no online account is safe from it. Whether it is the email service or the social profile we see our profiles getting hacked every now and then. If you have an account on Yahoo then do read this article as it will help you in tracking your login sessions and find if there is any access attempt on your profile.

Did you know that most of our email services like Gmail and Yahoo provide us a way of monitoring our recent login activities? Well the link to that option is very clear in case of a Gmail (button termed as “Last Access From” right on the homepage) however it is not that accessible in Yahoo. If you are a Yahoo email user then here is how you can check your Recent Login Activity.

Steps:

1. Either open yahoo.com or the email service mail.yahoo.com

2. Now login with your credentials

3. On the top right side you will see your name which is actually a button to your profile.

4. Hover the mouse over it and in the options that open up, select the Account Infobutton.

5. Now as a security feature you will again need to provide your password.

6. After you have logged in again, see under the “Sign-in and Security” section for “View your recent sign-in activity”

7. Now when you click on this link, it will open all your recent login activity logs that you have accessed from various Yahoo services like web, cell phone client etc.

The list of the logins will show you at what time and from what location or IP address you have accessed the Yahoo service. In my case as you can see from the screenshot, it shows a different state than where I am actually located but I guess that’s because of the IP address. Overall the country remains where you are.

So I guess it’s a nice way to track when and from where your profile has been accessed.

Facebook Trusted Contacts

It’s always good to have friends, and if you have really good friends whom you can trust then you will never lose access to your Facebook account. That’s right! Now having good friends adds to security of your facebook account and ensures that you will never lose access to your account.

Facebook yesterday announced a new feature that is called as Facebook Trusted Contacts and as per this feature if you, anytime, happen to lose access to your account or if it gets locked then you can regain the access to your account just by seeking help of your trusted contacts. The contacts can be anyone who is in your friends list and someone whom you can trust. It is like trusting someone with an extra pair of key to your house.

How Trusted Contacts work:

“Trusted Friends” is an optional security feature that you can make use of and avoid answering the old forgotten security questions. You just need to add three to five trusted contacts in your account and if a lockout situation arises, they will be provided some security codes. Now you need to ask them the codes, who after verification will pass on the security codes to you. Using these security codes you can unlock your account.

How to Add Trusted Contacts:

You can add anyone from your friends list as a Trusted Contact by visiting the Security Settings on top right. When you are done selecting the Trusted Contacts, they will be notified that you have added them as your entrusted buddies.

I think this is a cool feature added by Facebook but if you still feel that this is not what you were looking for, then the old answering the security questions process is still there. [via]

Check how Safe and Hackable your Passwords are

It is very important for us to create and keep simple, easy to remember yet stronger passwords that can keep all the hackers and other attackers away. Today we have lots and lots of online accounts like those from bank accounts, social accounts to our personal and work emails. Every account needs a password and I can imagine how difficult it is to keep passwords strong enough every now and then and still abide their password policies.

Well you can make use of Passwords Manager too in this case but if you don’t feel like then here are some tips that will definitely make you aware on “How you should create your passwords and how to take then from hackable to uncrackable”.

Tips to Create Passwords

Before we go deep in this topic, it would be better to know how much safe is your current password. Did you know, even a complex password like “XF1&tmb” would take 6 minutes to hack, according to Intel whereas a password like “The-shining-sea” can make the hacker busy for around 48 years?

Well do visit the Intel’s “How strong is your password page” and you can check for yourself, how much strong your passwords are and how much time it would take for a hacker to crack it. In my test on one of my passwords, I was surprised to see that it could be cracked in around 39 seconds. Gosh! Similarly, passwords like “12345” or “abcde” would take around 0 seconds to get cracked.

So if you now think it is time to change a password, then the following tips shall help you a lot:

• First of all, do not keep the same password for all your accounts. If you feel it is difficult to do that, then at least keep different passwords for bank accounts, email accounts, and social accounts. This way, even if your email password gets hacked, your bank accounts will be safe.

• Create password mix of Upper Case, Lower Case, Numbers, Punctuation marks and Spaces (some websites now allow space as password, if they do, use them else use dashes in place of them). As per Intel, even the simple sounding password “My 1st Password!” will take months to crack.

• Use prefixes or suffixes to distinguish the passwords for different websites example, “My 1st Password!: Twtr” for Twitter and “My 1st Password!: Fb” for Facebook.

Now since you have become a Password Master, go ahead and change your passwords to make them safe and unhackable. [via]

Record PC Screen to Create Animated GIF with GIFCam

There are many screen recorders available on internet and we have also shared some of them but most of them are used to record the computer screen to save in video formats. I haven’t come across some tool that can actually create animated GIF images from my system screen. Well if you are also looking for some tool that can create animated GIF images for you then this post shall help you.

Here is a free and simple tool called GIFCam and as the name of the tool suggests, it is used to capture your computer screen to create animated GIF images. The tool is very easy to use, as you just need to run the exe file (download link at the bottom), and place the capture screen over the area of the capture. You can also resize the capture screen to include larger portion which would automatically adjust the GIF resolution (the following image shall help you understand).

So whenever you are ready to capture, just press the Rec button which will start recording your activity on the screen. If you don’t wish to record the screen, you can manually add the frames too with the option of Frame button. If you wish to edit the capture or remove the frame, then editing is very easy too. Just click the Edit button and it will open the captures in the new window from where you can delete the frames easily.

When you done recording and editing you can save your gif in 5 color reduction formats(as shown here).

You can record anything off your screen from this tool whether it is text you are writing in a notepad or your drawing in the Paint or etc. Have a look at the animation by the developer himself.

To know more about the tool, do visit the download link below. See more animation ideashere. GIFCam is compatible with all version of Windows too.

Download GIFCam

Facebook Trusted Contacts to Unlock your Facebook Account

It’s always good to have friends, and if you have really good friends whom you can trust then you will never lose access to your Facebook account. That’s right! Now having good friends adds to security of your facebook account and ensures that you will never lose access to your account.

Facebook yesterday announced a new feature that is called as Facebook Trusted Contacts and as per this feature if you, anytime, happen to lose access to your account or if it gets locked then you can regain the access to your account just by seeking help of your trusted contacts. The contacts can be anyone who is in your friends list and someone whom you can trust. It is like trusting someone with an extra pair of key to your house.

How Trusted Contacts work:

“Trusted Friends” is an optional security feature that you can make use of and avoid answering the old forgotten security questions. You just need to add three to five trusted contacts in your account and if a lockout situation arises, they will be provided some security codes. Now you need to ask them the codes, who after verification will pass on the security codes to you. Using these security codes you can unlock your account.

How to Add Trusted Contacts:

You can add anyone from your friends list as a Trusted Contact by visiting the Security Settings on top right. When you are done selecting the Trusted Contacts, they will be notified that you have added them as your entrusted buddies.

I think this is a cool feature added by Facebook but if you still feel that this is not what you were looking for, then the old answering the security questions process is still there. [via]

Convert your MS Word Documents into Audio Files with AudioDocs

There are situations when you are tired of working and don’t feel like seeing or reading some document or say you are narrating some novel to someone, then why do it manually when it can be done automatically? Whatever is the situation you can make your word documents hearable by converting the entire document into an audio file by using the text to speech conversion technology.

There are many tools that can read out the text to you but with this tool called AudioDocs you can not only get the text narrated but also convert the entire word document into an audio file so that you can carry it too with you wherever you go. The tool is free and really simple to use and works great in the conversion process too.

AudioDocs is an open source sourceforge product that can create documents which you can actually hear. The tool has decent and minimal interface that can be used by anyone easily. All this tool has is a “MS Word to AudioDoc button” clicking on which pops up a dialog box which you can set as per you and the document.

The box (as shown above) has some fields like File name which you need to browse and add the doc file, TTS Voice which is used to select the voice option, Speaking rate which is used to set the pace of the audio and the last as Volume which can be set later on too. So when you are done configuring all the options, just click the Create AudioDoc button and after the successful message box, the file would get generated.

The audio file converted is in .wav format which is not compressed thus, is large in size. Although the file is played in all music players and without any errors, I think the developer should provide an option to convert the file into .mp3 format too.

If you liked the tool then download it from the location below.

Download AudioDocs

Forcefully Empty Recycle Bin of All Users same time

Mostly people living in a joint family own a shared workspace that is being used by more than one member of the family. In some cases people use the same user profile on the computer but there are some that create separate user profiles of each individual on their Windows machine. While creating multiple user accounts is a good idea but managing all those can be a problem.

This problem can be worsened if you are a network admin and have many user profiles created on a single computer. Each user account has got its own set of directories and files like the Recycle Bin. So suppose if someone does not delete its data from the recycle bin, it will consume the shared space of others too.

Thus it becomes important for the network admins, to forcefully empty the recycle bin of all the users at the same time so that the space can be freed upon. But if you are thinking that this is some hectic task as one will have to log in into all the user accounts then here is a way that is easier.

All you need is the access to the admin account and by running the following command prompt command in the elevated command prompt, you can delete all the files off the recycle bin of all the user accounts.

Open the cmd and type in the following command:

rd /s c:\$Recycle.Bin

Note that this command will empty the recycle bin contents of only the C drive. So if you wish to empty the contents of recycle bin of some other drive too then type it as rd /s d:\$Recycle.Bin

But I would advise you to be cautious as you won’t want to delete any important file or would you?

Disable Chrome’s new White Context Menu easily

It felt very strange when I realized there was something strange about Google Chrome browser few days back. I was wondering something had changed, what, I wasn’t sure of until I realized that it was the new white colored context menu. I am not sure when did it happen but it surely doesn’t look cool and contains some extra spacing too.

If you also felt the same and are wondering if there is some way to switch back to the old grey colored context menu there here are the steps using which you can disable the white context menu in Chrome browser. You don’t need any kind of tool or extension for this purpose, all you have to do is just append some command in the Chrome settings and it will revert back to its old state.

Steps:

1. Look for the Chrome shortcut icon whether it is placed on your desktop, taskbar or may be in the Start menu.

I opened it by right clicking and clicking on the Properties button in the Start menu.

2. Right click on the shortcut to see something as shown here. We need to make some changes in the Shortcut tab.

3. Now go to the Target field and append the following code as it is but with a space in the beginning after the already mentioned value (as shown above).

–disable-new-menu-style

4. Click OK to make the changes and restart the browser for the changes to take effect.

Note: It might take couple of restarts also but it would work for sure. Also make sure that the command has space in the beginning and after the already written value there.
The old classic Chrome grey menu should appear if you follow these steps and in case you don’t want it again, then you can similarly remove the code to get the new white menu back.