Steganography and Arachniography

Steganography refers to hiding encrypted data or information inside of a common or completely innocent looking file such as an image, audio, or video file.

For all intents and purposes, most people will never be aware that the file is more than it appears to be, thus providing a nice hiding place in plain sight.

If someone does become aware of the ‘extra data’ in a file, it can be identified as encrypted data or information, but will be undecipherable without the decryption key.

An Arachniography is the web-based equivalent of a bibliography. Taking things one step further, an annotated Arachniography is the web-based version of an annotated bibliography.

Andrew J. Butrica of NASA was the person responsible for coining the term during his work on the history of NASA’s X-33 project.

Send a Free Fax to Anywhere in the World

If you don’t have a fax machine at hand, or if the cost of sending an international fax seems prohibitive, this should interest you.

Send an online fax for free to any fax machine in the world

HelloFax, the online fax company, has recently partnered with Microsoft and now lets you send up to 50 pages per month to any fax machine in the world for free. All your need is a web browser and a Microsoft account (your Hotmail or Windows Live ID should also work).

To get started, go to hellofax.com/skydrive and click the “Sign-up with Microsoft” link. Once your are signed in, just upload any document and put in a fax number (with country code) to send your first online fax. Once your fax has been successfully delivered, a copy of the outbound fax document will be automatically saved in your SkyDrive.

You can use HelloFax to send Word documents, PDFs, text files, images and several other popular formats. You can also pull in documents directly from your SkyDrive, Box, Dropbox, Evernote and Google Drive accounts for faxing.

Also see: Comparison on Online Fax Services

Your free account will only help you send faxes to other numbers but in order to receive faxes, you’ll have to buy an incoming fax number that costs around $7.99 per month.

Update – If you don’t have a Microsoft account, go to hellofax.com/googledrive and use your Google Account to sign-up for HelloFax.  You will still get credit for sending up to  50 faxes per month for free for a maximum of 6 months.

Multitasking on Android With Floating Apps

Android has decent multitasking, but the missing piece of the puzzle is the ability to have multiple apps on-screen at the same time – particularly useful on a larger tablet. Floating apps fill this need.

Floating apps function as always-on-top windows, allowing you to watch videos, browse the web, take notes, or do other things while using another app. They demonstrate how Android’s interface is more flexible than iOS and the Modern UI in Windows.

Browsers

Two popular floating browsers are Floating Browser Flux (free) and OverSkreen (paid, doesn’t yet function on Android Jelly Bean).

With these apps, you can use a browser while using another app, open multiple floating browser windows and view multiple web pages at the same time, or both.

Video Players

Video players are an obvious use case for pop-up apps, especially on a larger tablet. You could watch a video while browsing the web, doing your email, or using any other app on your tablet or phone. DicePlayer, BSPlayer, and Super Video are all free floating video players. Stick It! is a paid app, but it also supports YouTube videos in addition to local video files.

Notepad

Want to take notes while reading a web page, PDF, or any other type of document? Switching back and forth between a note-taking app and the main app you’re using can be tedious. Instead, try hovernote – a floating notes app that hovers over the other apps you’re using. It’s a paid app, but there aren’t any free floating notes apps on Google Play at the moment.

Chat & IRC

Old-school desktop chat programs like ICQ, AIM, MSN, Pidgin, Trillian, and the others didn’t force you into a full-screen chat mode, but most apps on your tablet do. LilyPad gives you a floating chat window, allowing you to chat on Google Talk, Facebook, and Windows Live Messenger (MSN). The developers promise future support for AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber.

If you’re a geek who still uses IRC for your chatting, try FloatIRC.

Calculator

The default Android calculator app looks a bit ridiculous in full-screen mode on a tablet. TryAirCalc or Float Calculator instead – both are free and allow you to use a calculator while using another app.

Any Widget

While floating apps are useful, the selection is currently a bit limited. For example, there’s no floating app that shows your Gmail or a Pandora music player. However, many apps provide widgets, which are normally attached to your home screen. A floating app likeFloating Banner (free) or Floating Widget (paid) allows you to turn any widget into a floating app. If you can’t find a floating app that meets your needs, you can find a widget and turn it into a floating app.

Terminal

AirTerm gives you a floating Linux terminal. If you want to SSH into your Linux server or use Android’s terminal (particularly useful on rooted devices), AirTerm will allow you to do it in a floating window. It’s a paid app, but it’s the only one of its kind on Google Play.

System Stats

Apps like Cool Tool (free) and PerfMon (paid) give you a floating window with information about your Android device’s system stats – resource usage and everything else you might want to know. If you like seeing this stuff, you can see it all the time.

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Android developers who want to create their own floating apps can use StandOut, an open-source library for creating floating apps.

14 Special Google Searches That Show Instant Answers

Google can do more than display lists of websites – Google will give you quick answers to many special searches. While Google isn’t quite as advanced as Wolfram Alpha, it has quite a few tricks up its sleeve.

We’ve also covered searching Google like a pro by learning the Google search operators – if you want to master Google, be sure to learn those.

Calculator

You can use Google as a calculator – just type in a quick calculation and Google will provide an answer. Google now offers a clickable calculator tool when you search for a calculation, so you can use Google like you’d use a calculator application on your desktop or smartphone.

Unit Conversions

Google can also convert between a variety of units. Just type a search in the form X unit to unit. For example, 40 degrees f to c converts 40 degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius.

As with the calculator, the unit conversion tool is clickable.

You can also combine unit conversations and math. For example, the search two miles plus 500 yards in kilometers will return a valid answer.

Currency Conversions

Google can also do currency conversions for you. You can do a search such as usd to cadto see the exchange rate between two currencies, or do a search such as 500 usd to cadto see how much a certain amount of currency is worth in another currency.

Your IP Address

You can determine your current public IP address by typing what is my ip into Google – or just search for my ip.

Weather

To see the weather in a specific location, search for weather location – for example, search for weather new york to see a weather forecast for New York. If you enterweather without a location, Google will show you the weather for your current area.

Sunrise and Sunset

You can also view the sunrise or sunset times for a location by typing sunrise location orsunset location. Like with the weather search, searching for sunrise or sunset without a location will show you the sunrise or sunset times for your current location.

Times

View the current time for a location by typing time location – for example, searching fortime paris will show you the current time in Paris, France.  Like with the weather searches, searching for time without a location will show you the current time where you are.

Package Tracking

If you want to track a package, you can enter a UPS, USPS, or Fedex tracking number directly in the Google search box. Google will link you to the appropriate package-tracking page.

Dictionary Definitions

To view the dictionary definition for a word, search for define word – Google will show you the definition of the word, along with a button you can click to hear the word pronounced aloud.

Flight Tracking

View the status of a flight by typing an airline name followed by a flight number.

Flight Schedules

Search for available flights by searching for flights from city to city. Google will show you a list of available flights along with their prices, durations, and airlines – you can enter your dates and locate flights right from the search page.

Movie Schedules

Want to see a movie in a theater? Search for movies followed by your postal code to view a list of movies playing near you.

Data

You can view many types of data for different cities and countries, such as the population and unemployment rate, by searching for them. For example, searching for population location will show you the population of that location, whether it’s a city, state, or country.

Stock Information

View about a stock, including its price and a graph of its price history, by searching for any stock symbol on Google.

How To Create Your Own Custom Google Search Engine

Have you ever wanted to create a custom Google search engine that searches only specific websites? You can easily do this with Google’s Custom Search Engine tool. You can bookmark your search engine and even share it with other people.

This trick works similarly to Google’s site: operator, but you won’t have to type the operator every time you search. It’s particularly useful if you want to search a large number of sites at once.

Creating a Custom Search Engine

To get started, head over to the Google Custom Search Engine page and click the Create a custom search engine button. You’ll need a Google account for this – the search engine will be saved with your Google account.

Enter a name and description for your search engine – these can be anything you like.

The Sites to search field is the one that really matters. Here, you’ll specify a list of the websites you want to search. For example, if you wanted to search both howtogeek.com and microsoft.com, you’d enter:

howtogeek.com/*

microsoft.com/*

The * character is the wildcard, which can match anything, so the /* characters tell your search engine to search everything on both of these websites.

There are more advanced things you can do with this box – we’ll get back to that in a bit.

After clicking Next, you can specify a style for your search results and test the search engine you created.

Once you’re happy with your search engine, click the Next button at the bottom of the page and you’ll end up at a page that gives you an embed code for your search engine.

You’re probably not a web developer, so you’ll want to ignore this page. Click the Google Custom Search logo at the top of the page instead.

To get to your search engine’s page, click its name in the list of search engines you’ve created.

You can bookmark this page for easy access your search engine. You can also share your search engine with anyone by sending them the full URL that appears in your address bar.

URL Tricks

You don’t have to specify an entire website while creating your custom search engine.

For example, the custom search engine above searches all areas of microsoft.com. If we do an example search, we might see that there’s useful information coming fromwindows.microsoft.com and support.microsoft.com, but the results fromanswers.microsoft.com (Microsoft’s support forum) are not very helpful.

To exclude answers.microsoft.com and include the other subdomains, we could use the following URL list while creating a search engine:

howtogeek.com/*
windows.microsoft.com/*
support.microsoft.com/*

Note that there’s no way to exclude a specific subdomain – we can only include the ones we want to search. This list will search only the two subdomains on microsoft.com.

There are several other types of URLs you can define in this list:

• Single Page: You can define only one specific page by entering its URL, such asexample.com/page.html. This will include only a single web page in the search engine.
• Part of a Website: You can use the * character in other ways. For example, the URLsupport.microsoft.com/kb/* will search only Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. Using the URL example.com/*word* will search all pages on example.com that haveword in their URLs.

You can continue fine-tuning the search engine until you’re happy with the results by clicking the back to step 1 link, modifying the URLs, and then performing another test search.

Once you’re done, you can even add your custom search engine to your browser’s search 

Can’t Find a User Manual For Your Gear? Search These Specialist Websites

User manuals – those thick (or thin) soft covered sheaf’s of paper with multi-lingual instructions and weird hieroglyphics that we don’t bother to read. Not only that, it gets stuffed inside the box it came in and gets chucked into the deep cob-webbed corners never to be seen again. Until, brain freeze strikes and you can’t quite make out what that little button on your glitzy remote does. We all have rummaged through the house looking for the user manual we ‘misplaced’. No luck.

Here’s where a bit of smarts comes in. The meticulous guy with foresight will either scan it and keep a softcopy in his computer, or look for a softcopy that’s usually available as PDF on the manufacturer’s site.

There’s a third option – a bunch of specialist websites which does the hard work for us lazybones, and stockpiles user manuals for us to search and download.

Retrevo

Retrevo is an electronics shopping site. It is also an above par consumer gadget review sites, but I am betting here that you can make better use of it for its rich index of over 100,000 manuals that are available for free download. That’s 100,000 user manuals from 1000 brands.

When trouble strikes, you can head to Retrevo and drill down the alphabetical listing. Better still, scan down the popular brand name list to find the electronic/electrical gizmo that’s playing hard to get. Retrevo covers popular names like Casio, Canon, Dell, Electrolux, and Sony. I spotted a few names like Victorinox and Fossil that you don’t expect to see so commonly.

What I like about Retrevo: The broad categories: I found 2-way radios, humidifiers, telescopes, GPS systems, and gaming accessories here.

Manuals Online

Manuals Online ranks right up there when you search for user manuals on Google. Why shouldn’t it, as it beats Retrevo with a headcount of 600,000 user guides and manuals, and it is just as attractive. The specialist site covers all kinds of user manuals in any category of consumer electronic/electrical product you can think of. 300,000 user manuals from 5000 brands…that’s quite a collection.

Manuals Online is completely about manuals. Choose Brands or Categories, or just use the search engine at the top. You can also register and log-in to organize all the manuals you need with the Manage My Stufffeature on the site. It allows you to arrange your manuals by rooms, and also record any discussion topics or related information around the product.

What I like about Manuals Online: The virtual filing cabinet (Manage My Stuff) is a super organizational tool. Also, Manuals Online could be your one-stop for manual and gadget related help with its 2 million strong community that can give you any product help.

Safe Manuals

Safe Manuals gets it right when it says – what can you do when an e-bay auction you won ends with you getting the item without the instructions?

Safe Manuals does not look as spiffy as the two sites above, but it does have nearly 400,000 user guides and manuals across nearly 11,000 brands to hold its own. Here too you can upload your own user manual and help to grow the stock. Browse by manufacturer or category. You will notice that Safe Manuals also covers car and bike manufacturers starting from A (Aston Martin) to V (Volkswagen). There are also some names which do not have manuals linked to them, so that’s sometimes a downer.

What I like about Safe Manuals: Quite a few of the popular brands have forums around them where you can shout for help or help others with their troubleshooting.

iFixit

Do you balk when you have to pick up your screwdriver and open up the panel of a gadget? Most of us do, because we aren’t the DIY-er types. It is also not a great idea to go charging into the complicated circuitry of a gadget’s innards. That’s where iFixit comes in. iFixit is a repair-it-yourself website with free online repair manuals across varied products – from Apple to Xboxes. It started out with Mac but now includes general purpose household gadgets too.

iFixit has been divided into three major portions: Parts (get repair parts and upgrades), Repair (step-by-step guides), and Answers (diagnose and troubleshoot).

What I like about iFixit: Teardowns (disassembly instructions) and repair guides come with illustrations and detailed instructions.

eSpares

eSpares describes itself as UK’s leading spare parts retailer. It is mainly a site that deals with spare parts, accessories and consumables for all the electrical appliances in your home and garden, but it also stocks up on user manuals for appliances around the house. With common brands available across the Atlantic, you can try this out too.

What I like about eSpares: You can search for your user manual using a combination of manufacturer’s name from the dropdown and the model number.

The Manuals

I wouldn’t underestimate the plain-Jane nature of The Manuals which is basically a Google Custom Search engine disguised as a PDF search tool for user manuals. It is quick and handy if you don’t have the time to drill through the other sites on this list. You get the option of viewing manuals online or downloading them to your desktop as PDF files.

What I like about The Manuals: Quick access and simple search with a language selection.

These six specialized websites on user manuals and guides are probably the cream of them all out there. If you still don’t manage to get the one you are looking for, approach the communities behind some of these services. Then, there’s trusty old Google Search of course. Do you have your own trusty old source? How do you manage your manuals? Did you ever miss one, and curse yourself for throwing it away?

Test Firefox OS on Windows

On July 2,2012, Mozilla announced “Firefox OS”, a mobile operating system based on HTML5  language, which is used to make websites and other applications.

Codename’d as“Boot 2 Gecko”, the Web-based OS from Mozilla will support  will support everything you would expect from a smart phone  such as  dialing,  messaging, internet browsing, web gaming, photo taking, video watching, and music.. e.t.c.

The Firefox OS for mobile devices is built on Mozilla’s “Boot to Gecko project” which unlocks many of the current limitations of web development on mobile, allowing HTML5 applications to get access to the underlying capabilities of a phone, previously only available to native applications. Telefónica’s Digital unit joined forces with Mozilla earlier this year to take this work and showcase a new phonearchitecture where every phone feature (calling, messaging, games, etc.) is an HTML5 application

Device manufacturers TCL Communication Technology (under the Alcatel One Touch brand) and ZTE today announced their intentions to manufacture the first devices to feature the new Firefox OS, using Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm .

The first Firefox OS powered devices are expected to launch commercially in Brazil in early 2013 through Telefónica’s commercial brand, Vivo.h  With Firefox OS, Mozilla aims to  compete with iOS, Android and Windows Phone .

Test Firefox OS windows /Mac or Linux PC :

Today Mozilla released  a desktop build of  Firefox OS , that allows interested users to  preview or test  the Firefox Mobile operating on your  Windows, Linux or Mac PC.

According to Tony Chung, developer of Mozilla mobile os

If you’re a web developer, you can use these builds to create and test your webApp against.  If you’re looking to help do some testing, these desktop builds will also give you an immediate opportunity to play with and help us write testplans and file bugs.    We encourage anyone interested to give the desktop builds a spin (available on Mac, Windows, and Linux), and get involved with the project!

Install Firefox OS on Windows ?

If you wish to install Firefox OS test build on your windows system, first you must set up a Gaia profile before launching, here’s how you do it.

Quick start Instructions for running Gaia in a Nightly build :

  # Install a nightly version of Firefox from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

  # Clone the main gaia repository and generate a default set of apps/permissions
  git clone https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia gaia
  cd gaia
  DEBUG=1 make

  # Start Gaia by telling Nightly where is the profile generated
  # IMPORTANT: Make sure all Firefox instances are closed before doing that.
  nightly -profile profile/ -no-remote http://system.gaiamobile.org:8080

  # Start making your changes!

If you want detail instructions of Gaia/hacking, read over here.

Now to run Firefox OS on Windows or other :

1) For your win32/linux/osx computer, download and install a nightly “B2G Desktop” build

2)Run  B2G (b2g.exe)
3) on command line, run:

•     $ git clone git://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia
•     $ make -C gaia profile
•     $ /path/to/b2g -profile gaia/profile
•      (eg. Tonys-MacBook-Air:MacOS tchung$ ./b2g -profile /Users/tchung/Desktop/DailyB2G/07172012_desktop/gaia/profile)

4) you should see content now.

Note : If you see a “black” screen after launching the B2G Desktop build,  because you havent set up a Gaia profile before launching.

Reference :

1. http://dknite.wordpress.com/

2.https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Hacking

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Google Fiber

Google Fiber is a revolution brought by Google that will make internet broadband speeds up to 100 times faster. The speed will be around 1 GB/s. But it also has a bad news attached to it, Google has started this service only in Kansas City. If you do not live there, then it might take long time to reach you.

How To Get Google Fiber :

Google Fiber is a combined process. You can not have Google Fiber at your own will. You need to convince your neighborhood to get Google Fiber too. Google has set goals for every locality. If the number of connections Google has asked for or the goal that Google has set is met, only then you would have Google Fiber in your locality. So you must ask your neighborhood to get Google Fiber too.

Pricing Of Google Fiber :

Google is offering 3 Plans under the Fiber revolution :

• Free Internet : It offers the  internet at today’s average speed, the download speed will be up to 5 Mbps download, up to 1 Mbps upload speed, unlimited download and upload for at least 7 years. The subscription also includes a Network Box. You can anytime upgrade to any other high-speed plan with no additional equipment required. The one time cost for this plan would be $300 construction fee or 12 monthly installments of $25 + taxes.
• Gigabit internet : This plan is the real Google Fiber plan. You will experience download and upload speed up to one gigabit (1GB). The plan comes with free 1TB Google Drive storage and upload and download are unlimited. You will have a one year contract, the $300 construction fee is waived off and you will have to pay $70 per month + taxes. This subscription also includes the Network Box.
• Gigabit + TV : This package gives you the full Google experience. You will have a Network Box for Gigabit internet, a TV Box for watching TV, a Storage box for recording 2TBs or 500 hours of your favorite shows in HD and a Nexus 7 tablet  for surfing and watching all over your house, all free with this package. The specs are all same as Gigabit Internet but with added support for TV and storage. The plan will cost you $120 a month + taxes.

In all Google Fiber will not bring us close only to the Internet but also give us full fledged entertainment by changing our TV experience too.  With Google Fiber you will be able to watch YouTube videos without having to wait for buffering to complete. You can also record your favorite TV shows and also have an ample space in cloud to a way for a better, secure and reliable space for storage.

Visit Google Fiber