Stuff You Should Know – Making Your Life Easier – Technology

5 Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do
For all the folks with cell phones this should be printed and kept in your car, purse, wallet. Good information to have with you.There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies. Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival.
Check out the things that you can do with it:
FIRST
Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly, this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

SECOND
Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock
button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other “remote” for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
Editor’s Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a cell phone!”

THIRD
Hidden Battery Power
Imagine your cell battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370#. Your cell phone will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell phone next time.

FOURTH
How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: *#06#. A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.

When your phone gets stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

And Finally….

FIFTH
Free Directory Service for Cells
Cell phone companies are charging us $1.00 to $1.75 or more for 411 information calls when they don’t have to. Most of us do not carry a telephone directory in our vehicle, which makes this situation even more of a problem. When you need to use the 411 information option, simply dial: (800) FREE411, or (800) 373-3411 without incurring any charge at all. Program this into your cell phone now.

This is the kind of information people don’t mind receiving, so pass it on to your family and friends.
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11 Things To Never, Ever Say On Facebook
Facebook is great for sharing the most special of life’s moments. Like pictures of a cake, funny links or your need for an able body to help you move a sofa. But those status updates are an open announcement to everyone you know. Some information is unwelcome. Some of it is unbearable. So, for the sake of all your friends, the following public statements are no longer allowed.

The birthday thank you
The only thing less sincere than the Facebook birthday wish (copy, paste the words “happy birthday!”) is the day-after status update, expressing your gratitude for the dozens of perfunctory congratulations from people you barely know anymore.All this serves to do is remind everyone that it was, quite recently, your birthday, in the wispy hope that someone will realize they forgot and shoot you a belated message. You don’t need to shout thank you into the wind. If someone in real life wishes you a happy birthday, thank them. That’s it.

Deaths
Bummer city! This stuff has no place on Timeline, because Timeline is beautiful. And a death notice, whether casual or elaborate, will only make everyone uncomfortable and cheapen the passing of the deceased. The end of a human life shouldn’t be making bedfellows with a shared meme picture of a squirrel. Be respectful. Or you will be haunted.

Personal messages to your significant other
You’re in love. Love is wonderful. But love is intimate, and Facebook is not. Cutesy messages (“I miss u so much babe! had a great time this weekend :-D”) — these must stop. Send a message, an email or literally any other form of communication that isn’t relayed across hundreds of news feeds. We wouldn’t walk into your kitchen and shout about how hungry we are — don’t pollute Facebook with your love howls. In fact, we’d prefer that you stop by each of our computers and just gag us by hand.

Hangovers
Whoa, man! Did you really drink all of those beers? No, you did not! What, you did? You drank all of those beers, and now you’re hung over? So hung over!

Now we know. Now we can nod solemnly and think: Man, you are the coolest, and you have the worst hangover of all time, and you vow to never drink again. Maybe you won’t mention it again, either.

College admissions
Nobody cares except your close family and friends — who can be reached online directly — so stop bragging. Unless you got into a terrible school, in which case you’re just making everyone feel bad a la Facebook death announcement.

Exercise
Another braggart’s favorite, the feat of physical strength is now a common subject of Facebook statuses. Nobody cares about how much you just benched or how many miles you just ran. Nobody wants to see photos of you standing at the finish line of a 4k fun run. Unless you sustained a grotesque injury during the race — we’ll take a look at a shot of that.

Asking for money
It’s great that you started a business/website/app/lemonade stand/Kickstarter/massage parlor, but asking your friends for money — especially the giant swath of your Facebook pseudo-friends — is always a faux pas. So please, no blanket invitations to shop at your online jewelry store.

Romantic anniversaries
There are two people who truly care about this, and you are one of them. You can probably surmise who the other one is without using Facebook. See “Personal messages to your significant other” above.

New phone number
Helpful: letting everyone know you can’t be reached by phone because you dropped it in a toilet or it fell off a cliff or whatever. Cool, we’ll know to hit you via email instead. Not helpful: asking that everyone send you their phone numbers because you lost your phone and can’t be bothered to actually ask us personally. Losing your phone is actually a great excuse to rebuild your phone book with people you truly care about! If you can’t remember who to ask, odds are you don’t need to be calling or texting those people anymore.

Bemoaning Facebook
Not even because it’s ironic, but because it makes you look like a sidewalk Rapture street-shouter. Nothing makes you look less So over Facebook like taking to Facebook to express your disapproval of Facebook. Or its privacy policies.

Engagements
Noticing a pattern here? This might be the only time in your life 150 people will like a status update (unless you’re selected to join a manned mission to Mars). Either way, it’s a LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME move. Change your relationship status if you really want some indicator on your Timeline. Any kind of status message beyond that is self-indulgent and irritating. You’re also broadcasting your upcoming marriage to hundreds of people who won’t be invited to the wedding. That isn’t very nice either.

When it doubt, use the golden rule. Stay away from things nobody but you cares to know about or celebrate. Then, Facebook will continue to be a fire hose of semi-interesting life gristle, instead of a dump truck full of tripe.
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Microwaving Water!
Microwaving Water
A 26-year old man decided to have a cup of coffee. He took a cup of water and put it in the microwave to heat it up (something that he had done numerous times before). I am not sure how long he set the timer for, but he wanted to bring the water to a boil.. When the timer shut the oven off, he removed the cup from the oven. As he looked into the cup, he noted that the! Water was not boiling, but suddenly the water in the cup ‘blew up’ into his face. The cup remained intact until he threw it out of his hand, but all the water had flown out into his face due to the buildup of energy. His whole face is blistered and he has 1st and 2nd degree burns to his face which may leave scarring.He also may have lost partial sight in his left eye. While at the hospital, the doctor who was attending to him stated that this is a fairly common occurrence and water (alone) should never be heated in a microwave oven. If water is heated in this manner, something should be placed in the cup to diffuse the energy such as a wooden stir stick, tea bag, etc…, (nothing metal).General Electric’s Response:Thanks for contacting us, I will be happy to assist you. The e-mail that you received is correct. Microwaved water and other liquids do not always bubble when they reach the boiling point. They can actually get superheated and not bubble at all. The superheated liquid will bubble up out of the cup when it is moved or when something like a spoon or tea bag is put into it.To prevent this from happening and causing injury, do not heat any liquid for more than two minutes per cup. After heating, let the cup stand in the microwave for thirty seconds! Before moving it or adding anything into it.Here is what our local science teacher had to say on the matter: ‘Thanks for the microwave warning. I have seen this happen before. It is caused by a phenomenon known as super heating. It can occur anytime water is heated and will particularly occur if the vessel that the water is heated in is new, or when heating a small amount of water (less than half a cup).

What happens is that the water heats faster than the vapor bubbles can form. If the cup is very new then it is unlikely to have small surface scratches inside it that provide a place for the bubbles to form. As the bubbles cannot form and release some of the heat has built up, the liquid does not boil, and the liquid continues to heat up well past its boiling point.

What then usually happens is that the liquid is bumped or jarred, which is just enough of a shock to cause the bubbles to rapidly form and expel the hot liquid. The rapid formation of bubbles is also why a carbonated beverage spills over when opened after having been shaken.’

If you pass this on you could very well save someone from a lot of pain and suffering!
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7 Clever Google Tricks Worth Knowing
Below are compiled a list of 7 clever Google tricks that I believe everyone should be aware of. Together I think they represent the apex of the grand possibilities associated with Google search manipulation tricks and hacks. Although there are many others out there, these 7 tricks are my all-time favorite. Enjoy yourself.

1. Find the Face Behind the Result – This is a neat trick you can use on a Google Image search to filter the search results so that they include only images of people. How is this useful? Well, it could come in handy if you are looking for images of the prominent people behind popular products, companies, or geographic locations. You can perform this search by appending the code &imgtype=face to the end of the URL address after you perform a standard Google Image search.

2. Google + Social Media Sites = Quality Free Stuff – If you are on the hunt for free desktop wallpaper, stock images, WordPress templates or the like, using Google to search your favorite social media sites is your best bet. The word “free” in any standard search query immediately attracts spam. Why wade through potential spam in standard search results when numerous social media sites have an active community of users who have already ranked and reviewed the specific free items that interest you. All you have to do is direct Google to search through each of these individual social media sites, and bingo… you find quality content ranked by hundreds of other people.

3. Find Free Anonymous Web Proxies – A free anonymous web proxy site allows any web browser to access other third-party websites by channeling the browser’s connection through the proxy. The web proxy basically acts as a middleman between your web browser and the third-party website you are visiting. Why would you want to do this? There are two common reasons:

  • You’re connecting to a public network at a coffee shop or internet café and you want privacy while you browse the web. You don’t want the admin to know every site you visit.
  • You want to bypass a web content filter or perhaps a server-side ban on your IP address. Content filtering is common practice on college campus networks. This trick will usually bypass those restrictions.

There are subscription services and applications available such as TOR and paid VPN servers that do the same thing. However, this trick is free and easy to access from anywhere via Google. All you have to do is look through the search results returned by the queries below, find a proxy that works, and enter in the URL of the site you want to browse anonymously.

4. Google for Music, Videos, and Ebooks – Google can be used to conduct a search for almost any file type, including Mp3s, PDFs, and videos. Open web directories are one of the easiest places to quickly find an endless quantity of freely downloadable files. This is an oldie, but it’s a goodie! Why thousands of webmasters incessantly fail to secure their web severs will continue to boggle our minds.

5. Browse Open Webcams Worldwide – Take a randomized streaming video tour of the world by searching Google for live open access video webcams. This may not be the most productive Google trick ever, but it sure is fun! (Note: you may be prompted to install an ActiveX control or the Java runtime environment which allows your browser to view certain video stream formats.)

6. Judge a Site by its Image – Find out what a site is all about by looking at a random selection of the images hosted on its web pages. Even if you are somewhat familiar with the target site’s content, this can be an entertaining little exercise. You will almost surely find something you didn’t expect to see. All you have to do is use Google’s site: operator to target a domain in an image search.

7. Results Based on Third-Party Opinion – Sometimes you can get a better idea of the content located within a website by reading how other websites refer to that site’s content. The allinanchor: Google search operator can save you large quantities of time when a normal textual based search query fails to fetch the information you desire. It conducts a search based on keywords used strictly in the anchor text, or linking text, of third party sites that link to the web pages returned by the search query. In other words, this operator filters your search results in a way such that Google ignores the title and content of the returned web pages, but instead bases the search relevance on the keywords that other sites use to reference the results. It can add a whole new dimension of variety to your search results.

Bonus Material:

Here is a list of my favorite Google advanced search operators, operator combinations, and related uses:

  • link:URL = lists other pages that link to the URL.
  • related:URL = lists other pages that are related to the URL.
  • site:domain.com “search term = restricts search results to the given domain.
  • allinurl:WORDS = shows only pages with all search terms in the url.
  • inurl:WORD = like allinurl: but filters the URL based on the first term only.
  • allintitle:WORD = shows only results with terms in title.
  • intitle:WORD = similar to allintitle, but only for the next word.
  • cache:URL = will show the Google cached version of the URL.
  • info:URL = will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
  • filetype:SOMEFILETYPE = will restrict searches to that filetype
  • -filetype:SOMEFILETYPE = will remove that file type from the search.
  • site:www.somesite.net “+www.somesite.net” = shows you how many pages of your site are indexed by google
  • allintext: = searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
  • allinlinks: = searches only within links, not text or title
  • WordA OR WordB = search for either the word A or B
  • “Word” OR “Phrase” = search exact word or phrase
  • WordA -WordB = find word A but filter results that include word B
  • WordA +WordB = results much contain both Word A and Word B
  • ~WORD = looks up the word and its synonyms
  • ~WORD -WORD = looks up only the synonyms to the word

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Free Phone Lookup
This actually works!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Here’s a number worth putting in your cell phone, or your home phone speed dial:
1-800-goog-411. 1-800-4664-41

This is a service from Google, and it’s free — great when you are on the road. Don’t waste your money on information calls and don’t waste your time manually dialing the number. I am driving along in my car and I need to call the Chinese Restaurant and I don’t know the number. I hit the speed dial for 1 800 goog-411. The voice at the other end says, “City & State.” I say, “Washington, DC.” He says, “Business, Name or Type of Service.” I say, China King Restaurant.” He says, “Connecting” and China King answers the phone. This is nationwide and it is a free service.

Click on the link below and watch the short clip for a quick demo.

http://www.google.com/goog411

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6 things you can do now to be stealthier on the Internet

image001
While being invisible on the Internet is about as possible as being invisible in real life, a few easy changes of habit can make you a more elusive target for advertisers, intrusive social networks and possibly even the NSA and friends. While these are measures anyone can take, please note, they won’t necessarily provide total anonymity or protection from hackers. They’ll just keep much of your everyday Internet activity from being recorded and tracked.

1. Use private browsing windows
Whether you’re looking up engagement rings or a sensitive medical issue, there are plenty of reasons to go off grid temporarily. All major browsers offer a mode that neither loads nor stores any information about you on any sites — when you finish, it’ll be as if the session never occurred on your computer, and visited sites won’t remember much (just whatever they can glean from your home network’s IP address).

image002

Google / Mozilla

Private browsing on Chrome (left) and Firefox (right).

Look for the option in the main menu of your browser. In Chrome it’s “Incognito,” in Firefox it’s “Private Window,” and in Internet Explorer it’s “InPrivate Browsing.”

2. Adjust your preferences!
Almost every app, service, game — anything you have to download or sign up for — has a preferences or options menu. Go through and uncheck anything that you’re not totally okay with.

Sending anonymous usage data? Can it really be anonymous? Uncheck. Geotag pictures? You can always add location later. Uncheck. Check for updates on startup? Do you really want companies knowing exactly when and how often you use their stuff? Uncheck. How much information you volunteer is up to you, but usually you have to opt out rather than in.

3. Download browser plugins
You can modify your browser to reject dubious activity on the Web. Here are two of the best add-ons:

image004

Ghostery

Ghostery: Creeped out by Facebook widgets showing which of your friends likes the site you’re on? Ghostery allows you to turn on and off everything from social widgets to tracking cookies.

HTTPS Everywhere: This useful tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes sure you’re connecting with websites at the highest level of security supported, so it’s more difficult for snooping software to see what you see. It’s especially good if you use public Wi-Fi a lot.

4. Use false identities
Unless your real name or address is actually necessary for a service you’re signing up for (e.g. job recruitment or banking), there’s no reason to provide it. Put in “Jane Doe” or “Bill Clinton” instead — it can’t hurt anyone and it may save you from unwanted communication (even in your real mailbox).

It’s not just your name that you should be careful with, either. Your username is often public-facing, and can be used to track you as well. Are you “SeattleGuy1949″ on Gmail, AIM and assorted support forums? Advertisers (and hackers) will be able to connect the dots. Make up unique names, and let a password manager — or a pad of paper — take care of remembering them.

Lastly, there’s no reason to have everything go to your main email address. Email is free, so keep one for personal correspondence and a spare for lists and sign-ups. Some email services, such as Microsoft’s Outlook.com, let you add additional email addresses — and even temporary ones — for transactions you want to keep one-sided.

5. Choose services built for anonymity
If you use Google, there is a 100 percent chance that you’re being tracked for ads. Even the new Yahoo mail has ad-tracking on by default — though, like Gmail, that can be deactivated. If you use Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple’s iCloud or other cloud storage services, your content may be passively monitored for illegal material like child porn. While monitoring tends to be lawful and non-intrusive, many don’t like the idea of their private lockers being rummaged.

Try these alternatives to the usual suspects:
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DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo search engine provides solid results, totally anonymously. Unsurprisingly, the site’s traffic has skyrocketed since the PRISM story broke.

Hushmail works like any other webmail, but offers strong encryption both while your emails are in transit and when they’re stored. The host company won’t look unless a court order forces them to. (Note: If you love your current webmail, you may be able to deactivate the ad-tracking, so have a look in the preferences before jumping ship.)

SpiderOak cloud storage is totally encrypted — only you know what you put there. If 2GB is enough for your private files, sign up for a free account and you can be reasonably sure that your data is secure.

6. Take extreme measures
If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, you’ll need to put in some serious time looking up things like VPNs and proxies, TOR, PGP, TAILS and local encryption. These powerful tools aren’t easy to use, and are often employed for evil as well as good, so you’re on your own there.

That said, for most of the everyday surveillance we’re subjected to as we use Internet services and browse the Web, the rest of the above should help keep you undercover.
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This Is The Greatest Keyboard Shortcut Ever
image001That’s for Mac users. If you’re on a PC, it’s Ctrl+Shift+T.

Try it right now. Close this tab and bring it back. I dare ya.

See how cool that was? This miraculous finger-to-keyboard resuscitation, a sort of Ctrl-Z for the entire Internet, means no more called-out cusswords, no more wishing the back button had you covered when, aiming to click on a tab, you accidentally hit the little X on the tab’s starboard. With just one more step than the Ctrl-T that gives new tabs life, the E*Trade tab you mistakenly closed will pop back into existence, all cued up to sell those 10,000 shares of stock. Don’t worry, the trick works in Firefox and Internet Explorer, too, so clumsy mousing won’t send your long political post on your uncle’s Facebook page on a one-way trip to the undiscovere’d country in those browsers, either.
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Damn  I Shoud Have Thought Of That_Small

Ted: 10 Top Time-Saving Tech Tips

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