10 January 2014

6 Warning Signs Of Digital Identity Theft You Shouldn’t Ignore



identity-theft

What would you do if you checked your bank account and saw a $0 balance? Identity theft isn’t too rare of an occurrence these days, yet we often fall into the trap of thinking that it’ll always happen to “someone else”. Unfortunately, we are all somebody else’s “someone else”, which means identity theft can happen to you. Your identity can be stolen in numerous ways. Thieves can steal your credit card numbers when you shop online. They can also steal your identity through hacks, viruses, and malware. They can even manipulate you into giving up your personal data without you...


Read the full article: 6 Warning Signs Of Digital Identity Theft You Shouldn’t Ignore



Dead PCs, Gmail Stalking, Bitcoin Overstock, Kindle Kiosk [Tech News Digest]



abandoned-desktop-computers

Today in Tech News Digest, desktops are declared dead, Gmail stalkers get given a gift thanks to Google+, Overstock starts accepting Bitcoin, scanning your irises to protect your identity becomes a thing, Snapchat apologizes, Amazon starts selling hardware from a vending machine, and two companies fight over the right to pin. Tablets Are Killing PCs It's only going to get worse for the PC industry http://t.co/LA8Ubl5O4a — Josh Wetzel (@jwetzel) January 10, 2014 The PC market is continuing to slowly die, with a seventh consecutive quarter of declining worldwide shipments. According to Gartner (via The Next Web), there were 82.6...


Read the full article: Dead PCs, Gmail Stalking, Bitcoin Overstock, Kindle Kiosk [Tech News Digest]



How to Watch YouTube in the Background on Android



You are watching or rather listening to a music video on YouTube but are distracted by an email notification. You switch to the Gmail app to check your mail and, as expected, the YouTube video stops playing. You have to switch to the YouTube app again on your Android device to resume playback.


This is a limitation of the YouTube app on Android. It automatically stops video playback as soon as you move it to the background. The same is true for the YouTube mobile website as well. The videos will play as long as the web browser – be it Chrome or some other browser – is in focus. Switch to a different app and the video will pause itself.


The YouTube app for iPhone and iPad too impose a similar restriction but you can easily get around that limitation by playing YouTube videos inside the Safari browser (see: Play YouTube in the background on iOS).


youtube in background


Play Youtube in the Background on Android


The iOS trick however won’t work on Android but there exist even simple workarounds in the form of apps. The Google Play store has several apps that support background playback thus letting you use YouTube as a music player. I did try them all and here are my favorites:


The uListen app has a simple interface and minimal features which is what I like most about this app. Just use the search button to find videos and playlists on YouTube and hit the play button. You can also tap and hold a search result to favorite it or to add it to your playlist. uListen doesn’t link to your YouTube account and all your playlists and favorites are saved locally.


Then there are apps like SuperTube and Viral that more like clones of the official YouTube app except that they also let you watch or play YouTube videos while in the background. You can create local playlists or connect these apps to your main YouTube account and access your playlists, watch later queue and favorites. Another handy feature is that you can do a vertical swipe on the video to increase or decrease the volume.


Both Viral and SuperTube offer a floating video player which essentially means that you can pull out a YouTube video and place it over any other app. It’s like the Picture-In-Picture effect – you can read the New York Times in the browser and watch a movie on YouTube simultaneously. I prefer SuperTube more since it lets you choose a different video in the queue from the floating player itself.


A major downside of the previously mentioned uListen app is that it doesn’t offer autocomplete mode so you have to the type the entire search terms manually for relevant results. YT Player, another free YouTube audio player, fixes that problem. It pulls in search suggestions from YouTube and you can search for videos, playlists or even channels. If you prefer apps with slightly bigger fonts, you will probably like this one even more.




This story, How to Watch YouTube in the Background on Android, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/01/2014 under Android, Music, YouTube, Internet

Web Scraping Reddit with Google Scripts



I am working on a little side project that involves mining Reddit data. It fetches a listing of all posts on different subreddits and copies the obtained data to a Google spreadsheet for further analysis (more on the project later).


Reddit, unlike most websites, allows web scraping as long as the crawler scripts make no more than one request every two seconds to the Reddit servers (see rules). You don’t even need a developer account or an API key to perform scraping on Reddit.


There are popular tools like wget, Site Sucker (Mac) or HTTrack Website Copier (Windows) that can download entire websites for offline use but they are mostly useless for scraping Reddit data since the site doesn’t use page numbers and content of pages is constantly changing. A post maybe listed on the first page of a subreddit but it could find itself on the third page the next second as other posts are voted to the top.


While there exists PHP and Python libraries for scraping Reddit, they are too complicated for the non-techies. Fortunately, there’s always Google Apps Script to the rescue. Here’s what you can do to pull data from any Subreddit on Reddit automatically.



  1. Open the Google Sheet and choose File – Make a copy to copy this sheet in your Google Drive.

  2. Go to Tools -> Script editor and copy-paste the Reddit Scraper Script. You can change “LifeProTips” to any other subreddit name.

  3. While in the script editor, choose Run -> Run and authorize the script.


That’s it. The script will run in the background automatically pulling content from Reddit into the Google spreadsheet. And it stops automatically once all the posts* of that Reddit have been fetched.


[*] All Subreddits on Reddit display a maximum of 1000 posts – you can’t go beyond that number even while manually browsing a subreddit.


This story, Web Scraping Reddit with Google Scripts, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 09/01/2014 under Javascript, Internet