Take The Guesswork Out Of Buying Gifts With These Cools Tools

The holiday season is upon us and just like every year you need to get gifts for family and friends. While the holidays are usually fun and relaxing, the days leading up to them are usually quite hectic. To be honest, remembering what your nephew wanted for Christmas and dealing with the hectic pre-season activities is a tough task. This is exactly why you need some tools to help you select the best gifts for everyone. In this article, I will show you some great tools you can use to come up with gift ideas, refine them, and materialize them...

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6 Really Easy Ways To Make Charity A Happiness Gift For Your Christmas

Christmas is a celebration. Thankfully, it is also a state of mind. When Yuletide comes around every year, we put love into our actions. We put thoughts into our gifts. We also place charity in our hearts. The Web makes it so much easier. Charity organizations have taken readily to the Web, and with a few innovations they make giving as easy as a click. Last year, we took a look at some tech savvy charities and the year before that we took Angela’s advice on how to charitable throughout the year and not simply wait for a special season....

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What To Back? Use Social Networks To Find Great Kickstarter Projects

Kickstarter projects are a great way to spend your hard-earned money on something truly fun and innovative. Some projects go super nova, at which point everyone writes about them, but most projects aren’t so lucky. There are several ways to find good Kickstarter projects to back, but most require some diligence and a bit of research. The simplest way to find those Kickstarter gems is to integrate your search with something you already do daily — namely, your social networks! With these feeds, you’ll always know what to back, who to back, and when. Twitter @CrowdFundingBB 5 Hottest New CrowdFunding...

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How to View your Old Notifications in Android

There were a couple of pending notifications sitting in the status bar of your Android phone and you have just tapped the “Dismiss” icon to clear them all. And then it occurred that you may have dismissed certain important notifications. Where did they go? Can you retrieve the old notifications even if they have have removed from the notifications bar?

Well if your phone is running a more recent version of Android, Jelly Bean or later you can get a log of notifications that have pushed by various apps. Here’s how.

Go to your Android home screen and tap the apps icon. Switch to the Widgets tab, tap and hold the 1×1 Settings Shortcut and place it on your your home screen. Now select “Notifications” from the available choices.

Tap the settings icon that you have placed on the home screen and it will display the notification history in reverse chronological order. You will know the name of the app that pushed the notification, the title of the notification and the time when that message was pushed.

You may also use the notifications shortcut to prevent certain apps from sending notifications to your phone. Just tap the name of an app and deselect the option that says “Show Notifications” from the App info page.

Credit: Stack Overflow

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This story, How to View your Old Notifications in Android, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 16/12/2013 under Android, Software

How To Install Windows 7/8.1 From Your Phone’s Micro SD Memory Card

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A couple of years ago, during the days of Windows XP and Vista to be precise, we all used to use traditional CDs and DVDs to install Windows operating system. Post the release of Windows 7 Beta in January 2009, a number of tools started appearing on the web to create bootable USBs that help […]

Skynet Edges Closer, Twitter Experiments, 40k Bitcoin Valuation [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Google buys Boston Dynamics (bringing Skynet closer to reality), Amazon starts selling its Kindle Fire tablets in installments, SteamOS arrives, Twitter experiments with location-based tweets, Microsoft Photosynth gets updated, Doctor On Demand debuts, and Winklevii (the Winklevoss twins) make a shocking prediction about Bitcoin. Google Buys Boston Dynamics Do not be alarmed: News broadcasts about Google acquiring Boston Dynamics are a fictional dramatization. Plz return 2 your homes immediately — Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) December 14, 2013 Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, an engineering firm with a slew of robots under its command. We only recently...

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Instagram Users Categorized - So Which Type Are You?

When Instagram reinvented the meaning of photo sharing, I am sure not many of us would have thought that we would discover photographic talents among our friends and family. In addition to taking pictures of everything under the sun, photo-filtering craze had caught on immediately after Instagram was launched. I have friends who, after spending years in their company, do not even have the slightest inclination towards art or photography. And these days the same friends are posting pictures of brightly lit skyscrapers and calling them ‘modern art’. The picture looks good, no doubt, and it also looks like it has been ripped out of 1960 photo album. Thanks to the filters, every single click of the camera turns into a masterpiece!



After some pretty interesting scientific research and data analysis, we have deciphered the mind and pattern behind these pictures. Sifting through a huge stack of Instagram pictures and burying our nose behind data for quite some time, we have been able to identify 10 different user type patterns emerge. These people are almost everywhere, they are among us, they are a part of our lives! They could be your close friends, your next door neighbors, and the old man down the street or your good ol’ colleagues. They could just as well be you. Which type are you anyway?

1. The obsessed Selfie – Always me. Always the same smile

They were the creators of the new term ‘selfie’! They defined and redefined it as well. Regardless of the time of the day or night, you could always spot them posing for their own cameras, smiling their perfect smile, minutely documenting their facial expressions from ‘a-wee-bit-too-close’ angle. You could see them taking a shot of themselves stranded in traffic or posing in front their bathroom mirrors. Well, you might think that the world could do well without selfies, but not everyone has the same sane thoughts like you and me! There is yet another manner in which you can spot these self obsessed selfies, their favorite Instagram filter is Mayfair. There you have it. Are you one among this crowd? Well, you know who you are.

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Secure Passwords v2.0

You want to have lengthy, complicated and unique passwords for every website that you use but that rarely happens in practice because complex passwords are impossible for anyone to remember.

Some people rely on password managers like LastPass or KeePass – they store all your passwords in an encrypted database which is then protected by a master password. You enter the master password and you instantly have access to all your stored user logins and passwords. LastPass and 1Password also offers apps for mobile devices.

A Unique Password for Every Website

Here’s a simple open-source app that I am internally using for managing the passwords of my various online accounts. The app is called Secure Passwords and it generates unique and strong passwords using the secure bcrypt algorithm.

Secure Passwords is available as a web app that you can use from any browser on any device, as a Chrome extension, as an Android App that you can sideload or you can download the single-page app and save it to your Dropbox for offline use.

To get started, enter your user name (or login id), the site’s domain name where you are trying to log in (e.g. google or facebook), your master password and hit the generate button.

The generated passwords meet all the criteria for strong passwords – they are made of digits, special characters and letters are in mixed-case. The passwords are generated using bcrypt which is still resistant to brute-force attacks and therefore it will be impossible for anyone to decrypt the master pass phrase should any of password ever gets leaked online.

You only have to remember the master key (pass phrase) and tool will generate unique passwords base on the site name and the user name. Also, the tool computes passwords in your web browser itself and not a single byte of data ever leaves your machine.

The source code is available for download on Github (↓).

Related reading: Keep your Online Accounts Safe and Secure

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This story, Secure Passwords v2.0, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 16/12/2013 under Password, Internet

How To Stop Gmail From Automatically Loading Images In Emails

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Those of you who have logged-into your Gmail account on or after 12th December probably have seen automatically load images in emails option upon signing into your account. On December 12th, Gmail team announced that Gmail will now automatically display images in emails, meaning users don’t need to click Display images below or always display […]

The Secret To Finding The Perfect Writing App That Works For You

Writing is difficult enough as it is. Stop making it more so by wrestling with an unfriendly writing application. Given that we live in the Digital Age, it’s very likely that you do all of your writing on a computer or some other digital device. It can be a little more complex than simply using a pen and a notebook, because of the wide variety of options available to you. From word counters to idea generators, from fancy timers to writing metrics, there’s plenty to draw your attention away from your writing. Even the choice of distraction-free writing tools is...

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