Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

AutoComplete is a quite useful tool in Firefox that allows your browser to remember what you enter in forms. For example, you may want Firefox to remember your personal details such as name, address and email, so that you do not have to type it each time. This can save you a lot of time, especially if you fill out various forms on a daily basis. This feature is great and I use it a lot, but there are also some potential problems. One of them is when you misspell some important information such as email. Next time when you will try to enter your email, Firefox will suggest this misspelled email. That is why when you make such a mistake it is important to erase the saved form data. You can do that by going to Tools -> Options -> Privacy and clicking Clear Now. Just make sure you indicate what you want to clear. Of course, if you had any other information stored, it will also be deleted. That is why you should only use this feature when you are absolutely certain you want to do it. You should be especially careful if you have been using Firefox for many months, and possibly have a lot of personal details stored. Once you press Clear Now, all of them will be lost. Anyway, I believe that AutoComplete is a very useful feature, and I recommend that you take advantage out of it.

Keeping the files and documents on your PC in order is as important as keeping your apartment or home tidy. Some people who spend a lot of their time in front of their PC say that it is even more important to take care of your PC. One of the ways you can keep your desktop tidy is by arranging your icons in a better way. Many icons on our desktops are colorful and look appealing. Many of them will also remind you of something enjoyable, like your favorite music track which you love to listen to.
Anyway, when it comes to arranging icons, some users do it either manually. However, it usually takes them a lot of time. Others prefer to automatically arrange their icons. You can change the location of your icons, their position, as well as spacing between them. You can have plenty of satisfaction keeping your desktop tidy. To do it, you just need to right click anywhere on your desktop, and from the menu choose Properties->Appearance tab->Advanced Options->Item->Icon. From there you can adjust their size and font.

You can also experiment with other items that you can change. I am sure that experimenting with ways to keep your desktop tidy will give you plenty of satisfaction. I definitely had a lot of fun while I was arranging various icons on my desktop.

Handling dangerous files is definitely risky. You might receive such dangerous files through email from someone you do not trust. However, there are things that you can do to greatly limit the risk. The thing that you should be worried about is whether the file contains a virus, spyware, or malware. You can make a scan with your own antivirus software, but most people do not have a good antivirus program, and scanning with only one antivirus might not detect a potential threat anyway. If you would be completely sure that a particular file does not contain any malware you would need to scan it with at least two or three antiviruses. Since buying multiple antivirus programs would be very expensive, you might be wondering at this point what I am going to suggest. My recommendation is to visit a site like virustotal.com, and upload the file so that it will be automatically scanned by 33 best antivirus programs available. You do not have to pay anything, and you get the best protection. What else could you ask for? The only disadvantage is that each time you want to scan a file you will need to upload it, but that is not a problem if you are uploading small files.

You do not have to store all your data on a disk to have access to it at all times. It will be even more convenient for you to store some of the more important data online. If your computer refuses to work or something else happens, you will be able to access your documents quickly from any other computer from an Internet cafe. To do this, the easiest way is to store your data in your email box. All you have to do is send an email to yourself. I have confirmed that it works with Gmail. Just click on Compose message or New message, type your own address, attach the desired files, and your email is ready to go. However, there is still another way you can protect your data. You do not have to necessarily attach them to your emails thanks to add-ons like Gmail Drive. Gmail Drive is a special add-on that you can have installed on your computer, and it can be quite useful in various situations. By copying your content to your Gmail Drive folder, the add-on will automatically send all its new content to your email account. There is absolutely no need for you to do it manually, as the add-on will take care of everything.

Intel and AMD are the most important players in the processor market. Both of the processors are high quality, and there has been a long debate which one is a better choice to buy. I think that you cannot go wrong with any choice, however, there are some differences. First of all, AMD processors are generally regarded as CPUs that provide a bigger bang for a buck. Usually, AMD processors are slightly cheaper than the Intel counterpart. That is why if you want to save some money you may want to go with AMD. On the other hand, Intel processors are sometimes considered to work faster with some programs like advanced graphical applications or some games. As you probably noticed it is not that easy to decide which processor is better to purchase.

Anyway, when it comes to buying a new processor it is important to know what processors are compatible with your motherboard. For example, a motherboard which is designed to work with AMD processors, will not work with Intel processors. Secondly, it is important to check what socket your motherboard has, and based on this you can usually say what CPU it will support. Let us say we are looking at the ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2 motherboard. The socket in this case is “939” and it supports AMD Athlon 64/FX/X2 processors. You should only buy such processors as those are the ones compatible with this particular motherboard. You can get the information of supported CPUs for a particular motherboard from your manual or from the Internet.

Duplicate content is something that every serious webmaster is trying to avoid. Basically, duplicate content means that some specific content, like an article, exists in a few locations on the Internet. Search engines often penalize websites for having duplicate content, as usually duplicate content provides a smaller value for Internet users. On the other hand, original content is something considered to be very valuable.

However, it seems that detecting duplicate content not always works as well as it should. From time to time, bloggers report that articles on their site has been marked as duplicate content, because scraper websites have copied those articles to their own domains. If the duplicate content filter was working correctly, then the scraper sites would be marked as sites with duplicate content, not the opposite. Generally speaking, scrapper sites are automated websites that pull content from other websites using web scraping. Most of those sites are made solely for Google AdSense. It is important to understand that many of them violate copyright law, as they do not even give credit to the original author. The webmasters of such sites do not put any work into writing articles, yet they might be listed quite high in search engine results.

Some speculate that many search engines fail to realize on which site the content was posted in the first place. The websites that copy/paste content from other sites, which are indexed earlier, might be actually treated as legit sites. While it is alarming, let us hope that the major search engines will work on those content filters, as we do not want our content copied/pasted to other websites. I hope that this article reminded all of us that original content is something we should strive for, and that copying copy/pasting content from other websites should be avoided at all cost.

Benefiting from various technological advancements can give a lot of satisfaction. However, what we need to remember is that being obsessed with some aspects of technology is not always good. I am talking about excessive email checking. It is quite possible that in the future there will be meetings of people called “email checkers anonymous”. Let us discuss our this topic for a while. First of all, there are people who are addicted to checking email so often that it ruins their personal life and well-being. Very often the problem is that instead of spending quality time with their family, people often work too much. However, in case of excessively checking emails, you are not even going to get paid by anybody. One might say that it does not take that much time to read emails. However, you have to remember, that checking email is often associated with not only reading the message, but also responding or taking other actions. There is also no point checking email if you know that it might contain a message about some potentials problems at work, which you cannot solve until next Monday anyway. If you are tempted to check your email too often, talk to somebody about it. Ask this person to help you in some way.

Do you want to know how to obtain a free hard drive? I might not be able to tell you how to obtain a regular one, but you can get an Internet virtual drive by utilizing Gmail. You will need to have a Gmail address, but these days it should be quite easy to obtain. Secondly, you will need to download the Gmail Drive shell extension and install it. You can do it by visiting this link: softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/GMail-Drive-shell-extension.shtml. Once installed, this software is going to create a virtual file system around your Google Gmail account. What this means for you, is that you will be able to save and retrieve file directly through Internet Explorer. Of course, the transfer rate of files is going to be a lot slower compared to copying files between your regular hard drives. On the other hand, since it is completely free, it is useful anyway. I must admit that I really appreciate the ability to back up my files this way. There are many users who use this Gmail drive on a regular basis. I would like to encourage more people to benefit from this free hard drive, as I am aware of the fact that not many Internet users know about it yet.

If you use your computer a lot, and are smart enough to back up your important data from time to time, then you know that external hard drives are very useful. Floppy discs or even CDs do not contain enough storage space to back up everything. These days we gather so much information on our computers that so few megabytes of storage are no longer sufficient. I predict that in the future there will be an even bigger and bigger need for external hard drives. Looking at the progress that happened within the last few years, I see that computers usually store a lot more data than they did ever before. A lot of people store on their hard drives various files such as DVD quality movies, avi files, mp3 files, games, and many different programs. Some of the programs require a few gigabytes of data. I think it is safe to presume that we will be needing more and more external hard drives in the years to come. What do you think will be the average size of a hard drive in 10 or 20 years? Anyway, remember to back up any documents and programs that you have stored on your computer.

Would you like to hear some email tips? You have probably seen BCC before many times, and were wondering what this abbreviation stands for. By using BCC, you can send your email to many people without them knowing who the other recipients are. Whereas CC stands for Carbon Copy, BCC is a abbreviation for Blind Carbon Copy. As using CC enables other people to see who else received a message, there are many advantages of using BCC over CC:

Overall, Blind Carbon Copy ensures privacy of your recipients, so in many situations this will be the biggest advantage of using it.