While we are surfing the internet, there are several scripts and other similar entities tracking our activities and fetching our data pushing back to the companies who implement these monitoring and data collection scripts. Generally, an average user is unaware of these invisible eyes and continues to browse without any concern. However, if you regularly do sensitive work requiring great deal of privacy, you must consider a reliable and easily implementable solution to monitor these tracker scripts.
Ghostery is a free and powerful tool for monitoring and blocking online data collectors. It is an ideal solution to protect your internet privacy thus increasing the web security you deserve. There are several Google privacy tools that enable you to control how much data you share from within your Google account. An average user may not be aware, but there are hundreds of data collecting services that fetch your information not only from your various online accounts, but also pull important information from your local storage on PC. 
To combat that you can install this excellent add-on for your favorite browser to tighten your web security. It is available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and iOS. Ghostery monitors over 600 data collection services and can selectively block their scripts as per your requirements.
It maintains a detailed inventory of well-known advertising networks, web analytics services and popular data collecting companies. You can see a detailed analysis of each of these services including links to their privacy policies and what data they're collecting. Whenever you visit any web page, Ghostery can show you all the active tracker scripts and other web elements that may fetch some information from your accounts or from your local storage. Simply click the right mouse button and you'll get the handy context menu to enable or disable data collection for a particular tracker script.
You can also detect and disable selective iframes and img tags on a given web page that may contain malicious scripts. Installing this add-on doesn't slow down your browser and it works seamlessly in the background until you explicitly invoke it to do the data crunching. I've tested it on Firefox and Google Chrome and found no issues or problems.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
How To Monitor And Control Your Internet Privacy
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Google+ Introduces Revamped Circles And Follow Suggestions
Since the launch of Google+, almost every month something new is added to this promising social network. If you're on Google+, you must be familiar with circles - one of the most intuitive ways to manage friends on a social network. Recently Google+ has introduced two changes that greatly impact the growth rate of the network as well as the engagement level as a whole. Let's see what these changes are and how to make most out of it.
New circle layout with extra options - The team at Google+ has introduced some major changes in the layout of the Google+ circles tab adding some more options for better friends' management. This includes handy sidebar section populated with multiple options of importing your contacts from different email services. Earlier these options were aligned on top of the circles and their visibility was pretty much hindered by the group of circles right below the links. Now they are much more prominent and are easily detectable. This is a clever ploy to gather more users from rival networks.
You can also find users to befriend in 3 different ways. The default option is 'Relevance' that presents you with like-minded or closely connected (in extended circles or in your GMail contact list) users. What I liked most in this revamped interface is the ability to increase and decrease the size of the circles in the list. This is very handy for users switching to smaller or larger size monitors each day.
Improved suggestions & easy befriending - Now there's an improved version of finding interesting people in different domains. These suggestions are based on your interests, current geolocation and your country. For each category, a group of select Google+ users are shown as suggestions to be befriended. The handy 'Add' button serves dual purpose in this case. First, it automatically creates a circle (if required) by that category name and secondly, all the suggestions in the list are automatically added to that circle in one go.
This new feature saves loads of time especially if you're searching for most active and known people in a particular niche/domain. The 'Add' button works as a toggle button to prevent accidental befriending. After adding a group of users, if you press it again, the circle created through this option is not deleted, but all the befriended users are automatically removed from the circle. Later, you can easily delete the empty circle very easily without having to worry about accidental unfollow of any friend.
Both of these latest additions to Google+ are aimed at inflating the user-base quickly in an easy way. Do take a plunge in these two new options and let me know how they worked for you.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Virtual Magnifying Glass - A Free And Powerful Magnifier For Desktops
Almost every modern operating system comes with a default magnifier for assisting visually impaired, elders and of course web designers. A magnifier software simply presents the exploded view of any part of the screen. I've used Window's default magnifier and I must say it has limited capabilities. Fortunately, there's a free and extremely powerful solution that equips you with some advanced features topped with regular magnifying function.
Virtual Magnifying Glass is an open source and free magnifying software for Windows, Mac OS X and popular Unix/Linux flavors. I've thoroughly tested it on Windows XP and Red Hat Linux and found it extremely useful piece of software from web designer's perspective. Here are some of its handy features.
Multi-monitor support - If you've set up multiple monitors at your place, this software supports it out-of-the-box. There are no complex configuration procedures and you can use it seamlessly over all monitors with ease.
Large magnifying power - Unlike limited magnifying power of default magnifiers bundled with operating systems, this software can explode a screen to up to 32 times from the original scale. This is extremely useful for very large monitors involving graphic intensive work.
In-built color picker - Now this is a web developer's paradise. With this much of magnifying power and the ability to pick colors from individual pixels makes it an extremely useful tool. You can copy a pixel's RGB value in both decimal and hexadecimal formats through this amazing software.
Variable magnifier size - The default Windows magnifier has a fixed magnifying box with no possible customization. But with Virtual Magnifying Glass, you can easily increase or decrease the height and width of the magnifier as per your requirements.
Dynamic mode - This is a unique feature that only exists in this software. You can switch on the dynamic mode which allows you to do the regular editing functions right under the magnified portion of the desktop. This is an extremely useful feature for web and image designers.
Friday, February 17, 2012
12 Tools To Control Your Privacy And Data On Google
Privacy and controlling access to our data are two big issues on internet. Often people complain about information theft by companies that may lead to unsolicited mails and offers from individuals and spammers. Fortunately, with some simple tricks, we can minimize this risk and can keep our data and privacy fine-tuned to avoid any mishap. If you're using Google and its various popular services, here are some extremely useful tools to protect your online privacy to safeguard your Google account data.
Google Dashboard - This is a central repository and control center for analyzing and protecting your data for large number of Google services. You can not only see what recent activities are being done in each of these services, but you can also fine-tune and edit the settings and privacy controls.
Ads Preferences Manager - This is a useful tool to control how advertisements served by Google network are shown to you. For logged-in users, Google always tries to show the most relevant ads on the basis of your recent searches and browsing activity. If you want to opt-out from this option, you may opt-out through this tool. Google Chrome users can also install Keep My Opt-Outs plugin to stop targeted ad serving on the basis of your account history.
Data Liberation Front - This is one of my favorite tools to exercise more control on my data stored in various Google services. As the name implies, you can use this service to export or import data from more than three dozens Google services. I'll strongly suggest you to bookmark this extremely useful online tool.
Encrypted Search - The encrypted version of Google search engine is extremely useful option to avoid collection of your search history. This extremely useful tool is a lifesaver in some cases, where you do not want your search queries data collection for selective topics.
Incognito mode in Google Chrome - If you're using a shared computer in cafe, office or at your home, you're risking exposing your browsing habits to others. Nowadays every modern browser stores the browsing history unless you've not done appropriate settings to flush your session data once you've finished browsing. Fortunately, Google Chrome Incognito mode protects your privacy effectively by stopping storage of any kind of data related to your browsing session.
Street View Blurring and Takedowns - Google Maps street view service automatically blurs sensitive and private information by default. Still, if you feel that an image should be blurred further or should be removed from 'street view', you can request that through this option. Your request is examined manually and appropriate action is taken as soon as possible.
Unlisted and Private Videos on YouTube - Generally, YouTube is used to share your videos with the world. But in some cases, you may choose either to keep them private or you may opt to share them with selective people. Whenever you upload a video on YouTube, its 'Broadcasting and Sharing Options' lets you make unlisted and private video which can be shared with up to 50 other Google account holders.
Web History Controls - Every logged-in Google user's web history is stored in his account. This includes searches and browsing activity. You can opt-in or opt-out from web history as per your preference. Turning it on provides more relevant results, ads and overall experience while you're using various Google services.
Off the Record Gmail Chats - By default, all the chats on Google Talk or in GMail are stored as chat history in your accounts. You can use 'Off the record' option to prevent saving of chat history in your account. When this option is turned on, chat is not saved in either of the accounts on both sides.
Google Analytics Opt-out - If you're concerned that your visits to various websites are being reported in their respective Google analytics accounts, you can install this handy 'Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on' available for all popular browsers to prevent recording your visit in Google analytics associated with the website you're visiting.
Search Personalization Opt-out - Signed-in as well as signed-out users on Google use the search engine as per their preferences. For every signed-in user, personalizing the search can result in better search result pages optimized according to your past search history. You can also opt-out from search results personalization by turning off web history as discussed earlier.
Control Your Location in Google Latitude - Quite similar to Foursquare and Facebook places, Google Latitude lets your Google contacts know your location as you check-in through your mobile, tablet device or PC. However, you can control how much information and when your location should not be shared with your contacts. You must fine-tune your Google Latitude location sharing settings to effectively control your location privacy.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
5 Essential Software For Your All-in-one Pen Drive
Everything in this world is shrinking and so is the computer. Secondary storage technology has come a long way and now pen drives are used by millions of users for day-to-day data storage and transfer. Customized portable applications have made these pen drives a miniature computer that can be carried in your pocket anywhere. Now you can boot a PC or a laptop directly from a pen drive and can run various software applications through it. Let's see some of the most useful applications for your bootable pen drive.
Portable operating system - The first thing you need is a robust and portable operating system that can boot a pen drive. Two of my favorites are Pen Drive Linux and Bootable Windows 7 USB Stick. Both solutions are tested and used by large number of users that enables them to carry their bootable drive in their pocket.
Portable office suite - A primary productivity application used by almost every user is an office suite consisting of a word processor and a spreadsheet. OpenOffice.org Portable is one of the popular office suites ideal for a bootable pen drive. It's available both for Windows and Linux platforms.
Portable web browser - Nowadays, web browser is perhaps the most heavily used application on a PC connected with internet. You must include Firefox Portable among the list of essential applications on your bootable USB stick. It's a stable, secure and popular web browser used by millions of users.
Portable messaging software - Instant messaging, video and audio chat are some of the most common activities among net-savvy users. Skype Portable and Pidgin Portable are the most useful software in its category that brings audio, video and text chat right within your bootable pen drive.
Portable archiving/compression software - Everyday we create, organize and collect information in the form of text, audio and video. Sometimes, we prefer to compress and archive them for saving storage space on our hard drive. Similarly, every bootable USB stick must contain WinRAR Unplugged and 7-Zip Portable to meet the compression and archiving needs.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
How To Install Multiple Full-Fledged Virtual Desktops Through One Linux PC
Linux provides several desktop variants with multiple graphic/windows system for general as well as professional users. There are free as well as commercial solutions available for Linux desktop software. If you're running an educational institution or a non-profit organization looking to deploy desktops, purchasing PCs for each node may not be a cost effective solution. But, if required, you can extend virtual desktop terminal from a single Linux PC with ease. Implementing this solution not only saves huge money, but also saves a lot of space. Let's see how to do it.
Userful MultiSeat Linux is an excellent free solution for deploying full-fledged virtual Linux desktops from a single Linux computer. The free version for schools and non-profits can extend up to 11 Linux Pcs from a single computer. Although, this system is specifically tailored for educational institutions, non-profits can use it as well.
To install this system, you simply need USB MultiSeat device (very cost-effective), monitors, keyboards and mice for each virtual desktop. Simply install Userful MultiSeat Linux system on the primary PC and connect each virtual terminal through the USB MultiSeat Device via USB ports. Needless to say, the primary PC should be powerful enough to handle the load of 11 simultaneous connections.
Installing this set-up saves you the cost of 11 separate CPUs and also lowers your electricity bill significantly. The administrator at the primary PC can monitor what work is going-on on each virtual PC, and each user can share files and content with each other. There's no recurring license fee associated with this set-up and you're free to use it for lifetime.
Monday, February 13, 2012
How To Enhance Your Google Analytics Reports Through Table Booster
If you own a website or a blog, you must be familiar with Google Analytics (GA). Through this excellent web analytics tool, we get vital data about our site's traffic. Standard GA reports are shown in tables with different columns filled with relevant values. These reporting tables are generally sorted on one of the columns. Human eye is always less receptive to the numbers, that's why we've invented different graphical representations to analyze the data in a better way. Today, I'm going to share an excellent tool for GA, which brings new life to the default tables shown in Google analytics.
This excellent tool is called Table Booster for Google Analytics available as a Google Chrome plugin. This excellent plugin adds three new visualizations to the columns in the data-grid of GA reports. It's completely free and makes data-crunching fun and easy-to-understand. Once you've installed this plugin, simply click 'Activate Table Booster' button on the top left of your dashboard. Once activated, you're ready to get more out of your GA report tables in the following three ways.
Bar chart - This gives you a good view in the form of small bar charts letting you easily visualize larger and smaller values. These bar charts take the minimum and maximum value from the column and are drawn proportionate to that. This gives you a clear indication of each value without even looking at the numerical value itself.
Heatmap - The second form of visualization is a heatmap and it's my favorite. Alarming or critical values are automatically highlighted in dark red and the healthy data in colored with green color. The intermediate data is colored in different variants of red. This visualization is very useful in finding out critical values from the long data table.
Comparison - And last but not the least is the comparison visualization. It shows the deviation from the average value of the column on both positive and negative sides. Positive deviation is colored in green color while the negative deviation is colored in red. This visualization is very handy for finding our critical data from a heap.
You can enable and disable these visualizations through toggle-buttons above each data column. Although you can enable all three visualizations together in a single column, but for better analysis, I'll suggest you to view them one-by-one for a single column.
Friday, February 10, 2012
2 Best Photo Viewers For Android Users
Nowadays every smartphone comes with a native image viewer; still it lacks some of the intuitive features that several 3rd-party applications support out-of-the-box. These 3rd-party applications offer better browsing experience for large number of files and offer some handy basic editing features. Some of these applications are tightly integrated with popular image hosting services and provides direct uploading and downloading of images from these web-based image hosting services. Here are some of the best image browsers for Android users that brings a whole new experience of browsing photographs on your Android smartphone.
Picasa Mobile - It is one of the most popular image browsers for Android-powered smartphone. You can get a nice tile-based photo browsing option with smooth scrolling. You can directly browse your Picasa web albums. This application also supports direct uploading of snaps taken from your mobile device and automatically includes GPS coordinates with each uploaded picture. You can also create albums in your Picasa account through this application.
Photo Mate - This is an advanced image viewer for Android users. You can view extremely large files through Photo Mate very easily. It also supports EXIF data display to know more about the picture. It also supports basic photo editing features and also includes file conversion facility. You can also open Adobe Photoshop's .psd files through Photo Mate. It also supports viewing of various raw image formats of different popular DSLR cameras.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
How To Find Coverage Maps of Mobile Operators
Often mobile customers want to find out the network coverage in their area before taking a subscription. Generally, every mobile company claims to deliver the best coverage within an area, but sometimes the reality is just the opposite. It may happen that you experience very poor connectivity resulting in frequent call drops during the conversation. To avoid such situation, you must find a way to find the quality of network in your area for a given mobile operator. Here's an easy way to do that.
Sensorly is an excellent service that shows you real mobile coverage maps of more than 120 networks from 27 countries across the globe. You can find network coverage for 2G, 3G, 4G, CDMA and Wi-Fi networks for all the mobile operators included in the list.
A free Sensorly Android application gives instant network coverage on your smartphone. It includes a heat-map showing the strength of signals in a given area. This excellent service is entirely community-driven. All the network data is submitted by Sensorly users through their application while on the go. This helps in improving the quality and accuracy of coverage maps giving more credible information to the users.
If you're using this service, it will help you in selecting the best mobile operator with the strongest network giving you seamless connectivity throughout your circle. There's also a web version of Sensorly that shows large coverage maps directly in your web browser. Simply fill in the city, country and zip code to get the heat map of network signal for a supported mobile operator.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
10 Ways To Upload And Share Photos On Twitter
Micro-blogging service Twitter has emerged as one of the popular social media networks used by large number of users for sharing multimedia content. Graphic content is shared in different ways on Twitter through different apps, clients, online services and APIs. If you're a Twitter addict and love to share photos with your followers, here's a list of some popular photo sharing services.
Twitpic : It's one of the most popular photo sharing services for Twitter. It has a robust API that can be used by 3rd-party developers to integrate the functionality within their applications. While uploading your photos, you can also add your comments that will be tweeted along with the link to the uploaded photograph.
yfrog : This is an excellent service to share multimedia content with the Twitter community. You can upload photos, videos and links to the yfrog live stream that other yfrog users can follow. Its API is extensively used in various 3rd-party applications. I use this service through my mobile Twitter client and I'm pressed with its reliability and ease of use.
Twitgoo : This is yet another Twitter photo sharing service powered by Photobucket. People can view public or user-specific feed to share the photo uploads on Twitter. Twitgoo API is implemented in dozens of clients and applications and is used by large number of users. You can upload photos either from your PC or you can paste the URL for direct sharing on Twitter.
TwitrPix : Whether it's your webcam or snap taken from your mobile device, TwitrPix lets you share your photos very easily on Twitter. The TwitrPix iPhone app is loaded with several photo effects that can be applied to your pictures before sharing them on Twitter. You can also do basic editing to adjust the photo dimensions as per your requirements.
Pikchur : Through this service, you can not only share photos on Twitter, but can also see the statistics about traffic coming to your uploaded pictures. Developer friendly API lets programmers easily extend the features of their existing Twitter clients. Apart from Twitter, you can also share your uploaded photos to various popular social media networks.
Twitxr : I prefer this application for adding location information to the shared pictures on Twitter. It supports photo sharing on multiple social media networks at once. You can use this excellent service on all major smartphones brands. Twitxr automatically adds the location information with each photo shared through it.
Tweet.Pho.to : This handy service lets you share photos on Twitter from your webcam, hard drive or through a URL. You can also use this service through your smartphone and can easily add your comments with each uploaded picture. You can also share your photos on Facebook through this useful photo sharing service.
Twipik : This is one of my favorite photo sharing services for Twitter. Apart from regular photo sharing on Twitter, users can also upload their pictures only to Twipik. Quite similar to other services, you can also add comments with each uploaded photograph. Through its simple web interface, you can easily share your pictures with your network.
MobyPicture : This service is quite popular among social media enthusiasts. Mobypicture lets you share your pictures to multiple social networks including Twitter. It is available for every major mobile platform apart from the regular web uploading interface. You can also add your comments through web as well as from mobile during the upload.
Twitter's Native Image Sharing : And last but not the least is Twitter's native photo-sharing feature that lets you upload photos directly from your PC to share with your followers. These photos are also showcased in user's photo gallery on their profile. Large number of users prefers the native photo sharing option through web interface.
