Whether you're at work or at home, everyday you face new challenges (small & big) and along with it come deadlines and much needed reminders. We often scribble important things either on paper or in a normal word processor or notepad type application. If you have a paperless office, your best bet is having a good sticky notes application for your PC. Here are some of the best sticky notes apps to keep track of your goals.
iGorv - Sticky Notes - It's one of my favorite sticky notes applications with simple and clean interface. You can include fonts, colors, transparency and hyperlinks with a sticky note. Every sticky note persists even after reboot until you explicitly close it.
Hott notes - This excellent application support multiple types of sticky notes. If you're using a stylus with your tablet PC, you can scribble freehand text and drawings in your sticky note. Hott notes also let you set alarms for important notes. Another worth looking feature is the archiving capability that saves your sticky notes for future use.
Efficient Sticky Notes - What I like most in this application is the in-built recycle bin. So if you accidentally delete your important sticky notes, you can easily restore them with a click of button. It also supports powerful search capability to scan through all active sticky notes to quickly spot your important reminder.
Stickies - I like its capability of storing images within the sticky notes. The interface is clean is soothing to eyes. Stickies also support transferring of notes from one PC to another through regular mail client. You can also hide your sticky notes for a definite period and they pop up back like magic when the time is over.
Simple Sticky Notes - I personally use this sticky note application because its minimal yet very powerful. Usual rich text support with hiding/un-hiding feature makes it one of the best sticky notes applications available for an average user. I highly recommend using this free and powerful sticky notes software.
TK8 StickyNotes - This application has the best interface that will make you addicted to it in no time. It has a freeware as well as shareware version. The former version is good enough for an average user. You can also pin your sticky note to keep it above all windows. The pro versions supports advanced features like password protected notes with remainders and email integration.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
6 Best Sticky Notes Applications For Your Computer
Monday, May 30, 2011
How To Prepare For Unexpected Hard Drive Failure
Nothing is immortal in this world. Same thing applies to our computer components. One of the most essential parts is the hard disk, where all your precious data resides. Every hard drive has an average life span of 7 to 15 years. This is not a scientific calculation but a rough approximation. Whatever is the case, you can't afford to lose your precious data in the event of sudden disk failure. 
The best strategy is to back up your files on multiple locations. Often we back up our important files on cloud storage networks like DropBox. It may help you in saving some important files, but there's no guarantee that you've saved every single important document in the cloud. Secondly, in the event of disk failure how quickly you can get your system running back with all the data intact. The solution is quite simple.
Add a similar secondary drive and clone it through some popular disk cloning software like Clonezilla or Easeus. Keeping a backup on one more external zip drive solidifies your over-all disk failure recovery process. So don't waste more time, especially if you have important client data on your system. It may cost you big money if you don't prepare for disk failure recovery program.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
How To Create Awesome Word Clouds Easily
Word clouds are quite popular nowadays and are used in almost every type of digital content. They easily grab attention and helps in anchoring the piece of content. But making these word clouds can be a very cumbersome process if you do it manually through a graphic editor. Although there are many word cloud making services, but I found Wordle the best with wide range of custom effects to get the desired cloud.
The flexibility of customization offered by Wordle is amazing. You can either use a bunch of text or can simply submit a url or rss feed link to make your word cloud.
Language options - You can choose to exclude common words (default option) and can opt for making all the words in uppercase and lowercase. If you're unsure you can leave it to Wordle to automatically guess the right case for each included word.
Fonts - Availability of dozens of beautiful fonts ensures you get the best cloud as per your requirement. You can match the cloud font with your blog/website font to gel it well with the theme.
Layout - Wordle provides ample options to align (horizontal, vertical, mix) the cloud the way you want it to be. You can also choose between rounded edges or a much straighter edge. The former edge is most popular among users.
Color - Life without colors is dull. The same case applies to word clouds. Wordle provides enough color schemes to beautify your cloud as per your requirement.
If you more adventurous you can use advanced option to fine-tune the cloud making process. Through advanced option, you can choose the weight and color for each word in the cloud explicitly. This ensures you get the exact alignment, size and color as you've planned.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
How Restore Points Can Save Your Ass When AntiVirus Fails
Almost every computer user encounters file corruption, data loss and virus infections at some point of time. Nowadays, there are dozens of free anti-virus software that provides pretty good protection. However, hackers are not behind and create more complex viruses and trojans that override anti-virus protection mechanism. Whenever such situation arises, restore points are like chilled water in scorching desert.
I've used several anti-virus software programs in the past years and found that none of them is a silver bullet. In recent years, thrice my computer was infected despite of active and updated anti-virus software. These smart trojans completely freeze the anti-virus operation and override them to spread their tentacles across the entire system. This is really frustrating when you're using a trusted brand having a large user-base. Create restore points
Generally, an average user re-installs the entire operating system in such cases losing all the precious data on primary partition. But wait, have you tried reverting your system back to the most recent Restore Point.
Windows restore points create a system snapshot of the system, recording all changes in critical files. If you're system has been compromised, simply choose a recent restore point and your system will be in previous state prior to virus infection as if nothing has happened. It's like going in the past.
You can create a system restore point in 2 ways. First way is very easy, Go to Accessories -> System Tools -> System Restore -> Create a restore point. Second way is completely automated where Windows OS itself creates restore points whenever critical changes (installation of drivers, installation and uninstallation of software programs) occur in the system. To bring back your system to previous state, simply go to Accessories -> System Tools -> System Restore -> Restore my computer to an earlier time.
Next time, whenever your anti-virus gives up, use restore points to salvage your precious data.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
yED - All Purpose Powerful Graph Editor
While using stumbleupon, I get to know tons of utility softwares each one having unique features. And this time, I've found a gem called yED - Graph Editor. It's the most flexible and powerful free graph-making editor I've encountered so far. Since it is java-based, you can run it on different platforms. Some java applications are known to be sluggish (start-up time) on a typical home pc, but this application is a flyer.
Through yED, you can make Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) diagrams, flowcharts, family trees, Semantic networks, Social networks and UML Class diagrams. You can also create complex computer network diagrams through yED, which makes it one of my favorites utility software.
You can import your data through excel (.xls) or XML file to quickly build complex diagrams. yED also supports exporting all these diagrams in popular image formats, PDF file or a flash file. The interface is clear and easy to learn with drag and drop support.
Each graph node/element can be completely customized through dozens of attributes associated with it regardless of the type of diagram you're making. yED's excellent session management feature preserves your incomplete session and restore it later so that you can start from where you left. It's very useful while creating large complex presentation that may take multiple sessions.
Interestingly, you can also assign multiple labels to a single element. They can be multi-line with rich HTML support. You'll see countless diagrams made through this software in forthcoming posts. If you've not tried it yet, you're missing the flexibility and ease of making stunning graph diagrams.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
3 Best Ad Serving And Management Plugins For Wordpress
Wordpress is extremely flexible content management system, yet an average user needs support of plugins to get things done. If you're showing pay-per-click (PPC) or affiliate ads on your wordpress blogs, either you're embedding them manually or using an ad serving plugin to do the same. If its the former case, here are 3 awesome plugins that makes your Wordpress blog advertisement management easy.
All in One Adsense and YPN - It is one of the oldest ad management plugins which is quite popular since 2009. Thousands of blogs manage their Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network ads through this useful plugin. It is extremely flexible with lots of options to display ads on multiple criterions. You can display ads on the basis of tags and post/page types. You can also limit the number of ads that you want to show and posts and pages. This plugin can show the ads in random order from a lot. You can also show ads at random positions to reduce ad blindness.
Advertising Manager - This is yet another popular ad management plugin that supports 15 popular ad networks including the most popular Google Adsense. The set up requires you to import all the ad codes and it automatically detects the ad network through the code. Apart from tags, you can also specify post author as one of the criterions for displaying the ad code. This opens the room for easy ad management on multi-author blogs.
WP125 - This plugin is ideal for bloggers interesting in serving (size 125x125) direct or affiliate ads on their blog. The plugin offers 1 and 2 column layout that can be tweaked in look-n-feel with custom CSS. The plugin is smart enough to calculate the expiry date when you mention the number of days it should be served. It records the impressions and clicks for each ad and archives the data once the ad is taken down automatically by this plugin.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Why Android Is The Future of Smartphones?
There are several smartphone operating systems each one having unique features and its user base. Some of the prominent players are Symbian, iOS, Windows 7, BlackBerry OS and last but not the least Android. Nowadays iOS and Android are capturing the market at breathtaking pace. Although iOS is quite popular with huge user base, Andriod seems to be winning the race in the long run.
Last year, Andriod witnessed a whopping 888% growth. At this pace, within a decade it will literally eat up the competition. Why Android is so popular and why it is the future of smartphones?
Google's hand on the back - It's the initiative of Google, one of the web
giants committed to make this popular software the cornerstone of smartphone market. Android's future is quite secure because Google is there to support it in every way.
Open source and free - If you're a coder, you can download Andrioid's source code for free and can tweak it as per your requirements. Andriod is backed by thousands of developers from across the world creating a strong community committed to develop this popular mobile software.
Thousands of applications - Android has the largest collection of applications for every user. Whether you're a gamer, scientist, blogger, doctor or a casual mobile user, you can find all your required applications with ease through Android Market.
Supports wide range of hardware - Since its linux based and is developed by a large community of experts, it's easily ported to different mobile hardware platforms giving more options to users to choose from.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
5 Best Network Monitoring Tools
Computer networks generate massive amount of data both encrypted and unencrypted that travels across open and public networks leaving ample room for hackers to prey upon your confidential information. Fortunately, IT managers and enthusiasts have enough options to monitor their network traffic to detect any suspicious activities with ease. Here's a list of some powerful network management software.
Wireshark - It is one of my favorites software for monitoring network traffic. It's plethora of options are overwhelming for an average user. Wireshark is both open source and free at the same time. It has a large user base and I'm among those who love this amazing packet analyzer.
SpiceWorks - It is the best overall network management free software available on web. You can manage your network inventory and can monitor your computer network with ease. Whether its a router malfunction or one of the LAN cable is gone, SpiceWorks monitors all and provides you with immediate alerts about the problems in your network.
PRTG Network Monitor - The free edition of this powerful network management software is good enough to take care of a small network comprising of up to 20 PCs. The interface of this software is amazing that makes it very attractive for novice network administors. PRTG Network Monitor can also be used through web interface and smartphones.
IPSentry - This is yet another powerful network management tool with solid user base. The free edition is powerful enough for SOHO (small office home office) segment. Whether its hardware monitoring or regular traffic analysis, IPSentry brings all reports right on your desktop in quick time. I found the mail queue monitoring option really useful.
ManangeEngine OpManager - No network monitoring tools list can be considered complete without mentioning about OpManager. The free edition supports up to 10 PCs with lifetime functionining including almost all PRO edition features except support for add-ons. Whether its network monitoring, server performance reports, VOIP monitoring or genral network fault managmeent, OPManager gives you enough power and flexibility to do all these tasks effectively.
Friday, May 20, 2011
How To Create And Decode QR Codes For Free
If you live in Japan or South Korea, you must be familiar with QR (Quick Response) codes. It's a similar technology like barcodes (which is more popular in west) to encode text, data and other objects. Through QR you can encode your hyperlinks, vCard, text, sms, email address, geo-locations, maps and other digital objects. You can encode your bookmarks and your blog/website, which can be decoded by a standard QR decoder very easily.
Nowadays almost all smart phones are capable of reading QR codes. Simply encode your digital life and let your mobile traffic or your friends read it easily through their QR decoders. Here's a cool site that lets you encode and decode QR codes for free. If you opt for PRO edition, you can also track your QR code deciphering.
This is ideal for sending encoded sms and site links to your network. You can also print your site link in QR code format on the backside of your visiting cards. While doing offline promotions, you can embed QR code of your website on the pamplets.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
How To Create CSS3 Drop Shadow Effects With Ease
With HTML5 and CSS3, web designers can create stunning interfaces much easier than before. However, for an average theme tweaker or a non-coder, learning all the tricks (e.g - drop shadows) of creating special effects is bit cumbersome. ThemeShock have developed a useful CSS3 drop shadow creation tool that makes this process very easy.
There are total 8 different drop shadow possiblities through this awesome shadow code generator.
1. Default (shadow on all 4 sides)
2. Bottom
3. Sides (streched out shadows on 4 corners)
4. Top & Bottom
5. Bottom left
6. Bottom right
7. Top right & bottom left
8. Top left & bottom right
Once, you've selected your desired shadow option, simply adjust height, width, X & Y dimensions, blur and opacity through draggable sliders. You'll see the resulting preview instantly so that you can fine-tune it as per your requirements. Once you're done, simply copy the auto-generated code and use in your projects.
Note: These shadow effects won't work in old browsers (e.g IE6).
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
How To Create Entertaining And Hilarious Fake Facebook Walls
If you are net-savvy, most probably you're on facebook. In recent years, this popular social networking platform has grown exponentially adding hundreds of millions of netizens from across the globe. Facebook walls are like living rooms where interesting things happens. People share their professional stuff, discuss things in their life in general, chit-chat with their friends and of course, sometimes, rant about their personal grudges.
How about creating a fake facebook wall that makes your facebook friends choke in a fit of laughter? You can do it easily through The Wall Machine. It's one of the best fake facebook wall creation services available on the web. 
Whether you're a software engineer or a granny, creating a fake facebook wall from this excellent service is like a cakewalk. All you need is images of the people involved (easily available through Google search) and a tickling naughty script. Simple upload the pics, and copy paste your rib-tickling script. Then save it and share with your facebook friends. The popularity of your fake facebook wall depends on how funny it is and how much likes (now that's quite obvious) it receives.
Pick current issues and add some spice to it and see how quickly you'll become popular among your facebook network for giving them different reasons to laugh heartily.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
How BlogCollector Can Help You Publish Your Own Book
You write great stuff, but struggle to prepare a manuscript to get it printed? Large number of writers across the globe face similar problems. After completing a book, the first step is to convert it into a manuscript so that professional book printing company can print it accurately. A great manuscript-creating tool called BlogCollector can help you in creating a professional manuscript in no time and that too for free.
All you require is to post all your book chapters in chronologocal order on a blog. BlogCollector supports Blogger, LiveJournal and MSN Spaces. . Following these simple steps can complete the whole book publishing process.
1. Publish your entire book on blogspot blog in chronological order.
2. Submit your blog's RSS feed to BlogCollector.
3. Save your properly formatted manuscript in your preferred format (PDF, MS Word, HTML).
4. Purchase an ISBN number through IdentifierServices.
5. Send your manuscript to a professional print-on-demand company.
6. That's it, time to tie-up with popular bookstores like Amazon.
Monday, May 16, 2011
SimpleDiagrams : An Application To Create Awesome Presentations
There are countless applications for making process diagrams. Some of these applications are free and others are commercial. Recently, I stumbled upon an application SimpleDiagrams - which is an Adobe AIR application for making presentations and diagrams. It has two versions - the paid one (offering premium features) and the free version! The latter version includes enough features to create awesome diagrams. 
Although the free version doesn't let you save your presentations, but with a simple screen capturing software you can easily save all your diagrams. SimpleDiagrams offers rich set of premade objects that can be used to create impressive process flows with ease. The interface is very friendly and clean. You'll not need any help to create your first diagram. Its all drag, stretch, rotate and drop.
Since its build on Adobe AIR platform, you can run it on all major operating systems (Windows, Linux and Mac).
Thursday, May 12, 2011
How To Use Google Docs To Power Your Submission Forms And Surveys
Whether you own a website or a blog, your contact page must be having a submission form. Web forms are used by almost every website whether its hand coded or built by content management system. Generally these CMS systems support plugins to add such forms to your site. At times, you must have felt the need of organisning a survey for your readers and visitors. Apart from plugins, what other easy, reliable and flexible methods you know to embed submission and survey forms?
Well, one of the most reliable and extremely flexible alternatives is Google docs. It lets you create highly customizable forms that are easy to embed with complete data back up and reporting. And above all, it's free! Let's see how to do it.
Start by logging into your Google Docs account and choose 'Form' to make your custom submission or survey form.
Make sure you use your active primary account to create the form, so that you can easily view reports without any need to switch to different account.
The form shown above is a basic template to start with. You can add as many fields as you want. You can add text, multiple choice, checkbox, drop down list, scale and grid as your fields. If required, you can also make selective fields mandatory. You can also choose themes and various premade templates to speed and spice up the form creation process.
Once you've completed the form creation process, it's time to get the embed code. Since it's in the form of an iframe, you can embed it almost anywhere. Simply select the 'Embed' option to get the required code.
Make sure you paste the code in HTML mode to get the desired result. After embedding, all user submissions are stored in your Google Docs account in a spreadsheet. You can also view graph chart of daily user submission activity. In case, you're running an important survey, you can activate email notifications for instant intimations.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
How To Add Multiple Users To Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics system used by millions of websites across the globe. Generally, a webmaster or blog owner himself take care of all aspects of traffic analysis and reporting. But in some cases such as multi-author blogs or a large multi-subdomain website, the entire team needs access to analytics dashboard.
Instead of sharing your analytics administrator's account with all the team, you can grant access to your dashboard with different access level (report view mode, administrator mode). So let's get started and see how to do it.
Go to your analytics dashboard and click 'Analytics Settings'.
Click 'Edit' for respective website record for which you want to add users.
Scroll down and click 'Add User' to initiate user addition process.
Finally, add the email address of the user and provide the type of role he/she is granted. The access provided can be read-only report viewing or full administrator level rights.
Adding users and granting privileges is a very delicate task. Before assigning administrator privilege to any user, make sure he is trustworthy and responsible. So go ahead and let your team help you in analyzing your site's traffic.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
How To Ask Your Visitors To Upgrade To Modern Browser
Nowadays technology is changing at breath taking pace. Whether you code your website from scratch or use any content management system, you're bound to introduce such elements in your web design that are not supported by old browsers like IE6. Still a large chunk of web traffic use these old browsers that breaks your web pages. We cannot force them to upgrade but can surely show them a friendly message to upgrade whenever they visit our web site or blog.
If you are a coder, you can write a small piece of code yourself, for others, there's a premade script that gracefully handles browser detection and prompts for upgrading to a modern browser.
DevSlide Labs have developed a script for browser detection that shows a nice upgrade message to people using old browsers. You can choose from 5 premade prompts or can fill in your own text for the dialogue. Once configured, simple copy paste the code in your website such that it is fetched in the header of every web page.
Monday, May 9, 2011
How To Create An Ovi App From Your Web Content
Although Android and iPhone users are growing rapidly, still a large number of users use Nokia smartphones. If you are using Nokia smartphone, you must have visited Nokia Ovi Store several times to download your favorite applications. How about creating your own Ovi app for free, so that users can download it and can use it on their smartphones? Sounds interesting? 
You can use Ovi app wizard to create free Ovi app from your web content in minutes. The process is pretty simple and just takes less than 5 minutes, provided you have kept your logo and favicon ready on your desktop. Here's how you can do create an Ovi app to distribute your web content for free to Nokia smartphone users.
Once approved, your Ovi app will be included in the Ovi store, where users can download your app and can read your blog through a gorgeous mobile optimized interface.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
5 Best Mind Mapping Software
Struggling with your productivity? Don't get new ideas to boost your business? Why not try out some mind mapping software? These excellent systems ignite your creative intent and bring out the best ideas with ease. All you need is a good mind mapping software and a zeal to churn out some creative ideas for your business. Here are some of the best mind mapping software that can help you in generating tons of ideas in no time.
Buzan's iMindMap - This is a commercial mind mapping solution made by Tony Buzan. It's perhaps the best software to brainstorm new ideas. I've used it once at my friend's desk and found it extremely helpful in visualizing and exploding your thought chain spawning countless ideas in no time. I highly recommend acquiring this software.
FreeMind - Written in Java, this impressive mind mapping application can run on almost every platform. With an excellent intuitive interface, you can create complex graphs with links and nodes to generate feasible solutions to your problems. FreeMind is worth trying out. It's free and very effective.
Compendium - It's one of my favorites mind mapping solution. It's unique 'Dialogue' and 'Argument' maps can help you present the most complex problem in an easy way facilitating N numbers of solutions to the problem. It's an open source application written in Java, so you can run it on all platforms.
XMIND - No mind mapping software list can be complete unless you don't include XMIND in it. It's open source and written in Java supporting mind maps, Ishikawa diagrams (also called fishbone diagrams or cause-and-effect diagrams), tree diagrams, organization charts, and spreadsheets. The interface is extremely good and help notes can get you started in short period of time.
VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) - And last but not the least is VUE. It's a free mind mapping application developed by Tufts University. This software supports complex visual (semantic) mapping and presentation modules with search and integration support with popular services like (Flickr, Yahoo and Twitter).
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
How To Create a Wordpress Theme Without Writing Any Code
There are tons of websites, freelancers and professional coders offering free and premium Wordpress themes to the ever-expanding user base of the most popular blogging platform. Designing a Wordpress theme is not a rocket science, but not a cakewalk either. Do you want to create your own theme customized to your preferences? And that too, without write a single line of code! If yes, use Wordpress Theme Generator to get your very own Wordpress theme without any need to write a single line of code.
This excellent service lets you stylize your theme with nifty controls giving ample options to transform the default template to a completely new and fresh look. Themes created through this service supports WordPress 2.1 to Wordpress 3.1 and renders well and good in all A-Grade modern browsers. The HTML code generated through this theme is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard.
After you've finished customizing your theme, you can click-save your theme files in a zipped archive that can be later uploaded to your web server.
