How to Embed Just a Portion of a YouTube Video

How do you embed just that green segment of a YouTube video?

Sometimes you may want to embed just a portion of a YouTube video in your web pages.
For instance, you are embedding a movie from YouTube but want the viewer to focus of one particular scene that begins at ‘x’ seconds and ends at ‘y’ seconds. When the scene has finished, the embedded clip should stop playing irrespective of the length of the video.
Well, here are two simple ways to help you embed a part of any YouTube video:

Case A: Embed YouTube Video with Start Time

This is a scenario where you specify a start time for the embedded video and let it play through the end. Here you can use the standard embed code and append the start time parameter to the YouTube URL as illustrated in the following example:

<iframe width="500" height="300" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen
   src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID#t=1234s"></iframe>

Replace VIDEO_ID with the actual ID of your YouTube video and replace 1234s with the start time (in seconds). For instance, if you want the video to start playback at the 03:24 (mm:ss) mark, you’ll specify the time as t=204s (60*3 + 24).

Case B: Embed YouTube Video with Start & End Time

The following YouTube video from an Apple event is over an hour long but I have only embedded the most interesting 2-minute segment (22:10 – 24:26) where Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone.
Hit the play button inside the embedded player for a quick demo.
The standard YouTube embed code doesn’t support the end time parameter but we can make use of the YouTube JavaScript API to embed a part of any YouTube video. Without boring you with the technical details, here’s your new embed code:

1. <div videoID="t2MOwQ089eQ" startTime="1330" endTime="1466" height="400" width="400" 
2.  id="youtube-player"></div>
4. <script src="http://labnol.googlecode.com/files/youtube-embed.js"></script>

You just have to replace the Video ID, the start time (in seconds), the end time (in seconds), the height of the player (in pixels) and the width in the <DIV> tag as per your needs. See this annotated source code to learn how the playback is controlled via the YouTube API.
Also, if you are planning to use this embed code on a popular site, please host the youtube-embed.js file on your own server as googlecode.com may offer limited bandwidth.

Download Web Pages as PDFs with Chrome for iOS

Just like the desktop version of Chrome, you can now the Google Chrome browser on your iPad or iPhone to download web pages as PDF files without requiring a separate app. The menu options aren’t very intuitive though so here’s a quick walk-through.

Save web pages as PDFs with Chrome on your iPad and iPhone

Print Web Pages as PDFs with Chrome

While you are inside Google Chrome, tap the Menu button and then choose the Print option. Choose Google Cloud Print and you’ll see a list of all your Android and iOS devices that also have Chrome installed on them. Choose the Save to Google Drive option instead and a PDF version of the current web page will instantly get saved to your Google Drive.
Alternatively, you can pick any of your other Android /iOS devices under the Google Cloud Print menu and the PDF file will remotely download to that device. You’ll have to open Chrome on that other device to access the PDF file.
If the PDF printing option isn’t working on your iOS device, make sure that you are signed-in with your Google Account and that Chrome to Mobile option is enabled. This is available under Menu -> Settings -> Google Account (your email address) -> Chrome to Mobile.
One more thing. It is also possible to save web pages as PDFs directly on your iOS device, bypassing Google Drive, but you can’t export that file into other PDF reading apps like iBooks or even your Mail application.
Chrome internally uses the Quartz API of Apple to generate PDF files – the page layout is well preserved but the hyperlinks won’t work inside the PDF.

Find Who is Linking to your Website with Google Analytics

The organic search rankings and Google PageRank of your web pages depend on several factors but the most crucial one is incoming links (also known as backlinks). Search engines treat external links pointing to your website as “votes” and more votes will often translate into higher search rankings.

Find Sites That Are Linking To You

You can use Google Analytics to quickly find out which external websites are linking to your home page or any of your internal pages.  Analytics can also tell you how many incoming links have you “earned” since yesterday and where these backlinks are coming from.
Step 1: Sign-in to your Google Analytics Account and open the “Traffic Sources” section under “Standard Reports.” These options are available in the left sidebar.
Step 2: Under Traffic Sources, expand the Social group and then choose Trackbacks. You can think of Trackbacks as notifications that Site A sends to Site B when A links to B’s content. 

See all the incoming links to your website in the Analytics Trackbacks report

Step 3: Google Analytics will now display a list of external web pages that have recently linked to any of the pages on your domain. The report also mentions the number of visits that may have been generated to your site as a result of these incoming links.
If you would like to know how many new sites have linked to your websites in the last day, just change the Date Range to “Yesterday” or you can even choose custom dates.

When you cannot open Google or Gmail in Chrome, try this simple fix

Ever since I upgraded to the latest version of Google Chrome, I keep getting “socket” errors when trying to open Google, Gmail or any other website under the google.com domain.
This isn’t as issue with my Internet connection as I can easily access the Google websites from IE and Firefox but they simply refuse to load inside Chrome with the following error:

Error 15 (net::ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED): Unknown error.
The problem gets resolved when the computer is restarted but that’s just a temporary solution as the errors keep coming back. It turns out that this is a known issue in Google Chrome and has also been experienced by dozens of Google users on Twitter.

Fix Socket Errors in Google Chrome

While we wait for the Chrome team to fix the issue, the irony is that it only seems to affect Google websites, there’s one simple step you can perform to get rid of the socket errors without having to restart the computer.
Open Google Chrome and type chrome://net-internals in the address bar (omni box). Switch to the Sockets tab and choose Flush Socket Pools. Now open Gmail or Google.com in Chrome and the site should open without problems.

A Podcast Directory Integrated with Dropbox and Google Drive

My latest project, Podcast Gallery is now live. It is an online directory of audio and video podcasts that you can watch /listen in the browser without requiring any software or apps.
Please watch this YouTube video for a quick introduction.
The show pages are integrated with Dropbox and Google Drive and thus you can send your favorite podcast episodes to your online drive directly via the cloud. For instance, if you are on a desktop, you can start a download request and the podcast will instantly become available on your mobile phone (or vice-versa).
The other feature of Podcast Gallery is Collections. You can sign-in with your Facebook or Twitter accounts and add your favorite podcast shows to a collection. These collections have a unique web URL that you can share with friends  or you can download the list as an OPML file. This will help you importing your favorite podcasts into any RSS Reader or another podcasting app.
Podcast Gallery uses the HTML5 media player and hence the audio /video files would play inline without requiring Flash or other plugins.
You can follow the gallery on Twitter, Facebook or through RSS Feeds.
Internally, the site is built on top of WordPress and the podcast data is sourced from iTunes API and the Google Feeds API. The integration with Dropbox and Google Drive is done with the help of filepicker.io while the media players are powered by the MediaElement.js library. The icon fonts are courtesy the Entypo and Font Awesome libraries.

Adobe Media Player for Watching Podcasts and FLV Videos

Adobe Media Player, a desktop media player that lets you play Flash Videos (flv), podcasts and QuickTime movies, just got better.
 

Adobe today posted a new build of Adobe Media Player on Adobe Labs – the UI is more or less the same but Adobe Media player can now play videos that are encoded using H.264 codec.
You would need Adobe AIR to install Adobe Media Player. And though you can watch videos that are already saved on your desktop, the current build of AMP won’t let you add new RSS feeds.
Updated: For subscribing to your favorite video podcasts inside Adobe Media Player, go to “My Favorites” and click the “Add RSS Feed” link at the bottom. Thanks Brian.
Get Adobe Media Player [Available for Win and Mac]

How to Prevent People from Stealing your Wi-Fi Network

The data LED of your wireless router is constantly blinking and none of the family members are using the Internet at home. This might indicate that someone outside – probably your neighbors – are surfing the web using your Wireless (Wi-Fi) network.
Are neighbors using your Wi-Fi network?
If you would like to confirm whether an outsider is using your wireless home network, here’s a trick. First enter the router’s IP address in the browser’s address bar – here’s how to find the router’s IP Address. Then open the DHCP Client Table (it is under Status – > Local Network – > DHCP Server for Linksys routers). This shows a list of all devices connected to your wireless network including those of strangers.

How to Prevent Wi-Fi Theft

You can’t block the Wi-Fi signals from reaching your neighbor’s house but there are several things you may do to prevent them from piggybacking on your wireless network. Some of the well-known techniques to secure your Wireless network include:

1. Setup a password for your Wi-Fi network – Open your router’s admin dashboard and set the wireless security mode to either WPA, WPA2 or WEP (use WPA2-mixed if possible). Now people would have to know the password before they can join your Wi-Fi network.
2. Use MAC Address Filtering – Your laptop computer, mobile phone, tablet and all other gadgets have a unique MAC address. Go to your router’s dashboard and under the Wireless Mac Filter section, add the MAC addresses of all your known devices so that only whitelisted devices can access your wireless Internet.

Discourage Neighbors from using your Wireless Network

Most people in the neighborhood, who are connecting to your Wi-Fi network without permission, could be doing so unintentionally just because their computer showed them that an open wireless network in available in that area.

Mikko Hypponen has a brilliant idea to discourage such people from connecting to your wireless network.
You can rename your wireless network name, also known as SSIDs to something scary – like c:\virus.exe - and your neighbors are less likely to connect to your Wi-Fi network ever again. Other suggestions for scary SSID names include Police Van and Network Service Unavailable.
To change the SSID of your wireless router, log in to your router’s admin console and rename the network under Basic Wireless setting.

[*] Find the MAC Address of your devices

If you type “ipconfig /all” at the command prompt, you can easily find the MAC address of your computer’s network card – just look for the string “Physical Address.” The Wi-Fi Mac address of mobile devices is often listed on their Settings page.
The MAC Addresses are also listed inside the DHCP Client Table of your router.

How to Get RSS Feeds for Twitter

Twitter is permanently retiring the Twitter API v1.0 sometime later this month and, to the end user, what it means is that all the existing Atom and RSS feeds of Twitter will stop working once the old API is turned off. With API v1.1, Twitter has completely switched from XML to JSON format and the other big change is that all requests to the Twitter API must now be authenticated with OAuth.
In simple English, you can no longer subscribe to any of the Twitter streams – be it search results, timelines of users, their favorites or even Twitter Lists – in your RSS Reader.
That said, there is any easy workaround.

Twitter RSS Feeds – Demo

What we really need is some sort of a parsing program sitting between Twitter and our RSS Reader. The parser would fetch updates from Twitter at regular intervals and convert them from JSON to RSS which we can then subscribe in our favorite RSS Reader.
This can be easily accomplished with a simple Google Script but before getting your hands dirty, try any of the following RSS feeds. These feeds use the new Twitter API v1.1 and are served from the Google cloud.

• Timeline of @mattcutts [Twitter Timeline]
• Favorites of @ginatrapani [Twitter User Favorites]
• Twitter List curated by @Scobleizer [Twitter List RSS]

How to Create RSS Feeds for Twitter

Step 1: Setup a Dummy Twitter App

Since the Twitter API now requires authentication for all requests, we will have to create a new Twitter App that our Google Script will use to communicate with the Twitter API.

• Go to dev.twitter.com, sign-in with your Twitter account and create a Twitter app. Give your app any name, description, website (any URL) and put https://spreadsheets.google.com/macros/ in the callback URL field. Click Submit.
• Once the Twitter app has been created, make a note of your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret Key.

Step 2: Configure your Google Script

• Go to script.google.com and choose File->Make a Copy to copy that script into your Google Drive. Put the Twitter Consumer key and Secret in line # 24 and 26.
• Go to File -> Manage Version and choose Save new version.
• Go to Publish -> Deploy as Web App and choose Anyone, even anonymous under Who has Access. Click the Deploy button.

Step 3: Deploy the Twitter RSS Feed generator

• Now that you have deployed the Google script, go to Run -> Start and grant the necessary permissions.
• Choose Run -> Start again and the script will require access to Twitter. Grant access and you’ll get an email with links to some sample RSS feeds for Twitter.

That’s it. You can now generate custom RSS feeds for any Twitter Timeline, List or Search Results by simply change the value of “q” parameter in the feed’s URL. As always, you are free to use, modify and distribute the source code with attribution.

Use any YouTube Video as your Page Background

You are probably using a single static image as the background for your website but it may offer a slightly more richer experience if you could consider placing moving images, like an animation or a self-playing video clip, in the background of your web pages.
The Bing homepage frequently uses video backgrounds, like those penguins jumping out of an ice hole one after another, and so can you on your own website.
There are several approaches here:

• Bing uses the standard HTML5 <video> tags to serve videos on the homepage. The embedded video has a fixed size and it doesn’t resize itself with the browser.
• There are ready-to-use jQuery plugins, Tubular and BigVideo.js for example, that let you easily use any video, or a series of videos, as page backgrounds.
• The other more simple approach, as you can see in this demo, uses HTML and CSS tags (no JavaScript) to help you place any YouTube video in the page background.

YouTube Video Backgrounds

To get started, simply paste the code below near the opening <body> tag of your web template. You should also replace the ID with the actual video ID of the YouTube video that you would like to use in the background.

<div style="position: fixed; z-index: -99; width: 100%; height: 100%">
  <iframe frameborder="0" height="100%" width="100%" 
    src="https://youtube.com/embed/ID?autoplay=1&controls=0&showinfo=0&autohide=1">
  </iframe>
</div>
 
// Replace ID with the actual ID of your YouTube video

Internally, we are using YouTube’s IFRAME tags to embed that video such that it occupies the entire page (both width and height are set to 100%). Also, the z-index is set to negative so the YouTube video layer will appear several levels below the main content of your page.
The downside is that your background video won’t work on mobile devices and it is not possible to mute the sound of a video without using JavaScript.

Bonus Tip: Embed Background Music with YouTube

Remember the Geocities era when websites would automatically play background music as soon as you opened them much to the embarrassment of office workers. They mostly used raw audio files, like MP3, WAV or even the MIDI format, to embed music but you can even use any of your favorite YouTube tracks for embedding background audio.
The trick is that you embed a regular YouTube video (with autoplay=1) and set the height & width of the video player to zero so it stays invisible. This can be achieved with a single line of code which you can add anywhere on your web page.

<embed height="0" width="0" 
  src="http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/VIDEO_ID&autoplay=1&loop=1" />

How to Choose an Image Format for Screenshots

The quality of screenshot images and illustrations used on your website can make a difference.You may use the good-old Print Screen key or any of the professional screen capture tools to grab your desktop but the basic requirement remains same – the output image should be sharp and that the file size be well within a reasonable limit.

Now PNG, JPG and GIF are the three most popular image formats for sharing screen captures on the web. Of course there’s another format called BMP but people rarely use that for obvious reasons.
Text & Clipart – If you are capturing text (like a block of source code or Google search pages or a navigation menu), always use GIF or the PNG format – the screenshots are clear and file size remains pretty low.

Regular Desktop Windows – If you need to screen capture a regular window on your screen, dialog boxes, Windows Explorer, DOS command prompt window, Google Maps or even splash screens – use the PNG format.
The advantage with PNG is that it preserves all the colors and yield a much sharper output when compared with JPG. See this Photoshop splash screen for a comparison between JPEG and PNG quality.

Videos & Photographs – If you doing a still image screenshot of a video (YouTube Flash video player), Google Earth, video games, Flash animations, desktop wallpapers or photographs (like Flickr) – always go with JPG instead of PNG because the image file size would be smaller without much degradation in the quality.
To give you example, this Wall Strip video on YouTube would take around 92kb when saved in PNG format but that would fall to 20kb if we changed the format from PNG to JPG. Surprisingly, there isn’t any remarkable difference in quality.

Not Just Videos, Upload your Photos to YouTube

How do you share a picture slideshow on YouTube?
Previously, you would use a tool like Windows Movie Maker or Picasa to stitch the image files into a video for uploading to YouTube. That addition step is however not required as you can create a video slideshow from pictures directly inside YouTube. Here’s how:

Create a Photo Slideshow in YouTube

While you are on the YouTube website, click the Upload button and then choose “Create” under “Photo Slideshow.” Here, switch to the Upload Photos section and drag-drop all the pictures that you would like to be included in your slideshow.
Once the photos are in timeline editor (see screenshot), you can drag them around to rearrange their position in the video. On the next screen, you have an option to change the default duration of individual slides and also the transition effect between pictures.
You can add background music to your slideshow though YouTube does not offer an option to upload your own audio files for the slideshow.
You can set the privacy to Unlisted if you would not like the video to appear in YouTube search. Also, YouTube might include ads in your video if you have attached a background track to your slideshow and the revenue in that case is shared with the music creator.

How to Load Social Widgets Conditionally to Improve your Site’s Performance

Social Sharing is now tightly integrated into all mobile OS platforms. That means if someone is viewing a web page on an Android phone, or inside the mobile Safari browser of an iPhone, they can share that web page on Twitter and Facebook using the system-wide sharing menu without having to rely on bookmarklets or those tiny social sharing widgets.

These “tweet” and “like” buttons add several extra kilobytes to your web pages and if mobile users are less likely to use them, you may as well consider removing the social buttons completely when your website is accessed from a mobile phone. This reduces clutter and also improves the page speed score which is now a factor in Google search rankings.

Remove the Social Buttons on Mobile Devices

If you are sort-of convinced that social sharing widgets are less useful on your mobile site, here’s what you can do to prevent them from loading on the small screen. Remember, we aren’t just hiding the buttons but removing them completely so the associated JavaScript and CSS files won’t download on the user’s mobile device.
For a quick demo, open social-widgets.html in your desktop browser and then on a mobile device. The desktop view will load the social widgets but not the mobile device.

How to Load Social Widgets Conditionally

The technique is simple. We calculate the width of the user’s screen /browser and if the width exceeds a particular value (say 480 pixels), we load the associated social widgets.
To implement conditional loading on your blog /website, first add all the necessary social widgets to your blog using the usual procedure. For instance, you can visit facebook.com to generate code for the Like button while dev.twitter.com will provides codes the Tweet and Follow widgets of Twitter.
Remove the JavaScript from these generated codes – everything that’s between the <script> tags – and add everything else to your website template. Then copy-paste the following snippet before the closing </body> tag of your website template.

<script type="text/javascript">
 
(function(doc, script, minimum) {
 
   // Calculate the width of the user's screen
    var browserWidth = window.innerWidth 
        || doc.documentElement.clientWidth 
        || doc.body.clientWidth;
 
   // Load JavaScript only if the site is being viewed on a wide (non-mobile) screen
    if (browserWidth > minimum) {
 
    var js, frag = doc.createDocumentFragment(),
  
    // Credit : Stoyan Stefanov of phpied.com
    js_queue = function(url, id) {
        if ( ! doc.getElementById(id) ) {
            js = doc.createElement(script); 
            js.src = url; js.id = id; 
            frag.appendChild(js);
             }
         };
       
    // These are the most common social widgets, remove the ones you don't need     
    js_queue ("https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js",      "googleplus-js");
    js_queue ("//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js",          "twitter-wjs"); 
    js_queue ("//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1","facebook-jssdk");
    js_queue ("//platform.linkedin.com/in.js",              "linkedin-js");
    js_queue ("//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js",         "pinterest-js");
 
    var fjs = doc.getElementsByTagName(script)[0];
    fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(frag, fjs); 
    }
 
// Set the minimum width here (default is 480 pixels)
} ( document, 'script', 480 ) );
 
</script>

The above JavaScript code asynchronously loads all the popular social widgets – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest – but you may remove the js_queue calls for widgets that you do not plan to use on your website. Save the changes and you are done.
I have implemented a variation of the above code on my site as well. There’s a Facebook Like box in the right sidebar but it won’t load if you open this site on a mobile device.

How to Send Out of Office Replies in Twitter

Twitter, for many, has become a preferred medium of communication in recent years. Your email message may never get read or, in the worst case, may get caught in the Spam folder but tweets are less likely to suffer from such issues.
When you are travelling or take a “disconnected” vacation, with limited or no access to the Internet, you create an “out of office” reply in your email program to let people know that you won’t be able to respond to them right away. How about doing something similar for people who are trying to reach you through Twitter?

What will the Twitter Auto-Responder do

Unlike your email program, Twitter offers no easy way for you to setup out of office auto-replies but we can easily and quickly add such a feature to our Twitter account(s) with the help of a simple Google Script.
You specify the start date and the end date when the auto-responder should be active and any tweets sent to you during this period will automatically get a reply from your Twitter account saying you are out of office. The replies are sent once so if a person sends you two or more tweets during your vacation period, they will get only one out-of-office auto-reply.

How to Setup Out of Office Replies in Twitter

Step A: Setup a Twitter App

1. Go to dev.twitter.com and sign-in with your existing Twitter account. Create a new Twitter app , add a description, website (any URL) and callback URL (https://spreadsheets.google.com/macros/).
2. Once the Twitter app has been created, click the Settings tab and set Read and Write as the Application Type. Click Update to save your changes.
3. Switch to the OAuth tool tab and make note of the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.

Step B: Setup the Auto-responder Script

1. Open script.google.com and choose File -> Make a copy to duplicate the auto-responder script into your Google Drive.
2. Enter the start and end dates of your vacation, the Twitter app keys (from the previous step), and your Twitter handle.
3. Go to Run -> Start to initialize the auto-responder. Say Yes if the script requires you to authorize access to certain Google Script services.
4. Choose Run -> Start and it will show an “Authorization Required” dialog. Allow the script to access your Twitter account and you are done.

The script will invoke itself on the start date specified by you and will respond to all incoming tweets until the end date. It will then uninstall itself automatically. As always, you are free to use, modify and distribute the source code with attribution.
When you are taking another vacation, just open the auto-responder script already present in your Google Drive, change the Start and End dates and choose Run->Start to setup the autoresponder again.

How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes

Meet @DearAssistant, a Twitter bot that is like a mini version of Siri. You can tweet your questions in plan English and the bot will reply with an answer.
The Twitter bot is internally using Wolfram Alpha so there’s a whole range of questions that it can answer. Here are some questions that people have asked @DearAssistant so far:

• How many calories are in Diet Coke? (link)
• When was Mahatama Gandhi born? (link)
• What is the distance between city A and city B (link)
• Who directed the film M (link)
• What is the price of Kindle Paperwhite.

You can also ask the bot for word meanings, weather conditions, language translation, to convert between time zones, date calculations (how many days until Christmas) and more.

Writing a Twitter Bot – The Basic Ingredients

Writing a Twitter bot is surprisingly simple and you can get one up and running in 5 minutes. It helps if you know little bit of coding (simple JavaScript) but that’s certainly not a requirement for writing a basic Twitter bot.
A bot is essentially a program that is always running in the background and whenever it encounters a command (tweets in this), it processes it (based on the text of the tweeet) and sends a reply to the tweeter in another tweet.
Earlier, you would need a web server to run the bot while the bot itself would be written in languages like PHP, Perl or Python. That’s complicated so we will use Google Scripts to write the Twitter bot and host it on our Google Drive.

How to Write a Twitter Bot – Step by Step

Step A: Setup a Twitter App

1. Create a new account at Twitter that will become the bot. Then go to dev.twitter.com, sign-in with your new Twitter account and create a Twitter app. Give your app a name, description, website (any URL) and callback URL (https://spreadsheets.google.com/macros/). Agree to the terms, fill in the CAPTCHA and submit the form to create your first Twitter application.
2. Once the Twitter app has been created, click the Settings tab and choose Read and Write under Application Type. This is important since we want the bot to read tweets as well as post tweets. Click the Update button to save your changes.
3. Switch to the OAuth tool tab and make note of the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. We will need these later in our Google Apps Script.

Step B: Create a Wolfram Alpha App

1. While the Twitter app will monitor and respond to tweets, the Wolfram App will be used to determine answers that users will be posing to your Twitter bot.
2. Go to developer.wolfram.com, create an account and then choose “Get an App ID” to create your new app.
3. We will need this App ID in the Google Script. Remember that your free Wolfram Alpha App can only be used for a non-commercial purpose.

Step C: Host the Twitter bot on Google Drive

1. While you are signed-in to your Gmail account, go to script.google.com and then choose File -> Make a copy to duplicate the Twitter bot into your Google Drive.
2. Edit the values of TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY, TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET, TWITTER_HANDLE (your new Twitter account) and WOLFRAM_API_ID – you know them all from the previous steps.
3. Go to Run -> Start to initialize the Twitter bot. Say yes if the script requires you to authorize access to certain Google Script services.
4. Go to Run -> Start to actually run the Twitter bot. It will show an “Authorization Required” dialog and will redirect you to Twitter where you can grant the script access to your Twitter account.

That’s it. Close Google Scripts and your Twitter bot is now up and running, ready to take commands. As always, you are free to use, modify and distribute the source code with attribution.

Facebook Like Box Becomes Faster and Lighter

If you have the Facebook Like box embedded in your website, the good news is that the plugin should have little impact on the performance, or page speed, of your pages.
Stoyan Stefanov of the Facebook engineering team shares that the updated Like box is 2-4x faster and is considerably lighter than the previous version. The Facebook Like plugin now loads in 0.5 seconds, as opposed to 2.3 seconds and while the previous version was 245KB in size, it now weighs a mere 46KB.

Earlier, Facebook Like box made 24 web requests and would load in 2.4 seconds

Facebook improved the performance of the plugin by switching to inline CSS styles (as opposed to using external stylesheets) and by squeezing multiple scripts into one – the plugin thus has to make fewer web requests.

Facebook Like box now loads in .7 seconds and makes just 13 requests (for photos)

How do you get the faster Facebook Like box for your website? First, does the Facebook embed code on your website look anything like this?
XFBML version (old)

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:fan stream="false" name="PAGE_NAME"></fb:fan>

IFRAME version (old):

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/fan.php?connections=10&name=PAGE_NAME

If your embed codes are different, you are covered as Facebook will automatically serve you the improved Like box. Else, you are using the older /deprecated version of the Facebook Like box  so head over to developers.facebook.com and generate the new embed codes.

How to Fake your Location in Google Chrome

Sometimes websites may request access to your location so that they can serve more relevant information. For instance, if you are looking for a gas station, a maps website may use your current geographic location to display stations that are near your place.

Google Chrome will only share your location if you click Allow.

How Browsers Determine your Location

Earlier, websites would use the IP address to determine your approximate location but with the HTML5 Geolocation API, web browsers can more accurately detect your location using data from GPS, Wi-Fi networks, cell towers, Bluetooth and the computer’s IP address. If you agree to share your location, the browser will send these details to Google Location Services for estimating your location which is then shared with the requesting website.
To give you an example, open the Where am I app in your browser, allow it to use your location information and the app should be able to display your latitude and longitude coordinates (it is more accurate on mobile browsers as those devices have built-in GPS).

Fake your Geolocation Coordinates

When you happen to visit a location-aware website, the browser will always ask for a confirmation before sharing your location. If you aren’t keen to share your geographic coordinates, you can always deny that request or, if you are using Google Chrome, you can even send a fake location to the website.
Here’s how. Press F12 (or Ctrl + Shift + I) in Google Chrome to open the Developer Tools. Click the Settings icon in the lower right corner and switch to the Overrides tab (see the next screenshot). Now you can specify the exact latitude and longitude coordinates* that you want to share with that website.
[*] You can use the Postal Address finder to know the latitude and location of a place.Make sure that the “Override Geolocation” setting is checked and then refresh the page to send that fake location. And this is obviously a useful feature for web developers who would like to test their geolocation-enabled apps from the same location.

Boot up Your PC faster: Best Tips and Programs

Until I upgraded my computer, I was struggling with this problem also: how to make my computer boot faster. It took ages for it to boot up, and as I later learned, it was because all of the programs I had installed on it. All the useless programs on my machine were suffocating it and this had to be solved. After doing some digging, I found a couple of ways to make my PC boot faster, and now I share them with you, so everyone can do the same.

Of course, there are other ways to speed up computers, without using other programs, but those require money to be invested, such as buying more RAM, or buying a SSD drive, or even installing Windows 8, that has really revamped its boot up process, now taking much less time than what it used to (but with all of this innovation, some users still want to downgrade to Windows 7).

Tricks to Boot up PC Faster

Of course, the biggest improvement on any PC will be to add more computing power, but to change the components requires some technical knowledge and it can cost quite a lot. By using optimization programs and implementing some simple tricks, you can make your computer much more responsive and faster. We’ll start tuning your PC from the bottom up, and the lowest level you have is the motherboard’s BIOS.

• BIOS Tricks

When you start your computer, press the BIOS key (it’s not the same for all the computers, but it usually says in the bottom of the screen “Press [key] to enter Setup”). When you have entered the BIOS, you can enable or disable some features that will allow your computer to boot faster.
Note: Not all BIOS versions are the same, some have different menus or features, do some research on your BIOS version to see what features are available for you.
One feature you can disable is Quick Power On Self-Test. What this means is that the BIOS will no longer do all the hardware and memory tests at startup, thus making it faster. Set this setting to “Fast” something similar. If your BIOS has IDE and Floppy Drive check, you can disable these if you do not use IDE drives or a Floppy drive.

• Windows Tricks

Moving on from the BIOS to the operating system, the first step here is to scan your computer for viruses. There are lots of free antivirus utilities that do an excellent job, but I would recommend buying a good antivirus also. After scanning your computer (I usually use 2-3 antivirus utilities to scan my computer), you can move on to deleting useless files and cleaning the startup process.
Some programs have the option of starting on Windows startup, but each program takes up some memory, and with the more you have, the startup of your computer has a lower speed. To disable the non essential programs, click on “Start” and the “Run”. When the Run windows opened, type ”msconfig”. The Msconfig utility is a Windows integrated tool that allows you to remove startup programs. In the main window, click on “Startup” and you will see a list of startup programs. All you have to do is uncheck those that you do not necessarily need. Apply and exit without restart.

Note: For those who have dual boot, you can adjust the “timeout” time and the default OS from the Msconfig tool. This feature is located under the “Boot” menu.

• Cleaning the Temp files is something that might make your computer a bit faster. You should know that if your C: partition is running low on space, the performance of your computer drastically decreases. These files are temporary files that have no actual use for Windows on startup, so can delete them with no problems. There are two temp folders on your computer, you can find them here: C:Users[Yourusername]AppDataLocalTemp or C:WindowsTemp.

After doing this, you can clean your registry for entries that are not used anymore. These can really pile up after some time because each program you install creates registry entries and they are not deleted after uninstalling the program. There are lots of utilities that allow you to clean the registry of your computer, we will feature a list later on.

• Updating the drivers of your computer can have a beneficial effect on the performance of your computer and sometimes it will help it boot faster, so visit the websites of the manufacturers of your components and download the latest drives and install them.
• Defragment your drive for better seek times. We have previously discussed the benefits of defragmenting your drive, and you can also use defragmentation programs. A list of the best can be found here.
• Remove unused fonts that make your computer run slow. You usually do not use all the fonts installed on your computer, so removing some of them is a benefit. Head to Control Panel -> Fonts and right click on unused fonts and delete them.

The last thing you might want to change is the visual aspect of your desktop. This is why desktop customization apps are not recommended for slower computers, they take up RAM memory and increase the boot time of your computer. Setting your desktop background to blank or solid colors and disabling transparency for Windows can free up some memory. Also, try disabling the Windows widgets.
These are some of the tips you can use to speed up your boot time for your computer. But there are other methods to optimize a PC. There are programs that can help with the boot time of your computer. Also, they have some other optimization tools that can lend a helping hand. Here is a list of such programs:

Programs to boot up your computer faster

1. Soluto – Soluto is a complete PC optimizing solution. It helps you identify and remove start-up programs slowing down the PC boot in addition to identifying crashes.
2. Regcleaner – We previously talked about this tool. It allows you to delete the unused registry files.
3. Tuneup Utilities – This is one of the best optimization utilities that I have ever used. It features lots of optimising tools for making your computer faster.
4. PC Doctor – Similar to Tuneup Utilities, this program offers some great optimization tools that I have used to great success.
5. Norton 360 – 360 is right, Norton is one of the best antivirus utilities, but apart from this, it provides a good parental control feature and a great PC optimizing tool.
6. Startup Faster – A utility that has a very low resource footprint but it can also have a massive impact on your computer. It allows you to very easily stop or delay startup processes.

If your computer had problems with the booting time, after using these tips and programs, you surely won’t have any more problems. Try them out for yourself and see what an impact they can have on your computer.

Create Temporary Email Addresses inside Hotmail

A temporary email address is handy in situations where you don’t want to share your primary email address because of the risk of spam. Now there are quite a few services on the web, Mailinator and 10MinuteMail for example, that offer temporary email addresses for free but with certain limitations.
For example, these services provide receive-only inboxes so you can’t send email to someone using your temporary address. Second, these addresses auto-expire after a certain time and then you may have to generate a new one. Finally, we don’t have much of a clue about the companies that run these services and their privacy policies.
If you have been looking for a more reliable temporary email service but without any limitations, it’s time to log in to your Hotmail account.
Microsoft has added a new feature in Windows Live Hotmail that will let you create aliases for your main email address and the good part is that all these aliases can be managed though the same Inbox. Google Apps also supports email aliases but not Gmail.

I really like the way they have implemented aliases in Hotmail (see the video above). All incoming email for an alias gets stored in a separate folder, outside your main Inbox, and if you are getting too much spam for an alias, simply delete it from your account.
You may associate up to five different aliases with your Hotmail account.
Technically, this is quite similar to creating a new Gmail account that auto-forwards to your main Inbox and then you set up a filter for routing those messages. However, for people who aren’t that technically inclined, Hotmail’s approach is a winner.

Get an Email Alert (with Picture) When Someone Tries to Log into your Computer

You have a feeling that someone else used your computer (or at least made an attempt to login) while you were out for a quick coffee break. Maybe that colleague with whom you share the cubicle knows your password or he made a few guesses before finally giving up.
How do you get notified when such an attempt is made to intrude into your computer?

Email alert with a webcam picture of the intruder.

A new website (made in Turkey) called MouseLock.co may have a simple solution here. They will send you an email alert as well as a picture of the intruder as soon as someone tries to use your computer.Here’s how Mouse Lock works.
You sign-in with your Google Account (they’ll send the alert to your Gmail address) and then select a secret pin on the screen. Next, put your mouse cursor in a designated area on the Mouse Lock website and leave the machine.
Now when someone moves the mouse, they will also have to enter the original pin. If they fail to do that in the first few seconds, Mouse Lock will send you an email and, if the computer has a webcam, it will use that to also snap a picture of the intruder.
Mouse Lock won’t prevent the intrusion but will at least notify you the minute it happens. And best of all, this a web app and thus requires no installation.
Internally, the site uses jQuery (mouseLeaveEvent) to detect mouse movements while the webcam photographs are captured using the getUserMedia() API currently supported in Chrome and Firefox. The alerts, possibly due to a bug, are triggered even when any of the keys are pressed and that makes it a little less useful since there’s no way to lock the computer after setting up the monitor.

1,000 Free Music Albums Up for Grabs at Flipkart

Flyte, if you are new, is an online music store from Flipkart where you can download individual songs and music albums in MP3 format. The files are DRM-free meaning you can listen to your purchased music on any device without restrictions and using your favorite media player.
It’s been a year since Flyte launched and, to celebrate, Flipkart is giving away 100 music albums per day, across various genres, for the next 10 days.

Download music albums in MP3 format from Flipkart for free for the next 10 days.

To get started, go to flyte.com, pick your favorite genre and hit that “green” download button to add a music album to your online MP3 library. You can buy /add the tracks in one go and download them anytime later.
The listed music albums will change daily until February 28 so do remember to check the site every single day.
There are no string attached to this offer – you neither have to make any purchases at Flipkart nor do you need to have any minimum balance in your Flipkart Wallet. All you need is an account at Flipkart and the music is all yours.
You can download music directly from the Flyte website and they also have discovery apps for Android and iOS devices. The only restriction is that you can download music only within the territory of India.