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.