Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned: Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location.   Students participating in the Mono Project in the 2013 Google Summer of Code can get paid $5,000.  Mono is an open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET. Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects. A good way to send yourself an email via text message is to send yourself a Twitter Direct Message after setting up your account to notify you of direct messages via email.  Google manages a whopping 343 million active Google+ accounts. Story of a guy whose account was disabled without any prior notice. He now prefers storing his data in spiral notebooks and relies on his handwriting to encrypt his data. Google's Android O...

Twitter DM'ed me a "Happy 5th TwBirthday" along with this online greeting : How time runs! In these 5 years, Twitter helped me - ...find insightful information in my areas of interest ...reach out to people whose email addresses I don't know  ...complain against or compliment service providers who have a Twitter presence ...saved time by giving me the gist of whatever is making news ...publicize my blog posts  ...learn about brevity and still be expressive Related posts: World Citizen News - mashup based on Twitter Trends Twitter Search Tricks HOW TO add hashtags while auto-publishing posts to Twitter Get fresh news fast from Twitter and Google News JSONP feeds using jQuery HOW TO show expanded form of shortened URL within a tweet using Twitter API

While copying a basic ASP.NET MVC 4 project sample from a different machine, I noticed that the project created using the Internet Application template was a whooping 27MB in size. The Packages folder takes up 27.4MB while the DLLs (47 of them compared to 29 in the MVC 3 project template) in the Bin folder were 5MB in size. The default ASP.NET MVC 4 Solution created with Basic Template was 24MB (Packages folder - 18MB, Bin folder - 4.34MB) Is there really a chance that anyone uses all of the DLLs? I looked up what some of the non-Microsoft DLLs among the list of 47 DLLs do - Antlr :  (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It's widely used to build languages, tools, and frameworks.  DotNetOpenAuth :  Compiled library that adds support for your site visitors to login with their OpenIDs by just dropping an ASP.NET control onto your page. Newtonsoft...

This Week I Learned: New Azure VM Image Templates include SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint Server (2013?) images . This can be handy when you don't have time to build the environment to try one of those server technologies It is possible to run a ASP.NET web page on a Raspberry Pi Code School has a nice set of video tutorials on learning about Chrome DevTools . The videos are downloadable for offline viewing. If you want to show someone how your responsive website looks in just a single image, here's a nice tip Download progress indicator is shown next to the address bar in Firefox version 20 & upwards You can use the Alt-click combination on a link in Chrome to download a page as HTML. There are also a bunch of other time-saving shortcuts mostly specific to Chrome The Calculator program in Windows 8 can be used to calculate the difference between two dates in years,months,weeks and days A handy guide to severing your ties with social networks  Going a s...

I "discovered" this infographic which shows the iPhone models released so far along with their specs , on flickr via my World Citizen News app : click to view enlarge image The first iPhone was released on 29th June 2007

This Week I Learned: Microsoft offers a minimum of 10 years of support for Business and Developer products.   Microsoft is getting ready to pull the life support on Windows XP .  Mixed Active Content is now blocked by default in Firefox 23 . It has been happening already in Chrome.  With Click-to-Run , you can start using Office before the whole suite or product has been downloaded. While you are using your application, the rest of Office is being downloaded quietly in the background. Click-to-Run uses Microsoft virtualization and streaming technologies.  You can save a Word document as a PDF. Word 2013 can directly open, view, as well as edit PDF. You can install and use both Microsoft Office 2013 and Microsoft Office 2010 on the same computer . However Microsoft does not recommend this.  Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the  total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half . A Google engineer once  ac...

Here is a GitHub Gist snippet that shows how to get local time for a location based on its latitude and longitude using World Weather Online's Time Zone API & jQuery - This can be useful in scenarios where you have to display time for a location relative to another.

The Recommended Product Links Amazon widget can be adapted to display book titles in Amazon ads dynamically based on context or custom keywords. Here is a GitHub Gist snippet that illustrates this - I have used this in our app to search for free eBooks from the Google Books collection . It improves the app by showing results from an additional info source and helps surface free Kindle eBooks that may be available for a specified keyword.

Our latest app, World Citizen News gets you: the Twitter buzz weather forecast, local time & map for popular cities around the world images of selected location from flickr news based on the trending Twitter topics It makes use of the following APIs: Twitter Trends flickr World Weather Online for the local time MapQuest  Yahoo Weather via YQL Google News Whether you're a world citizen or a geography buff, try the World Citizen News mash-up to see what's happening around the world. The following links explain how different features of the mash-up were built: Weather information for a place based on its WOEID using YQL & jQuery Finding the latitude, longitude of a location based on WOEID Local time for a location based on its latitude and longitude Display book titles in Amazon ads dynamically based on context or custom keywords

The bookmarking sites Delicious and Google Bookmarks haven't been working well for me. So on the lines of the TodayILearned section of Reddit, I plan to jot down interesting things I've learnt from the internet each week under the TWIL (ThisWeekILearned) label. Snipping tool isn't available in Windows Server 2012 & Windows Server 2008. Everything is a proprietary freeware Windows desktop search engine that can rapidly find files and folders by name on an NTFS volume. ( found via SuperUser ) The Mouse Keys feature that lets you control your mouse with your keyboard appears to have a few more options in Windows 7 than in earlier versions. Does your computer have DDR2 or DDR3 type of RAM? You can use the freeware tool  CPUID's CPU-Z tool  to find out. Don't like the styling of a web page you're browsing? You can view it with your own User style sheet . I've seen image ads being shown using Data URIs.  Data URIs  are now supported by all the popu...

A list of websites that use crowd-sourced information to compare salaries offered by Indian companies - PayScale Glassdoor SalaryKhoj Jobiness Zuby Also see: Comparison of Payment Gateways Aids for comparative analysis of software tools/products Indian comparison shopping sites Comparison of URL Shortener services

Having spent a few months with VS 2012, I like Visual Studio 2012 more than Visual Studio 2010 as it feels faster. Although I don't mind the menu titles in upper-case, there are quite a few features that annoy me - Track Active Item in Solution Explorer - I don't understand why this option has to be unchecked while almost all the rest in the group are checked. Word Wrap - why can't this be activated by default? Solution Explorer - When I open a project, the Solution Explorer stays closed. In all the older versions, Solution Explorer would be in an expanded state once a project has finished opening. I thought there would be a setting hidden in the gazillion settings within Tools > Options but I haven't found anything related so far. Find & Replace - The Find & Replace box feels smaller than in older versions. It is so crammed with options, it makes me feel claustrophobic. Related:  Why are these Visual Studio Settings not enabled by defa...