Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Have trouble reading fine print? Most packaged products & medicines these days have labels with text so tiny, even those with perfect eyesight can have trouble deciphering what's printed. Rather than buy & carry a magnifying glass to tackle this issue, your own smartphone can be of help. Most smartphone cameras come with a digital zoom option that can come in handy to magnify text printed in a small font size.  After your camera app is on, point your camera at the text you want to read and then pinch two or more fingers together or spread them apart to zoom in or out for desired size . Source: Quora Digital zoom refers to the level of additional magnification achieved through a camera’s internal cropping abilities, by way of software. Optical zoom is the phrase used to indicate the strength of a given lens’ optical magnification. I had almost written off my  Lyf Wind 3 smartphone but after three months of usage, I'm starting to be impressed with the fe...

This Week I Learned - *  The Cloud OS is Microsoft's hybrid cloud solution comprised of Windows Server, Windows Azure, System Center, Windows Intune, and SQL Server - Building Clouds with Windows Azure Pack [ PDF Sampler, Chapter 1 ] *  "Widgets do track you, as well as sometimes pump advertising: disqus is a good example, they provide comments, but do put advertising content above the comment block. Another example is Facebook. The Facebook like button that's embedded on every site allow Facebook to know what stuff you like: for example, lets say you go on tmz.com for some celebrity stuff, Facebook will then derive that you like celebrity rumors, and so on." *  Tips for Extending Smartphone Battery Life : 1. Use auto-brightness for the screen 2. Block power-sucking ads 3. Tweak your email settings - most phones can be configured to instead check for (or “fetch”) emails on a schedule — say, every 30 minutes — or only when you manually tell your email app to...

Based on this forum post on StackExchange Also see:  What do you give someone who already owns a lot of gadgets?

Here are the steps to share a Facebook conversation thread with folks who don't use FB as a PDF or to send the thread as an image via email or publish it on a website: 1. Open the mobile version of Facebook - m.facebook.com 2. Grab the direct link to the post from the FB timeline & open it within the browser 3. If you're using the desktop version of Chrome, generating a PDF is easy. The Ctrl+P shortcut will let you print the content as a PDF. To generate an image of the conversation thread, submit the direct link to the URL of the Facebook post to one of the many online screenshot generators The mobile version of Facebook provides a clutter-free view of the thread. Also see: Conserve bandwidth. Use the mobile version of websites on the desktop browser

Sites like  SharedCount and Like Explorer  can fetch the count of "likes" and "shares" for a submitted URL. SharedCount also provides a free and paid API to simplify the process of getting the consolidated count if you wish to implement it on your own. Interestingly, the site has also listed how they fetch the counts from the major social networking services. The following services provide a JSON API for accessing the shared counts for specified URLs: Facebook: https://api.facebook.com/method/links.getStats?urls=%%URL%%&format=json Twitter: http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=%%URL%%&callback=twttr.receiveCount Reddit:http://buttons.reddit.com/button_info.json?url=%%URL%% LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=%%URL%% Digg: http://widgets.digg.com/buttons/count?url=%%URL%% Delicious: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/urlinfo/data?url=%%URL%% StumbleUpon: http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=%%...

Andher Nagari  (City of Darkness) is a play written by Bharatendu Harishchandra (September 9, 1850 – January 6, 1885) who is known as the father of modern Hindi literature.

I found the code sample in Blaize Stewart's video tutorial OAuth 2.0 Up and Running  (requires subscription) easy to follow for  implementing authentication & authorization using OAuth 2.0 Providers - Google, Facebook, Live Connect/Windows Live in a ASP.NET WebForms web application. The tutorial doesn't get into all the details so I'm jotting down what I picked from the official documentation of the OAuth 2.0 Providers (links are provided in the References section at the end), here. The original sample showed how to utilize OAuth 2.0 with Google & Facebook. Extending the same sample to work for Live Connect was easy. OAuth 2.0 is a standards based authentication and authorization framework on top of the HTTP protocol. There are more than a dozen services that support OAuth 2.0; the popular ones being - Google, Facebook Graph API, Live Connect, FourSquare, DropBox, SalesForce, GitHub This image from the Google's OAuth 2.0 documentation explains the wor...

Your personal details are safe only if the people you've shared it with also realize the importance. With the cost of computing power and storage drastically coming down, it's getting cheaper & easier for social media to entice you and your connected circle into revealing personal information to forward their commercial interests by breaching your trust. image from Google Play TrueCaller is a mobile app that will show you the name of a caller that's not already on your mobile contact list. The app's website claims that it is a collaborative  global phone directory with over 700 million numbers. Don't be surprised if your carefully guarded phone number is in their database. The novelty of finding the identity of an unknown caller may have suckered someone known to you to give away their contact list that includes your number. Thanks to Big Data and Machine Learning, the individual datapoints (phone number, date of birth etc) can be aggregated to pain...

A depiction of the Padmavyuha or  Chakravyuha formation, from Wikipedia Not understanding Facebook privacy settings before getting into it is like Abhimanyu landing into the Chakravyuh trap in the Mahabharata battle of Kurukshetra - it can lead to unsavory social consequences. Like most teenagers of the previous generation who anxiously yearned to get a driving license when they turned 18, these days driven by peer pressure, teenagers eagerly look forward to turn 13 so that they can legally subscribe to Facebook. The privacy settings are too many and in my opinion, purposely defined in a complicated way so that users don't bother with them and accept the default settings which are not in their best interest. So for Facebook users, a little time spent reading about the Facebook Privacy Settings  & implementing them can go a long way in protecting their online social reputation. Also see:  Don't let Chrome & Firefox remember your pa...