Discover "Lists" on Facebook!

Facebook has been around for a while but still many are not yet familiar with this simple feature called “Lists”.  When you use Facebook’s List feature, it allows you to separate your personal “friends” from your professional “friends” and other group of “friends” and assign levels of access to your connections as you choose.  This is a good way to go if you are conscious about your privacy; in addition to that, it gives you a piece of mind to think, “Whoa, my friends are organized in lists”. You can post unique content to each list on the same page and feel secure in the idea that your posts will be only visible to a group of related friends only.  With the Lists feature, you can move your friends around in as many ways as you choose. Remember that your Facebook friends can be on more than one list at a time.

Advantages of having Lists on Facebook

• Post your shoutouts, links, photos to specific group.  With Lists, you can share your posts, links or photos to the people you only like in an easier way by picking lists instead of choosing from hundreds of friends.

• Group Messaging.  Send messages to multiple related contacts once by using lists, however, only lists containing of maximum 20 persons can be sent to.

• View recent updates of specific group of people.  By clicking the drop down list on your News Feed, you can view friends’ updates in an organized manner.  As you can see here, I want to see the latest updates from my relatives. One click and here it goes..

• Suggest Friends easily.  If you add a new friend who is new on Facebook, you can suggest friends to him/her that belongs to the same group.  It saves you time, believe me!  In this picture, I recently added Charlie as my friend.  Since he is new on Facebook, I suggest friends to him using “Suggest Friends” button.  I selected all friends that I think he knows in just a few clicks.

• Let your friend add your friends easily!  By using lists you can put “Featured Friends” and this will appear on the left side of your profile.  Your friends will be shown in group, an easy way for your profile viewers to find your friends that they know too. 

To do this, just go to “Edit Profile” and click “Featured People” on the left.  There you can add the list of friends you want to show on your profile.

• Be online on Chat but invisible to others (cool).  This is my most favorite feature since I used “Lists” because you can chat like you are in an instant messaging program.  You can go “Invisible” to a specific group of people in just one click, while staying online for the others.

So how do you create “Lists”?  Just follow these 3 easy steps:

1. Go to Accounts and click Edit Friends.
2. Click Create Lists, assign a name for it and choose your friends that belong to this list.  You can have a friend be a member of as many lists as you want.  After selecting click “Create List” . 

   3. You can also edit lists if you like and add more friends :)

 

So now, if you still don't have more than 500 friends, it's not too late. it will take you about 1 hour to group your friends.  If you have patience, even if you have more than 1000 friends, you can still  make lists if you want.  I am sure  it can still be "rewarding" in the end.

Don't forget to post your comments.  Thanks!

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Make your PC more PERSONAL!

Have you ever visited your System Properties in your Windows XP System?  If not, try clicking Start then right click on My Computer and click properties.  The window will pop-up is called the System Properties applet.

This is used to view and change core system settings, a user can for instance:

• Display general information on the user's machine such as the amount of RAM, CPU speed and type, the version of Windows the system is using and the manufacturer.
• Edit the computer name in a network workgroup.
• Manage and Configure hardware devices, and view information such as the manufacturer, user access and driver version of any hardware device installed on the system via Device Manager.
• Enable/Disable system features such as automatic updates and System restore monitoring.
• Specify advanced features such as performance logs, virtual memory settings and roaming profiles.

Did you know that you can personalize that window like the one above, into this?  Don't laugh, of course it's ridiculously me.  Here goes a quick tutorial on how to get this done:

1.  Open the Notepad program, from Start>All Programs>Accessories
2.  Copy the following code to your notepad:

[General]
Manufacturer=Abu Dhabi Geek
Model=dyespinner.blogspot.com

[Support Information]

Line1 =Email: jcdejesus.tadeco@gmail.com
Line2 =Mobile No.: +971501419558
Line3 =For any questions, just contact me!
3.  Of course you need to change the details (after the = sign) into something you like to add.  In the  Support information section, if three lines are not enough, just add Line4, Line5 and so on.
4.  Save the file as "oeminfo.ini" in this folder C:\Windows\System32.  To do this, select "All Files" in the Save as Type combo box. (If your computer is branded and pre-installed with Windows XP, it will ask you to overwrite an existing file, which I recommend that you back-it up first

5.  Now open the Microsoft Paint program from the Start>All Programs>Accessories.  Paste some picture or logo that you like.  You can put your portrait photo, or the picture of your pet if you want, but just keep it small.  (Recommended size is up to 120x160 pixels)

6.  Save it in the same folder \Windows\System32 as "OEMLOGO"

7.  Now it's done, right click again your My Computer icon, and click Properties.  Congratulations, you have personalized your System Properties applet.  If your picture is not oriented the way you like, you can always open and edit the file "OEMLOGO.bmp"

Just a word of CAUTION:  Do not attempt to delete, move or modify any files in this folder unless stated in this tutorial, or you'll end up ruining your computer.

I hope this trick will amuse you a bit. ;)  Don't forget to leave your comments.

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Handy-dandy Video Converter

We didn't seem to notice but there is a growing number of video formats available in the world of computing.  As far as we know, mpeg is one of the most popular video format in the internet because of its cross-platform compatibility, i.e. playable in almost any operating systems.  But with the emergence of the latest gadgets like iPhones, PSP's and sophisticated mobile phones, we combat some problems, firstly, the "limited memory" available in our device and secondly, the "compatibility" of it to play in our device.  That's the reason why we need to convert to specific formats designed for our gadgets.

Total Video Converter is designed for this purpose.  Thanks to thepiratebay.org for providing us useful "cracked" piece of software to play with.

E.M. Total Video Converter is a piece of extremely powerful and full-featured converter software that supports almost all video and audio formats. The software is designed to convert video for your mobile video player as 3gp, mp4, PSP, PS3, iPod, iPhone etc and also VCD or DVD player, XBOX360. New Total Video Converter 3.50 let you experience Unparalleled High-Definition movie. It is the best and unique software today with incomparable support for converting and burning video to AVCHD disc which can work on PS3 and Blu-ray player. Meanwhile, it supports for converting and burning video to HD formats like H.264 TS, Mpeg-2 TS, WMV-HD, MKV-HD, DivX-HD, Divx-HD, MOV-HD, FLV-HD and MP4-HD.

So much for these "nose-bleeding" video format acronyms, but the important thing is to know which video format is designed for your gadget and could satisfy its disk space.

To download, just hit this link.  Once again, you need a torrent software to download this program.
And P.S.. don't forget to leave a comment.

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Pack your MP3's

If your music's starting to take up an uncomfortable amount of space on your hard drive (or small MP3 player), you can decrease the size of it by converting all your songs to Variable Bit Rate with WinMp3Packer.
A lot of the music we download and rip is stored in a constant bitrate format, which at higher bitrates can be inefficient. Variable bitrate (VBR), on the other hand, is much more space efficient. MP3Packer is a free program for Windows that will turn any MP3 file into a variable bitrate MP3 file, thus shaving a bit of space off each track. The best part is, since you're not re-encoding your music, it's a lossless conversion—the quality stays the same while the space used goes down.
Whether it saves a meaningful amount of space depends a lot on your music.

If you imported all your music yourself through a program like iTunes, you might notice a bigger space savings, and if you happened to download your music from somewhere like BitTorrent, you might save even more (depending on the encoding presets the original ripper used). And, the higher the bitrate of the original track, the more you're likely to save. All in all, it's a cool program to just run some of your music through to see if you can save some space. Hit the link to read more about how it works.
WinMP3Packer is a free download for Windows.

WinMP3Packer

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"Outlook" your Gmail!!!

Do you have a Gmail account?  Most of us do have I guess.  But still, many are using it online and in the event that your ISP is down and you need to retrieve some of your messages in your Gmail, you should at least have an "offline content" of your inbox.

The good news is Gmail offers POP and IMAP services to configure your account in Microsoft Outlook.  The best thing is it's free. Unlike Yahoo! Mail which needs you to pay in a monthly basis.

Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection.  POP and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern e-mail clients and servers support both.

Here's a quick guide to "Outlook your Gmail"

1.  Go to your Gmail account, under Settings, Enable IMAP. Don't forget to click Save Changes when you're done.







2.  Open Outlook2007.  For new setups, click next button two times.  Alternatively you can click in the Tools Menu>Account settings and click New...

3.  Enter your display name, email address (including '@gmail.com'), and password
4.  Be sure to select the 'Manually configure server settings or additional server types' checkbox and hit Next















5.  Select Internet E-mail then click Next
6.  Settings: name, full email address (including '@gmail.com')

• In the Account Type dropdown menu, select IMAP; enter the incoming and outgoing server names shown below.
• In the 'User Name' field, give your full Gmail address, including '@gmail.com'

7.  Click More Settings, then the Advanced tab.

• Incoming server must be 993, and must use SSL encryption.
• Outgoing server can use 587, TLS encryption.

8.  Click the Outgoing Server tab. Make sure that 'My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication' is selected. The radio button 'Use same settings as my incoming mail server' should also be selected.

9.  Click OK > Next > Finish.  Congratulations, you have set up your Gmail account in Outlook!!!

You can now use Gmail on your Microsoft Outlook!

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Happy New Year! Share your memories!

Sending large files like videos and photos easily. 

Happy new year everyone! I admit it, its not easy starting up a blog.  Still my site is not searchable in search engines. I still have to wait... talking about patience.

Have you ever wondered about sharing your videos and tons of photos to your families and friends especially this holiday season?  I bet you will send it through email.  But what if your files are up to 30Gb?  Do you have patience to upload them? As well as for the one who will receive, does he/she have patience to download 'em?  Imagine if you're already at 99% download process, and you suddenly lost your connection, you need to download it from beginning again. What a waste of time!!!  As we all know that email attachments are limited upto only 25Mb in most of email services like Yahoo!, Gmail etc.  Is there any to send 30Gb files without any hassle? Yes there is...

Use Bittorrent software.Popular bit torrent clients are every where which you can download for free.

So what is BitTorrent? BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files. Basically, you share your files to the internet and create a pointer (called torrent file) to your file location, and your friends can download it to their computers directly from your computer.

Here's a quick walkthrough to use bittorrent for sharing large files:

1. Open your bittorrent client.  If you haven't got one, you can download it here
2. Open uTorrent, and File > Create New Torrent
3. Choose a file or a directory

4. Insert the Trackers, so your friend’s computer know where the files are. Fill Trackers as below:

http://open.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce
http://www.torrent-downloads.to:2710/announce
http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
udp://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
http://www.sumotracker.com/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce

5. Make sure that "Start seeding" checkbox is checked.
6. Create and Save as. Now you have a torrent file.
7a. Send the torrent file to your friend through email. Torrent files are usually small (less than 500kb)
or
7b Upload your torrent file to torrent websites.

For privacy issues, 7a is recommended since only the persons you know will have the access to download your files.  While 7b is used if you want to share these to virtually anyone in the whole world.

For advanced users, you can make your own private tracker, which is more secure and private.  Follow the steps in this link


I hope this post helps! Happy sharing!

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My PC away from home!

It's been eight months since I left my home country, the Philippines. As a computer savvy, a day will never pass without using it.  It's not only the case for me, because at these times of technological revolution, even the not so well-versed in computers can't live without using it.  Talking about leaving your prized computer, your precious files that you forgot when you go out of town, on a vacation or in the case of me working abroad.  There are times that you need your personal files that can be sent supposedly by email but no one is around your home.  Even worse some technical problems happened on your PC. What should you do?

That's where Remote Desktop Applications enter.


There are several RDA out there but one of my favorites is the Symantec's PC Anywhere.

Symantec pcAnywhere provides secure, remote access to computers and servers. It lets you quickly resolve helpdesk and server support issues or stay productive while you work away from your office. You can use your desktop computer, laptop, or mobile device to work across multiple platforms, including Windows®, Linux®, and Mac® OS X. You can also deploy a limited-functionality, single-use host to computers that do not have a host running.

Connectivity features such as Symantec pcAnywhere Gateway help facilitate connections through firewalls, routers, and other types of Network Address Translation (NAT) devices. Robust security features help protect your computers and servers from unauthorized access.

You can use Symantec pcAnywhere in the following ways:

Manage computers remotely	Symantec pcAnywhere lets helpdesk providers and administrators troubleshoot and quickly resolve computer problems. You can remotely perform diagnostics, check and modify settings, and deploy and install software.
Support and maintain servers	Symantec pcAnywhere lets administrators connect to servers across their organizations to perform routine maintenance, deploy and install software patches and upgrades, assess performance, and troubleshoot network problems.
Transfer files between computers	Symantec pcAnywhere lets you connect to your home or office computer to quickly get the files that you need. You can perform automatic end-of-day file transfers from one computer to another or exchange multimedia and other files that are too large to send by email.
Work from a remote location	Symantec pcAnywhere lets you remotely connect to another computer and work as though you are sitting in front of that computer. You can view and edit files, run software, print files to a printer at your location or at the host's location, or give presentations or demonstrations.

You can download Symantec pcAnywhere 12.1 here

You must have a torrent client which you can download here

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