In spite of stiff competition from other browsers Google Chrome is undoubtedly the fastest and the most responsive browser. With 11 versions in, Chrome continues to improvise. Google‘s latest experiments with Chrome involves pre-rendering of pages to reduce (atleast visibly) their load times. Pre-rendering means to load an element or a webpage in the background before its link is clicked i.e. explicitly requested by the user. Currently, this feature is in an experimental stage but you can use it nonetheless.

To pre-render a page, web-masters have to include a <link rel="prefetch" > tag to the header. For example, if you wish to pre-load page 2 while the user is on page 1, you’ll include the following line in page 1′s header:

<link rel="prefetch" type="text/html" href="page-2.html" />

The actual process is pretty simple. When Chrome identifies a link with a ‘prefetch’ tag, it renders it in an invisible tab. When the user clicks the link, the invisible tab’s content is instantaneously swapped with RenderView (i.e. a visible tab). In case the user does not, the content is removed from the invisible tab after a pre-defined time interval, which is usually less than a minute. Here’s the simple flowchart:

Pre-rendering is one small but very useful feature. For example a lot of content that needs to be loaded dynamically could be pre-fetched, which can then appear to be load instantaneously when called for. At the least, pre-rendering gives an impression of a faster website. You can read more about Chrome‘s pre-rendering here.

Is it possible to unsubscribe all inactive feeds from Google Reader? Yes. It is. Sometimes you just want to streamline your feeds and remove all the dead junk from your subscriptions. This will also help you better organize your active and relevant feeds. Here’s how you unsubscribe them:

• In Google Reader, click the small ‘+’ icon beside ‘All items‘ and then click on ‘Trends‘.
• Then go to the ‘Subscription trends‘ section, ‘Inactive‘ tab and then click on ‘delete icon‘ beside each feed.

You can also check out the ‘Most obscure‘ tab to see feeds that you read the least and unsubscribe them too. Get ‘em off. Get ‘em off, I say!

Important: If you are using Firefox 4 Beta 9+, don’t follow this tutorial because you already have this feature built-in. The smart guys at Mozilla have used our method to permanently include this feature into Firefox 4 Beta 9+ ;).

This is the latest solution to the original hack to remove Firefox 4′s title bar. The problem with the original hack was that it was having some problems with beta version 7 and upwards. Also, the addon-bar has been introduced in Beta 7 which is not so pleasant looking. So I modified the original userChrome.css to include the fixes.

Here’s what Firefox 4 Beta 7+ looks like after using the new and improved userChrome.css:

Features and fixes:

• Neat relocation of tab-bar and removal of title bar.
• Engraved effect on inactive tab labels. (This effect was present in initial betas but was removed in the latest one. I liked it so I added it back ;)
• In the original hack, the tabs would overlap window controls in FF4B7+. In this new userChrome.css, I’ve fixed the problem.
• The menu bar is moved to the top. It can be viewed by pressing ‘Alt’ as usual.
• The addon bar’s background is made ‘light-blue’ to complement with the overall theme.

How to:

1) First, right-click beside the URL bar (Address bar) and click ‘Customize…‘. Now drag the ‘Group Tabs’ icon to beside the URL bar.

2) Now download this userChrome.css file (Right click > Save Link As…).

3) Place the file into this folder:

[Windows Vista/7] C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\chrome

[Windows XP] C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\chrome\

4) Restart Firefox 4.

Do note that, you need to have ‘Tabs on Top’ enabled for this to take effect. If you find any problems, do mention it in the comments. If you like this post, please share it.

Requirements: Linux

Yesterday Google introduced the new image format – WebP which aims to go head-on with JPEG with 40% smaller file size. We also did a visual comparison of the two formats which clearly showed the efficiency of WebP. Today we bring you a small tutorial on how to convert any JPEG, PNG or a BMP into a WebP image file.

Two important things:

1) The tutorial requires Linux installed on your computer because the only converter available as of now supports only Linux. Moreover, you need to know basic terminal commands. (Don’t worry though, we’ll help you)

2) The WebP images that you will be able to generate after following this tutorial will be utterly useless. Atleast for now. That’s because there are no WebP image viewer software available. So, to deal with this issue, we’ll convert the WebP image into a lossless PNG. That way, we’ll be able to ‘actually see’ what WebP conversion looks like. Let’s begin.

Convert JPEG, PNG or BMP to WebP

1) Boot into your Linux computer and open up your favorite web-browser. Download ‘webpconv‘ file from this page.

2) Store the ‘webpconv‘ file in the home folder and then open up the ‘Terminal’.

3) Type the below command and press enter:

chmod a+x webpconv

4) ‘webpconv‘ has now turned into an executable file. To simplify things, put your JPEG, PNG or BMP image also into the home folder.

5) Run the following command in the ‘Terminal’ and press enter:

./webpconv <YOUR_IMAGE>.jpg

6) Voila! A new WebP image filw will be generated in the same folder which is surprisingly smaller than the original JPEG, PNG or BMP file.

To view WebP files:

As I said earlier, due to the complete lack of WebP image viewers as of now, we will convert the WebP image in to a PNG equivalent. PNG is a lossless conversion method preserving 100% image quality.

Run the following command in the ‘Terminal’:

./webpconv -format PNG <YOUR_WEBP_FILE>.webp

The above code will generate the exact PNG rendition of the WebP file. Compare the images.

Options:

There are two options which you can specify for WebP conversion – Format and Quality. If you are converting a JPEG, PNG or BMP into WebP, you don’t need to specify the ‘Format’. As for the quality, you can specify it in the range from 1 to 100. Here’s the syntax:

./webpconv -format JPG -quality 85 <YOUR_WEBP_FILE>.webp

This tutorial is the only way to convert JPEGs, PNGs and BMPs to WebP until someone comes up with a decent GUI based tool along with support for other platforms too.

If you liked the tutorial, do us a little favor by sharing this post

Mozilla has implemented a very nice, useful and pleasant looking feature in Firefox 4 called the ‘All tabs preview’. Although it looks more like the task-bar preview, albeit on top, it’s slightly more handy and according to what I feel, ergonomically better. In order, to enable the ‘All tabs preview’ in Firefox 4, this is what you need to do:

While you tweak Firefox 4, do  subscribe to our feeds and join us on  Facebook and  Twitter.

1) In the address-bar, type ‘about:config’ and press enter. Bypass the security by clicking the ‘I’ll be careful, I promise’ button.

2) In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘browser.allTabs.previews’. Double-click its entry to change its value to ‘true’.

3) Close the configuration tab. Now you will notice the small ‘All tabs’ icon the extreme right in the tool-bar. Click it.

4) Once you click the ‘All Tabs’ button, all the tabs will get listed just below the toolbar in a considerably large thumbnail previews.

The only thing I find missing in the All Tabs Preview is the real-time updating of the thumbnails. It would really add a lot to its functionality. However, this is just the Beta so you never know what’s in store for us in the stable version of Firefox 4.

WiFi networks without any kind of security measures set up within them are more dangerous than you can possibly fathom. An open WiFi network is like an unguarded treasury. Let alone unrestricted bandwidth usage by strangers, your private data like email, documents, pictures, etc can be at stake. Recently, Google apologized for collecting private data samples over unsecured WiFi networks. Here we have a basic 3-step guide to a robust and secured WiFi network.

» Hiding the SSID

Service Set IDentifier is a public name of your wireless network which can be set by the user. Wireless routers, by default, broadcast their SSIDs which are identified by the WiFi modules present in the WiFi enabled devices. All we have to do is to make the wireless network hidden i.e. not to broadcast the SSID.

This can be done by logging into the router’s control panel. The following screenshot shows how one can disable the SSID broadcast in NetGear Wireless G 54 router. These settings are more or less the same for most browsers. So look for ‘Advanced Wireless Settings’ or something along those lines where you can enable/disable the SSID broadcast.

Once you disable the SSID broadcast, your wireless network will be hidden. You will have to manually enter the SSID of the network on your WiFi device to get connected. So it will be a hard time for strangers to guess the SSID or even know the possibility of an available wireless network in the first place.

However, smart WiFi sniffer software can detect hidden networks and can even get hold of their SSIDs by injecting malicious packets. Hence, it’s necessary that you enable WEP/WPA password protection.

» Enabling WEP/WPA protection

Every wireless router has a security options panel that lets you set a password for the WiFi network. In NetGear routers you get WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), WPA (WiFi Protected Access) and their variations to secure your wireless network. These protocols implement high quality encryption algorithms to protect your password. Set your passphrase and remember it for logging into the WiFi network.

» Allow access based on MAC address

For those who don’t know, a MAC address is a unique identifier for the network card of your computer or a device, commonly referred to as the ‘physical’ address. For the MAC address based security, you need to punch in this physical address in the ‘Allowed’ list of devices in the router’s configuration.

To find your MAC address, open ‘Command Prompt’ (Start > Run > Type ‘cmd.exe’. Press Enter). Then type ‘ipconfig’ and press enter. If you’re running Linux or Mac OS X, you need to type ‘ifconfig’ in the Terminal window. Here, look for the ‘Physical address’ entry.

Alternatively, you can go to the network connections, right click the Wireless Network adapter, select ‘Status’ and then in the window that appears, click the ‘Details’ button. A new window will appear where you can find the Physical Address.

Now you need to setup the access list in your wireless router. In NetGear routers, in the ‘Advanced Wireless Settings’ click the ‘Setup Access List’ button. Again, these settings are more or less same in most routers so I don’t think it will be difficult to find them. Enter the MAC addresses (physical addresses) of only the devices your need to provide connectivity. Any device not included in this list won’t be able to connect with the wireless network.

The MAC address based security is extremely good. However, nothing beats the combination of all the three mentioned above. This concludes the our basic 3 step guide to a secured WiFi network. Hope you liked the post. Do subscribe to our  feeds and also join us on Facebook and Twitter.

Quick-Tutorial

Media Player Classic bundled with K-Lite Mega Codec Pack is my favorite player for watching movies (VLC comes close second). But sometimes I do run into a problem where the volume of the movie is not properly normalized. The result is a very low sounding audio. Here is a small workaround for this.

I am assuming that you have already installed K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.

» In Media Player Classic, go to View > Options… 

» In the Options window, in the left pane, click Audio Switcher under Internal Filters.

» In the right pane, checkmark Normalize option and move the Boost slider to a considerable amount (as shown above). Click OK.

There you go! The volume will now be normalized and also the intensity will be much better.

Security of your blog and thereby your hard work is extremely important. Like all web 2.0 systems, WordPress too is susceptible to attacks. I guess you already know how much important it is to have a robust security for your online content. Here is a quick tutorial to secure your WordPress blog in less than 5 minutes.

First, get a FTP client like FileZilla and configure it with your WordPress blog.

Changing Permissions

This is the most primitive yet effective solution. Once you have setup your blog with the FTP client, you now have to change the permissions of certain folders in it. If you are using FileZilla, you can do this by just right clicking the folder and selecting ‘File Attributes’

Now you need to put in some numeric value (shown by an arrow in the above picture) for the different folders.

Using empty HTML to hide plugins

Make an empty HTML file, call it ‘index.html’ and place it in wp-content/plugins folder. This will prevent listing of plug-ins you are using on your blog.

Using Login Lockdown & WP Security Scan plugins

Download and install Login Lockdown plugin. This will lock your administrator login for a definite amount of time after a predefined number of failed login attempts. Simple yet highly effective.

Also, download and install WP Security Scan plugin. This plugin will scan for any security loop holes in your wordpress installation and will help you rectify them.

Strong password with these characteristics

Finally choose your WordPress administrator password wisely. Make sure you includes ALL of the below parameters:

» 8 characters long.

» Must include a combination of uppercase and lowercase characters.

» Must include special characters (!, @, #, $, %).

» Must include a number.

» Must not be dictionary word.

» Must not include information related to you. For eg. your birth date, your car number, your middle name, etc.

So these are some quick security measures to ensure a considerable amount of protection. If you too have come across a nice security tip for WordPress blogs, do share here.

Just a few hours ago, our site TechExplorer.in was experiencing some server-side issues and hence was down for a few minutes. That led me to make a quick post on what ‘you’ do to verify that a particular website is actually dead or not.

I will list down the 3 quick ways to check a website’s status.

» This one’s way simple. Go to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com (well, that makes sense ;) ). Enter the URL of the site in question and click the ‘or just me’ text-link. Results will be immediate.

» Second is the very well known ‘Ping’ method.

• Open ‘Command Prompt’ (Press + R > type ‘cmd.exe’ > press ‘Enter’).
• In the Command Prompt window type, ping <website’s URL> and press enter. For eg. ping google.com
• If you get a ‘Request Timeout’ error then the website’s having issues. Else you’d get a ping-back reply from the website’s server.

» Third is the most information rich ‘tracert’ (Trace root) method. It additionally tells you exactly ‘where’ the problem lies.

• Open ‘Command Prompt’.
• Type in tracert <website’s name> and press enter. For eg. tracert google.com
• You will get the list of intervening network servers starting with your own router/modem followed by your local ISP.
• If you see a * symbol instead of the time in milliseconds, it indicates a problem with the associated server. The first 2 entries are usually your home routers / modems. The next one is your Local ISP, followed by many intervening networks that exist between your ISP and the website’s hosting server.

The ‘tracert’ (Trace root) method is extremely useful for webmasters while for the casual users, there’s always DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.

Quick tutorial

Recently I had to revamp a video of a family function with some overlaid text and images and I used VirtualDub after a long time. Thought this would be really helpful for anyone who wants to overlay an image / logo on a video and want it to be done really quick. So follow these simple steps.

1) Open the video file in VirtualDub [Download VirtualDub].

2) Setting ‘Compression’ parameters first:

• Go to ‘Video’ > ‘Compression’.
• Select the Xvid MPEG-4 or H.264 Codec.
• Press OK.

3) Now click ‘Video’ > ‘Filters’. In the Filters window, click ‘Add’ button.

4) Here, select the option ‘logo’ from the list and click OK.

5) You will see a window like the one shown below. Here you can specify the image to be overlaid on the video and some related options.

• If your image contains Alpha channel (i.e. transparency values) then check mark ‘Enable per-pixel alpha blending using alpha channel’ to retain transparency.
• X, Y offset values let you better position the image on the video.
• Use ‘Show Preview’ button to see the preview of the video with the image overlaid on it.

6) Once you are done playing with the settings, click OK a couple of times to close the ‘Filter’ windows.

7) Finally, click ‘File’ > ‘Save as AVI…’

This method is very efficient, time saving and does not require bulky software.