Saving Your Laptop after from Water, coffee, and soda (spill)

Water, coffee, tea and soda are among your laptop’s worst enemies. Just a little bit of such a liquid on your laptop keyboard can damage or destroy your machine or cause you to lose data.

The best way to prevent damage from a mix of liquid and electronics is to keep them as far apart as possible. Keep your laptop far away from cups of coffee, glasses of water, and cans of soda. But in read life it is not possible.

Yahoo tech has some info – an emergency recovery from a spill

How color-blind people see your User Interface (UI)

Color vision deficiency (color-blind), in humans is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish.

It is most often of genetic nature, but may also occur because of eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals. (see wikipedia article for more info)

According to the medical studies, eight to ten percent of male population suffers from some kind of color blindness (figure for female population is much lower). What does it mean to the average Swing developer? Well, if you rely too much on color differences, you may be not conveying the information as well as you thought. Now you can run your application in debug UI mode and have a live preview of your UI as viewed by the color-blind population

(Via osnews)

How to surf securely at public WiFi hotspots

The average user has no idea of the risks associated with public WiFi hotspots.

It’s possible to use your laptop safely in a coffee shop, but you have to take a bit of responsibility for that security. You’ll need to use your common sense, change a few habits, and perhaps install and use some new software.

Here are some very simple tips for them to keep their network access secure.

Read Scott Granneman tips

Visual Studio .NET 2003 SP1 Available for Download

Download Visual Studio .NET 2003 SP1 and all of your troubles will be behind you. Well maybe that’s too much to hope for in a Service Pack, but this one has fixes for “Stability Issues” and “Security Enhancements” as well as other goodies.

Link to Download details: Visual Studio .NET 2003 SP1 (via )

Thanks for release; I hope it will stabilize many things :D

Google search people by name and their phone number

With Google search engine it is possible for searching for people by Name and their phone number. However note that google can only display listed phone number and not the unlisted one.

For example search for Rose Clinton, NY
Where,

  • Rose – First name
  • Clinton – Last name
  • NY – City name

Procedure:

  • Step # 1: Goto google.com
  • Step # 2: Type the query : Rose Clinton NY
  • Step # 3: Hit search
  • Step # 4: You will see result as follows:

Google search people by name and their phone number
(Click to enlarge an image)

New ideas to enhance the human or computer interface from Microsoft

HealthGear is a wearable, smart health monitoring system

VIBE (Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment) is an initiative from Microsoft Research for developing new ideas to enhance the human/computer interface.

From the site, “Today’s computer user is inundated with information, and making sense of this growing mountain of material is becoming an overwhelming task. We believe that more powerful methods for presenting the information users need to make sense out of can greatly reduce cognitive load. Also, by exploring elegant, subtle, peripheral awareness techniques, we strive to preserve the user’s task flow and minimize interruption.

You will find lots of good information here. I am sure with such research Microsoft will bring new ideas soon into new products which will benefit all of us.

Read more at VIBE

Blackberry data spy (stealing confidential data)

Blackberry one of the hottest gadget used by corporate. A booby-trapped game of noughts and crosses has been used to show how a Blackberry can be hijacked to steal confidential data

According to BBC news, “Created by a security researcher the game contains malicious code that turns the popular mobile e-mail device into a backdoor into corporate networks.”

That is why you should never-ever install any games or other fancy stuff such as screen savers. Only way to prevent such a nasty stuff is to educate yourself. :)

Use Google to get warning about unsafe websites

Google has started warning users if they are about to visit a webpage that could harm their computer.

The warning will pop up if users click on a link to a page known to host spyware or other malicious programs.

How does it work?

The technology to do this has been developed in partnership with StopBadware.org project. According to StopBadware:

We’re entering a new phase here at StopBadware.org. Google — which is one of our partners — is now presenting people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware.

BBC marks following keywords as DANGEROUS:

  • Free screensavers
  • Bearshare
  • Screensavers
  • Winmx
  • Limewire
  • Lime wire
  • Free ringtones

Read more at BBC news

Firefox portable download new updated version

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

Firefox portable logo

Firefox Portable is a repackaged version of Firefox designed to run from a USB flash drive, iPod, external hard drive or other portable media. It arose out of a mozillaZine thread in June of 2004. John T. Haller released the first packaged version and has led its further development. It includes a specialized launcher that adjusts extensions and themes to work as it is moved from different computers. There is also a portable version of Firefox available for Macintosh computers called Portable Firefox OS X.

Download updated portable app version here.

This is necessary download for USB device.