How To Enable Checkboxes On Icons In Windows 7, Vista and Xp

Selecting multiple files using the all so common ctrl+click method can get pretty tedious. And the worst part is if you accidently let go off the the ctrl button while selecting any file, all your selections just vanish. Now a better way to select multiple files in windows would be by using checkboxes. The people working in Microsoft realized this and provided a simple option to enable check boxes in windows vista and windows 7. But they never told it to the consumers.

So lets see how can we get these check boxes on icons in Windows Vista and 7. Later on in the article I will tell you how you could get this feature in windows Xp using a small program called TrayProdder.

Enable Checkboxes On Icons In Windows Vista and 7:


1. Launch Folder Options:

There are many ways to launch folder options in windows vista and 7. You can either:

a). Go to control panel. Switch to small icons and open folder options from there

b). In the windows explorer, go to tools and then select folder options

c). Go to start, type folder options in the search bar and open it from there

2. Enable the check boxes:

a). Once in the folder options, click on the view tab

b). Under the advanced settings, you will see an option 'use check boxes to select items'. Check that.

c). Click on OK

From now on, you will notice that a small check box will appear when you move your mouse cursor on any file or folder, at the top left corner of the icon. You can use this check box to select any number of files. No need to hold the Shift and Ctrl key anymore. Also there is a small box under the menu bar that will let you select all items.

Note: In case you miss any check box while trying to select a file, or you click on the icon instead of the check box, the operating system removes all the checks that you have placed in any boxes so far.

Enable Checkboxes In Windows Xp:

This feature is not available in windows Xp by default. But a small program based on the .net framework provides this functionality in windows Xp too. Its not that good though. The program is Trayprodder (requires .net 3.5).

1. Download TrayProdder from here.

2. Once downloaded extract it and open it. You will see a window like this

3.  Select the 'Checkboxes' and 'Full row select' Check boxes.

4. Now just open any folder and you should see the checkboxes in upper left corner of each file

Note: Switch to details view for easier control. You may have to close and reopen the folder once you apply the details view.

5. Now to select files, check the check boxes for the files you want to select and then click 'Select all Checked' in TrayProdder.

6. Once you do that all the files you checked will get selected and you can then cut, copy, delete or do anything with those files.

In case you still prefer the ctrl+click method to select files here's a tip. To select mutiple files using the keyboard you can use the arrow keys and the space key. So hold on to the ctrl button, use arrow keys to move to the file you want, and then press the space key to select the file. This may be helpful in certain situations.

Talking about Windows Xp, I agree TrayProdder isn't the best piece of software you will find but it gets the work done. And it can be quite helpful at times.

Also there aren't any alternatives available to TrayProdder. If you know of some alternative, share it in the comment section below. Hope you like it.

Thanks for reading.

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Use Full Sized Pictures As Emoticons In Facebook Chat

Well I guess you all are aware of the fact, that you can use profile pictures of people on facebook in facebook chat, using a simple trick. If not have a look at this:

But the problem with that trick is that the pictures that appear are really small and are hardly visible. It would be much better if we could use bigger pictures too. And its possible . Don't believe it? Try chatting with any of your friends on facebook and paste the following code there:

[[262286870522932]] [[262286900522929]] [[262286913856261]] [[262286923856260]]
[[262286950522924]] [[262286970522922]] [[262286987189587]] [[262287007189585]]
[[262287037189582]] [[262287053856247]] [[262287077189578]] [[262287087189577]]
[[262287097189576]] [[262287113856241]] [[262287140522905]] [[262287170522902]]

If done right you will see something like this.

Basically to do this you will have to slice the bigger picture into smaller parts, upload them separately and combine them together using the photo Ids in facebook chat. This is exactly what I am going to show to you in this post. At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to use any picture you want and turn it into an emoticon for facebook chat. Lets begin.

Use Full Sized Pictures As Emoticons In Facebook Chat:

Difficulty: Moderate       Time required: 10 min approx

I have divided the process in 3 parts:

1. Splitting the Picture into smaller Pictures

2. Uploading the Pictures to Facebook

3. Preparing the codes


1. Slicing the Picture into smaller Pictures:

You can use any tool to slice the image into smaller images. For this tutorial I am going to use a free software called Image Cut.

1. First download Image Cut from here.

2. Install it and then open it.

3. Once opened, click on the first icon on the left panel and select the image you want to use and click on open.

4. You will see that the image has now loaded. Next click on the 'Add Grid' button on the left pane. In the add grid window, choose the number of horizontal and vertical cells you want the image to be divided into. The higher the number you choose here the larger will the final image appear in facebook chat. For now choose 4 for both horizontal and vertical cells.

Note: The cells should be proportional to image's length and width.  For best result use a square image.

5. Now click on the split button in the left pane and a window will open up.

6. In the split window, select the first image and change the part file type to 'jpg'. Then click on the small icon with a tick on it in the bottom right corner of the window.

7. Choose the output folder and image subpath, Finally click on save parts.

To make sure everything worked fine open the folder where you saved the image parts. You should see 16 images there numbered 1 to 16 in the end. This completes the first step.


2. Uploading the pictures to facebook:

To use the image in facebook chat, you will first have to upload all those smaller images to facebook. For that you should preferably create your own facebook page. You can upload pics to your profile too but that won't be a nice idea. Creating a facebook page is easy and would not take more than 2-3 mins.


1.  First go to this link https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

2. Choose cause or community in the page type and name it anything you want. Check "I agree to facebook Pages Terms" and click on get started.

3. Skip through all the unnecessary steps. Keep clicking skip and next button until your page is ready

4. Once you get to see the main page, click on photos to upload the photos.

5. Click on "Add more photos", browse to the folder where the pictures are stored, select all photos and click on open.

6. Once uploaded click on post photos

This completes the uploading part.


3. Prepare the final code:

Now comes the boring part. In this step you will have to note down the Photo Id of each of the 16 images you uploaded earlier and then arrange them together. To help get through this step, I created a small program in visual C++ called facebook emoticon maker.

You can download it here: Download facebook emoticon maker

1. Now open the album where you uploaded the pictures in the last step and open the first picture:

2. Take a look at the Url of the picture. You will see something like this:

"https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=262286870522932&set=a.262285093856443.63246.262284137189872&type=3&theater"

3. The Photo Id is the number followed by '?fbid='

'262286870522932' in this case

4. Now open the program "Facebook Emoticon Maker" you downloaded earlier.

5. As soon as you open the program, it will ask you to enter the number of rows and columns. Since the image was sliced into 4x4 parts, enter 4 for both rows and columns here and click on OK.

6. Now you will see another window open up with 16 text boxes in it arranged in a 4x4 format. Copy the photo Id of the first image and paste it in the first text box.

7. Similarly browse to the next picture in the album, note its photo Id and paste it in the second text box. Repeat this step until all the 16 boxes are filled. Finally click on the generate button.

8. You will notice that as soon as you click on the generate button the text box in the bottom left corner is filled with some code. This is the final code. Right click in that text box, then click on select all and then finally copy it.

Now its time to test the code. Go ahead and start chatting with any of your friends and paste this code in the chat box and see what happens. What was their reaction???

This complete the tutorial. You can save the code generated in the end, in notepad or any other word editing software for later use. In case you find this whole process too tough, but still want to use any particular image in facebook chat, mail it to me at digital.worldzzz@gmail.com. And I will convert it for you and send you the code.


Feel free to ask anything in the comments section below. 


Thanks for reading.

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Why did I lose all my +1's, facebook likes, tweets and other social stats in blogger?

Something strange happened yesterday. While browsing through my posts, I noticed that all my +1's, facebook likes, tweets, reddits etc were gone. I mean even if I had 30 shares of a particular post on facebook, the facebook counter was set to Zero. 

Have a look at this. For the same post i.e. http://digital-worldz.blogspot.com/2011/07/7-coolest-google-im-feeling-lucky.html, here are the stats for yesterday

Instead of,

Now if you use blogger's free blogspot domain for your blog, you must have noticed something similar. The other weird thing that I noticed today was that I was seeing a blogspot.in Url, instead of the blogspot.com Url for my blog. So when I tried to visit http://digital-worldz.blogspot.com, I was automatically redirected to http://digital-worldz.blogspot.in. 


And it didn't take much time to realize that this was the cause for all the mishappenings.

So why did this happen?? 

Here's why. In an effort to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing, Google has decided to redirect all blogspot.com domains to there country specific url's. So if you live in India, all blogspot blogs you try to visit will be redirected to the Indian version of the site i.e the .in domain. 

Here's the official statement by google on this:

http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2402711

Now this explains why the 31 likes, I had on that post were gone. Those 31 likes were for the URL, 

http://digital-worldz.blogspot.com/2011/07/7-coolest-google-im-feeling-lucky.html 

While what I am seeing now is the Indian version for this post i.e 

http://digital-worldz.blogspot.in/2011/07/7-coolest-google-im-feeling-lucky.html. 

The fact that people shared the .com version and not the .in version explains this behavior.

How To Get Rid Of this??

If you would like to see the default .com version for your blog instead of the .in version you could use the NCR url. NCR stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display the .com version, whether you’re in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. To do this type your blog name followed by "/ncr"(make sure you don't type it in CAPS)

For ex: Lets say you have a blog "http://xyz.blogspot.com", then to avoid the redirection type "http://xyz.blogspot.com/ncr" in the browser. 

Note that even though you will not be redirected to the .in version after using this command, but other users will still be redirected to there country specific domains. There is no way to avoid this. The only thing you could do to get rid of this is to buy a Custom Domain and redirect your blog to the new domain. 

Effects on SEO due to the redirection:

The fact that the same content is now hosted in different domains means that it could severely effect the SEO of your blog. We all know that blogger sucks for SEO and this could make the condition even worse. Here's what Google has to say about this:

"After this change, crawlers will find Blogspot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but we are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains.

The majority of content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals, and therefore identical. For all such content, we will specify the blogspot.com version as the canonical version using rel=canonical. This will let crawlers know that although the URLs are different, the content is the same. When a post or blog in a country is affected by a content removal, the canonical URL will be set to that country’s ccTLD instead of the .com version. This will ensure that we aren’t marking different content with the same canonical tag."

While it does sound convincing, there is something else you could do to avoid SEO issues.

Go to your blogger dashboard, then design and then click on edit HTML. Click on expand widget templates. Now do a search for the <head> tag. Immediately below the tag enter the following piece of code.

<link expr:href="data:blog.canonicalUrl" rel="canonical"/>

This is a canonical tag that tells the search engines to consider the .com URL as the original content. Credit-Labnol.org

This would make sure that Google could identify the original content and would not penalize your blog.


Final Verdict:

Although I do agree that something like this could be necessary, due to the ongoing pressure by the government from different countries, doing so without any prior warning or any official announcement isn't right. It took me a lot of time to find out the reason for all the weird things that were happening to my blog. I would take it as another reason to buy a custom domain or move on to wordpress. 


What about you??

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How To Close All Open Programs At Once

I came across this small utility today while browsing through different blogs on the net.  Its called CloseAll and it closes all open programs in Windows at once. There isn't much to it. Its a simple program that requires no install. Also you can easily point it out to the quick launch bar so you access it anytime using just a single click. 

Why Should I Use It?


Although it doesn't do anything spectacular, I still recommend that everyone should have it. Why?? Here are some situations where you may find it useful.

• You try to install a program and it asks you to close all open programs. So you could just close all programs one by one or you could just click on this program and all open programs will be closed in less than a second.

• You have a lot of programs open at the same time and your windows starts to slow down. So much so that you could hardly move your mouse to the close button. Pretty rare but believe me this happens So you click on this program and within an instant your windows is up and running again.

• You have opened up a lot of programs at once and you just want to shut down your PC. So you are not really in the mood to close all those programs using the taskbar or clicking the cross button one by one so you click on this and task completed.

I could go on and on with this list but I hope you get my point. 

Click here to download Close All(36 Kb)

How To Point Close All To Quick Launch Bar

• Right Click on the zip file you downloaded earlier and extract it

• Open the folder where you extracted the file

• Now just drag and drop the close all file to the quick launch bar. To drag it click on it and move your mouse to the quick launch bar as shown below.

             

Note 1: If you run a 64 bit windows operating system, make sure to choose the file present in the x64 folder

Note 2: If you can't see the quick launch bar in the taskbar, right click on the taskbar, click on toolbars and select quick launch from there

Advanced Options:

So what if you want to close all open programs except your browser(or anything else). You can manually add the programs you want to exclude. To do this follow these steps:

• First create a shortcut to the CloseAll program. Right click on the file and click on create shortcut

• Now right click on the shortcut you made and click on properties

• In the target window add the following commands at the end (-x="app-to-exclude.exe") without the brackets. Here "app-to exclude" should be replaced by the program you want excluded. For ex: type -x="chrome.exe" to exclude Google Chrome. Also you could add more than one program using the '|' seperator. For ex: -x="chrome.exe|notepad.exe|iexplore.exe"

Final Verdict:

To test how good this program is, I opened more than 20 applications at once with Close All setup in the quick launch. And I clicked on the program. It took 1-2 secs to close all the open programs. Pretty effective.

 

Note that it closes only the programs that are there on the taskbar. Tasks running in the background are not effected in any way. I highly recommend it to all of you. So did you try it out?? I would love to hear from you.

All Credit goes to Alexander Avdonin. from Ntwind

Thanks for reading...

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How To Get Mac Like Behavior On Windows

You must be familiar with the Alt+Tab feature in windows that allows you to switch between different open windows. Do you use it a lot?? Well if you do then you will love this. Even if you don't, give this a try. Instead of the simple Alt+Tab feature in windows, Mac provides a completely different switching option. It visually brings in focus all the open windows from where you can choose which one to switch to.

In this post i will show you how you can get this functionality in windows. Have a look below

How to get mac Like behavior in windows

• First download this free software, Smallwindows(468kb)

• Once downloaded install it, installation is pretty simple and fast

• Once installed you will see the small windows icon in the taskabar, double click on it to launch the settings menu

• Now you will see three different options in the settings menu i.e Hot-zone, Hotkey Activation, Advanced features. Lets try to understand them one by one.

Hotkey Activation

In Hotkey activation you can assign shortcuts for three different tasks

• Miniature All - Bring to focus all open windows
• Miniature Realted - Bring to focus all related windows
• Show/Hide desktop - Show desktop or hide desktop

Now to set the shortcuts click on the button corresponding to the task you want to perform. Then you will see a windows like the one below:

Here you can either choose a key as a shortcut or a combination of a key with shift, alt, ctrl, windows key modifiers. I recommend you choose the 'alt' modifier and 'Q' key as the shortcut. Then click on OK. Now close the settings menu and press 'Alt' + 'Q'. And see for yourself. Now set shortcuts for other tasks too if you want

Hot-zones

Hot zones represent the four corners of your monitor. You can select what should happen when you move your mouse to any of the corner points. Just select the corresponding task from the drop down menu when you move to one of the corners. Notice below that i selected 'All' for the top left hot zone. This means that when i move my mouse to the top left corner all my open windows will come to focus.

Advanced features

Here you can set some advanced features like excluding windows based on the title, which i found pretty useless. So ignore it for now, you can play with it later on. Lastly there is an option to auto launch this application on windows startup. I would recommend to turn that on. 

So this completes the setup of this awesome software. Now you can use the assigned shortcuts to navigate to different open windows faster and smarter. And don't forget the eye candy it provides. Hope you find it useful.

If you have any doubts or have something to share with others then you can do it by leaving a comment below.

Thanks for reading

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Cool Interesting Stuff On The Web – Week 1

A word from the author

I spend a lot of my time everyday, trying to discover new interesting things on the web. And though I would love to write a post about all these things but the truth is I can’t. Why?? Because they don’t fit in the niche of this blog. This blog is about technology, computer tips and tricks and some other interesting stuff. Now lets say I find something really interesting, a video, a list of inspirational quotes or a cool website. It wouldn’t make sense to write about all these things in here. Who would like to read motivational quotes on a technology blog..

So to share all these interesting things I come across everyday, I am starting this weekly feature whereby I would write a list of cool stuff that you may find interesting every SUNDAY. This is a type of an experiment for me, you may like it or you may feel its ridiculous. So help me here by providing your reviews whether you like to read such things or not. Also I am not concentrating on search traffic here, this is for all those people who visit this blog daily.

Without wasting any more time, lets start.

5 Cool Things For This Week:

Totally random stuff ahead of you. Some of these may be related to technology, some may be completely off topic.

Hope you like it.

1. Suspend water in air without a glass – Magic

Yes I love magic tricks. Who doesn’t?? I remember the first time I saw this video I was completely blown away. Have a look

Although the trick looks real but I suggest you not to try this. Why?? Because its something which the laws of physics don’t allow. This guy must have used some cool editing effects to perform this trick. But nonetheless full marks to this guy for the creativity..

 

2. Drive your car using just your thoughts-Technology

How could I miss to write something about technology. Now this is an ongoing research where a team of researchers are trying to build a mechanism through which we would be able to drive our cars using just our thoughts.  Have a look at this video

How is that possible?? Basically this technique is based on commercially available sensors for recording electroencephalograms (EEGs), which are basically the electrical outputs your brain produces while it thinks coupled with a software which could transform these signal into directions.

As I said earlier this is an ongoing research and it may take years before something like this gets good enough, so that we can use it in actual traffic..

 

3. Some interesting quotes- Quotes

There are millions of quotes you can find on the internet so its no less than a category itself. Have a look at these lovely quotes, who knows, it may just make your day.

http://thumbpress.com/sometimes-all-you-need-is-a-little-inspiration-to-keep-rolling/

 

4. Giant water balloon explosion in slow motion- Fun

This a video by HowStuffWorks on Giant Water Balloon Explosion in ultra slow motion. Anything shown in slow motion is always fun to watch. And this is no exception. Have a look:

 

5. People are awesome 2011 – Awesomeness

Last in the list is a video which shows what crazy things people do around the world, every year. Sure these people are awesome. If you are too lazy to finish your homework or to do something you love, this may just inspire you.

 

Final Words

I am going to prepare one such list every Sunday from today onwards. This week’s list was full of videos. And most of these were quite old actually. From next week I assure you I would give newly uploaded content a preference.

Note that I don’t own any of the videos used above. This is just a platform for me to share these things with you guys.

 

Also please share your views about this new Sunday Special list. This is my first post in this category and I would absolutely love to have your feedback on this. What are your interests? Which one of these did you like the most.?? Your reviews are important to me..

Thanks for reading…

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Google Graph Search Tricks

Last year back in Dec 2011, Google announced a new feature with which you could draw graphs of complicated functions using just the google search. Just type any mathematical function a click on search and google will draw a graph for it. That's a great feature but is actually quite useless for someone like me. But nonetheless you can do some crazy things by using this new feature. Now try this out:

Draw Heart Shape Graph using Google search:

• Go to Google

• Type sqrt(cos(x))*cos(200 x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(9-x^2), -sqrt(9-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5 in the search box, and

• Click on Search

Heart Shape Graph Using Google Search

So what did you see? If you did everything right which I am sure you did, you will see a heart shape graph in the search results. You can zoom in and zoom out of the graph or even move the graph around. Also if you have some free time to spare, try modifying the values in the function to get different results.

To draw Heart Shape Graph without the circle type this in Google and click on Search:

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(200 x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(9-x^2)

Draw Batman Shape Graph Using Google Search:

As you may have thought, the heart shape graph isn't the only one in the list. Practically you can make any graph you want using this graph feature given that you know how to deal with graphs and functions. But for the time being try these out. Search for this function in google:

• 2sqrt(-abs(abs(x)-1)*abs(3-abs(x))/((abs(x)-1)*(3-abs(x))))(1+abs(abs(x)-3)/(abs(x)-3))sqrt(1-(x/7)^2)+(5+0.97(abs(x-.5)+abs(x+.5))-3(abs(x-.75)+abs(x+.75)))(1+abs(1-abs(x))/(1-abs(x))),-3sqrt(1-(x/7)^2)sqrt(abs(abs(x)-4)/(abs(x)-4)),abs(x/2)-0.0913722(x^2)-3+sqrt(1-(abs(abs(x)-2)-1)^2),(2.71052+(1.5-.5abs(x))-1.35526sqrt(4-(abs(x)-1)^2))sqrt(abs(abs(x)-1)/(abs(x)-1))+0.9

This is what you should get as a result for that function. That's the graph for batman. I had some problem getting this at times. So if you don't get this the first time try refreshing the page.

Lastly I had some spare time so I tried to make one of these myself. Apparently I am not really good at it but nonetheless I did make something(or did I?). Try this out:

• 2sqrt(-abs(abs(x)-1)*abs(3-abs(x))/((abs(x)-1)*(1-abs(x))))(8+abs(abs(x)-3)/(abs(x)-3))sqrt(1-(x/7)^2)+(5+0.97(abs(x-.5)+abs(x+.5))-3(abs(x-.75)+abs(x+.75)))(1+abs(1-abs(x))/(1-abs(x))),-3sqrt(1-(x/7)^2)sqrt(abs(abs(x)-1)/(abs(x)-5)),abs(x/80)-1.9913722(x^2)+21+sqrt(0.1-(abs(abs(x)-2)-1.5)^2), abs(x/2)-3.9913722(x^2)+9+sqrt(0.35-(abs(abs(x)-1.8)-1.3)^2)

Please don't zoom out of it, you will be dissapointed. If you understood what that was, you should be proud of yourself. If you didn't its not your mistake, I said I am not really good at it:D

Have fun sharing this trick with your friends. Also if you liked this have a look at:

Cool Google Im Feeling Lucky Tricks

So what do you think about it? I would love to hear from you. Also if you were able to make some of your own fun graphs, please share them in the comment section below. I am up for surprises. 

Thanks for reading..

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