For several reasons you will need to hide folder in Windows 7. It could be a security reason or may be to organize them properly. Windows 7 is having a built in mechanism to hide folders. By default it hides system files and folder to give a clean folder view to users.
The easiest way for you to hide a folder is Right click on folder -> Properties -> Check Hidden. Now you won’t be able to see the folder in windows explorer. But still you can access the folder by manually typing its path or activating “Show hidden files, folders and drives” in folder options. So this is only the easiest way to hide a folder but not the best way.
Advanced Way to Hide Folder
Today I’m going to tell you a better and more secured way to hide a folder in Windows 7. In order to get it done you have to go through few steps manually.
Right Click on the folder -> Properties -> Customization
Click on Change icon and select the transparent icon there. You can identify this as a significant empty space between other icons.
Click OK and exit folder properties. Now your folder is invisible except its name.
Now you have to find an invisible character to make the name invisible as well. Unfortunately folder name doesn’t accept only spaces.
For this you have to give the ASCII code of non-breaking space. For that Right click on folder -> Rename then press hold ALT and enter 0160 in num pad. (ALT + 0160)
Now folder is totally invisible.
Hardware: Intel Core i5 2nd Gen // 4GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium // 64 Bit
Unlike default folder hiding there is no way to see the folder by making hidden folders visible or access is by manually typing its location. All you have to do is disable auto arranging and place the folder in a odd location.
However, if someone select all the folders by pressing CTRL + A, it will make the non-breaking space character visible which we used for the folder name. Though the folder is invisible, it’s still there in windows explorer. Therefore, you can enter it by simply double clicking on it if you know where exactly it is.
To ensure maximum security you can hide the folder as well. In that case no one will be able to access it even by accidental while the hidden folders are set to be invisible.
Previously I was talking about how to hide a folder without using default mechanism in Windows 7. It protect your folder from accessing after unhide hidden folders in folder options as well as by directly typing absolute location.
Quick Catch-up
How to Hide a Folder in Windows 7
But still it’s vulnerable for accidental clicks and become visible if someone selects all the files and folders. If you need better and more secured way to hide your folders, My LockBox is great piece of software to get it done easily.
How to Use My LockBox?
Download and Install My LockBox in your Windows 7 PC.
During the installation process check “Add Protect with My Lockbox” to windows explorer context menu. You can do this after installation as well.
Precede with the installation steps and compete it.
It will place and shortcut on your desktop named My LockBox Control Panel. Open it and in the initial launch it will ask you to set a password.
Now close the application and go to the folder you need to protect, right click on it and select Protect with My LockBox.
It will ask you the My LockBox Password. Once you give it folder will disappear. Now no one can access it by any means.
Whenever you want to access the folder, open My LockBox control panel, provide password and click on Unlock. Then protected folder will appear automatically.
You can access My LockBox control panel using shortcut key CTRL + Shift + P.
Free version of My LockBox can protect only one folder at a time. If you want to protect any number of folders you have to purchase PRO version.
This is a highly secured way to protect your folder and without providing password no one would be able to access the folder. This works even when PC is on safe mode. My LockBox is indigent to let virus scanners and backup applications to access folder. This works with NTFS, FAT 32 and FAT file system as well as Win 7, Win Vista and Win XP.
Web site performance optimization is the process of using various tools and techniques to reduce the size of web pages in order to minimize the load time, utilizing the bandwidth. This is one of the most critical success factors of any web site or application. There are so many technologies introduced to optimize the web application in the development time including AJAX. This article will give you an introduction to optimize your web page even with lesser technical skills, using simple tools without altering its basic architecture.
Getting Started
Before you proceed you have to prepare the development environment. First you have to setup the tool required and identify the skills required to the process.
Tools
You will be using the latest version of Mozilla Firefox browser and YSlow add-on installed on it. Before you install YSlow you have to install Firebug add-on on Firefox. YSlow is an add-on for Firefox developed by Yahoo which can be used to identify the performance level of the web pages.
Knowledge And Skills
In order to optimize the performance of your page you have to have basic knowledge of HTML, JAVAScrip and CSS. But in this process you don’t have to alter any code which already written, yet you will have to re-structure them.
Analyze
As the first step you have to identify the current state of your web site. For that open your web page in Firefox and click the YSlow icon at the right bottom of the browser window. It will pop up another window and there you can click the “Grade” button. (Choose rule sets according to your web site) Once you click, it will display the performance grade of your web site along with the overall performance score. Furthermore down the window, it will display grade for each sub-section. In addition to that there will be another tab displaying the size of each component of your web page and another tab for statistics including caching state and HTTP requests. This will give you a basic over all idea about the current state of your web site and where the performance hits are. After that you can solve the identified problems one by one.
Below section will explain the step by step process of optimizing a web page.
Performance Optimization Process
Optimize Page Content
Page content plays a big role when it comes to the performance. Pages with smaller file size will have the maximum performance. Therefore your main goal should be to make it smaller as possible. Any web page will have two main contents, which are hypermedia and text including HTML CSS and JS.
Hypermedia: Basic rule is reducing the size as much as possible. Especially for images you can reduce the resolution and use a compression like JPEG. Avoid using HTML sizing for images. If you need to optimize the performance in a greater scale you can use image Sprite. It will minimize the HTTP request for the external images.
HTML/CSS/JS: In the development time of the web page the HTML codes must be highly readable. Therefore developers keep spaces, comments, line breaks and indentation to increase the readability. But when it comes to the run time they will be a performance hit because it will increase the file size. In order to reduce the size those unnecessary characters should be removed. For that there are various HTML compressors out there. If you need to compress many HTML files at a time, you can use HTML Compress 5.5 PC application. In addition to that there are various online HTML compressors as well. You will observe, after the compression HTML, CSS and JS files are formed in to one single line or very fewer lines in the source code. At the same time you will be able to observe this will reduce the file size by around 10%. This process generally called as minifying the code.
Optimize External CSS/JS
If you have so many external JS and CSS files linked to the web page they need to pack in one single file for each type. This will reduce number of HTTP request for the external resources. Pack all the JS to one file and add the link in the bottom of the web page. Do the same for CSS and link them at the top of web page.
Now you have reduced the size of Hypermedia, HTML, CSS and JS. In addition to that you have minimized the amount of external HTTP requests as well.
Compression
After minimizing the size of hypermedia, HTML, CSS and JS codes by restructuring them, you can enforce compression to further reduce the size of them. This can be enabled by your web server. Once you enable the compression (in most cases its GZip) web server will compress the page before seeding it to the user over HTTP. GZip compression can reduce the file size in greater ratio, more than 75%. This will improve the performance of web page drastically and will be help full to utilize the bandwidth of the web server as well.
Before Compression
After Compression
By pasting below code in . htaccess file you can enable GZip in your web server.
If you don’t have access to .htaccess file you can use this code in every .php page header.
Caching
Finally you can enable caching support from your web server. Once you enable caching your browser will store most of the common content in your web page locally. Due to that browser can load that content without calling the web Server and this will save the bandwidth and reduce the HTTP request drastically.
You can control the caching by pasting below code in the .htaccess file in your web server.
Traffic!! Every one hate traffic on the way to office and the way back to home. There must be a perfect traffic controlling system. But what is it? By the way, Si-fi writes has come up with some solutions. I thought of noting my idea about that with my own ideas and dreams.
Just think, if everyone on the road will perfectly follow the road rules, In that case there won’t be any traffic. But humans are controlling vehicles and we are not that perfect. So is there any perfect one to control traffic. Yes, a computer. I actually saw this in the movie “Minority report”. This is a Centralized Traffic Control System. All the vehicles are connected to a centralized server and it control everything on the road. And the best part is the server knows positions of each and every vehicle, so it can move two vehicles nearby on the same track with the speed 120 Kmph, maintaining very narrow distance between them. And the same thing can be applicable to ‘n’ number of vehicles. On top of all, just assume the vehicle in front of you going to turn left in next junction. In general situation the driver on signal light in left and indicate that. But in this kind of system, the central server knows that the vehicle going to turn left and it can control other vehicles behind that accordingly. This sounds like a dream, but not impossible. We already have GPS and maps on our vehicles. All we have to do is update those details and get driving instruction from the server and execute them.
Once this kind of system will come to action, there won’t be a Steering wheel in vehicles. That space also will be allocated for passengers. The passenger will have to enter the destination once he gets in to the vehicle and those details will go to the central server. The server will give the vehicle a rout considering all the factors including other vehicle routs etc. Finally vehicle will reach the destination without human involvement. And it’s so difficult to find a parking space in modern busy cities and it’s a real pain to many people. But one day with this kind of system, once you go to office, you can tell your car to go home and come back when you going to finish the shift.
This will be a bad news for auto lovers. So sad that manual driving is no longer permitted. And you can’t drive over speed, break the law and have some fun. No more manual shifting, drifting, drag, street racing or anything. This is going to be kind a boring yes.
One possible problem in this kind of system is servers are always going down. Under any conditions we can’t guaranty 100% up time. What will happen if the central server (Probably the Server Cluster) will go down? Yes we can design the system to stop all the vehicles, but can we afford that delay? On top of all, what will happen in the case of bug or defect in the system? The possible damage will be massive and probably cost many human lives. And how far can we expand this system? When it comes to implementation we have to go for a direct changer over. Is it possible? The engineers will have to find solutions for all those problems before this kind of system comes to live.
As a blogger or a webmaster, sometimes it’s really important for you to screen capture content of a web page and share it with others. Here what you really need is not only a screen capturing tool. There are plenty of them out there. But if it has options to highlight, draw things, redact area or add text etc after capturing the web screenshot, that’s the exact tool you should go for.
When I was stumbling across the WWW I came across with a very simple tool that works like magic. It’s a Chrome extension you can find on Chrome Web Store. The tool is Screen capture developed by Google itself. Let’s take a closer look.
Getting Started with Screen Capture
Go to Chrome web store and add Screen capture.
It will add an icon to chrome address bar.
Click on that and take a look at options before you start using it.
There you can set file format, default save location, auto save, and keyboard shortcuts.
Now you are good to go and screen capture a web page.
If you select capture page region, you will get a box on page content. There you can see its size in pixel. Move it, resize it and click ok.
Then it will take you to the captured image. There you have several editing options such as highlight, redact, add text and draw line.
Finally you can save it on your HDD or share it.
Drop down menu gives you options to copy or print.
Capture visible content, capture while page and capture screen region has the same set of editing options.
If you like to go pro, start using shortcut keys.
Hardware: Intel Core i5 2nd Gen // 4GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium // 64 Bit
Browser: Google Chrome Version 23.0.1271.91 m
If you are a non techy blogger, this would be a great tool for you to work with your web developer. You can capture screen, draw on it, write on it and send it to your web developer. I’m using this tool a lot and it saved me a lot of time.
Try this out and let me know how you feel about this. If you know any other cool tips about this please share those with us as a comment below.
The world of automobile continues to hunt for alternative fuel sources. At the same time engineers are trying so hard to save the remaining fossil fuel by improving efficiency of engines. That decade long effort gave birth to the concept of Hybrid Automobiles which saves almost half of the fuel consumption compared to conventional engines.
Most of the news about hybrid cars came from Japan. Toyota came with their Prius while Honda came with their Insight and Civic. There are some cars from Europe as well such as BMW 320D diesel hybrid but Japan was the one to dominate the hybrid market according to the sales statistics.
The American vehicle legend was always about performance and safety. They were not much concerned about fuel efficiency. Therefore, most of the American vehicles were having a hardy metal body and huge engines which does less than 20 MPG. They survived for decades, yet could not give good competition to highly economical Japanese cars which do more than 30 MPG. The sales of American cars continued to drop for the past few years putting most of the American Automobile manufacturers in great financial danger.
However as it appears to be, Americans never gave up. For the year 2012 they introduced a new line of Yukon SUV from legendary GMC (General Motor Cars). They are having the same huge engine and maximum safety as any American vehicle has, plus considerably good fuel efficiency. And they introduced Hybrid version of GMC Yukon as well which does more than 20 MPG which is too much to hope from this metal monster and he is under today’s spotlight in Notes Of Genius.
Special Features
Exterior
Most of the previous versions of GMC SUVs were having a hardy metal look. But new Yukon is has a very smooth curved edge design. In order to improve aerodynamics they have undertaken many measures including lowered front, smooth leadingedge of hood and rear spoiler. Other than that they have included light weight 18” alloy wheels with less rolling friction.
Yukon has good ground clearance and at the same time it’s having lower center of gravity which gives maximum stability and safety to the vehicle. All the air intakes are carefully placed not to disturb the smooth air flow around the vehicle to ensure the stability.
The catchiest feature in exterior is placement of lights. The main lamps are powered with Dual halogen bulbs. Other lights are also nicely designed and adds extra value to the vehicle.
Interior
Yukon Hybrid has 8 leather passenger seats with more leg space like no other SUV. This will give the ultimate conformability to the passengers and maximum safety with the 3 point seat belts. Dashboard is having a very simple design yet giving all the required information to the driver.
There is an information display in the middle of the dashboard to display the status of the hybrid controls including power flow, power ratio used, battery power remaining etc.
Engine and Transmission
GMC never seemed to like to go for a smaller engine displacement. Most of the Asian SUVs are having approximately 2.5 Engine displacements while GMC Yukon Hybrid is having 6.0 L V8 engine which gives 332 hp @ 5100 rpm. Of course this huge engine will deliver quick performance which will provide a great driving experience with great responsive controlling.
Unlike in older versions of GMC vehicles, they are focused on fuel efficiency as well. In new Yukon Hybrid there is a technology named Active Fuel Management. This is having an algorithm to engage and disengage pistons to save fuel according to the driving conditions.
Ex: When you are accelerating, all 8 pistons will be engaged. When you are in constant cruising speed, 4 pistons will disengage since it only needs power to maintain the speed.
If you take a closer look in to the hybrid technology, the GMC Yukon hybrid is powered by 2 Mode Hybrid engine. This technology allows the engine to run on electricity, fuel or combination of both. The controlling unit will decide what the best fuel source for the condition of drive. Same as in any other hybrid vehicle Yukon Hybrid is also having Regenerative Breaks. The 300V battery which powers up the hybrid engine is placed under the 2nd row seat.
The entire information related to hybrid engine will be displayed on the above mentioned information display in dashboard.
Yukon Hybrid comes with 6 speed hybrid automatic transmission. 4 Wheel Drive is not a standard option yet it’s available for special orders.
Hi-Tech
Yukon Hybrid is equipped with many high tech features. If you take a look in to the car’s audio and video, it’s having 9 speaker sound system with 8”display and a DVD player. There is a separate display in between rear seats as well. Adding an extra value this multimedia system supports wireless head phones for the rear seats.
In case you need to use your mobile phone while you are driving, you can connect it to car audio system using blue tooth connectivity and then it works as a hands free system.
Yukon Hybrid comes with lots of other sophisticated features such as rear view camera, GPS navigation system and touch sensitive display.
Why You Should Go For GMC Yukon Hybrid?
Safety
The main reason to buy GMC Yukon is its great safety features like no other Asian vehicle offers. Mainly it’s having a solid metal body and sub frame to ensure safety in a collision. It’s having 360 degrees safety which comes from air bag system covering not only front, but sides and other areas. There is a children safety seat as well. As additional safety system there is an intelligent breaking assistant, tyre pressure monitor and parking assist.
This is one major factor that GMC vehicles are still here in the automobile market though they have very low mileage compared to Japanese vehicles. No Japanese vehicle can ensure the safety that GMC vehicle can offer its passengers. Therefore, people who are willing to pay extra to get that level of safety still go for GMC regardless of the very low mileage.
Performance
Another reason to buy a GMC Yukon Hybrid is its power. It’s giving 332 hp from its 6.0 L V8 engine. There are very few SUVs which will give that kind of power to your drive. And this power will give you a nice driving experience since driving controllers are snappy responsive. To control this iron monster there is a 4 wheel anti-lock disk brakes system.
With all these power, Yukon Hybrid can accelerate 0-60 mph within 8.1 seconds.
Fuel Efficiency
If safety and performance are your concerns of course you cannot expect that vehicle to be highly economical. Most of the previous versions of Yukon were doing less than 15 MPG. Still most of the people who bought Yukon were happy with it when it comes to other great features it offered.
The new GMC Yukon Hybrid is doing 20 MPG in city driving conditions according to its specification which gives you fairly economical drive in this huge vehicle. In a Highway, a Yukon hybrid will do 23 MPG.
No matter what, these huge metal monsters are having very a limited market due to global economical conditions. Most of the countries who used to buy GMC vehicles such as Saudi Arabia are also now going for economical Japanese vehicles. Even in USA Japanese vehicles, especially hybrid vehicles sales are sky rocketing because they are doing more that 40 MPG.
If GMC want to compete in this market, they have to scale down their vehicles to meet the general requirement of the automobile users. But as it appears they are not willing to go on that track. They still believe in huge vehicles with huge engines. Hope this hybrid version of Yukon will give them a hope to survive in automobile market and continue their ledged started from 1908.
UI design is one of the critical success factors in any software product. This is the secret of market giants such as Microsoft and Apple. When it comes to web design it’s even critical. Most of the visitors may come to your website for the first time and they need to know what to do in the first glance.
The magic of a clean UI is its background color combination and patterns. It embosses the important content and focus users attention to the right content. However, designing such a background pattern could be challenging for most of the web designers.
You may be able to design good backgrounds, but look and feel is not the only concern here. You have to think about the dimensions, human eye movements and performance issues as well.
If you need a one stop place to find this kind of background patterns for your web design, Subtle Patterns come to save your day. Its website where you can find plenty of well engineered background patterns and beauty here is you can try them out in the same place.
How to Use SubtlePatterns?
Go to SubtlePattern Home page.
There you can see a list of patterns.
You can switch the viewing mode to thumbnails as well.
When you open a pattern, on mouse over you will be able to see the preview button.
Once you click on the preview button it will automatically apply the pattern to the background, so you can see how it’s going to looks like in your web page.
After selecting the suitable pattern you can click on the download button.
It will take you to a page where you can find one tile of image.
You can download it and put it as a background with appropriate duplication.
Once you go to the download page you will be able to see that image is having the smallest possible size without losing the quality and carefully designed to tile and virtually create large background image.
I hope Subtle Patterns will help your web design or any kind of multimedia application. If you want to download all the patterns in the website you can find the .PAT file, which can be opened in Photoshop, in the site footer.
If you like to contribute to the SubtlePattern you can submit your own, original patterns to share with everyone else. Give it a try too.
We use Icons for various different purposes. Mainly you’ll need nice looking icons to customize the desktop look and feel. If you are developing software you’ll need icons for more serious interface designing purposes.
In most of the cases you will need icon files in different sizes to match with the design. You can easily get it done with Adobe Photoshop but converting it in to ICO format could be a problem to you. If you need portable solution to get this kind of work done, again you will run in to problem with Photoshop.
To save your day, there is an online tool by the name ConvertIcon. I was introducing lots of online tools recently and as same as most of them, this is also a Rich Internet Application.
Quick Catch-up
Rich Internet Applications – Redefining Web Experience
How to Use ConvertIcon?
Visit ConvertIcon Home page.
There you can see the welcome message. Hit the Get Started Button to proceed.
Once you click on Get started it will give you a file browsing window.
There you can select icon files or image files which need to be converted or resized.
After selecting the files ConvertIcon will show you a preview of the image.
Then click export to save the image as an Icon.
Once you click on that, it will give you a dialog box with several size options.
Select the sizes you need and click on save as.
Give and appropriate file name and location and then click save.
The process is simple as that! If you selected several icon sizes still it will export one file, but it will contain all the sizes you selected as different pages. The best thing about this is everything is happening online and you never have to install software on your computer.
Best Way to Use ConvertIcon
The name Rich Internet Application rings a bell and you know that the best way to use such an application is within a SSB (Site specific Browser). You can get the maximum out of ConverIcon the same way.
Quick Catch-up
You can use this application for most of the icon creating and re-arrangements. If you have this application in a SSB you will never need any installed application to get the this work done. It’s a simple and complete solution work like magic.
When you receive an email, you can see senders email address and name in the header. But this is not really a reliable way to find the sender since those can be faked very easily by changing email headers. However email header contains a lot more information. Most of the email clients don’t display them to users not to disturb the user experience with technical details.
But still you can access that information easily in any email client and get accurate details about email sender including his mail exchange and IP address. Once you find the IP address you can find lot more details about sender such as his geographical location and with more effort, true identify as well.
How to See Header Information in an Email?
This process is entirely depending on email client or service you are using. I’ll show you how to do it in Gmail and then you will be able to figure out how to do it any email service.
Go to Gmail and open the email which you need to analyze header and find original sender.
In top right corner of email you will find a drop down menu with the label More. Click on that.
There click on Show Original.
It will open another tab and show original textual version of email. There you can find all the details which are there in email header.
There you can find several Received: by statements. Last one represent the origin point of email and first one is the server which forwards the email to you.
If you take a closer look you will find more useful information there such as email client used by sender or whether he used a web interface, authentication and is this email a subscription of an email list.
Now you have the IP address or origin point of email. Based on that you can find lot more information using IP look up too.
You can use any online WHOIS tool to find location of IP address. Try ip-adress.com, its reverse IP worked well for me.
There you have better tool, email trace which you can find here. Copy and paste entire header details there and it will give you a detailed report about the sender.
However you might not be able to find the exact sender using this method due to data protection policies and laws. But still you can get a good enough idea about the original sender and path of email very easily. If you are using other email service or client all you have to do is simply get the original textual version of email. Then you can retrieve entire header formation in no time.
Strength of the password you are using in online activities has become a hot topic around the word. Everyday we are hearing lots of hacking and cracking and when you take a closer look most of them are due to easily predictable passwords.
Previously I was taking about how to create a strong password, what are the best practices and how to measure the strength of your password. There I introduced to you an online tool to calculate time to crack your password using average desktop computer.
Quick Catch-up
How to Create a Strong Password?
What if you feel like you can’t create a strong password for yourself? Still there are ways for you to have one. You can let a tool to auto generate one for you. GenerateMyPassword.com is a good option.
How to Generate Strong Password with GenerateMyPassword.com?
Visit the home page of GenerateMyPassword.com
There you can see a simple interface letting you to select character domain and length of your password. Better to include all types of characters.
After selecting those simply click on generate.
It will auto generate a password for you which is not there in any dictionary and need VERY long time to break.
Now the next big question, how to remember this. There you can see a button labeled as practice.
The best way to remember any phrase is repeated it several times till you get the grip.
Practice will take you through a repetitive process for you to get the grip of new password.
Once you get the grip, you will be able to type your password effortlessly in no time.
Now you have a very strong password and you found a way to remember it as well. The next step is going to settings of online account where you need to use this password and set this as new password. Then you can use this to login. Now the account is secured with a very strong password.
No matter how strong is the password, never use same password to all your online accounts. Never write them down physically or digitally, change them frequently and follow other best practices. Then you will be safe in WWW.
