Search engines are using very sophisticated algorithms today. So you can find most relevant result using them. The most popular search engine Google is using its page ranking algorithm and more than 200 other factors to show you the most relevant content in search results.
But can you find most popular top sites for a given topic using search engines? As an example you want to find top sites about “Smartphone”. You may try Goggling for “Smartphone” but it will give you sites with fresh and relevant content about Smartphone but not top sites.
I came across with the website TopSite.com which is a search engine, but as the search result it’s giving you top web sites for the given topic.
How to Use Topsite.Com?
Go to TopSite.Com
In the home page you can see the search box with the button “Find top sites’.
Enter your topic and start a search.
It will give you a search result within less than one second.
There you can see an ordered list of Top websites for the given topic.
By clicking on the sites name you can directly visit the websites in search result.
If you like or dislike websites in the search result, you have the voting facility to give your feedback.
More about TopSite.com
TopSite.com is not only about finding top sites on internet. If you take a closer look in to the search result you will be able to see more functionality there as motioned below.
Similar websites: you can find similar websites to the sites in any search result by clicking on the given link.
Related Topics: They are displayed in right hand side of the search result.
In addition you can find popular top ten sites, Topic Cloud and Top website index in the top right corner of the main page.
According to my accuracy test, this tool seems to be highly dependable. It’s always giving me acceptable results as top sites and similar sites. However, still there is a room for algorithmic optimization to provide more accurate and updated results.
Try this tool, find out top sites on internet and help them to provide more accurate results by giving your feedback as a vote in search result. Never forget to share your experience here with us at Notes Of Genius Community.
So far we discussed lots of factors which you have to consider when you are buying a Smartphone. I hope now you are comfortable with lots of marketing jargons they use and technical terms used in specifications.
Quick Catch-up
Today I’m going to focus my attention to operating systems in Smartphone. This is a really important factor which gives life to all previously discussed hardware.
If you go back few years in time, you will notice that there was lots of mobile operating systems developed by many phone manufactures. It was very confusing for customers. But today the situation has changed and you have to pay attention to very few mobile operating systems.
Here I’m trying to show you what are the strengths and weaknesses in those. Then you will get a clear picture as to which mobile operating system should be there in your Smartphone.
Apple iOS
iOS is developed by Apple, specially for their iPhone and iPad. The architecture of iOS is very carefully engineered to consume lesser hardware resources and deliver optimum touch display experience to users.
It’s having lots of functionalities and they are organized in very user-friendly manner. Most of the configurations are pre installed and users can start using the device without worrying about technical details.
Applications, the most important thing about Smartphone! And iOS supports the largest number of applications in the earth. You can find millions of applications in Apples App store.
The environment in iOS is well controlled and restricted. Therefore it’s less vulnerable for crashes. This would be a great OS for most of the non techy people who hate to struggle with technical issues.
Quick Catch-up
New Features and Possibilities of Apple iOS 5.0
Google Android
World’s fastest growing mobile OS and it’s developed and managed by Google. It comes for free, therefore devices that comes with this are having good price labels. Android has lots of functionality and user friendliness giving solid competition to iOS in Smartphone market.
When it comes to applications Google Play is having millions of different applications and it’s growing in an exponential rate. Lots of developers around the world are developing lots of creative applications for the android platform.
Unlike in Apple iOS, android is not developed for very controlled hardware environment. It’s a generic OS which could be used with any supported hardware platform. Due to that there can be some performance bottlenecks and technical issues.
The best part is, if you area techy person you can do a lot with Android than with iOS. You are free to do any type of software tweaking and have lots of fun.
Quick Catch-up
Windows Phone
This was in the game for many years, but recently Nokia-Microsoft collaboration gave a boost to Windows Phone as well as to Nokia. This is a proprietary Mobile OS developed by Microsoft. It’s highly performance tuned and comes with famous metro UI.
When it comes to application support it’s still way behind than iOS or Android. There are very lesser applications available, but most of the important ones for personal and business usage is there.
This is a future trend and if you are buying you must be ready to compromise application support while experiencing excellent elastic user interfaces.
Quick Catch-up
HTC HD 7 – The Windows Mobile Smartphone
Wrapping Up
It’s a very difficult task to say which OS is the better one. It’s highly dependant on whom you are and what you need. My personal point of view is as below.
If you are a techy person go for Android Smartphone.
If you looking for Smartphone for personal or business usage and you are a non-techy person iOS would be a great choice. Then you have to go for an iPhone.
If you fancy the aesthetic appeal in UI in your Smartphone, Windows Phone would be a great choice.
If you do a further research you will come to know that there are many other Smartphone mobile OS such as Blackberry, MeeGo and WebOS.
However there is no clear cut way to tell which OS is the best fit for you. If you need further personalized help, drop a comment here and I’m here to help you.
Cinema Industry is rapidly developing both technologically and conceptually in past few decades. Story writers came up with unbelievable stories, and then directors made them possible in Celluloid film. Sometime after 3D graphic designers made lots of impossible dreams possible with virtual reality characters and backgrounds. Especially in scientific fictions and action moves were empowered with lots of technologies and concepts.
Latest move post production is totally based on Digital based technologies. Digital era evolve the SLR camera to DSLR. Yet moves are recorded in analog celluloid films. Due to that there were lots of technical difficulties faced in post production face. Top of all there were no replacement to Celluloid film with digital recording technologies due to their low resolution video frames. However, in that past few years digital cinema cameras are been introduce which give us hope of total digital cinema production.
Existing Technology
Existing technology used to record a movie is Celluloid film. It is very similar to the film that we used in SLR cameras before DSLR camera comes. It’s like taking 24 still pictures in SLR camera and plays them as a film. In Cine camera celluloid film is running inside it, and there is a lens system to focus light in to that. The speed of running on celluloid film decided the frame rate of the video. The frames in the video get burnt in to celluloid film and then it need to be developed chemically. If the director needs some special color correction that need to be done chemically.
In editing, it will be linear editing. In very early stage, editors used to cut off the part of film and re-join them to get the edited movie. Later there were special editing stations to do non linear editing for celluloid films. In the case they need a 3D object in the film. They have to transfer the frame in to new celluloid film with the 3D object in it. Later mixing stations were capable of work with a computer and control entire procedure through that. This made the life easier when producing virtual reality moves using computer technologies.
In the early stage of cinema, they were using a very basic version of celluloid film. So moves were in black and white. Later the chemical that were using in the f celluloid film were improved gradually, so movies go better colors. Today they are capable of capturing the color in front of the camera as it is. With the improvement of the less kit and cinema rigs, in collaboration of all directors could come up with exceptional moves that we see today in theaters.
Advantages
The reason why movie producers are still using this technology is, it the only option to display and movie in large cinema screen. Celluloid films are having unlimited number of pixels theoretically. If you have good optics, you can expand the frame in to any larger screen. In theater this celluloid film fill will be developed as a “positive” which contain video frames in transparent film and it will be run in the given speed in projector with the aid of optical system to zoom it in to standard cine screen. And latest celluloid films are capable of capturing very accurate colors. Due to that some video producers are using celluloid film even to record videos prepared for television broadcasting.
Disadvantages
No matter how quality is the video celluloid films are having lots of problems. Most of the problems are there in SLR cameras and here it’s even worse. Mainly the cost, cost for celluloid film and cost of complex cameras are way higher to afford. Due to that to produce a cinema there is a huge cost barrier. And the cameras are huge and very less portable. If something goes wrong, you have no way to delete it. All the frames that captured are irreversibly burnt in to celluloid film. In such a case you have to throw the film away. In the post production phase you need very complex instruments to get the editing done. If you need to include partial virtual reality world in your movie its even difficult and take very longer time to finalize or render.
How about 1080p HD videos?
Now you must be wondering, “Why can’t we use full HD videos in Theaters?”. Yes 1080p HD videos are very common today with Blu-ray disks and people are watching them in big Plasma screens or projectors. 1080p videos are having the frame size of 1920 x 1080 which is very big for most of the home theater system we use. But when you take the same video in to theater the video resolution is way not enough. It will be blurred in the screen and you will realize that video need more details means more resolution. But do we have such cameras to capture such videos. Never seen in general production environments, but they are out there.
Digital Cinema Standards
The cinema industry was so badly demanding a digital cinema camera for years. Therefore various different standards were introduced to develop such a camera by various people. When it comes to HD video there were standards like 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Same sort of standards for screen resolution were introduced to digital cinema as well. So camera manufactures will have to comply with them.
2K Videos
It’s having 2048×1080 resolution video frames. Normally used in 24 fps yet you can choose to use in 48 fps as well, if you are using background tracking. This is a good resolution to display in cine screen, yet most of the people are still reluctant with the detail level.
4K Videos
It’s having 4096×2160 resolution in video frame and very good detail level to display in digital theaters. Frame rate is same as 2K. Most probably this will be the standard for future digital cinema.
8K Videos
It’s having 8192 × 4320 resolution in video frames. They could be use to video capturing to get the maximum amount of details for post production. Yet final product will be redder as 4K.
Advantages of Digital Cinema
Digital cinema solved many problems which were there in celluloid film technology. The main factor is cost. Initial investment could be higher for equipments yet cost for video shoot will be much lesser as long as they will be stored in reusable digital storage. Cameras will be less complex and smaller equipments with much portability. In the case something goes wrong you can easily delete it and re shoot it. In post production the editor can use all the non liner editing techniques to come up with exceptional video. Most of the latest movies are having virtual reality technologies included and those will be much easier why video also in digital format. Further, if you need to do a advanced color correction it also will be much easier and less costly.
Digital Cinema Cameras
Red Camera
The most discussed digital cinema camera is Red camera. There is a range of cameras with different capabilities. The very first one camera they released is Red One. This camera attracted massive public attention which was capable of recording 2K videos. Lots of people were inspired and started doing research on possibilities of digital cinema. Lots of theaters were looking forward to upgrade their conventional projector to digital projector.
In 2011 they released the camera Epic which is again capable of capturing video in 4K format and 5K format as well. The camera comes as different version like brain only (only the processor), Epic-M Pack and total package. This is excellent choice for any kind of commercial digital cinematography.
In late 2011 they are planning to release another camera good for small scale digital cinematography named Scarlet. It comes with an affordable and good set of features as well. Most attractive thing in there is some version of Scarlet support Canon lenses. This will be a good news for the people who already doing digital cinematography using Canon DSLRs.
There are lots of Movies, commercial and music videos done using red cameras. Below video shows some of those.
Canon EOS C300
With the start of digital cinema era Canon also decided to come in to the market with a camera called EOS C300 which is capable of 4K video capturing. There were lots of cinematographers who are using Canon DSLR cameras for their production. This will be good upgrade for them since they can use their existing lens kits. And I believe this will be a good competition to Red camera as well.
Future
SLR to DSLR
Sometimes ago most of the professional photographers were using analog SLR cameras for their photography. Once the Digital SLR camera comes and they improve up to Full frame camera most of the professionals started using DSLRs for they work. Today it’s very rare to find a professional photographer still using a SLR. It’s true that there is a data loss when we convert the continuous data stream like light in to discreet data system like Digital. But most of the cases human eye is not capable if identifying it with the latest digital advancement. And considering many other factors like ease of use, cost, fatly tolerance and digital post processing professional have been shifted to DSLRs.
Digital Cinema Possibilities
In cinema industry large part of the movies are still producing with celluloid film because digital technology was not developed to not to make feel difference to human eye. But with this advancement of digital cinema cameras and their 2K and 4K video formats, future movie producers will start using digital cine cameras more. Even now most of the forthcoming massive movie productions are doing using digital cameras, especially Red Camera Epic.
Post production
Importantly there won’t be much effort to improve the post production environment since they are up to standard already. All they need is very powerful computer to handle high resolution videos and relevant software. If talk about software they are more than advanced today to get any classy work done. Most of the productions housed are using clusters of computer to get more processing power for editing and rendering. If it’s still not enough they can easily get a online cloud cluster or rendering farm.
Digital Theaters
At the same time theaters also need to be equipped with the latest digital projectors. Their initial cost of way bigger than previous film projectors, yet with that investment they will be able to deliver amazing movie experience to the audience.
Windows 7 is one of the greatest products I have experienced after Windows XP. But when it comes to folder arrangement I came to know there is a missing feature. In windows XP I could disable ‘Auto Arrange’ then drag and re arrange icon the way I want in any folder. In the case I need to re arrange folders in more organized way I could enable ‘align to grid’. After that still I could drag and re arrange, but icons will be aligned to a virtual grid.
Once I start using Windows 7, I noticed that this features is there only in Desktop, not for other folders. I was keep looking for a solution to disable auto arrange and enable align to grid whenever I want it. Finally I found a way.
How It Works?
When you go to folder in Windows 7 you won’t be able to see the options ‘Auto Arrange’ and ‘Align to Grid’ in the right click menu. If you want those back you have to change the System Registry with some values.
That sounds too geeky. How can an average person going to enable those options in right click menu? Here we go with the solution.
Download this file
Save and Unzip it to a known location of your computer
Run ”disablefullrowselect.reg” file by double clicking on it.
It will give you the below pop up window.
Say “Yes” to continue and of course this is a trusted file. It won’t cause any harm and you have nothing to worry about.
Then it will give you below pop up confirmation
Click “OK” and we are done.
If this process cause any problem to your system, reverse it to original configuration by running “undo.reg“
Then you can go to a folder and right click. Under “View” you will be able to see the options “Auto Arrange” and “Align to Grid”. You can enable and disable them for any folder any time.
Hardware: Intel Core i5 2nd Gen // 4GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium // 64 Bit
Tips
If these options won’t appear even after following these steps, you may try restarting your PC.
These options will be disabled for “List” and “Details”. If you are in such a viewing option change it to “Medium Icons” or may be “Large Icons” to enable those options.
Now you have total freedom to drag and re arrange the files in any folder the way you want. If you want to apply any specific configuration to entire folders, follow below steps.
Alt-> menu bar appears -> Tools -> Folder options -> View -> “Apply To Folders”
Ex: You disable “Auto Arrange” in current folder, then follow the above steps, auto arrange will be disable for the entire folder in your PC
Note
By the time I was writing this post I didn’t know the original creator of registry patch. Recently though a comment below I got to know him. I could have notice him earlier If I opened this file in notepad. He is Ramesh Srinivasan and click here to visit his blog.
In the First Part of the article I explain step by step how to setup Hootsuite account. Further I explained how to connect different social media account in to dashboard and use extension of Bookmarklet to share content easily.
I believe that now you are generally comfortable with HootSuite and its basic features. In this article, I’m trying to explain the special features I found in Hootsuite. Most of the below features will come for free, but you have to buy few of the advanced enterprise features according to your requirement.
Take a closer look in to below section. With these tips you will be able to configure Hootsuite dashboard to a level where you never miss even single social media update in all your accounts.
Special Features
Manage All the Social Media Accounts in One Place
This is the most interesting part in this application. It comes with tabbed interface. In one tab you can have up to four columns. There you can easily organize all your social media accounts and their different media types.
Ex:
I have included two twitter accounts and one Facebook account. For those I have 3 tabs.
In Facebook tab I have 3 separate columns for status, photos and videos.
In twitter tab have columns for sent tweets, mentions etc.
I have another tab named Home. There I have included twitter timeline, Facebook news feed etc.
You can periodically refresh the streams manually or set auto refresh interval.
You can add twitter lists as separate stream as well. When you go to Add stream panel, there you have array of options to personalize the streams.
In this kind of setup, you will never miss any social media event. The best pert here is, you don’t have to go to social media website to respond to updates, you can do it right here in HootSuite. If you want to update a status or send a tweet, there is a message box up there.
You can select the social media account from right box and send the update to all the account by one click.
In every update you can see some tools when you take your mouse over it. In there you can re tweet, like, reply etc.
Use One Social Media Account by Many People
This is one of unique feature in HootSuite. After you create a HootSuite account, you can add team member to any social media account. After that, using HootSuite they also can update the account. This will come in handy for online marketeres who are working as teams. However, this is a pro feature, so you have to purchase it.
Scheduled Updates
If you have many number of update that needs to go in to many social media accounts at a specific time, you can schedule all of them here in HootSuite. You can access all those features from left menu bar under publisher.
Under the same panel you can see the option to connect RSS feed to your social media accounts as well. Most of the people are using different services to update your events to different social media account. Now you have everything under one hood, here in HootSuite.
Manage Social Media Contacts
When you are using Twitter, there you create lists to narrow down specific types of updates by different people. In HootSuite you can re organize those lists by dragging and dropping people to different list in a very user friendly manner. You can find all those options in left menu bar under the section Contacts.
Enterprise Features
If you purchase enterprise solution of HootSuite you can access further advanced features such as analytics and assignments. Using analytics you can closely monitor and gather statistical data about your social media campaigns.
In assignments you can create tasks and assign them to your team members. Once they logged in to HootSuite they can list down the assignment that should be completed.
Try out HootSuite and make your social media life simple. Save the time that you have to spend on social media. Share you experience here with us.
iPad was introduced to the global market back in 2010 April and It became a super hit electronic gadget within few days. It changed the people’s general idea about mobile device with many outstanding features. It came with a 7” display which is distinguishing it from a mobile smart phone. Other than that it came with increased resolution in display, 1 GHz processing power and wireless internet connectivity with advanced multimedia capabilities that redefine the idea of ‘Tablet’ PC. Most of the consumers were using it to read books surf internet etc on the go. By the end of year 2010 there was a rumor spreading that iPad 2 is also coming to the market in the 1st quarter of year 2011. There was much different paradoxical news and I thought of analyze available unofficial news and predicting the shape of forthcoming iPad 2.
What’s Going to be New in iPad 2
Processor
Most if the news stating that new iPad 2 will be equipped with multi core cortex A9 processor. However there is argument about processing speed. Most of the information sources saying that it’s going to doubled the speed as previous iPad which will make it 2GHz. For me its seems realistic since there are already smart phones with that kind of amazing processing power, Apple will never wanted to be the 2nd in the market. After all, in order to handle the high resolution images and video it will have to have that kind of processor. Else users will feel delayed response and it will spoil the magic in apple products. In order to deliver maximum graphical experience there will be upgraded dedicated GPU as well. When it comes to memory it is expected to be 512 MB, but personally I expected it to be little bit more around 768 MB since 512 MB is general average in current market.
Display
In iPhone 4 the most attracted feature was its retina display. Most of the people expect to iPad 2 to have same kind of retina display. However, it will consume great amount of power and it will be critical since iPad is having 7” display. And if it will be a retina display, resolution has to be around 2048×1536 which is exceptionally high. It’s way bigger than 1080p high definition video resolution. For me it seems like unrealistic and not practical in few aspects like power consumption and required processing power. I’d say it will come with a display having resolution 1280 X 960 with wide screen aspect ratio though the previous iPad was having 4:3 ratios. Further, apple engineers will put extra effort to make the display more energy efficient and on success it will add an extra value to iPad 2 in future competitive markets. Then comes a most common complain for most of the tablet devices which is ‘The display reflects sun light when working outdoor’. I hope iPad 2 will give us a solid solution o this issue on its arrival.
Operating System
iPad 2 will be having the latest iOS 4.3 and it’s already released for developers. As a special feature it equipped with ‘Multi-touch gestures’ which will probably attract iPad users. Unlike before now iOS have multitasking so users will be able to enjoy many applications running background at the same time. Further, Apple app store is continued to expand exponential, so there will be millions of great application for forthcoming iPad 2. The application will be using upgraded hardware capabilities of iPad 2 like probable front camera to come up with cool applications.
Multimedia
Most of the people expect the iPad 2 to have improved speakers for music listening without head phones. Same as in latest HTC phones it will come in 2 stereo speakers in both the end of phone which can create surround effect in audio playback. However some people argue that there is no pint of having good external speakers why most of the users are using head phones and they have serious point too. The most discussed feature in iPad 2 is its front camera. Sometimes ago iPhone didn’t have front camera and it was a hot topic everywhere. As long as iPad is also evolving to be a wireless communication device, yes we can expect it to have front camera for video conferencing. And as always there will be a 5 MP rear camera with a flash. Some rumors saying that it will be having a ‘Video out’ which will come in handy since another rumor saying that it will be capable of recording 720p videos. Personally I’m pretty sure about 720p video recording since most of the latest smart phones are already having it, yet can’t say for sure about video out.
Connectivity
In the previous version if iPad there were 2 versions which is having GSM/CDMA connectivity and other did not. However, new iPad 2 will be having GSM and CDMA connectivity as a default option. Further it will be capable or extend its operations to 4G connectivity technologies. And there is another rumor that it will be having USB port which seems pretty realistic. I guess if apple engineers are planning for USB port, it will be USB 3.0. Additionally as always there will be Bluetooth connectivity and Wi-Fi. Even previous selected version of iPad having GPS receiver and we can expect is as a default feature in iPad 2.
Storage
For some reason entire iOS devices doesn’t support external SD memory cards. When it comes to iPad, it’s limiting its capabilities especially in multimedia playback. Most if the uses store many number of movies in it and watch them on the run. This will require easily expandable memory storage and it required to be hot swappable as well. It’s not clear why the engineers in Apple ignoring the perfect options which is SD memory cards. Further, increasing the internal memory won’t solve the issue ‘Hot swap ability’ though it will solve the problem of storage up to some extent. I hope there will be a solid solution to these problems in new iPad 2 and probably it will be external SD card slot.
Usage Possibilities
Multimedia Applications
iPad was very popular for it multimedia capabilities and it will continue with the arrival of iPad 2 also. With the increased processing power, RAM, GPU and display it will deliver never better multimedia experience to the users. If the screen will be wide screen and device will come with SD card slot iPad will be THE portable multimedia device for next few years. Additionally, there will be games which are using its hardware capabilities like multi point touch screen and accelerometer. Even now there are many games out there and with iPad 2 they will use its increased screen resolution and multi touch gestures also. As always people will be using to iPad to read books and surf internet on the go.
Capita Market Applications
Other than multimedia usage, I have noticed that iPad was getting popular in financial world. Most of the day trades in stock markets were using iPad to analyze trends in stocks and momentum of market. The 7” high resolution screen, multi point touch screen and internet connectivity gave a solid plat from to run trading software and advance charting software. Most of the trading software provides also have came up with iPad versions of their software after identifying this possibility. With the improved high resolution display, high speed connectivity and operating system support iPad 2 will continue to getting popular in capital market.
Further Evolution
Tablet PC trend will continue and iPad will always play a significant role in there. We can expect more extensibility and compatibility in future iPads. Most of the hardware vendors looking forward for open standards and we can see the trend in smart phone world. However, Apple was trying to develop own hardware specific culture with iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. I expect them to join the open standard and come up with iPad like tablet portable communication devices which will be compatible with cross vendor platforms.
Additionally, they were having less extensibility in hardware. Generally, in a PC if hard disk is not enough we can plug bigger one and if RAM in not enough we can do the same. But with iPad and also iPhone users are not that free to extend the device the way they want. Specifically, we can’t even a plug a SD card to iPad to extend the storage and make it hot swappable. I hope apple will take steps to let us to extend hardware capability as far as they can in future releases of their devices.
References
Brownlee, J. (2011, January 10). Kevin Rose’s iPad 2 Predictions Are Unlikely, Here’s Why. Retrieved February 02, 2011, from www.cultofmac.com: http://www.cultofmac.com/digg-co-founder-kevin-rose-retina-display-ipad-2-in-next-few-weeks/76344
Coldewey, D. (2011, January 17). iPad 2 Rumor Roundup. Retrieved February 02, 2011, from www.crunchgear.com: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/17/every-ipad-2-rumor-roundup-and-evaluation/
Marshall, G. (2011, January 20). iPad 2 rumours: what you need to know. Retrieved February 02, 2011, from www.techradar.com: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/ipad-2-rumours-what-you-need-to-know-900232
Yarow, J. (2011, January 19). iPad 2 Not Likely To Get Super High Resolution Retina Display (AAPL). Retrieved February 02, 2011, from www.sfgate.com: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/19/businessinsider-ipad-2-no-retina-display-2011-1.DTL
Couple of days ago Notes Of Genius introduced you a website named DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com where you can find availability of website. This comes in handy when you try to trouble shoot your internet connections when some sites are not working.
Using this you would figure out the site is down just for you or is it common for everyone. Further, you came to know it’s using pinging to get the status of the website.
Quick Catch-up
How To Know When A Website Is Down?
Today I’m going to introduce a tool which does the same thing but provide you more detailed and accurate report. It comes with the name JustPing.
The information provided by JustPing could be used to troubleshoot your web server and availability of service for different geographical locations rather than just finding whether it’s up or not.
How to Use JustPing?
Go to JustPing home page.
There you can find a text box to enter a domain name of a website or IP address of the server.
After entering above details accurately, press Ping!
Then you will be able to see a long list of location where pings get initiated and their details updating real-time.
It will take some time to complete the pinging from all 50 locations.
Now you can get a clear idea about the availability of given website around the world.
JustPing is providing you a report which containing percentage of packet losses, min, max and average pinging time as well as the destination IP address from more than 50 locations around the globe.
You can use this information to find whether a given website is available for all those 50 locations. This report gives you further information to find out the quality of connection to server from different locations in the world as well.
Adobe Photoshop is a very popular tool among professional graphic designers. It is capable of produce raster graphics with lots of comprehensive user-friendly tools. With the modern advancement of photography, especially with digital cameras most of the photographers are using adobe Photoshop to edit their photographs by color correcting, cropping and with many other techniques. In the context of photography identify conditions and configuration of the camera in the shooting time is essential parameters when it comes to editing. Normally Adobe Photoshop doesn’t identify the camera configuration, only the image data. If you want to solve this problem and edit your images accurately considering camera configuration you need a plug-in. The plug-in you need is Adobe Camera RAW which also comes built-in with Adobe Photoshop CS5. If you are using previous version of Photoshop you will have to download and install the plug-in before you go from here. With the aid of this plug-in you can edit your digital images which are in RAW formats accurately and non-destructively.
What are RAW Files?
Normally point and shoot type digital cameras produces JPEG files which can be open in any personal computer. But when the camera converts its images sensor data in to JPEG file, it has to reduce significant amount of data to fit in to its compression. Further if camera applies any color correction to JPEG file, it’s irreversible. It’s ok to use day to day photography, but not good enough to get a professional quality result. Professionals need what the image sensor actually captures without any data loss or correction. At the same time they need the camera configuration also to be saved with the file for accurate editing. Therefore most of the professional and semi-professional cameras allow shooting in RAW formats.
RAW file is the collection of data which captured by the image sensor in the camera, without any data loss. This is also called as pixel dump. Some cameras provide feature to use uncompress, lossless compressed and compressed raw files. In above three types first two are containing total amount of data captured by the image sensor and compressed format reduce details of image according to the configuration. Other than the pixel dump, a RAW file will contain lots of information about the shooting conditions including the type of camera, type of lens, focal length, ISO, aperture, shutter speed. If camera is configure to automatically apply any color correction to image like white balancing, selective color or saturation that information also will be attached to the RAW file as parameters in a non-destructive way.
Most of the camera manufactures have their own RAW file formats specially designed to cater the specific features and functionalities of each camera types. Below list contain some of the camera manufactures and their RAW file types.
Nikon: .NEF
Canon: .CRW
Kodak: .CDK
Epson: .ERF
Olympus: .ORF
Pentax: .PRF
Samsung: .SRW
.DNG also called a Digital negative format could be identified as a universal RAW format those there are no international agreement saying everyone should comply with that. So when you shoot in different cameras you will still get different file formats. In Camera RAW there will be separate profiles to handle camera types and their different lenses.
Getting Started
Once you figure out that you need to use Camera RAW and install it successfully, you have to do some configuration in Photoshop to make it work well. To do that configuration you should follow the below path in Photoshop menu
Edit -> Preferences -> Camera RAW
This will give you below window.
Adobe Camera RAW – Preferences
Generally you need not to do any changes in here. In general section you can change the ‘save images settings in’ to camera raw database. In that case the entire configuration will be saved in centralized database. With this setting ‘sidecar .xmp files’ it will create a configuration file where the original image is, which could be the best configuration. Camera RAW allows you to edit JPEG and TIFF files as well. If you need Camera RAW to be open when you open such a file you can change the setting in the section ‘JPED and TIFF handing’.
Main Window
After you install and configure the Camera RAW plug-in you can open RAW file in Photoshop, you may drag and drop the file in to Photoshop window. Once you do that it will open the below window.
Adobe Camera RAW – Main Window
This is the Camera RAW main window. At the top of the window it provides you basic image manipulation tools like white balance, crop, straighten, spot removal, red eye reduction etc. If you tick ‘Preview’ it will reflect the changes that you will be doing to the image real-time. There is a button to make the window full screen too.
Right below the manipulation tools, you can see the preview of the image inserted. You can select the amount of zoom below the image. I prefer ‘Fit in view’. There is a button for you to save the edited RAW image as a JPEG or any other common image format. The blue color link will take you to work flow options which contain color space and other details.
In the right hand side you have variety of controllers to edit your image. At the top you can see the color histogram separated in to color channels. It will reflect the changes you will do with the controller real time. In the histogram there are two arrow heads in both ends. You can use them to identify detail loss in black areas and detail loss in white areas due to over expose. Below the histogram you can see the shooting configuration of the image automatically identified by Camera RAW by reading Meta data in RAW file.
Below that there is a tabbed pane where you can access the image editing controllers. The detailed explanation of each part will be there in the next section.
Image Editing Tools
Adobe Camera RAW – Basic
The first section ‘Basics’ allow you to do an accurate light correction to your image. First 2 sliders are for white balancing. If you have set your camera to auto white balancing, those configuration will be reflected with the values of slides, yet totally reversible. Then you can change the Exposure which controls the amount of whites as you need. You can use Recovery slider to re gain the details of over exposed areas up to certain level. If you feel like your image background is too dark using Fill light slider you can increase it. Blacks slider controls the black area and it’s commonly used to remove the haze in images. Brightness and contrast works the usual way. If you need to blur or sharpen your photo, you can use the Clarity slider for that. Finally you can enhance the color levels of photo using Vibrance and Saturation.
If you have done a good job with the camera, this basic controller would be enough for you come up with exceptional photograph.
Adobe Camera RAW – Tone Curve
In this section you can alter the color curve and change the light of the photo. Parametric curve could be changed using different sliders and Point curve could be change using any number of points that you can introduce to the curve using mouse click on it. If you are using parametric curve it will be same as Exposure, Recovery, Fill light and Blacks in the ‘Basic’ section. If you are using point curve you have fine control over different rage of light with much flexibility.
Adobe Camera RAW – Detail
Using this section you can manipulate you image to make to little bit blur or sharp. In order to get this done you can use the sliders in the Sharpening section. After controlling, radius, detail and Masking levels you can blend the effect with the image with the amount slider.
If your digital camera is producing noisy images, especially in low light conditions, using Noise reduction section you can remove noise in to certain level. Mainly there are two options, luminance and color. In order to see the actual change will happen to the image you have to set the preview size to 100% and this message is displayed there in the window.
Adobe Camera RAW – HSL/Grascale
If you need to change the characteristic of each color channel you can do that in this section. There are you three main section, hue, saturation and Luminance. You can change the each attribute for each color channel using the given slider.
There can be creative usage in this section. You may de saturate one color, or de saturates all the colors, except one to make out standing photographs.
Adobe Camera RAW – Split Toning
This section allows you to change the hue and saturation separately in highlights and shadows. To define the difference between shadow and highlight you can use the balance slider. I have rarely used this section, yet there can be creative usage depending on your photograph.
Adobe Camera RAW – Lens Correction
This is a very important section in Camera RAW. Sometimes, when you are shooting with different lenses, they cause problems to your photograph. If your lens profile is there in Camera RAW, it will automatically fix those errors that come from the lens. If camera RAW doesn’t have your lens profile you can always use the manual controllers.
Transform section deal with the different tilting of images in all direction. Distortion slider could be use to control the effect of fish eye lenses and sometime you may use to make a image looks like fish eye using that.
If you have different unusual color chrome around the edges of your images, you can use chromatic aberration to correct those.
Lens vignetting is very important especially when you dealing with high power telephoto lenses. They might make the corners of your images slightly darker. You can correct those errors using amount and midpoint sliders.
Adobe Camera RAW – Effects
In this section you can introduce grain to you photograph to give it a old look and feel. At the same time you can add different effects to corners of the photo using post crop vignetting. I have rarely used this section as well. Never feel like using it for my photographs.
Adobe Camera RAW – Camera Collaboration
This section fine tunes the color interpretation of Camera RAW for different types of cameras. However, most of the cases default configuration will work. If default configuration is not good enough you can calibrate your camera manually using this panel. If you required manual calibration you can use color calibration chart. Here you can find specific instruction to calibrate your camera with camera RAW.
Special Tips
Configure Camera to Shoot RAW
Most of the latest digital SLR cameras support RAW file formats, yet they have their own proprietary version as I mentioned below. When you shoot with the camera you should capture the image with maximum possible quality. As the first step you should change the file format in your camera to RAW. Then the camera will offer you options as below.
Uncompressed RAW
Lossless compress RAW
Compressed RAW
Down the list quality will get reduced. However out of first two options both will hold the same quality, so you may go for 2nd option to save the space. If your camera offers bit depth to select go for the highest. Additionally your camera may offer you to save a JPEG file also as a preview.
Handle RAW file in Windows Platform
Once you copy pasted your RAW file in to windows PC you have no way to open it in any application before you drag and drop in to Camera RAW in PS. This will give you problem of previewing and take lots of time to get the actually image you needed. As a solution, above mentioned JPEG preview could be use, which will be placed next to the RAW file, yet it consumes more storage space. The best solution I came up for this is install a RAW file encoder in to your Windows PC, then it will be able to handle RAW files same as any common image format. There are several RAW encoders and none comes for free. Depending on your requirement you may purchase one.
Finalizing
After you have done with your editing in Camera RAW you have two options. You can open the image in Photoshop to continue with further manipulation. For that you can just click on ‘Open Image’ button. If you have many images, first you can select the desired images and click ‘open images’. By pressing ‘delete’ you can remove the unwanted images.
If you are happy with the edit you can simply save the RAW file in ant common file format By clicking on ‘Save image button’ without going in to Photoshop.
If you have your own blog I’m pretty sure that you have your own social media accounts too where you publish links to your blog posts. Of course that will give a good exposure to your content among people. Not only blogs, if you have a web site for your organization, it’s a good practice to have a RSS feed for updates related to your service or products. Again to get a social exposure you can post them in social media.
However if you have more frequent updates in your website it could be difficult to allocate time to post links on different social media accounts. If you have a number of social media accounts, the situation will get worse.
Even if you don’t have your own blog, sometimes you might like to post someone else’s updates on your social media accounts. Probably you are already doing that manually. When you are doing manually you can easily filter out the content you are going to publish but it will consume lots of time.
What if you have a solution where you can automatically publish updates in a RSS feed to all your social media accounts? And what if that service comes with keyword filtering facility which allows you to select updates that need to publish? Of course that will save lots of time you spend on social media, sharing different content.
That solution you are looking for is TwitterFeed.
Create an Account
TwitterFeed is a free service where you can connect all your RSS feeds and configure it to post updates in different social media accounts in a convenient and customizable manner. As the first step you need to create an account for yourself.
Go to TwitterFeed website
Click on the Sign Up link in header
Enter your email address which will act as your Username and then enter the Password and confirm it
Click on the Create Account and you are done!
Once you log in it will take you to the dashboard. Since you just created the account there won’t be any feeds listed. But you will be able to see the button Create New Feed.
Configuration
Create Feed
Once you click on the Create New Feed button it will take you to the below page where you can enter the details of your RSS feed.
Enter a Feed Name as an identifier
Enter the correct RSS feed address or your Blog URL
If you enter your blog URL, TwitterFeed with automatically fetch the RSS address
Click on Test RSS Feed
If your RSS feed is working good it will give you the message “Feed Parsed OK”. If not you have to check whether your RSS feed address is correct or its working good
These basic details would be enough to setup a RSS feed for any social network. But to utilize the maximum power of TwitterFeed I recommend you to open the section Advanced Settings. It will give you the below page.
There you can see lots of configuration options. Let’s take a closer look in to each.
You should set Update Frequency considering the update frequency of the original source. If you have more frequently updating source and you set low updating frequency in TwitterFeed it will take longer time to publish them in Social media accounts.
There you have to select how many posts you need to publish at a time. This again depends on the original source and your requirement.
Then you can select the content options. Generally RSS feeds are coming with Title and Description. You can use any kind of combination to your social sharing.
If you want the original links also to be published check-in Post Link. If this goes to twitter don’t forget to use a shortened URL.
If sharing goes to Facebook better to check-in Include automatic thumbnails in facebook wall posts.
To append any fixed text to the begging of content or after content use Post Prefix or Post Suffix respectively.
You may be a person who is sharing someone else’s RSS feed. In that case you can filter out the content that needs to be re-shared using a keyword list. To enable it check-in Filter your posts by using keywords to auto-approve new posts. Then you can enter the list of Keywords. There you can find some useful instructions to use keywords effectively.
Now you are done with configuring RSS feed. It’s time to proceed to step 2 to configure publishing services.
Publishing Service
Once you go to step 2, configure publishing services, you will be able to see a list of social media including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Below is the page you will get when you try to add a twitter account.
Connect the previously created RSS feed with twitter by clicking on Authenticate twitter button. In order to proceed with this you will have to login to the desired twitter account.
If you already have the twitter account authenticated, you can simply select it from the drop down menu.
In the next section, UTM tags give you the facility to track your campaigns. The entered details will appear in your Website Analytical Report. It’s working great with Google Analytics.
Following the same procedure you can add many social media accounts for same feed.
If you have Facebook pages, they also work well with this.
Finally click ‘Create Service’ and you are done! Your feed is live and all the updates will be automatically published in selected social media accounts.
Advanced Tips
If you want to manually check for updates in a RSS feed, go to dashboard and click Check Now in front of the feed.
If you use Bit.ly as the URL shorten service, it will keep records on number of clicks you got for each URL and they will be displayed in the Dashboard. In order to activate Bit,ly service you have to register with bit.ly API. (Detailed tutorial coming soon!)
If there are several accounts linked to one feed, there will be separate indicators for each account.
Using the dashboard you can view or edit the feeds anytime.
That all about TwitterFeed! It’s a totally free service that provides highly reliable service for a long time. Of course this will save loads of your time you spent on sharing content on social media. Furthermore, frequent automatic updates will attract lots of attention to your accounts as well. Once you configure everything, all of this will happen without even knowing. Enjoy the service and share your experience with us.
When I was talking about Mozilla Prism and Google Chrome Application Shortcuts, I was always saying that you can make these applications run automatically on Windows start up. I gave you some brief instructions about how to get it done. This article is a result of the request made by lot of Notes of Genius readers to publish an in detailed tutorial about how to auto-run applications on start up.
The technique that I’m going to talk about in this article is very simple and easy to configure. This will work with any application that you have installed in your PC as well as any Rich Internet Application you are running through Mozilla Prism or Chrome application shortcuts.
Steps to Follow
As the first step you should create a shortcut to the application and place it in a known place such as desktop
You can find the desired application by searching for it on Start menu
Once you find it there, the easiest way to create shortcut is Right click on the program -> Send to -> Desktop (Create shortcut)
After that you will be able to see the newly created shortcut in the desktop
Then go to Start menu -> All programs -> Start Up
This folder may already contain few shortcuts
If you place a shortcut in this folder, it will automatically launch on windows start up
The easiest way to open this folder in windows explorer is Start menu -> All programs -> Start up -> Right click -> Open
Then it will open in Windows explorer, the file browser
Now you are just one step behind. Move your previously created shortcut to this folder. You may drag and drop or Cut and Paste.
Then you are done! Next time you boot your computer, on windows start up this application will be launched automatically.
You can add any application shortcut in this folder the same way.
Advanced Tips
This is not the only way for you to launch an application on windows start up. You may have observed there are some applications which run on start up but not there in “Startup” folder such as Skype.
They are using Windows Registry to get it launched on startup.
Launching too many applications on startup will increase the boottime of your computer.
If you want to manage entire start up applications go to Start menu -> Type “msconfig”
It will give you below window and in there you can control all the startup applications.
If there is a program you want to opt out from windows startup remove the tick, click OK and reboot the computer
Keep your Windows startup folder clean and remove all the unwanted programs using System configuration as mentioned above. This will help you to launch only highly required applications on start up in a highly performance optimized way.
