All the geeky stuff
Posts tagged tech tips
Happy Pi day
Mar 14th
We geeks and mathematics around the world celebrate March 14th as Pi day.
=3.1415926535… Today is also the birthday of Albert Einstein. (14 March 1879) We celebrate Pi minute also, which occurs on March 14 at 1:59pm.
The logic behind Pi minute is truncated to seven decimal places – 3.1415926 that is March 14, 1:59:26pm is Pi minute. (I published this post on 1:59pm)
Pi day was founded by Larry Shaw who is a now-retired physicist at the Exploratorium and he still helps out with the celebrations.
Ok. Wait a minute. How exactly do we celebrate Pi day? … By eating pie and talking about in geek terms. You can also purchase Pi stuff like T-shirts, clocks, mini pi buttons, Pi mugs for your geek friends or yourself.
Happy Pi Day!!!
Become a Google Ninja
Jan 13th
Manage you Gmail email Ninja style.
There’s White belt, Green belt, black belt, and then there the Gmail master.
This stuff is just lots of Gmail tips to save time, increase your productivity, and manage your email efficiently. Start with the tips that are right for you, based on how much email you get each day.
In White Belt there are some simple stuff like -
- Use stars to indicate a note is special.
- Reply by chat.
- Organize your email with labels.
- Clean up your inbox using “Move to”.
- Search your mail instead of sorting.
- Archive messages instead of deleting.
- Import your email and contacts from old address.
- Spice up your inbox with a theme.
- Help get rid of spam.
In Green Belt -
- Using voice and video chat, To-do lists.
- Use filters to control the flow of incoming email.
- Highlight important emails using filters and colored labels.
- Send email from your phone.
- Preview attachments without downloading them.
- Avoid email gaffes with undo send.
- Updating status message in chat.
- Use Attachment Detector.
- Use vacation responder, Emoticons.
- Save notes in your drafts.
Things get a little more advance in Black Belt -
- Use keyboard shortcuts, Search operators.
- Filter email with personalized email address.
- Use indicators, Gears, add multiple attachments.
- Add “EMO” to the subject of one-liner messages.
- Set up canned responses.
- Use quick links and preview services like YouTube, Flickr etc.
- Send and archive in one step and send to receive from multiple address.
- Pictures!
- Bring Google Calendar and Docs to Gmail.
- Send SMS from Gmail.
- Sign out remotely.
- Personalize RSS feed.
- Access your mail via https.
- Search for superstars by name.
- Use Gmail on your domain.
- Shift click multiple messages.
- Set Gmail as your default email client.
- Emphasis the importance of words in chat. (and finally)
- Quote selected text to respond to a long thread.
You can read the tips in detail here and download the download the PDF here.
Make Firefox 3.5 faster
Jul 17th
Although the performance of Firefox 3.5 is supposed to be fast, the startup is somewhat slow, in older computers this is more prominent. The reason for slow startup is said to be because of a change in how Firefox 3.5 gets the randomness it needs for security purposes on Windows. The procedure involves scanning some temporary folders looking for bits normally added by OS and other applications operations. Firefox 3.5 looks for more files and deeper (more subfolders) for increased randomness, but it has led to unexpected results for users with too many temporary folders or files resulting in slow startups. This is a known bug (501605) and should be corrected when Firefox 3.5.1 comes out in the next couple months.
Some things you can do to increase the startup speed is -
1. Do a clean install. This gets you a clean profile.
2. Clear temporary files. There are some ways to do this (which is not mentioned in other sites)
- a) Use CCleaner
CCleaner optimizes your PC by removing various kinds of system detritus, such as temp files, old Registry entries, and invalid shortcuts. It also helps promote privacy by deleting your browser’s URL history, cookies, and so on.
b) Manually delete all the files in these folders (some may be in use and therefore can not be removed) -
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\History
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\My Recent Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Temp\
Vista & Windows 7 users can use Disk Cleanup -
or open Run (Windows key + R) and type %temp% –> click OK and delete everything in the temp window.
You can also manually clear IE’s browsing history -
These are some of the safer ways to speed up your Firefox startup. Try it and tell me if it works for you.
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