Chat on Facebook without getting detected.

Recently Facebook made a change in its chat system and it enables the other user to know that you have seen their message.

Now you see what I mean. A sad thing, Facebook does not allow you to turn this feature off manually, but luckily the browsers today have extensions that can alter the way your browser works.

Step 1.>
Go to this website.

Step 2.>
Depending upon the browser you are using Firefox / Chrome, you will be prompted to install the extension that will then allow you to chat undetected.

 
Step 3.>

Congratulations, you just went incognito... ;- )

Yes, that's it. You are done. Now suppose I have installed the plugin on my Computer and my friend replies to the chat. Here is an actual screenshot from my friend's computer.

  

You see, my friend cannot see if I have seen the message or not...catching my rift..?? ;)

Remove background from any image

For design buffs like me...have you ever wanted to remove the background from any image..it can be any off your photograph or may be you want to apply some custom background...a nice scenery or some special monument just for experimenting or due to some purpose.

Removing background from an image can be a tedious job and we need to select every portion of the image.

Luckily, we have this online tool that lets us perform this operation easily....just drag and drop...yep...its that simple... :D

Step 1.>
Open this website in a new tab/window and come back to read the further instructions.
Clipping Magic.

Step 2.>
Just drag and drop any image..a high contrast image works best...but you can try others as well.
We will use this image

Step 3.>
Open the image in the website and you will be given some instructions how to go about...and then you will be taken to the work area. There are just 2 simple rules
-> Mark the areas you want to keep in green
-> Mark the areas you want to remove in red.
Here is a screenshot of my work halfway through. Note the green and red marks.

Step 4.>
Complete marking the areas until you get your desired image. I have added a screenshot that shows the complete work...hardly took a minute.
Note that the right side of the image gives a preview and this will be our downloaded image.

Step 5.>
Download the image and you are ready to play around with it. Here is a sample of what I did with it.
Feel free to click the image to get a bigger preview.

For any other design queries...please leave a comment. :)

Create custom shortened links

When you do a lot online there is usually a need to track which of your efforts are actually being paid attention to and which are not. One way is to track how many people are clicking on the links you post. Bit.ly is a service letting you shorten links, but did you know you can customize those links?

A Bit.ly account

The best route with this process is to create a free Bit.ly account. This will give you more options that we’ll talk about later.

The sign up steps are pretty minimum. You can put in the usual info or use Facebook or Twitter to create an account.

Once you have an account, you should see a dashboard like this.


Near the top right you will see the Puffer fish near the text box. This is where you will paste a long link to shrink it.



When you shrink a link it will look something like this.

 








See the link next to the word copy in the bottom right? This is your shortened link. If you were to copy and paste this link to anywhere, the person clicking on your link will be taken to whatever link you shrunk.

Creating a custom link

To make your own link, you can click the pencil next to the link. The box will pop up and let you type whatever you’d like in the box.

What you will want to do here is add something descriptive. If you are linking to an article you wrote about big orange spiders, you can add that as your custom link. I made a link with the end “nikoo28blog”.

Now you can easily share this link with your friends without the hassle of remembering long names... :-)

Convert file

Have you ever encountered problems like you have a pdf file but you require it as a jpeg image. The screen capture wont work because the file is large to fit in one screen.
Maybe you want to go the other way round and convert this jpeg to pdf.

What about music? You have a .wav file but want the mp3 version or the .ogg version.
What about video? You have a .flv version but want the .avi version.
Everyone has his/her own conversion needs.

Definitely one way is to have a encoding tool or a different converting tool for each type of file.

Luckily, there is a easier way... :-)

Recently I came across this excellent online tool that meets all your conversion needs.

Step 1.>
Open www.zamzar.com
The site offers a pretty simple interface in which you need to upload the file you want to convert.
Let it be any image file. Upload the file and proceed to step 2.

Step 2.>
Choose your format.

As you see, the site offers multiple options for conversions. Select your desired output and proceed.

Step 3.>
Since the site is absolutely free, they now ask you for your email address where the converted file will be sent.

Step 4.>
Click on convert and you are good to do. Depending upon the file size you will receive a download link in your inbox.
Converting was never this easy... :-)

Download a complete website

Its great to browser the internet, learn new things and often see tutorials from your favorite sites. But what in the times when you do not have internet access, or your internet is down, maybe you dint pay the bill.. :P

Lets cut the crap!!..have you ever wondered if you could download an entire website and save it later for offline browsing?
Well, IT IS POSSIBLE and even you can download your favorite website in just a few easy steps. :- )

Step 1.>
Download this software. HTTrack Website Copier.

Once downloaded and installed, proceed to the next step.

Step 2.>
Launch the software, and you will be presented with this sort of screen. Click "Next".

Step 3.>
On the next screen, Type the project name and create any category if you want to.
Now you need to select the base path. This is the path where the website will be saved on your hard disk. Remember this path as you will need it when you want to do offline browsing.

Step 4.>
Once done till here, click Next. Now is the time to add the website that you need to download. On the next screen add the URL of the website that you wish to download. If you wish to download my entire blog onto your hard disk you may enter as shown in the below screenshot.

If you are a first time user, just click on next but if you like to play around with things, you may as well click on the "Set Options" box and adjust various other settings as per your need.

Step 5.>
Once you have clicked Next, you will be presented with several optional things, like whether to shutdown the PC after the job is done and some stuff like that, you may tweak around a bit or you may simply click next to watch the software in action...

Step 6.>
Almost done now!! Click on Finish and watch as your site gets downloaded to your hard drive... : D

It can be a long process depending on the website you have chosen to download.

Once the process is complete you may navigate to the location on you hard disk and open the folder to find a file named "index.html"
Just open this file with your favorite browser and VIOLA!!...you can now browse the complete site offline...
I hope this will be helpful to you at some or the other point of time...  :- )

Please share your opinions if you enjoyed reading this post.


IMPORTANT: Please do no try to download websites like 'wikipedia'. It will begin downloading no doubt, but will take years to complete. Only proceed if you have that amount of time.