Clean up your Gmail Inbox Automatically

Gmail has always had an excellent spam filter that keeps junk messages out of your Inbox. Then, earlier this week, Google added a reverse feature that is quite unique to Gmail – it’s called the Priority Inbox.
Priority Inbox is like having a personal secretary whose job is to sort your incoming mail based on importance. She knows about your friends, your colleagues and other people with whom you interact regularly and can therefore categorize your email accordingly.
Priority Inbox is something similar – it’s an intelligent, self-learning filter that automatically puts your most important email messages at the top of your Inbox so that you may deal with them first. The feature is now live for both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts.

Sort your Emails by Priority

Priority Inbox has one limitation – it works with incoming emails only and doesn’t really care about the hundreds and thousands of messages that are lying in your Inbox unattended.
I have been testing an impressive web app called Other Inbox that brings much need order to your existing Gmail Inbox and looks like a perfect complement to Google’s Priority Inbox.

Other Inbox scans your mailbox for less-important emails and sorts them into relevant categories. For instance, email alerts from CNN, BBC, Google News, etc. would go into the News folder while messages from Amazon, iTunes, etc. will find their place in the Shopping folder.
You just have to authorize Other Inbox to access your Gmail account once and it does the rest automatically. Other Inbox is reasonably good at categorizing your emails but you also have the option to choose your own labels (see next screenshot).

Depending up the size of your inbox, it might take anywhere between 5-10 minutes for the whole process to complete.
I have used this service with my Gmail and Google Apps mail accounts and the results have been fairly impressive. Now if I ever want to clear my inbox of all notifications from Twitter and Facebook, I can simply open the “Social Media” label and empty it with a click.
That said, a lot of us will obviously not feel very happy sharing our mailboxes with a third-party. Now they do have a privacy policy in place and you can always manually revoke access to sites that are authorized to access your Gmail and Google Account

How to Add Speech Recognition to your Website

Your website pages probably contain a few text fields that require user input. For instance, your site may have a search box where people type in search queries, a comment form (commonly found in blogs) while some sites have a contact form that visitors can use to quickly send a message to the author /webmaster.
The visitors to your website currently need to use the keyboard to enter text in the various input fields but wouldn’t it be nice if you could also offer them an alternate form of input where they can just speak instead of typing?
Well all you need to do is add an extra word – highlighted in red - to your existing search code and your site will able to accept voice based input.

Add Speech Input to your Search Box

<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
 <input type="text" name="q" size="30" x-webkit-speech />
 <input type="submit" value="Google Search" />
</form>

Try a live demo - click the microphone icon, speak and hit enter:  

You may also find a live speech-enabled search box on the site’s homepage. When you are done speaking, the audio is sent to Google servers where it gets transcribed and delivered as plain text.
Currently, only Google Chrome supports the HTML speech input API and thus, the microphone icon will only be visible to users who are accessing your site through Chrome. If they are using a different browser, they’ll see the standard search box.
The speech input attribute that does all the magic - x-webkit-speech - works with <input> fields only but there’s an easy workaround that will help you enable voice support for any other text field the <textarea> tag.

Add Speech Input to any Textarea like Comment Forms

Speech input for textarea - click the microphone icon and talk:  




The code looks something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  function transcribe(words) {
    document.getElementById("speech").value = words;
    document.getElementById("mic").value = "";
    document.getElementById("speech").focus();
  }
</script>

<textarea cols="50" id="speech" ></textarea>
<input id="mic" onwebkitspeechchange="transcribe(this.value)" x-webkit-speech>

Internally, when you click the microphone icon and speak, the transcribed text still goes into the <input> field but with the help of a JavaScript function, a copy of that text is instantly sent to the textarea as well.
The above trick will come handy in case you wish to voice-enable the comment form or the email form of your website that accept long-form text.

Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results

Would you like to monitor Google search results for a particular query in your favorite RSS News Reader? You have two options depending on what you would like to monitor.
Option A: RSS Feed for Fresh Results
If you are ego-surfing and would like to know as new web pages get added to Google Search around a particular query, a good bet is the feed option in Google Alerts.

Type your query in the search box, choose “Everything” for type, choose “All Results” for Volume and set “Feed” as the Delivery Method. Google will create an RSS feed of web search results that you can subscribe to in Google Reader or any other RSS Reader.
You may refer to the Google Alerts tutorial to write more advanced search queries.
Option B: RSS Feed for All Google Search Results
A limitation with feeds created using “Google Alerts” is that the feed won’t include all results. In fact, the first time you create a feed, it is likely to be empty and results would be added as Google discovers and indexes new content for that search query.
If you would like to have an RSS Feed for all search results that appear on the front page on Google, irrespective of the time when those page were added to Google, use the following method:

Go to code.google.com/apis/console and sign-in using your existing Google Account. Click the “API Access” link in the left sidebar and the copy your unique Google API key to the clipboard.
#3: Now replace the API_KEY and QUERY in the following URL with your own values and your RSS feed for Google Search is ready for use. If you query contains multiple words, you may simple use the + symbol (as in london+riots+2011).

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?alt=atom&cx=010722013183089041389:ab5yj_rbe5q&key=API_Key&q=Query

The above URL points to regular feed that you can subscribe to in any news reader (screenshot). Also, these are regular Google search queries so you may also use advanced search operators like site:, inurl or even the undocumented Around operator.
The only limitation is that you can call this URL more than 100 times in a day. However, if you enable billing inside the Google API Console, the free limit will be upgraded to 200 search queries per day.
An easier alternative for creating RSS feeds would have been to use screen scraping in combination with Yahoo! Pipes or Google Docs but unfortunately, Google search servers seem to deny screen scraping requests.

Why is Facebook so Blue in Color?

This is original design of Facebook when it was called thefacebook.com – you were required to have an .edu email address to even open an account on Facebook.

This is Facebook now – open for all and 500 million people are using it already.

Why is Facebook Blue?

Facebook has gone through some major redesigns in the past few years but one part that has more or less stayed the same in all those years is the site’s blue color.
Everything is so blue about Facebook right from the sign-up page to the logo, their mobile app and even the site pop-ups that have shades of blue. Why?
I was recently listening to an episode of Twig where host Leo Laporte pointed to this New Yorker story on Mark Zuckerberg that seems to explain why Facebook is all blue in color.
The young Facebook founder is color blind but can see blue:

Colors don’t matter much to Zuckerberg; a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook’s dominant color, because, as he said, “blue is the richest color for me - I can see all of blue.”

Blue – The Web's favorite color

Facebook is not the only Internet brand the loves blue. An interesting study by Color Lovers has revealed that blue is the most popular and dominant color among the top 100 sites in the world followed by the red color.
Update: Emil Kostov sends this note on why Facebook maybe sticking with blue:

It is part of their well planned Marketing plan. Most colors distract and make the human eye focus on them while blue act as a transparent palette for 65% of time spending watching the main background aka index space. It is well known also that blue color is the nirvana for the brain, as well green. Well, their choice make the competition envy most of the time.

How to Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS

It's a long weekend and you're happy because you'll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It's a sinking feeling because there're so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there's no point calling them for help.
So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that's not required - just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.
There's no magic here, it's the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.
It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you're AFK (Away From Keyboard).
Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.
Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to "Protect my Updates".
Let's get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

How to Send Commands to the Remote Computer

Now that your basic configuration is done, it's time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.
By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer. (Also see: Post to Twitter via Email)
By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.
By IM: Add the Twitter bot - twitter@twitter.com - to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.
By Web:If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

Download Files, Capture Remote Screenshots & more..

While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well.
For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home.
Here's a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC - they're case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.
Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I've come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what's happening within the confines of your PC when you're not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web (see example).
 
ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.
Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download <url> : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.
GetFile <filepath> : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don't know the file page, use the command GetFileList <drivename> to get a list of file folders on that drive.
GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You'll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill <process id> to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.
Conclusion:
TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there's scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it's not "instant". The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour.
And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.

Write an Email Message Using QR Codes

QR Codes offer an easy way to transfer information information from any screen – like your computer desktop, display window at a retail store or even the ads in a newspaper – to your mobile phone.
You may use QR codes to send all kinds of text-only data to a mobile including web page URLs, email addresses, business cards, postal addresses and even phone numbers. For instance, scan the above QR image and you can instantly open this site on your mobile phone without typing a single character. Such a convenience!
Other than plain text, do you know that you can write a full email message inside a QR code – when people scan the QR image, the message will open right into their email program ready for sending. To get an idea, try scanning the following QR code with your mobile phone:

You can compose an email message in QR code using either the mailto syntax that is used in HTML web pages or using the MATMSG identifier.
To write an email message as a QR Code, you need to write it in the following format:

MATMSG:
TO:john@example.com;
SUB:My comments on your story;
BODY:I just finished reading your story on QR codes. 

[Insert feedback / comments here]

Thanks
[Your Name];;

Your email message will have three parts – the TO address of the recipient, the SUBJECT of the email and the BODY of the message (notice the semicolons). You may also insert new paragraphs in the message body as in the example above.
Once the template is ready, just paste that text into a QR Code Generator. A QR code can store up to 4,296 characters so even your lengthy email messages will fit in easily.

How to Setup a Whitelist in Gmail

Have you ever come across a situation where you were expecting an important email from a known sender but the mail never made it to your Inbox? Instead, Gmail had incorrectly classified that mail as spam and thus moved it to the junk mail folder.
Gmail filters are pretty awesome at detecting spam but they do sometimes make mistakes. So how can you prevent Gmail from marking mails from certain legitimate senders as spam?

How to Whitelist an Email Sender in Gmail

There are two ways to whitelist email addresses, or even web domains, in Gmail.
One, you should add the email addresses of all the known contacts to your Google Contacts list. Google will almost always deliver messages to your Inbox when the 'From:' address of the message is listed in your Google Contacts database.
The other thing you can do is create a manual whitelist in Gmail to ensure that email messages from certain senders are never ever marked as Spam. You can in fact whitelist entire domains so that messages from your colleagues reach your Inbox irrespective of whether you have added them to your Google Contacts or not.
Here’s how you can whitelist email addresses and domains in Gmail:
Step 1: In Gmail, click the “Create a Filter” link which is placed just next to the search box.
Step 2: In the From: field, enter the email addresses, domain names or even actual names of people who you would like to whitelist. You can separate multiple entries using OR (in Caps) or with the bar (|) sign.
Step 3: Once your filter is ready, click Next and select “Never Send it to Spam.”
That’s it! Now messages that match the above criteria will always get delivered to your Inbox and won’t ever be marked as spam.

Trivia: Did you know that Windows Live Hotmail offers a safe senders list where you can put email addresses and domains of known contacts and Hotmail will never mark messages originating from these addresses as spam. That’s much easier than setting up a whitelist filter in Gmail.

Yahoo! Brings Full-Length Bollywood Movies to your Computer Screen

A few months ago, YouTube India launched a new box office channel where one can watch popular movies from the Indian cinema every month. YouTube already had a huge library of Hindi and regional films online but the box office channel is more about showcasing the blockbuster hits.
Now Yahoo! is also getting into the online movie business in India.
They have introduced a new service called MoviePlex where you can enjoy full-length Bollywood movies on your computer screen anytime, anywhere. The movie collection at this is limited but does include some popular titles.
Unlike YouTube which streams movies in both standard and HD resolutions, the movies on Yahoo! are currently available only in SD. Also, Yahoo! uses Flash Video and thus you cannot watch the movies on iPad or other devices that do not support the Flash Player.
The movies on Yahoo! India are currently available for free and there are no in-stream ads to interrupt your experiences. I however doubt if people outside India can watch these movies.

How to Remove Passwords from your PDF Files

You have a bunch of PDF files on your computer that are protected by a long and complex password. You know the passwords but it still feels inconvenient and boring typing them each time you have to open a PDF file.
Is there a tool available that can remove password protection from PDF files? Someone asked me this question on Twitter the other day and the answer is obviously yes.

Removing Password from a PDF File

There’s a free Windows utility called BeCyPDFMetaEdit that can help you remove passwords from PDF files* but without make any other change to the document. (I am not sure why the developers picked such a complex name for this useful utility).
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Launch the program and it will ask your for the location of the PDF file.
2. Before you select and open the PDF, change the mode to “Complete Rewrite.”
3. Switch to the Security tab and set the “Security System” to “No encryption.” Click the Save button and your PDF will no longer require a password to open.
[*] If you would like to test this tool but do not have a password-protected file, use this sample PDF (the password is labnol).

How To Remove Your Blog From NetworkedBlogs Facebook Application

NetworkedBlogs is a Facebook application to integrate your blog or website with Facebook. Now since most of the people are using facebook share to promote their blog on Facebook, NetworkedBlogs is not much useful.
I decided to remove HackTrix from NetworkedBlogs but was surprised to see that its difficult to delete the blog from this app. I had to search the web and read the documentation at NetworkedBlogs to find out how to delete the blog from this app.
To save you some time, here’s the procedure to remove your blog from NetworkedBlogs,

Case 1 – If You Have Less Then 50 Followers

1. Go to the application page, and click on your “Profile” link on top.
2. Scroll down a bit to find your blog under the “Blogs I Write” title, and click on the blog you want to remove from this app.
3. Now on the blog page, click on the Edit Details link,

4. On the details page, look for the “delete blog” link in the bottom right corner. Just click on it and your blog will be deleted from NetworkedBlogs.

Case 2 – If You Have More Then 50 Followers

1. Go to the NetworkedBlogs page, and click on your “Profile” link.
2. Scroll down on the profile page to find your blog. It will be under “Blogs I Write” section. Now, click on the blog you want to remove from this app.
3. On the blog page, click on the “Edit Details” link,

4. Change the name of the blog to DELETE.
5. Get the email address of NetworkedBlogs support from the bottom of page and send them an email to delete the blog. It will be deleted in less then 24 hours.

Stay Away From Malicious Facebook Apps

Recently there’s been a flood of rogue Facebook apps that steal your personal information and use it for malicious purpose, like sending you spam mails, forcing you to fill surveys, selling this info to unsolicited advertisers and so on.
Most of these apps start by promising to show you a shocking video. You are tempted so you click to watch the video. You will be then redirected to an application’s page and you have to authorize this application to use your data if you want to see this video. Once you authorize the application, ‘they’ get access to all your personal data and are free to use it in any way they want. They will also post the same video link to your profile, so that all your friends will also get into the trap. See this video from Sophos that shows the life cycle of this Facebook worm live,

How To Stay Away From Malicious and Rogue Facebook Applications

1. Never click on any untrusted links on your Friends’ wall posts. Obviously messages like the following aren’t posted by your friends’ but rogue facebook apps,

I am shocked! The teacher nearly kild this boy: http://bit.ly/aWeBMl – Worldwide scandal!

Tempting words in the messeges like scandal, hottest etc. should be enough to convince you that its a spam message and you should not click it.
2. If you have already added any application that you don’t trust, then remove it immediately. Check how to delete any application from your Facebook account.
3. If you see these kind of spam links on any of your friends’ profile then alert her of the consequences and ask her to delete that post and the rogue application immediately. You can redirect her to this page so that she can learn all about the issue.
Its good to socialize and make new friends using the online social networking platforms like Facebook but make sure that your personal information is not compromised in the process.
Share this information with your friends and help make the web a safe place!

Is it Possible to Find Who Has Visited / Viewed Your Facebook Profile?

Every now and then I get a message, or see a wall post by a friend about an app that can track profile visitors on Facebook. Is it possible to track the visitors or views on your Facebook profile? Let’s find out.
In an FAQ, Facebook clearly states that its impossible to track profile views or visitors. Any application that does that is not accepted by Facebook as it against their TOS.

Can I know who’s viewing my profile or how often it’s being viewed?
No, Facebook does not provide the ability to track who is viewing your profile, or parts of your profile, such as your photos. Applications by outside developers cannot provide this functionality, either. Applications that claim to give you this ability will be removed from Facebook for violating policy. You can report applications that provide untrustworthy experiences by clicking the “Report Application” at the bottom of the application’s About page, or by clicking “Report” at the bottom of any canvas page within the application.

So basically when you get any message or see any wall posts about any Facebook application that can track profile views and visitors, chances are that these are automatically generated from already scammed Facebook profile.
If you click on any of these links and add these apps, a similar status will be automatically posted on your wall, thus making your friends also vulnerable. Check this post on malicious Facebook apps to learn more.
Conclusion: Its impossible to find out who has visited or viewed your Facebook profile, so stop looking for any app or method that does that.
Note: In case you have already clicked on any scam link or added a scam Facebook app to your account, remove that app from your Facebook account immediately to prevent further damage.

How To Delete or Remove Any Application From Your Facebook Account

There are thousands of different applications available on Facebook and I am sure you get multiple invites everyday from your friends to join new applications. There is nothing wrong with having too many applications added to your profile. Its just that,
1. They clutter your Facebook stream/updates. And sometimes it gets really annoying.
2. Applications have full access to your data, and some applications are developed solely to gather your personal information so that they can send you spam emails.
So if you want a clean Facebook updates page and want to keep your private information really private then you should delete any unwanted applications from your facebook account. Here’s the procedure-

How To Delete or Remove Any Application From Your Facebook Account

Once you are logged into Facebook, click on the Account link in the top right corner, and choose Application Settings from the drop down menu. This will take you to a page where all your applications will be listed. To remove any application, just click on the X button in front of it. Facebook will immediately confirm if you really want to remove this application. Just click on the Remove button and the application will be immediately deleted from your Facebook profile.

Repeat this for all the application that you want to delete. Enjoy the clutter free and private Facebook environment!

How Can I Delete My Shaadi.com Account/Profile?

Have you got the job you were looking for and now don’t want to receive any emails from monster.com? Its really easy to unsubscribe from monster.com email newsletter.
Open any email message you got from Monster.com, and scroll down to find the unsubscription link,

Click on this link, and select the option that says, “Yes, please remove my email address from this email list”. Then click on the Submit button.

That’s it. Note that it may take upto 10 days for this change to take effect, so you may get an email or two from monster.com for the next 10 days after you have unsubscribed. But you will never get any email from monster.com after that.

How To Delete Monster.com Account

If you have got the job you were looking for, you may want to stop receiving emails from monster.com. But sometimes, even after you unsubscribe from monster.com emails, they still keep sending the emails.
Even if you report these email messages as spam, they somehow still land in your inbox, instead of the spam folder. Its probably because of the high trust of the monster.com.
So, the best way to get rid of monster.com emails is to delete the monster.com account permanently. To do so, login to your monster.com account, and go to, http://my.monster.com/Account/Settings.aspx, and click on Cancel Membership.

That’s it. You just deleted your monster.com account

Decide Who Appears in the Friends Box on Your Facebook Profile Page

There is a friends box on your Facebook profile page which displays a random list of Friends every time someone checks your profile. Do you know that you can choose who appears in this friends box? Its really easy…

Make Sticky Friends For The Friends Box

Click on the pencil icon on the top right corner of the friends box on your profile page to edit it. Then decide how many friends should appear in the box. After this, click in the box that says, Always show these friends, and just start typing the names of the friends you want to be ‘sticky’. Facebook will auto suggest the names as you type. The friends you choose here will always appear in your Friends box. In other words, they will be sticky.

If the number of friends that you want to display is higher then your chosen sticky friends, then the rest of the friends will be selected randomly.

Find All Pending Friend Requests on Facebook

Do you know that you can get details about all the people who have not yet responded to your friend request. Here’s the procedure,

Get Pending Friend Requests on Facebook

1. Go to Accounts > Edit Friends.
2. On the Edit Friends page, click on the Friends List (its located in the left sidebar).
3. Now in the Friends list, you can see all your pending friend requests as the people who have not yet responded to your request will be labeled with, Friend Request Pending.

Just visit any of these pending friend’s profile, and it will display the “Awaiting friend confirmation” button instead of “Add as Friend” link.

How To Find Your Orkut Friends on Facebook

If you are from India, then you probably started your online life from Orkut. But many of us have since migrated to Facebook, as its an international community, unlike Orkut which is popular only in India and Brazil.
If you left Orkut a long time ago, here’s a great new feature added to Facebook, using which you can reconnect to all your Orkut friends on Facebook. Its called, Orkut friend finder.
Using Orkut friend finder, you can find all your Orkut buddies on Facebook, and then add them as friends. You can also invite those who are not yet on Facebook using this feature.

Using Orkut friend finder on Facebook

To get started, log in to Facebook, and click on Friends link in the left side. You will see all the pending friend requests on this page. Scroll down to find a section that says, Find your friends, wherever they are. Here, just look for the Orkut logo and then click on the link that says, Find Friends. Facebook will then ask you your Orkut’s login details to import all your Orkut Friends.

Just enter the details and wait for few second until Facebook imports all the data. After the import process is complete, Facebook will show you all your Orkut Friends that are also on Facebook. You can add some, or all of them as Friend immediately. After this, Facebook will display the rest of your friends who are not yet on Facebook. You can then invite them to Facebook.

How To Invite Your Friends and Family Members To Google+

Since you are on this page, you are probably already in Google+. Now you may want to invite your friends and family members into Google+.
Sending invites for Google+ is really easy. Just click on the Invite People to Join Google+ link in the right panel of your Google+ homepage.
In case you don’t see that link on your Google+ homepage, you need to follow an indirect way to invite people to Google+.
First create a post. You can write anything in it, but it would be helpful for your friends and family members if your write that this post is about inviting them to Google+.
Now click on Add circles or people to share with… link below it and type the email addresses of all the people you want to invite. Then click on Share button.
All your invitees will then receive an email with your post. At the end of this email, there will be a button saying Learn more about Google+. Clicking on this button will take your invitees to the Google+ registration page.

Note that Google+ invitations are limited per hour. So sometimes clicking on that button may not work for your invitees. If this is the case, then tell them that they can try again after one hour using the same link.

How To Pause Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in Windows 7

If you see a BSOD or a Blue screen of death on your computer, then the first step to troubleshoot the issue behind it is to write the error code that appears on the blue screen.

However, by default, most Windows systems restart automatically in case of serious errors that normally cause a BSOD. So you see the BSOD for a couple of seconds and the computer restarts instantly making it impossible to write the error code.
To pause the BSOD, you have to disable the automatic restart of Windows in case an error occurs. To do that, right click on My Computer and select Properties. Then select Advanced System Settings from the right panel.

On Advanced System Settings window, un-check the Automatically Restart option.

That’s it. Now Windows will not restart automatically in case of any serious issue and will pause at the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) screen.

FREE US NUMBER

Do you need a US phone number even if you are located outside US? Here’s a simple way to get a US phone number, from any country in the world, for free.

First Get a SIP number:
To get a free US local phone number, you must get a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) number. You don’t need to know what is a SIP number to get a US phone number, but if you are interested, check this page.
There are many services that provide free SIP number. Two of them are listed below along with the detailed explanation on registration process. Use any one of the to get your SIP number.

Go to CallCentric and sign up for a free account. After sigining up click on the confirmation link they send you on your email address to confirm your email address.
After email address confirmation, fill your country code and city. If you don’t know the country code for your country, get it from the country calling code finder. Now agree to their terms and click on the Sign up button.
Click on the link that says Go to My CallCentric and copy your CallCentric number. It will be in the format 1777**

Go to Tpad and sign up for a free account. Unlike CallCentric, they ask you for all the information like you name, address,etc. while registration.
While registration, you must provide your phone number in international format. That is, you must add your country calling code before your phone number. To get the calling code for your country, check the country calling codes page.
After registration is complete, you will get an email from Tpad which will have your SIP number. Copy this SIP number as it will be used in the next step.

Get US Local Phone Number using your SIP number:
Now that you have your SIP number (using either of the method explained above), open a new tab in your browser and go to phone.ipkall.com.
Set the account type as SIP. In SIP username field, paste your SIP number. Keep the default value for the area code and the # of ringing seconds. For the host name, email and password:

• If you got your SIP number from Callcentric, use in.callcentric.com for host name. Use the same email address and password that you used while registering for Callcentric.
• If you got your SIP number from Tpad, use sipx.tpad.com for host name. Use the same email address and password that you used while registering for Tpad.

Click on the submit button to complete the registration at ipkall. You will get an email from ipkall within few minutes containing your own US phone number!
Activate and use your local US phone number to get incoming calls:
Now that you have your own local US phone number, you can easily get incoming calls from your clients and relatives that are based in US. To start receiving incoming call, you must configure a SIP client on your mobile phone or computer.
If you have an Android phone or iPhone, look for SIP Phone apps on Android marketplace or iTunes respectively. For Symbian phones (Nokia phones) you can configure SIP on it without any third party apps.

ALL IZZ WELL

WELCOME