How to Capture Screenshots of iPhone and iPod Touch

December 26, 2008 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · Comment 

How to Capture Screenshots of iPhone and iPod Touch

How to capture screenshot of your iPhone or iPod Touch’s screen? The good news is, its simple and third party software is not required. The built in iPhone 3G and iPod Touch screen capture utility works right out of the box. Below are the steps:

1. Press the front button on the iPhone. (Do not release after step 2)
2. Hold down the power button on top of iPhone simultaneously (for 1 - 2 seconds).
3. The iPhone / iPod Touch screen will flash.
4. Your screenshot is saved in a new folder under “Photos”.

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Extract and Save Images from PDF to jpg, tif, gif, png, and tga

November 22, 2008 · Filed Under Software · Comment 

How to extract images from a PDF file? Screen capture is an option, but not desirable because it takes too much time stitching the images together. There are several software in the market, most of them are sharewares, only a handful are worth mentioning and the best PDF Image extract software is Some PDF Image Extract.

It is free with no limitation, no advertisement, no spyware, and it is small, less than 1MB.

Extract Images from PDF to JPG

The drawback, it doesn’t tell you where it puts the files jpg images extracted, it can be confusing at the beginning but you’ll get used to it. Note: Images extracted can be found in the same directory where your pdf file is located.

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Google Book Downloader - Download Books From Google Books

August 18, 2008 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · 34 Comments 

Google Book Downloader - Download Books From Google Books

Stumbled upon this web application, it amazed me with its ability to extract and list down every single page from Google Books. I can’t be certain if this is considered illegal, but I don’t see any difference between viewing it from my browser and viewing it from an image manager.

As the name implies, Google Book Downloader does exactly what it says, it will give you a list of url of the images, what you need next is a download manager such as Download Accelerator Plus or Flashget.

Downloading the images appears to be breeze free, it was not until half way through the process Google Books decided to cut me off, possibility they system detects an ongoing unusual activity or mass bandwidth consumption that does not justify a normal reading behavior. Superman?

Is it illegal? Well, I’m won’t be too concern about that, the million dollar question is, is it worth the trouble? Just have a look at the screen shot below.

It’s like downloading a broken mp3 where it skips a beat or two every 20 seconds. Nothing is more annoying that missing pages in a book, but then again, these missing pages does not apply across the board. Having said that, do you happen to know that copyright laws are meant to last for 50 years only? This means a huge number of books that falls within this copyright free category are copyright free, good old books such as Oliver Twist and many more.

While you’re busy exploring Google Books, why not treat yourself to some free magazines?

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Watch Online Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony and Games Free

August 17, 2008 · Filed Under Sports · Comment 

Attention worldwide user, watch Beijing 2008 Olympics Games and Closing Ceremony online.

Watch Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony and Games Online Free

Now you can watch the games and closing ceremony online for free if you happen to live outside of US. Unlike NBC with its exclusive rights in the US, CCTV Olympics is offering all internet surfers the chance to watch the games online for free, anyone and everyone regardless of which country you’re from. The only catch is, the website is in Mandarin, fear not, I’ve created a step by step tutorial on which button to click. Only a few simple steps, here goes:

Watch Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony and Games Online Free
STEP 01 : Visit CCTV Olympics website, sign in with your msn account ‘Step 01′, once you’re done, hit the orange colour button labeled ‘Step 02′. Please note that this could be a phishing website, a phishing website does no harm to your comp but its main intention is to steal information. I strongly suggest you create a new msn account and sign in! Please take my advice seriously, get a new msn account.
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Watch Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony and Games Online Free
STEP 02 : You’ll be redirected to a new page as shown above, wait for it to load.
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Watch Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony and Games Online Free
STEP 03 : You’ll be greeted with a matrix like menu as shown above, it won’t be hard to figure about the type of games that each button represent. Red means ‘Live’, Green means ‘Re-runs’
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Watch Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony and Games Online Free
STEP 04 : Select the channel, please note the installation of an unknown file is required, click on the orange link if it does appear and download. If you’re unsure about the purpose of the file and its functions, I’ve done a virus scan on it. View VirusTotal online report on CCTVRegOcx. For your information, Virustotal is a service that used 32 different types of virus engine and databases to analyze suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines.
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virus scan online norton macafee free

virus scan online norton macafee free

Remember the 5 mascots? Apparently some guy/girl decided to spice things up, I have to admit that it is way much more attractive. What say you? Its a wallpaper, click on the image for a higher resolution.

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Free magazines on Fashion, Photography, Playboy and more

August 10, 2008 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · Comment 

Free Playboy, Penthouse magazine and more

Here is a little tutorial on how to read 20 different magazines for free legally online, yes, you heard me loud and clear, it is totally legal. The pro and cons of this free service are:

  • No subscription charges
  • Only requires Firefox or Safari browser
  • Its free and the content is the same
  • High resolution images for easy reading
  • Not all issues are up to date, usually a month or two behind the actual release

Now, I bet you must be wondering why they are making these magazines available for free? Magazine publishers do not make a single dime from printing magazines, in fact, they’re subsidizing the magazine so that it is affordable to everyone, what they want in return are eyeballs, the more circulation they have they more advertising dollars they get, simple as that. The following titles are available for free:

  • Reader’s Digest
  • Macworld
  • Macworld Espanol
  • PC Magazine
  • Technology Review
  • Lonely Planet
  • Outside
  • Popular Photography
  • Saveur
  • US News and World Report
  • Men’s Health
  • Kiplingers
  • Popular Mechanics
  • Car and Driver
  • Viv
  • Elle
  • Playboy
  • Penthouse

What is the catch? Truth is, there are none. Zinio is a company that sells the soft copy version of almost every magazines available in the market for half the price. Currently they’re giving out free magazines to iPhone users, and in order to read these magazines for free using your laptop or desktop, you’ll need to tell the website that you’re browser (user agent) is an iPhone. Here goes:

Apple Safari Browser

Step 1 - Go to ‘Edit’ then ‘Preferences’

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Step 2 - A new Window/Dialog box will pop up, under the advance tab, check the ’show develop menu in menu bar’

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Step 3 - a new menu (develop) will appear in the menu bar, select ‘Develop’ then ‘User Agent’ and finally change the user agent to ‘mobile safari 1.1.3 - iPhone’

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Step 4 - Visit www.zinio.com/iphone for the free magazines.
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Mozilla Firefox 3 Browser

For firefox user, install User Agent Switcher plugin, this plugin will adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of Firefox, simply change the user agent to iPhone and visit the following url - www.zinio.com/iphone

Download the entire magazine for offline reading

Digital Quest has a cool tutorial on how to browse the magazine offline, no hack or crack or any pirated software needed, just a simple and legal tools available, think out of the box. How to download magazines from Zinio.

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Watch Beijing Olympic 2008 with P2P Torrent

August 7, 2008 · Filed Under Sports · 3 Comments 

Authorized videos on YouTube are made available after three hours after the event and it is only available for the United States internet user. Non US citizen can still access the site using a proxy, but the three hours delay is a put off.

P2P Streaming is big in China, in the land of pirates where law and order in the world of internet does not exist, P2P has taken a new life by itself and evolve way much faster than the European and America counterpart due to strict internet laws.

Here are a list of possible streaming and P2P sites that are willing to serve up TV feeds:

If installing software is not the answer, do give FreeTube a try, it seems as if FreeTube took all the online channels available and organized them in one place. Because of the voting system, you’ll find most channels do work. Here are a some examples:

  • Fox 5
  • CNBC Awaaz
  • MTV (Uber, China, Brand New, ect)
  • ESPN
  • Toonami
  • BBC World
  • CourtTV
  • C-SPAN 1-3

Read more about the Proposal for Beijing Olympic 2008 Stadium by various architects and the technical difficulties faced with the construction of the Beijing Olympic 2008 Stadium also known as the ‘Bird Nest’.

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9rules is open for submissions again

August 6, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · Comment 

9 rules design logo

9 Rules is open for submissions again, if you happen to have great content, do give it a try and who knows, you might be short listed as one of the many potential blogger out there.

Round 7 as it is known as begins Wednesday August 6th, the submission date ends at 11:59pm EST. Good luck.

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How to increase your google adsense earnings?

July 20, 2008 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · Comment 

How to increase your google adsense earnings

Blogging for money is not my cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean I hate the idea of making money online, who does? Lately, I’ve noticed a large number of people decided to blog not because they enjoyed blogging but wanted to make a living out of it, and that really annoys me. Reminds me of a good friend of mine, when the blogging world was in its infant years, I proposed the idea of co-blogging, with no intention of making anything out of it, but he rejected my idea, reason is because it is a waste of time.

Fast forward 2 years, he came talking to me and wanted to know how blog works and told me he bought a book - ‘Google Adsense for dummies‘, and just like yesteryear, I politely rejected his proposal on the ‘idea’ of co-blogging with him. His sudden passion in blogging was due to the fact that he overheard I’m making a living out of it.



Anyway, GeckoandFly was meant to be a collaboration between my friends (non-tech savvy people) by it did not materialized, glad that it didn’t worked out, if it does than my earnings would be equally divided among them. Three years of blogging and numerous trial and errors, I conclude that the art of monetizing your blog comes in many forms, depending on the blogging platform, keywords, language and many more, I would like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the key issues or shall I say some really simple technique that all newbie should know.

1. Insert Ads into your post.

This is by far the easier way to increase your CTR, but be cautious that just like a sword, it cuts both ways because it can be potentially annoying to your readers knowing that you are bombarding them with advertisement. Some of my favorite formats are the 468 x 60px, 300 x 300px, and 125 x 125px. Read AdesBlog.

2. Filter unwanted or low paying ads

Rumors has it that the author of AdsBlacklist own numerous spammy websites and the only for his splog to appear in adsense is by blocking out the competitions, thus born AdsBlacklist, basically he provide a list of his competitor’s splog to be filtered by the publisher. Well, it does works to a certain extend.

3. Ping your blog, submit to all the search engines.

Based on my 3 years of experience, pinging you blog and submit it to every known search engine does not guarantee traffic, and in most cases you get spammed in returned.

Submit to Google
Submit to Yahoo
Submit to MSN
Submit to Baidu (China’s biggest search engine)

Ping Moreover - http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml

Ping MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com

Ping ASK - http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml

Ping Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.YOUR-NAME.com/sitemap.gz

Ping Yahoo - http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=Yahoo&url=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml

4. Sitemaps and SEO

Submit your sitemap.xml manually to Google, MSN, and Yahoo, it is a great way to monitor the keywords and your ranking in Google and Yahoo, highly recommended. The following table lists the Sitemap submission URLs for several major search engines:

Google Webmaster Central
Yahoo Site Explorer
MSN Webmaster Tools

If you are using Wordpress, then you should install these plugins:

All in One SEO - It works, based on both my blogs’ traffic, I noticed a 10 - 15% increase in term of pageviews.

Google XML Sitemaps - Will generate a sitemap.xml automatically whenever you update your post and comments, it pings all the three major search engine as well. A highly recommended plugin.

I’m not a SEO expert, neither am I a rich millionaire with tons of money lying around on the carpet. Just an ordinary kid making some spare cash for my college education. Whatever I wrote here are pretty basic in term of monetizing your blog, Google for more.

5. Drop Comments

By dropping your comments with a link back to other blogs, you’re building a social presence in the blog sphere, make it a habit, I would say at least 3 comments for each for your write.

p.s. If your new to the world of blogging, do read ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, it is very informative for beginners.

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