Book Review: Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography

Al Jaffee is a tireless satirist, inventor of the MAD magazine “fold-in” & my all-time favorite cartoonist. At 89, he is MAD magazine’s oldest & most prolific artist, having actively contributed to it for over five decades. His biography titled Al Jaffee's Mad Life tells the tragic story of this creator of incredibly funny cartoons and how this “master adapter” has surmounted overwhelming odds.His childhood was short-lived as he had...

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HOW TO sarcastically tell someone to google for their answer

Before Google became popular, it was common to see the expression RTFM (or in polite terms, Read The Fine Manual) used in internet forums if a poster asked a question without doing any homework. These days it is more common to see messages directing such users to Google or Bing instead of the manual.LMGTFY.com (the word LMGTFY represents the initial letters of "let me google that for you") is one among a bunch of sites that sarcastically explains how to use Google. It lets a responder create a shortened...

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How Tynt Insight works

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects.If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is...

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HOW TO make Gmail Labels act like Hotmail Folders

If you apply a Label to an email in Gmail, it will appear under both the Inbox & the Label category chosen. This is unlike in Hotmail where an email can appear only under one Folder category. To address this issue, Gmail introduced a "Move to" option that will place an email under a single Label or category. This option can help in maintaining a clutter-free, cleaner Gmail Inbox but requires manual intervention. A poster on...

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Hotmail tip - Move, Delete, Find emails originating from a specific sender with a single click

Did you know, a context menu will pop-up after two seconds if you place your mouse on any email within HotmailWith just one click on the context menu, you can then ...reply to that email without explicitly opening itfind all emails which have originated from the same email address as that of the selected emailmove all emails from the same sender to a specified folderdelete all emails which have originated from the same...

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Free eBook: The Insider's Guide to Mobile

If you are involved or interested in Mobile development, check out Tomi T Ahonen's free eBook - The Insider's Guide to Mobile. It has 11 case studies, 7 essays & exposes 8 myths.Also read Peter-Paul Koch's assessment of the Smartphone Browser Landsca...

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Track the most visited websites worldwide & by country

Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner maintains a list of the 1000 most visited websites worldwide & the top 100 websites in 20+ countries. This list is based on estimates & updated monthly.It combines information from a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features,  publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.For each site on the list, you'll be able to see:The site categoryUnique...

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Find meanings of a bunch of words at once with Google Spreadsheet

A relative recently asked me if there was a quick way to find the meanings of a list of words all at once. I use & recommend WordWeb to look up difficult words but it takes one word/phrase a time.I knew about the nifty GoogleLookup function in Google Spreadsheet that fetches "straightforward facts about specific things", but it does not fetch definitions from Google Dictionary as I had imagined. So, I turned to the ImportXML function...

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HOW TO find readability level of search results & books

Google's “Instant Preview” lets you visually preview a search result page before you actually visit a page. A new advanced search filter called Readability level now lets you predetermine whether the result pages you want to see Basic, Intermediate or Advanced. I could not find details on what methodology Google uses to judge the readability level.Amazon.com has been carrying a Text Stats feature in the "Inside This Book" section of most book-detail...

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Manipulate PDF files for free with PDFRider

PDFRider (currently in version 0.5) is an open source project on Codeplex. This utility provides a GUI for the command-line program Pdftk. It can perform the following operations on PDF files -Merge PDF documents Insert pages from PDF file to another Extract pages from a PDF document to a new document Delete pages Rotate pages Crypt and Decrypt a PDF file Burst or split a single, input PDF document into individual pagesI used it to extract summaries of chapters from a PDF eBook & then...

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HOW TO use IIS 7.5 on Windows XP, Vista with Visual Studio 2010

The free download IIS Express brings the IIS 7.x feature-set to Windows XP SP2+ (which comes with IIS 5) & Windows Vista (which hosts IIS 7). With the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (a beta is now available), enabling integration with IIS Express will be easy. IIS Express will bring the best of both existing web server options in Visual Studio - ASP.NET Development Server & the native IIS.The advantages of IIS Express paraphrased from Scott Guthrie's post -IIS Express will work with VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, will run...

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Do you live on the web?

We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're gonna live on the internet! - Sean Parker/The Social NetworkGoogle has announced that the Chrome operating system which was supposed to come out in the fourth quarter of 2010 will now be available through netbooks in the first half of next year.On the elegant but minimalist Chrome OS website, it says Chrome OS is for people who live on the web. To check if you are a native of the web, take...

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Google Custom Search can let your prioritize results

You can use the site: operator to make Google restrict the search results to only websites originating from a specified domain. However, there may be times when you want Google to prioritize results so that those from your favorite websites will automatically appear before results from other sites (which then appear below).Google's personalized search feature of star-ring results requires manual intervention but Custom Search can automate the process of always moving results from your favorite sites to the top.Also see:Google Gu...

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The Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites is growing

The Internet is a great place to find answers provided you know where to ask. Search engines can only go so far. The Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites is unique because the user community votes up or down answers & therefore the best answers float to the top of the list. People who provide good answers get “reputation points”, which gives an additional indication of the value of an answer.It all started with the site Stack Overflow...

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