How to Delete the Useless Photos in your WhatsApp Automatically

WhatsApp is probably the largest space hog on our mobile phones. We all have friends and relative who diligently forward us every single motivation quote and meme they’ve received from their own network. Some think it is their duty to wake us with a “good morning” message accompanied with photos of the rising sun or chirping birds.

The bigger problem with WhatsApp is that these ‘spam’ messages often originate from contacts who are close to you in real life and thus blocking them would be considered rude. You have an option to mute WhatsApps groups but the downloaded images would still take up precious space on your mobile phone.

A simple solution to the problem would be that you open the Photo Gallery app on your Android phone, or use a File Manager app to locate the media folder of WhatsApp, and delete the entire folder containing those WhatsApps images. But since WhatsApp makes no distinction between real photographs and useless forwards, you risk deleting the good pictures too.

Are junk WhatsApp images filling up your phone’s memory?

Siftr, an Indian startup founded by ex-Adobe employees, has launched an intelligent Android App that can help you get rid of all the junk photos from your WhatsApp with no effort.

The app, Magic Cleaner, scans the media folder of your WhatsApp app and automatically detects all the junk images including screenshots, memes, video screen grabs, cartoons and other pictures with overlay text. You are then offered an option to delete all the detected images in one go.

 

How does it work? Like Cloud Vision, Google’s image recognition API, Siftr has developed their own image recognition engine that analysis the content of an image to determine whether it’s junk or not. It requires an active Internet connection because the image analysis is done on Siftr servers and not locally on the mobile phone. However it is unlikely to blow up your data plan as the app only uploads a small hash of the image and matches it against their own database of images.

I ran the photo cleaner app against a WhatsApp account that had about 4000+ images and it could successfully clean it up in about 10 minutes. The accuracy was very impressive. The app is free but you can only auto-delete a limited number of images in a single run. If you would like to delete more images, you either need to invite a friend to use the app or wait for a day.

If you have WhatsApp, which you probably do, Magic Cleaner is a must-have app. An iPhone version is in the works. Also, though the WhatsApps images are deleted from the memory card, a blurred thumbnail will still exist inside your WhatsApp message logs and you’ll have to erase them manually.

How to Show My Computer in Windows 8 Desktop?

The beautiful Windows 8 is finally available at a very reasonable and lucrative price. If you’ve upgraded your system to Windows 8, you probably have noticed that apart from start menu and hot-corners, there are various little changes happened around especially at Windows 8 Desktop. A similar major change that probably everyone has noticed is the unavailability of “my computer” shortcut on desktop.  In windows 7, we are able to add that shortcut on desktop by going to start menu, right clicking the My Computer Field and by clicking “Show on Desktop” option. But there’s no such start menu in Windows 8. In fact, similar things have changed a lot around Windows 8 and all those tricks that you were using in Windows 7 may or may not work in Windows 8.  So how will you show the “My computer” in Windows 8 Desktop? Well, over the due course of this article we’ll be discussing you the same and help you in placing a “My Computer” shortcut on Desktop.

For adding “My Computer” shortcut on your Windows 8 Desktop, follow the below steps:

• First of all jump to metro start menu by pressing Window key on keyboard and select Desktop tile.

• On reaching to desktop, right click on empty portion and select “personalize” option from popped -menu.

• This will open a personalized settings window. On the left side of that window, look for “Change Desktop Icons” and click it.

• This will open a “Desktop icon Settings” window just above the personalized window.  Look there for Computer check box under desktop icon. Check in the “computer” check box, press apply and then Ok.

• Close the personalized window as well and now you’ll find a “My Computer” icon on the desktop.

In the similar manner you can add Control panel shortcut, Network shortcut and lot of more.

 

For showing Desktop Icon on Metro UI, follow the below steps:

• Right click on the My Computer icon we just placed on desktop.
• And select the “pin to start” option from the right-click menu.
• This will automatically create a “My computer” shortcut tile on “Metro Start Menu”.

Tip: For minimising all windows at once and directly jump to desktop you can press: Win + D

So there you go guys! Finally we’ve guided you to place a “My Computer” icon at the Windows 8 Desktop.  If you liked the article, do share it with your friends. And if you have a similar trick, let us know through comments.

 

Facebook Just Fooled You with this Notification to Sign-Up for Saving Free Basics in India

Facebook’s Free Basics has been on fire in India since its inception. First it started with internet.org but even it got a lot of negative response from experts all over the country as it was violating Net Neutrality. And now again Facebook has come up with Free Basics in collaboration with Reliance. Again all the experts started firing Free Basics as it was violation Net Neutrality in the country.

• If you are new here is everything you need to know about Net Neutrality.

In an attempt to save Free Basics from getting banned in India, Facebook came up with this strategy by sending notifications to all the people and signing up in support of Free Basics.

What does the notification say?

This notification is very persistent, and it comes whenever one of your friends signs up without his/her knowledge. A regular internet user who doesn’t has much knowledge about Net Neutrality and Free Basics tend to fall for it and signs up in support of Free Basics which you shouldn’t.
When you click on the notification you see a sign up page in support to Free Basics which reads as:

“To the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, I support digital equality for India. Free Basics provides free access to essential internet services like communication, education, healthcare, employment, farming and more. It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online. And it’s open to all people, developers and mobile operators. With 1 billion Indian people not yet connected, shutting down Free Basics would hurt our country’s most vulnerable people. I support Free Basics – and digital equality for India. Thank you.”

Free Basics gives people access to vital services like communication, healthcare, education, job listings and farming information – all without data charges. It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online. And it’s open to all people, developers and mobile operators.

But Free Basics is in danger in India. A small, vocal group of critics are lobbying to have Free Basics banned on the basis of net neutrality. Instead of giving people access to some basic internet services for free, they demand that people pay equally to access all internet services – even if that means 1 billion people can’t afford to access any services.

The TRAI is holding a public debate that will affect whether free basic internet services can be offered in India. Your voice is important for the 1 billion Indian people who are not yet connected and don’t have a voice on the internet.

Unless you take action now, India could lose access to free basic internet services, delaying progress towards digital equality for all Indians. Tell the TRAI you support Free Basics and digital equality in India.

Read the last line: “I support Free Basics – and digital equality for India.”

Facebook was taking an unfair advantage using this Campaign by fooling most of the people by setting up this trap. When a typical internet user gets this notification he/she might feel that their friends have supported the cause and they also tend to do the same thinking that they are doing it for a good reason which is not.

We guess by this time most of you people fell for this well planned trap. Now, visit Savetheinternet and sign petition to ban free basics completely and save Net Neutrality.

However, as per the latest news, Reliance was suggested to put Facebook’s Free Basics on Hold. Do let us know what do you think about this in your comments below.

– See more at: http://www.alltechbuzz.net/facebook-free-basics-campaign/#sthash.R3A45pDa.dpuf

The Top Android Apps on the Google Play Store

This is an updated list of the top Android Apps that have amassed more than 50,000,000 downloads on the official Google Play store. The data has been screen-scraped from Google Web Search and the Google Play store. You can also download the raw data as an Excel sheet.

Legend: The blue bars indicate the average user rating of an app while orange reflects the total number of users that have rated that app on the App Store.

Android App Install Base 500 million to 1 billion Gmail YouTube Google Play services Maps Facebook 100 million – 500 million GO Launcher EX Twitter Viber Facebook Messenger Voice Search Google Play Books Subway Surfers Google Play Music Tiny Flashlight + LED Pandora WhatsApp Messenger Skype Fruit Ninja Free Dropbox Adobe Reader Angry Birds Talking Tom Cat 2 Free Street View on Google Maps Google+ Hangouts (replaces Talk) Google Search Chrome Browser Google Play Movies & TV LINE: Free Calls & Messages

50 million – 100 million GO SMS Pro KakaoTalk: Free Calls & Text Google Translate Temple Run SoundHound Tango Video, Voice & Text Yahoo! Mail Brightest Flashlight Free ® Advanced Task Killer GO Locker Pou Angry Birds Rio Hill Climb Racing Barcode Scanner WeChat TuneIn Radio MX Player PicsArt Shoot Bubble Deluxe Despicable Me Talking Tom Cat Free GROUP PLAY Shazam ChatON Kindle ZEDGE. Jetpack Joyride AntiVirus Security Pool Billiards Pro Opera Mini web browser Google Earth Flipboard: Your News Magazine

Quick highlights:

• Facebook is only non-Google app in the Google Play Store that has been downloaded more than 500 million times. The others are Gmail, YouTube, Google Play and Google Maps that are mostly pre-installed on Android phones.
• The 50m+ list has 65 apps but the one app that enjoys the highest average user rating is Brightest Flashlight, a free app that turns your Android phone into a torch.
• Facebook has been rated by over 8 million users while 4 million Android users have added their ratings for WhatsApps Messenger on the Play Store. No other app comes close.

Create a Public Folder Where Anyone Can Add Files

Dropbox and SkyDrive allow you to have “Shared Folders” where a folder is shared between all members of the group. Any member can contribute files to the shared web folder and such a thing is ideal for collaborative efforts like for sharing photos with guests after an event. People can view photos uploaded by other users as well as upload their own to the shared folder.

A limitation with these “shared folders” is that the folder owner must invite a user before he or she can add files to the folder.

OneTimeBox, a web app that went live at the recently concluded MIT hackathon(coding contest),  takes a different approach to shared folders. The app creates a disposable, public web folder where anyone can add files as long as they know the unique URL of your shared folder.

There’s no registration required and neither do you have to invite anyone as a contributor. Just share the URL of your folder with friends and they’ll have full access – including delete permissions – to the files in that folder.

OneTimeBox is built using Meteor.js and the source code can be found onGithub. Internally it uses the Filepicker API which uses the Amazon S3 service for storing files in the cloud. The app is neatly designed though you cannot add file to the shared folder from your mobile devices.

Create Price Alerts on Junglee

Amazon owned Junglee.com is probably the biggest price comparison website in India. Unlike other comparison engines that mostly focus on “popular” online sellers, Junglee lists prices from smaller stores as well that aren’t well-known brands but may sometimes offer better deals.

Get email notifications when prices drop

What some may not know is that Junglee offers price alerts, a useful feature that is not even available on its parent Amazon website. You can add one or more items to your watch list on Junglee and the site will send you an email alert whenever the price of a monitored product drops by 300 or more.

To set your price alert, open any product page on Junglee – like this listing ofiPhone 6 – and click the button (screenshot) that says “Price too high”. Next click the “Set alert” button and the product will be added to your watch list. You can manage all your price alerts from this page.

Junglee’s price tracker is reliable but a downside is that it will not show prices from the biggest e-commerce websites like Flipkart or Snapdeal. For them, you can always build your own Price Tracker using Google Sheets.

What is the Best Color for Text Captions in Photos and Videos

Whether you are adding titles in the lower third of a video or creating text captions to be placed on top of a coloured photograph, the text should be readable irrespective of the color of the background image.

If you have been struggling to find the perfect text colours for your video or image, try this simple rule. Set the fill colour as white and use a thin black outline and your text captions will be clear readable over any other colour and brightness.

This is exactly the reason why most meme generators on the Internet, including the one available on Google+ and Cheezburger.com, use a white font with a black outline for the text to be readable over any background.

And if you enable text captions for any YouTube video, you’ll find they also use the white colour with a black outline and a little amount of drop shadow. Thus the titles ill display well in the foreground even if there are different colours used in the video. The source is unknown.

One more thing. Prefer using Sans Serif fonts, like Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Tahoma or Verdana, for your video and image captions as they are more readable than Serif typefaces.

Find the Most Optimized Ad Sizes for your Website

Go long. Go wide. Go big. Google recommends that AdSense publishers switch to wider ad formats as more Adwords advertisers target these ad sizes, more competition among advertisers leads to higher eCPMs thus translating into increased earnings for the website owner.

The statistics suggest that the best performing banner sizes are the 336×280 Large Rectangle and the 300×250 Medium Rectangle. In addition to standard IAB units, the AdSense program now supports custom-sized ads which may serve even bigger rectangular ads. Will they perform better than the standard ads?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and what is working on my site may or may not be the most optimized solution for some other website. As a publisher, you need to run A/B tests on your site for about a week and only then you can you reach a conclusion based on the CTRs and CPMs of individual AdSense ad units.

Split Testing isn’t a new concept for most AdSense publishers but with the introduction of asynchronous responsive ads, the older methods no longer work. AdSense does offer a new feature called Experiments but that’s primarily for finding the most effective color scheme for an ad unit and not the most optimized ad sizes.

How to Split (A/B) Test your AdSense Ads

Here’s how you can perform split testing for AdSense ads on your own site. I am using the rectangle format for this example but the approach is similar should you wish to run split testing against vertical or horizontal units.

1. type=“text/javascript”>
2.  
3. google_ad_client = “ca-pub-xxx”;
4. google_variations = [
5. [“slot-medium-rectangle”, “display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px”, “width:300px;”],
6. [“slot-responsive”, “display:block”, “width:100%”],
7. [“slot-large-rectangle”, “display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px”, “width:336px;”]
8. ];
9.  
10. google_style = Math.floor( Math.random() * 3 );
11. google_ad_format = ( google_style == 1 ) ? ‘data-ad-format=”rectangle”‘ : “”;
12.  
13. document.write (
14. ‘
15. + google_variations[google_style][2] + ‘”>
16. + google_ad_format + ‘ style=”‘
17. + google_variations[google_style][1] + ‘” data-ad-client=”‘
18. + google_ad_client + ‘” data-ad-slot=”‘
19. + google_variations[google_style][0] + ‘”>

The Best Online Tools To Know Everything About a Website

How do I contact the owner of a website? Where is a particular website hosted? What other websites are hosted on that same server ? Is the site using WordPress or the Drupal platform? What ad networks are they using to monetize a site? Is the site accessible from China?

The best tools to know everything about any website. Picture credit: Flickr

Here are some of the most useful online tools that will help you know each and every detail of any website. Let’s get started.

• just-ping.com — Use Just Ping to determine if a particular website or blog is accessible from other countries. Unlike other online ping services that have service in a couple of locations, Just Ping has 30 monitoring stations across the world including Turkey, Egypt and China. If the ping results say 100% Packet Loss, most likely the site is inaccessible from that region.
• who.is — If you like to know the contact address, email and phone number of the website owner, this free whois lookup service will help. This is a universal lookup service meaning it can simultaneously query the whois database of all popular domain registrars.
• whoishostingthis.com — Enter the URL of any website and this online service will show you the name of the company where that website is hosted. This may come handl if you need the contact information of the web hosting provider for writing a DMCA Notice or if you are looking to switch web hosts.
• popuri.us — You can use popuri to estimate the relative popularity of a website on social sites like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. It also display the Google Pagerank of a website and the Web of Trust matrix.
• chillingeffects.org — When there’s a copyright related complaint against a website, a copy of that letter is archived in the Chilling Effects database. Anyone can query this public database to know about all the copyright infringement complaints against a particular website.
• myip.ms — MyIP.ms offers a comprehensive report of any website or I.P. Address. You get to know about the hosting provider, the physical location of a website, the IP Address change history of a website and the DNS information.Netcraft also offers similar reports.
• ewhois.com — Ewhois, short for enhanced whois lookup, will help you determine other websites of someone. It looks the whois details, the AdSense publisher ID and the Google Analytics code of websites to figure out other web domain that may belong to the same owner. See example.
• builtwith.com — Use BuiltWith to know the technology stack of any website. It helps you figure out the mail service provider of a domain, the advertising partners, the tracking widgets that are installed on a website and whether the site is using any CDN like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud. See example.
• semrush.com — If you wish to analyze your competitor’s website, this is tool to go with. SEMrush will help you figure what organic keywords are people using to find a website, what is the site’s traffic and which are the competing websites. See example.
• whatsmydns.net — When you buy a new domain or switch from one host to another, the DNS records for the domain change and it may take a while to propagate these changes worldwide. WhatsMyDNS check your DNS records from various locations and it can check your domain’s A, CNAME and MX records.
• modern.ie — This online app will help test your website’s compatibility with various web browsers and detects coding errors that might cause problems. The site is integrated with BrowserStack so you can quickly know how your site looks on different devices and browsers.
• developers.google.com — Find the Page Speed score of any website on both desktop and mobile devices. The higher this number, the better. The Google tool also offers suggestion on how the score can be improved.
• ctrlq.org/sandbox — – The AdSense sandbox solves two problems – it shows the various advertisers that are targeting a website and it will also help you figure out if a particular web domain is banned in the AdSense network or not.
• httparchive.org — The HTTP Archive is a repository of all performance related metrics for a website. It keeps a record of the size of pages, their average load time and the number of failed requests (missing resources) over time. See example.

The 10 HTML Codes You Need to Know for Writing on the Web

The computer keyboard creates “dumb” punctuation marks that may not be acceptable in printed work but are common on web pages. It outputs straight quotation marks (“) while your writing may require curly quotes. You can only type hyphens using the keyboard while an em or en dash may have made your text look more elegant and professional.

HTML Entities for Punctuation

HTML Codes for Punctuation

Your keyboard lacks the keys for inserting the correct punctuation marks but there are simple HTML character codes, on entities, that you can use to mimic the typography of printed books on the web. Here’s a quick guide to using HTML codes for inserting typographically-correct punctuation marks in web writing.

Hyphens (-)

Hyphens, or half-dashes, are most commonly used to join together two or more words. You can type a hyphen directly without using any HTML codes.

• The next-generation iPhone is expected to become available in mid-September.
• The word email contains no hyphen but there’s one inside e-books and e-commerce.

Dashes (– —)

Dashes come in two sizes: the En dash (–) and the Em dash (—). The En dash is longer than a hyphen but shorten than an Em dash.

The En dash (–) is used for suggesting a range of numbers such as time periods, sports scores or page ranges.

• Our bank is open 8a.m.–8p.m., Monday–Friday.
• The players are disappointed after losing the match 3–1 to Spain.
• Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the 16th President of the United States.

The Em dash (—) is used to indicate breaks or pauses in a sentence, to quote sources or to separate a series of words within a phrase.

• We plan to visit London this summer — if the visa is approved.
• My three friends — John, Peter and Richards — are moving to New York.
• “Well done is better than well said.” — Benjamin Franklin.

Ellipsis (…)

An ellipsis (…) is a series of three dots (periods) and two spaces in a row and they are used to indicate omission of one or more words in the quoted material. If the ellipses follow a complete sentence, end that sentence with a period, insert a space, then the ellipsis (…) followed by a space.

• “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.…” — Shakespeare
• “I have a dream … they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr

Quotes & Apostrophes (‘ ’ “ ”)

Your computer keyboard creates straight quotes (or dumb quotes) though what you really need to use are smart quotes (or curly quotes) that can be easily written in HTML. The dumb quotes are best used for writing programming code.

Use double quotation marks (“ and ”) to identify the exact words of a person, to indicate irony or for writing titles of creative works.

• The last episode of “Friends” was the most-watched program of the year.
• Thoreau said that “that government is the best which governs the least”.
• They recalled the “toy safety” buttons as they were contained lead paint.

Use single quotes (‘ and ’) to indicate quotes within quotes. The right curly quotation mark (’) can also be used for smart apostrophe instead of the straight apostrophe.

• John said, “I told her, ‘the traffic will only get worse.’”
• Her answer was, “I’ll call you in the next hour or so.”

Prime (′ ″)

While we often use apostrophe (‘) or quotation marks to indicate units of measurement (like feet or seconds or degrees), the correct symbol is Prime that are likely slightly slanted quotes written as ′ (single) and ″ (double).

• The height of this Ferrari car is 47′8″
• I am currently at 27° 11′ 45.315″N, 78° 1′ 27.1668″ W.

Web Typography: Further Reading & Resources

Punctuation Mark	Symbol	HTML Entity	Code Decimal
Apostrophe	’	’	’
En dash	–	–	–
Em dash	—	—	—
Ellipsis	…	…	…
Single Quote (open)	‘	‘	‘
Single Quote (close)	’	’	’
Double Quote (open)	“	“	“
Double Quote (close)	”	”	”