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Go Offline in Facebook Chat

Editor — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:41:43 +0000

Facebook has a great feature which not many social networking sites have – in browser chat. It sounds awesome, but sometimes it can give you real headaches. You might be doing something important, and all of a sudden that annoying friend of yours starts pinging you.

But luckily for us, there is a simple solution by which you can go invisible… just like how we go in yahoo/msn/skype.

Just click the ‘chat’ button at the bottom, and select ‘options’, and hit ‘go offline. Yep, its as simple as that… now start using Facebook without people disturbing you… Happy Facebooking!

Restore Scratched DVDs and CDs

Editor — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:10:00 +0000

What if your favorite CD or DVD refuses to play? Your reliable DVD player simply says… “Dirty Disc” …you remove the disc and clean the shiny surface with a cotton cloth, but the player is simply not dancing to your commands. You check the player by playing another DVD, and it works. Now you know that the problem is not with the DVD player, but with the DVD itself. You decide to break the DVD in to two halves, but your little brother asks you to stop and commands you to check Technoi.. yep, this site.

Do we have a solution to your problem? Most probably we have, but if you are extremely unlucky, nothing can help you. But for those who are somewhat lucky in life, here are some simple ways to restore your Dirty Disc aka Scratched Disc.

Solution #1 – Toothpaste

We are talking about the same toothpaste you use to brush your teeth every morning.
Apply a small amount of toothpaste on the shiny surface of your disc. Spread it gently with your fingers focusing on the scratches. Let it dry for 5 minutes, and wash it gently with running tap water. Use a clean cotton cloth to dry the disc.

Solution #2 – Banana

Bananas are great for energy and they taste yummy. But could banana do more than that? Our answer is a very big YES!
Peel a banana, and cut it into half. Gently rub the sliced surface of banana onto your disc focusing on the scratches. Let it dry for 5 minutes, and wash it gently with running tap water. Use a clean cotton cloth to dry the disc.

If you are even remotely lucky, your DVD player should be able to play your Scratched Disc.

Happy Restoring your Scratched CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays!

Note: Do the above experiments at your own risk.

Protect Your Wireless Network with WEP

Editor — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:29:22 +0000

Most of the wireless networks installed at homes and offices are password protected, but there are plenty which are not. Probably the owners of the wireless networks don’t even know that they can password protect their network. If you are thinking… ‘what is the need to password protect my network? ‘ Its almost like leaving your house doors open to everyone.

Very soon most of the major countries are going to implement a law which will prohibit unprotected wireless network. Before you are caught and fined for leaving your wireless network unprotected, lets’s get to know a bit about WEP.

WEP stands for ‘Wired Equivalent Privacy’. Don’t get overwhelmed by the technical jargon… its nothing but a simple password.

If you use a phone number or a name of a person as a password, its possible that your neighbor might crack it. By using an online WEP key generator you can generate hard to crack keys(password).

Here are some of the online WEP key generators which allow you to generate 64, 128, 152 and 256 bits WEP Keys.

Andrews WEP key generator

YellowPipe WEP key generator

Install Wordpress on PC

Editor — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:46:08 +0000

Want to install Wordpress on your PC? You might ask : why do I need to install locally when I could install on my online server? To put it simple, its easier to test your site without your visitors knowing anything. Sounds cool, right?

You could check for plug-in conflicts, theme compatibility, coding issues, image display problems… without even touching your online site. Once you decide that everything is fine, you can upload your shiny site to your web server.

But installing Wordpress on your PC is not that simple, but if you know some ‘ABC’ of computing, you can easily do it. First you need to download XAMPP, which is an Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. Probably you don’t even know what Apache is because your web host does everything for you. Don’t panic. Just go to this link, it has a step-by-step instructions on how to install Wordpress on your PC.

Make the Corrupt Mp3s Work

Editor — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:54:51 +0000

How many times have you downloaded an Mp3 and it does not play in your media player because the file is corrupt? Personally, I have never come across such problem. But for those who are having such issues, there is a simple freeware tool which works like magic.

Mp3val is a portable tool which can repair Mp3s which were incompletely downloaded or truncated.

Repairing Mp3s using the tool is as simple as 1-2-3. Download the file, launch it by double clicking. Choose the corrupt Mp3 from the file menu and select scan. Once it is done with the scan, right click the corrupt mp3 in the tool window and choose repair. Voila… You have a working Mp3.

Download Mp3val here

Download Bing Ringtones for your Mobile

Editor — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:44:03 +0000

I don’t know about the availability of google or yahoo’s official ringtones, but Microsoft’s new shiny baby, Bing, certainly has few. If you are not following the recent developments in the web world, here is the news: Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft which is set to rival the big daddy google.

It certainly looks trendy with colors and cool Ajax effects, but I don’t think it can compete with google.
Anyways, here are 3 Bing ringtones for your mobile which you can showoff to your friends and colleagues.

Download Bing Ringtones

Free Hard Disk Space by Installing Vista Sp2

Editor — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:23:46 +0000

Not sure whether this is true or not, but the internet is buzzing with the word that installing Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista could free up GBs of your valuable hard drive space.

Some Techies think that the service pack might be erasing the restore points. Whereas others indicate that it could be due to the command line cleaning tool, compcln.exe.

Whatever the reason, it always feels good to have more hard drive space for your Mp3s and Divx movies.

Backup and Restore your Desktop Icons

Editor — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:03:21 +0000

Unfortunately our PCs are prone to crashes, and many a times we loose valuable data and settings. The best way to keep yourselves free of pain is to regularly backup your hard drive.
Many times we see that after the PC has recovered from the crash, desktop Icons placement is lost. IconRestorer comes handy in such event. It lets you to take a backup of your desktop icons position with click of a button. Whenever you want that particular desktop icons setup, you just have to hit the restore button.

This utility also comes handy when you are trying different resolutions.

Features:
Windows Vista and Windows 7compatible.
Works on 64-bit systems (XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and Windows 7)
Manage icons position separately for all screen resolutions
Multiple backups for each resolution
Backup management: rename, delete, export and import
Backup Preview (thumbnails of saved backups)

Click here to download IconRestorer

Utility To Find System Information

Editor — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:24:22 +0000

What if you want to know the MAC address of your PC? Well, most of us would have no idea where it is located. So we would google, get the proper link to the website showing the method, then follow the steps, and finally manage to find it.
Now imagine what if you get all the important info of your PC in one place.

MiNode is one application everyone should have in their PCs. It displays the IP addresses, MAC address, drives and free space available, printers, and much more.

Click here to download MiNode.

Free Online OCR

Editor — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:50:15 +0000

It seems that we no longer need any software in our computers other than a Browser. We all know that there are plenty of softwares which can extract text from an image, but how about an online service for that?

Free-OCR is a website which takes your image and extracts the text in it, and lets you to save it as any format you desire such as PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP or PNG.

Click here to visit Free-OCR to extract the text from that scanned magazine page.