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Customize your Facebook Profile Page

Ankur Kumar

The new layout of your Facebook profile page can accommodate six images thus giving you room to be a little bit more creative with the design.


For instance, some people “slice” a large photograph into pieces and tag them on Facebook such that one slice appears as their main profile picture while the other pieces show up in the thumbnail region.
If you would like to have something similar for your own Facebook profile page, just get a 700px (W) x 500 px (H) picture of yourself and slice it in Photoshop /GIMP as per dimensions marked in the next image.





Upload all these image slices to your Facebook photo album and then tag them in the following sequence (the order is very important).
First set the largest image (200x500) to be your main profile picture. Then choose the 100x68 thumbnail from the image gallery that will appear in the extreme right on your profile page and tag it with your name. Then tag the immediate left image and so on such that the left-most thumbnail get tagged in the end.











 

Check if Someone Else is Using Your Facebook Account?

Ankur Kumar

Notice some suspicious activity on your wall? Well there some simple security settings built into Facebook – some of these settings are new while others have been around for some time – that should help you quickly detect if any other person is secretly logging into and using your Facebook account.







Go to Facebook.com -> Account -> Account Settings -> Account Security. Here you’ll see a list of all computers and mobile devices that have logged into your Facebook account and when. You can also see the approximate geographic location of the device, based on the IP address, that was used to access your Facebook account.
If you come across an unknown device / location in the list, say you are Mac user and the device listed is IE on Windows, just click the corresponding “end activity” link and it should immediately log you out from that machine.
For extra safety, you may also choose to receive email and SMS alerts if someone else tries to log into your Facebook account from a previously unknown computer or mobile phone. (I wish Google could bring such a feature to Gmail as well).


 

Use goo.gl to Know if your Email has been Read

Ankur Kumar

How do you know if your email message has been read by the recipient(s)?
One option is that you embed a tracking image in your outgoing email messages. If that image downloads on to the recipient's computer, it is a confirmation that your email has been opened and read. Obviously, this technique will only work if the recipient has enabled automatic image downloads and that he or she is reading your email in HTML and not plain text.
There’s another option as well. If your outgoing email messages include one or more hyperlinks, you may even consider taking the help of a URL shortening service like goo.gl for email tracking.










The idea is pretty simple. Before including an hyperlink in your email, shorten it with goo.gl first. Now if the recipient opens your email and clicks on the link, his activity will be captured which you can see by simply adding a + sign to the Google short URL.
For instance, if the short URL of your link is goo.gl/abc, you can see the click stats for that short URL on goo.gl/abc+ or goo.gl/info/abc. Hover over the click points in the graph and you’ll even get to know the time when the person clicked your link in the email.
This of course is based on the assumption that your email messages have one or more hyperlinks and that the recipients are keen to click on them for you to track their activity.

 

How to Enable Windows 7 GodMode

Ankur Kumar

Here’s a neat Windows 7 trick that’s been doing the rounds on the Internet. It enables “GodMode,” a term devised by the Microsoft development team, which provides a single place to access all Windows settings without needing to browse options and folders in the Control Panel.
To use it:
  1. Create a new folder.
  2. Rename the folder toGodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
    (note that you can change the “GodMode” text, but the following period and code number are essential).
    The folder icon will change — double click it to show the GodMode window


The window shows nearly 50 sections with quick links to configuration options. Strictly speaking, it’s not a God Mode since all the options are available elsewhere. It’s more akin to an “all tasks” list — but you may find it easier than stumbling through Windows numerous screens and panels.

Big Red Warning!

The trick appears to work on both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. Vista 32-bit and Windows Server 2008 32-bit should also work. However, it is known to crash 64-bit versions of Vista — and you may need to boot in safe mode or to the command line to delete the folder.

 

Write the Indian Rupee Symbol using Common Windows Fonts

Ankur Kumar


The India Rupee symbol is now part of the official Unicode standard but for you to type that new currency sign into your favorite word processor or spreadsheet using a regular keyboard, your existing fonts must be updated to the new standard as well.
There are some font families – like DejaVu fonts - that have been updated to the new Unicode standard and thus include support for the new currency symbol but the problem is that these fonts have limited adoption.
Well the good news is that Microsoft has recently updated all the common fonts the ship with Windows to include support for the new Indian Rupee symbol. That means you can open a document inside Microsoft Word (or notepad), select a popular font family like Arial or Times New Roman, and type the Rupee sign directly.
To get started, you first need to update your existing Windows fonts by installing the kb2496898 hotfix available for both Windows Vista and Windows 7. Once installed, this will update the Arial.ttf, Times.ttf, Tahoma.ttf and some of the other font files on your computer with the latest version.

How to Type the Indian Rupee Symbol using Arial
Launch Microsoft Word, change the document font to Arial or Tahoma, and type 20B9 followed by Alt-x. If the 20b9 string is converted into a Rupee symbol, as in the screenshot above, the update has been successfully applied.

The Microsoft fonts update is available as a free download to anyone who is running a genuine copy of Windows 7 or Vista. However, if you add the Rupee symbol to your document and share it with another colleague who doesn’t have the latest Windows fonts, they are likely to see some junk characters in place of the Rupee sign.
A simple solution to this problem is that you create a PDF file of your Word document with font embedding enabled and that should preserve the character even if the font is missing.

 

Half A Billion Blog Posts Later, Google To Give Blogger A Revamp

Ankur Kumar

Google’s blogging service Blogger has been used for over half a billion blog posts (with over half a trillion words in total) to date, writes product manager Chang Kim on the Blogger Buzz blog.
Those blog posts have been read by 400 million readers across the globe, Kim adds. And according to the video below, 75 percent of traffic comes from outside the United States (the service is available in 50 languages).
Now the product is getting an overhaul, the biggest change being a more modern user interface for both the editor and the dashboard (fi-na-lly), built with Google Web Toolkit.
Google says it will be showcasing the new design of the Blogger back-end at SXSW (our coverage of the event), as well as a new content discovery feature that lets users find new content to read based on the topics of the blog they’re visiting.
The new UI is shown extensively in the video below as well, in case you’re not in Austin.
Of note: Google says it will unveil more fresh Blogger features this year – they posit that these are only the ones they’re “allowed to talk about” at this point.
Let’s call a spade a spade: Blogger has been around for a long time, but has unequivocally been losing mindshare to the likes of Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous and even services like Facebook and Twitter for content creation purposes in the past few years.
Its audience is still enormous, though, so it’s nice to see Google hasn’t forgotten its many users around the globe.
We’re looking forward to seeing how the service evolves in the course of this year.
Some of the new snaps i've collected over buzz is