Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Well, we had made these videos a few months ago telling people how to secure their Wifi connections quite frankly because many people use other people’s internet without their knowledge. We had made the videos to prevent pranks where kids use other people’s networks to save some money.

But the recent blasts in India opened a new picture. Terrorists used the Wifi connection of an American citizen living in Navi Mumbai to send threatening emails and emails taking responsibility for blasts. As an Internet user, its your responsibility to secure your connection and make sure criminals are not using it. The following 2 videos will help you secure your Wifi connection. I will also make another video, showing you how to implement MAC address filtering to further strengthen your Internet security.

These videos are for Linksys WRT54G series, if you have some other router, refer to your user manual to see how this is done or search youtube, someone might have made a video for your model too.

Securing your Wifi connection (WPA security , only people will passphrase will be able to logon to it wirelessly)

Password protect your Router also

This post is issued in public interest

We keep you updated on the new Iphone 3G, and as things would have it a lot of companies are making software exclusively for the Iphone 3G, many of them like Ebay, and certain GPS GIS companies are innovating hard. So what do you expect from google ?

A supercool version of Gtalk which perhaps shows your GPS location and allows you to talk with crystal clear voice clarity. Well sorry, but thats not gonna happen. The Gtalk for Iphone will only be a text chatting service, disappointed ? So are they just porting Jabber for the Iphone in fancy Google colours ?

The Indian Iphone users will also be disappointed, but dont be. Skype will answer your Iphone needs

Your friendly Iphone 3G reminder for Indians looking to buy the new Iphone

Remember when the Iphone 3G launches in India, it will only be available from Airtel and Vodafone and will probably be locked and come with a hefty plan and high termination fee. Your best bet is still to get the old Iphone for a bargain and get it unlocked, that baby still turns heads. Also other market players like HTC Diamond, Cruise etc. and Asus P320 phones may be given a thought. Personally i am addicted to Windows Mobile these days.

Pidgin 2.0 is what was to be GAIM 2.0 , after a string of betas it was revealed that AOL was harassing their engineers. So they decided to change the name of the product in a  settlement with AOL.the new Pidgin is simple fast and effective and i am happy to state it was able to replace successfully MSN Messenger, Yahoo messenger and Gtalk, which are now no longer on my machine. It supports the following protocols 

AIM Bonjour Gadu-Gadu Google Talk Groupwise

ICQ IRC MSN QQ SILC

SIMPLE Sametime XMPP Yahoo! Zephyr

I also love their new mascot, they realise that cute is in !

Rating:

Think that now that you have Windows you don’t need DOS ? Well you aint a techie till you dont know these DOS Commands which make computing simpler and more enjoyable ! Firstly click on start and then type command to open command prompt.

=> DIR - Lists the files and directories.

=> Ping Address- Pings a remote machine or your own machine with data packets and calculates time taken to reply. The ping command will not work on most firewalled PCs these days, but servers usually allow these pings so that people can test connections.

Did you know that the word PING, comes from the sound made by a sonar !

e.g. ping 192.168.0.1 , this will ping the machine with the IP address 192.168.0.1

also ping www.google.com, the name will be resolved by Windows automatically.

=> Type Filename - Allows you to view the contents of any file in DOS itself, useful for txt files and programming documents.

=> Edit Filename - Allows you to edit the file.

=> Netstat - Allows you to view the sites you are currently connected to.

=> IPconfig - Displays your current IP configuration

=> CLS - clears the screen.

=> Tracert - To trace the path to a network node.

And If you keep exploring you will find a lot many more ! Also read about wildcards to make using the dir, copy,rename etc. commands much simpler.

Yes that’s true folks, Windows Live Writer , currently in Beta makes writing blog entries much easier and simpler. The writing of a blog entry actually becomes more enjoyable and less tedious. Windows Live Writer as the name suggests is a product of Microsoft. It has lots on inbuilt features and offers support of in post tagging, image insertion, category marking, Map insertion etc.

One place where it lags though is the Blogger Beta Images department, if is not able to offer image hosting for blogger beta, which is a serious flaw actually, but I guess its got more to do with Google than Microsoft. The new version also features an in-built spell checker which thank god is 100 times better than Firefox’s inbuilt spell checker.

When Microsoft ventures into something, you know its going to be the best and the biggest. So this Graphing calculator was no different.

The Graphing calculator is just a small part of Microsoft Student’s Math tools and is made by the Educational Products Division of Microsoft (My favourite division for reasons you will never know )

Continue reading »

Microsoft has launched its file hosting service called Windows Live Folders. It offers 250 MB of free storage space on the MSN servers. The maximum file size is fixed at 50 MB. Not only can you host your files for free, you can also limit access to them to your friends and family. All they need is a Windows Live Account for accessing the files.

The display is uncluttered and minimalist. You are allowed to organize your files into folders. Each folder can have a certain share level which is indicated by the (huge) icon next to the folder name.

Continue reading »

No its not the same as the feature in your mobile phone, and its not a part of the Opera Mini feature list also. Its yet another innovative feature by the Opera programmers at Norway. Speed Dial lets you set your favourite bookmarks in a speed dial fashion. Confused, Click on the pics below !

“Speed Dial is based on the idea that people generally have five to 10 sites they browse regularly throughout the day,” said Johan Borg, team manager for Opera’s desktop browser. “Speed Dial is made for almost instant access to those sites. We want developers and the curious-minded to discover Speed Dial. When they do, we hope they’ll help us with another rigorous round of testing before the final release.”

Each bookmark on the speed dial is represented by its thumbnail view, entering the number in address book opens the URL. Really Exciting Feature !

You may download the new Opera Browser from labs.opera.com

Please remember opera’s latest version is in Beta stage, we recommend you download the stable version only.

Images Credit : Opera Software

Microsoft unveiled the Deepfish mobile browser for smartphones. The browser is based on the Seadragon technology, which was a company acquired by Microsoft. The software displays the webpages like they would be displayed on your desktop. The beauty lies in the zooming and panning features of the software.It also optimises bandwidth ,i believe that this must be like the bandwidth optimisation of Opera Mini.
Currently the browser is in testing mode and is available by invitation only. Lets hope this great software is released to the public soon.

The Windows Live Team working on deepfish was quoted as

“With the Deepfish technology, we capture the full layout of the page and deliver it to the mobile device, resulting in an experience similar to that on the desktop. Deepfish provides users with a full ‘as-designed’ view of virtually any Web site on their mobile device and looks as you would expect it to on your desktop, allowing much more of the Web to be easily viewed on a mobile device than is possible today. The interface lets users zoom in and out on the parts of a Web page that interest them in an intuitive way, making it easy to use these large-screen formatted pages on a mobile device. On current mobile browsers, it can typically take up to a minute or more for a Web page to render, however the Deepfish architecture only loads the user-specified portion of the page, providing much quicker page-load times, as detailed information is only retrieved as needed or in the background.”

 System Requirements of Deepfish

• Device: Windows Mobile Smart Phone or Pocket PC.

• Operating System: Windows Mobile 5.0+

• Internet connection: Required.

• For Desktop setup: NET Framework 2.0, ActiveSync 4.0+ or Windows Mobile Device Center(WMDC) for Vista.

• Minimum Device Memory: 64MB Program Memory. Deepfish supports external storage when available.

Check out the great image preview functionality of Windows Vista, The image previewer features tagging capability alongwith a rating system , wherein you can easily tag and rate images at the OS level in Windows Vista without having to install external utilities. This is the Windows Vista Ultimate Edition !!

Check out more such Windows Vista screenshots on Ankit’s Blog also.