Geeky Ninja » Tips and tricks

How to use Remote Desktop using Google Chrome

Ashish — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:00:05 +0000

It is not unusual for me to get calls at odd hours from my friends or any of my close relatives. No, it’s not that they are concerned about me, rather they want me to find a solution to some error on their computer that they can’t figure out. Yes, being the resident IT geek of the family is a lot of fun!

If the problem is small I usually instruct them step by step over the phone and hang up with a credit note, but when the problem becomes complex it becomes quiet difficult to explain everything over the phone. In such cases I tell them that I need to be see the problem in person to come up with a solution.

Now, if your relative lives just couple of blocks away paying a visit to solve the issue will not be a problem, but what if they live miles away or may be at the other end of the Globe.

For such scenarios I prefer using a Remote Desktop application, but again setting up one can be so tricky that it becomes a problem in itself.

Just a few days back I was going through the Chrome web store’s productivity section and got my hands on an amazing application called the Chrome Remote Desktop.The Chrome Remote Desktop as the name suggests allows a user to remotely access another computer through the Chrome browser.

The application is pretty east to use. Just install the plugin on both the computers and allow all the privacy permissions at the time of initialization.

Now, if you want to host your computer you must select Share This Computer and mail the unique sharing code that the application generates for you, to your friend.

The person who wants to Access a shared computer must choose the respective option and enter the unique code mailed to him.

As the application takes a lot of resources while hosting a remote desktop, make sure you don’t have any unnecessary pages open on your browser. Also the quality of the remote desktop will depend on your internet connectivity speed.

Verdict

Chrome Remote Desktop is an excellent way to easily setup a remote desktop without any hassle but the performance is just average. As the program is still in beta phase and there is a lot of scope for future improvement, I am sure it will be fixed and improved in the upcoming releases.

Are you the resident IT geek in your neighborhood ? How do you remotely help your friends and relatives with their computer problems ?

3 Ways To Download Bing Wallpapers To Your Computer

Gourav — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:00:42 +0000

Bing, the search engine from Microsoft created a lot of buzz when it was launched because of its neat interface and relevant search results. But, arguably, the most striking feature of the search engine is the beautiful featured wallpapers/background images.

In fact the background images are so beautiful that a lot of users want to download them to their computers to use as their desktop wallpapers. Although the official website does not provide any download option, the background images can be easily downloaded manually or by using free software.

Bing Downloader is an excellent application that can be used to download daily wallpaper images from Bing. The application is less than 100kb in size and does not require any installation.

When you run the application, it creates a folder named “BingImages” at the location where the application is executed from. Bing background images from various countries for the day are stored in this folder.

One drawback of the application is that since the same background is sometimes used on the Bing webpage for multiple countries, the application downloads the same wallpaper more than once. That, however, is a small price to pay for the convenience.

Those who don’t want to download all the Bing wallpaper, should take a look at Wallpaper Downloader. The site features Bing wallpapers being used worldwide for that particular day. Clicking on any thumbnail opens up the full image which can then be saved with a simple right click.

Users can browse the wallpapers according to a specific country or by selecting any specific date. The site even offers free Wallpaper Downloader software that downloads Bing wallpaper backgrounds automatically and sets them as your default desktop wallpaper.

Download Wallpaper Downloader from here.

If the above two methods also don’t work for you and you only want to download wallpapers occasionally, you can download the Bing wallpapers manually without visiting any other website or downloading free software. The process to download varies slightly from browser to browser.

Firefox users can download the wallpaper images very easily. All you need to do is visit the website and right click anywhere on the image. You then need to select the “View Background Image” option.

The “Save Image” option can then be selected to save the wallpaper.

Unfortunately, Chrome or Opera do not give any direct right click option to save the image. However, users can download the Bing background with a little bit of tweaking as described in the following steps:

Visit the Bing homepage.

Press “Ctrl+U” or open the page source by choosing the “View Page Source” option (in Chrome) or “Source” option (in Opera) from the right click context menu.

A new tab will open showing you the source code of the page. Now, go to “Find” option (or press Ctrl+F) and type “jpg” in the search box.

The selected text will be found and highlighted on the page. Copy the entire text that is present within the bracket (or single quotes) in which it is found. The text to be copied will be similar to the form: /fd/hpk2/any_name.jpg and is shown in the image below.

Open a new tab and type www.bing.com and paste the copied text after this. It should look like: www.bing.com/fd/hpk2/any_name.jpg

Hit “Enter” and the image will open.

Right click anywhere on the image and choose “Save Image As” option to save the image and you’re done.

You can download Bing wallpapers using any of the above mentioned three methods. If you happen to know any more of ways for downloading wallpapers from Bing, please let us know in the comments.

How to schedule tasks in GNOME using gnome-schedule

Sharninder — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:14:47 +0000

Most Linux/Unix veterans use cron to schedule tasks on their machines and it is a very powerful utility for what it does.

The problem with cron is the cryptic syntax which tends to scare away most new users and the fact that a user has to use the terminal to create a new job.

In this tutorial we will explain how to use a graphical front end to cron, called gnome-schedule.

Gnome-schedule is a graphical front-end to cron and at, another utility to execute commands at a specified time . It is completely GUI driven and the user does not need to have any prior knowledge of cron or it’s syntax.

Installing Gnome-schedule

To get started with gnome-schedule on Ubuntu/Debian, install it using the apt-get install command:

apt-get install gnome-schedule

Once, gnome-schedule is installed, it can be launched from the Applications -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks menu entry.

Scheduling a new Task

To schedule a new task, click on the New button in the menu bar.

There are three options to create new tasks, either create a recurring task (This will use cron at the backend), or create a one time task (This will use at at the backend) or use a template.

For our purpose here, we’ll create a recurring task. Click on New -> Recurring task and you should see the following window which will let you define the task.

The advanced radio button will let you chose exactly when do you want the task to be run. ‘*’ here stands for ‘all’. So, the above task will be run on Day 1 of every month at 0 hours and 0 minutes. The handy preview, in case you didn’t notice, tell you exactly what option have you selected.

You don’t need to manually enter the times. Click on the Edit button next to the text field and you will be able to select the exact time of the task using a simple GUI.

Once a task has been created, the gnome-schedule application can be closed and cron will take care of executing the task at your chosen time and interval.

gnome-schedule also lets you create templates for tasks that you schedule frequently. Although, I don’t use this option a lot since I don’t really have that many tasks to be scheduled at any given time, some people might find this option useful.

gnome-schedule is an absolute time saver and negates the need to learn the complex cron syntax for newbies. It presents almost all the power of cron to the users with a nice and easy to learn interface.

Are there any other scheduling applications that you guys use ? Let me know in the comments.

How to display word count in Microsoft Word 2007

Sharninder — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:53:59 +0000

If you’re writing an article or a thesis where you need to keep track of the number of words written, you basically have two options to count the number of words, either count the number of lines and multiply that by the average number of words / line or use something other than Microsoft Word for the purpose.

That changed with the release of Word 2007. Microsoft Word 2007 can now count words, lines, paragraphs and even characters in your document. This tip will tell you how to enable this feature.

To know the current word count of a document, open the document and right click on the status bar at the bottom of the Word 2007 window. The context menu which comes up will have an entry named “Word Count” which will tell you the current word count.

Click on “Word Count” and you can then have the count displayed in the status bar at all times.

If you want to find the word count of a particular paragraph or a line, Just select that portion of text and you will be able to see the word count in the status bar.

If you’re interested in more statistics about your document, like the number of paragraphs, lines or the number of characters in your document, Go to Reviews –> Word count from the menu bar. That should give you all the statistics that you’d ever need.

Use Windows Notepad as your electronic diary

Sharninder — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:30:04 +0000

Who knew the humble Windows Notepad was capable of anything other than, well, taking text only notes.

If you’re searching for a simple application to write a diary or take daily notes, look no further than Notepad. So, what’s new you ask ?

Well, with this tip you can make notepad automatically add the current day and time to a document as soon as you open it and save you the headache of doing so yourself.

To accomplish this:

Open Notepad (START->Run->notepad.exe)
Type “.LOG” on the first line of the new document.
Save the file and close Notepad.

Now when you open the same file again, you’ll see that Notepad would have added the current Date and time to the document automatically.

Write your entry for the day and close the file. Everytime you open the file, Notepad will add the current timestamp on a new line saving you the effort to do the same.

Turn off deep linking in yahoo search results

Sharninder — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:10 +0000

According to wikipedia, deep linking is defined as:

Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on another website, instead of that website’s main or home page. Such links are called deep links.

Yahoo search recently turned on deep linking and images from wikipedia for any queries that result in a wikipedia page. For example, for the following query (“blog”), this is what yahoo search comes up with as a part of the results.

Notice how the wikipedia entry is different from the others. Yahoo search included four useful links from the wikipedia page, a summary and an also an image.

Yahoo was already using deeplinking for a couple of other popular websites like flickr, yelp and linkedin.

I, personally, think that this feature is pretty useful, especially the image that is shown along with the search result, but if you’re not interested in the links that yahoo provides, you can disable deeplinking in your search preferences. Just click the remove button in front of the service name that you want to disable deeplinking for. Yahoo will never bother you with more than what you searched for.

Let me know what you guys think of this feature in the comments.

Geeky Ninja » Tips and tricks

How to use Remote Desktop using Google Chrome

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