Link Mania

MacInstruct - The place to learn about mac. They have a tutorial contest going on for the best mac tutorial submitted by its user.

How to Get Hired, What CS Students Need to Know -

• Employers look for people who are Smart and Get Things Done
• Employers look for people who Have Already Done Things

Pro guide to Google searches - It will turn you into a google power user.

Top 10 Magic Trick Tutorial Videos - From card tricks to tearing a phone book in half, its got all the amazing magic tricks.

Travel like a pro: 8 tips to make your journey easier -

• Fly through the airport
• Upgrade your airline seat
• Get a free hotel room upgrade

Free Devon Note

Complete this survey and at the end of the survey, you can request for a free copy of Devon Note.
From Devon Technologies blog,

Alexander Reppel, a German student, is conducting a online survey evaluating the two products announced at Macworld San Francisco this January. Every visitor who completes the survey gets a free copy of DEVONnote.

Devon Note only works for the Macinstosh. Sorry Windows user.

Firefox 2.0

Firefox 2.0 has been out for a while. With it comes a number of improvements and new features.
Some of the new features are:
1) Built in phishing protection - Warns user about sites that are possibly not safe.
2) Resuming your browsing session - "The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. "By default, it only asks you if you want to restore session if firefox crashed.
To make it restore the previous session everytime you start Firefox,

• click on Tools
  
• Then click on Options
  
• and then under the Main tab , you should see When Firefox starts: pick from the drop down box, Show my Windows and Tabs from Last Time.
  

3) Inline spell checking - "A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms.."
These are just some of the new features. If you wanna read all about it, check out Firefox Release Notes.

With the release of Firefox 2.0, i figured a lot of new users would like to know what are some of the great extensions that can significantly enhance your firefox experience. According to wikipedia, "Extensions are installable enhancements to the Mozilla Foundation's projects (and compatible variants such as Portable Firefox), and add features to the application or allow existing features to be modified."

My Favorite Extensions

• FireFTP - "It is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers."
  
• AdBlock - " Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers." It allows you to block ads based on rules set by you. So u could ask it to block all gif images or all banners. Your choices are endless. So give it a try.
• GooglePedia - "Shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results." When you perform a google search, it shows the google search results and the wikipedia article for the same term side by side. I love this extension
• Fast Video Download - This extension allows you to download videos from youtube, google video and much much more.
  

Hamachi - Best and Easiest VPN Solution

So What is VPN?

According to wikipedia, "A virtual private network (VPN) is a private communications network often used within a company, or by several companies or organizations, to communicate confidentially over a non-private network. VPN traffic can be carried over a public networking infrastructure (e.g. the Internet) on top of standard protocols, or over a service provider's private network with a defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider."

How can i create a VPN?
One of the easiest solution today is to use a software called Hamachi.

So What is Hamachi?
According to Hamachi's website, "Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application. ...Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable. "

1. To learn how to configure Hamachi, read the step by step tutorial from Lifehacker.
2. The basic (free version) of Hamachi does not allow you to run it as a service, but there is a way to get around this limitation. Here's how.
3. There is a gui version of Hamachi for the mac, which is called HamachiX.
4. If you are interested in remote desktop using VNC (for example, accessing your home computer from school, work etc), here is a step by step tutorial.

Update[Jan 8th,2007]: Guide on how to install Hamachi on the Mac.

Update[Jan 20th, 2007]: Lifehacker's Gina Trapani has written an article on Running VNC securely using Hamachi.

P.S The above screenshot of Hamachi was obtained from Hamachi's website.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year everyone. Lets raise our glasses for an absolutely fantastic 2007. Hope this new year will lead you to make decisions that will help you achieve all your life goals.

What is the Meaning of Life? - Is Life like a bagel, grapefruit, banana, cooking or a jigsaw Puzzle?
Ways to Distinguish Yourself - " Not distinguishing yourself is to subject yourself to the risk of eroding your market value almost on a daily basis."
How to Find what You Love to do? - ".. the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Seven Ways to Start Your New Job Right - ".. getting off to a strong start establishes the foundation upon which long-term success is built."
Six easy Steps for beating Procrastination - ".. people avoid doing things that hurt."