Sunday, July 13, 2014

17 Websites That Will Make You Smarter

Here's a list of websites that will actually make you smarter:
1. Digital Photography School — Read through this goldmine of articles to improve your photography skills; they're helpful even if you're a complete beginner. There's also an active forum where you can find a community of other photographers to connect with.
2. Duolingo — Sharpen your language skills with this fun, addictive game. It's a college-quality education without the pricetag. If you're looking for more free language-learning materials, you can also try BBC Languages.
3. Factsie — Did you know the horned lizard can shoot blood out of its tear ducts? Keep clicking through this site to find unusual historical and scientific facts, along with links to sources. Another great site for fun facts is Today I Found Out.
4. Freerice — Expand your vocabulary while feeding the hungry. It's the best way to feel good about yourself and learn words you can use for the rest of your life.
5. Gibbon — This is the ultimate playlist for learning. Users collect articles and videos to help you learn things from iOS programming to effective storytelling.
6. Instructables — Through fun videos and simple instructions, you can learn how to make anything from a tennis ball launcher to a backyard fort. You can also submit your own creations and share what you make with the rest of the world. Still wanting to learn more? You can visit eHow and gain a wide range of skills, such as how to cook, decorate, fix, plan, garden, or even make a budget.
7. Investopedia — Learn everything you need to know about the world of investing, markets, and personal finance.
8. Khan Academy — Not only will you learn a wide variety of subjects through immensely helpful videos, but you'll get a chance to practice them and keep track of your learning statistics, too. It's a great way to further your understanding of subjects you've already taken or to learn something new. Other great learning sites include UdacityCourseraAcademicEarthMemrise, and edX.
9. Lifehacker — On this highly useful site, you'll find an assortment of tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.
10. Lumosity — Train your brain with these fun, scientifically-designed games. You can build your own Personalized Training Program to improve your memory and attention and track your progress.
11. Quora — Get your questions answered by other smart people, or read through the questions other people have asked. You can learn anything from productivity hacks to the best foods of all time.
12. Recipe Puppy — Enter in all the ingredients you can find in your kitchen, and this wonderful search engine will give you a list of all the recipes you can make with what you have. It's a great way to learn how to cook without the hassle of buying everything beforehand. For a more extensive list of recipes, try AllRecipes.
13. Spreeder — This free, online speed-reading software will improve your reading speed and comprehension. Just paste the text you'd like to read, and it'll take care of the rest.
14. StackOverflow — It's a question and answer site for programmers — basically a coder's best friend. Other great sources to learn code are Learn X in Y MinutesCodecademy, and W3Schools.
15. TED-Ed — This is a new initiative launched by TED with the idea of "lessons worth sharing." It is meant to spark the curiosity of learners around the world by creating a library of award-winning, animated lessons created by expert educators, screenwriters, and animators. You can create your own customized lesson to distribute around the world by adding questions, discussion topics, and other supplementary materials to any educational video on YouTube.
16. Unplug The TV — A fun website that suggests informative videos for you to watch instead of TV. Topics range from space mining to "How Containerization Shaped the Modern World."
17. VSauce — This Youtube Channel provides mind-blowing facts and the best of the internet, which will make you realize how amazing our world is. What would happen if the world stopped spinning? Why do we get bored? How many things are there? Watch the videos and find out. 
Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234981

Friday, March 7, 2014

Free Typing Game

We at FreeTypingGame.Net are committed to bringing you high quality, fun and interactive free touch typing games, free touch typing lessons, and free touch typing tests. Our free typing tutor has 30 different typing lessons progressively teaching the keyboard. We award a printable certificate on completion! Take a look at our timed typing test or our certificate typing test. The tests and games have 40 lessons, 10 are based on classic stories to make the typing test more natural. Our typing lessons will educate on many levels, offering commonly misspelled words and foreign language words. Learning to touch type has never been more fun or exciting. Standardized typing methods have their place, such as key, hand, and finger based lessons. However, a fun and entertaining keyboarding game will often motivate some learners over traditional lesson based typing tutors, so we teach typing using our original free typing games. We have also found that the ability to compete against others with our realtime worldwide scoreboard can motivate some to type faster, type more accurately, and enjoy playing our free typing games.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

How to Batch Resize in Photoshop

batch-size-ps_before-after.jpg
While it’s relatively easy to write an Action to resize a series of images in Photoshop, it’s easier still to get Photoshop to do all the work for you. Photoshop comes with an image processor script that will open, resize and save a series of images for you – very quickly.

Step 1

Choose File > Scripts > Image Processor. The image processor dialog shows a simple four-step process for resizing the images.

batch-resize-photoshop_step1.jpg

Step 2

In Step 1 of the dialog, select to either resize the images already open in Photoshop (if you have them open), or click Select Folder and select a folder of images to resize. Select Include all Subfolders to include all subfolders of the selected folder.
batch-resize-photoshop_step2.jpg

Step 3

In Step 2 of the dialog select where to save the images. If you select Save in Same Location Photoshop creates a subfolder in which to save the images so you don’t have to worry about overwriting them. If a subfolder by the same name already exists with images with the same names in it, Photoshop saves to that folder but adds a sequential number to the file so you still won’t lose your files. Alternatively, you can select a different folder for the resized images.
batch-resize-ps_step3.jpg

Step 4

In Step 3 of the dialog select the file type to save in. For the web Save as JPEG is the obvious choice. Set a Quality value in the range 0 to 12 where 12 is the highest quality and 0 the lowest. For better color on the web, select Convert profile to sRGB and ensure that Include ICC Profile at the foot of the dialog is checked so the profile will be saved with the image.
batch-resize-ps_step4.jpg
To resize the images, select the Resize to Fit checkbox and then set the desired maximum width and height for the final image. For example, if you type 300 for the width and 300 for the height, the image will be resized so that the longest side of any image, whether it be in portrait or landscape orientation will be 300 pixels. The images are scaled in proportion so they won’t be skewed out of shape.
The Width and Height measurements do not have to be the same so you could, for example, specify a Width of 400 and a Height of 300 and no image will have a width greater than 400 or a height greater than 300.

Step 5

If desired you can save in another format as well by selecting its checkbox so you can save the same image in different formats and at different sizes in the one process. You can also select to run an Action on the images, if desired.
When you’re ready, click Run and the images will be automatically opened (if they are not already open), resized, saved and closed.
To see your resized images, choose File > Open and navigate to the folder that you specified the images to be saved to. If you chose to save as JPEG, the images will be in a subfolder called JPEG, for PSD in a folder called PSD and so on.
So whenever you need to resize a lot of images for uploading to the web, for example, the Photoshop Image Processor script makes the job almost painless.
batch-resize-ps_step5.jpg
Reference: http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-batch-resize-in-photoshop

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Lock down your phpMyAdmin access!

There are a couple of ways that I lock it down.. I won’t get into specifics because I don’t want you (or you!) trying to find it, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an old phpMyAdmin install just sitting on someone’s server waiting for someone to type in the correct login and password and screw up your day. The following are a couple good-practice ways to lock it down so that you don’t have to lose sleep over wondering if someone’s going to get in easily.
Rename your phpmyadmin alias:
Edit: /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
Look for:
(or something like that… )
and change it to something like:
Restrict access to your known ip address:
Edit /etc/httpd/conf/phpmyadmin.conf
At the top of the file you’ll see something like:
Modify it to only allow the ip addresses that you’ll connect from:
Restart apache and test it out!
Reference: http://www.linuxbrigade.com/lock-down-your-phpmyadmin-access/

Friday, January 10, 2014

How to convert .pem file to .ppk file?

Question:- What is .pem file?

Answer: .pem Defined in RFC’s 1421 through 1424, this is a container format that may include just the public certificate (such as with Apache installs, and CA certificate files /etc/ssl/certs), or may include an entire certificate chain including public key, private key, and root certificates. The name is from Privacy Enhanced Email, a failed method for secure email but the container format it used lives on.
Question:- What is .ppk file?
Answer: The PPK file type is primarily associated with ‘PuTTY’. PuTTY is a terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols. The name PuTTY has no definitive meaning, though tty is the name for a terminal in the Unix tradition, usually held to be short for teletype.
Benefit of converting .pem to .ppk file
PuTTY does not natively support the private key format generated. So it is advisable to convert the .pem file to .ppk so that it can be easily recognized by the FTP Clients like Filezilla, winSCP etc.
How to Convert .pem file to .ppk file?
Step-1: Start PuTTYgen (e.g., from the Start menu, click All Programs > PuTTY > PuTTYgen). if you don’t have puttyGen in your system download it from here.
Beanstalk9 300x289 How to convert .pem file to .ppk file?
Step-2: Click Load and browse to the location of the private key file that you want to convert (e.g., GSG_Keypair.pem). By default, PuTTYgen displays only files with extension .ppk; you’ll need to change that to display files of all types in order to see your.pem key file. The private key file must end with a newline character or PuTTYgen cannot load it correctly.
puttygen How to convert .pem file to .ppk file?
Step-3:
When you click OK, PuTTYgen displays a dialog box with information about the key you loaded, such as the public key and the fingerprint. Click Save private key to save the key in PuTTY’s format. Select a passphrase and save your private key somewhere secure if you click on save without giving a passphrase it will ask you whether you want to save it without passphrase.
Beanstalk11 How to convert .pem file to .ppk file?
Step-4: Save the file with the suitable name. You will get the desired .ppk file
Beanstalk121 How to convert .pem file to .ppk file?
Note: A passphrase on a private key is an extra layer of protection, so even if your private key is discovered, it will not be usable without the passphrase. The downside to using a passphrase is that it makes automation harder because human intervention is needed to log on to an instance, or copy files to an instance. For this exercise, we’re not using a passphrase.
Reference: http://p3lang.com/blog/2013/05/06/how-to-convert-pem-file-to-ppk-file/