Friday, May 31, 2013

9 worse habits involving humans and gadgets

Man invented technology, moulded it to various forms and produced infinite gadgets just to make life easier, comfortable, and prolific. While humans today are busy developing some more super gadgets, most of them hardly spent any time to improve their own personal habits. These bad habits or negligence causes uncountable amount of damage to life, money, and emotions. Today's topic will include few points that will focus the role of both technology (and gadget) combined with worse human habits (or negligence).

Leaving a device in an open place â€" Crowded places like a coffee shop, perhaps a mall are hot favourite destinations where you may accidentally leave behind your tech valuables like smart-phones, laptops, tablets or even the car keys. Once neglected or forgotten these devices (items) can be stolen in fraction of seconds. The thief enjoys both the negligence of the owner and the environmental support to grab your object and flip/flops into the crowd. Most of the time such things happen so quickly that even the people near by you remains clueless. If your gadget is really an eye candy for you then it must be taken care like a toddler who requires mother's attention all the time. Always keep your laptops in front of your eyes rather than keeping them aside, even you can place them with some part of it touching with your body part so that you may sense any foul.

Keeping your phone in the bag â€" Guys always place them in their trousers or jeans. Not all but few women do like to keep their mobile phones into their glossy purses. This again lures the notorious minds who wait for chocolaty moments like these. In a crowded metro or bus one can easily pretend to almost stick with you and then making his hands steal the show. Because the mobile is kept in the purse and not in the clothes, the ladies usually miss the sense of someone’s hand reaching out to their purses.

You can avoid this by keeping the phone always inside your pocket.


Using Hand-free at dangerous locations â€" Though it is sad to share but many people including young boys and girls have lost their lives or sustained serious injuries to their bodies while crossing roads or railway tracks and operating the hands-free at loudest volume. Trust this, the jazzy music at loudest can make a human go lost completely not even hearing the voice of railway engine or speeding car. Who in the dreams would have thought of such devastating results just because of inappropriate use of hands free? Remember, hands-free are facility to make your interaction on phone simpler or perhaps to entertain for a while but don't use this device to get free from the life.

Educate kids to avoid hand-free on roads, railway tracks and near a construction site. The best time to use it when you are travelling inside a car/bus and of-course not while driving.


Unhygienic usage of own devices â€" We mostly in a hurry forget to handle the equipment with clean hands. Ever expected to receive a clean gadget from the hands of a child? It's not their fault, kids will remain kids after all but adults can make the difference by always handling the electronics with hygienic conditions. It may be the hands or clean environment but gadgets are to be treated especially so that they don't get disturbed even by the tiniest of the dirt particle. Many a times the main cause of the trouble encountered in laptops/phones and computers are the accumulation of dust that comes either from us or from the surroundings.

At-least place the device into some kind of cover when not in use. Clean the cover timely to remove the hazardous particles from it. If the device has lost its shine then there are various solutions that can be applied to bring the glossiness back.


Inappropriate sitting posture â€" There are number of incorrect sitting postures and only one correct posture which is shown in the second image. 
I feel no need to go in details of correct and incorrect sitting postures as the couple of images reflect all.

Consuming heat from the devices â€" We have compromised here too by accepting all the radiated heat eliminated by computers (mostly laptops). Professionals don't think a twice using the laptop from their lap. Human body comes secondary even you should not place your mobile phone near the laptop ventilation side as it is hazardous for the other devices too. I remember keeping my laptop near by refrigerator and sensing more heated computer next day. Same goes with the human body which accepts these heats and later causes dryness and discolouration of the skin.

Didn't realize the urge of backup till a disaster
â€" Any data loss disaster doesn't arrive at doorstep by ringing the bell. It strikes unexpectedly leaving behind no smiles for sure. Not only computers, but phones too these days are becoming victims of data loss due to accidental formatting, virus infection and hard drive failure. You may afford to install an anti-virus software to prevent a data loss but other factors like theft can still make you isolate with your data. Data backup sounds preachy but when you realizes its need and available resources you will joyfully initiate the backup operations. Resources like hard drive clone, Time Machine in Macs, cloud services and USBs are simple facilities to take care of data even in the most challenging times.

Multiple users on single system â€" Recently, news of a kid who made online shopping worth £1,700 from his parents account to buy iPad games went viral on social media. However, Apple returned all the money to the family that was playfully transferred by the kid. Incidents like this would hardly happen if there exist a separate user accounts for immature or other users. The highly confidential data remains safe and user purposes are also solved without any side complaining.

Not restarting the system often â€" PC and Mac both are designed to deliver fast performances but over a period of time they become sluggish. Though the reason of slow down could be numerous, you can make small efforts in improving the speed significantly by restarting the machine in a course of time. Often restart the system at your work place in the midst of the day so that it can free u[ RAM spaces and gives you a fresh start. 

This ends some of the worse habits involving technology and man. Please write us more about new worse habits or the ones which we missed out.

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Monday, May 27, 2013

Fixes of 'Windows was unable to complete the Format'

For some time, you may try to format external hard drive or USB and all the time, getting error messages like 'Windows was unable to complete the format' or 'Windows Couldn't Format the Drive'. This may occur because of subsequent reasons and there is no guarantee that you'll able to format it by using some tactics.

Such sort of problems is pretty common with modern hard drives or USB's and might ends up with losing all of your valuable stuff permanently. Though, you might able to recover data if you're lucky enough and the storage device isn't completely dead.

            windows-not-formatting

Here's how the problem goes:
As soon as you connect the external hard drive to your PC, a pop up message will open and asks you to format the drive so you can use it further. Pressing Yes button will brings the error message as described earlier i.e. Windows was unable to complete the format. Formatting the hard drive using disk management utility will not help you either. Remember, unsuccessful formatting from the disk management will left the hard drive with RAW file structure. After that, CHKDSK utility will not helps in fixing the damaged hard drive file structure. 

In such cases, using various hard disk diagnostics tool or third party hard drive formatting tool is completely waste of money as well as takes your countless unsuccessful attempts to format hard drive.

Note: You might not able to recover data from such drives until you format it completely. So you're at huge risks of losing your valuable data forever specially when you haven't any copy of recently created backups.

Format drive using Diskpart

As the GUI based hard drive formatting method is not helpful anymore, we may switch to command based formatting method and see if we can get it done here. Follow the steps mentioned below and hopefully everything goes well.

  1. Start typing CMD from the Windows 7 start menu search bar.
  2. Right click on the Command Prompt from the main menu and choose Run as administrator
  3. Enter the administrator passwords and hit OK
  4. Type diskpart on the black screen and hit enter. This will lists all the currently attached storage device i.e.,  internal or external or both.

    diskpart

  5. All the drive will be listed with numbers assigned to it. Find your problem drive by focusing attention on the drive size and its status.
  6. Type select disk N, where N is the numbers assigned to your problem drive.
  7. Type clean and hit enter. Disk Part will begin cleaning your drive and removes any damaged files structure it founds while scanning the drive.
  8. Once the confirmation message appears that disk part successfully cleaned the disk, we need to create a primary partition the targeted drive by typing and hitting enter create primary partition.
  9. On the next step, type format fs=fat 32 quick and press enter. Now the drive will be formatted in FAT format. Quick stands for performing quick format instead of clean format which may takes time longer than usual.
  10. Now we need to assign the drive later to the problem drive. You can do so by assign command. Simply type assign on the same screen and hit enter and disk part will assign any available drive name for your drive.
  11. Type exit and hit enter.

Now, you may able to use your drive (either external hard drive or USB) as before without any problem. Remember, data on the drive was completely erased but you can refer to various available recovery programs and see if you may able to get your data back.
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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

How to run Windows (exe) software on Mac OS X?

Even though you own a Mac OS X you will still look out for technical methods to run a Windows application on Mac OS X. We know windows executable files are in .exe format while Macs have .dmg or .pkg format for their executable applications. To make things simpler, Mac can run Windows OS through bootcamp partition or third party emulators like Parallels for Mac are able to run Windows applications simultaneously in an emulated environment without booting into bootcamp partition. The latest Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac supports Windows 8 on your OS X.
Installing and Running Window apps through Parallel for Macs software
  • Mark it, parallel for Macs are not bagged with the Windows OS installation copy. So, users must own their own genuine Microsoft Windows OS installation disk or an .iso image of the Operating System. If you don't have the disk with you, then find one on Ebay.com, Amazon or visit a Microsoft retail store.
  • As we know Parallel for Mac run virtually you have to find the option located on the top-menu, File & Select New. This will give you an option to “Install Window through DVD or a stored Image file”. An OS disk or the image file saved on the Mac hard drive will help you upload and shoot the further process.
  • You will be asked to provide Windows OS key. Further you can opt to select for 64-bit version of Windows.
  • Next option asks, “How to use Win OS on Mac”. It gives option like use it as a PC where a separate window comes up and launches your Windows application from it. With this window it's easy to move Mac files to PC and vice-versa by just drag-and-drop. The next option is use it like a Mac, where it launches similar to other Mac applications, without a separate window.
  • You can also put a name for your Windows OS. A name like Window8_Mac would be fine for my purpose.
  • After all these fields have been filled appropriately, click with continue to begin installation of Windows from the DVD or image through interface of Parallels for Mac software.

Did you know, this emulator tool was previously named as “Parallels Workstation”, but this name renamed unpopular amongst many Mac users. Later it was renamed to Parallel for Macs and it is today a huge success and flawless method to run Windows OS virtually on a Mac OS X without creating a partition for the same on the Mac hard drive. With the help of this tool you may also upgrade your existing Windows OS to a higher version with the help of this tool. E.g.: Window 7 to Windows 8.

So, this was all about an emulator making you to enjoy windows apps on Mac but at times you may not want to spend above asked price for the emulator tool neither a full fledged Windows operating system on Mac? For few Window applications and playing some of the most popular games you can opt for free resources that enables running of .EXE files on a Mac OS X.

First such application to evaluate is:

Wine Bottler â€" Good thing about this app is it's free and run .exe application on Macs. Unlike the Parallel for Mac, it is not an emulator. In fact, WINE expands to “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. Once again, you must remember that this application is not suited for operating everything that can be run on a Microsoft OS. Just focus on single or few windows apps that you wish to run badly on OS X. WineBottler comes under Stable and Unstable versions both of which are capable to run on Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion. Download the .DMG file from website http://winebottler.kronenberg.org and install the tool on OS X Mac. All done, launch the app and let's review how great it works.

  • Drag the icons, Wine and Winebottler to application folder.
  • Launch the installed application and you will be welcomed by below screen-shot. The WINE utility contains three features displayed on the left hand side of the window. With Existing Prefixes, you can check out the list of Windows supported OS and down to this is the option to Install Predefined Prefixes. This one is for your needs now. Simply browse the default applications and select one of them & click Install. In the list of prefixes you will mostly find multimedia applications such as media players (traditional but popular media player for Windows such as Winamp), Microsoft Internet Explorer which you won't find on any of the Macs. Other such needy applications are the IrfanView, textpad and WinFF.
  • Any time the WinBottler freezes to no response, you can simply force quit by pressing the button located on the top-left of the software interface.
  • The third option which is “Create Custom Prefixes” is a facility that will help you install an application that might not be listed in the list of WineBottler. It’s obvious, Winebottler utility possess basic Windows application and for others unlisted apps you have to make use of its third option. Before proceeding, you should check for the Windows App downloaded so that executable file (exe) is located on OS X. From the Install File menu, browse the path of the file through Select File button. The next processes includes simple manual walk thought the application installation process.

Disadvantages of WineBottler application - Though, it sounds useful and cheap, it has plenty of packed disadvantages which may let you find another likewise options.
  • WineBottler is dead slow sometimes. Perhaps it all depends upon the type of application you are dealing in with. Often the utility is fine and works satisfactory with some of the default applications.
  • It may not give you an exact Microsoft application what you wanted it for. 
  • Winebottler uses X11 which is an additional tool that helps it run on OS X. There are other tools like Wineskin that don't use X11 support.
What is X11 and prefixes after all?

Prefixes are the alternative word used for applications stored in the Winebottler application. The Predefined Prefixes is the list of defined applications on it. X11 is the real cause of how this utility runs the .exe files on Mac OS X. To know we might have to go deep about its working but overview suggested that it doesn't install the file on Mac but bundles it into the OS X environment. The entire process of running and installing the application pops out the X11 files on the Mac dock.

Let us quickly Evaluate WineSkin which serves the same purpose as Winebottler.

Wineskin supports Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion & is a good choice for gaming and non-gaming applications. The latest beta version of the WineSkin application doesn't need support of X11 files that were previously needed by Winebottler to execute windows application all the time. Other similar features of the tool are free of cost availability and exact manner of bundling PCs application on the Mac OS X hard drive.

Make your choice as per your requirements. Looking for complete PC environment on your Mac OS X then go for bootcamp or Parallels for Mac software. Else, install WINE to run few basic applications and popular games on Mac.

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Free tools to spice your Mac anytime

My point is to mention some of the best free utilities belonging to various categories that can any day make your life simpler. The tools to be mentioned don’t belong to a specific category but comprises of different themes like video creator app, image capture app, clean the Mac app and so on. So here goes the useful list of those apps absolutely free.  

Free Word Processor â€" A Mac by default has text edit to meet all your document processing needs. Either if you don't want to purchase Office for Mac the Textedit application will do all of your basic work that can be accomplished in Ms-Offices. Still you want to use a different app similar to the TextEdit then here are few options to proceed. Bean is similar to TextEdit and comes free to install on Intel Macs with OS X 10.5 or later. It's a very straight word processor designed for Mac OS X. Being free, the Bean has several cons like it doesn't support few of files of Ms-Word. Anyway, for simpler and less issues bean can be your choice to get done the documentation task. You can always try some more free processors like Bean â€" NeoOffice, OpenOffice & Focus Writer. 

Free Screen Capture tools â€" A Mac will grab the screen-shot of the windows by executing the command â€" CMD+Shift+3. Once done the image file is saved to the location (preferably desktop). Though, there are bunch of shareware that provides the unmatched facility to grab a screen-shot, we are focusing only on the freeware. One such free ware is DuckLink, is actually a cute named and looking utility just to capture the screens. Once installed like any other app on the Mac OS X, the DuckLink icon will place itself on the top panel. Once the mouse pointer is focused on the icon it instantly displays screen catching options through various figures like a rectangle. You may proceed with your desired figure & never miss a screen-shot. If you want to capture the screen and make a video out of it then try Camtesia. Though its paid utility and of-course for advanced users, still you can enjoy and create as many videos within its 30 days trial. So, don't wait and go on with Camtesia for unmatched output. 

Free Anti-virus Tools - Who said you won't need an AV tool on your Mac? These days, even hackers want to break the ice on Macs by intruding as much as possible. It's in the period of last one year that AV tools have become a topic for discussion on Macs. As the threats for Macs have increased in numbers so as the users who want to stay protected. If you’re on the latter side then install either ClamXav or Sophos. While ClamXav is not 100% an anti-virus tool, still it can manually be launched to check the authenticity of the file downloaded from the web. Sophos (Home Edition) on other hand is a complete anti-virus utility designed to provide protection to Macs from Trojans, malware and other threats. Get Sophos Now, its cheap and easy to use protection deal. 

Free Cleaner for Mac â€" This particular area comprises of numerous utilities that can throw out every possible garbage data from Mac partitions. Such utilities scan the entire hard drive or selected volumes of the Mac OS X and clean out junk data, caches data, unwanted language files and files. The sole purpose of these cleaning apps is to get rid of unnecessary data and grab as much free space as possible. As a Mac user you must try useful cleaning apps such as CCCleaner, App Cleaner, Onyx and Stellar Speed up Mac. These tools also possess free uninstaller to get rid of obstinate/vicious files that OS X is unable to trash. 

Free Cloud backup for Mac â€" Cheers Mac users as there are plenty of cloud sites ready to offer you free spaces & security as well. My favourite are the Dropbox, SugarSync and of course the Google Drive. You pay no money up to 2GB of spaces in Dropbox, 5GB of valuable spaces in SugarSync, again 5GB of spaces in Amazon Cloud Drive, MemoPal gives you straight 3GB free and Adrive that gives monstrously 50GB of free cloud spaces. Like me, you can sign-up to these free cloud addresses and start saving your data online.

The author of this post is using some of the apps mentioned above and sharing the information on the basis of his results. 

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