Manage the pictures you upload to Blogger

Luckily, it's not as hard as Facebook to get your pictures off Blogger so you can make space for some new ones. If you've upgraded to the new Blogger every picture that you'll ever upload to blogger after the upgrade will actually be uploaded to Picasa (Picasa Web technically) in an album Blogger creates for your blog. Although Picasa has a limit of 1000 MB per account, if you optimize the pictures for the web the sizes will be relatively small.

So, all you need to do if you ever cross the limit or if you really want to delete a picture, just go to your Picasa (Picasa Web) account > Log in with your Google credentials and then do as you please.

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How to read or download e-books online for free!

Ever wanted to read old classic novels and like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn right at your computer without paying a cent. Guess what, you're in luck. You can now download e-books right from the Gutenberg Project. The project itself has been around for quite a while, with its main purpose being typing up old books that no one can claim copyrights to and publishing them freely on the internet for everyone to enjoy. These books can be downloaded onto any computer or even portable computer or cellphones for that matter so you can read them whenever you're free. You can also read them online, without being bothered by online advertising if you so wish which I think is perfect when you are at the library and can't really find the book you are looking for on the shelves.

Other such websites where you can legally download free e-books are the text archive of The Internet Archive, Page by Page books (all books can only be read online), CMU's Universal Digital Library and Munseys.

Some websites require certain software, most of which are free to be installed on your computer. Popular formats in which e-books are published include DjVuLibre, Adobe PDF (I suggest you get Foxit Reader to read such files because Adobe's PDF reader is usually quite sluggish when it comes to handling big e-books with a lot of pages), Microsoft Reader

For now, you can't read new books that are out in the market as of now like Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code online for free but I'm sure in a couple of years as the books become less and less popular (if thats ever going to happen) we might find them online too. You're best bet for finding such books would be to check out your local library and find out if they have an online e-book service. Most libraries now offer e-book downloads to their patrons free of charge, but if it's not available in their collection you'll just have to wait.

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Hack a Windows Password In Minutes

How to hack a Windows Password

How to hack a Windows password
I've written about securing windows passwords before, but here's a video for those who are yet unaware of how windows computers are often compromised due to lack of knowledge on the user's side. Although the video exaggerates the fact that the password can be found quickly, in reality it takes a bit more time, although ultimately the password will most likely be cracked.

The same thing can happen to your wireless network, which can compromise the security of every single computer on your network. An attacker can even steal all your private information (passwords to online banking accounts, internet chats.. you name it) if you use a computer that is not connected to the network through a cable. So take my word for it and protect your wireless network before attempting to increase the speed of your wireless network.

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Back up your blogger / blogspot posts and blog

Blogger gives you a great free blog hosting facility, but unfortunately if something were to happen their servers, all the your carefully composed posts will perish along with it. Along with that, when something is offered free you never know when they are going to stop giving it away for free, so its best to always back up your blog - no matter which blogging/CMS system you use!

Hopefully since blogger is now owned by Google they'll continue to provide this service for blogging enthusiasts like me who like to share their knowledge and ask people questions. So how exactly can you back-up your blogger posts to your computer or may be even Gmail account?

The answer is quite simple. You can either copy every single blog post and save in a text file or word file (as cumbersome as it may seem this might actually work if you're like many who use word or text files to initially compose the rough draft of a post) or use an application like the blogger backup utility from CodePlex.

Just download the zip file, extract all the files inside it, install the application and start backing up the contents of your blog regularly. You can even save all the comments in your blog and specify the posts you want to back up. It'll save all the posts to your hard drive in XML format and restoring every single post in your blog is as easy as clicking the restore posts button.

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How to immitate the immaculate desktop on a Mac

Having a immaculately super clean desktop for me means that I can concentrate on the task at hand without being distracted by the little icons and links that I constantly keep adding to my desktop.

Of course, taking all these links and documents and placing them in a folder makes as much sense as taking the book you are reading and putting it in a drawer and removing it out again when you fell like reading it doesn't really work. Instead it causes the 'out of sight is out of mind phenomena to occur' – not a good thing.

So after a bit of searching and pondering I think I've found the perfect application to help me focus on one thing at a time and no, it's not WriteRoom, since tasks also deal with creating presentations and designing graphics (did I mention editing movies?).

When I was reading an article on how to take great screenshots on a mac (I tend to forget the keyboard shortcuts quite often) I came across this gem of a application called backdrop. All this app does is puts a layer of colour on top of your desktop so that you can take screenshots more easily and effeciently. However, it can also be used to make the desktop look more clean for a short amount of time. I think its a great way to only keep the application you are working with active and at the same time not get distracted by the oh so interesting webclips/files/pictures and other stuff that I tend to keep on my desktop.

Oh and another tip if you're on Leopard and find the shiny... oohh shinny.. did I mention its very reflective too.. my icons look so glossy... dock really distracting. Just press Command+Option+D and the dock will automatically hide itself. Or if you're too lazy to locate the command key you can just right click on the dock and click hide. Pretty neat huh? (pun intended)

Heres a screenshot of my extremely clean desktop. Not bad, if I can say so myself.

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