Tips And Tricks Archives - Page 2 of 49

How To Reverse Mouse Scroll Direction in Mac OS X

I have been a Windows user for probably all my life, but started using Mac a few years ago. While I never required to use an external mouse with my Mac earlier on, I did find the need for one when I started using the Mac for longer periods.

On Windows, a mouse with a scroller will scroll the page in the direction the mouse wheel is scrolled, for example; the page will scroll down when you scroll the mouse wheel downwards and vice versa. However, Apple uses something called as natural scrolling direction and scrolls the page in the opposite direction.

If you are someone who is annoyed because of this strange scrolling behavior on a Mac, you can change the settings to make the page scroll in the direction you scroll the mouse wheel in.

To make that change, head over to System Preferences -> Mice and then uncheck the box next to “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating” (In older Mac OS X versions, this would be the checkbox next to “Natural” scrolling”.

Once you uncheck the box, the page will scroll in the direction of the mouse wheel and not the opposite direction.

How To Uninstall Office 2013 Consumer Preview

Microsoft revealed the newest version of Office; Office 2013 which is available as a free download (Office 2013 Offline Installer Download). Office 2013 is a souped up version of Office 2010 and uses the Metro interface.

Also Read: Office 2013 Review | Office 2013 Screenshot Tour

While Office 2013 can work simultaneously with earlier versions of Office including Office 2010, there might be reasons where you might want to uninstall it. Uninstalling Office 2013 is pretty simple, however, with Office 2013, Microsoft introduced a new feature where they restrict a single install to 5 computers. So you will also have to deactivate a PC online when you uninstall Office 2013 from your PC.

The first step in uninstalling Office 2013 is to go to https://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/MyAccount.aspx (this link will change for future versions) and sign in with your account. Once you have done that, click on the Deactivate link next to the PC you are uninstalling Office 2013. Deactivating the PC will allow you to install Office 2013 on another PC.

After you have deactivated the PC, you can open Control Panel -> Programs -> Uninstall a program and look for an entry named “Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Preview” and click on the “Uninstall” button.

Once you have done that, a new dialog will pop up asking you whether you want to really uninstall the product. Click on the “Uninstall” button in that dialog to perform the uninstallation.

After the uninstallation has been complete, you can check if your older Office products work or run the Repair tool accompanying that product to fix the errors.

How To Delete Posts on Facebook Timeline or Wall/Feed?

With all the Facebook scams going on these days, one of our readers asked us a simple question on how to delete a post on her Facebook timeline which was incidentally a Facebook scam post. While deleting any post on your Facebook Timeline should be easy, not many people are aware of the steps involved in it.

If you are someone who is not aware of deleting posts on their Facebook Timeline or wall, you can follow the steps listed below to find out how you can do it.

How To Delete Post from Facebook Timeline

Step 1: To delete any posts, you will first have to visit your profile page or your Timeline as it is called now and find the post you want to delete.

Step 2: Once you find the post, just hover over the post area in the right and side hover your mouse and you will see a button to “Edit or Remove” the post. Click on this button to view the options.

Step 3: From the available options in the drop down menu, click on the “Delete” option to delete the post. You will be shown a popup confirmation dialog asking you whether you “Are you sure you want to delete this?”. Click on the “Delete” button in the dialog to delete that post from your wall.

How To Delete Post from Facebook Feed/Wall

If you want to delete any post on your Facebook feed or Facebook wall, you can do it by hovering over the post in the right hand side corner and then clicking on the “x” button provided to you.

Clicking on the “x” button will once again pop up a dialog which says “Are you sure you want to delete this?”. Click on the “Delete” button in the dialog to delete that post from your feed or wall.

Access Banned Torrent and Video Sites in India

The Indian governments Department of Telecom (DOT) recently notified ISPs to block several torrent and video websites such as Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent, KickAss Torrent, Vimeo, Pastebin and more to curb piracy. ISPs like Reliance and Airtel have already started blocking those websites.

In reply to those blocks, the famous group Anonymous has attacked several Indian government websites and taken them down. While the attacks continue, several users in India are still looking to access the websites but are seeing a message “This site has been blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DOT)”.

If you are someone who is looking to access those torrent and video sites in India, you can still do it through several means. As I had stated earlier you can easily access blocked websites using proxy servers, you will find several proxy servers in our earlier guide on how to access blocked website.

Additionally, you can also access those websites using services like OpenDNS and Google DNS. See our guide on How to use Google Public DNS on Windows 7 and Windows XP or use a Google DNS helper to automatically change to Google DNS. If you are in India, you can use a DNS proxy website like http://dnetproxy.appspot.com/ as well.

If you are still not able to access those torrent websites, you could always try and use the site operator in Google search to directly search those websites and view their cached copies.

If you have any other means to access those websites, please feel free to leave a comment.

Access isoHunt, Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent and Kick Ass Torrents in India

Several ISPs in India have started blocking popular torrent sites like ISO Hunt, Vimeo, Pastebin, The Pirate Bay and Extra Torrent on various ISPs including those of Airtel and Reliance. Users who visit these website on those ISPs will see a message as shown in the image below.

pirate_bay_iso_hunt_blocked_india

The message reads:

This site has been blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DOT).

The reason for the ban is still unknown and users are flooding Twitter with tweets opposing the ban. If your ISP has blocked ISO Hunt, Pirate Bay or Extra Torrent for you, you might still be able to access those sites albeit using some workarounds.

If you are looking to access those websites, you can try out several of the proxies we had listed in our earlier article on how to access blocked websites. Additionally, you can also try out some other failsafe methods to access blocked websites.

Additional Reads:

Some of the blocks are DNS based (h/t @anantshri) . To overcome this issue you can try out services like Google DNS or Open DNS to access those websites. Read our earlier guide on How to use Google Public DNS on Windows 7 and Windows XP or use a Google DNS helper to automatically change to Google DNS. You can also use a Public Proxy DNS site like http://dnetproxy.appspot.com/.

You can also visit Pirate Bay using proxies which you can find at http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html and http://tpb.fl.ax/. You might also want to switch to magnet links if your tracker is being blocked. Learn more about what magnet links are.

Last but not the least you can also use Google’s site operator to search those sites directly without visiting them and then view the cached version of the page through Google search.

Block Unblocked Websites in FlashBlock Extension for Chrome

I don’t hate Flash like Steve Jobs, but it does slow the browsing experience at times and can get annoying. There are several extensions and tools which allow you to block Flash in browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox, but most of the times Flash blocking extensions are heavy on memory usage and can slow down the browser. This is why I prefer to use a lightweight and versatile extension called FlashBlock for Google Chrome, which does the job very well without using lot of memory.

Disable Flashblock

One of the problems I have faced with this extension though is the lack of support for whitelisting/blacklisting websites. However, FlashBlock does provide users with an option to do so through a right click option as seen above. The problem is that though it is easy to unblock websites from FlashBlock, there is no easy way to block them again if you want to change your decision.

However, I did find a way to block unblocked sites in FlashBlock extension by using a simple trick. If you are someone who wants to do it, follow the steps given below.

To block a unblocked website in FlashBlock, open the website in question in Google Chrome and then click on the wrench icon and then select “Developer tools” from under the Tools menu. Alternatively, you can also use the shortcut key “Ctrl + Shift + I”

Doing the above steps will load the Chrome Developer interface. Now click on the “Resources” tab in the interface and expand the “Local Storage” dropdown. Now look for the exact URL of the website under the Local Storage menu and click on it. This will display the “Key-Value” pair of information stored for the website.

Block Flash Again in FlashBlock

To block the website through FlashBlock again, look for the key “ujs_flashblock” and right click on it and select the “Delete” option from the menu. Once you have deleted the key, reload the website again and Flash will be blocked on it.

Though there are several other Flash blocking extensions which provide with an easier interface to manage whitelists and blacklists, the extension in question is one of the best out there and does not hog resources. Blocking a website again is a little hard, but it is a great tradeoff for performance it provides.

Make Chrome Canary the Default Browser on Windows/Mac

Google Chrome has several versions of their browser which includes the stable version, beta version and development version. However, users can only run one instance of them at any given time. Google does provide another cutting-edge version called the Canary build. The Canary build is a nightly build and contains untested code and features which will be introduced in other version of Chrome at a later stage.

Chrome Canary Default Browser

I prefer to use Google Canary builds because they usually contain cutting edge technologies and newer features which are not yet available in other versions and gives me a chance to test them out. However, the one thing I have had a problem with the Canary version is that Google does not allow you to set it as the default browser.

The explanation they give for it is that it is a secondary installation of Chrome and cannot be set as the default browser. Well, that is a problem for me because some times the dev version (which I also used) was buggier than the Canary version and was not updated as frequently to address the reported bugs.

So I decided to find a way to set the Google Chrome Canary version as default and found a neat registry hack at this forum. All you have to do is download a simple registry file listed in the forum post and edit it to replace your username in the Registry.reg file. Once you have done that just double click and click on the “Yes” button when prompted to add the entries to your registry.

After you have inserted the registry entry, Chrome Canary will be set as your default browser. If you are looking to reverse that, just head to control panel and change the default application or use your browsers’ preference to set it back as the default browser. The forum in question requires you to register before you download the file as an alternative, you can download the file directly from here.

For Mac users all you need to do is run Safari and then head to preferences and change the “Default web browser” to Canary from the dropdown menu. You can visit this site to find visual instructions for doing that.

Download/Export Instagram Photos to PC, Dropbox or Flickr

Instagram is one of the hottest apps for iOS and Android with more than 35 million users combined. The app which did not have any revenue was so popular that Facebook went ahead and purchased it for more than $1 billion. However, the purchase by Facebook has left many users wondering as to whether they should continue using the app or not?

If you are one of those disgruntled users and are looking to stop using the app, here is a easy way to export and download all the Instagram photos you have uploaded till now and back them up to your computer. You can also download and move them to a free online storage service of your choice as well.

Export and Download Instagram Photos to Desktop PC

Instaport is a web service which allows you to export all your Instagram photos and download them to your local PC (they are working on social export soon). To download all your Instagram photos, visit the website at http://instaport.me/ and connect it to your Instagram account.

Once you have done that, you will be able to export and download all your Instagram photos to your computer. You can also select from to only download a smaller number of photos or select photos you have uploaded between certain dates. Additionally, you could also download photos which you have liked and photos with certain tags.

Export, Download or Backup Instagram Photos to Dropbox, Facebook or Flickr

If you are looking to download your Instagram photos to Dropbox, Facebook (ironic ) or Flickr, you can use a very useful service called If This Then That or ifttt for short, which provides you with recipes to automatically perform tasks based on certain triggers or action.

ifttt is a very simple service and users can find recipes which will allow them to backup their Instagram photos to Flickr or save them to Dropbox or upload them to Flickr or Tumblr among other places.

To setup a backup for your Instagram photos, sign up for the ifttt service and visit the recipe page for Instagram at http://ifttt.com/instagram. Once there, you can select the recipe you want to use and setup the required parameters. Once you have done that, just click the “Create task” button to create it. ifttt will then periodically run the task and backup your Instagram photos to your selected service.

Please note: While using ifttt, your older photos may not be backed up. You might have to use the first method to download all your photos and then upload it to your choice of service.

Hate Gmail’s New Interface? Get Old Gmail Interface with This Stylish Script

Just like the new Facebook timeline, Gmail also recently forced their new theme on users and apparently many people are not happy with this decision. While Gmail earlier provided a simple way to revert back the Gmail interface, that option is no longer available. This has definitely not gone down too well with Gmail users.

So is there any way in which you could revert back to the old Gmail interface? Well, not officially, but you can still do it thanks to a Stylish script.

Old Gmail Interface

The Return of Old Gmail Stylish script is one which resembles the “Old Gmail” interface the most. Although the overall interface is not as neat (see screenshot above), it definitely is one of the best options if you despise the new Gmail interface. The script in question reverts back some of the Gmail styles to the older one and also reverts back the top navigation in Gmail.

You will also find several other Stylish scripts for Gmail, however, the one listed here seems to be the best alternative to get back the old Gmail interface. You can also try out several other themes for Gmail by using this Stylish search.

Please note that Firefox users will have to install the Stylish add-on before using the scripts. Google Chrome users can also install the Stylish extension or install the Stylish script as a Greasemonkey script and run it as an extension.