Bypass Free Site Registration with BugMeNot

Ever more web sites require you to register on them for free and sign in with a username and password to view their contents. An active surfer can easily accumulate dozens of logins for various sites across the Web. But what about when you don’t want to go through the whole tiresome procedure of registering for a web site — you simply want inside?

Web site BugMeNot maintains a public database of shared usernames and passwords for free web sites. If you come across a site that prompts you to log in to view its content, bypass the registration process by heading to BugMeNot to search for an already-created username and password. Not all BugMeNot logins will work, but you can see the percentage success rate for a particular login and report whether it worked for you as well. If you can’t find a BugMeNot login that works? Create one and share it with the BugMeNot community.

There are three ways to use BugMeNot:

• Enter the address of the site you want to log into on BugMeNot.com to get a list of possible logins.
• Drag and drop the Bugmenot bookmarklet to your web browser’s links toolbar. When you come onto a site you’d like to log into, click the bookmarklet and get login detail suggestions in a pop-up window as shown in the fig. Copy and paste the suggested login — in this example, username stupidideas and password asdfghjkl — into the nytimes.com login page to view a password-protected article.

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• Download and install the BugMeNot Firefox extension, available here. Restart Firefox. Next time you are presented with a username and password prompt, right-click inside the username text box and choose Login with BugMeNot as shown in the fig.

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The extension is the fastest way to log in with a BugMeNot account because it doesn’t require you to copy and paste the username and password into the login fields, but it only works in Firefox (http://mozilla.org/firefox/).

Google and Yahoo search results in the same window at the same time

If you've ever searched for the same phrase at both Google and Yahoo!, you've probably noticed that the results can be surprisingly different. That's because Google and Yahoo! have different ways of determining which sites are relevant for a particular phrase.

Though we might never know exactly why results are different between the two search engines, at least we can have some fun spotting the differences and end up with more search results than either one of the sites would have offered on their own.

One way to compare results is to simply open each site in separate browser windows and manually scan for differences. But viewing both sets of results in different windows is a bit tedious, and a clever Norwegian developer named Asgeir S. Nilsen has made the task easier, at a site called Twingine. It contains a blank search form into which you can type any search query. When you click Search, the site brings up the results pages for that query from both Yahoo! and Google, side by side. To be fair, the sides on which Google and Yahoo! appear change at random, so people who prefer one side of the screen to the other won't be biased.

Clicking Next or Previous in the top frame at Twingine takes you to the next or previous page in the search results at both sites.

Surfing the pages in the search results at Twingine can be a bit tricky. You'll probably want to open linked search results in a new window or tab, so that you can keep your place in the search results at both Yahoo! and Google. You can open links in a new window by right-clicking the link (Ctrl-click on a Mac) and choosing Open Link in New Window from the menu. You can also set your search preference at either search engine to automatically open links in a new window when you click a search result.

Remove and disable Hibernation Files in Windows XP

In Windows operating system environment such as Windows XP and Windows Vista system, there is always a file named hiberfil.sys created and existed in the system root drive on boot disk.

The hiberfil.sys is large and big in size, always as big as your system physical memory (RAM) size. For example, if the computer have 2 GB of DRAM memory, the hiberfil.sys file size will also be around 1.99 GB in size, taking up precious hard disk space, and in worse case increase fragmentation on the drive.

hiberfil.sys is a file that Windows system creates whenever the computer goes into hibernation mode. When system hibernates, the system state of the computer is preserved by storing a copy of all data in the memory in hiberfil.sys file located on your local disk, so that when the computer restarts, the information can be read into memory to restore the state as of exact state when computer starts to hibernate. That also explains why the size of hiberfil.sys file is always same size with computer’s memory size.

If you have ever used hibernation feature in XP and Vista, the hiberfil.sys file will be created. Actually, Windows kernel reserves hiberfil.sys file and allocates space equivalent to memory size to it when installing Windows and enables hibernate ability by default, thus the file exists too even if you never put system into hibernation mode. However, when the computer wakes up from hibernation, the hiberfil.sys file is left on the hard disk and not deleted. If you no longer use the hibernate feature of Windows XP and Vista, the safest way to remove and delete hiberfil.sys from the hard disk is to turn off and disable hibernation function.

How to disable Hybernation in Windows XP:

• Go to Control Panel, click on Performance and Maintenance link, then run Power Options applet.
• Go to Hibernate tab.
• Uncheck and untick the Enable hibernation option.

Looking for Definitions!

In Google you can use the 'define' search syntax, if you are looking for definitions on the web. Simply write the word(s) you need the definition with the special syntax keyword 'define', like shown below:

define google juice
define julienne
define 42

Google tells you that these are defined as "power of a website to turn up in Google," "cut food into thin sticks," and "being two more than forty," thanks to Wikipedia, Low Carb Luxury, and WordNet at Princeton, respectively.



Click the "Web definitions for..." link or prefix the word you're defining with 'define:' (note the addition of a colon) in the first place, and you'll net a full page of definitions drawn from all manner of places. for example, 'define:TLA' finds turns up a large number of definitions (all about the same).

Here one thing to be kept in mind that The 'define word' syntax is still subject to spelling suggestions, so you don't have to worry too much about misspelling. The 'define:word' form, however, doesn't perform a web search at all, so it returns no results or spelling suggestions whatsoever if it finds no definitions to offer you.

Make money from PDF documents

Adobe has partnered with Yahoo! for an interesting advertising idea — running ads alongside PDF documents in the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader. Officially called Ads for Adobe PDF, it allows PDF publishers to monetize their content without having to find advertisers themselves. That’s because Yahoo! provides them as part of their ad serving system.

Much like a typical search results page, ads are run along the right-hand side of Adobe Acrobat Reader. A publisher simply uploads a PDF document to Yahoo!’s ad serving system. The PDF gets analyzed to determine the most relevant ads (similar to contextual advertising). A set of marketers’ ads are served up to readers of the PDF. It also claims to allow you to block competitors’ ads from showing up in your PDF. Lastly, publishers get the full performance tracking and reporting capabilities of regular Yahoo! search advertisers.

Free Office substitute online

Though it doesn't support all Microsoft Office features, the no-cost ThinkFree Online can use the same file formats, making it the most Office-compatible online productivity suite- it even works with Office 2007 files.
The package, which combines a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program, runs in your browser, lets you store documents (upto 1GB) on ThinkFree's server. It has two editing modes, Quick Edit and Power Edit. Both have a toolbar interface but no standard menus. A subscription version, currently in beta, also runs as a desktop app.
Writer, the word processor, opens and saves even complex Word 2007 and older files, but edits in full-page view only. Calc, which is rich in financial, scientific, and engineering functions, opens complex Excel files, displays most charts well, and imports Pivot Tables. The Show app opens elaborate PowerPoint files and, in Power Edit mode, resembles PowerPoint. It offers basic transition effects.
If one needs both Office compatibility and online storage, it's a good choice.

Strip and Format text from PDF documents

PDF Text Online is a free online utility, that can:

• Converts PDF text quickly and accurately
• Handles all fonts and languages (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more)
• Provides easy access to form data, document properties, and bookmarks
• Doesn't require a software download -- it works in your browser!

Upload your PDF document and the service will present it to you in text format, allow you to change some formatting elements like the font, and page layout of the text. In the end, you get a text document that you can save for later or just text your can copy and paste without having to worry about the formatting.

The developers of PDF Textonline developed an application called PDFTextStream, which they've incorporated into the PDFTextOnline Web app. The app uses Ajax to smoothly upload your document, strip out the images, and give you a clean and simple way to get to the document's text. The tool even retains any bookmarks and document information that might be included with the PDF.

If you just need to copy and paste the text, you don't need to save the document, you can just copy the text from the Web app. If you need to edit the text, you'll have to save the document as a text file. Click "save all text," and the service will present you with a zip archive that contains the text of your PDF document inside it. Once you've unzipped the file, you can use any text editor or word processor to manage the document.