This is one of the useful tools I’ve come across recently. The Alphabetizer is basically a service that helps you manipulate lists apart from its primary service of arranging a list in alphabetic order. The list you enter can be of different forms and still you can get yourself a meaningful output. Let’s look into how this works

The Alphabetizer

The first service, which is the arranging of list elements in alphabetical order. A list is simply a set of words separated by commas, semicolons or any other separators. These lists can simply be copy pasted into The Alphabetizer and you get the output at once. Usually, the terms are separated by a new line, meaning one term in every line.

However, you can use commas, semicolons, spaces or anything else for that matter. The service reads the list and gives you the output in the same form it received. It also gives the number of items that are sorted as well. It is essential that all the terms are separated by the same separator, if not the service stops arranging once it hits a unusual symbol!

Other Services

There are other smaller but useful services to manipulate your lists as well. Here are a few

Appending Text

You can add some text to the beginning and end of each term in the form of a label of some sort

Strip HTML

You can choose to strip HTML codes from the input and sort only the rest of the required text. Useful if you are copy pasting from a HTML Source!

Make Lowercase

You can change all the text to lowercase while sorting.

Capitalize First Word

Capitalize the first word of each list term.

Remove Duplicates

Remove duplicate terms from a list. Can be useful if same terms are added many times in large lists.

Reverse/Randomize

You can reverse the entire list to be arranged in reverse alphabetical order or simply the reverse order. Also, you can randomize the list. This can be used the give random numbers to participants in a contest and so on.

Numbering Results

You can make the list a true list by using numbers or letters before every term.

Apart from this you can prevent the Alphabetization of the list and at the same time use these other functions as well. It is a simple looking tool, but I’ve found it quite useful recently! What do you think about this? Do let me know! Thanks for reading!

Infrared Light and Ultraviolet Light, are, as most people know, invisible to the human eye. Meaning, you can’t view IR or UV rays without special equipment as you see normal light. However, here is a simple way to view Infrared Rays with equipment available in most homes. This method is quick and no setup is needed as well.

Equipment Needed:

• Infrared Emitting Device: This includes any Remote Control of a TV, a stereo system or any other electronic equipment. The only necessity is that the IR emitting device like the LED should be visible. This includes most remote controls, so you needn’t worry.
• A Camera With A LCD Screen: You can use a video camera, digital camera, camcorder, webcam or any camera that has a LCD Screen.

How To See The Infrared Rays

This is too simple. Now that you have the above equipments, here is what you do.

• Ensure that the camera is in capture mode. i.e. The LCD Screen should show you the surroundings.
• Now point the Remote so that the LED in it is within the range of the camera. Or simply point the camera at the LED in the remote.
• After this, simply press any button on the remote to emit the IR Light.
• When you look through the LCD Screen, you can see the IR Rays as a blue glow at the LED on the Remote Control! [as shown above]

As long as you keep the button pressed, you can see the IR Light. Also, in a dark room it would be more distinct to notice. If you cannot see it in your camera, try using another camera. There was no problem with the Canon Powershot A550 I have and it worked instantly!

And you need not worry, this process won’t damage your camera or its lens. Also, you can only see the IR through the LCD Screen and not through the optical viewfinder, so it works only on Digital Cameras. Do try it and let me know if it works for you as well!

If you find this useful, do consider sharing it.. Thanks for reading!

Your system may sometimes run slow if a number of memory hogging applications are running simultaneously. Also, the PC may slow down if a Trojan was working in the background. The same applies to viruses or worms as well. These malicious programs may work in the background without your knowledge and may not be detected by your Anti Virus programs.

The processes that work in the background can be found out by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and then selecting the Processes tab. Here you get a list of processes that are currently running on your system including the ones that run in the background. The easiest way to eliminate a potentially unsafe process would be to select it and click on End Task. But the fact is that there are vital system processes running as well, and if you end any of them accidentally, your system may very well crash.

What Can You Do?

In order to find out what each process actually does, you can download Process Scanner, a small application that doesn’t even need installation. All you need to do is open up process scanner and start the scan. The scan typically completes in a minute and then it opens up the results page, online.

The advantage of the online results page is that, the latest updates are always available and any new virus or trojan is detected at once. The results page consists of a table with details about the process, the application it’s running for, its memory usage and more. Any potential threats will be flagged at once, so you can disable or delete that file or application it’s related with.

Why Use This?

It is not only viruses that cause problems to your computer. Some malicious programs may transmit sensitive and personal information from your computer to other computers. Since these processes run in the background, you would have no idea. Also, if you haven’t received the latest updates from your Anti Virus service, even that may not be able to detect the threats.

By using this atleast once a day, you can ensure that your system is safe to run. For an example, a common process is lsass.exe. However, a process called Isass.exe (note the I), actually carries a virus and may infect your system. When you simply look through the processes, you can’t probably differentiate. So, this can come in very useful then!

With Process Library, you can also search for names of individual processes and get details about them as well! Since the download is small and needs no installation, I would recommend that you go ahead and download it.

What do you think about this? Please leave your comments! If you are using any other software for this purpose, do let me know! Thanks for reading!

After being acquired by Google, Feedburner announced that they were offering Feedburner Pro Features for free to all its users. One of the interesting features was MyBrand, a way to implement the feeds for your site to be accessible from a sub-domain of your own site instead of redirecting to Feedburner. And finally, I took the time to go ahead and implement MyBrand here!

Why MyBrand?

When you look at a particular feed’s address, you can tell me which looks better.

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/yoursite
• http://feeds.yoursite.com

Obviously the second option makes your site look a bit more professional indicating to visitors that you are managing your feeds, even if you aren’t actually doing so. And anyway, the process to implement MyBrand was quite simple and straightforward, so I didn’t mind wasting a few minutes doing it!

How to Implement MyBrand?

To implement MyBrand, you need to do the following:

At Feedburner

• Login to Feedburner
• Go to My Account area
• Go to MyBrand
• In the 3rd step, simply enter the subdomain on your site where you will your feeds to be present. If you want to host it at feeds.yoursite.com, then enter that without the http://

At Your WebHost

Most domain registrars do not offer the CName service unless you point your domain to their nameservers. So, you need to ask this service from your web host to whose site you are pointing the nameservers of your domain name. Most hosts do not allow CName changes to be done by yourself. So, you should send them a support ticket asking them to do the same.

The CName entry for your site should be set to feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. The final dot may be essential as well. The first word should be feeds only if you are want the feed address to be at feeds.yoursite.com. If you want it to be elsewhere, simply use that sub-domain name here. e.g For it to be at myfeeds.yoursite.com, use myfeeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com as the CName entry and save it. Do not forget to create a sub-domain called feeds using Cpanel.

The CName entry may take upto 24 hours to propagate, however the process lasted only a few minutes in my case. After this you’d be able to access your feeds at feeds.yoursite.com/yourfeed. As in my case, the feeds are at feeds.siteguide.us/siteguide.

How it Works?

CName is nothing but an alias for a domain name or sub-domain. Basically when you set the CName of a subdomain to another domain name, the subdomain would point to the other domain name. Here, the subdomain feeds.siteguide.us points to feeds.feedburner.com.

Remember, my feeds are actually located at feeds.feedburner.com/siteguide. After applying the CName, the sub-domain name feeds.siteguide.us will behave like feeds.feedburner.com. So, any feed at feeds.feedburner.com can be accessed via your site as well.

Also, you will most certainly not lose any of your earlier subscribers who have subscribed through feed readers or by email. They’ll still continue to get the same feed since this address acts as a redirect to the original feed which will still be located at feedburner. So, you can go ahead and use this without any worries. Thanks to Keith for mentioning this!

The reason you can’t place your feed at feeds.yoursite.com itself is because you may have more than one feed for the same domain. For e.g there may be feeds for the categories, individual posts, comments and so on.

If you have any queries regarding the article, do feel free to ask me. How many of you have already implemented MyBrand on your site? Do let me know in the comments!

Google has never failed to disappoint with Gmail and now its just been taken to the next level with the introduction of Colored Labels. The labels feature instead of folders in other mail providers was quite debated by most and disliked by a few as well. First, I too was apprehensive in using labels instead of the folders which I had been used to.

However, the labels actually proved more effective in organizing the mail without leaving the main inbox page. Now, the introduction of colored labels only means that the mails under each label now have a greater visibility. Though the multitude of colors against a gray background seems kind of odd, I certainly welcome this upgrade as identification of mails becomes easier for me.

 You can change the colors by selecting the boxes next to the labels in your right navigation menu of your Gmail inbox. Selecting a color auto updates all the labels with that color. A simple, but quite useful tool. Would these colored labels be useful for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading