Monday, May 28, 2012

Cut Onions without tears

If you use onions to cook from time to time and is annoyed with the whole onions making you cry then here are a few cool tricks that you can do to stop your eyes from crying when you cut onions.

Why do Onions make your eyes watery?
When cutting through an Onion, the onion cells get cut too which releases a gas that reacts with water and creates sulfuric acid which causes irritation. The eye then releases water to dilute the acid which makes the eye watery.

How to prevent your eyes from watering when cutting onions
The most effective way is to run the onion under water before cutting it. So peel the onion and run it under water before you chop it.
- Use a sharp knife (sharp knife cuts the onion cells cleanly and hence less juice is released from the Onion)
- Use salt or bread crump on the knife.
- Put the onions in the freezer for 10-15 minutes before cutting them

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Candle wax on the carpet

From carpets, fabric, and upholstery: Harden the wax by pressing ice against it. Scrape off the wax with a blunt knife, and then cover what is left with a sheet of kitchen paper and ironing over the top with a cool iron. Do not touch carpet fibers directly with the iron. Remove any remaining marks on carpet or upholstery with a dab of methylated spirits (test on an nconspicuous area first), and wash fabric on the hottest setting it can stand.

How to get rid of stains and marks on wooden furniture

Alcohol spots and watermarks can be removed with a cream metal polish (test on an inconspicuous area first), then faded areas can be disguised with ash or shoe polish; grease marks on unsealed wood can be sprinkled with good old talc, which you then cover with kitchen paper and press with a warm iron to absorb the grease; fill in small scratches with matching colored wax crayon or shoe polish.

Minimize the start up time of your Windows computer

If your computer is taking too long to start up and you want to minimize that time then here is a tip as to how you can control the applications that Windows starts at Startup time and make your computer boot fast. You don’t have to be a computer expert for this either.

To put it simply… at startup Windows goes through a list that has all the application names that it will start. Many of those applications you don’t use or need at startup time like Yahoo Messenger and etc. You can modify the startup application list on your own cause if you need an application later you can always start it manually. In the end your computer will startup quicker. For example you can always start ‘Msn messenger’ later when you want to chat with your friends/family, no reason for Windows to start it at startup at every Windows boot. It will also make your computer run faster as those applications are not taking the system resources anymore

Reduce your website’s bandwidth and storage usage

If you are looking for a quick and easy solution for using big files (movie files for example) on your website without wasting your website’s bandwidth and storage then read on.

When you host a media on your website it takes the storage on your site and when the users view that media it takes up your bandwidth too. If the media file is small then you probably don’t have much to worry about. But when you want to use some media files that are large in size then it can have a significant impact on your site’s storage and also when the users view it, it takes up your bandwidth. Now if you have limited storage and limited bandwidth on your site like mine then you can try this method that I use to save bandwidth.

Say for example, you want to host a movie file. you can upload that file to YouTube and link to that file from your website or embed it on your website. The bandwidth is always taken from the site truly hosting the file. So if you embed the video from another site(YouTube in this case), anytime a user buffers and plays the video, the bandwidth (for the video) is taken from the original host, not your site. Also you save storage on your site too.

Bank card or Credit card plastic bag swiping trick

Have you ever had trouble swiping your Bank/Credit card at the checkout? Here is a card bag swiping trick for you.

The Problem:
Bank card or Credit card doesn’t work when swiped.

Solution:
Wrap the card in a thin, clear plastic bag and swipe it again.
Arrange a replacement of the card.

What can cause my Card to have bad reads?
The likely problems are dirty or scratched stripe, or erased stripe.

Prevention:
One way to prevent this is to use a thin layer of tape on all your cards from new.

Why does this trick work?
The card reader has a small induction coil that detects a succession of magnetic and non-magnetic zones in the card’s magnetic stripe. When the card is pulled through the reader, each magnetised zone makes a small electrical pulse as it passes the coil. The zones are arranged to encode the data needed to complete a transaction.

Improve your daily productivity, 7 must use Google products!

Google has already won the search engine war. Everyone already knows that online search means Google. But many of us don’t know or haven’t explored some of the many cool products Google has beside its search engine. If used correctly, some of these products can significantly improve our day to day productivity and efficiency. In this post I have given a very brief overview of seven Google products that I use on a daily basis.

Gmail
Gmail, is a free POP3 and IMAP webmail service provided by Google. Tired of having to refresh all the time to see if you have got new mail in your inbox? Gmail uses POP3 which means your mail will pop up in your inbox as they arrive; goodbye to the good old endless refresh!
Gmail has a much better spam protection than other webmail providers. Which means you don’t have to spend fifteen minutes every morning trying to work out which emails are important and which ones are spam!
Organization of your mails through the usage of ‘Labels’ is a very easy and an efficient way to manage your emails. Gmail offers many more cool features that I will leave up to you to explore if you haven’t already.

How to control access of the web crawlers or web robots to your site

There are numerous reasons as to why or when you should control the access of the web robots or web crawlers to your site.  As much as you want Googlebot to come to you site, you don’t want the spam bots to come and collect private information from your site. Not to mention that when a robot crawls your site it uses the website’s bandwidth too! In this post I have explained how you can control the access of the web robots to your site through the usage of a simple ‘robots.txt’ file.

What are web robots or web spiders?
Web Robots (also known as bots, web spiders, web crawlers, Ants) are programs that traverses the World Wide Web in an automated manner. Search engines (like Google, Yahoo etc.) use web crawlers to index the web pages to provide up to date data.

Stop the cell phone thieves

Here is something worth knowing if you have a mobile phone …
Have you ever wondered why phone companies don’t seem interested in trying to prevent the theft of mobile phones? If you have ever lost, or had one stolen, and if you are on a plan, you still have to pay the plan approximately up to 24 months, and you have to buy another handset and enter into another contract. This is more revenue for the phone company. There is a simple way of making lost or stolen mobiles useless to thieves and the phone companies know about it, but keep it quiet. To check your mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following on your phone:
star-pound-zero-six-pound ( * # 0 6 # ) and a fifteen digit code will appear on the screen.
This is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it in a safe place. Should your mobile phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset, so even if the thief changes the sim card, your phone will be totally useless.
You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either. If everybody did this, there would be no point in stealing mobile phones.
You may want to share this with those friends who have cell phones.

Prevent liquid from exploding when boiling in the Microwave Oven

when you boil liquids in your microwave. It may not be necessary, but it won’t hurt anything either.
The explanation for the explosion is described in the UNWISE MICROWAVE OVEN EXPERIMENTS website as following:
Things are different in a microwave oven. The water gets hot but the container usually does not. There are no “boiling-bubbles” triggered by a hot metal pot. Without those bubbles to cool it, the temperature of the water rises far higher than 100C°. We call this “superheated water.” Superheated water is just waiting for some sort of trigger which will let bubbles form and allow boiling to commence. If the water becomes hot enough, a few bubbles will appear, but these quickly rise and burst, and the water isn’t cooled much at all. In the microwave oven, even if your mug of water is bubbling slightly, don’t trust it, since it’s temperature has risen so high above 100C° that bubbles are appearing spontaneously. If some unwitting victim should pour a soluble powder into the superheated water, this will carry thousands of tiny air bubbles into the water. Each of these micro bubbles expands into a 1cm steam bubble, and the result is a huge “explosion” of hot froth. It’s just like dumping ice cream into root beer, but the froth can be so violent that the hot water sprays into the air.

Keep your refrigerator and freezer fresh and smell free

Place an open box of baking soda in both the refrigerator and the freezer. The baking soda will absorb the bad smell quickly. This will keep your fridge fresh and smell free. Every six months you will need to change the boxes. After you are done with the boxes just toss them in the bin.

Query or show a specific post in wordpress

If you are looking for php code or a plugin for your WordPress that takes a post ID and returns the database record for that post then read on. This is very helpful when you want to show a specific post on your homepage or other pages to get more attention. It allows you to design your homepage or a page with the post(s) that you want to be shown on the page rather than the 10 recent posts that the WordPress automatically chooses for you.