How to Make Amazing Wallpapers Just using Photoshop Paint Brushes Quickly

Photoshop paint brushes are a cool thing if you know how to use them. In this photoshop tutorial I have provided a step by step guide on how to make amazing wallpapers by just using Photoshop paint brushes. I have included the paint brushes and the photoshop file (psd) that I used in this Photoshop tutorial in the download section below if you wish to download them.
You can look at some examples of wallpapers that you can make by just using photoshop brushes on the Wallpapers page of this blog. In this tutorial we are going to look at creating the following wallpaper:

So open your Photoshop application and let’s get started.

How to Open/View Excel 2007 files without Excel 2007 Software

If you ever get into a situation whereby you need to open/view an Excel 2007 file (.xlsx) but the computer you are using does not have Excel 2007 installed then these tricks could come in handy. This was particularly very helpful to me when I was checking my email from my friends computer and I received an Excel 2007 file as attachment that I wanted to view immediately but my friend’s computer didn’t have Office 2007 installed.

How to Create Strong Passwords that are Easy to Remember but Hard to Break

I don’t need to tell you the importance of using strong passwords when creating user accounts online. Passwords are keys to accessing your online accounts or your computer. Using strong passwords are vital in protecting your identity and stopping others from hijacking your account. In this Post I have shared a trick to create strong but memorable passwords that I learned a few days ago.

What is password strength?

According to WikiPedia:

Password strength is a measurement of the effectiveness of a password as an authentication credential. Specifically, it estimates how many trials an attacker who does not have direct access to the password would need, on average, to correctly guess it. The strength of a password is a function of length, complexity, and randomness.

25 Very Useful Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

Working with Photoshop can be quite time consuming for both beginners and advanced users. Once you have worked with photoshop for a while, you will find that lot of the times you are using the same menu items or palette buttons. Photoshop has approximately 690 keyboard shortcuts. Here are some shortcuts for Photoshop users that will significantly improve the editing efficiency when using this software. I use Photoshop frequently to design icons, logos etc for website design and I find these set of shortcuts save a lot of my time when using Photoshop.

How to Create and Display Favicon to Make Your Site Stand Out in The Pile of Bookmarks

Favicons are a great way to make your site stand out from the crowd. It is also very easy to implement too. In this post I have explained how you can easily make a favicon and use it on your site.

What is Favicon?

Favicon is short for favorites icon. This is the icon that shows up on the left side of the browser’s address bar. Favicon is also known as bookmark icon, website icon, url icon or shortcut icon. Size of a favicon is 16×16 pixels.

How to Make a Favicon Easily in Photoshop

1. In Photoshop open a new file (make sure the image size is 16 x 16 Pixels).
2. Design your favicon. You can either start from scratch, use a picture, or a section of a picture.
   Note: The image size is rather small so I advise not to use a picture with a lot of graphic content.
3. Save the favicon you created as ‘favicon.ico’ (you can save the image as .png or .jpg and then rename it to .ico)

You can even use MS Paint to make favicons too… all you have to make sure is that the image size is 16×16 pixels and the filename is ‘favicon.ico’.

Top 15 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques I Forget to do

Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic in the World Wide Web. After all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. I have identified and made a list of top 15 SEO practices that I tend to forget quite often. These simple SEO techniques if practiced properly can make a significant difference as to how my pages are ranked in the Search Engine Queries.

1. Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice. For example ‘Read the rest of the entry’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’ etc.
2. Use proper anchor text for interlinks. Don’t use ‘here’ or ‘there’.
3. Optimize the images, always create alt tags and write description in the alt tag.
4. Use search engine friendly permalinks. Make sure the URLs do not have ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters.
5. Use hyphens (-) between words to improve readability.

quivalent of UNIX Grep command in Dos/Windows

You can use the ‘type’ and ‘find’ command in Dos/Windows to get the equivalent output of the UNIX ‘cat’ and ‘grep’ commands. The ‘find’ command can be very useful when you are trying to search for a specific text or phrase over multiple files. The ‘find’ command also comes in handy when searching for all the occurrences of a specific text or phrase in all the files under all the sub-directories of a given directory.

The Type Command

The ‘type’ command in Dos simply displays the contents of a text file or files. To see the content of a file simply enter the following in the command prompt:
C:>type “filename”

The differences between Power (Watts) and Energy (Kilowatts-hour, kWh)

Before you can start saving money by cutting cost on unnecessary electricity usage in an attempt to live a greener life (Essential tips to start living Green today), you need to understand Power and Energy and the units of power (watt) and energy (kWh), what they mean, how do you use these terms etc. I have tried to give a high level explanation on the differences between watt and kilowatt-hour (kWh). Feel free to add your thoughts through the comment are below.

What is Power and Energy?

Simply put, Power is the rate at which work is performed or energy is transmitted. Energy is the capacity of a physical system to perform work.

Good Domain Name Picking Tips for Your Blog Setup

The first thing that comes to my mind when setting up a blog is getting a good domain name. In this article, I have described why I think it is important to choose a good domain name upfront. I have also explained how you can pick a good domain name for your blog or website followed by some domain name picking tips and general outlines (“dos” and “don’t s”).

Why pick a good domain name for your blog

Apart from many other reasons, you want to pick a good domain name for your blog site from the start because most likely you will be stuck with that domain name for the rest of the blog’s life. You may change the domain hosting provider from time to time depending on how reliable your current domain hosting provider is but the domain name will remain the same. The reason I say that you will be stuck with that name is mainly because changing the domain name is kind of like starting all over again from the start and you don’t want to do that once your site is established and getting regular traffic. You will start with ’0′ Google Page rank and will have to work your way up again if you do change the domain name in the middle. The Alexa rank and other ranking metrics will drop too because all these rankings are associated with the domain name. So the bottom line is that you want to pick a good domain name that you can live with from the start. Now, the question is how?

List of useful and frequently used DOS Commands

This list of DOS commands is very useful when repairing Windows after a system crash when Windows doesn’t load and the only option you have is a Dos command prompt. Use the “help” command to find the usage and details of any particular command e.g. C:\>help copy

• CHDIR – Displays the name of or changes the current directory.
• CHKDSK – Checks a disk and displays a status report.
• CLS – Clears the screen.
• COMP – Compares two groups of files to find information that does not match.
• COPY – Copies and appends files.
• DATE – Displays and/or sets the system date.
• DEFRAG – Optimizes disk performance by reorganizing the files on the disk.
• DEL – Deletes files from disk.
• DELTREE – Deletes a directory including all files and subdirectories that are in it.
• DIR – Displays directory of files and directories stored on disk.
• DISKCOMP – Compares the contents of two diskettes.

Find out which web hosting company offers the cheapest and reliable web hosting solution

I have been looking for a good web hosting company who offers cheap but reliable web hosting solution for quite a while. The keywords here are cheap and reliable and for some reason these two words do not want to go together very well  . If you are willing to pay big money then you have nothing to worry about… your options are endless. My focus is finding that sweet spot where reliability meets affordability. I update this page with my findings on affordable web hosting solutions. Hopefully this information will be of some help to someone looking to find a good web hosting company.


I am very strict when it comes to the reliability of the web hosting company. Server uptime is very important for anyone who has a website doing whatever business that they are doing. If your site is down when a visitor or customer goes to your site then you are losing traffic and business. In addition to losing temporary customers, if your site goes down frequently then there is a good chance that your customers will get annoyed and will try to avoid coming to your site in the future.
Most web hosting companies guarantee 99.9% Server uptime but in reality a lot of them do not deliver 99.9% server uptime that they guarantee. Most of the time you won’t even know that your site was down and you lost customers. None of your visitors complained doesn’t really mean that your site was up 100% that month.

Protect your WordPress site/blog from comment spam trick

I got caught with this trick once so I decided to share this with other web masters who don’t know this already.
In WordPress the default settings for comments (Settings->Discussion) are set as the following:


So the requirements for a comment to appear are:

• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail.
• Comment author must have a previously approved comment .

This is all good until someone decides to be all nice about your site and make a true nice comment so you approve it and then becomes a spammer. Since you already approved one of his comments before so now he can post a spam comment with links everywhere without your permission.
This is how this trick works:

WordPress Plugin for Simple Google Adsense Insertion/Integration

Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar by using a trigger text or calling the php function.

There are many plugins and services which can add Google Adsense to your WordPress site. However I found that even though something like Adsense Manager or Adsense Deluxe provides a lot of customizable options, it can be overwhelming and isn’t really simple enough for people who are new to WordPress or for people who simply want to insert Google Adsense to their site in a few clicks.
I found that most of the time I only use two or three types of Google Adsense units in various places and posts throughout my sites. Google’s Adsense policy mentions to not have more than three adsense block in one page anyway. That’s why I wrote my own Simple Adsense Insertion Plugin for WordPress, to focus on having 1-3 Google Adsense codes saved and use them where ever I want on my site by inserting a simple trigger text to my posts,pages and sidebar.

How to Uninstall and Reinstall WordPress

In this post I have explained how you can uninstall and reinstall WordPress. You will rarely think about uninstalling/reinstalling WordPress on your site unless you start having ‘Apache security mod rewrite and htaccess’ issue like myself.  I decided to Reinstall WordPress on one of my sites after trying numerous fixes to solve the issue and getting no result. Some people uninstall/reinstall WordPress to start over from scratch. Anyway, whatever the reason is, you can uninstall and reinstall WordPress the following ways.