Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Day 10 with Nexus S: Battery mystery, 10 Battery Power Saving Tips #Maxis10

Battery mystery in Google Nexus S

Battery StatusEver since Day 1 with Google Nexus S, I never have the phone fully charged at 100% – the phone always claimed to be fully charged at 94%-97%, and charging the device overnight doesn’t help. Faulty battery?

Nope. Luckily my 1500mAh Lithium-ion battery in Google Nexus S seems to be pretty normal after I did some extensive studies on this phenomena. Not too sure it will occurs in all other Android devices, but apparently fully charged at the battery life of less than 100% in Google Nexus S is not something need to be worried.

In Byron G’s study, he did an extensive study on the charging and discharging conditions on his HTC Droid Incredible and figure out the reason of inconsistent battery drains, especially during a full charge. It’s a lengthy article, which is a pretty interesting one, so if you have about 15 minutes to digest it, do check it out.

Continue reading Day 10 with Nexus S: Battery mystery, 10 Battery Power Saving Tips #Maxis10

[How To] Temporary Solution to the Slow/Laggy Facebook in Malaysia (Windows only)

facebook-icon

Update 1: Fix updated for those concern about security issue.

If you are staying in Malaysia and have recently found that your Facebook has been loaded quite unbelievably slow, you are definitely not alone. The author of this post have the same issue, especially during the photo viewing, it is pretty laggy.

Luckily there is a temporary solution for this. It is being a temporary solution because I believe eventually the problem will be solved by Facebook themselves, plus if there are more people know about this workaround, it might cause congestion as well, therefore the temporary.

Basically it requires a minimal changes in your Windows file, and you can start to feel the difference in loading times. So let’s get started!

Continue reading [How To] Temporary Solution to the Slow/Laggy Facebook in Malaysia (Windows only)

Get Extra 768MB Space in Dropbox for Free [How To]

Dropbox is a service that allows you to store documents or media files to their server, and synchronize them to all of your other devices easily. It is also meant to use for sharing easily where you can generate a quick link to your file, and monitor any changes to your file, which is very helpful in work collaboration; they also offers client in smartphone. If you are new to Dropbox, you can log on to their site for more information.

Although Dropbox team do offers some Pro account (50GB and 100GB) with monthly fee or annual fee for heavy users, but the free account from Dropbox which has a 2GB storage is most likely adequate for most of the office users, to synchronize their documents between home and workplace, or even home users, which can use it to store quite a number of medias such as photos, digital songs, documents, either for sharing or backup purpose.

Once you have your account signed up in Dropbox, you are readily to make the full use of the given 2GB capacity. Dropbox is so kind that they offer you and your friend (good thing meant to be shared together) a free 250MB for each invited friend that registered themselves, up to 8GB. However, unless you have a relatively large network, you might find it is a little bit difficult to get yourself free spaces in Dropbox (some of them doesn’t need Dropbox at all), here’s another way to do it.

Continue reading Get Extra 768MB Space in Dropbox for Free [How To]

Increase Your Browser Loading Speed [How To]

speedometer0100_ffxInternet browsers have become one of the most important software on the computer, be it a PC or a Mac, and those big brand of browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera etc. are always working hard to add in tons of features into their browser to attract more users. Although new features are most welcomed (like HTML5, JavaScript speedup etc.), but I believe most of the usual browser users will still concern about the speed of the browser itself, either the startup speed or the loading speed.

Recently, there are a new trick which has been widely spread through the internet on how to increase the browser’s speed, by creating a virtual RAM disk from your physical RAM (Wikipedia: RAM Disk). As we all know, RAM (or Random Access Memory) is able to be accessed much faster by your computer compared to the hard drive, thus if the disk cache of the browser (which stores all the data, images from your browsing session) is located at the RAM disk, theoretically the browser’s loading speed should be faster, since the cached data are now accessed from RAM to the browser, instead of the hard drive. And I do find the browser startup a little bit faster with this method (might be different for different systems), so I think it should helps in browsing experience, given that you have a large amount of RAM installed (4GB is recommended).

Continue reading Increase Your Browser Loading Speed [How To]

Firesheep Forced Internet User to Rethink the Security Issue of Web Services

internet-globeTwo weeks ago, or 24th October 2010, there is a new plug-in for Firefox being released during the ToorCon 12 (a hacker conference) and immediately the plug-in captured tons of media attention. What is this plug-in made for, you might ask? Firesheep, a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox that is developed to demonstrate the security issue in most of the famous web services, such as Facebook, Twitter etc., and this security issue (known as HTTP Session Hijacking) wasn’t a new one – it is already made known and discussed since year 2004, and still most of the web services are ignoring this issue. Most of the web services aware that they can do a fully secured website for their users by using HTTPS/SSL, but a big portion of them choose either not to implement it, or implement it at the surface layer only (like Facebook and Twitter), where you only have the full encryption and protection during the login, but not the session after that. This doesn’t do good for their user since the HTTP sessions are still easily being hacked, and certainly their new privacy settings doesn’t help in the situation at all.

Continue reading Firesheep Forced Internet User to Rethink the Security Issue of Web Services