Exploring Firefox Cache: A Bunch Of Really Cool Tips

The browser cache temporarily stores images, scripts, and other parts of websites while you are browsing. This is normally a good thing because this enhances performance and load time.
The browser cache usually works behind the scene: you are unlikely to notice it even exists unless you feel like digging deeper.
But do you know that you can actually have quite a bit of fun viewing your browser cache? Do you know why and how you can clean it? Today’s tutorial is just about that: what you can do with your Firefox cache.

Viewing Your Firefox Cache

The cache statistics and directory location can be viewed in about:cache. Then:

• about:cache?device=memory – Lists memory cache entries.
• about:cache?device=disk – Lists disk cache entries.

It is really not easy to make sense of that interface but luckily we have an addon to make it easier.
CacheView is a GUI Front-end of “about:cache”. It allows searching and sorting memory and disk cache files. CacheView gives you a preview pane for any images, and makes it really easy to save MP3s and flash files from the sites you’ve visited.
After you have it installed, just go to Tools ->CacheView (or just use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+C) and you will be presented with a nice table containing your cache files and a preview pane.
The table is sortable by column (key, size, MIME Type, storing device, Last Fetched date) and what’s more it has a search function which adds a lot of sense to your cache database:

You can also right-click on an entry and delete it. It won’t delete things if the page is still opened in one of your tabs.

CacheSearch is another useful cache addon for FireFox which can search through the full-text of cache records:

Clearing The Firefox Cache

There are a few reasons why you may want to clear the Firefox cache, including privacy concerns and technical problems. I usually do it when I have any issues with a website: problems on sign-up, incorrect interface loading, etc.

Clearing the Cache Manually

Official Guide:

• Navigate: Tools -> Options -> Advanced panel -> Network tab
• In the Offline Storage section, click Clear Now.

FireFox Addons:

If you find yourself clearing the cache too often, you can find this little addon helpful. It adds a button to your browser toolbar – with it you can clear the cache with one click of a mouse.

Note: After installation, you will need to manually install the button to where you want it to be. For that, right-click on the sidebar and select “Customize“.
Here’s an alternative addon that can be used for that: Cache Status which will both monitor your cache statistics for both memory and disk devices and allow to clear it any time:

Clear The Cache Automatically:

• Navigate: Tools -> Options -> Privacy panel
• In the drop-down select “Use custom settings for history. “
• Select the check box for Clear history when Firefox closes and in the Settings next to this check box select Cache:

Courtesy: Make Use

Author: Ann Smarty

Avoid Getting an Unwanted Surprise on Twitter

You have come across an application on Twitter that will find your level of smartness with a click. You connect it to your Twitter account (using OAuth) and then you suddenly realize that that app has published your score to Twitter as well using your own account.

Such Twitter apps may be rare but they do exist and may sometimes embarrass you.

For instance, a popular directory would automatically change your Twitter profile as soon as you added yourself to that directory. More recently, we saw another Twitter app that would automatically tweet on your behalf and it nearly went viral.

How to Avoid Surprises on Twitter

If you would like to prevent apps from fiddling with your Twitter stream without asking, the easiest solution would be to not use them at all. That’s however an extreme approach as you’ll then miss a whole lot of other apps that are both nice and useful.

The solution is however simple. When you add an app to your Twitter account, you’ll see an authorization page where you can either allow or deny the app access to your Twitter data.

Read the language carefully. If it read something like “the app would like to access and update your data on Twitter,” you are granting the app permission to post to your Twitter stream. Majority of the Twitter apps won’t misuse that privilege but some may.

Therefore, if you are trying out a new app on Twitter that you have never heard of before, it may be a good idea to authorize only the ones that require read-only access to your Twitter data as seen in the screenshot below

Source: Digital Inspiration
Author: Amit Agarwal

Funny 404 Error Pages

File Not Found

WANTED

Dear Happy Internet Traveler

The page cannot be found

Page Fault Error

You have encountered an error

Couldn’t find the page you’re looking for

Press any key to continue

Courtesy: Smashing App
Author: AN Jay

How To Completely Restore Your Windows Computer To Factory Settings

Most computers from PC vendors come with certain pre-configured factory settings which are important to the computer’s operation. This is particularly true of laptops, which usually have special function buttons, and touch screen computers, which require special drivers in order to function. Of course, a computer from a factory also has default Windows settings and does not feature any of your own customizations.
There may come a time in your computer ownership that you decide to basically hit the reset button.

This may be because your computer was struck by a virus, or it may be because you are selling your computer and you want to make sure your personal information can’t be retrieved by the person you are selling to.
Whatever your situation, this guide will help you completely restore your computer to absolutely pristine factory settings.

Step 1: Save Files & Folders

Depending on your version of Windows and the recovery system your computer’s vendor uses, some of your settings and files may be saved when you restore your computer to factory settings. However, it is best not to rely on this.

Treat your restoration to factory settings the same as you would a complete re-format of your hard drive. Assume all data will be lost and back up all crucial information to an external hard drive. Don’t bother backing up programs you can reinstall, but make sure to back up everything you don’t already have a copy of.
Also, make sure that you back up your browser information. The help website of the web browser you use should provide instructions on how to back up your browser. If you don’t do this you will lose all of your bookmarks and saved passwords.

Step 2: Start The Recovery Program

There are two common methods for returning your operating system to factory settings. One of these is to simply reinstall the operating system through the operating system’s own repair or reinstall process. With Windows this usually requires access to a Windows installation CD  or the creation of a boot CD. If you have this available, you can refer to our guide on how to re-install Windows.
However, most computer vendors no longer ship out a copy of the Windows installation CD with their computers. Instead, the computer ships with a recovery partition or recovery disk. Each vendor uses their own particular type of solution, but the basics of them are the same. The most common names used by each company for their recovery solution can be found below. Note that manufacturers do change names from time to time – usually it will simply be something with the vendor’s brand name and the word “recovery” included after it.

• Acer – Acer eRecovery
• ASUS – ASUS Recovery Partition
• Dell – Dell Factory Image Restore
• Gateway – Gateway Recovery Management
• HP – HP PC System Recovery
• Sony – Sony Vaio Recovery Wizard

You can start the recovery program from within Windows. Alternatively – if perhaps your computer is having problems booting into Windows – you can usually access the recovery partition during your computer’s boot cycle. Pay attention to the display when your computer boots. There should be text indicating what button you need to press to start the recovery process. Typically, it will be a function key.

Step 3: Restoring To Factory Settings

Each vendor has their own recovery solution, so there is no way to provide a definitive guide to each and every vendor within the scope of this article. However, the general process of restoration almost always works like this.

• First, you will start the restoration program in Windows.  The program will ask if you’d really like to begin the restoration process and warn you that your data could be (or will be) destroyed during the process.
• Once you confirm that you would like to start the recovery process you’ll reach some sort of progress screen.  The computer may reboot to access this, or it may simply exit Windows and boot directly into the restoration program. At this point you’re set in your course – do not cancel the process. This can take half an hour to several hours depending on the speed of your computer.

• Once the restoration to factory settings is complete the computer will reboot and begin the Windows setup process. You will have to set up your user account and your settings just as you did when you first purchased the computer.

Step 4: Finishing Restoration

Ideally, the factory restoration wizard will completely restore everything needed to make your computer fully functional. However, in some situations you may find that a few drivers were not installed. For example, you might find that the screen brightness buttons no longer work on your laptop.
If you run into this problem you’ll need to download the drivers for your computer, which can be found on the vendor’s support website. You can either enter the serial number of your computer to obtain the proper drivers or you can find your model of computer yourself.

Once you have downloaded the appropriate drivers and installed them your system will be returned to its original factory settings. It will work just as it did the day that you bought it.

Author: Matt Smith

Courtesy: MakeUse

Backup your Gmail Inbox Online

If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy!
Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are some nice email clients that can automatically and easily bring your entire archive of Gmail messages offline.
Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?
If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:
Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked, you will still have access to all your previous emails.
Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.
Reason #3 – If the Gmail service goes down (yes, it happens), you will still be able to read your older emails. Gmail outage won’t affect work.

Backup your Gmail Messages Online

There are three services that can help you automatically backup your Gmail (and Google Apps) email accounts online and luckily, they won’t cost you anything.

The first and most obvious choice is Gmail. Create a new Gmail account and under Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Check mail using POP3 –> Add POP3 email account, enter the email address of your main Gmail account that you want to backup.
Within an hour or so, the online mail fetcher program will pull messages from your main Gmail account and will copy them to your new “backup” account. In my limited testing, I found that Gmail’s mail fetcher left all the messages that were either “read” or have been previously downloaded by another POP3 client so it’s not “true backup.”
That brings us to another alternative – copy your Gmail mailbox to Windows Live Hotmail. While you can add a Gmail account to Hotmail using POP3 (just like Gmail’s mail fetcher), there’s a much better and reliable option out there for copying emails from Gmail into Hotmail and it’s called TrueSwitch.

Setup a new Hotmail account and TrueSwitch, an awesome web-based email account migration service, will copy all your emails and attachments from Gmail to your new Hotmail address. If you have a relatively large Gmail Inbox, the backup process might take up to 24 hours but you’ll get an email as soon as the transfer is complete.
Like Gmail, Hotmail too offers “expanding” storage so it can possibly fit your large Google inbox as well. You can then add your Gmail address to Hotmail (click “Add an email account” in the sidebar) and this will ensure that new messages that land in your Gmail inbox in the future are also saved in Hotmail.
That said, both the services discussed above have one common drawback – they’ll always backup your entire Gmail mailbox and you cannot limit the backup process to a specific set of folders (or labels in Gmail). So if you have a fairly large mailbox and don’t want to backup each and every Gmail folder (or label), try Backupify.

Courtesy: Digital Inspiration 

Author: Amit Agarwal