How to Record your Desktop Screen with YouTube

Screencasting is simple. You download a software program, hit the record button and a video of your computer screen is created, ready for uploading to YouTube. There are a plethora of screencasting tools to choose from but did you know that you can also create screencast videos inside YouTube without requiring any desktop software? All you need is a YouTube account and a web browser.

Here’s a step by step guide on how you can make screencasts of your desktop windows with YouTube.

How to Create a Screencast with YouTube

Step 1: Sign-in to YouTube with your Google Account, click the Upload button in the upper left corner and choose Events under Live Streaming. If you never done this before, YouTube make require you to verify your phone number to enable streaming.

Step 2: You are on the Create Event page. Give your screencast video a title, set the privacy of the video to either Unlisted or Private and click the “Go Live Now” button.

Step 3: This will open the Hangouts on Air page. You can click the camera icon to turn off webcam recording. Similarly you can toggle the microphone icon if you do not wish to record audio.

Step 4: Now click the Screenshare button in the left toolbox and select a desktop window that you wish to record for your screencast. Remember that if you using multiple virtual desktops, it will only show program windows that are active on the current desktop.

Step 5: Click the Start Screenshare button to share your screen and then click Start Broadcast to start recording the screen. This is a private session so nobody can watch your broadcast while it is being recorded. When you are done with the recording, click the Stop Broadcast button and switch to the YouTube website.

That’s it. Go your YouTube video dashboard (http://youtube.com/my_videos) and you’ll see the new screencast video that you’ve just finished recording. You can download the video to your Google Drive or share it withe world.

The videos are recorded in 720p HD and this it would be a good idea to resize your desktop window to the 16:9 ratio before hitting the broadcast button.

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The story, How to Record your Desktop Screen with YouTube, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/01/2016 under Screencasting, YouTube, Software. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1JfqDel

How to Use Pluralsight Training for Free

Pluralsight is among the best places on the web to learn programming through videos. Whether you are a complete beginner or a pro looking to advance your coding skills to the next level, you’ll find a video course at Pluralsight that will meet your needs.

They have courses on practically all programming languages from JavaScript to PHP to Java to the trending technologies like AngularJS and React (see complete list). It is a subscription based service and you have shell out $30 per month to get access to their entire video training library.

Now here’s the interesting part. If you join the Microsoft Visual Studio program, which is also free, you automatically gain free membership to the entire PluralSight library for 6 months. No credit card or coupon codes required.

Here’s how you can activate your Pluralsight subscription in a minute:

1. Go to signup.live.com and create a new Microsoft Account. Skip this step if you already have one.
2. Go to my.visualstudio.com and sign-in with your Microsoft account.
3. This will open the Visual Studio Dev Essentials page. Here choose Pluralsight among the benefits (see screenshot) and click Get Code.
4. You’ll taken to the Pluralsight website to activate and redeem your 6-month subscription.

That’s it. Your subscription will be active for 6-months from the day you redeem the code. Pluralsight has iPhone and Android apps as well so you can learn on the go. And they have a desktop player that you can use to download videos and watch offline.

On a related note, you should definitely give Visual Studio Code a try. This is light-weight code editor from Microsoft that covers most programming languages and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It feels snappy, supports themes & extensions and has most features you would look for in a code editor.

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The story, How to Use Pluralsight Training for Free, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/01/2016 under Code, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1lqmBnV

Twitter Guide: How To Do Everything With Twitter

The first tweet was published almost 8 years ago and Twitter has come a long way since then. There’s a whole ecosystem of apps and services available now that allow us to use Twitter in more ways than ever before. This guide curates the best tools that will help you get the most out of Twitter.

1. Nuzzel – This works as an intelligent filter for Twitter and helps you discover the most popular news stories shared across your Twitter network. All signal, no noise.

2. Flipboard – Connect your Twitter account to Flipboard and it will create a beautiful magazine for all your Twitter feeds that you can flip through on the web (example), mobile and Windows 10 devices.

3. LifeOnTwitter – Get interesting statistics and facts about your Twitter account (example).

4. TallTweets – It lets you send tweets of any length by slicing your long tweet into multiple 140-character tweets (sample) and sending them in sequence.

5. IFTTT / Zapier – Whether you want to tweet by email, cross-post tweets to Facebook, or need a way to easily upload your Instagram pictures as native photos on Twitter, these tools can easily automate such tedious tasks.

6. Spruce / Canva / Adobe Post – Pick a photo, write some text and watch as these tools transform your text into a typographical masterpiece.

7. Storify – A web-based app that helps you find and curate tweets around topics and turns them into stories. You can also pull in YouTube videos, Facebook posts and other content from the social web in your stories.

8. Twitter Curator – This is like Storify for Google Docs (demo). You can search, filter and collect tweets right inside a Google Document.

9. Buffer – The best app for scheduling tweets. They offer useful analytics and the same tweet can be simultneously published to Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

10. Twitter Archiver – Specify a search phrase or an #hashtag and the archiver will pull in all matching tweets into a Google Sheet where they’ll live forever.

11. Twitter RSS – Easily create RSS feeds for Twitter search results and subscribe to them inside Feedly or any other feed reader.

12. CrowdFire – A handy tool to keep track of your unfollowers, send auto DMs to new followers, find dormant users in your Twitter timeline and more.

13. Egg Followers – Find all your Twitter followers that are still using the default egg as their profile picture. They are likely spam accounts.

14. TwitterCounter – See how your Twitter circle has grown over time. Some of this data is now available inside Twitter Analytics.

15. TweepsMap – It creates a Google Map of your followers so you know where they are coming from.

16. Daily140 – Get a daily email with most recent follows and favorites of any 5 Twitter users of your choice.

17. Tweriod – The tool analyzes the time when your followers are most active on Twitter. You can time your tweets accordingly for maximum reach.

18. Sleeping Time – Know the time period when a particular Twitter user is least active online.

19. TwitterFontana / VisibleTweets – Show tweets for any search term in real-time  on a big display. Useful for events.

20. PayWithTweet – Tweets are a form of social currency and some websites will happily give away design goodies, PDF ebooks, coupon codes, etc. in return for tweets.

21. ClickToTweet – The site will transform your text, say a quote, into a tweetable link. Useful for putting links in email newsleeters.

22. TheHash – It aggregates the most popular tweets around trending hashtags for the day and puts them in a beautiful visual design.

23. Direct – It brings a messenger-style interface to Twitter allowing you to chat with anyone through DMs.

24. Twitter Merge – Send personalized Tweets or DM multiple peope in one go from a Google Spreadsheet.

25. Twipho – A search engine for Twiter but limited to tweets with images.

26. Twitter Bots – Learn to write your own Twitter bots that can auto-reply, retweet or like tweets.

27. T4BP – Short for Twitter For Busy People, the site lets you quickly see updates from all your Twitter friends in single page.

28. Out Of Office – Setup an out-of-office reply bot similar to the one you have in your email program.

29. Web TweetDeck – The only reliable Twitter client that works in the browser without having to install any app. Includes tweet scheduling as well.

30. Instacurate / Vellum – These will turn your Twitter timeline into a visual Pinterest style news site.

31. Fake Tweets – With a little CSS, you can change the text of any tweet and create fake screenshots similar to the ones you regularly see on satire websites.

Bonus Tip: If you tweet labnol.org, Twitter will convert your text into a link pointing to the actual website. In order to prevent Twitter from doing so, insert a zero-width space after the dot. See how.

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The story, Twitter Guide: How To Do Everything With Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/01/2016 under Twitter, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/Z3DncZ

RED Raven Impressions: 4.5K!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkcJL_FARp8
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Dope Tech: CES 2016!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hUxIO09hPA
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Ask MKBHD V5: CES!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5UiAaeHdgg
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MKBHD Update 12.0: Moving Out!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZLZtH5hnKo
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R.I.P. Valleywag, 2006-2015

Here lies Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip and news site launched in 2006 by Gawker Media and decommissioned in 2015. Its editors and writers over the years included Nick Douglas, Nick Denton, Owen Thomas, Ryan Tate, Nitasha Tiku, and Sam Biddle. The site’s archives are maintained here, but no new posts will be published at this page. You can find incisive news and commentary on the personalities and institutions that govern the technology world at Gizmodo.

Read more...

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Dope Tech: Best of 2015!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3DmlFkC2cI
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Pick Your Smartphone Giveaway!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShcnNkr_PEY
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Smartphone Awards: 2015!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBuVR8_Mybw
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Tech of the Year: Tablets!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0BSqrfXBjM
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Talking Tech with Kobe Bryant!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP5Au3tH448
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Grado SR80e: Dope Budget Headphones!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqkBD2FK7KE
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iPhone 6s Battery Case: Explained!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tuHrt42WnI
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5 Facts about the LG V10!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TWB32376QA
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OnePlus X Review!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgK-bxZIG-o
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YouTube Gear #1 | Blue Yeti Pro!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E006QLHt0Y
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A Wireless USB Stick that Expands your Phone’s Storage (And a Giveaway)

What do you do when your mobile phone has limited storage and there’s no option to add an external SD card? How do you carry all your videos and documents where there’s not an iota of space left on the device? Yes, you do have cloud-based services like Dropbox or Google Drive that add virtually unlimited storage to your phone but you’ve to be connected to the Internet to access your files.

This week I’ve been testing a wireless USB stick from Sandisk that adds storage to your phones and tablets much like a regular USB drive. To get started, you plug the USB device into your laptop or desktop computer and let it charge for about an hour or two. You can also transfer the files to the stick from the computer through Windows Explorer or Finder on Mac.

Once the device is charged, you tap the little power button on the stick to turn it on. Now install the Sandisk Connect app on your mobile phone, go to WiFi settings on your phone and connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot created by the USB stick. That’s it.

The content of the USB drive can now be accessed from your mobile phone. You can stream audio and video files stored on the stick, you can browse photos, open PDF files and other documents in associated mobile apps and you can easily transfer files between the phone and the wireless drive. It is much like plugging a USB stick into your mobile phone but without the wires.

The Wi-Fi network has no security by default but you do have an option to add a password to prevent other nearby devices from connecting to the USB stick.

Unlike using cloud storage, Sandisk’s Connect USB stick requires no Internet connection (it will create a hotspot that your mobile device will connect to) and multiple devices can connect to the same USB drive over Wi-Fi. So if you are carrying an iPad and an Android phone, not only can the two devices connect to the stick simultaneously but it can be used as a temporary medium to transfer files between the iOS and Android device.

The USB stick itself is solidly built with a transparent protective casing though it is obviously heavier and looks bigger than regular USB sticks. The Sandisk mobile app does have some issues but none of them are a deal breaker. In my testing, the iPad app frequently crashed especially when reading big PDF files. The Android app would not allow me to browse the web using cellular connection while the phone was connected to USB drive over Wifi.

Sandisk Connect (Amazon, Flipkart) is compatible with both Android and iOS devices and is available in various capacities from 16GB to 128GB. If you are running out of storage space on your mobile phone and upgrading is not an option, the Connect stick is probably the easiest way to expand your phone’s existing storage.

SanDisk Connect Giveway

SanDisk India is giving away 5 units of the SanDisk Connect Wireless USB stick to @labnol readers in India. All you have to do is fill this short form to participate in the giveaway. SanDisk will announce the winners on November 30 (Monday). Good luck!

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The story, A Wireless USB Stick that Expands your Phone’s Storage (And a Giveaway), was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 24/11/2015 under Android, IPhone, Usb, Gadgets. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1Oe0H36

How to Link to a Specific Part of a Web Page

You are reading a web page, say a longform article published in The New York Times, and would like to share it with your friend. The article is lengthy and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the parts that you really want him to read. How do you thus focus his attention to the most interesting stuff on the page?

Genius and TLDRify are useful web apps that that let you annotate web pages much like the yellow highlighter pens that you would use on the printed page. The services let you highlight any paragraph or specific sentence on a web page and create direct deep links to the highlighted text. When people click the shared link, they see the original page but with the annotated text.

How to Annotate and Deep Link Web Pages

Genius is a music lyrics website but they also provide a web annotator to help you add context and commentary on any web page. The best part about Genius is that you don’t need to install any bookmarklets or browser extensions to use the annotator. Go to the browser’s address bar and add genius.it/ before the page URL.

Next sign-in with your Twitter, Facebook or Google Account and you’ll be able to add annotations to the current page. To get started, highlight a sentence on the page and click the Genius button that pops-up to add your own comment. Genius will then provide you with a unique hyperlink that will directly open the page with the annotation highlighted.

The next useful app in the category is TLDRify. Here you need a bookmarklet or a browser extension but there’s no need to sign-up for an account to annotate web pages. Also, unlike Genius which may show annotations left by other users on the same page, TLDRify links will only show your own highlights.

While you are on a web page page, select any sentence or paragraph, click the TLDRify bookmarklet and it will create a deep link to the highlighted text. When people click the link, the browser will automatically scroll to the annotated text.

Internally, these services create an exact copy of the web pages on their own servers so even if the original page goes down or has changed, your old citations may still work.

Also see: How to Archive Web Pages Forever

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The story, How to Link to a Specific Part of a Web Page, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/11/2015 under Bookmarklets, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1Yr2yEv

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium: A 4K Smartphone!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEMmKu4tYWI
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How to Opt-Out of Interest-Based Advertising and Stop the Ads from Following You

You are probably aware of contextual advertising where ads are served based on the content of the current web page. For instance, if you are on the ESPN website, the ads on the page could be for sports related products. If you are reading a review of a mobile phone, you may see ads for mobile accessories or other brands of phones.

The buzz is however around interest-based or behavioral advertising where ads are displayed according to your past online activity and interests. To give you an example, if you search for ‘hotels in singapore’ on a travel website, you’ll see that almost every website you visit later will have ads arounds Singapore hotels. Whether you are reading news on CNN, checking out cooking videos on YouTube or reading your Facebook newsfeed, the ads are likely to be around the same them – Singapore hotels.

In other words, the ads follow you on the Internet even after you have switched to a different website. Online advertisers, with the help of browser cookies, are able to track you across the web and serve relevant advertising. The following video explains behavioral or interest-based advertising in slightly more detail.

How to Opt-Out of Interest-Based Advertising

If you would not like web companies to use your past online behavior to target ads on your computer, you do have an option to easily opt-out. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and other web advertising networks offer simple ways to help you opt-out of targeted advertising.

1. Google – Go to http://ift.tt/zixXyp and ensure that the “Ads based on your interests” setting is turned off.

2. Microsoft – Go to choice.microsoft.com and turn off the “Personalized ads in this browser” setting to only allow generic ads. Windows users can click the “Start” button, click Settings – Privacy and then turn off “Let apps use my advertising ID for experiences across apps” to disable personalized ads that appear inside apps.

3. Amazon – Like Google, Amazon too delivers interest-based ads on its own websites as well as external websites. Go to http://ift.tt/1IafMMy and enable the setting that says “Do Not Personalize Ads from Amazon for this Internet Browser.” This is a cookies based setting, not linked to your Amazon account, and thus if you clear the cookies, your setting will be erased too.

4. Yahoo – Yahoo offers an Ad Interest Manager (AIM) allowing you to opt-out of interest-based ads with one click. Go to http://ift.tt/1Nn18cA and click the blue ‘Opt Out’ button to register your preference.

5. iOS – On your iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Privacy > Advertising and turn on Limit Ad Track to opt-out of interest based ads from iAd, Apple’s advertising network.

6. Android – Open the Google Settings app on your Android phone, tap Ads and enable Opt out of interest based ads.

7. Twitter – Go to Twitter Settings on the web and uncheck “Tailor ads based on information shared by ad partners” to disable interest based ads. Similarly, on the Twitter app, go to Settings > Select Privacy > Select Advertising > Enable the “Limit Ad Tracking” setting.

8. Facebook – Go to Facebook Settings, click Edit against the setting ‘Ads based on my use of websites and apps’ and select ‘Off’ for Show online interest-based ads.

How to Stop Interest-based Ads Altogether

What we have here are links to disable online interest-based ads from the most popular advertising networks on the Internet. If you would like to completely stop interest-based ads from all companies on any website or device, you should use web-based tools like aboutads.info and networkadvertising.org. These offer a single window to help you opt-out of Interest-based advertising from all member networks.

These tools also use cookies and therefore you need to use them on every browser and device where you wish to opt-out. The downside is that you preferences will be lost if you clear your browser cache.

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The story, How to Opt-Out of Interest-Based Advertising and Stop the Ads from Following You, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/11/2015 under Advertising, Privacy, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1HhOoS1

Blackberry Priv Review!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-jYDRd_53w
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iPad Pro Second Impressions! [Apple Pencil]

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAoQPp9XLt8
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Smartphone Camera Quality: Explained!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldS_yHnZMDs
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Google Nexus 5X Review!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NTOZbjg6SE
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Twitter Is So Hopelessly White Its Only Black Engineering Boss Just Quit in Protest

Leslie Miley was “the only African-American in [engineering] leadership” at Twitter, a company that employs thousands, and owes much of its success to adoption by non-white users. Then he quit, as he explains in a new blog post, because the company is absolutely brain-dead on race.

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Dope Tech #2: Customs!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuHD9h5gTS4
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How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter

How do you get SMS notifications on your mobile phone for important emails in your Gmail? Google doesn’t support text notifications for their email service but Twitter does. If we can figure out a way to connect our Twitter and Gmail accounts, the Gmail notifications can arrive as text on our mobile via Twitter. Let me explain:

Twitter allows you to follow any @user via a simple SMS. They provide short codes for all countries (see list) and if you text FOLLOW to this shortcode following by the  username, any tweets from that user will arrive in your phone as text notifications. For instance, if you are in the US, you can tweet FOLLOW labnol to 40404 to get my tweets as text messages. Similarly, users in India can text FOLLOW labnol to 9248948837 to get the tweets via SMS.

The short code service of Twitter can act as a Gmail SMS notifier. You create a new Twitter account, set the privacy to private and this account will send a tweet when you get a new email in Gmail. Follow this account via SMS from you main Twitter account and the SMS notifications will start pouring in.

Use Twitter as a Gmail Notifier with Google Scripts

Here’s a step by step guide on how you can use Twitter to get SMS notification for important email in your Gmail account. It will take a minute to setup and, internally, there’s a Google Apps Script that’s doing all the magic. It monitors your Gmail mailbox in the background and as soon as a new message arrives in your account, the script sends out a tweet.

1. Log out of your existing Twitter account and then go to twitter.com/signup to create a new Twitter account for your Gmail account.
2. Confirm your email address, then open the Twitter settings page and check the option “Protect My Tweets.” This will make your Gmail notifications private and neither search engines nor other Twitter users will be able to see tweets generated through Gmail.
3. Click here to copy the Google Sheet and choose Authorize under the Gmail to Twitter menu (near Help). Remember to authorize with your new Twitter account.
4. Once authorized, choose Start from the Gmail to Twitter menu and enter your Gmail search query. For instance you can say is:important is:unread in:inbox newer_than:1d to only receive notification for new, unread and important emails in your Gmail. Click OK.

That’s it. The Gmail notifier is running and it will tweet when a matching email is found. It runs every 10-15 minutes and will only work on incoming email, not the old message. The messages will also be logged in the Google Sheet so you know what’s happening behind the scene.

Get SMS Alerts for Emails at Gmail

Open a new browser session in Incognito mode, log in to your old Twitter account and send a follow request to your new Gmail account on Twitter. Approve the new follower request and you should now see tweets for new Gmail messages, as they arrive, in your main Twitter timeline.

Should you wish to receive SMS alerts on your mobile phone for new Gmail messages, just open the Twitter profile page of your Gmail bot and turn on Mobile Notifications. This will obviously work only if you have connected (and verified) your mobile phone with your main Twitter account.

Also see: How to Write a Twitter Bot

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The story, How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under GMail, Sms, Twitter, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/ysZ3wy

How to Get Things Done with Trello

My work involves prioritizing, organizing and managing tasks, information and ideas. I have tried hundreds of todo lists and project management tools to get the job done but finally settled on using Trello. It is now my swiss knife where I do everything from collaborating with my wife on shopping lists to building products for my company to teaching students to writing a book.

Trello provides a very flexible way to do this all and it has a whole ecosystem of apps and extensions to make your life simpler. If you are new to Trello, here’s a getting started guide that will help you understand the basics of Trello and how you can use the service to manage work and get things done.

What is Trello and why I need it?

Trello is like a todo list on steroids. At the core of it is a card which is the fundamental unit of information and it can be around lists. Here is a simple Trello card. It has a title with something I plan to do in the near future.

What follows is more complex Trello card containing a title, description (optional), file attachments (you can even pull files from Dropbox or Google Drive), comments from other people and a variety of things including checklists and tags. Each card as a unique email address and you can add comments to the card by simply sending a message to that address.

Product Management with Trello

You can make a card as simple or as complex as you want. The cards are then organized into flexible lists. The lists show a preview of various cards and you can click on them to view details. The list stores all related cards.

In this example, each card in the Trello list corresponds to a feature I was building for a product. The lists are then grouped into boards. The board is effectively a project. If you take a look at my product board below, you’ll see lists like Backlog, In Implementation, QA, Questions and Finished.

I see this as an assembly line to make products. I create a Trello Card for each feature or idea and add to the Backlog list. The team would discuss and add further details to each card. Then the developers would drag individual cards to the In Implementation list and once the task is complete, it is shifted to the QA list. The testers would then move it to Finished once it has passed all the necessary checks.

Each of my projects would have a board like this and you can do a lot of cool things with that. For instance, I use the Pomello extension to pick up a task from Trello and start working on it. It will calculate the time taken and prompt me to take a break every, say, 25 minutes.

The cards work great in team settings and help the whole team to understand who is working on what and they can also keep a track of the status of tasks. Of course, there are more powerful project management tools out there, but none as simple and as extensible as Trello.

Getting Things Done with Trello

I’m a fan of the Getting Things Done method and here’s how I manage my time with Trello using GTD approach. You can download my Trello template for the GTD board here.

Whenever an email arrives, or there’s a task I need to complete or when an idea pops up in my mind, I create a new card in the “Inbox” list of my Trello board. Once a day, I “triage” them (decide the priority) to move into one of the 4 buckets.

• If it is something I’m waiting for someone else to do, I will move it to the “Waiting” list.
• If it is something that is not mandatory or urgent, say I want to read the new GRR Martin’s novel or call my uncle, I move it to the “Someday/Maybe” list.
• If there is a set time for a task, like tax filing or submitting a paper to an event, I move that card to “To Calendar” and assign a due data to the card. You can easily link Google Calendar to your Trello list using the iCal feed.
• If a card doesn’t fall in any of the above buckets and I really have to do it, I move it to the “Need to do” list.

Every morning, I take the most important cards from the “Need to do” list and move it to the “Today” list. These are the things I plan to get done today. If the “Need to do” list is clear, then I move a couple of pending cards from the “Someday/Maybe” list at the end of the day and handle those cards. Any unfinished task at the end of the day must be moved back to the respective lists.

If you can dump your mind into the “Inbox” list, you can have much better clarity in what you do.

Trello for Book Writing

Here is a partial view of my Trello board of my book on Indian history – “From Tryst to Tendulkar”. I use the board to organize my chapters, ideas, references and everything else.

Trello for Teaching a Class

I teach classes for entrepreneurs, product managers, business school aspirants and civil participants on various methods to study. Here is a screenshot of my Trello board for a class for business school aspirants.

Trello for Shopping

My wife and I share a Trello card with all the things to buy. Either one of us puts stuff there and when one of us goes shopping, the card becomes our shopping list. As I pick up stuff in the supermarket, I also check the item in the Trello card. When my wife needs that stuff again, she simply unchecks the checked item. Thus, we don’t need to keep adding existing stuff to the card.

Balaji Viswanathan is a product manager by profession, he writes a blog, created Be Limitless (a popular Chrome add-on), wrote a book on Indian history and is considered a rockstar on Quora. His favorite GTD tool is Trello.

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The story, How to Get Things Done with Trello, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under Productivity, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1Wpa7bW

OnePlus X Impressions: Super Budget!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zulLRv0GFhM
via IFTTT

How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results

Google Alerts, you probably know this, offer an easy way for you to create RSS feeds from the Google search results of any query. This is a good option if you are looking to monitor when new web pages are indexed by Google that match your search query.

If you have never created feeds with Google Alerts earlier, here’s a quick primer. Type your search keyword, expand options, choose “Automatic” for sources, choose “All Results” for “How Many” and set “RSS Feed” as the Delivery Method. Google will create an RSS feed of web search results that you can subscribe in Feedly or another RSS Reader.

Please see the Google Alerts tutorial to write more advanced search queries.

Better RSS Feeds for Google Search

A big limitation with feeds created using the “Google Alerts” approach is that you’ve limited control over the feed and it won’t include search results from all over the web. In fact, the first time you create a feed, it is likely to be empty and results would be added as Google discovers and indexes new content for that search query.

There’s an alternate method for creating RSS feeds for Google Search results and, though the initial setup takes few extra steps, you’ve enough options to fine tune the search query and have more meaniningful search results in the feed. You can even have RSS feeds for Google Images.

1. Go to Google Custom Search and create a new search engine. If you would like to search the entire web, just like Google search, put *.com as the site to search, edit your CSE and under Sites to Search section, select the option that says “Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.”
2. Make a note of the Google CSE id which will be something like xxxx:yyy – click the Search Engine ID button under Details to know your CSE ID.
3. Go to Google Developers Console, sign-in with your Google Account and create a new Project. Give your project any name – like Google Search RSS Feed – and click the Create Project button.
4. Next go to the API & Auth link in the sidebar and click on APIs. Here search for “Custom Search API” and enable the API.
5. Under the same API & Auth group, click Credentials – Add Creditials – Browser Key and click the Create button. You’ll get the API key now.

Now we have all the ingredients required to create our RSS feed for Google Search. The basic feed URL will be something like this:

http://ift.tt/1N7Lf7Wxxx:yyy&key=abc&q=query

Replace xxx:yy with the Search Engine ID, abc with the API key and query with the actual search query. If your query has multiple words, separate them with a + symbol (like Digital+Inspiration). There are tons of other search parameters to the Feed URL. For instance:

• googlehost=google.de (to return results from Google Germany)
• searchType=image (search images only, the default is web pages)
• safe=high (filter adult content from search results)
• dateRestrict = d10 (return results published in the last 10 days)

To give you an example, the following feed URL will fetch family safe pages from Google India, published in the last 2 weeks for a query “Make In India”

http://ift.tt/1KFnez6;cx=xxx:yyy&key=abc&q=Make+In+India&dateRestrict=w2&googlehost=google.in&safe=high

Advanced users can create simple web apps that use the Custom Search API to monitor search results by email or they can scrape Google search in a spreadsheet. The only limitation is that the Search API has a daily quota (100 requests per day) so you should not share the feed or the API key with other users. However, if you enable billing inside the Google API Console, the free limit will be upgraded to 200 search queries per day.

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The story, How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under Google, RSS, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/qSFDDN

Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On

Your WordPress website has a public login page, often found at http://ift.tt/1FGSnly, and it is possible for someone to gain access to your site by guessing your password through repeated trial and error method. To harden your WordPress security, it is therefore recommended that you password-protect the WordPress admin folder and also use 2-factor authentication.

Secure WordPress with Single Sign On

WordPress Single Sign On offers an even more secure option for protecting your website from brute force attacks as you ‘outsource’ the authentication part to WordPress.com. Once enabled, the login screen on your WordPress website is disabled and you are required to sign in to your WordPress.com account in order to access the admin dashboard of your own self-hosted WordPress blog.

There are several advantages here:

1. Since WordPress.com accounts support 2-factor authentication, the the same level of security is now enabled for your blog as well without requiring another plugin.
2. All login requests on your site, including the malicious login attempts, are now automatically redirected to WordPress.com and thus it reduces the load on your server and database.
3. If you manage multiple sites, you can log into them all with a single WordPress.com account and no longer have to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

How to Implement WordPress Single Sign On with Jetpack

Here is a step-by-step guide that explains how you can enable Single Sign On for your WordPress website:

Step 1: Create an account on WordPress.com using this link. Skip this step if you already have an account. You may be required to create a dummy blog on wordpress.com as part of the registration process.

Step 2: Once your account is created, click here to enable two-factor authentication. Specify your phone number, WordPress will send a verification code via SMS and you need to type the same code to verify your number.

Step 3: Go to your WordPress blog, install the Jetpack plugin, activate the plugin and then click the green button that says “Connect to WordPress.com” to link your blog to  your WordPress account.

Step 4: Once the connection is established, go to Jetpack settings and activate the “Single Sign On” module.

Step 5: Go to your WordPress installation folder via FTP or SSH, switch to the current theme folder (wp-content/themes/theme-name) and edit the functions.php file. Here copy-paste the following line of code after the first line:

 add_filter( 'jetpack_sso_bypass_login_forward_wpcom', '__return_true' );

Step 6: Go to Users – Your Profile and, at the bottom of the page, click the button that says “Log in with WordPress.com” – this will essentially link your WordPress.com account to the username that you’ve used to log into the site.

This will completely disable the login form of your WordPress site and instead forwards the user to the login screen on WordPress.com. Once you login through WordPress, you are immediately redirected to the admin dashboard of your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Also see: How to Improve WordPress Security

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The story, Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under WordPress, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1kQWTsX

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