Faster: 100 Ways to Improve your Digital Life
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1. IP Address
In this field you need to enter the private IP address of your computer. To find this, you need to open Unified Remote server on your computer > Click on the Connection tab > Click on the Network Interfaces button, and usually the IP address mentioned in the first entry is what you need.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
2. Port Range
From Port 9512 to Port 9512
3. Protocol
TCP and UDP
Manually adding the server to Unified Remote is not too complicated. In the Host IP / Address field, you need to enter the external public IP address of the computer you want to control from your Android phone. To find the external IP address of your computer, start your browser on it and connect to the website What Is My IP Address (www.whatismyipaddress.com). Whatever IP address is displayed by the website is the external IP address of your computer. Enter it in the Host / IP Address field in Unified Remote on your phone. All the other fields will be pre-filled by Unified Remote and you don’t need to make any changes to them. Tap the Save button to continue.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Unified Remote will now connect to your computer and allow you to remotely control stuff on it through the Internet. To check whether you have successfully connected to your computer and troubleshoot connection issues, you need to tap the Diagnostics option on the Unified Remote dashboard screen.
To start controlling your computer, go into Remotes section of Unified Remote. There is a variety of controls available, each of which allows you to remotely control or perform a number of different tasks on your computer.
Some of my favourite and most useful remote controls are these:
1. Basic Input
Using this remote control, you can control the mouse on your computer and type stuff on your computer.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
2. Chrome and Firefox
Using these remote controls you can control all aspects of your favourite browser on your computer, including opening a new tab, browsing to a particular website, closing a tab, moving between tabs, going to the home page, refreshing a page, scrolling up and down, zooming in to a page and so on.
3. File Manager
As the name suggests, this remote control allows you to navigate through all the files on your computer remotely. Moreover, you can remotely carry out various functions on your files, like open, delete, move, cut, copy and so on. This can also be used to launch apps on your computer by browsing to their folders.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
4. Custom Run and Custom Windows
These remote controls allow you to launch apps on your computer and implement Windows shortcuts on them, like minimize, maximize and others. It is probably one of the best ways to launch apps on your computer from your phone.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
5. Power
These remote controls allow you to remotely shut down, restart, hibernate or log out of your computer or even resume it if it is switched off. Perfect for playing pranks on your friends!
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
6. iTunes
Using the iTunes remote control from your Android phone, you can launch the iTunes app on your computer and control all the music that is playing on it. Similarly, Unified Remote also has remote controls that allow you to control other media apps on your computer, including Windows Media Player, VLC, Winamp, Spotify, Pandora, Netflix, Hulu and others.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
7. Picasa
This remote control is perfect if you have people over and want to show photos to them on a big screen (like your TV screen or even your room wall!), and want to control the flow of your Picasa photos remotely from your Android phone.
8. PowerPoint Basic and PowerPoint Advanced
If you are giving a presentation and want to remotely control the flow of your presentation slides from your Android phone, these are the remote controls you need. The only limitation is that you need to first launch PowerPoint on your computer, and only then will this remote control become active.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
9. Start
You can use this to launch apps that are listed in the Start menu of your computer.
10. YouTube
This remote control allows you to remotely manage the media controls for videos that you are watching on YouTube using your computer. For this remote control to work, you need to make sure that the focus is currently on YouTube on your computer—otherwise it doesn’t work.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
To prevent cybercriminals from connecting to your computer for malicious purposes, it is highly recommended that you enable an access password on the Unified Remote server. To password-protect the Unified Remote server on your computer, simply start the app and go to Security tab and select the Enable password protection option on it.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Unified Remote and the Unified Remote logo are registered trademarks of Unified Intents AB, used with permission.
Once you have enabled password protection on the Unified Remote server, the next time you try to connect to your computer from your Android phone, you will need to enter the access password by going to the Unified Remote dashboard > Servers> selecting your server > entering the access password in the Password field.
With the help of Unified Remote you can control everything on your computer almost as if you were sitting in front of it!
89. How to make basic conversation in foreign languages using your mobile phone
< 60 Seconds
Imagine that you are lost in a foreign country where no one speaks English and all attempts to communicate with the locals in broken English or exaggerated gestures also fail. Do not worry—you can communicate with non-English speakers with the help of Google Translate on your mobile phone.
Google Translate (http://translate.google.com) is a free app that translates text from one language to another and can also read it out aloud, using the built-in speaker on your phone. To use this app, open the browser on your phone or tablet to Google Translate and type in whatever text you wish to translate. You can type in English or in any other supported language.
Google Translate and the Google Translate logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
Google Translate and the Google Translate logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
From the drop-down list, select the language into which you wish to translate the input text and press the Go button. In this example, I am going to select Spanish as the final language. As of now, Google Translate supports more than sixty five languages.
Google Translate and the Google
Translate logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
After I enter my input text, Google Translate will translate it from English to Spanish, and display it on the screen. You can either show the translated text to the Spanish speaker, or you can press the Speak button and let Google Translate read out the translated text aloud for you. Even though the translation done by this tool will be a little textbookish and may not always be perfect, it will at least help you get by in case you are lost in a foreign land.
90. How to use the panic button to hide stuff from your boss
< 60 Seconds
Imagine that you are in the office, and watching some videos on YouTube instead of doing your work. Even if you have a cool boss, you don’t want him to get the impression that you are slacking off work. Since bosses often like to prowl around unannounced, you won’t have the time to close all the open tabs in your browser, once you are chanced upon. The best you can do is minimize your browser and hope that your boss simply keeps walking and doesn’t linger at your desk for too long. However, a bunch of minimized browser windows is visible even from a distance, and is a sure sign of no productive work being done.
Panic Button and the Panic Button logo are registered trademarks of Privax Ltd, used with permission.
Don’t worry, because there is a panic-button app that can be installed in your browser, which will not only minimize all your open tabs but also open a safe, work-related website instantly. It is available as a free download for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Once it is installed, Panic Button will add an actual panic button next to the URL address bar of your browser. Right-click on it and select Options to manage the settings of this app.
Panic Button and the Panic Button logo are registered trademarks of Privax Ltd, used with permission.
On the Settings page of Panic Button, you can completely customize its behaviour and working to suit your preferences. Normally, you need to click the panic button in the browser address bar to hide all open tabs. However, the Settings page of this app will also allow you to set up a keyboard shortcut that will do the same thing much faster. Whenever you see your boss walking towards your desk, simply press the keyboard shortcut to hide all the open tabs in your browser!
Panic Button and the Panic Button logo are registered trademarks of Privax Ltd, used with permission.
The best part about Panic Button is that you can set it up in such a way that it will also open a safe page instead of your already open tabs. You can also choose to hide the Panic Button icon from your toolbar once it has been activated.
Once it is safe to go back to your open tabs, you can reopen all the hidden tabs with a single click of the mouse on Panic Button. The Settings page also allows you to set a password to protect the saved hidden tabs from prying eyes. In other words, without entering the password, nobody will be able to reopen the saved hidden tabs on your browser. This is an additional safety feature in case someone else accesses your computer and browser.
Panic Button and the Panic Button logo are registered trademarks of Privax Ltd, used with permission.
91. How to access blocked websites
< 120 Seconds
Internet censorship has become all-encompassing in the past few years. Most governments, companies and even colleges block access to popular websites like Facebook, YouTube and others.
In order to understand how to unblock access to these blocked websites, it is important to understand how your local network administrator blocks access. Typically, all networks will maintain a list or a database of blocked websites. Whenever you type a website address in your browser, that address is compared with the list of blocked websites. If what you typed in your browser is found in the blocked list, then you are blocked and shown an ‘access denied’ error message. On the other hand, if what you type in your browser does not appear in the blocked list, you will be given access to it. This is where something known a proxy server comes into play.
A proxy server is a means to indirectly access a website with the help of a browser to conceal the location of the user. It accepts the request for a specific web page, processes the request, fetches the required web page and displays it immediately back to the user. The firewall or filtering mechanism on the local network of the user thinks that the user is merely connecting to the web proxy—which in itself is not blocked—but the address of the blocked website is not registered. In other words, a proxy server is a way to bypass filters and gain access to blocked websites on the Internet.
Web proxy servers not only allow you to bypass blocking censors, they also protect your IP address or identity, giving you complete anonymity on the Internet. Proxy servers act as a mask for you as you surf the Internet. One of the most popular proxy servers on the Internet is a website called Anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.ru), which allows you anonymous access to blocked websites on the Internet.
As the name suggests, this is a Russian website. There are a lot of practical advantages of using Russian websites. Most Russian websites are free and, more importantly, most of them are completely anonymous and do not maintain any records of their users’ activities.
Once you have connected to Anonymizer, type in the address of the website you need in the space provided on the top right corner of the screen, and click on whatever looks like the ‘submit’ button.
For example, if you type http://www.google.com. Anonymizer will connect to the Google website, fetch the web page and display it on your screen, Google will record that someone from Russia is connecting to it, but not your IP address. From the other side, your local network administrator will record that you are merely connecting to the Anonymizer website, and not to Google.
If you use Anonymizer from www.anonymizer.com and www.anonymizer.ru frequently enough, sooner or later your network administrator will block them as well. But the good news is that there are thousands of such web proxies available on the Internet. Some of the most popular and reliable ones are the following:
http://www.hidemyass.com
http://www.cooltunnel.com
http://www.bypassthat.com
http://www.btunnel.com
http://ztunnel.com
http://anonymouse.org
http://thexite.com
http://getus.in
http://anonsurf.org
92. How to recognize a song playing somewhere
< 180 Seconds
Has it ever happened that you are at some place and hear a song playing you really like, but have no clue which song it is? It happens to me all the time—at a bar or club, listening to the radio in the car, at the shopping mall or while watching TV in a friend’s house. There is no longer any need to keep trying to guess which song is playing, instead just Shazam it!
Shazam (http://www.shazam.com) is an app that you can download on most mobile and tablet platforms. It is able to identify any song by recording the music playing in the background and comparing it to its growing database of approximately ten million songs. The most impressive thing about Shazam is that it doesn’t matter what part of the song is playing when you run it, it will still identify the song! The only thing it requires to work properly is Internet access on that mobile phone. In this example, I am going to run Shazam on my iPad.
Shazam and the Shazam logo are registered trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Ltd, used with permission.
This is the Shazam app home screen. In the left column, Shazam displays the top most tagged (or Shazam-ed) songs currently in the world. To view all the songs that you have Shazam-ed until now, you need to press the My Tags button. To identify a song that is playing somewhere, you need to press the Shazam button on the top right corner of the app. Make sure that you are as close as possible to the source of the music, and avoid covering the microphone of your device with your hands while running Shazam.
Shazam and the Shazam logo are registered trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Ltd, used with permission.
Shazam will now li
sten to the song playing in the background, compare it with all songs in its database, and try to identify the song. The whole process does not take more than a few seconds.
Shazam and the Shazam logo are registered trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Ltd, used with permission.
As soon as it identifies the song, Shazam will display various details related to it. In this case, the song turns out be ‘Beautiful Life’ by the Shawn Anthony Band, featuring Aqua, and the album is Beautiful Life.
Shazam and the Shazam logo are registered trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Ltd, used with permission.
Using the Similar feature in the right column of Shazam, you can discover other songs that are similar to the song that has been identified. This is a great way to discover new music that you would otherwise not come across. Moreover, Shazam is completely integrated with popular social networking platforms and allows users to not only share tagged songs with friends, but also watch the music video of a tagged song on YouTube. If the song is available on iTunes, Shazam will also show you the option to buy it from the iTunes store.
Shazam and the Shazam logo are registered trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Ltd, used with permission.
Shazam will usually recognize most English songs. It also often recognizes popular songs in other languages. To test the versatility of Shazam’s database of songs, I decided to try to confuse the app by playing the song ‘Ya Ali’ from the Bollywood movie Gangster, which is supposedly inspired from the Arabic song ‘Ya Ghaly’ by Guitara. I tried this multiple times with different portions of both songs, and each time Shazam recognized which song I was playing!