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Sunday, 7 April 2013

Smartly backing up and securing your contacts with Smart Phones

We all generally face problems when we lost the phone and we do not have the backup of the contacts. But with the wave of smart phones this problem is quite solved. The simple solution is that you need not to save any contacts in the phone or sim. You might be thinking that why so? This is because when ever you lost the phone the contacts are saved in either of the two memories i.e. phone or sim. But if you do not save anything to either of the memories then the threat of misuse of contacts is quite less. The simple way to back up and secure your data is keeping the contacts on the cloud. The best is to save the contacts to your Google account and sync your smart phone with your account and all the contacts will be visible from your Google account. The simple steps to backing up all the contacts to your Google account are as follows:

1. Firstly export all the current contacts in your smart phone to a single .vcf file. This is not difficult at all. All the smart phones have this facility to export all the contacts into a single file. Go to contacts in your smart phone, chose the option export all contacts to SD card. It will automatically create the single .vcf file containing all your contacts.
2. Go to your Gmail account from your smart phone or transfer the .vcf file to your computer and then login to your Gmail account. 
3. On the left corner where Gmail is written, click on the small arrow to see the contacts section. 

4. Click on the contacts to move to the contacts section and click on more button to expand the menu.
5. Click on import and give the path of the .vcf that you have exported. This will import all you contacts to your Gmail account. 
6. The next step is to sync your Gmail account to your phone and the contacts in your phone are ready form the Gmail. Whenever you add a new contact, add it to your gmail account when phone asks you where you want to save. 

Another benefit of this is that, you can sync your gmail account on your multiple devices and your contacts will be there at multiple devices without having the trouble to import and export your contacts. Whenever you lost the phone just change the password of your Gmail account, so that the contacts in your lost phone got unsync and your contacts remain safe and backed up.

Friday, 5 April 2013

Creating Animations using CSS3

This is the era of Internet and Technologies where every day you could find a new development. CSS3 is a mind blowing development in the field of web designing. This is not only a technology but a platform from where any designer, weather fresher or experienced could touch the sky. Its so simple and results are so impressing that you could even forget flash. The design era in the web designing sector was firstly captured by flash and it remain there for a decade, but now JQUERY, HTML5 and CSS3 have changed the scenarios. They are so light in size that they could easily load in the web browser and the results are awesome. Here, I am discussing a small example as how to easily create animations using CSS3.
#anim
{
width:100px;
height:100px;
background:red;
position:relative;
animation-name:myfirst;
animation-duration:5s;
animation-timing-function:linear;
animation-delay:2s;
animation-iteration-count:infinite;
animation-direction:alternate;
animation-play-state:running;
}
I have created an id with the name anim. The basic CSS you can understand if you are a web designer or a fresher even in the IT sector. I will describe the CSS3 properties. animation-name is the name that is given to the animation. You will come to know, further in the tutorial how it will work. animation-duration specifies the seconds for which your animation will play. animation-timing-function tells the behavior of the animation, it could be liner, ease, ease-in, ease-out. animation-delay specifies the time in seconds between consecutive iterations of the animation. animation-iteration-count specifies the no of times animation will play. IF you want it to play all the time then specify it infinite. animation-direction tells the direction in which animation should play. It can be normal or alternate. animation-play-state specifies the state of the animation when the page gets loaded. This is the description of the CSS3 for the id anim. Moving on further, I want to explain the @keyframes CSS at rules. These are certain set of rules that can be used to develop the animations.
@keyframes myfirst
{
0%   {background:red; left:0px; top:0px;}
25%  {background:yellow; left:200px; top:0px;}
50%  {background:blue; left:200px; top:200px;}
75%  {background:green; left:0px; top:200px;}
100% {background:red; left:0px; top:0px;}
}
Here @keyframes is the syntax and myfirst is the name of the animation that we have specified in the CSS property. Coming to the description of the rules. The @keyframes rule set provides you the facility to give different animations at different time intervals of the animation. In this example I have divided the animation into four sections. At 0% i.e. when the animation starts the css given will be applied till 25% of the animation is complete and the css given at 25% will be applicable till 50% and so on. When you apply this in your code you will find something like below.












Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Beware of Phishing

Phishing is the art of fetching the personal and secret information like user name, password, bank details, credit card details, cell numbers etc. Since many persons hesitate to reveal the personal information on the websites because of identity theft, the phishers have found an advantage out of that. They deliver the mail to you which seems like it is sent personally and is so convincing that it attracts and forces the user to give the personal information. Instead, persons should understand that giving the information on trusted sites is purely secure rather than giving the information by mail to any one.

Certain ways how phishers attack, what mistakes are commonly observed and how you can protect yourself are as follows:-

  • Fake and spoofed emails and messages on cell phones: The main way by which phishers attach is emails and messages. Whenever you receive an email or message with a threat or congratulations like 
    • Send the form immediately or your bank account will be terminated
    • Congratulations you have won $1000, please fill your details and send as soon as possible
    • You have been selected in MNC, register yourself for the interview
    • Your credit card is at the last stage of renewal. Renew immediately
          All these types of messages are fake and they are intended to get your personal information. So when ever you receive such a mail. Do not panic or get excited, rather stay calm and recheck the things.
  • Copy of Popular Websites: This is also very common technique to get the information via fake means. The designers make the copy of certain popular websites and misusing the faith developed by those websites to fetch the information. They just make small changes in the URL of the website like they change www.facebook.com to www.faecbook.com but the design on the page and the website is the same. Even many persons make clone of the bank's website. So when ever you fill your personal data on any website do check the URL twice.

Portable Electronic Gadgets - A need or social symbol?

These days most of the persons do not judge you by what you wear, how you talk, how you behave, in-spite of that they judge you by what electronic gadget(s) you carry along with you like smart phones, tablets, smart watches etc. This scenario is not applicable only to the youth but to every age group. In any party, the status of persons is with smart phones or tablets. If you have something to show like this then you have a status else you do not.

This is not the fault of the people rather it is the impact of the developing technology. The technology has developed to such an extend that every person is in the net of that technology. Every one needs to have access to the technology in order to get updated. In one or another sense, we can say that portable electronic devices are much of a need these days. These electronic devices provide a means of ease in every sphere of life, like instant mail access, instant media sharing via messengers like whats app, any time any where business conferences using apps like Skype, any time any where television using apps like nexGenTv, weather access via AccuWeather, you can create and give presentations any time any where, get up-to date on social front etc. etc., it is endless. 

There are so many advantages of the smart phones and tablets but still for many persons it is just a status symbol. There is no doubt that what a high end phone can provide you features, a basic smart phone cannot provide, but still they could provide all basic needs that a smart phone needs to deliver. We should not use them as a status symbol rather than they are for making our life simpler and faster on technological front.