Scrabulous, the famous game by Indians - banned from Facebook

Wednesday, July 30, 2008 0 comments

Looks like bad news for millions of Facebook users - Scrabulous, the famous Facebook app by 2 Indians Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, from Kolkata has been banned due a law suit by Hasbro. They say, the game closely resembles their original board game - Scrabble.

If you did not know what scrabulous was, get ready to experience it here at www.scrabulous.com. You can even play it with friends all around the world. The site design closely resembles Facebook site's design.

You can also play it over e-mail. So no need to worry if internet is blocked at your work place.

Thanks Tim

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Thanks giving post :)

Thursday, July 24, 2008 4 comments

I have been busy lately due to my work load and not been able to post frequently. I will soon be done with all my work and will be back with great posts for my readers. I will be putting effort in making this blog better and building more readers soon.

In the mean while I would like to thank a few good hearts who have been helping me directly or indirectly in building this blog.


First I would like to thank Bulls (Prakash), my close friend and classmate for being supportive in many ways. He runs a blog about tamil movies, songs and Indian current affairs.

I would like to thank Rahul (Devil's Workshop) and Balal (Million Clues) for encouraging me in various ways.

I would like to thank the list of my entrecard droppers. Some of them have been frequent in dropping by.



A very special thanks to PC, the indian blogging legend for mentioning TECHTOLA again in his recent post about the guest bloggers. He runs the QuickOnlineTips, a world famous tech blog which has been published in the BBC site.

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Wordpress style comments for blogger blogs !

Thursday, July 17, 2008 8 comments

Just in case you didn't know - there is a version of our favorite Blogger.com @ draft.blogger.com where the Blogger development team keeps releasing beta features and tests them. You can log in over there and try out the features.

Finally the most wanted feature of Blogger has been released for testing. Now you can comment very very easily on TECH TOLA posts too.

No more waiting for annoying pop ups to load for commenting on my blog posts. Blogger in Draft has released the Wordpress style embedded comments for Blogger blogs. Its very easy to enable this for default templates by going to settings in "Blogger in Draft", and for custom templates like mine, just a small little hack is required.

Below is the link for the complete guide to set up this, including the changes you need to make for custom blogger layout templates.

Check out Amanda's tutorial on the Blogger Buster.
http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/06/how-to-add-comment-form-beneath-your.html

I would like to express my gratitude to the blogger team and Amanda.
Also Blogger in Draft has a blog here.

And I am adding a new section for blogger hacks. As I am a web developer myself, I will try to put up some cool hacks which I discover. You can also request hacks in the comments, which I will find out for you and post in here in my free time.

P.S. Thank you Balal, the link has been fixed and the post has been re-written.
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Preview/Save all images on a webpage inside Firefox

Friday, July 11, 2008 1 comments

You might want to save pictures that you find on web pages, but are not able to do it directly by using Right click -> Save As

Reasons for this might be
  • Images are Background images with transparent images overlaid to prevent copying.
  • Usage of JavaScript to block the right click. (Find out how)
  • Complex CSS usage to clutter a lot of images over each other.
  • It behaves like a link, and doesn't show the "Save Image As" option.
  • You just don't know how to right click !
and so on....

Now Firefox gives you an easy solution to save any image you find on a web page.
Just go to Tools -> Page Info -> Media and you will find all the images listed on the top.

When you select an image you can see the preview of it in the bottom panel. Now just select the necessary image and click Save As. One advantage of this method is that you get to select and save even hidden images like the loading animation GIF etc. Moreover the properties (resolution, name, size etc.) of each image are display in the middle as you select them.

Click the image on the top right for screenshot.

Rahul has written about another easy method to save background images in a page @ Devil's Workshop.
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Think.learn.io - blog with a cool name and cooler posts !

Wednesday, July 09, 2008 3 comments

http://think.learn.io/ - thats the URL.

Today while going through this post on QOT, I happened to click on one of the commentators blog URL as it was unique. Now I know why, names matter a lot :)

I found 2 posts which I felt I should share with my readers. It seems like the blog template is broken and even the feeds don't work. So I am forced to copy and paste the text from the site.

Create CON folder in Windows operating system.

The reason for this is that the following words are reserved words in DOS. Try and create a folder with any of the following names:

CON,PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9

start -> Run -> CMD
c:/>mkdir \\.\c:\con

Remove folder
c:/>rmdir \\.\c:\con

Note by Quakeboy - This trick is cool. You will not be able to create folders with the names given above directly using right click. You can do it only through the above method. After creating you won't be able to delete it using DEL, SHIFT DEL or even Right Click -> Delete. Now you can ensure that no one deletes your folder easily on a shared computer.

Check your antivirus !!!

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Open notepad..........Copy the above code in the file....then save it with the name Test.exe If this file got deleted immediately ....that means ur antivirus is working n updated!!!

Write a C program without using ; at the end of each line.

#define ; z
main()
{
int a, b, cz
printf("Enter the first value:")z
scanf("%d", &a)z
printf("Enter the second value:")z
scanf("%d", &b)z
c = a + bz
printf("%d + %d = %d\n", a, b, c)z
}

Click below for an extra cool funny page for people who know C programming !
http://think.learn.io/fun.html

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MAKE UNLIMITED FREE CALLS WORLDWIDE !

Tuesday, July 01, 2008 1 comments

Its has not been very long since someone came up with an idea to mix advertisement with sms to provide absolutely FREE SMS through the internet. The result of which was a bunch of sites which sprang in various countries offering free sms among which, one of my favorite 160by2.com has been doing well in India.

Now Parrot Media, an Israeli based company founded in 2007 has taken this industry to the next step to provide absolutely free calls worldwide by mixing clever advertising tactics with it.

Now you can make FREE unlimited calls of 2-5 mins each to any landline or mobile number on planet earth. You have to register in the site to use their service.

Check out their FAQ page to know more. I have already spoken to all my friends who live abroad using this fabulous service & it works FINE !

I wonder why such a site has not been covered by blogging sites like TechCrunch yet.

Link to site - www.parrot-media.com

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Good news for Web designers and Flash developers !


Flash content all over the web are soon going to be made search engine friendly. Here is what CNET News blog says -

Adobe Systems is helping Google and Yahoo to uncover Web content that was previously "invisible" to Web searches.

Still ExtraSuperMario has raised a very good point in the comments. He says that recently we have been seeing most of the Flash movie loaded through Javascript and XML files instead of the direct embed and object html tags in the page. Will search engines be able to parse them also and index the contents of the target flash files? We will have to wait and see.

Read more on CNET News Blog

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