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8 Random Tech Tips Youve Never Heard Of

Publication: The Economic Times Delhi;Date: Jun 18, 2012;Section: Personal Technology;Page: 6

8 Random Tech Tips Youve Never Heard Of The gadgets and tech that you use everyday can have many hidden features you may not know of. Karan Bajaj & Hitesh Raj Bhagat explain a few useful ones
TV viewing Distances Most people sit too far away from flat panel televisions. In order to provide an immersive viewing experience, the TV needs to occupy a certain minimal field of view. Plus, sitting too far away means that your eyes will not be able to view the extra detail that a high definition set offers. Recommendations can vary, but as a thumb rule, take the screen size in inches, multiply it by 1.5 and you get the ideal viewing distance (in inches). For instance, for a 40-inch HD set, you need to sit about 60 inches (5 feet) away for the optimum viewing experience with HD content. Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in iOS To make typing simpler on your iOS device, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to oft used phrases or sentences. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard and tap on Add New Shortcut just type out the phrase you want to use, the shortcut for it and click save. Now when you are typing in any app, enter the shortcut and it will automatically enter the phrase it is assocciated with. Using Gmail Aliases Your one Gmail ID is actually many. Gmail aliases are a great way to filter incoming mails. The first way is to add a "+" icon after your username followed by text of your choice. For example, you can register on shopping sites with the ID "yourusername+shopname@gmail.com" and then set a filter for emails to this ID. The other way is to use dots. If your ID is username@gmail, mails sent to user.name@gmail or even us.er.na.me@gmail will still get delivered to your inbox. Call Barring The call barring feature present in almost all phones now, allows you to restrict incoming or outgoing calls. This is useful when you are roaming out of your network or when you are handing your phone over to someone else and want to prevent misuse. Usual settings include restricting all incoming/outgoing calls, outgoing international calls or calls when roaming. Go to Settings > Call Settings and open the sub menu for call barring. Here you can set a restriction of your choice. If available, set a password so that no one else can change the settings. Volume levels on iPod Many songs have different volume levels, especially when they're different audio formats and obtained from different sources. You'll notice that when listening to songs using earphones, levels can keep changing, forcing you to adjust the volume. On most iPods, Apple has included a setting called 'Sound Check' when switched on, it automatically adjusts (normalises) volume levels of different tracks to similar levels. To activate this feature, head to Settings > Music > Sound Check. Note that Sound Check only works with the default music player. Leave a CD inside
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8 Random Tech Tips Youve Never Heard Of

your DVD player It's an unfortunate (and completely overlooked) design flaw, but almost all CD/DVD players have their lenses facing upwards. And the biggest enemy of the lens is dust which always settles down. Accumulation of dust on a lens leads to several issues slower loading times, read errors (skips, pops) or a complete failure to read. The easiest way to prevent this is to simply leave a disc inside the player at all times. The disc completely covers the lens and acts as a shield that prevents dust from settling. If you haven't used your CD player for a long time, make sure to eject the disc first and clean it before playing. How to Tweak Equalizers When tweaking audio equalizers, almost everyone increases the levels to boost certain frequencies. However, it's way better if you first move all the frequencies to the zero position (flat) and then lower the ones you want reduced. For instance, if you want more bass, leave the lower frequency bars (often denoted by Hertz or Hz) at the zero or flat level and move the higher frequency (often denoted by KiloHertz or KHz) bars down. To compensate, simply increase the volume a bit. These settings will give you 'sweeter sound', protect your speakers from damage, reduce overall distortion and prevent the automatic limiter (found in most audio systems now) from kicking in. USB Drive as RAM On a Windows PC (Vista and later), you can use a highspeed USB flash drive to increase performance. The feature, called ReadyBoost, can be enabled by right clicking a connected USB drive in 'My Computer' and selecting 'Properties'. It works best if you dedicate a 4GB drive for this purpose (don't use the same drive to store files). 8 More Quick Tips 1 You can find out details about the owner of any particular website from www. whois.com/whois. 2 You can send emails with attachments within Facebook compose a new message & enter the email ID in the 'To' field. 3 As long as an HDMI cable works, you won't be able to tell the difference between one that costs 200 & 2,000. 4 In Windows machines, use hibernate instead of sleep or shut down it'll start up faster and won't use up the battery. 5 If a CD is too scratched to read, cleaning it with white toothpaste or Brasso can get it working once or twice. 6 You might be able to temporarily revive a non-functional hard drive by placing it inside a freezer for 12 hours. 7 Use proxy sites like as www. vtunnel.com or www.graph. ws to access a website that has been blocked by your ISP. 8 Even on standby, most devices consume a small amount of power (vampire power). Unplug them to save money in the long run.

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