ISP is Limiting your Download Speed ?

ISP is Limiting your Download Speed ?

Sometimes speed seems to go down while you are watching videos on YouTube or are trying to download files through a torrent client, even though you have a fairly good Internet connection at home and regular websites load pretty quickly in your browser.

If you observe such a speed pattern quite frequently, chances are that your ISP could be rate limiting your traffic for certain bandwidth intensive operations. To give you an example, if your regular download speed is 100 kB/s, YouTube videos could be streaming at a speed of 30 kB/s due to rate limiting by the ISP.

Is your ISP is limiting your download speeds?

You can run the Glasnost test in your browser to determine whether or not your ISP is following any such tactic to manipulate your download speeds for specific sites.

The test uses a Java applet to compare your regular download speed against the speed at which Flash videos get streamed to your system. Other than videos, it can also compare the download speed for email attachments (via POP and IMAP), normal HTTP based file transfers, torrents and binary downloads from Usenet servers.

You should consider running these tests at different times of the day since some ISPs may be limiting speeds only during peak hours.

Note: Check & Stop any other downloads that might be running in the background for more accurate results

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How Big Really

How Big Really

It often becomes a bit easy for us to visualize the size of an area if it is shown relative to something that we are already aware of.

Based on this idea, BBC has launched a new site called Dimensions where you can visualize the scale of important historical places and events by overlaying them on a map of a location that you are already familiar with.

For instance, you can set your city as the starting point for the Great Wall of China to understand how massive it is. Or if you wish to know how much distance did the astronauts walk when they first landed on the moon, simply overlay that area to some familiar neighborhood.

There’s a map of Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan where Laden was thought to be hiding sometime. Once you see that area relative to your own location, you suddenly realize how big it is.

Note: Dimensions is a prototype built by BERG for the BBC. We make no guarantee as to its accuracy, reliability or performance.

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Undo Send

Undo “Send” in Gmail

Note: The feature is hidden from most users who don’t know where to look, so here’s a quick guide to avoiding social and workplace faux pas with the click of a button. Be aware that the feature is part of Gmail Labs, though. That means it’s still in testing and it might not always work as intended – CosmoCyber

Since the Undo Send feature is part of Gmail Labs, you’ll have to navigate to the Gmail Labs page to activate it. Load up Gmail (Gmail) and look in the top-right corner of the page. Between your e-mail address and Settings you’ll see the green Labs icon.

Find “Undo Send” among the list. (Picture Below)

Customize Undo Send’s Duration

By default, Gmail gives you a 10-second window of time in which you may undo a sent e-mail. You can change that to five, 20 or 30 seconds by going to Settings.

How it Works ?

Write and Send Your E-mail

Now you have either five, 10, 20 or 30 seconds to undo your sent e-mail, depending on what you selected under Settings.

As soon as you hit Send, a subtle line of text will appear above your Inbox saying “Your message has been sent.” It will be accompanied by a few extra options. Among them is “Undo.” Click that within the allotted time and your faux pas will be prevented.

Click the “Undo” Button After You Send

“Sending Has Been Undone”
You’ll immediately be taken back to the e-mail composition page, and your e-mail will be in draft form, unsent and ready for further editing.

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>Tricking Notepad

>Tricking Notepad

Here’s a really funny way to break Notepad.

This actually works. It will not crash your computer, it just breaks Notepad in that it causes it to display very oddly. No permnent damage comes of the following steps.

1. Open up Notepad (not Wordpad, not Word or any other word processor)
2. Type in this sentence exactly (without quotes): “this app can break“
3. Save the file to your hard drive.
4. Close Notepad
5. Open the saved file by double clicking it.

Instead of seeing your sentence, you should see a series of squares. For whatever reason, Notepad can’t figure out what to do with that series of characters and breaks

Explanation: In notepad, any other 4-3-3-5 letter word combo will have the same results.
It is all to do with a limitation in Windows. Text files containing Unicode UTF-16-encoded Unicode are supposed to start with a “Byte-Order Mark” (BOM), which is a two-byte flag that tells a reader how the following UTF-16 data is encoded.

The reason this happens:

1) You are saving to 8-bit Extended ASCII (Look at the Save As / Encoding format)

2) You are reading from 16-bit UNICODE (You guessed it, look at the Save As / Encoding format)

This is why the 18 8-bit characters are being displayed as 9 (obviously not supported by your codepage) 16-bit UNICODE

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