UrTrix - UnRevealed Tricks

What do you do when your mobile phone has limited storage and there’s no option to add an external SD card? How do you carry all your videos and documents where there’s not an iota of space left on the device? Yes, you do have cloud-based services like Dropbox or Google Drive that add virtually unlimited storage to your phone but you’ve to be connected to the Internet to access your files. This week I’ve been testing a wireless USB stick from Sandisk that adds storage to your phones and tablets much like a regular USB drive. To get started, you plug the USB device into your laptop or desktop computer and let it charge for about an hour or two. You can also transfer the files to the stick from the computer through Windows Explorer or Finder on Mac. Once the device is charged, you tap the little power button on the stick to turn it on. Now install the Sandisk Connect app on your mobile phone, go to WiFi settings on your phone and connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot created by the USB stick. T...

You are reading a web page, say a longform article published in The New York Times , and would like to share it with your friend. The article is lengthy and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the parts that you really want him to read. How do you thus focus his attention to the most interesting stuff on the page? Genius and TLDRify are useful web apps that that let you annotate web pages much like the yellow highlighter pens that you would use on the printed page. The services let you highlight any paragraph or specific sentence on a web page and create direct deep links to the highlighted text. When people click the shared link, they see the original page but with the annotated text. How to Annotate and Deep Link Web Pages Genius is a music lyrics website but they also provide a web annotator to help you add context and commentary on any web page. The best part about Genius is that you don’t need to install any bookmarklets or browser extensions to u...

You are probably aware of contextual advertising where ads are served based on the content of the current web page. For instance, if you are on the ESPN website, the ads on the page could be for sports related products. If you are reading a review of a mobile phone, you may see ads for mobile accessories or other brands of phones. The buzz is however around interest-based or behavioral advertising where ads are displayed according to your past online activity and interests. To give you an example, if you search for ‘hotels in singapore’ on a travel website, you’ll see that almost every website you visit later will have ads arounds Singapore hotels. Whether you are reading news on CNN, checking out cooking videos on YouTube or reading your Facebook newsfeed, the ads are likely to be around the same them – Singapore hotels. In other words, the ads follow you on the Internet even after you have switched to a different website. Online advertisers, with the help of browser cookies, are a...