Research Bin

If your phone case is bulging or your laptop lid won’t close right, don’t ignore it. Battery swelling is more than annoying : it’s time to care for your device. Here’s what’s happening, why it’s risky, and what you can do about it...  

How long can we keep data intact? Surely a very long time..? Not necessarily! A few events over the past few months got me thinking and it turns out that keeping data over long periods of time is pretty challenging. Let's see why.

Digital editions of books are rapidly gaining popularity. While some people still find it preferable to use hard-copy, more and more people move to eBooks in favor of added functionality and usability. When it comes to a book you own, it is nice to be able to commit your thoughts on to it. Highlighting, scribbling, commenting or making notes on your copy allows a more personalized feel to your books. And it makes reference a lot easier. Unlike in printed books, the original text is not ruined by user edits on a soft-copy. Such data introduced by the user are referred to as "annotations". They are actually an overlay of information over the book print.

When it comes to recording information, multimedia files have the obvious upper hand over plain text documents. They have a solid flow with a lot of accompanying data in addition to the objective information. For example, It's much interesting to listen to a narrative as opposed to reading the same information on text form. It's not quite the same. But it is difficult to move at our own pace through an audio unlike text or an image. This can be a headache when it comes to keeping track of contents in long audio/video tracks. Let's look at a couple of features we can make use of to make life easier.

When I first got my hands on an Android phone, it had a 1150mAh battery. Normally, it wouldn't last a day without recharge. Sometimes its a real pain, running out of fuel so fast. I surfed forums, tried apps and many tweaks. I experimented over time and finally cracked the mystery. Now I manage just near 3 days on average without recharge and guess what? its on the same battery. It may last 4-5 days on standby! Here's a thing or two I learned from my experience.

As an Android phone user, you would probably have experienced what its like to match up with your data plan to avoid unpleasant financial issues. Smartphones depend heavily on the Internet and Android is no exception. Unless you are willing to dedicate a reasonable amount of money to afford an unlimited data plan, it's most likely that you are forced to keep your droid unplugged from the Internet  most of the time. Not to mention how dumb your phone would look like with its data turned off. So, lets find out to lessen the burden via some alternative Internet connections

Ever wondered to set a webserver  on your own  and declare access from the Internet? Seems challenging and expensive. Yes it will be if you plan to do it professionally, but setting up a experimental and temporary one is not that hard; trust me. Here I will cover the basic procedure for setting up that experimental server. 

If you are a blogger using Google's Blogger platform, I'm sure you have met with some Widgets which you can add to your blog as simply as Clicking a button. While most blogger widget makers provide this One-click installation method, you too can!

Peer-to-peer is a networking model where the two parties involved in either sides of a connection have the same functionality. In contrast, Server-Client model offers one party to run a service while the other uses it. In P2P , both parties are servers+clients themselves and each party is called a 'node'. For two devices to connect P2P,

Visual Basic applications exhibit considerable dependencies. In order to execute a Visual Basic application, those have to be fulfilled. The special environment which backups execution of VB apps is called the VB runtime environment. Unlike most runtime dependencies exhibited by similar languages, VB is a relatively special case. The VB executable is a true PE(Portable Executable) file directly executable by Windows OS. The runtime environment is required in the middle way as the VB app starts relying on the runtime environment to do work for itself. (Read more on Ups and Downs of VB )

Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, it gained huge popularity and became one of the best products of the time. However within the next few years, rather than an updated version, Microsoft announced a new product, .NET which was a totally new environment where there is no backward compatibility with previous VB applications. .NET hit the market in 2002 with VB.NET replacing VB 6.0  Introducing a new language is a significant risk, both from technical and marketing points of view. But Microsoft risked a new system without continuing their proven success at the time. Why?

Microsoft Visual Basic has come a long way since 1991 when it was officially declared. Since its introduction, it revolutionized the world of software development. By the way credit to the 'Visual' concept goes to some one else(find out it here ). It made software development so easy that soon it became one of the most popular programming languages of all time.

There are a couple of rating widgets for blogger for free. 5-Star Ratings, Thumbs Up-Down Ratings, Yes-No Ratings, 1-5 Ratings etc. To my knowledge, there are 4 service providers to choose from.

Cabinet files(a.k.a. Diamond files) are the Microsoft Windows Archives. These archives can store multiple files/folders into a single file with or without involving data compression. Since every Windows system is natively compatible with cab files, Windows provide enough facilities to create, extract, or rebuild cab files without requiring additional software.

When it comes to distributing a collection of files, a software, or a setup. One of the best choices is to make the distro in the form of a Self-extracting Archive( why? ). If you chose to go with this solution, you will have to use some tool to create the SFX. Ofcourse, that's no big deal; There are plenty of software which allow you to produce self-extracting archives. Winzip, WinRAR, 7zip, etc may be the obvious choice. But, have you ever noticed that the Windows Operating System holds a built-in utility for this? Strange enough, but it's true.

I'm sure most of you have dealt with data compression. The concept is shrinking the space consumption of files and folders. WinRar , 7zip , Winzip , KGB archiver are some famous utilities for this purpose. Keep in mind that its not the software, but it is the compression algorithm that does all the magic(Software are just different different implementations of data compression algorithms) Now, let's say you run a bunch of files weighing 200MB through one of these compression software and came up with a single compressed file with 150MB. Clearly we have a saving of 50megabytes here. This compressed file is literally a pack of data. If you plan for a distribution, this is the obvious choice. However...