Below is a list of selected popular Easter Egg pranks by Google.

Anagram:

Google the word “anagram” and you should notice a suggested search result – “Did you mean: nag a ram” Google normally uses the phrase “Did you mean:” to correct misspellings.

Of course, “nag a ram” is an anagram of the word “anagram”.

Recursion:

Google the word “recursion” and shows “Did you mean: recursion” even though your search term is spelt correctly. This is a recursive search, pointing it back to the same result again and again.

The Answer To Life:

Google for “the answer to life, the universe, and everything“. The phrase is equated to 42, a reference to Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

World Cup:

Google the word “world cup” and scroll down to see “Gooooooooooal” instead of “Goooooooooogle”

Google Egg Drop Game:

This java applet (game) was developed specially for Google by Ken Perlin of New York University. You need to use your mouse to help the bunny collect the eggs in order to spell “Google”.

ASCII Art:

Searching “ascii art” will turn the Google logo into an ASCII art

Number Of Horns:

Search the phrase “the number of horns on a unicorn” and the result is equated to “1”

Hacker search:

Words on this page are spelt with the combination of numbers and special characters.

The Loneliest Number:

Google the phrase “the loneliest number” and it will make the Calculator answer 1, a reference to the song by Harry Nilsson.

Windows version of Google:

Once the plug-in is activated, visitors are displayed with a message as shown below.

This message can be fully customized of your desire.

Download Maintenance Mode Plug-in

Definition of WordPress Plug-in: It is a program, or a set of functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that provides specific features to your WordPress blog.

There are about 10,231 plug-ins developed which are hosted on WordPress site and are available for download. Not all 10k plug-ins are essential. That’s crazy to think something like that. So, below is a list of few essential and most important plug-ins your blog will be in need of.

Post Related:

WP-Note: This plugin allows you to create nice «notes» in your WordPress posts or pages. There are five tags namely note, important, tip, warning and help.

WP-Post Views: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.

Yet Another Related Posts: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

WP-Post Ratings: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Social Media:

Social Bookmarks: The Social Bookmarks plugin for WordPress adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.

Lifestream: Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Twitter Tools: Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Digg Digg: A social plugin that use to add Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz button into WordPress content.

Comment Related:

Thank Me Later: Thank Me Later is a plug-in which will automatically send a thank you email to readers after they post a comment. It can be set to send the message a time after the comment was posted (an hour, day, week, month, etc).

Ajax Comments-Reply: When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired.

WP-Spam Free: An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtually eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Subscribe to Comments: Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows commenter’s on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.

KeywordLuv: Reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Ad Management:

Who Sees Ads: Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, for instance Adsense, depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates (eg sidebar.php) or within posts and pages.

Amazon Context Links Ads: Use this plugin to enabled Amazon context ads in your blog start earn money from Amazon affiliate

Ad Coder: Ad Coder is an easy way to spread adserver banner code or other html/js code over your blog or page content

WhyDoWork: WhyDoWork Adsense is a WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template.

Got Banners: Got Banners is a simple banner rotating plugin for WordPress. Unlike other banner rotators, Got Banners displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

Developer Plugins:

All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

WP-Ban: Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referrer URL from visiting your WordPress blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name, user agent or referrer URL tries to visit you blog.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator: This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

WordPress.com Stats: Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your page views, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.

Security:

Ask Apache Password Protect: This plugin adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog’s admin directory. It adds a 2nd layer of security to your blog by requiring a username and password to access anything in the /wp-admin/ folder.

Force SSL: This plugin will force HTTPS connections for security purposes. Of course, you will need a web server “equipped” with a proper SSL certificate to use it.

WP Security Scan: Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. Scans Passwords, File Permissions, Database Security,Version Hiding, WordPress admin protection/security, Removes WP Generator META tag from core code

Login Lock Down: Login Lock Down records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.

Adjustment Tool consist of various tools – Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Exposure etc, with which you can process your images better. If you’d left me with no choice but to choose one tool out all, then I would certainly select Curves, without any effort.

Below is an example of before and after tuning my shot using curves.

Note: Create a new fill or Adjustment layer before using the adjustment tools (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves Or at the bottom of the Layers panel). That way, it enables quick alteration or removal at any time during the color correction process.

So, what does Curves offer you?
The curve tool is one such tool that helps you tune your images and intensify the mood, though you think you’ve taken pretty neat shots, but needs a little adjustment to make it look even better. Curves allow you to adjust the color and tonality (contrast) by changing the shape of the curve. The upper section of the curve represents the area of lower contrast and the lower section represents the area of higher contrast. Dragging the curve upwards/downwards it lightens or darkens the image respectively.

Curves can be used on individual color channels by selecting the color from the drop-down menu. We can selectively increase or decrease the amount of a color cast in the red, green, and blue channels to achieve perfect balance.

Microsoft Word 2007 comes with a feature that creates a backup copy of every document you create. By default, this feature is disabled. Here’s a step-by-step producer on how you can enable and take advantage of it.

Step 1: Click on the Microsoft Office logo (top-left corner) and click Word Options in the lower-right corner.

Step 2: The Word Option window pops-up. Click on Advanced and scroll down through the headings until you find the Save section.

Step 3: Check the Always create backup copy setting and press OK.

You’ve saved the settings and every time you create a new document, a back-up copy will be created automatically.

Now, how do you access the back-up copy? The back-up copies are saved with .wbk extension. Fetching the back-up copies is pretty easy. Open Search and type *.wbk (This filters your search results by displaying only the files that have .wbk extension).

Acer Liquid Features and Specifications:

• GSM: Quad-band 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
• GPRS/EDGE Class B
• Processor: 1GHz Qualcomm QSD 8250
• 5 megapixel camera with autofocus
• 3.5 “WVGA (800 × 480) Capacitive Touchscreen Display
• 256 MB SDRAM / 512 MB FLASH
• Bluetooth® 2.0+EDR
• Integrated A-GPS
• 3.5mm headphone ja
• Battery: Lithium Polymer rechargeable with 1.350 mAh capacity
• Talk time: Up to 5 hours for WCDMA / Up to 6 hours for GSM

P.S. If you’d like to get your hands on it and play around with it, then contact me or just DM me on Twitter

I’ve used keyboard shortcuts here to make the process faster.

Step 1: Open the image you want to work on. In this tutorial I’ll be using the image below.

Crop the image if you would like to…

Step 2: Desaturate the image. Press Ctrl+Shift+U to do so…

Now create a new layer by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N and change the blending mode of Layer 1 to Color. (Important Step!)

Select Color from the drop down menu. See below.

Step 3: Now select the Brush tool (press B) and set it’s hardness to 3% or below that.

Step 4: Now, select colors from the Swatches palette (Window>Swatches) and start painting on the part you would like to. You gotta zoom in to paint it perfectly.

This process could be time consuming but you can color it perfectly if you have patience and time.

An alternative to that is, select Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) and select the area you want to paint. Check the screen shot below.

Start coloring/painting after the selection is done. The results obtained can be seen below.

Step 5: Continue the process until your finally done with the painting. Save it.

If you want to continue playing with the colors then open Hue/Saturation by pressing Ctrl+U and start playing with Hue You’ll end up with some cool colors

Step 6: Your done! Save it, close Photoshop and get back to work

P.S Please don’t curse or scold me if you didn’t understand or it was too tough to follow. If your stuck with something then do ask by leaving a comment below

You can view my Flickr Photostream and follow me on Twitter to know more interesting things

Twitter is a place to have fun, stay updated and connect with friends of friends. Growing your network on Twitter now is becoming a little tougher than earlier. All thanks to bots and spammer You know, they are the spoilsports found everywhere.

Anyways, I found something interesting on Jerod Santo’s blog. A way to expand you Twitter network with Ruby. This Ruby (program) generates a list of people highly followed by our friends.

The Flow

1. Fetch the ids of all the people you follow
2. Use those ids to fetch the ids of all the people they follow
3. Remove any ids in both groups
4. Tally the occurrences of each unique id in the list
5. Sort them by most occurrences
6. Iterate the top 10 and print the user information

The Script

require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'

base        = Twitter::Base.new(Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password'))
my_friends  = base.friend_ids
candidates  = my_friends.inject(Array.new) { |array,id| array += Twitter.friend_ids(id); array }
candidates -= my_friends
tallied     = candidates.inject(Hash.new(0)) { |hash, can| hash[can] += 1; hash }
ordered     = tallied.sort { |x,y| y[1] <=> x[1] }

ordered[0..9].each do |array|
  user = base.user(array[0])
  puts "#{user.screen_name} is followed by #{array[1]} of the people you follow."
end

P.S I am not a Ruby programmer.

P.S.S You can follow me on Twitter. Click here here to do so.

WordPress enables you to install plug-ins, which basically is used to power up your blog even more. In other words, plug-ins help you to extend your blogs functionality. There are thousands of WordPress plug-ins that are available for download (free and premium). You just need the right plug-ins to tweak and extend your blogs functionality.

So, are you worried about to which plug-in you should install? Confused about it? Hmm, need not be anymore The following is the list plug-ins that I’ve created for you and the reason, why you need to install them on your new blog even before you go ahead and make your first post.

1. All in One SEO pack:
   This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. This plug-in is mainly used to optimize your blog for Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on…Some features
   • Canonical URLs
   • Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
   • Generates META tags automatically
   • Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
2. WP-Super Cache:
   Your blog loads it’s pages pretty slow? Then this a want you need to install. WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.Too geeky? Forget it then. Just install this plug-in. It helps you to load your pages faster. Simple!
3. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator:
   Sitemaps are simple and easy way to keep Search Engines informed about the pages existing on your site/blog for crawling. It lists the URLs and META data along with the URL as a small description for Search Engines for better results. This XML-Sitemap format is supported by Google.com, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.comP.S. The XML-Sitemap format was introduced in 2005 by Google and adopted in 2006 by Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com so that’s why it’s often called “Google Sitemaps”.
4. ShareThis:
   “Sharing is Caring” Your readers on your blog might really appreciate and love the way you blog. Why not ask them to share it among with their friends? Sounds like a great idea to me This plug-in adds a “Share This” button at the end of your posts and enable readers to send it to their friends or submit it to social media websites.
5. Enhanced Contact Form:
   He there! Your readers are desperate to talk to you! Give them a chance to speak to you. This plug-in loaded with features and enables visitors/readers to contact you without disclosing your email address.Scared of those stupid SPAMS!? Not to worry. This plug-in protects SPAM messages reaching you. We hate SPAM. All hate SPAM!
6. Google Analyticator:
   Every blog needs a statistics system to keep track of things. Hence, there exists Google Analytics. Thanks to Google If you don’t have a Google Analytics account then go get one, now!You need to put in the Google Analytics tracking code into your theme by editing it. to make it work. Does that sound too geeky to again!? Don’t know coding? No problem! This plugin, Google Analyticator allows you to add the tracking code to your blog without having to edit the template and make you go mad.
7. WordPress Database Backup:
   Okay, now that you have installed these basic essential plug-ins and your blog is running smoothly and effortlessly and you should be definitely happy with it. But what if something goes wrong with your host provider? There are chances of server crashes and not every host provider backups your blog regularly. And if they do, there’s no guarantee that you could get your hands on it. (unless you are rich enough to shed some cash!)So, never take the risk of depending on your host. Just install this plug-in and put in your email id and tell it how often you want it to make backups in the setting page. It automatically mails them to you at those scheduled intervals you have set. Sweet! Isn’t it ?:)

Well, there you go. These plug-ins will definitely help you and your blog’s performance. Enjoy blogging

P.S Here’s another list that I’ve created. You must be interested in it – Collection of WordPress Plugins for Better Blogging Performance

P.S.S Oops! Did I miss something? Something that is really worth a mention? Then please, use the comment form below and share it with us. Like I mentioned, “Sharing is caring”

WinMend Auto Shutdown will display a 30 seconds countdown before initiating shutdown. When the auto shutdown is set up, it will be minimized to the task bar. Your screen will look clean, leaving your desktop uncluttered.

At least I am in need of such a software for my PC as I keep downloads on and leave for work and there’s no one to shut it down after it’s completed. If you are looking for anything like this then, WinMend Auto Shutdown is the software that you would be in need of.

[Direct download: WinMend Auto Shutdown]