Super HelpDesk Blog: August 2012

Make Your Phone’s Battery Last Longer

Why Battery Life Decreases Under Different Conditions

Smartphones almost exclusively employ Lithium-Ion (aka Li-ion) batteries as these offer an affordable, high capacity solution for the various functions, services and connections that smartphone users expect from operating systems.
Battery charge decreases on a day-to-day basis through constant use – but what factors affect the life of a Li-ion battery?

The age of the battery is most important, as this can affect that maximum charge. A 2010 study demonstrated that from a starting capacity of 88-94%, battery life after 250 charges reduced to 73-84%.

Internal resistance and self-discharge is

Are you tired of seeing stupid comments around the web? Tell those people to Shut Up with this extremely simple Chrome plugin. It blocks comments on most websites, allowing you to ignore the disastrous consequences of sub-par education. If you know a few sites with decent commenters, you can quickly turn comments back on for that site – it only takes one click. The plugin will even remember which sites you actually like seeing comments on.

People type what’s on their mind before they think, and certainly aren’t trying to be helpful. Frequently they’re not even talking about anything relevant. This post from NPR sums things up nicely, but it gets much worse than that. XKCD offered one solution for the problem, but if you’d rather not wait for that fix to take hold I highly recommend Shut Up. It’s a simple installation and works so well you’ll forget it’s there.

Get Rid Of Them!

First things to do,

CCleaner

One of the quickest, easiest ways to remove context menu entries is with CCleaner, a popular application we’ve covered in the past. The context-menu-editing feature was added to CCleaner fairly recently, so be sure you have the latest version of CCleaner or you may not have the feature. Launch CCleaner and click the Check for Updates link at the bottom of its window to check that you have the latest version.

In CCleaner, click the Tools icon in the sidebar, select Startup, and click the Context Menu tab at the top of the list. You’ll see a

Lock and unlock your computer with a USB drive.

If you prevent access to your computer with just a password, you are missing out on an alternate (and more secure) way to lock down your computer.

Predator, a free Windows program, turns your USB drive into a key that locks your computer when it's removed. To unlock your computer, you'll have to plug the USB drive back in. (Talk about having secret-agent-style security.)
Anyone who attempts to access your computer without the USB flash drive will be hit with an epic "Access Denied" message. To get started, follow this guide:
Step 1: Download and install Predator.
Step 2: Once Predator launches, plug in your USB flash drive. None of the contents of the drive will be deleted or altered in any way, so feel free to use your primary thumbdrive.
When you insert the drive, a dialog box will appear asking you to create a password. Click OK to continue.
Step 3: In the Preferences window,

Youtube – You know that site with videos and all. Yeah! It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:

1. View high quality videos

Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos

While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part

Linking to a video where the real action starts at

10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent

Your ISP is where it starts

Check the maximum download and upload speeds allowed by your ISP. Most ISP’s have specific bandwidths for both uploads and downloads. Obviously your torrent download speed won’t cross the cap set by the ISP.Go over to this article on Speed.io forbroadband speed test and this one by Tina on ways to increase your connection speed. There are many other bandwidth testers like DSLReports which is included in the speed test within uTorrent.

Choosing the right BitTorrent client

Use the better clients out there like uTorrent, Vuze or the BitTorrent client itself.Wikipedia lists about 51 of them supporting the BitTorrent protocol. The choice of client used should always be updated to the latest version. The screenshots here depict uTorrent. The settings should be similarly configurable for other clients too. Mac users shuld also check our Transmission vs. uTorrent post

Go for healthy seeds and peers

A peer is any computer participating in the download and

Super HelpDesk Blog