* Health risks while using computers.

Health risks while using computers?

Using computers for long hours may cause eye problems and spinal cord problems. Some of the common health risks in using computers are Carpel Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) and Repetitive Stress/Strain Injury (RSI). Pain from shoulders to fingers, numbness, numbness at the wrist, Shivering and shaking while holding objects in hands, Waking up often during nights are also problems faced by some computer users. The main symptom of CTS is the pain in the hand muscles. Pain, straightness, swelling, numbness in hands, legs, shoulders and the back are symptoms of RSI. Since these diseases occur due to work, they are called Occupational Hazards.

Here are some tips for daily computer users to prevent and protect yourself from CTS and RSI:

• · Keep your shoulders loose
• · Rotate your elbows at frequent intervals
• · Keep your wrist straight and parallel to the table while typing
• · When you look straight from your chair, you should see the top end of the monitor. If you can’t see then increase your chair’s length.
• · The distance between your eyes and the monitor should be at least 60 CM
• · Always sit straight. Never bend and look at the monitor. You should sit straight and look at the monitor straight neither bending your head down or tilting up.
• · Your back should always rest against the chair
• · Your feet should always touch the floor
• · After every one hour of working, you should take 5 minutes break. In this five minutes leave your computer chair, take a walk in your office, stretch your fingers and stretch your body.
• · Close and open your eyes often, to prevent the eyes getting dry.
• · After every half hour of working at the computer, for two minutes take your eyes Off the monitor and look at objects very far and give some exercise to your eyes.
• · Drink water often
• · Eat healthy food
• · Buy keyboard, mouse and computer chair based on Ergonomics design
• · Exercise daily!!!!!! ( for lazy"ssssssssssss )

What is Bluetooth?

Bluetooth Tutorial

by sri vastav...

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Bluetooth is a very common buzzword used in computer and electronics Industry. In this tutorial let us see what is bluetooth and what are the features of bluetooth.

What is Bluetooth?

Bluetooth is a technology which uses Radio Frequency to connect different computer equipments and telecommmunication devices and transfer voice and data between them. Bluetooth operates at 2.4 Ghz frequency. We connect devices that support bluetooth and talk or send data. Bluetooth plays an important role in wireless technologies. You may wonder how the name bluetooth came about. A king named ‘Herald Bluetooth Blaatand’ integrated Denmark and Norway countries together. Therefore, the technology that connects various devices was named after this king.

Is WiFi and Bluetooth Same?

No. Both are wireless technologies. Both are related to computers. However they both differ in many ways. Computer, Cellphone, PDAs, headsets etc can be connected using bluetooth. Bluetooth is used to connect devices that are near to each other. Bluetooth consumes very less power. Whereas WiFi is used to connect computers, notebooks and PDAs that are far from or near to each other.

What is the distance required between two bluetooth devices?

Bluetooth devices should be within less than 10 meters (32 feet) apart to connect to each other. There are also high power bluetooth devices that can operate upto 100 meter distance. But these high power bluetooth devices are expensive. For normal home users the normal 10 meter distance is more than enough.

What is the speed of bluetooth?

Two bluetooth devices transfer data upto 1MBPS speed between them. But in reality you maynot get this 1MBPS speed. Normally you will get speed upto 721 KBPS. Is the data transfer in bluetooth secure? Bluetooth uses Frequency hopping. Furthermore the data is encrypted. Hence the data is fully secure in bluetooth.

How many devices can be connected in bluetooth?

Consider Bluetooth 1.0 and Bluetooth 1.1 standards. Using Bluetooth 1.0 based devices you can connect only one device to another device. But using Bluetooth 1.1 based devices, one device can connect to eight other bluetooth devices simultaneously.

What are the different types of Bluetooth devices?

Mobile phones, Notebook computers, Printers, PDAs are some of the bluetooth enabled devices. Many manufacturers including Nokia, IBM, Ericsson, Toshiba, 3 Com, Intel, Motorola produce bluetooth devices.

Bluetooth Frequency Interference.

Bluetooth operates in 2.4 Ghz frequency. Microwave oven, Cordless telephone are other devices that use the same 2.4 Ghz frequency. Moreover 802.11b, 802.11g Wi-Fi standards also use the same 2.4 Ghz frequency. By right there will not be any interference from these other devices though they are using the same frequency. This is because bluetooth uses frequency hopping and Direct Sequence Spreading methods. However it is advisable to keep these devices atleast 10 meters apart from bluetooth devices.

How to use Bluetooth?

Most of the latest mobile phones are bluetooth enabled. Normally to turn it on you need to turn on bluetooth using your phone’s manual since it may differ in various models of phones.

You can get bluetooth cards and connect to your computer. Or buy a USB or PCMCIA bluetooth card and connect it to your notebook. Now just give a name to each of your bluetooth device and then using your bluetooth utility scan for nearest bluetooth devices to connect to. Once you find the bluetooth device to connect to just select it and connect and then you can start to transfer data files between them.

enjoy!!!!!!!!

In PC, what is a Cookie?

A tutorial on cookies

BY SRI VASTAV

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Literally, a ‘Cookie‘ is referred to biscuits. But in computers, a Cookie has a different meaning. Even those who know about it, think that cookies cause damage to the computer. In this article let us learn about cookies and their usage.

What is a Cookie?

Cookie is a text file created by the webserver and stored in our computer. Let us see what is the purpose of this text file.

Generally when a client computer connects to a server they both get introduced and start sharing information. The server will identify the computer and this relationship will continue until the connection gets discontinued.

But the connection between the web server and a client computer is ’stateless’. After serving the information that the web client requested, if the same client sends another request, then the web server will not know that it is the same person. Instead it will treat is as a new person and serve the information. Cookie is used to change this ’statelessness’ in the web server.

With the use of cookies, when a web client connects to a web server, the web server will create a cookie file and write some information about the web client and store it in the web client computer itself. When the same web client connects to the web server next time, the web server will see the cookie file in that computer and will know about the client.

Why to use a cookie?

Personally there is no use of storing the cookie in our computer. But it helps the web server a lot. Web servers creates cookies for two main reasons.

· To identify the visitors

A server will normally write details like when did the visitor visit the website, which are the pages he viewed, what is his name etc in a cookie. When the same person visits the same website again, the server will display his name and welcome him, and show those webpages related to his previous visit and also show the changes since his last visit to the website. In short, cookies are used to personalize the website for the visitors.

· To record activities

Cookie is also used to record the activities between the web client and the web server and used to rectify problems that may occur during the session. For example, imagine that you are filling out a form with many fields. After filling the first page and moving to the second page if the computer hangs and you had to restart the computer. Then if you restart and go back to the same webpage, the webserver will know the details that you already entered from the cookie and hence will just show the second page directly. If there was no cookie then you will have to type from the first page again.

Common Myths about cookies.

1. Cookies spread viruses. This is a false statement. Cookie is a text file, therefore virus cannot spread through viruses.

2. Cookies get stored in any folder in the computer. This is also false. Cookies are also stored in a specific folder only. For example in c:\windows\profiles\yourname\cookies folder, Internet Explorer creates one text file for each cookie. Netscape navigator will store all cookies in c:\Program files\netscape\users 50\default\cookies.txt file.

3. Using cookies, the other files in your computer can be read. This also is false. Websites just read their own cookies and do not read other cookies or other files.

4. From other cookies webserver will know which websites you visit. This is also false. A website will only open its own cookies. It will not read other cookies.

5. You can’t read a cookie. This is also false. Cookie is just a text file. You can read cookies using any text editor like notepad.

How to read a cookie file?

You can use a software like ‘Cookies Cruncher’ to read cookies. You can download cookies cruncher fromwww.rbaworld.com

In Netscape navigator all the cookies are stored in a single file. You can read it using Netscape navigator. Select ‘Edit->Preferences’ and click on ‘Privacy & Security’ and select ‘Cookies’. Now click on ‘Manage Stored Cookies’.

15 Milestones in the evolution of Information Age

by, sri vastav........

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Ten years back, if you needed some information you would have asked an expert in the neighborhood or you would have made a trip to the local library to search for a related printed book. But today everything has changed. Now we are able to do everything by just a click of a button. Be it from mobile phones, handheld devices or computers. Here is a list of most important technologies and milestones that changed our lives forever and helped make this information age a reality, listed in Alphabetical order.

Blackberry: Research In Motion introduced this handheld device in 2002. Blackberry combined the features of Email, Web Browsing, Mobile Telephone, Text Messaging, Internet faxing and so on. The introduction of Blackberry was a turning point in the mobile information industry.

Blogs: Peter Merholz founded this new word BLOG in 1999. It was a short form of weblog. Even though there were thoughts about blogs ten years earlier, it only took off after 1999. In countries were freedom of expression is a given, even government bodies have their own dedicated blogs to keep in touch with their people.

Bluetooth: Bluetooth is a technology used to transfer and share information between various devices including mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices. This enables easy exchange of information between peers and friends.

Camera Phone: These days every mobile phone has inbuilt digital camera. This enables camera phone users to easily take pictures and videos wherever they are and share it with the rest of the world. Some websites and blogs allow easy upload of these user generated content which has resulted in huge amount of information that are end user generated.

Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in 2004 at the age of 20. Today millions of active users use facebook to share information and network with their friends, colleagues and family. It is an interesting fact that more than 20 percent of these facebook users are using their mobile phones to share information.

File Sharing: File sharing has a long history. In fact its origins date back to as early as 1980. However with introduction of bit torrent technology the file sharing took off fast. Though media industry still has objections of these technologies, people still use these to share files, songs, pictures and even movies.

Firefox, Chrome: When IE was the defacto browser that totally removed Netscape’s Mozilla browser from the market, Firefox came with a bang and slowly took some market share from IE. Tabbed browsing, increased speed, live bookmarking, multiple home pages, security, robustness etc are some of the features that Firefox had which propelled its uptake. Google introduced Chrome recently and is the third most popular browser in the market today.

Gmail: Today you can safely say that anyone who used email has at least one Gmail account. Even though email had been around for quite a while before Gmail was introduced, GMAIL took everyone by surprise when it was launched in 2004 with 1GB free space. The free space has been increasing ever since and gmail users too have increased ever since and are set to overtake all other email providers.

Google: There is no doubt that in the last ten years Google is the most visited website. Larry Page and Sergie Brin invented Google search engine in 1998. It will take very many years to beat Google’s dominance in the Internet (If at all it happens).

IM (Instant Messaging): Today we can see people messaging using IM whether from home, office, train, bus and anywhere, anytime. Google Talk, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live messenger are some of the popular IMs.

IPod, IPhone: Apple introduced IPod in 2001. This revolutionized the way we used to hear music and songs. It started with 5GB, 10GB and so on and today 160GB memory is available with IPod. The IPhone which was launched in 2007 with a touch screen phone features, push email, browsing and millions of downloadable IPhone applications free and paid has reduced the gap between man and machines.

Memory stick and Blueray: In 2000 8GB flash drive was available commercially. 256 GB thumb drives are available today. Similarly in 2006 Blueray disks were introduced which may soon replace DVDs. In a similar size as DVD, blueray disks have 10 times more storage capacity.

Youtube: What Shakespeare said has come true today. When he said the whole worlds a stage, probably he was thinking of YouTube. Today YouTube has become part and parcel of internet life. From 2005 until now it has grown tremendously and its importance in future information sharing became evident when Google bought it over for 1.6 billion.

Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia in 2001 and from day one it has been a hit. Today millions of articles in various languages are available freely for anyone to read. It is contributed by volunteers worldwide and anyone can contribute to this knowledgebase which will be a HUGE encyclopedia for coming generations.

Twitter it all: Last but not the least, web 2.0 technologies and user generated content, social bookmarking sites, networking sites are mushrooming and taking this information age to a new level.