IPL

Website Of The Week

www.ipl.org

This is nothing about cricket. It is a merger of the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians' Internet Index (LII). That's why it is named as IPL2. If you thought it is just another "...pedia" website, please wait! This website is not about indices of information but indices of website addresses!!

The idea sounds good. Ain't it? Website links are given for various topics ranging from Arts to Science. There is even a section for Newspapers and Magazines in which I found some of my local newspapers!! If you have a particular doubt, you can ask IPL2 Librarian. You can also suggest a website to be added here. This website is claimed to be maintained by students and volunteer professionals of renowned universities around the globe.

Tips Of The Week

Tip 1:

If you visit the homepage of Guardster, you will find two more services there. But, of course, they are NOT free. One is SSL Proxy Subscription which differs from the Free Web Proxy service by being FASTER and ENCRYPTED. Although it is encrypted, it is not enough to provide secure connections for large data transfer. That's why there is a Secure SSH Tunnel & SOCKS Proxy service. This is useful to counter the throttling measures of ISPs with anti-P2P policy.

Tip 2:

There is a small danger in using Hotkey CD Eject. You may accidentally press the hotkey to eject the DVD drive during burn process. I will tell you what I have done. Unlock the number pad in your keyboard by pressing NUM LOCK (See LED Indicator or Tray icon). Then open Hotkey CD Eject Settings and choose NUM 0 in the number pad as the hotkey. Now, lock the number pad to guard against accidental hits. Of course, this makes two hotkeys in effect. But, this is faster than clicking on the graphic button in Nero Drivespeed because Nero Startsmart takes sometime to start its modules.

What is a Magnet Link?

Question Of The Week

What is a Magnet Link?

In recent times you would have seen the words "Magnet Link" frequently in your favourite torrent websites as an alternative for downloading torrent files.

Magnet link is just an inspiration of... or shall we say, adaptation of ED2K link. Such a link typically identifies a file not by location or name, but by the content; more precisely, by the content's cryptographic hash value (signature of a file) which is similar to an ISBN or catalog number. However, these content-based signatures (MD5 checksums) can be generated by anyone who already has the file, and so do not need a central authority to issue them.

That's why, magnet links do not need trackers. They just use DHT (Distrubted Hash Table). The biggest advantage of DHT is that you might be able to download the content of the torrent, even if the tracker is down or reserved for registered users only. Nowadays, most of the torrent programs support magnet links. If you enable magnet URLs in the settings of a torrent program, all you have to do to download the content of the torrent is just click on the words "Magnet Link" in your favourite torrent website.

Hotkey CD Eject

Program Of The Week

Hotkey CD Eject

This is a tiny but very useful program. It fixes a hotkey in your keyboard to Open/ Close the DVD drive (Not applicable for Lap-tops). After installing it, you will see its icon in the tray. Right-Click on it and press SETTINGS. The first option is DEFAULT DRIVE. If you have more than one drive, then you can fix a different hotkey for each drive. The second option is HOTKEY. Just Left-Click once in that box and ignore the Slash. Now press the any key which you want keep as the hotkey to Open/ Close the DVD drive.

The third option is AUTOCLOSE. You can either keep it DISABLED or choose something between 5 to 20 seconds from the drop-down menu. The final option is START WITH WINDOWS. If you are frequently using your DVD drive, then keep it checked. Otherwise, read MY POST on why you shouldn't enable START WITH WINDOWS for too many programs.

Guardster

Website Of The Week

www.guardster.com/free

Those who are already using proxy setup for their browsers can skip this post. This website helps those users who have a static IP address to browse the web anonymously and protect their identity from the sites they browse. Their requests appear to be coming from Guardster servers so that third parties can't find their IP (Internet Protocol) address. Just enter the website name you want to see, select NO COOKIES and click surf anonymously. That's it.

On the contrary, those who browse the web from behind their ISP (Internet Service Provider) servers, won't benefit much from this guarded browsing because such ISPs assign the users a different IP address randomly whenever they connect to internet. To check your IP address, Right-Click on your network icon after connecting to internet. See STATUS -> DETAILS -> CLIENT IP ADRRESS or simply click HERE.