The IP address. Your gateway to the internet. That little set of numbers that guarantees you can log on and check mail, watch videos, etc. This is something I only used to bother about when my internet connection stopped working and I needed to check if there was a problem from my end.

All this while, my ISP had assigned me a static IP address. Then, a few days ago, someone from the ISP called me up asking me to change some settings. Turns out they are now assigning dynamic IPs to their users.

While my internet experience hasn’t really changed significantly, I got curious about the merits and demerits of both types of IP addresses. From what I’ve gleaned so far, the type of IP address doesn’t matter for the average home user. However, if you run some kind of server like Web, FTP, Email etc. then you definitely need a static IP address. I’m still not sure which one is better though so I’d like to get ghacks readers’ opinions on the subject.

continue reading "What’s Better: Dynamic or Static IP Address?"

Many tech savvy Internet users love RSS news feeds to keep up to date with the latest articles and news of their favorite websites. Unlike bookmarks however RSS news feeds cannot be checked for dead sites that do not get updated.

Rarst posted a process on his own website that makes it possible to check all feeds for dead links. The process can be broken down to exporting all feeds in an opml file, extracting the links into a new text file and checking the links with a link checker.

Some feed readers might provide an easier way of discovering dead blogs either because the owner abandoned it or deleted the website completely. Google Reader for one is offering a feature called Subscription trends which show inactive feeds. Users have to click on the Trends link in the top left menu and choose the inactive tab under Subscription trends to get there.

continue reading "Check For Dead RSS News Feeds"

Users can practically set one or multiple websites as their start pages in Firefox (and any other web browser as well). Another option are Speed Dial extensions which copy a feature from Opera to Firefox that provide access to a handful of links on one page. Autohome puts that concept to the next level by providing a way to create a startpage that is filled with links that have been added by the user.

This concept is not really that different from creating a simple html file with links and use that as the startpage except that it does not require technical knowledge to create the page. The Firefox extension adds an icon to the Firefox status bar which provides access to the extension’s functions and options to add the current page to the startpage.

The extension will automatically grab the url, page title and a folder suggestion of which the latter two can be customized. Folders are basically headings under which the titles are shown on the startpage.

continue reading "Custom Firefox Startpage"

The Microsoft Filter Pack adds additional IFilters to the Windows operating system which are used by Windows Search and depending applications to index the contents of document formats. To be precise, the Microsoft Filter pack will register additional IFilters with the Microsoft Windows Indexing Service.

The document formats that get added by the filter pack are .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx whcih are basically all the new document formats that have been introduced in Microsoft Office 2007.

An IFilter basically allow the Windows Indexing Service and Windows Desktop Search so that these file formats become searchable in Windows. The Microsoft Filter Pack can be installed on Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista or Windows XP.

continue reading "Microsoft Filter Pack"

My Internet Provider decided to capture data that I entered in a browser’s address bar that could not be resolved to an Internet address and provide me with their own search interface instead of the default one that I enabled in the browsers. This is one of those sneaky moves that makes me want to run away from the provider as fast as I can even though I’m perfectly happy otherwise.

They did provide a switch in the user control panel to disable that feature again but this is again a company that is forcing the user to take action for something that they changed.

Open DNS has been covered before on this website and I just want to remind everyone that Open DNS can be used to get rid of search boxes from your provider. Setup of Open DNS takes a few minutes at most and should be doable for everyone.

continue reading "Open DNS"