Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) - Information Technology

Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication no that's something that's gaining popularity and well everyone sees is really important for security but what does that really mean what does that really do for us that you know a traditional login method like username and password that's not do know I know I've talked about this in the past before but that was sort of quite a limited level so today we're gonna delve further we're gonna take a closer look at what multi-factor authentication really means and how it's useful to us so yeah now first of all what is multi-factor authentication you've probably seen this before you know when you're logging into certain sites you get a message on your foot on that message there is this code which you then key in and that is sort of part of the login process to confirm it to you in certain cases you may even have to generate a code you know using your mobile phone or even a dongle like this one so the thing is well we get the idea that sort of we are authenticated in a different way but how does that help us to better understand this we're gonna have to delve into the fundamental concept behind authentication in the first place and let's start off with why we even need a password now here's you when you go to a website that has a username and a password you know for you to sign in on really what's happening that the idea is you're trying to identify yourself to the website by entering your username you are declaring that hey I am this bus it clearly that's not enough to sign you in right which is why they have a password a password is a way for you to prove that you are indeed that person you claim to be so the question then is why that's the password work Espoo the reason why this works is because it is a shared secret between you and the web service so you can see why this is sort of a fair assumption that you know if I sure that you are the only one who knows this piece of information and you can't present it to me it gives me some reassurance that you are who you claim to be of course we know that in many cases this is not true and well we can't see the problems of putting too much reliance on a password especially if it's one that you generate that is where multi-factor authentication actually comes into play having

The password is one factor and well by using other different kinds of factors we sort of get more and more solid proof that it is indeed you and not anyone else so of course the next question is what are these factors well we've just already taken a look at one and that is known as what you know the two other factors are what you have and what you up so let's take a closer look at what these terms actually mean what you have is pretty simple and while this seems to be you know a fairly new thing in fact this factor of authentication has been in use for many many years now you know how when you go to an ATM and you try to draw money you're gonna have to put in your ATM card into the reader that is in fact of what you have kind of authentication this is why losing your ATM PIN isn't the end of the world losing your ATM PIN doesn't mean someone's gonna be able to break into your bank account because you're gonna need to supply the ATM card as well of loss if you lose both then well that's a problem but the point is these are two different factors what you know that is your PIN and what you have that is your card a more modern example of a what you have kind of situation is of course having a dongle like this one this of course when I press a button it actually generates a little code and that's what I use to authenticate myself if you don't have a dongle you can still have an app on your phone that generates the code for you and a value that January is based on some kind of algorithm that is phat by some input that is unique to you the idea is if I'm able to give the correct response it proves that I have this device and the whole idea is only what you know the third one is the interesting one which is what you up these actually boil down to something unique about you know a person for example an iris scan or fingerprint scan there really isn't very much to explain about this I think it's fairly straightforward the idea is there is something biologically about you that is hot too you know duplicate and yet can uniquely identify you this makes a different factor other than you know what you have or what you know I would say this is one of these sort of newer ways of authenticating a user but it's getting more and more common now that we have fingerprint scanners on both phones and personal computers so now that we've come so far now that we've understood

The general idea behind multi-factor authentication let's compare a few different use cases and see whether one is more secure than the other now if you've been paying attention when I was talking about the ATM card example you realize that well going to an ATM to draw money you only supply two pieces of information that is well the card itself as well as your PIN number however when it comes to signing in to say Facebook where you enter a username a password and a security code that seems to be more secure right because I'm supplying three pieces of information well as it turns out no both of these are two-factor authentication methods let's delve deep at taking a look at what firstly what's different between the two clearly when you actually you know trying to draw money from an ATM you don't have to supply a username the ATM card both identifies you as well as proves something under the what you have category your PIN is what you know therefore that's you different factors yet you realize that when it comes to logging into Facebook it's exactly the same your username and password may look like two different pieces of information but ultimately they both fall under the same umbrella of what you know therefore even though we have two pieces of information here it really only covers one factor and that will has the safety of basically one factor the added factor comes from the code which well depends on the fact that you have your foot and therefore falls under the what you have category therefore from this point of view at least the two are equivalents they're both methods that involve two-factor authentication for those of you who play games you know if you steam you realize that now when you're trying to sell your trading cards you're gonna actually have to go over to your phone and confirm it what this means is if someone has hacked your account and tries to you know sell away your precious items well if they don't have your phone they cannot do it therefore this is two-factor authentication right you meet what you know to sign in as well as what you have that is your fault however there is actually a small problem with this actually sell cards from my phone itself and then authenticate it using the same device that is one key prerequisite of the what you have passed if the thing you have is not separate from the thing you use the key in the what you know information it defeats the purpose entirely I hope you can see why this is a problem you know if someone wants to sell your cards and they pick up your phone well they can do it anyway there is no separate factor of authentication of course I'm not saying the way Steam does things isn't secure Kerli there is a loophole there but well it does sort of mitigate the risk because that malicious entity still needs access to your physical food in order to do this a similar example is say I'm trying to log into some service they send a message to my thought and because my fort has some kind of notification mirroring service eventually the court gets mirrored to my computer again I hope you can see why this is a problem here you now no longer strictly meet to have my phone in order to actually log in and that creates a point of failure so then what is the best way to stay safe obviously to use all three factors at once it will be really cool if you know you went to an ATM and you put in your card you hit send your pin and you had to scan your fingerprint that I've cost things even safer because now you probably have to be physically there in order to draw money so you have just a few examples of when multi-factor authentication works and doesn't work hopefully this paints you know of in-depth and clear picture about how the whole idea behind multi-factor authentication actually operates but yeah that basically wraps it up...

6 Graphic Design Tips - Information Technology

Graphic Design Tips

Graphics design from time to time you may find that well something arises that need to do you know maybe come up with a little flyer come up with a little logo infographic well that's when you're sort of Lisa's graphic design skills actually needs to be called upon a lot of graphics design tends to be very intuitive but there are certain good practices that if you do actually follow them you can't create something that well just reach spatter looks better and use better now I know I explode myself but I have sort of game some tips from here invest and I'm going to do is today let's compile a small list of graphics design good practices so yeah that's what we're going to do today ball on this after brick if do today we're going to be talking about graphics design in particular how to actually sort of present and lay out design tips from

1. First and foremost minimize unnecessary ache now I think we all have this tendency this temptation to you know try and embellish things but the problem is doing that is that we actually make things more classes less readable let us in fact why one of the design trends of the day is very simple less salt the less you show the more attention goes to the right place and that is your content of course some of us may be kinda uncomfortable of getting rid of all the embellishments so I guess it's okay to prioritize keep us very minimal amount of additional stuff if you need to perform unnecessary things like shadows around text if you can avoid them get rid of them if there's a functional purpose they can of course see now

2. Has controlled amount of contrast and saturation of course it's nice to have deep strong colors you know highly contrasting areas of text but that actually makes it tiring for the reader to actually read at the same time you don't want to images to go to flat too little contrast of course the big swings hard to read as well because you may have trouble telling your past the foreground from the background and you don't want that so the important thing is to strike a balance once if I've seen that have actually been very useful to me is to generally avoid you know full on black and full on white colors this is a very common combination for many things but when you do things this way you create a very extreme contrast this may be less of a concern when actually printed out on say a piece of paper or flyer but when you're looking at something on-screen prep say on a website this can be quite jarring because ultimately a screen is bright and having that sort of contrast just makes it kind of hard on the ice instead consider going for a grayish color for the background and a much darker gray color for the text if you want to be fancy and change things up like yellow and that brown also work together very well that's problems say you should completely avoid contrast or having highly saturated areas but use it sparingly use it when you want to highlight something and when you want to make it pop out

3. Don't be afraid of white space no I'm kind of guilty of this as well because I like to utilize my screen grill website as much as possible and that's what I find myself doing in terms of productivity related applications but when you're designing something for people to actually read you may want to approach things slightly differently having insufficient white space can make a page feel very closeted and when that happens it may be harder to I should we pick out important things from the page and don't forget having white space means it's much easier for you to actually move things around on the page and that can be quite important in the design process as we move on to the rest of the tips you'll see how white space can be used to our advantage now let's move on to point

4. Pay attention to how a reader's eyes will move now generally well we read from top to bottom from left to right so expect that sort of passage the top is the areas i get noticed first and perhaps a user's interest may fall off as they move down so if you have any important pieces of information you want that right at the top one interesting ways to actually approach this is to build a visual hierarchy of information this can be very useful the more important things you know use a larger font or brighter colors and yes please them near the top of the page a newspaper is a very interesting example of how this is done now many news articles we'll start with a large image as well as a headline this of course is what grabs the page three that can look at that and basically decide whether they want to continue on with the article or move on this is a very simple example of a hierarchy you start with the big important thing that's sort of narrow down what's the main body of the article tip

5. Controlling how your styles vary now gives you of course you wouldn't want everything to look you know completely nude Islam on your peach if use the exact same font the exact same size the exact same wheat well it's going to look quite boring let's not saying you can't pull it off but generally will one a little bit of variance and let help for a variety of reasons as mentioned earlier that helps you build your visual hierarchy and that can also help you basically draw attention and emphasize certain points but how much variance is good how much variance is too much personally I prefer you know just a small amount of variance or generally stick to the same font or two fonts at most one larger style can be four titles and headings while another easily readable font for the main body text in terms of colors you probably want to stick to about three now how you choose these colors sort of depend on the kind of message you want to convey one strategy you could use this to pick one color and then use two variants of the same color this creates a very sweat harmonious look since there is very little contrast going on because well the colors are very related to each other this creates a very flat harmonious look you're going to create a little bit more contrast if you want to come up with something a little bit more catchy well consider using complementary colors these colors the opposite ends of the color wheel so expect them to stand out a lot when used in conjunction of course if that's too much you can always tone down

6. Probably the one that sort of brings everything together is the concept of grouping now when we actually look at something our brain is sort of coming up with associations and trying to understand things so when you actually group things together you're giving the readers breathe some cues about the nature of the information the easiest way to group elements together is to just simply place them close together proximity is a very easy to understand cue when it comes to actually creating groups and the cool thing about this is that it plays nice with tip 1. and that is to minimize you know unnecessary ink sure I could create two groups by drawing a line between them but that's unnecessary ink instead of doing that I could simply just add a little bit of white space between these two groups and so without using any additional ink at all I couldn't be the same idea I did this place nicer tip 3. white three the more white space you have the easier it is to actually separate things and push them around whooping also comes from visual similarities now in this case everything has the same proximity to each other but thanks to the difference in color your brain creates two groups anyway so this then comes down to tip 2. which is contrast and saturation by being strategic with your contrast and saturation again you create group creating groups is a very important thing because well Charles Nagy you have more than one piece of information to convey when you actually creating a flyer however using something the exact same meaning so yeah those for your six general design tips now of course if you are professional designer you need to know more than that to create consistently good looking design but cooling is this is generally enough for most of us to get on with the chooses you know design can be a very complex thing and a lot of it is dependent on your gut feeling on your self intuitive artistic tick on how something will look at the end of the day however these tips or self as good guidelines to sort of shape your intuition and push them towards the right direction so yes pay attention to these use these when you need them and hopefully you'll create even nicer easier to read design anyway...

What is Software Testing - Information Technology

What is Software Testing

if your programmer you probably know what it's like to you know go through the whole process of writing a program and then testing it you usually test your program in what I would consider a pretty intuitive a pretty unguided manner you just basically walk through the program and see if it works but have you ever wondered how testing is done on larger scale projects you know for example an operating system like windows we wouldn't expect them to actually walk through the program bit by bit to try and look for errors so how is it done we're going to do is we're going to take a look at some of the principles that go into formal testing and we're going to take a look at how larger projects actually make use of these principles we're going to look at some ways of rigorous testing we're gonna see how exactly it works and what schools it exists at you know when we are writing our own little programs it's called exploratory testing as its name implies we're just exploring but just you know sort of moving our way through the program and try to see if we can find any bugs obviously there are some pros and cons to this method get' father just being that well it's simple and easy to do you can do it as long as you know you're the one who's written the program you'll know where to go what to look out for this also helps in a sense that the obvious bucks those things that are immediately visible from the point of view of a user can be found very quickly because you are essentially putting yourself in issues of a user some disadvantages of this method could be difficulty in reproduction that is you may have done a whole bunch of things that lead up to a bug that maybe later on you wouldn't be able to reproduce exactly and as a result debug actually disappears all the conditions around it change so there is always a lot of uncertainty regarding bugs found in this manner and secondly there isn't a lot of coverage in formal terms coverage is defined as how many lines of code you are actually able to test when we are doing exploratory testing we might miss out areas of code you know we might miss out entire operations and as a result areas of code just don't get tested we lose out on coverage so yeah knowing why exploratory testing isn't great let's take a look at some fundamentals on actual rigorous testing methods and actually the first thing we want to quantify is what we are actually doing in the first place you know what's the objective of testing as it turns out really the intention of testing is to make sure that the program actually conforms the requirements and expectations that's it and that is what you've been subconsciously doing as you are doing exploratory testing so with an understanding of this you know key principle we can move on to

see how large-scale projects actually do testing as it turns out they actually do testing using an automated method so how do you test your expectations using an automated method turns out it's very simple you take a chunk of code be a function being a class basically you expect it to take some inputs and produce some output so all you have to do is to construct some input in which you know what kind of output it will produce through this input at the code and look at what output it produces compare it against the output you've expected and if they match everything is working fine if they don't your expectations are being violated and that indicates a bug somewhere the key to writing good automated test simply in changing that input to you know taking account as many cases as possible for every piece of code will want to try several different inputs on it we want to make sure that good input is accepted run to ensure that you know bad input is rejected we want to ensure that inputs at a boundary of good and bad are being handled appropriately and finally we want to make sure that completely invalid inputs don't crash a system your system is able to you know show some kind of error but doesn't actually accept the value software packages exist out there to make your life easier when you're doing automated testing basically it mix setting up and tearing down much easier it can also provide some kind of interface to show you how many tests have been run how many have passed how many are filled and where the issues up what you're seeing on screen right now is the test package called g-unit running within the Eclipse IDE and yeah as you can see it takes one click to start the unit tests everything is run it tells you how many tests have passed and how many have filled this makes it very easy for you to do your testing you can do testing very often and you can catch issues early which is always nice now testing exists on several scopes we can do what is known as unit testing and that works in a system that can be modularized what that means is we can actually break our system down into little components and what we want to do is run a test just each one of these components on their own that's what a term unit meets in a worse unit testing generally when we're performing unit testing we want to make sure that we are only looking at that unit itself we don't want to actually take into account any possible issues from other sources so what we do is for all the other modules that this particular unit and the test is communicating with we want to replace them with stubbs instead of running that full logic we just replace them with something simple that way we eliminate all sources of error except for within that unit and their test itself this of course makes finding issues much easier because we can just you know home in on the unit up so that was unit testing and while that is great eventually we will want to make sure that all these individual units can play nice with each other this is when we move on to what is known as integration testing where we actually test several of these modules together of course it's probably not advisable to do this before we've done thorough unit testing but once we sure that all the individual units are working fine we can test the whole lot together and if we find any issues we can be reasonably confident that it lies in the communication between those modules as opposed to the modules themselves now while automated testing is great you know it makes things much faster it's very easy to use we have to be aware of one basic pitfall and that is the fact that automated testing doesn't help us find new bugs all it can do is to make sure that thing's actually conform to our expectations nothing more nothing less if we test often during the development phase all they're doing is guiding ourselves against what is don't s regressions regressions refer to you know when something is right originally and then you know

you do something later on that breaks it this is when our original expectations which were once fulfilled now become violated we want to make sure that that doesn't happen which is why we keep testing to make sure that you know everything is working as we expect but that's it that is the limitation of you know automated testing and if we want to actually find bugs that come up from use will actually have to use the program will have to perform exploratory testing of some kind now we're almost done yet but i do want to bring up some related terms that may interest you the first of which is security testing security testing is an interesting way of doing automated testing on a program but SS name implies what we are trying to do is we're trying to make sure that our program is secure one interesting way in which this is done is actually by what's known as fussing fussing is when you actually just throw a lot of random input at some kind of input area you know like a fault and we want make sure that the program is able to gracefully handle this so what you're seeing here is the login form of one of the projects I've worked on in the past it's being bombarded by just randomize inputs you know it's just a little autohotkey script I've written to do that and yeah as long as the program holds up you know everything is working fine the whole reason why we are using randomized strings instead of something that we've set its because well whatever we said is something we've expected so this is actually testing against things that we cannot imagine is thinks that is completely randomized and not expected and the program still needs to work under these conditions here's another testing related tub test driven development also known SPD d now TVD actually gives us a very different perspective on you know the workflow of writing a program it basically says that we can only write code in response to failing unit tests what is visas at a very beginning to even start you need to write a test first then watch it fail and then write code to address it until it passes and write no more code than that the next thing you want to do involves creating another unit test so this is very interesting because it actually puts testing first you want to make sure that everything you write has a corresponding unit test to back it up it's a very interesting approach to writing programs I've got to confess I've never really done serious PDD before but it looks like a very good practice and looks like something that you know you should do if you want to be very sure that your program will work right...

What is Computer Security - Information Technology

What is Computer Security

The topic from a very technical point of view normally what we've done is we've taken a look at one aspect of security and basically we talked about the math or the principles that drives that particular concept and while that's all well and good we haven't really taken an overview at what security really is as a whole so this article is partly by request partly out of necessity we're going to approach the general principles of computer security and then we're going to move on to some common examples of what a security breach might be like this also gives me a very convenient way to plug some of my older work because as we move along in this episode we will come across some concepts that i have actually explained before and of course this article on computer security we are about to see are the four basic principles behind information security these four principles which I would consider you know things that have if you want a secure system as follows confidentiality integrity accessibility and non-repudiation now some of these terms are kind of self-evident while some others are not so let's take it from the top and try to understand what each of them meet first of all confidentiality think that is pretty self-evident the idea is if you are making a transmission you don't want any unauthorized third party to be able to tap into it and to understand its context

The practical way to achieve this would probably be to use some form of an encryption so that even if the information falls into the wrong hands that person wouldn't be able to make sense out of the information because to them encrypted information looks like garbled text and they don't have a means to reverse the encryption cryptography particularly the concepts of public and private key cryptography the whole idea behind that is when you receive a message from someone you need to be sure that this message is whole and not modified in other words the entirety of the message needs to be intact you need to know that that is indeed what that person wanted to send you practically what that means is we meet some way to know if modifications will meet to a particular piece of information and the way to achieve that is to use some checksum or fingerprints the whole idea of such an algorithm is that it is a mathematical method that considers all the text inside that transmission any little change in the contents of that text will create a huge change in the checksum and the way we actually use that to guarantee integrity is that the sender needs to compute the check some of the message then both the message and check some encrypts it and set on the receiving end when the user has received the message they need to decrypt it and then run the checksum on the contents of the message they'll need to check the information contained within the message into account next up is availability as its name implies we want to be able to guarantee that a piece of data is accessible when required now practically what this means is some form of protection against a denial of service now of service attacks can work in quite a number of ways but the most common one we see over the Internet is to simply flattest server with so much traffic that it cannot respond to legitimate requests how do you got against that well it's not an easy problem to solve by any means what people normally do is they have some kind of load balancing mechanism that is sort of able to take large volume of data that is coming in and if it's able to handle that then maybe the system you know still has enough resources to respond finally non-repudiation now this one is very interesting basically the idea is the person was sent the message cannot deny that data ones who have sent it like what wikipedia says this actually sort of transcends the idea of computer security and goes into sort of the legal side of things but at the same time we talked about it in this context and a reason being well there are actually computing methods for us to guarantee or at least ensure this to a certain extent practically to achieve non-repudiation we actually have to include some kind of fingerprints on the side of the sender of course the way we set things up is such that well the sender is the only person who could have generated this fingerprint and as a result it proves the center so you have those were the four principles behind computer security in general so to quickly summarize we've taken a look at confidentiality integrity availability and non-repudiation for fundamental principles behind security let us now move on to take a very general look at some common examples of vulnerabilities in systems.

let's take this list from the top and skim over some of the most common issues a programmer needs to protect the application against first and foremost is buffer overflow which happens when you allocate a certain amount of RAM space for a value but he end up inserting a value too large for that space as a result this value spills over out of the allocated space and possibly into areas of ramp that are in use by other applications this could cause corruption of data or even worse if the overwritten area was meant to be executed you run the risk of executing the input data which could be malicious code in disguise the simplest defense against this is to concave your information to the size of the allocated buffer that way it won't spill over operating systems also have mechanisms to prevent data areas of memory from being executed as code in Windows this is called data execution prevention and we've covered that before in the past next is integer overflow we've talked about this as well on several occasions but the idea is numbers are represented as combinations of a finite sequence of bits if we can make the numbers so large that we overrun the maximum value we can hold the number basically resets a malicious user could take advantage of this to make systems behave in undesirable ways we move on to SQL injection SQL which is used to interact with databases has syntax that is basically just a plain text drink a lot of the time curries are made based on user input but the user input should not be directly substituted into the statements because a malicious user could include SQL logic in input that ends up getting past this one is very interesting but we don't have next up is cross-site scripting web applications that receive and re display user input must be careful of this if a user enter some text containing HTML code it will get past when it's displayed on screen abolitionists user could use this to include scripts hosted elsewhere that could possibly compromise security the solution to this is to escape any code input by the user in the case of HTML that will be HTML text this stops user input from being executed we move on to passwords we could do all we can to protect the security of our database but you can't guarantee that it passwords held within our safe this is why to be safer we should install passwords in plain text if the database gets compromised the lost passwords could compromise more than one accounts if the password has been reused on multiple sites to protect against this password should be cryptography curly hashed we've discussed this before as well so follow the annotation on screen if you'd like to find out more grace conditions are an interesting one usually a small period of time elapses between obtaining a permission and actually using it if something crops up between these two points of time that invalidate the permission would the users still be able to perform the action since they've already gotten permission for it before him this is a hard one to tackle but one good solution is to minimize the time between obtaining and using a permission which reduces the chances of this happening finally permissions exploits generally a user is allowed to perform certain operations on a system but not others a user with malicious intent may try to find ways to give themselves more permissions to access what they are not allowed to this is not easy to guard against but staying up to date with software allows you to cover up loopholes that have been discovered so far so yeah there you go just a very quick crash course on top most basics when it comes to computer security in general we've also moved on and take a look at some examples that are quoted very often at least in school so yeah hopefully this gives you some sort of a comprehensive introduction to computer security in general...

Top 10 Google Search Tips and Tricks Techniques - Information Technology

10 Google Search Tips and Tricks Techniques

Google search a staple of our internet experience now using google is incredibly easy but to make full use of what features google can offer as well as to you know sort of tweak its behavior to your liking well that's not quite as easy today we're going to be taking a look at 10 tips that will perhaps make this a little better for before we begin disclaimer if you are technically inclined which I know quite a lot of you are maybe you already know some of the tips that i'm about to share so yeah perhaps i can only hope that we will cover something that you've never heard of but i can assure you that you know the things that we're going to see today are importance they are going to be useful or at the very least extremely cool to play with so without any further ado let us begin with tips 

1. First and most importantly of all use quotes around search terms now this is so important that if you're only going to take away one thing from this article let it be this you see when you actually perform a search normally using multiple words those words can appear in any order this may actually give you results that are not what you expect so well you put quotes around a phrase that should appear together Google will then only give you results in which these words appear together of course you can have multiple of such terms within your search query just have you know multiple sets of quotes at upwards this is also useful if you find that Google is actually dropping certain search terms this can happen when Google thinks they are not important but the ipod's into you so go ahead and put quotes around those words and they will not be ignored in the past you could actually use the plus sign to do the same thing but from what I've read that's not the case anymore Google had a google plus they now use that character for their own purposes.

2. The negative sign now sometimes when you perform a search you may find that there are a lot of results that aren't actually relevant to you and they all have something in common what you can do is you can simply add that term into your search bar but put a negative sign behind it this tells Google to ignore the word and so they will not appear in your search results.

3.  Site now if you ever want to search for things within a particular site well you can do that type in the word site insert a colon and then type out the domain of the site make sure you don't leave a space after the colon the two things must be stuck together the rest of your search will be confined to that particular site.

4. Definition now if you ever wanted to you know do a dictionary lookup for a particular word put into what definition stick a colon after it and then type into what you want to look up this tells Google to actually look towards dictionary sites and more often than not what's gonna happen is a definition is and more often than not what's going to happen as Google is just going to find something that looks okay and presented directly to you that way you don't even have to click through to any sites so what we've just seen I sounds the basic feature some things you can do with in the search box itself let's now actually step a little bit beyond the basic Google search and look at some other features that Google has to offer. 

5. From time to time you may need some kind of a stopwatch or some kind of a timer you know maybe you're rehearsing for our presentation maybe you're making eggs I don't know the point is google lets you do that right on the google search page itself if you search for stopwatch well Google presents you with a working stopwatch if you search for timer well you get a timer that you can set the alternative to setting the timer directly via the interface is by actually just searching the time you want so say if i search for two hour timer then it will be set a calling me and we'll start immediately. 

6. Reverse image search now you know what image search is you give Google you know a query and it'll give you images relevant to that query reverse image search is much more interesting you actually give Google a picture and it will find you relevant pictures to perform reverse image search simply drag and drop an image either from your browser or from you know some file explorer on your computer onto the text field of google image search the image is uploaded to google and they will perform a search using the image of supply this could be useful for plethora of reasons you could be tracing the source of an image maybe you have a very small image and you're trying to find a larger version simply tell google you're looking for all sizes of a particular image and Google will actually present you all the copies that's ever found in descending order of studies. 

7. Units and currency conversion as it turns out google is also great at very quickly converting from one unit to another all you have to do is to simply put in your quantity give it your original unit and then simply say to and a new unit and that's all the only thing Google converts Google can also convert currency types for example I can put a value in USD to convert to JP what which is Japanese yet if you don't know the abbreviation for the type of currency no problem just replace it with the country's name and then write the word currency at the end all these conversions are presented to you in a widget that can be modified what this means is if you want to perform subsequent conversions just type them in a widget and get an immediate response.

8. you can also use google as a calculator in fact you can put in any expression you can even use it as a scientific calculator you know functions like locks work functions like trigonometry works so yeah it's actually a pretty powerful calculator and why stop there you can even combine arithmetic with some of the conversion functions so if you want to do some calculation in one unit and convert it to another just take the two things together and it will work as you expect.

9. Plott grubs now not only can google do math for you you can even draw out your graphs in both 2d and 3d all you have to do is to put in a valid expression in terms of x and y to get a 2d graph all in terms of x y and z for a 3d graph you can then interactive the graph using your mouse you know you can either turn it around if it's 3d or panning around if it's too deep the 2d version also tells you you know all the x and y values so if you're looking for roots this is an easy way to do it finally. 

10. And this is a google maps tip anytime you want to find your way from one place to another simply type from place name to place me that will actually bring up Google Maps and will help you find your wave that some of the advanced things you can't do in this context is you can actually search for postal codes instead of you know addresses or street names sometimes addresses are just too long and I'm really too tight or sometimes maybe an address isn't very clear you know maybe you don't know all of it or if you know that some ambiguity using a postal code helps and as an added bonus you can actually try using from home or to home depending on what settings google actually has it may actually be able to figure out where you live which is kind of creepy in retrospect but that of course saves you a little bit of time telling Google we're home actually is and there you go that's it for this episode I hope you've learned something today especially for you tech savvy people hopefully something in this article was useful to you but yeah that's it that's all...

Printing Machines Works | Printing Technology - Information Technology

Printing Machines Works | Printing Technology

Printers we've definitely use them at home and we've probably also used it at say a work or school location you may have noticed that if you've used princess in those two different places well the printers look and function very differently we're going to do today is we're going to actually dive into several different prints technologies to try and understand how they work and how they're different printer technology and if you have a printer at home it's probably going to be an inkjet printer once we're done with that we'll move on to talk about laser printers which of course is the second most common often found in workplaces to wrap everything up we'll move on to talk about thermal printers as well as dot matrix printers which are a little bit more historical you know a little bit less common in our lives but at the same time are interesting pieces of technology that bear looking at so yeah without any further ado let's jump into our very first technology and that is the inkjet so inkjet printers wealth SS name implies prince with a Jets of liquid ink the idea is a paper is fed under a print cartridge the cartridge then actually deposits ink onto the paper and yeah basically the cartridge moves along a real continuing to deposit ink from left to right in order to go down to the next line the paper is fed up that is very simplified principle of how an inkjet printer actually works for an inkjet printer to print in color basically colored and gets used in fact four different colors are used namely cyan magenta yellow and black often abbreviated to CMYK the way in which the colors actually mix together it's called the subtractive color model and the idea is well the more colors you mix together the darker the result is so in fact this right here is your see your M and your white cyan magenta and yellow when combined this actually gives us the primaries we are familiar with and when we put them all together we get pure black applause that doesn't happen nearly as well when we are using you know an actual printer if you were to mix the cyan magenta and yellow colors what you end up getting is sort of a darkish dirty brownish color instead of black that's why an additional black color is used this gives you you know a pure a nicer black color and as an added bonus you also save on ink

because you don't have to mix three different colors together just to get black color now your inkjet printer cannot actually Prince a lighter color it can really only either deposit a dot of ink or not deposit a dot of ink therefore to create a notion of sheet we're going to actually have to change up the density of the dots within a particular area the more dots you put close together the darker it appears whereas if you're actually have the dots far apart you get a much lighter color but these aren't the interesting things about an inkjet printer what's more interesting is how do you actually get the ink to come out of a cartridge you could have to exert some kind of pressure inside the cartridge to push that ink out and don't forget that cartridges are meant to be used and then disposed of so you don't want to actually build some intricate mechanism inside that gets thrown away each time turns out that's you very interesting solutions to this problem one method is to actually use heat a heating element actually causes the heat to vaporize that creates a huge increased pressure within the print cartridge itself and that is what actually forces a drop of ink to come out of the cartridge and then the method is to use a piezoelectric component when incurrence is actually applied to that components well it deforms and it actually creates a pressure that similarly pushes out a drop of ink some pros and cons of inkjet well in jet printers can be extremely cheap in fact many inkjet printers can even be cheaper than a hundred dollars depending on what you buy you can get pretty good quality but unfortunately inkjet does have its fair share of shortcomings in particular the cartridges extremely expensive

you know you've heard of printer ink being compared to blood printing it slow and also not really waterproof water can cause printer ink to run and smudge and that was in jets which is probably the print technology you have at home let's now switch gears to talk about the one you probably have at school or in the office believes a printer laser printers are far more interesting than their counterparts unlike in jets laser printers actually use what is known as toner which is actually powdered color pigment what's even more interesting is the way it actually prints this by static charge let's take a look at how this works first we have a rotating drum this drum is charged with static electricity then and this is where the laser comes in you shine a laser on the drum to actually remove some of the charge in certain areas as the drum continues to rotate the laser continues to shine at different parts of the drum and true selective removal of charges actually projects the entire image of whatever it is you want to print onto the surface of the drum itself when this process is done the drum is actually brought near to powder toner this toner is also given the same charge now what happens here is that only the areas that have their charges removed by the laser will actually pick up the toner since all the other areas have the same charge there will be a repulsive effect those areas will not pick up any toner so this drum with the toner step to it is now brought near to a sheet of paper or we can then do is to

put the opposite charge underneath the paper and that will cause all the toner particles to get attracted onto the paper itself of course when dan yet since the toner is still in its powdered form we also have to expose the paper to a source of heat this process is called fusing the toner actually melts onto the surface of the paper this incidentally explains why Prince coming out from a laser printer actually feels quite wop and it prints out actually looks a little glossy laser printers are capable of printing in color usually they're for drums that do the process we've just seen for each Channel see my K the two ways to finish this off either you can take turns to deposit the toner from each drum onto the paper or you can also actually deposit them directly onto a temporary surface which then actually deposits all the toner onto the paper itself so I have two strategies they both work to give you color laser print the pros and cons of using a laser printer I as follows a lease and printer can print extremely quickly however toner well it's a powder so if you spill it that's kind of a problem not only is it hard to clean up since they have very fine particles you have to actually take precautions to not breathe it in because of course that could pose a health risk and that was laser printing now kisses you even though we always talk about you know laser princess as just a printer on its own really this technology is often a component in a much larger device for example a photocopy machine you know in order for it to actually produce the results needs to actually use some kind of printing technology to do it and usually the technology used is laser printing many office princess try to sort of follow the same model by including some kind of scanning capability and that is in fact why you will often find some kind of scanning ability mixed in on the same device that also has a printer usually a laser printer now let's move on to thermal printing using heats to print this one is quite interesting since you're actually just using heat to print what is special here is not the printer itself but the people that is be used a specific kind of paper called thermal paper needs to be used in a thermal printer the idea is this on the surface of the thermal paper they're basically multiple different substances which are sort of mixed in well among each other the print head is essentially just a heating element which well heats these substances on a surface of the paper the heat will cause these two types of substances to melt and when they're in their liquid form they can interact with each other to create a dark spot that's essentially how thermal printing works as your print head moves along the surface of the paper

selectively heating certain areas you actually create your pattern of dark and light spots thus creating your image now thermal printing isn't all that common today you know especially in homes but there are some notable applications namely in receives as well as the fabled Game Boy printer now all this may seem a little bit counterintuitive color thermal printers do actually exist though this requires you to sort of jump through some hoops one notable method actually uses multiple layers which can melt at different temperature levels what you see here is a cross section of the paper so imagine I sort of slice the paper and we're looking at this slice the edge as the print head actually comes by if it applies high heat it will actually cause only one particular color to show up if we sort of reduce it to medium heat then that will cause a different color to show up and again for low heat if we sort of mix and match different combinations of heat levels at the same spot we can then actually create well all the different colors by using a combination of different heat levels you can essentially produce a color image using a special paper like this here are some pros and cons of thermal printing first and foremost there is no issue of running out of ink

Since you're not using ink or toner of any sort since you don't have to actually swap out an ink cartridge well that needs to be less changeable parts and as a result there is surface area for wear and tear you can also get reasonably fast prints from a thermal printer some disadvantages is that thermal prints tend to fade after some time and you have to sort of protect them from being heated otherwise of course the same reaction is going to occur and you're going to destroy your print so that was thermal printing let's now go even further back in time to take a look at a technology that is barely used these days namely dot matrix printing now the design of a dot matrix printer is very similar to that of a typewriter and we'll see why that is in a minute a dot matrix printer is also quite similar to an inkjet in a sense then well the paper feeds in the same way and hit moves in the same way as well the idea is you have a prince head and in front of it is an inked ribbit when you want a dot on a paper essentially what the print hit does is it fires a little pin forward and as a result actually presses the ribbon against your paper since the ribbon has ink on it well that is actually going to deposit some ink onto the surface of the paper just like inkjet the print head moves left and right the paper gets fed upwards and as a result well you get your prints some advantages and disadvantages is that dot matrix printers are very cheap you can even sort of just leave them there and they won't dry out and I've course back in the day when people use carbon paper to produce what is known as carbon copies well you can actually use a dot matrix printer to produce a carbon copy for a very simple reason that a dot matrix printer prints by producing and impacts on a paper of course one disadvantage is that dot matrix printers are slower than noisy and for those that prints in color the quality isn't great and there you go that was for printing technologies you know starting from the most common today to those that are you know more historical in nature hopefully...

Rechargeable Battery | What is Rechargeable Battery - Information Technology

Rechargeable Battery, What is Rechargeable Battery

Rechargeable batteries a key component that can be found in many parts of all electronic devices now here's a view we sort of have some kind of an idea of you know what's the best way to take care of a battery but when it comes down to a lot of advice that we hear these days well some of it is outdated some of it is just plain wrong sometimes a lot of this knowledge may even be contradictory and then of course isn't good for anyone that's extremely confusing and how do we know what is right well all we're gonna do today is I'm gonna actually attempt to you know address some of these common misconceptions that I've been hearing a lot as well I'll of course try to find as many sources as I possibly can plus my own experience so hopefully well this will be a credible attempt at setting the straight rechargeable batteries are not all me to see even though they may all look the same in fact the key technology that drives them has changed over the past 10 to 15 years you see a lot of the battery advice that we hear today that I out dates it actually came from the days where we actually used nickel metal hydride batteries now if you actually took a chargeable battery and sort of spun it around you might see these words n i M H this tells us that the chemical inside the battery is in fact nickel metal hydride the thing is today most of the batteries we use a lithium ion batteries and that is indicated by the LI dash I on symbol on a battery itself these are obviously two completely different chemical compositions and of course that is why that works the way you actually use them properly a completely different nickel-base batteries enrich their actually two kinds not just one the other being nickel cadmium these were most popular around the 90s and the early 2000s now they haven't been completely eliminated these days but they are more commonly seen in areas like car batteries for electronic devices we've moved on to lithium based methods which could be lithium ion or lithium polymer for a very quick comparison of these two technologies well nickel-based batteries are actually cheaper and as somewhat more durable however on the flip side lithium

base batteries a lighter charge faster and most importantly a fall easier to use and that is why we can actually debunk some of these sort of old myths that still surround batteries today let's take a look at some of these starting from number one we should keep batteries fully charged all the time now I admit this isn't so much of a myth as just something we feel like yo is something we should do you know it makes sense to have a battery as full as possible but as it turns out batteries actually deteriorate the fastest when they're fully charged in an ideal case you actually want to star batteries at around half charge or so because that is what has been shown to actually maximize the life span of the battery you also want to avoid actually starring a battery app you know completely depleted charges because well for lithium batteries if you do actually let it run all the way down well that's it you can't actually recover it you can actually recharge it back luckily a lot of the times when our electronic devices actually shut off for low battery that doesn't mean the battery is completely depleted there is still a little bit of juice left so you don't have to worry about the battery being dead from that point on but of course you should

Actually charge it as soon as you can so that it doesn't actually fall into that state of permanent damage misconception number 2 we should drain batteries fully before I usually recharging them now this particular myth comes directly from the nickel battery days you see nickel batteries actually face that issue called the memory effects the memory effects is a phenomena in which if you actually discharge the battery to you know some kind of consistent but not complete this charge what's going to happen is the remaining amount of trash in a battery sort of disappears your battery sort of remembers where it was last discharged to and that sort of becomes the new capacity of the battery this does not happen to live your batteries and in fact in many cases for nickel batteries what some may consider the memory effect isn't really permanent either for lithium batteries of today you do not have to and in fact should not be completely discharging the battery before charging it back up the reason for this is vikas well this is called a deep cycle and deep cycles actually tend to hurt the battery more than if you sort of let it deplete a little and topped it back up this sort of goes back to our previous point where you know we talked about keeping a battery at about half charge well this is sort of doing the see you want it around half charge and topping it back up and that works the best for your battery in the long run there is only one disadvantage to this method and that is the possibility of you know confusing the calibration of the battery in a long run calibration is the process that you know a device actually needs to do to find out how much juice is actually left in your battery fully this Jing and then recharging your battery sort of shows your device wet is zero and one hundred percent points up and that will allow it to figure out you know where all the in between points will like if you shallow discharge a battery enough times the previous calibration might get thrown off which is why one possible thing you could do is you could do a deep discharge of your battery save once a month doing it more often than that really does more harm than good so don't bother all right let's move on to misconception number three and that is when you actually buy a device its first charge should happen over a long time this is another one of those myths that have carried over from the nickel battery type in this day and age with lithium batteries this is no longer a must in fact a lot of the time you'll find that you know when you buy a new device if it has to live your battery it's probably about fifty percent full and as we now know that is the

optimal way to actually you know leave a battery in storage for new devices you can in fact start using it right away though of course if you do want to give it a full charge you may do so but the moment you've reached full charge well that's good enough you don't actually have to leave it on the charger for more time because that's not actually helping anything the only drawback you have to look out for is of course the issue of keeping a battery fully charged misconception number four batteries should not be left on a charger for long periods because that will over charge the battery now this is actually one of those that are kind of on the line well not the overcharging part because overcharging is no longer an issue with lithium batteries in fact even in a nickel battery days this wasn't so huge of an issue you see unless all the charger does is it takes power and just tries to feed it to the battery constantly there is really no risk of overcharging a battery more charges nowadays actually know when to you know shut off the charging when the battery is full and as a result overcharging isn't an issue however you may still want to take note of leaving your battery in the charger for an extended period of time for one battery charges especially if they are actually connected to a device that is in use well they tend to generate quite a bit of heat heat doesn't play well with batteries that causes them to deteriorate faster and that is why if you say have a laptop that you're using with the power in all the time what some people do is they take out the battery by keeping it away from the heat and of course from the constant charging up to a hundred percent you can actually extend its life by a little

These are the two issues you want to look out for now some laptops actually have some built-in capability to prevent this from happening what it does is it allows the battery to charge all the way up to one hundred percent and basically doesn't top up the charge until it falls below say sixty percent this is great because of course these are shallow discharges as we know that's good for a battery so yeah if you have that capability built into your computer take advantage of it it's not too hard to do it yourself when your battery actually hits one hundred percent take it off the charger and don't plug it back in until it's fallen to about half capacity misconception number five always use the charges produced by the manufacturer of your product No yes you many sauces actually say this is completely untrue but I do believe it is slightly modern once than that kisses you generally it is untrue for a very simple reason that this is just a marketing thing to lock you into the ecosystem now in some cases some manufacturers do actually lock you in by actually giving you some proprietary charger or sub proprietary cable in such cases manufacturers may introduce some kind of electronics into either the charger or the cable itself preventing you from actually using something produced by a third party of course that sucks if your manufacturer has done that to you then unfortunately you have no choice however in other cases there is one other consideration you need to make buying a third PI charger is ok but buying a cheap knockoff charger is not and that is for a safety reason cheap no brand charges may be produced in places where you know safety guidelines are not being observed and that of course makes it dangerous for you as the end user to actually be using it if you want to buy a third-party charger that's completely okay but look for a reputable brand new look for one that has you know sufficient reviews and yeah stay safe basically that's it that's all the risk...