How to remove background from image

How do you remove background from a picture? There are provisions to strip off the background image. There are number of software e.g. photoshop, which can do this kind of photo editing. However, to use this software, you have to shell out good amount of money. So, I was in search for an online tool, which can help us to remove background image for free. Then, I found a new tool called ClippingMagic. This is a newly launched online tool, which is still in its Alpha version at the time of writing this post.

ClippingMagic makes it very simple to remove background image from a picture. It is so user friendly that even the kids can make use of this for their school projects. In the first step, you need to upload your photo. You can find number of tools in the top pane. In this, the green brush is meant for foreground and the red brush is meant for background. You need to mark the foreground by applying green brush and background by applying red brush. The application may not recognize the entire foreground and background in one shot and hence, you have to repeatedly apply the green and red brushes on the spots, which cannot be identified by the application. You can make your selection perfect by zooming in or taking a thinner brush. The application removes the background instantly. As you mark the foreground and background on the image on the left pane, you will be able to see the modified or background-stripped image on the right pane. Once, you are satisfied with the background-stripped image, you can change the background colour and download the same to your desktop or laptop.

You can access the site by clicking on this link

How to download facebook album

There are number of options, through which you can download facebook album.

Download Facebook Album Through a third party website

Facebook2Zip: It is the simplest utility, if you just want to do normal download. You need not install any software or extension to download facebook album for this. This is a simple web utility. Open facebook2zip.com/. Click on “Login with Facebook” and enter your facebook credential. If you are already logged in to your facebook, it will take you through automatically.

Now, in the “choose friend” tab, enter your friend’s name as shown in the picture below. If you want to download any of your albums, just click on your name.

In the third tab, it will show you list of albums available for download. Here you have the option of selecting multiple albums.Now press the download button and the album will be downloaded in your computer.

PickNZip is another utility in this category and supposed to be the best one. You can access this site from here. The good point with PickNZip is that it allows you to download the photos, where you are tagged. It also allows you to download selective photos. You can also download videos. The user interface is quite simple and easy to understand.

Download Facebook Album with the help of an extension

You can also download facebook album through a Chrome extension, called Download FB Album mod. You can download the extension by clicking on thislink. Once installed, you will be able to find a small page action icon, when open a facebook album. If you click on page action icon, it will give you different options for download. After selecting your option, press Ctrl-S and select “Webpage, Complete” in the Save prompt window. It saves the webpage and all the photos. You will get the options as below

Normal Download – It tries to auto-load all the photos.

Download without autoload – For large album, it doesn’t auto-load all the photos and hence it’s faster than normal download.

Load from specific id – Here, you have the option of downloading selected photos by fbid. Fbid is available in the url, when you open a photo from the album.

Facepaste is another extension in this category, which is meant for Mozilla Firefox.

Download Facebook Album through Desktop Application

Fotobounce: Fotobounce is a desktop application. You can download it from fotobounce.com. Once installed, open the application. It is available in two modes i.e. fee (ad supported) and licensed. After few initial settings, you will reach the home screen. Scroll down below and you will be able to see Facebook. Click on “Log In” and enter your facebook credentials.

Now click on Photos to see all your albums. You can just right click and download any album. The photos generally get downloaded in “My Pictures” in the windows OS. In case, you want to download albums of your friends, click on Friends under Facebookà<Your Name>. This will show you the names of all your friends. Now, click on the friend’s name, for which you want to download album. It will show you all the available albums. Now, right click on the album and download as before.

Fotobounce has lots of other features as well, which you can explore yourself.

Another software in the same category is PhotoGrabber. The software for photograbber can be downloaded from this link.

Watch Hulu outside US

Last time, when I visited the USA, we subscribed both Hulu and Netflix. Both Hulu and Netflix have wide verities of videos for all genres. Back to India, when we tried opening Hulu, we got the message “Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within United States”. And the same message, we got while we tried opening Netflix. We will see here, how can we watch Hulu outside US.

I understood that both the operators are tracking my geo-location through my ip. I tried to find out a way to watch Hulu outside US. Different free web-proxy sites are definitely an answer for the same. But the problem with the proxy sites, that they seldom assign a proxy server in the USA for me. They always try to assign a proxy nearest to my country. And the same goes valid if you want to use a VPSVPN.

I was in constant search if there is any work around to watch Hulu outside US. Then suddenly one day, I found an extension for Chrome, which claims that by installing the extension, I can access any site all over the world. If you are the one, who is still looking how to access Hulu, Netflix or any other site, where there is regional restriction, you can use the extension Media Hint. MediaHint only works with Chrome and Firefox. There is no set up required for MediaHint. Just install it and you are ready to go.

You can download the extension by clicking here. If you get the message “Apps, extensions, and user scripts cannot be added from this website”, click Ok. However, you can see that the extension is already downloaded. Open SettingsàExtensions in Crome and drag and drop the downloaded file there.

Now, you can watch Hulu outside US. So, now sit back and enjoy Hulu, Netflix, Pandora etc with your family.

How to download Youtube video

There are three ways, that you can download Youtube video a) Through an installed software b) By installing an extension to your browser and c) Directly from a third party website.

Download Youtube Video Through installed software :

VDownloader : VDownloader is a free software. You can download Youtube video from vdownloader.com/. Once you install the software, you will be able to download videos from multiple sites like YouTube, Facebook, Blip.tv, MegaVideo, Veoh, Vimeo, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Break etc. This free software gives you the option of downloading the video in different formats.

FSS Video Downloader is another free software, which gives the option of downloading video for free from Youtube and few other sites. The software can be downloaded from freesmartsoft.com. The good thing in this software is that it has different user interface languages.

Few other sites providing free software to download video in this category are

Tubebox - en.tubebox.org/

Tube Catcher - atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com

MacX Youtube Downloader - www.macxdvd.com

Download Youtube Video Through a Browser Extension :

Easy Youtube Video Downloader – Easy Youtube video downloader is Mozilla Firefox extension. The extension can be downloaded from thislink. There is an upgraded version also available for this extension, which works for Internet Mozilla, Explorer, Chrome and Safari. In the upgraded version, the download is faster, but this version is supported with advertisement. Once installed, the download button appears just below your youtube video. When you click on the button, it will provide you different formatting options. Just select your format and it will start downloading the video after converting it to your selected format.

Download Youtube Video through Web Based Downloader :

In web based downloader, you need not install any software or extension. And for this reason, it is my favourite option among the three.

Savefrom.net - Open any youtube video. Now in the url, replace “Youtube” with “ssYoutube” and open this modified url. This will open up Savefromnet.com. You will be provided different download links for different formatting options. Click on a link according to your choice of format and the file will start downloading. SavefromNet can also be availed in the form of extension.

Keep-tube.net also works on the same line as Savefrom.net. In case of Keep-tube, you need to replace “Youtube” in the url with “keep-tube”. Before providing the download option, Keep-tube asks you to run one executable, however it doesn’t install anything.

One more option in this category is ClipConverter. ClipConverter is pretty straight forward. Open the ClipConverter site from clipconverter.cc/. Enter the Youtube video url in the place provided. Select the format and conversion options. Now click on Start to start downloading.

How to bypass proxy server

One of my friends asked me, how he can bypass proxy server in his new company. I told him that he shouldn’t do it, as it is against the company policy. However, he was very adamant, as he was not able to check his yahoo and gmail. Also, he was not able access some stock trading sites. All these site were blocked by his company's new security policy. So, I explained him the ways it can be done. There are number of ways that you can bypass proxy server. But the easiest way to do the same is to join another company J. Joke apart, let us see how can we bypass a proxy to avoid any restriction.

1)If your target site is more or less static in nature, you can make use of Google Cache. Google cache is the local copy of the website stored locally in Google’s server. You can see my earlier post "Cached Web ...", how the cached copy can be opened. The cached site may not be exact replica of the original one, but in most of the cases, it serves the purpose. However, remember that it will not work out, if you are trying to check your mail, bank account etc.

2)You can make use of proxy servers. There are number of free proxy servers. Open any proxy site and enter your url there. Since most of the time, your access is restricted through urlip blocking, entering your url through a proxy site cannot be detected. You can also use anonymous https proxy. This way, your company proxy will not be able to snoop the data being exchanged. However, be aware that use of such proxy in a continuous manner makes your network admin suspicious, as huge amount of data will get exchanged to a particular ip. If you search in Google, you will get number of free proxy servers. I generally use two free web proxy i.e. freemenet.com and hidemyass.com

3)Though web proxy is the easiest solution, it may not be the best choice. It is due to the fact that many times, the proxy site doesn’t open up the site properly for various reasons. To overcome this problem, we have another solution in hand. This is called tunnelling and is very effective to bypass proxy server. You can implement it easily with the help of SSH or secured shell. You might have used many times the secured shell command to copypaste file from one server to another. We can make use of this SSH protocol to create a tunnel. As discussed earlier, when we send a request to a Web Server in the Internet that can be intercepted by your office proxy or any such mechanism in between. But, when you do tunnelling, your request directly goes to the destination server, without any interception.

The requirement for setting up a tunnel is a) Putty and b) Remote server.Putty is an executable. It can be downloaded by clicking on this link.To get a remote server, you can avail some free VPS or subscribe a cheap one. Most of the hosting services provide the facility of renting a VPS.

To set up the SSH tunnel, open the putty and click on Session menu on the left hand pane. Now enter your VPS server name and port (by default 22).

Now scroll down and click on ConnectionàSSHàTunnels. In the source port, enter 8080. Select radio buttons Dynamic. Now click on Add button and D8080 will appear in the space provided for Forwarded Ports.

Now click on Open. Enter your VPS user name and password. If it successfully connects, it means that you successfully established the tunnel and the configuration to bypass proxy server has been completed.

Now you have to do necessary modification in the Internet browser. Here, we will show the setting in Google Chrome.To route all the web requests through the tunnel, we have to configure SOCKS proxy.

Go to settings menu of Google Chrome. Now Click on Change Proxy Settings. In the connection tab, click on LAN settings.

Now in the Local Area Network pop up, check the check box in Proxy server. Click on Advanced. Now, in the SOCKS host, enter your VPS host and port 8080.

Now, when you open any url in Google Chrome , it will directly go through your VPS without any interception. When we connect through SSH protocol, it will bypass proxy server and directly connects to the VPS and the data is exchanged in encrypted mode. And thus, our ISP is also not able to snoop the data.

If you think that all these are big hassles, you can purchase your private VPN. However, that will be much costlier.

Website unavailable? – Open it through cached web

You must have experienced a situation, where you want to access one website and it is down. Website can be down for different reasons, starting from Server Maintenance to Website maintenance. However, if you are looking for some contents, which are more or less static in nature, you can still access the same through cached web, despite the server being down.

Before going into details, let us see how a search engine, like Google works. Google crawls the entire website to get the information on the contents and index the pages accordingly. Google stores the contents of the page locally (cached web) for faster search. However, when you click on a particular page url in the search result, it takes you to the original website for the most latest version of the page. In case, you find the website page is not accessible or down for some reason, you can open the cached web page from Google. Remember that cached web page content is just a local copy of the page with the google. The page cannot give you any functionality e.g. Log In etc as the original page does. Also, you may not get all the images or videos embedded in the cached web page.

Let us now see, how we can access the cached web page. For illustration purpose, we have searched with “universal-post.com” in Google. You can see a small green arrow on the right hand side of the search result. If you click on this, it will provide you two options Cached and Shared.

Now on clicking on “cached”, it will open up the local cached web page of the site.

You can see one notification, that this is Google’s local copy and the date, when the snapshot of the page was taken. In our case, we are seeing that the snapshot was taken on 15 May, 2013. Thus any update has happened after 15-May-13 will not be reflected in this cached page.

Another point to note here, that the url is not the actual website url, but it is a url starting with http://webcache.googleusercontent.com. Since, the local copy cannot provide all the functionalities, it is sometime bit messy to open the website in cached version. In such cases, you can switch the page to Text-only version, which is available as a link on the right hand corner bottom of the notifications.

How do you change the facebook font and language

Sending a message in your native language is always a facinating idea. Also, sometime you may want to change facebook font style. Changing default facebook language is very easy. However, I couldn’t figure it out at the first instance, as the menu is located at the place, where we generally don’t look into. Facebook doesn't provide any option to change font style or size. However, we will find out the tricks, which can be used to change the facebook font, as well.

After opening Facebook, go to your timeline. Scroll all the way at the bottom of the page. This may take some time, if you have good number of messages. You can see the language at the bottom just beside the “Copyright”.

Click on the language link (English US is the default one). This will open up the window with all the available languages. Select the language that you would like to use in your facebook. Now when you type a message, you will be able to see your selected language. Your friend also will receive the message in the same language irrespective their language setting.

In the latest version of facebook, smaller font has been introduced. Facebook doesn’t provide any option to change the font size or font style. However, if you want to make the font bigger, you have some work around. Just press the ctrl key and then the + sign together. It will increase the font size.

How to change font on facebook? You may not be able to change the facebook font as per your wish, but it is possible to have some funky fonts to send message to your friends. For that, we will make use of a third party site. Open the below url in your web browser

http://smileychatcodes.com/facebook-chat-text-generator/

Now enter your message in the message field. See the preview and change the font style as you wish. Now copy the chat codes and paste in Facebook message field. Your friends will be able to see your message in a funky font style.

Indian Share Prices Soaring High - Courtesy FII

From the middle of April, the commodity price became softened. The gold price started its journey towards south. And other macro-economic data became favourable to India. All of these together posed a strong future prospect for India. As a result, FII assumed that next few years, India will be having good economic growth. With the GDP at 4.5 in the third quarter, it is assumed that it has bottomed out. Recent IIP data, combined with low inflation data has made this point strong.

But if you see, when FII has been a net buyer in the last one month, the DII or Domestic institutional investor has continuously sold in the equity market. Despite this fact, the stock market has crossed one after another resistance. Thus, again it is proved that Indian market is predominantly driven by FII. And now the question is how long the current rally will go on. From the middle of April, the Nifty rose from 5500 level to 6200. It’s a quite a steep rise of 700 point with in a span of one month. However, the momentum is not driven by value any more. It is driven by liquidity. The strong liquidity flow has kept the momentum intact. From this point, the market is more likely to be corrected but it is expected to bounce back soon.