BinaryDay

USB Drives, Flash Drives, Pen Drives or USB Flash drives are one and the same thing. These are one of the most popular and useful medium to carry content around. I may be on the extreme end, but I carry most my most useful code on my USB Drive. So few days back, when I my Flash drive was infected with virus, I was really worried. Though finally I managed to delete the virus from the USB drive.

Make sure to remove read only from USB drive USB drives are popular because of the ease of writing on it. As I was going through the forum posts about issues faced with USB drives, I was surprised to see many users facing issue simpl because they had not removed the write-protect on their USB drive. You may not have write protect button on your Flash drive. Ignore the above then

Always keep a back up of the data present on the USB Flash drive
Threat of loss of data due to some corruption of memory is real. Sometimes files present on the USB flash drive, simply refuse to open. It is always a good idea to have a back up copy of data present on the pen drive.

Never remove the USB drive while data transfer is on
Remove the pen drive only after stopping it properly. Go to ‘Safely remove hardware’ (green arrow icon art bottom right corner), stop the usb drive and remove it only when it says it is safe to remove it.

If a file is not opening, transfer another copy of the file with a different name
When you transfer the same file with the same name the file may get stored in the same physical location and the problem may persist. Many a times transferring the file after renaming it helps.

The nuclear bomb: format USB drive
Never use formatting your USB drive as the first option. You will loose all your files and too many formats may reduce the life of the USB flash drive. Think of formatting as the nuclear option, use it only when everything else has failed.

Avoid quick format of USB drive
quick format gives rise to more problems than it solves. At least that is my personal experience. Avoid the temptation to do a fast quick format and go for the detailed option.

How to format USB drives?
The required software to format USB drives is generally present on the CD accompanying it. If you have misplaced the CD then simply google for it. You will find it on the support website for the manufacturer of the USB drive.

I am working on a comprehensive guide about generating income from blog. The document keeps getting bulkier and bulkier. So to manage the size, I was trying to convert it into pdf. Here are the 3 tools that I found on google, 2 useful and 1 not-so-useful.

Online Tools that help you convert microsoft word files into pdf files

1. doc2pdf: An awesome online tool that converts any word file into pdf format. This one is so good that I don’t feel like posting about any other word to pdf converter. Check it out and you will realize that I am not over stating the fact.
2. pdfonline: Converts word files upto 2mb in size. Unlike doc2pdf it does not allow you to directly download the generated pdf file. Rather it sends the pdf file to your email address.
3. Fastpdf: Similar to pdfonline in the sense that it also sends the converted document to your email address. They ask you to pay 11$ for downloading the pdf file. That is pathetic.

Please read this post carefully since I am trying to explain a rather complex concept in a single post.

You can have traffic that converts to peanuts or You can have content that converts to gold but noone ever visits them.

Not all blog posts are created equal. Some posts can get you as much as 3-4$ per click, whereas some others get only 0.1$. Net result is the same. Your adsense earning is always pathetic.

Obviously we want to write about the first type of topic like web hosting, making money etc. There is a catch though. The reason single adsense click on a post about paid webhosting costs you too high, is because that field is way too competitive. You can write as much as you want but you are not going to get more than 100 visitors a day. 100 visitors at 20$ eCPM will get you hardly 2$!!!!!

On the other extreme you have bloggers writing about bollywood, cricket etc. These are the niches with rather lower amount of competition. So it is easy to get traffic to the blog. You can easily get 2000 users a day. But since the competition is less, eCPM is less as well (in the range of 1$). So you have 2000 users a day but at 1$ eCPM, you will end up getting only 2$ a day!!!

What is the solution
There is a strategy to solve the bloggers’ dilemma. The FMCG companies use it, automobile companies use it, even your local store uses it. The strategy is simple. Get the users with a low competition, low profit product and then migrate those users to high profit products to make money. The online sites that use this trick too well are the web hosting companies. The paid webhosting space is way too competitive with affiliate pay-out as high as 90%. So what do some smart web hosts do? They offer free web hosting to the users with the expectation that eventually they will migrate to the paid web hosting option.

You can use this strategy on your blog as well
Create a mixture of both types of posts. Get the users through lesser competitive terms like how to create proxy sites and then lead them to more profitable content like web hosting options. The strategy needs to be thought through very carefully. Like if you have site related to cricket, then do a post about online games and lead the users to that page.

You can also see the trend if you go through the Earnings report of bloggers that I have collected. Do let me know your views on this topic as this is a rather important topic facing many bloggers.

Catherine Gomez Boxxy Dead??

There seems to be too much of speculation about the possible death of Catherine Gomez Boxxy. I think we bloggers may be crossing a line in speculating about the death of a person without being sure about the same. Such post about the death of Catherine Gomez may cause lot of unwanted stress in people who know her. Can someone please let me know about what is happening really?

A background about Catherine Gomez Boxxy

Can you kill someone just because you do not like her videos on youtube!!!!!!! Well that is the rumor that is going on, on the internet right now about Catherine Gomez Boxxy

Who is Catherine Gomez Boxxy

I am not sure if you have heard of Catherine Gomez Boxxy before. I had not heard of her before reading an article on the guardian about her. Catherine Gomez Boxxy was an absolutely unknown person who has become an overnight celebrity in the last few days with her videos on youtube hitting million views mark !!!! Surprisingly the videos that have made her so controversial are the ones that she had posted some 1 year back. According to the Guardian a year ago a young, unnamed and heavily-eyelinered young woman who hung around on Gaia Online made a video. She went by the handle of Boxxy.

Catherine Gomez Boxxy becomes a celebrity

The story about Catherine Gomez became more interesting around Christmas as the video that was languishing in YouTube’s vaults – got posted to i-am-bored and 4Chan. Over the subsequent days it became a topic of contention, splitting the community into two groups; people who loved Boxxy and people who hated Boxxy. Things really came to a head, though, when Boxxy haters – sick of seeing so much about her on 4Chan – decided to launch a denial of service attack on the website itself, bringing it down for some hours as a protest.

What got on my nerve though is this post on techbanyan that speculates that some of the Boxxy haters might have gone to such an extent as kill her!!!!!!! and the comments are even more sickening. I wish all of this is false because the alternative seems to be damn too terrifying to me.

Source

Speculation about the death of Catherine Gomez Boxxy

There have been quite a lot of speculation about whether Catherine Gomez Boxxy is dead. However Tweetmoney has a very good logic about why Catherine Gomez is not dead and I agree with TweetMoney. If Boxxy were dead it will be all over the newspapers.

My posts about A detailed study of 250 Indian blogs seems to be getting some good attention from many Indian bloggers that I highly respect. Many readers have complained about the fact that some really great Indian blogs like labnol.org has been left out of the list. The original post was based on blogs present in indiblogger.in. Thanks to Rahul from devilsworkshop for sharing a great list of good Indian blogs.

I would have liked to respond to all the great comments and updated the list with the additional indian blogs shared by Rahul. However I am in Khandala for the next 3-4 days on vacation. (a much needed one)

My seo experiment on posts about Ron Pratte Car Collection | who is Ron Pratte and Escape From The Oval Office Walkthrough seems to be doing quite good.

Other posts that seem to have generated some good interest among my feed readers includes the ones on 5 reasons why people leave comments on your blog, Difference Between Intel core 2 duo vs Intel dual core vs Intel Pentium D and How to remove virus from usb drive?

Once I am back in Mumbai, I promise to come up with some interesting posts including updated study of indian blogs. Guess what my next study of adsense and google-analytics usage is going to be done on more than 3 lakh blogs !!!!

Be the first one to get an update when I post these interesting topics by subscribing to my feed on feedburner.

Robert Eric McFadden has been arrested for allegedly trading information about online escorts and prostitutes. McFadden maintained a website for customers to post reviews of hookers and call girls. One street worker was 17 years old. McFadden had organized a raffle with $10 tickets whose main draw was an evening with a prostitute. The detailed news is here

I can not care less about Robert McFadden arrest. This is also not one of my seo experiment post unlike ealier posts Escape From The Oval Office Walkthrough Cheat Tricks or post about Ron Pratte Car collection

This post is under the blogging tips section to remind all fellow bloggers about the requirement to be careful about what you post on your blog. You may think that it is harmless to write about your freinds’ experience with hookers or about the red light zones in the city, you visited. But please try to exercise caution to avoid getting arrested.

A blog without comments is as good as dead. While traffic feeds us, comments feed our ego. I am sure you will love to see the number of comments on your blog posts increase significantly. However before that can happen, you need to understand what drives people to leave comments on your blog.

People leave comments on your blog because

1. They have a strong agreement or disagreement with what you have said: A comment like SEO is dead, No patriotic lawyer should represent Kasab or only morons use stumbleupon is sure to get you lots of comment.
2. they appreciate your content This is the reason why I love comments. Everytime I have put in lot of effort to write a post, the post has been awarded with lots of comments. Write an original and useful content and you are sure to get a number of thank you comments.
3. they want to be part of a community or discussion Have you seen the comments on seomoz? The people there know each other, respect each other. Good insightful comments are sure to get you some really good recognition from peer group. The same thing explains me being active on indiblogger forum. This type of comment tends to be of the highest quality and adds a lot of value to the original post.
4. they expect some benefit like top commentators, comment king, traffic Have you seen blogs using recent commentator, top commentators plugins? They tend to get higher number of comments because the commentator is getting some benefit. However these blogs tend to be spammed a lot as well. A better approach is to use a comment king contest, where the blogger recognizes the best commentators for the month and rovides them link and other rewards.

These are the only motivating factors, I could think of. Can you think of something more?

Escape From The Oval Office Walkthrough has gained a lot of popularity recently. Tarun has published a cheat tricks to help George Bush escape from the Oval Office! You can click on objects and parts of the room to interact. Click on blue boxes behind inventory objects for more information.”

Escape From The Oval Office Walkthrough

Go get the key on the desk near the pc.

Go get the right eagle wing front side of the desk.

Now click on the left window and Go get the eagle feet.

Now click on the right window and Go get the valve.

Now click on the left bookshelf and Go get the scissors.

Now click top of the door and Go get the flag.

Now click the right bookshelf and Go get the olive branch from the one of the books (top shelf 2nd dark brown book)

Go get the photo ang take off the photo from the frame and Go get the arrows.

Go get the screwdriver on the fireplace.

Open the lock of the picture on the fireplace and see the tv. (use key)

Now click on the yellow couch’s left pillow and Go get the key under it.

Open the door and enter the toilet.

Go get the remote control from the left cabinet.

Now click on the left down corner of the toilet and put the valve to its place.

Now click on the valve to let water go.

Go get the “w” pc key in the toilet.

Exit the toilet.

Go get the dart arrow from the dart board on the wall.

Go get the orange balloon.

Use dart arrow to blow up the balloon and get the eagle head.

Go to the bookshelf screen.

There is a panel under the right bookshelf.

Now click on it and use the screwdriver to Go get the paper inside.

Now click on the tv for zoom.

Use remote control on tv.

You will see some children on the screen. and also a hand image (1 on it)

Drag hand image on the question mark at the left bottom corner of the tv screen.

You will see the numbers 4202.

Go to the drawer cabinet and open the lock with numbers 4202.

Go get the handle in the drawer.

Now click on the paper machine on the floor.

Put the handle on it.

Put the paper in the machine and Now click on the handle.

Go get the wreath in the machine.

Go to the pc and insert “w” key on the keyboard.

Go to the desk and Now click the round carpet.

Drag all the eagle parts to the emblem and insert all the items.

Go to the pc and enter “wow2000″ and press blue button.

You will see “printing” on the screen.

Now click right side of the desk and Go get the paper from the printer.

Cut the left wing with the scissors.

Put the left wing on the carpet and press the red button

P.S:This is part of my seo experiment about duplicate content. Let us see how google will react.

I have thought a lot about what I shall like to do with this blog in 2009 and I have decided on a number of things that I will NOT do and one thing that I will do.

First with the things that I will do

1. I am going to stop doing something becuase everyone else seems to be doing that or because some great blogging guru recommended that.
2. I am not going to publish a post simply to ensure that the frequency of posting is maintained. If that means I have to post only once in a week, so be it.
3. I will not publish news that is available on the blogs of everyperson and their dogs.

Now my blogging goal for 2009
I am going to make this blog simply awesome. Expect to see more of

1. comprehensive posts like list of 900 proxy sites,7 kickass plugins to incentivize commenting on your blog and Beginners guide to building free backlinks
2. Results of my original research like A detailed study of 250 Indian blogs (Pagerank, Alexa, Backlinks, Technorati and Delicious details
3. My own thoughts like Start your own company without leaving your Job and Every Dream Comes at a Price

To put my blogging goal for 2009 in one line, I will say that every person who comes to this blog must end up knowing at least something new. It may be a simple idea, it may be a trick to improve his blog. But it must not be something that he has already read in 1000 other blogs.

Does that mean you will not see useless posts like Kellogg recalls peanut butter crackers anymore? Unfortunately I shall have to continue posting some of these useless posts as they form a part of my seo experiment. but I will definitely keep that number to a bare minimum.