Hacking Manual

If you are in a tech support position then this article might save you some hassle and save you some time by allowing you to quickly know your client’s operating system, public ip address, web browser, and whether or not cookies, flash, or java-script is enabled.

Sure you might have figured out an easy way to ask whether they are using Windows XP/Vista/7 but how about do you know what version of flash your running, or do you have java script or cookies enabled. Yes those are much trickier.

Instead simply direct them to go to supportdetails.com they can even quickly email you the details with a form or just read you what you are looking to find out.

This article will show you how to save some serious cash on video games. Video games are pretty expensive but it’s possible to save up to 90% or more when buying them and I’ll show you how.

Half.com is a company owned by Ebay and allows sellers to set their own price for video games, books, music, and movies. The difference is the sellers are forced to sell at low prices in order to make a sale. The sellers usually compete for the lowest price in order to get their item sold.The longer the video game has been out the cheaper it is.

The beauty of Half.com is once your done playing the video game you can sell it back for about the same price you paid. This gives you much more money than selling at Gamestop or a similar store because those stores don’t give you anything near what they are going to sell it for. If you finish with the game in a short period of time like a week or two or decide you don’t like it you can sell it back for pretty much the same price you paid for it. Almost like getting the video game for almost free.

Say you buy a $60 video game for $10. Then you sell it back for $8. You just got a $60 video game for $2.

This tutorial will show you how to  password protect your Dropbox application on iPhone.

If you’re using Dropbox on iPhone, you should password protect the application to protect the files stored in your account. This is particularly helpful if you don’t want to password protect your entire iPhone just the Dropbox application.

Launch the Dropbox app
Go to settings–sasscode lock
Turn the passcode lock on and enter a passcode

Optional Additional Settings
Require Immediately – This will lock the Dropbox application when you switch apps
Erase Data - Erases all Dropbox data stored on the iPhone after 10 failed attempts
Erase Data – Erases all Dropbox data stored on the iPhone after 10 failed attempts

This tutorial will show you how to easily install apk files on android.

Android apk files are android applications that are manually installed instead of downloading them through the android market. This is beneficial in case the app you want is not on the android market or you are a developer testing your android application.

First Go to settings—Applications—Then Check mark the box that says Unknown Sources.

Next download AppInstaller from the market.

Now Download the apk file to your SD card. If you have trouble here try emailing yourself the apk file to your email account connected to your android phone. Then save the attachment to your SD card.

Now open AppInstaller and look for the folder called downloads click on the app and install.

Looking for the best, quickest, easiest way to speed up your computer? Look no further.

Your probably already know your computer is slowed down by all of the multiple running applications running at once.

You can disable the hidden programs and services that silently start up with your computer without your knowledge.

Click Start—Run–msconfig
Or if your running Vista/7 Type msconfig in the “start search” bar
Click the startup tab
Pretty much everything here can be disabled without worry.
You’ll want to keep your anti-virus and anything else you knowingly use daily.
For example the only two items I have enabled are My Antivirus and DropBox.
If you have any problems you can always re-enable
Click Apply–Tell it to restart later

Next click the services tab, and click hide all microsoft services.
Now this section you should be a bit more careful with and only disable software you have uninstalled or know for a fact you’ll never use again.

Now restart your computer and enjoy the additional speed.

Mint is a free online financial management application located at Mint.com and also offers applications for iPhone and Android phones which allow you to connect to your online account.

First I’ll start off with an introduction to how mint works. Mint connects securely to your all of your financial institutions and synchronizes with them so you can see all of your accounts in one place including loans, checking, and savings accounts. Mint also connects to your credit card and investment accounts. It automatically syncs all of your transactions and categorizes them in order to track your budgets and allow you to see where your money is being spent. If you have any accounts, transactions, assets or liabilities that cannot automatically be synced you can enter this information manually. As an example, I have student loans that cannot be automatically synced. I have entered this information manually in order to best reflect my net worth. Another example might be if you have a job that pays cash or tips, you can enter this income manually as well.

Mint creates personal financial reports in a very easy to understand way. It shows you the positive or negative amount in each account and category; the categories are cash, credit cards, loans, investments and property. It should be noted that the cash category actually reflects your bank accounts, while the property category reflects any assets or liabilities entered manually. So if you manually entered five hundred in cash savings at home and a loan for five thousand it will be added to the property category instead of the cash or loan category. It then combines all of your assets and liabilities to show your net worth. I can see that my net worth is negative because I have more liabilities than assets.  You can also view your net worth over time and it creates a bar graph to help you better visualize how it has improved or worsened over time.  It also shows a table which can be exported to excel. There are other reports that can be viewed in the same manner as net worth. The other reports available are spending, income, net income, assets and debts. These reports can be further filtered to show more details. My favorite report is net income because I can quickly see if I spent more than I earned during that month. If you need a more detailed financial statement than is offered you can still use this information to prepare a financial statement quickly and easily.

Mint allows you to create budgets for any category and allows you to create complicated budgets. A complicated budget might be that you pay your car insurance every six months instead of every month. You can set budgets for once a month or once every couple months. You can set the specific amount of months between 2 and 12. So if you want to set a budget for five hundred dollars per year on clothes, or five hundred dollars per year on car maintenance you can easily do that. You can also make budgets rollover if you wish. So any money not used toward that budget will be carried over to allow you to spend extra the next month for that category. Mint tracks your budgets automatically based on your spending transactions and automatically categorizes them for you. You might have to slightly adjust the spending transaction categories if Mint cannot.  For example, if you write a check for rent, you will have to tell Mint that the check was for rent so it can reflect that in your budget. Mint will optionally send you email or text message alerts if you happen to go over your budget in a specific category. Mint has an everything else category for any money you spent that you did not create a budget for, this is useful for unplanned expenses and you can set a budget for those unplanned expenses as well.

Mint helps you monitor your spending easily. In the trends section you can view the spending report. You can view your spending by category or by merchant. You can additionally view the current month, or a range of months by category or merchant. It creates pie charts and bar graphs as well as a table that can be exported to excel. You can also view all of your spending transactions and edit or add them as needed. You can search through these transactions based on name or category as well as export them to excel. If you need to edit a repetitive transaction that Mint has been mislabeling you can set the option to always label this transaction in a specific category. You can also set tags on your transactions like tax related or reimbursable, this helps you quickly find tax expenses at the end of the year or items you need to be reimbursed for.

You can also monitor your savings with Mint. You can view the assets report in the trend section and filter by account. Now you can view your savings accounts and you can select a range of months, and compare them to the past. Mint also has a goals section where you can set a specific savings goal which it monitors and tracks and adds to your budget. It tracks that goal by monitoring a specific savings account for that goal. You can set the date you would like to reach the goal and how much you will contribute per month. It will then track total progress, and let you know how far behind or ahead you are on reaching your goal. There are many savings goals this can be used for; you can save for a new car, a new house, an emergency fund or even retirement. Based on your type of savings goal it even offers customized guides to help you figure out how much to save and how to reach your goal.

Mint also allows you to monitor your investments. I have found that Mint actually gives me a better picture of my investments than my investment company does. The main four functions are performance, value, allocation and comparison. Performance shows you the performance of your investments over time in relation to how much you paid for them. This helps you realize overall gains and losses. Value shows you the overall value of your investments and how much they have increased or decreased over time. Allocation shows you the allocation based on the asset type or the stock symbol. Comparison compares your investments to Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ.  The bottom section has a table which shows you if applicable the current price of the share, the amount of shares, price paid, market value, and the amount of change in percent and dollar values.

Overall Mint is a great and easy way to prepare personal financial statements, create budgets and monitor spending, saving, and investing. It is free, very easy to use for beginners and requires little maintenance. These are advantages to many other financial applications.

Many websites require registration and a valid email address in order to read content or download items.  This results in excess email, spam, and just being annoyed because you have to register and create a username and password.

The good news is you can avoid all of that and access many websites without registering or giving your email address.

Using Community/Shared user names and passwords
Bugmenot.com and bypass.rd.to are websites that allow you to search for community or shared usernames/passwords to access these registration only websites. You will be surprised at all the websites this will let you access.

Using a disposable email address provider.
If this is a website you would like to register for but want to avoid proving your email address you can use a disposable provider such as Mailinator.com When asked for your email address just type in anything@mailinator.com  you can replace anything with well anything it could be example@mailinator.com then when they send you an email for activation you can check the email at mailinator.com  This is not password protected anyone can check this inbox but if it’s disposable it probably means you don’t care anyways.

Create your own disposable email account
Stop giving out your main email address. Create a separate email address specifically for registration and spam at gmail or yahoo.  This provides you the protection of you being the only person who can access this email while still protecting your main email account from spam.

When viewing pictures on facebook you are now forced to use facebook theater to view the images. Luckily there are a few easy ways to disable the facebook theater.

F5 – When facebook theater comes up hit F5 and the browser will refresh and you will be taken back to normal picture view mode.

Facebook/Chrome Add-On – There is an Add-On available for Firefox and chrome called Facebook Lightbox Killer which disables by default the Facebook theater.

I prefer to F5 method but it you want it permanently disabled try the Firefox/Chrome Add-On.

Adobe reader will read your PDF’s outloud for you so you don’t have to.  This makes it simple to listen to your long PDF’s instead of reading them. If you have an audio recorder you can even record these PDF’s to an MP3 file to listen to later on your iPod. 

Open your PDF with adobe reader
Click View
Then Read outloud and activate read outloud
Click View again, Read outloud, and then read to the end of the document.
Now if you want to skip the introduction or a couple pages just click on the paragraph you want to skip to and it will skip and start reading from that paragraph or page.

The computer voice is a little rough around the edges but it’s still a very neat feauture and I hope they improve upon this and maybe even add a feature to convert the pdf into an audio book built in. So you could just convert it and transfer it to your iPod.

This article describes how to by pass the activation screen on the Android HTC DROID Incredible and this will probably work for other Verizon android phones as well.

When you see the screen that tells you to call to activate just hit call to activate end call, back activate again, end call and repeat 4 times and then it will bypass activation and you can use your android phone with Wi-Fi to play games and even make VOIP calls and send text messages with apps over Wi-Fi.