How to filter adult content at home/office – An easy way

My friend called me asking a solution for the above question. He runs a small medical transcription company. When transcriptionists are busy with searching medical terminology, there is a chance for accidentally going to the sites with adult content. He also wants to restrict the net use for the night shift people. He don’t want to spend money buying the content filtering software and it must be easy to setup because they don’t have system administrators to do that. Everything related to systems is taken care of by themselves.

So, I have started searching the net and found these easy steps to stop the adult content showing up in browsers. It is basically about changing the DNS servers in your system.

What is DNS?
DNS (Domain Name System) is a process that translates easy to remember addresses (like www.scrubit.com) to a numerical IP address used by computers (67.138.54.99) Everyone uses DNS. Most DNS is provided to the user by your internet service provider, or a recursive DNS service like ScrubIT. More info you can read on Wikipedia here.

Here I explain about two services OpenDNS and ScrubIt.

OpenDNS: It offers more free services than ScrubIt and more it is faster than ScrubIt. But, adult content filtering is not turned on by default. You have to create a free account on OpenDNS to turn it on. It will give you access to a number of interesting features like Adult Site Blocking, Phishing Site Blocking, Phishing Site Blocking, Stats and Logs, Typo Corrections, etc. Change your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220, create a free account on OpenDNS, add your IP address, and turn the adult site blocking on. Now you are free from adult sites.

Note that this works only with static IPs as your free account is linked to the IP to gain the control. Lot of broadband accounts comes with static IP and if your internet provider does not support static IP, you can download the Dynamic DNS client to update your IP address automatically. More information is here: http://www.opendns.com/support/dynamic_ip/

Below are some screenshots. It is totally free, so give it a try to learn more about OpenDNS.

ScrubIt: Just change the DNS servers to 67.138.54.100 & 207.225.209.66, and it starts working. Though it is somewhat slow compared to OpenDNS, there is no hassle of setting up anything. Takes few seconds and efficiently starts blocking adult content.

Go to the ScrubIt’s website to know more.

Screenshot:

Finally, how to change the DNS servers in your system? Do the following:

Right click on the network connection icon displayed in the notification area on the taskbar. A menu will appear and select “Status” from the list

Click the “Properties” button and a properties window will open.

Then click “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) ” and it will open up a window with DNS servers list.

You can also locate the local area connection from control panel

Sharing internet connection between two computers – a step-by-step guide

A week ago, I have purchased another system as we got a small project to work on. It is an online project and both systems need to have Internet. We have Sify connection at home and now we have to share it in both systems. I never tried before connecting two systems or sharing an internet connection. I have digged the net and found that we can share the internet using router. Router is a bit expensive one, so further digged the net for a simple workaround to connect both computers and share a single internet connection.

I found that using LAN card and crossover cable, we can setup a LAN connection and share the internet connection. Everything I did, but network icon in system tray was showing limited or no connection. For another one hour, I tried all sort of things, but failed. I put the same IPs in both systems, it did not connect. Then, I selected the option of obtaining IP automatically, again failed. Everyone one the net was describing about connecting it step-by-step, but no one explained about IPs. At last, I searched for it on Microsoft website and in an article, I found the IP numbers to put in, which are the default when you connect in LAN.

Following is a step-by-step instruction to connect two systems and share the internet connection.

Things you need: LAN Card and crossover cable.

Install LAN card in one of two systems, which will act as a Host. You need to connect to the internet through this computer. Connect one of two pins to the Host system and another pin to the second system. Once you connect both through cable, you can see the network icons glowing in your system tray. Sometimes, it may show the message that it is acquiring the IP address.

Click for bigger & clear image

Now, go to the Control Panel>Network and Internet Connection>Network Setup Wizard in Host system, in which you have installed an extra LAN card.  Look at the screenshot on the right side.

It will show a popup. Click two times and follow the below screenshots.  Click on the images for a bigger and clear images.

Select “Just finish the wizard” on the last window and we are done with the Host system.  I named it as “Home.”

In the Client system, run the same network setup wizard, but this time select the connection method as second one, look at the image below. Rest of the process is same.

Now, in the Host system, you will be entering the IP address provided by the Internet provider. In the Client system, enter the below IP details and click ok. Now, you will see a popup from the second connection telling that it is now connected at 10 mbps speed.

Now when you connect the Host system to internet, you can access it from the Client system too.

Pros:
1. Any type of Internet connection works.
2. Low cost of implementation (Rs.200-250)
3. Easy to install.

Cons:
1. You can only connect two systems.
2. Host always to be on to access net on the Client system.

If you still have problem, post in comments and I will try to answer.

Microsoft ICE - Free panoramic photo stitching software

I found this amazing software called Image Composite Editor (ICE) by Microsfot while searching for free software to stitch photos. I found few other free photo stitching softwares too, but they were difficult to install, took lot of time to stitch, and/or producing low-quality images.

 

Using photo stitching software, you can stitch a set of overlapping photos taken of a location into a single image. Assume that you want to shoot a wide-angled scene with your mobile camera, you can take photos of that scene into rectangular grid of rows and columns and then using photo stitching software, you can create a high-resolution single image.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is available as a free software. It can stitch giga pixels of images into one single image. No other software can match its speed. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit windows and supported up to Windows 7.

Click the image for a bigger and clear image

Flickr has a group for the images stitched with Microsoft ICE, http://www.flickr.com/groups/922872@N23/.  Check the photos created with it and you will understand what you can do with this little free application.

For example purpose, I have captured the Microsft webpage into 4 different parts of unequal lengths and stitched into one. Click the below images to see, how good it stitched the images into one.

This is a photo taken from the ICE group on Flickr as an example for panoramic image created with stitching 14 photos into one:

Backup and sync Firefox environment with one click

My system has been giving problems lately with the hardware and at anytime, it can crash.  So, I have purchased a WD Elements Portable 160GB USB hard drive and uploaded all the data onto it. Whenever I download a software, I keep a copy on my hard disk, so now I am having all the software copies.  What I am missing is Firefox data.  

I use a number of extensions, tweaks, and themes and has huge number of usernames and passwords stored in it. So, this Sunday, I have searched and implemented few backup options and found FEBE as the best extension for it. Here is my review of this little useful extension that relieved my tension of being missing very important data:

 

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows Firefox users to quickly and easily backup extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, search plugins, and browser history. Before backing up, it will rebuild all the extensions individually into installable .xpi files, so you can sync the Firefox browser in your office and home.  It also has option of scheduling the backups. Another useful feature in FEBE is backing up the data onto your Box.net’s free storage account, which makes this extension hot.  I used to export the username and passwords list using Password Exporter plugin and then uploading them into Box.net account.  Now, I don’t need to worry about manually uploading them. Just a click takes backup of all the data and stores a copy in your system as well as on Box account.

It also has quick backup option from which you can select few or only one item to be backed up saving your time.

FEBE Options Tab

Taking backup and uploading them into Box.net account

Showing progress of upload into Box.net account

Restoring the files is also easy.  By going through Tools>FEBE>Restore option, you can restore all the data one by one.

Restore options