Digital Inspiration

In Back to the Future, you need an expensive car, and a conveniently placed lightning bolt – but what if time travel was easier than that? What if time travellers were ALL AROUND US? The ‘time travelling hipster’ (above) is one of the creepier pieces of evidence touted as proof that time travel exists – but we’ve picked out some of the best below, including several people from black-and-white films who appear to be using mobile phones. Nigel Watson, paranormal expert and author of the UFO Investigations Manual, ‘Would time travelers from the future really be using mobile phones? Wouldn’t they use something more sophisticated and less visible? Then again Dr Who still uses a sonic screwdriver and that is so 20th Century…’ Entry by  Cervus Entry by  Chan Teik Onn Entry by  GordonHaid Entry by  gicusudoru

Remember when you were all of seven and things that mattered to you? The  video  game that you just had to have or the sleep-over at your bestie that you simply had to attend?  Well, seems like the times have really changed! A seven-year-old from the  United Kingdom  has become the centre of attention after shooting off a letter to  Google  CEO  Sundar Pichai .  Chloe Bridgewater , who lives in Hereford in the  UK , wrote to the Google top boss, expressing interest to work for the  tech  major .  THIS IS THE LETTER Here's the letter by Chloe Bridgewater that was shared on Linkedin by her father Andy. (Image: Business Insider)   The little one, enthralled by her Kindle Fire tablet and robots, and totally absorbed by the idea of working "somewhere with bean bags, go-karts, and slides" (as enlightened by her father), decided to apply to Google for a job!  Here's Sundar Pichai's message for Chloe Bridgewate.   (Image: Andy Bridgewater/ linkedin)   In a one-pa

Google hacking is the term used when a hacker tries to find exploitable targets and sensitive data by using search engines. The Google Hacking Database (GHDB) is a database of queries that identify sensitive data. Although Google blocks some of the better known Google hacking queries, nothing stops a hacker from crawling your site and launching the Google Hacking Database queries directly onto the crawled content. More information about Google hacking can be found on:  http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=170880 . What a Hacker can do if your Website is Vulnerable Information that the Google Hacking Database identifies: Advisories and server vulnerabilities Error messages that contain too much information Files containing passwords Sensitive directories Pages containing logon portals Pages containing network or vulnerability data such as firewall logs. In 2014 the total number of websites on the internet reached  1 billion . Today it’s hovering s

THOSE who upgrade their smartphones and tablets to Android Nougat could soon benefit from the next-generation AI assistant, dubbed Google Assistant, that so-far has remained an exclusive to the US search firm's own phone, Google Pixel !! It's very likely that Android users will begin to see Google Assistant start to pop-up on new devices beyond Google's own Pixel and Pixel XL. And the change could be coming much sooner than previously thought. According to  9To5Google , Google has inadvertently pushed-out an alpha release of its Android search app to beta testers, which allows users to enable Google Assistant support on non-Pixel hardware for the first time. Unfortunately, the updated Android search app isn't working for everyone on the beta program. But those who have managed to get the alpha version of the Google  app working have reported success running Google Assistant on a portfolio of difference devices. Notably, the availability appears to range fr

Do you ever wonder what is the demographics of people who follow you on Twitter. How many of your Twitter friends are men? Or women? Or random colored eggs, people who are either too lazy to change their default avatar or maybe they are  Twitter bots . The  Graph Search of Facebook  can provide deep insights into the demographics of people who are connected with you on the social network. For instance, you can write a natural language query like “ My friends who are older than 30 ” or “ My female friends who live in Delhi ” and the answer will be available instantly. Such granular data is however not available for Twitter users. Who Follows You? Males, Females or Eggs How do you programmatically determine the gender of a person on Twitter? The  Twitter API  doesn’t provide the gender information but there’s a workaround. You can take the profile picture of a Twitter user, feed it into Siftr’s  Vision API  and it will detect the gender of the most prominent face in the photogr

When you share any file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the  shared links  will work forever unless you manually change the sharing permissions. For instance, if you have shared a document with an external vendor, they’ll continue to have access to the file long after your business contract may have ended. In such a situation, wouldn’t it be nice if you could set expiration dates while sharing files in Google Drive? For instance, share a document temporarily for, say, 10 days and access to the file should be revoked automatically after that period has passed. Add an Auto-Expiry Date for Shared Links in Google Drive Google Drive does let you set expiration dates for shared links but this option is only available to paid Google App for Work accounts. Well, no worries. If you have a free Google account, you can still create temporary links that auto-expire after a certain time. Here’s a step by step guide: Go to xyz.org/expire and authorize the web app to access

You are planning to buy a new iPhone 7 but the model you want to have, the premium jet black finish with 128GB, is neither available at Apple stores in your area nor at any of the online shopping sites. Now the Apple website does have a simple tool to help you check the availability of iPhone, or iPad or any other Apple product, at their retail stores but you still need to perform these inventory checks manually. Wouldn’t it be easier if these checks could be automated? You specify the iPhone model you wish to own, your preferred color, capacity, your area zip code, your desired carrier and the tool would send you an email alert when iPhone is back in stock at any of the Apple retail stores in your area. It’s like having someone check the Apple website for iPhone availability every few hours. Check iPhone Availability by Zip  What we have here simple Google Spreadsheet, that resides in your Google Drive, and it will monitor the Apple store in the background for iPhone avai

A new bizarre “report” circulating in the conspiracy theory blogosphere claims that a leaked top-secret Kremlin document has revealed details of a recent top-secret meeting between President Vladimir Putin of Russia and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. During the meeting, Biden delivered to Putin a message from President Barack Obama, requesting Russia’s cooperation to establish an “Earth-wide” missile defense system to protect our planet from an impending alien UFO invasion expected to occur in September of 2017. The move by the Obama administration to seek the support and cooperation of Kremlin to ward off the threat of an alien military invasion of planet Earth came after NASA satellites reportedly detected a massive “miles-wide” alien UFO invasion fleet that entered our solar system. The massive fleet is believed to be heading toward Earth and will arrive in September of 2017. The bizarre report appearing on multiple alien and UFO conspiracy theory blogs claims that on Ja

Google Forms have this “all-or-none” problem. The forms are either public (anyone can fill your form) or, if you are on Google Apps, you can create forms that are visible to everyone in your organization. It is however not possible to restrict access to forms to specific people. another shortcoming is that Google Forms do not allow passwords or CAPTCHAs to prevent spam bots from filling your forms with random data. Google itself maintains the reCAPTCHA project but it is not known if integration with Google Forms is in the works. There is a workaround, though. Google Forms with Picture Passwords Google Forms do not support CAPTCHA but they do offer an option to attach images with questions. These can be used as picture passwords.   The idea is simple. We add a multiple-choice question where the user is asked to pick an image from a selection of multiple images. If they select the correct image, the main form is displayed else an error message is shown. Also, these images

How to Insert Clickable Phone Numbers in Web Pages We use the simple tel protocol to convert a plain text phone number on a web page into a clickable telephone link For instance, if you click  this link  on a mobile phone, it will open the phone dialer prefilled with the specified number. There’s no need to copy-paste numbers. How to Type Phone Numbers in a Google Sheet It is a bit tricky to type phone numbers inside Google Spreadsheets. Here’s why: Phone numbers are mostly made of digits preceded by the plus (+) symbol. The problem is as soon as add the plus sign in the spreadsheet cell, it assumes that you entering a math formula and tries to calculate the value. There are two simple workarounds to this problem. You can enclose the phone number inside double quotes (“) and precede it with an equal to (=) sign. An even easier alternative is to use the single quote (‘) before the phone number. Google Sheets will then interpret the cell’s value as text and

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses, running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems. It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency. What makes it different from normal currencies? Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically. In that sense, it’s like conventional dollars, euros, or yen, which are also traded digitally. However, bitcoin’s most important characteristic, and the thing that makes it different to conventional money, is that it is  decentralized . No single institution controls the bitcoin network. This puts some people at ease, because it means that a large bank can’t control their money. Who created it? A software developer called Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin, which was an electronic payment system based on m

One of the primary Twitter accounts for the internet’s most notorious hacktivist collective tweeted multiple times at the President-elect on Sunday night, shortly after Trump  attacked civil rights icon John Lewis  and blasted Saturday Night Live as “ the worst of NBC ” (oddly enough the same network that carries the reality TV show for which Trump is  listed as an executive producer ) . In a series of responses to one of Trump’s tweets accusing outgoing CIA director John Brennan of leaking the infamous “Golden Showers” dossier,  @YourAnonCentral  told the President-elect that his dealings with “Russian mobsters, child traffickers, and money launderers” would soon come to light. Anonymous also ominously warned Trump that information on the internet is there forever, and that his rich father can’t protect him anymore. Anonymous isn’t just blowing hot air — Trump actually does have ties to unsavory characters tied to the Russia mob, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journali