1. Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is an extremely popular extension. Most of you know about Internet advertising and the abundance of ads on some websites (see – even we have some ). A lot of these advertisements are mostly harmless, however, it’s a good idea to block the ads for many reasons. First is obviously for security. No matter how many times you tell people not to click ads that look suspicious (winning lottery, hot girls waiting for you, you are the millionth customer, etc), they still do it. Almost all such ads contain some security threat – phishing, malware, spyware, viruses. They are not safe. Another reason is if you have kids – even the supposedly safe sites these days can pop-up with X rated advertisements. Having a protection against them is very important.

This is where Adblock Plus comes in. Simply put it will remove all advertising content from web pages and will deliver only pure content to you. It’s the best no-nonsense extension out there. Because the pages no longer load ads, the browsing speed improves quite a lot – especially if you use slow connections. We strongly recommend this add-on to all users of Firefox. The extension can be downloaded and installed from here.

2. Video Download Helper

We are often faced with situations where we want to download embedded content from websites. You tube videos for instance. Many people don’t know how to download such content. There are some dedicated websites that convert the URL into direct download links but where most of those services work on one or two sites, video download helper works on many.  It sits near the address bar in Firefox and whenever it detects embedded media – audio, video and images, it gets activated and you can see 3 spinning balls. Clicking on that icon will list all the embedded media available on the page, which you can now download without having to go look for any other website that converts the links. You can find the download link and more details here.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a great tool if you have dried up on ideas. It’s a website where you can browse websites matching your interest. There are 500 topics to chose from and users like you tag the websites and pages with the topic. All you do is create an account, the toolbar (this add-on) has menus that you can use to chose a topic or a tag – click the stumble button and you’ll be browsing through the topics you chose. You can also browse through similar topics on the same website as well. It also gets better as you tag more websites and browse more. With over 25 million registered users and more than a billion stumbles per month, this is one of the best add-on for writers and researchers. It’s database it ever growing and is getting better every day. You can get it here.

4. Greasemonkey

Getting annoyed by the Facebook ticker that was added recently? Use Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to use scripts that allow on-the-fly changes to web pages. There are plenty of scripts available that you can use to make changes, there is no need to worry if you don’t know how to write the scripts. The best thing is, Greasemonkey remembers these changes and will execute them every time you load the page. It’s as if the website has changed – just for you. There are, as I said, a lot of user scripts available on userscripts.org. You can also roll out your own scripts, look at the wiki for information on how to do this and finally you can get the add-on here.

5. Feedly

Feedly is the overall best start-page add-on I have ever seen. Remember iGoogle? It tried to organize all your content on one page which you can put as your default start page for your browser. Feedly is similar to that but much better. Feedly is magazine-like start page based on the best content of your favorite websites. Powered by Google Reader and Twitter. When installed Feedly will present you with a starting page that has news from a variety of topics such as Android, Photography and World News. You can customize all of this, add sites you want to follow and also read your Google reader feeds right here. You can also log-in to your twitter and Facebook feeds to check them from Feedly. It also comes with a link to this article telling you 9 ways to personalize your Feedly page. You can download the add-on here.

Traditional way of learning math might be helpful for most, but for me it is a big no-no. I started discovering new ways to understand and learn math. I purchased many math reference books, started browsing through the web for best tutorials, made use of wolfram|alpha etc. But this just didn’t help me out to my expectations.

I wanted something that is a blend of both tradition as well as modern way of learning math and I was lucky enough to hit the sweet spot and found “Khan Academy“ through one of my friend on Google+

Khan Academy is free, non-profit, one man initiative with over 2400 educational videos teaching math, science, finance, history and test exercises. It is founded by Salman Khan who holds multiple bachelor’s degree from MIT and is very generous to help reach the knowledge to the mass. His teaching method is brilliant and uses good examples when needed just like in normal classes. The best advantage of this sort of learning is that you can pause, rewind and or forward the lecture if boring. This way you can learn at your own pace. Even Salman quotes this in most of his speeches. Also the ability to download the videos with click of a button is added bonus to share with people having no access to internet. To encourage visitors watch more videos, the academy also has included a pointing system where you get more points for watching videos and analyze the stats.

His collection of videos and his teaching is so good that it has attracted eyes many biggies like Bill Gates and co-founders of Google. Bill Gates himself has made a statement that Salman Khan is his favorite teacher and uses those videos to train his children. Recently Google funded Khan Academy with $2 Million to encourage making new tutorials.

Internet Censorship Map

Every packet that leaves your computer has a header containing your host IP address and the destination IP address. Even if the data (payload)  is encrypted, the header is not. This traffic analysis can lead to the attacker (which is your ISP / Government most of the times) getting hold of a multitude of information about you. The originating country, the date, time, which browser you use. Apart from identity theft, potential information leak – your location, browsing habits, your work can be in danger. The map on the left shows the countries where the government forces the ISPs to censor data and keep checks on the traffic. This, though not very dangerous, can lead to legal action against the users if they are doing something the government does not want them to do. Even if you have a dynamic IP address – you can still be tracked. This is where the TOR network comes in.

Tor network uses a distributed network of nodes – of other TOR users – to re-route all the packets from your network. What this means is – no single link can identify the source and the destination. To create a private network pathway with Tor, the user’s software or client incrementally builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the network. The circuit is extended one hop at a time, and each relay along the way knows only which relay gave it data and which relay it is giving data to. No individual relay ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each hop along the circuit to ensure that each hop can’t trace these connections as they pass through. The 2 images, taken from the official tor website, below show this process. The first image is how the network (plausibly) works and the second image depicts it after using the tor network.

How Tor Works

How Tor Works

Even with all this, Tor is not very safe. There are potential pitfalls and security threats. Tor by itself does not encrypt the payload and a sniffer at the exit node (as you can see in the image) can get all the data without any encryption present at the TCP layer. Unless the application encrypts data (SSL), a sniffer at the exit node can gather information. Tor does not work on UDP sockets for now. Tor is not designed to work with P2P networks as well.

It is however better than having nothing. To install tor, download the appropriate package from the tor website. The install instructions for various Linux distributions change however, for a general procedure, please head over to the Tor blog. Windows users can check the video below and get everything running.

Happy Browsing.

To overcome this hurdle, there is an hassle free solution which lets you not just share your documents online but will also let others see the content online before downloading it. This is made possible by a popular online service called “ZohoViewer”. This online service will let you share your documents online without any difficulties.

To share your documents online, follow these steps:

1. Goto ZohoViewer.
2. Select the file from your computer or URL which you want to share. Select the expiry time and click on “View” button to start uploading.
3. After it uploads successfully, you will be taken to the page where you can view and share the uploaded document.
4. Copy the URL of the page and start sharing with others!

ZohoViewer supports a wide range of daily used file formats. To view all the supported formats, visit this page.

Apart from sharing, ZohoViewer also lets you embed the uploaded file on your website or blog which lets your visitors to view it directly on your page. It also let’s you edit the file if you want to make any changes or append new content. There are bunch of other options as well. You can see a sample file that I uploaded over here.

Just go to any web page that you wish to download as a PDF file. And click on the dedicated “convert web page to PDF” button on the top right hand corner. And there you go, the page gets converted into PDF online and will be available for download. You can even send the PDF file via email on the fly.

Download this addon for: Firefox | Google Crome & Safari | Internet Explorer

Although it is not a addon for Google Chrome and Safari, it does the job well. Also if you like to do more, just visit PDF Download website to play more with PDF files. Enjoy!