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3 Browser Extensions for the Chrome New Tab Page

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Browser extensions have been designed with the express purpose of making your browser more useful than it already is.

Of course, there’s not much to improve when it comes to the UI with the exception of Chrome’s New Tab page.

That said, here are 3 browser extensions that can help brighten up your web browser:

#1: Pinterest Tab

First up, you don’t need to have a Pinterest account to use this extension but you still get a beautiful picture for your tab from this social network that focuses on images. When starting the extension, you will be asked to choose image topics such as food, travel to name a few. However, it also gives us access to Google Calendar as well as a direct link to Pinterest itself.

#2: Earth View from Google Maps

This extension does not need any set-up whatsoever. Once you’ve installed it, every time you open a new tab, you can a beautiful satellite photo from Google Maps. It’s hard to tell whether this is from an extension as indicated by a Google Maps logo at the lower left hand corner as well as an indicator informing you of where this satellite photo has been taken from.

#3: Momentum

This extension helps you add a bit of prettiness along with productivity in your new tab. As soon as you start this extension up, it will ask you for your name as well as what the main focus of your day is. So, everytime you open up a new tab, you will be greeted personally, the time of day as well as the reminder that you wish to focus on. Apart from this, a beautiful photo as a backdrop, a to-do list and the current weather is also displayed.

Essential Tips for Display Advertisers

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Display advertising has the potential to outperform text ads if you know how to harness that potential. It’s a form of direct marketing, so your messaging and your work need to be spot on. Testing and execution are keys in this equation, so you need to be able to produce ads that will perform quickly. Learning these essential tips is sure to help your performance metrics improve.

Copy is Key

When you are working with banners, copy is more than just the words. You have to consider the colors and images on your banner, as well as the space your banner will occupy. Make sure what you and your ad exchange’s preferred sizes are, and that you work within those constraints. It helps to write from a place of knowledge, so perform some quick competitive research on Google to determine which tag lines are working. The closer you get to find that pain point, the better your conversion rate will become.

Outsource Work

Don’t be afraid to outsource the technical aspects of your work to someone more knowledgeable than you. You can easily find a developer to design a landing page for your campaign within a budget of a few hundred dollars. If you can host your own banner advertising, you can capture more data about your target market.

Hiring designers and developers takes time, and you should be prepared to check a few sources to find the work you need. Keep your project simple, and limit yourself to only a few assets. The less you have to work with, the better for your long term efforts.

Bio: For over ten years, Ted Dhanik has used display advertising to boost sales for businesses of all sizes. Ted Dhanik is the co-founder of engage:BDR, and a mentor at the startup accelerator Start Engine. Ted Dhanik also publishes advice to Ad Age and Venture Beat.

How to Ensure the Long Life of Your Laptop Battery

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It’s common knowledge that batteries don’t last forever. However, in maintaining your laptop battery carefully, you can still carry a sufficient charge until you are absolutely ready to move on to purchasing a new laptop for your daily computing needs.

Of course, this may take some effort which means that will turn out to be more of a hassle than it should be worth.

So let’s begin with a practical but less effective method. Now, let’s say that you are at home and are running the battery on AC power. Of course, you wouldn’t need the battery then. So, if you think your laptop is going to stay plugged in for a week or so, turn off the PC and remove the battery.

Of course, when you’re on the road, then you might need the battery. In this situation, you can plug it back in but also remembering to charge it before going on your trip.

Keep in mind that you should never insert a battery when the laptop is turned on. Always make sure it is turned off before you do this.

For the best results, never charge it above 80 percent but ensure that the power doesn’t fall below 20 percent. To ensure this, always keep an eye on the battery when it’s charging as you work on AC power.

As soon as it hits 80 percent, ensure that you turn off your system and remove the battery. Not very differently, when using the battery on the road, remove it if it goes below 20 percent. As a result, do not start up your system until you have access to AC power.

Cooling essentials for your hardware

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Industrial air conditioning is a must have especially when you are working with quite a lot of computers and hardware. As a matter of fact, some mainframes and servers that require a great deal of cooling would sometimes even require a portable air conditioner as well so it would not overheat. It is a given fact that businesses thrive and survive on computers. And it is the responsibility of every employer or management team to make sure that these machines function correctly and properly as well. These machines produce a great deal of heat, and if you do not provide them with enough cooling, you are definitely going to have a great deal of trouble as they overheat quickly. You see, mainframes and servers may have their own cooling systems, but these simply will not suffice especially when you have them working twenty four hours a day and seven days a week as well. You need to have these machines stored in a cool place so they can function as efficiently and properly as well for extended periods of time. After all, a higher electric bill would be a reasonable trade off rather than having to suffer a machine breakdown in your servers. This can cause huge problems especially when you are heavily dependent on your mainframes and computers for your business. Also, you need to make sure that you follow what your IT personnel recommends as far as cooling needs are concerned. So if the say that your machines need to be kept at a constant temperature, you need to make sure that this is followed.

Portable ac units are quite affordable nowadays. If you need extra cooling requirements, this is definitely what you need.

3 Benchmarking Tools You Can Use to Test Your Android Phone

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How much do you know about your Android phone? Apart from its name, price tag and the applications it can run?

In order to know more, you can use this to run benchmarks that will not only tell you how how fast your phone but will also show you it fares against older phones or those in the marketplace.

That said, here are 3 benchmarking tools that you can use:

#1: Basemark OS II and Basemark OS X

Basemark is one of the most sophisticated benchmarking suites available that cover both gaming as well as OS separately. That said, Basemark OS II, in particular, works to check for OS performance while Basemark OS X tests for gaming performance.

#2: Antutu 5

Antutu’s fifth version will test for gaps in GPU and CPU performance. With this new version, single-core CPU performance is also included now that software can be written for the rising core counts. Even the GPU benchmark also gets a facelift where complexity has been added along with the addition of the Havok Vision Engine. With support for ART and Lollipop as well as new 64-bit hardware such as Nvidia and Qualcomm, Antutu is ready enough for the latest hardware.

#3: Ookla

Ookla is an internet speed meter that runs latency and bandwidth tests to particular servers that you can specify. This could be across a region or even a particular city as well. One good reason why it is a good idea to use this benchmarking your Android phone is because carrier performance and phone location works just as well.

Things to know before choosing a data center

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Written by: Rack Alley

If you’re choosing a new data center, Los Angeles might have popped up in your list a few times. That’s no coincidence though. A lot of companies will choose an LA data center over others.

Los Angeles colocation

The prime reason for that is the colocation. Colocation is a simple concept; it means sharing your data center with other companies. Now you might think about security issues, but that’s all been taken good care of. The companies are properly isolated from each other. In fact, colocation is a very common practice.

Colocation also addresses the time issue. Usually, setting up a new data center takes a lot of time. This means that if a company wants a data center fast, they’re more likely to find a colocation one.

Los Angeles web hosting

But why choose Los Angeles in the first place. What if price was not an issue?

Los Angeles has grown over the years to become the city to go to for high quality data centers. It has direct access to a lot of high quality network service providers. This makes sure that your data travels in a fast and reliable way.

Los Angeles is also home to a wide network of content delivery networks. Content delivery networks, called CDN, ensures that users worldwide have fast access your website. This is achieved by having servers on strategic parts of the world. These servers will contain a copy of your data, so users closer to the CDN server will use that one.

Email spam filtering is much better than it used to be, especially if you’re a Gmail user. Every now and then, there are emails that fall into your inbox.

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So, how does one know which email is suspicious and which one isn’t. While there are a number of tips that can make up quite a list, here are three that can prevent you from getting scammed:

#1: Addressed as “Dear Customer”

If you see an email titled ‘Dear Customer’ that asks you to follow a link so as to fill in account details, you can be sure it is a phishing scam. This is because spammers use this old feature known as mail merge when sending emails out to victims that automatically fills in customer names among other types of information. But this is not to say that any authentic emails sent from corporations to you won’t use your name when addressing you.

#2: Links look suspicious

If you’re not sure about an email, hover the mouse over any link that is found in the email but don’t, under any circumstances, click it. When you look at the lower left-hand corner of your browser or email client, you’ll find the exact address that you’re hovering over.

You can easily determine whether that email is a scam or not by reading the link until the first backslash. Now, go back from that point to the first period and you’ll see the address that you are actually heading towards. In most cases, it will not be the URL that it looks like at the beginning of the link.

#3: Contains an attachment

If they can’t get you to follow a link, the next thing is to send you an attachment. For this, make sure that you never download an attachment that you don’t expect from anyone. In some cases, you may be expecting some people to send you some attachments. Use discretion when trying to do so.

Metallizing Plastic

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Written by: Denton Vacuum, LLC

Summary: The metallization of plastic has completely revolutionized the costs associated with manufacturing.

Plastic is a great material to use for manufacturing, but its uses are limited when it is left in its original state. But, what if we could metalize it and change its properties entirely? That’s no longer in the realm of “what if.” Through the process of vacuum metallization, manufacturers are able to fundamentally alter the makeup of plastic, turning a simple plastic piece into a high-performance metal piece without adding significantly to the cost of production.

How it Works

The vacuum metalizing process takes place in two phases. The first phase involves superheating the materials used in coating. Typically, these materials include items like copper or aluminum. The heating would damage the substrate, so the piece is inserted only after the metal has been converted into gaseous form. The chamber is cooled as the substrate is put inside, creating the perfect conditions for materials to settle on the face of the substrate and coat t evenly. The particulates bounce off the walls of the chamber as the interior is cooled to a specific temperature. Occasionally, other apparatuses are used to rotate the substrate, making sure it receives an even coating on all sides.

Applications

Vacuum deposition systems aren’t just for making plastic into metal, although the aerospace industry benefits greatly from these advancements. The same process is also used in the construction of joint replacement devices, creating a more durable piece that lasts longer. Optometrists and manufacturers also utilize this same technique, replacing the metal with chemicals, to create lenses with scratch resistance.

Related Story: Using E-Beam Evaporation for Medical Technology

Related Story: How to Metallize Plastic

What You Need to Know (and do!) Before Purchasing RAM

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The reason why your machine is slowing down might or might not have to do with your Random Access Memory.

However, the more RAM you add, the faster your system will get apart from the fact that it it easier to install compared to installing a solid state drive. This is for the reason that with the latter, you will have to move the operating system.

Yet the question remains that you not only have to know what type of RAM your system will accept but also how much of it too.

Now, if you want to make sure that you actually need more RAM, select Task Manager and the Performance tab. At the bottom left-hand corner, you’ll see the amount of RAM that is available and if it is less than 25 percent, then it’s time for an upgrade.

Another aspect that you must consider is to determine the most effective arrangement for your RAM in terms of using the available memory slots. In most cases, they are arranged in pair whether two or four.

In order to understand this, check your motherboard’s manual. One thing that you should keep in mind for better performance: add RAM to different slots that use different memory channels.

Ultimately, if you are not sure about what you need or what you’ve got, then use the Crucial System Scanner. Download the program and run it: the results should tell you how many slots are filled (and with what!) and how many are empty. It will also tell you what kind of RAM to purchase as well.

How to Fix Your Retargeting

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Retargeting is a huge benefit, if you know how to use it. If you don’t, you might end up paying more money to actually lose customers! Retargeting tries to match your messaging with customers who have visited your site. It’s great for branding too. Retargeting often costs less than using standard targeting methods, but it’s very easy to break your retargeting efforts. If you find retargeting isn’t delivering the response you had hoped for, you might want to try adjusting a few parameters.

Frequency

The biggest change you can make is to the frequency with which your ads show. If your ads are presented to users too often, your “effective” messaging comes across as intrusive badgering. Be sure that you set a frequency cap, or a limit to how many times your display advertising will show to a certain person on a certain day, so that you’re not bothering people with your ads.

Messaging

The best kind of display advertising, especially on mobile, is succinct. Think about what you want your advertising to say, like benefits of your product or service, and highlight that in banner form. Try to distill what you want to say into one sentence, or even better, just a few words. Also, be sure that you adjust your messaging. If you are retargeting customers who bought from you already, for instance, showing them the same banner would be redundant. Instead, try to focus on a new benefit or product they have not seen and you might score an upsell.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the CEO of engage:BDR, a digital marketing company that offers real-time bidding. Ted Dhanik has been in direct marketing for over 15 years. Find out how to generate leads for your business with advice from Ted Dhanik.