DigitFreak

Category: Useful Applications & Tips

  • Advanced partition manager to convert MBR to GPT disk

    Advanced partition manager to convert MBR to GPT disk

    GPT (GUID Partition Table) is fairly new partitioning system which was introduced in 2010 to allow the seamless management of implications of large capacity Hard Disk Drives. It was developed as the part of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which is the replacement of PC Bios) when existing widespread ‘MBR’ system couldn’t handle HDD larger than 2 TB.

    The MBR partitioning scheme stores block addresses in 32-bit, which limits the maximum partition entries to 232x512 (or 2TB). As you have figured it out already, 2TB is comparatively small space today.  If you are wondering what is that GPT does differently, the answer is pretty simple — they use 64-bit and extends the capacity to store partition entries to 9.4 ZB (Zeta Byte) or 10 093 173 145.6 TB. Phew!

    Almost all modern OS supports GPT file system given that your computer setup is capable of using it. Microsoft outlines the benefits of using GPT and even suggested that one should use any third party tools to convert the existing MBR partition into GPT disk:

    You can do this yourself by reformatting the drive using the instructions below, or if you need to preserve the data, use a third-party utility to convert the drive to GPT format.

    In addition to the ability to handle fairly large capacity HDD, GPT disk can also allow to overcome the limitation of maximum 4 partition creation on MBR. The GPT drive format lets you set up drives that are larger than 4 terabytes (TB), and lets you easily set up as many partitions as you need.

    Why use third party tools?

    Why would Microsft suggest us to use third party software when we can easily convert our HDD using ‘windows Disk Management’ tool? Well, it is true that we can use the default Windows tool to convert MBR to GPT disk but at the expense of our valuable data being wiped out entirely. As Microsoft suggested on their official website, one should use third party utilities or tools to convert MBR to GPT without data loss.

    But wait! They didn’t mention which tool. Don’t worry that’s what we are here for.

    Now that Windows 10 is on the way and HDD has been cheaper than ever, this is the right time to get your Hard Disk ready for the big upgrade. I went ahead searched for the tool that could convert my disk and I wanted it to be easy. That’s when I stumbled upon this interesting tool — EaseUS Partition Master.

    mbr to gpt easeus partition master

    Instructions

    Converting a disk into GPT had never been easier. You just need to follow three steps to achieve this:

    1. Download and launch EaseUS Partition Master.

    mbr to gpt

    2. Select the MBR disk that you want to convert to GPT disk. And then click “Convert MBR to GPT”.

    MBR to GPT disk without any data loss

     

    3. Click Apply, you will see that the MBR disk has been converted to GPT disk without any data loss.

    Convert MBR disk to GPT disk

    To know More about partition external hard drive with EaseUS Partition Master, go to EaseUS official website.

  • Remove uTorrent Sponsored ads with single click

    Remove uTorrent Sponsored ads with single click

    We posted a tutorial that would guide you to manually disable the Sponsored ads in uTorrent. While it does the work and helps you disable ads on uTorrent on Windows, it is fairly complex for some less tech-friendly readers. I wanted to write an article on this wonderful online tool I found few months ago, but somehow I forgot to do so. Today, I was forced to filter out this tool again from my never-ending bookmarks on Google Chrome after formatting my computer. I was testing an AntiVirus software, and I messed it up.

    Anyways, I felt like I should share this tool with my readers.

    See Also: [How To] disable sponsored ads on uTorrent

    The free tool called “Pimp my uTorrent,” is a one click ad removal for uTorrent. You just need to go to their web page (which is hosted on Github) and click on a button to remove ads from uTorrent. It is the same person who developed “Duckie TV,” a tool to track down your Favorite TV shows.

    pimp my utorrent

    Once you click the button, it will remove all the sponsored ads from uTorrent and give your UI a new visual effect which resembles that of uTorrent Plus (a premium version of uTorrent).

    utorrent without sponsored ads

    While this seems so interesting, it is little creepy that a single button can inject some codes or change the settings on a software. It may seem little suspicious but there is nothing to be worried about as the developer of the website revealed their secrets and posted a note on the website explaining how they are able to get into the application to change hidden settings.

    Apparently it is just a javascript magic, which exploits a piece of code which is still present in uTorrent from one of their abandoned project – Torque. The project was supposed to implement torrent support to the browser using a version of uTorrent that runs without a user interface. This allowed the developer to reverse engineer it for this script to work.

    So, go ahead and pimp your uTorrent!

  • ATOM v1.0: Stable Version of This Revolutionary Modularized Editor is Out

    ATOM v1.0: Stable Version of This Revolutionary Modularized Editor is Out

    Today world is ruled by open source application and which is why this ATOM editor by Github which was available in the beta feature for about a year now has gained a lot popularity. Since the beta version got released it has been downloaded as many as 1.3 million times and as many as 350, 000 users are currently using this application on regular basic.

    The catastrophic success that this editor has experienced can be judged by the fact that even developers at Facebook have used this editor to create their own editor named as Nuclide which is capable of coding numerous codes across the platform. The need for a brand new editor came while coders at Facebook were creating their application for iPhone. Their old editor Xcode which was used for purpose stitched the code so huge that even the whole operating system of Microsoft Windows was smaller then it. This was when they decided to get themselves equipped with a brand new editor which was built using ATOM.

    atom mark1200x630

    There have also been many different plugins that have been created by this application. The best part about the ATOM is that it is an editor that can create a editor which can in turn create another editor and so on and so forth. This is exactly what Facebook did, they just put their editor into the open market and those outside the company bettered it and gave it back.

    There are many different kinds of editors available in the market, So what makes ATOM so special? Well to answer this question it is important to put a light on the working of editors. Most of the editors that are available in the market are build up using C which enables them to gain good speed and so, all these editors can also be customised using one or the other coding languages. But with all these editors the coder does not have the permission to access the core engine of it. ATOM is completely different in this manner. It is completely coded in Javascript which permits the coder to use it to build whatever kind of editor they require. Chris Wanstrath while describing this editor tells that” its one thing hacking your own editor but with ATOM you can use plug-in that others have created.”

    atom 1

    The current version of ATOM 1.0 is stable cross platform and gives the coder completely controls of what they want to achieve. The new update boosts up a lot of packages that can be downloaded to make the experience of coding a lot better. The auto competition update is very useful and makes the job a lot simpler. Along with these the makers have also added some more impressive features such as multi-folder projects and pan resizing to the newly launched version.

  • Intel Remote Keyboard: Control your PC from your Android

    Intel Remote Keyboard: Control your PC from your Android

    If your PC is running Windows 7 or 8.1, you can connect your smartphone to PC and control your PC from other side of a room. It not only works as QWERTY keyboard, but also as a mouse too with scroll bar and trackpad for your input needs. A keyboard is displayed on your phone display with enough whitespace above to perform trackpad functions with multi-touch gestures. A single finger tap on the screen produces left mouse click while two fingered tap produces a right mouse click.

    Intel Keyboard qwerty

    Intel actually developed this app for use with its NUC and Compute Stick mini-PCs that are designed to be connected to televisions, but it works with devices running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 too.

    Intel Remote Keyboard is available free of cost at Google play store. It’s easy to set up, just download it from Google Play store but devices should be compatible to be able to use this app. To connect, a companion software should be installed on your PC too. The mobile app automatically detects the host computer, and you can pair it by scanning a QR code on your PC screen with smartphone. Both smartphone and PC should be on same Wi-fi network to communicate with each other.

    Intel Keyboard

    Apple users should not worry either. Intel’s documentation says an iOS version is coming soon.

    You can download Android app from here. And companion PC software from here.

  • WebAssembly: A new binary format to make web faster [wasm]

    Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple and many other major oragnizations teamed up together to participate in this new approach to make internet faster. How they are planning to achieve this? The answer is simple, yet complicated.

    The new group – WebAssembly Community Group is organized to design a new bytecode to write web applications. ByteCode is actually a machine-readable instruction set that is faster for web browsers to load than high level language.

    It is known that machine performs faster with Assembly language because they don’t need to translate the human readable instructions into machine understandable language. It allows computer to execute instructions efficiently and save considerable time to display output.

    WebAssembly or wasm for short, is a new standard protocol and instruction set, which will allow developers to code browsers and web applications. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the javascript engine.

    Instead of having to parse the full code, though, which can often take quite a while (especially on mobile), WebAssembly can be decoded significantly faster.

    WebAssembly team is working on a standard programming language which is based on bytecode for specific languages to design web applications. What this means, the encoding and decoding of webpages and web applications will be much faster because it won’t have to parse the whole source code to construct the output.

    Mozilla and Microsoft offers very similar structure with their Asm.js  and TypeScript projects, which is a stripped version of the Javascript, to parse pages faster. Seeing them come together to build this web standard, is a step into internet of future.

    Currently, only C and C++ code can be compiled into a WebAssembly (a.k.a wasm) file.
    Moreover, the developers of wasm know that JavaScript is supported everywhere so for older web browsers, they are providing a polyfill — a JavaScript script that will convert WebAssembly bytecode into asm.js for those browsers that don’t support wasm.

    As JavaScript inventor (and short-term Mozilla CEO) Brendan Eich points out today, once the main browsers support the new format natively, JavaScript and WebAssembly will be able to diverge again.

    The whole project is still on the very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do but, with all the major four browser developers working together, wasm should appear soon.

  • Gift your loves ones a Google Play Store gift voucher.

    Buy this card for your loved ones or redeem the one sent to you for your own shopping. This card can be directly redeemed on the Internet or on your Google Play Store on your Android devices. Please remember that credit card is not required.

    These cards are for Indian residents who are 18 or above. For the youngsters between ages thirteen to seventeen, who wish to do the same have to get consent from their parents/Guardians. Note that these cards don’t have any additional fees or expiry dates. However, they are a single-use gift. You can buy your favorite books, movies and games through this card. Not only this, but these cards can also be used to buy your choice applications and other content.

    Entertainment got easier now. Once you buy the card, you can select from the collection of digital entertainment like songs, cinema, application and more from the Google Play store. From the comfort of your own home, now you can simply reach to your favorite without much hassle.

    The company has announced that these prepaid vouchers will be present in denominations of Rs. 500, Rs. 1,000, and Rs. 1,500. Within next few days, these prepaid cards will be available at few selected stores of Vijay Sales and Hotspot stores. The company is planning to launch them to Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Pune.

    According to a post from Google India blog, you can inquire the cashier sitting at the register for these vouchers. For more information and to redeem the gift card, please click here.