In my last article about DNS servers I have mentioned some DNS servers that you can use.
That article opens up a new question how can we determine the best possible DNS server for our network, PC, etc? DNS benchmarkers are for that purpose.
DNS benchmarker will check and tell you the best DNS server(s) for you.
Here are two free tools that you can try
DNSBench/DNS Benchmark
namebench
DNSBench is more faster among the two but both will show you the best possible DNS server resources that is suitable for your purpose.
Which DNS server is the best for me? I think about this all the time. I have two Internet connections both comes with their own DNS servers but I am still looking for the best possible DNS server for me. Why is this?
The primary duty of a DNS server is to convert the domain names (eg: yahoo.com) to its IP address. So you need to use the best DNS server that you can use. So that the DNS lookup can be quick. This will definitely improve the browsing speed especially if you are dealing with hundreds of websites a day.
Two best DNS servers I normally recommend are:
Google
OpenDNS
The IP address of Google DNS servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
The IP adress of OpenDNS DNS servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
You can use Google and OpenDNS servers alternatively.
You may find some other resource too but these are the most consistent DNS server I’ve used until now
Have you ever looked for a small library that exclusively used for validating form fields that comes with a very light footprint?
validate.js is a lightweight JavaScript form validation library inspired by CodeIgniter.
This library supports over a dozen of validation rules on the form fields with provision for customizable messages to the user, provision for setting custom validation rules, etc.
The size of the library comes around 1.3 KB (minified and gzipped) and also there is no noticeable dependency with any popular JavaScript frameworks.
Demo and Documentation of this library can be found here
Most of us used to save web pages for later or offline reading. The problem with the saving a web page is you need to specify a location and most of the cases next time when you save another page the location may not be the same as the previous one. Saving and keeping those page in your PC can be difficult task (at least for me).
I have recently stumbled across an interesting Firefox extension called ScrapBook
ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and manage the collection. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support.
We can save whatever page that we wish for later reading with this extension. The extension will save it and manage it. We don’t have to worry about other than clicking a menu item for saving the page.
Later you’ll get a list of the saved page (similar that of the bookmark listing) through a menu in the browser menu bar from which you can click on any item that you want to open. Also it supports a search feature through we can search for a particular item(s).
More details about this is available here.
I’ve been searching for a small yet powerful file encryption tool for the last two days and finally laid my hands on AxCrypt
AxCrypt is free and easy to use open source strong file encryption for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/7, integrated with Windows Explorer. Encrypt, compress, decrypt, wipe, view and edit with a few mouse clicks. Cryptographic primitives are AES-128 and SHA-1.
Hope this tool will come handy for someone.
