Sunday, 12 August 2007

Cursive Writing, Handwritten Documents Are Endangered Species

We are not writing letters on paper anymore because email is fast and more convenient. We don't use the pen or pencil to take notes in libraries because our research is done online and notes are often stored in digital scrapbooks or Word documents for easy retrieval.

Two years ago, I remember my niece in Maryland carrying a Tablet PC to her classroom - she had just entered teens and would often complete her school homework typing on the computer keyboard instead of writing on traditional paper notebooks.

Not just keyboards, handwriting recognition software of your touch-screen Tablet, Digital Pen or PDA have become so efficient that you can scribble the way you like and it will be read correctly. That further reduces the need for learning good or even legible handwriting skills.

When SAT exams introduced handwritten essays, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. Everyone else printed block letters because they were not used to writing with Pen. [WP]

Handwriting may soon become a lost art with not just the younger generation but even with old timers like Mark Cuban who very frankly admits -& ;"I forgot how to write".

Mark went to a meeting without his laptop and missed noting the important points because he couldn't write fast enough though he can touch type pretty fast. His comment - "Is writing with a pen on a pad of paper not like riding a bike ??"

In the digital age, we aren't writing any less but the medium has shifted from pen or pencil to the keyboard. Maybe it's time to rephrase the old saying - "the pen keyboard is mightier than the sword".


Related: Cursive Handwriting Meets Blogging

How to Play MP3 Songs Stored on your Home Computer at Work

Problem: You have tons of MP3 music files, podcasts and other Windows Media Audio on the hard drive of your home computer neatly organized in playlists. You hate burning this music to CD but still want to listen it while in office or from other computers in your home or want to share the same music with your friends who can be in any part of the world.

Solution: All you need is SimplifyMedia and the popular iTunes media player - both are available for Mac and Windows. It is expected that SimplifyMedia will support WinAmp, Windows Media Player and other media player software pretty soon.

Update: The Simplify Media service is no longer available but you can use Amazon Cloud Drive or Dropbox to stream media.

It works like this - you add the music folders to SimplifyMedia watch-list on your home computer that contain the songs you would like to access or listen from other computers. When you are in office, you again login into SimplifyMedia and start iTunes where you'll find the same home music library under Shared Playlists. Hit play and the music or podcasts stream over the internet. Quite simple.

When you install Simplify Media software on additional computers, you are connected automatically when you log in with the same screen name. To share the music with other friends, you can invite them via email and they too can listen to our iTunes music playlists on their computers.

However, you cannot use this system to copy songs from the home computer to work or transfer them to the iPod. Other options for sharing your music collection on other computers via the web are Purple Nova and Dekoh Music.


Related: Turn Google Talk or Yahoo! Messenger into a Live Music Station

The Godfather Poster Drawn Using the Movie Script

Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, the GodfatherFor fans of The Godfather - here's something you'll love to have - a handwritten poster of Marlon Brando (Don Vito Corleone) that's created using the entire movie script of The Godfather movie.

The poster is completely handwritten, all words are completely legible and you can easily identify favorite lines from the film including the famous - "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."

[Click the image of Marlon Brando on the right for a full version of the text poster where the lines of script are pretty readable.]

The poster is a creation of LA Pop Art who also designed the NYC World Trade Center poster that's done using names of all those people who lost their lives on 9/11. Thanks Spluch.

Recently someone posted a copy of Facebook PHP source code on the web - this is a colored text painting of Mark Zukcerberg created just using the Facebook leaked source code.

Related: ASCII Art Portraits

Before You Leave the Windows Laptop or MacBook Unattended..

What is the best way to protect your laptop computer against theft? Most would say that treat your laptop (or tablet) like the cash in your wallet and therefore never leave it unattended, even for a minute.

Easier said than done - it's not always practical to carry that heavy notebook with you all the time. For instance when you are in a conference, you won't like to carry the computer to the restroom or to the nearby coffee vending machine but that time maybe more than sufficient for a thief to walk away with your expensive notebook.

secure-laptop-from-theft

So what's the next best option to ensure that your laptop and the extremely important data doesn't disappear ? Either lock the Laptop with security cables or get the free utility called Laptop Alarm.

Laptop Alarm is like an anti-theft siren that only rings (using the in-built speakers of the laptop) when someone tries to logoff or shutdown the machine or removes the charging AC power cord or unplugs the external mouse attached to your laptop.

Laptop Alarm is Windows only but MacBook users can get the free iAlertU utility that will even capture the photo of the thief using the webcam and email it to any specified address.

Get LaptopAlarm (Windows Notebook) | iAlertU (Apple Notebook) [Thanks Sridhar]

Caution: The Laptop Alarm won't work in the case when the thief is clever enough to turn off the laptop by pressing the power button.

Related: Improve Battery Life of Your Laptop Computer

Install WordPress Plugins and Themes from Firefox, No FTP

WordPress is fun but adding a new theme or plugin to your WordPress installation is not - you have to download the WordPress Theme or Plugin from the developer's website to your hard-drive, unzip the files and then upload them to the right WordPress folder via FTP.

You follow the same cycle when installing new updates to your existing WordPress themes or plugins.

install-wordpress-plugins

Well, here's a neat solution to make your WordPress life a bit simple - OneClick Firefox Extension - that allows you to install (or update) new WordPress themes and plugins via Firefox.

You just have to right-click the URL on a webpage that points to zipped WP theme or plugin and select Install from the contextual menu. Then you enter your WordPress dashboard and activate the plugin. That's it.

Think of OneClick as a simple replacement of your FTP client - it takes the zipped installer files for themes or plugins from the developer's site and unzips them to the appropriate folder of your WordPress installation.

OneClick Firefox Extension | Developer Site

PostSecret Sunday Postcards Turned into a Movie

Frank Warren of the awesome PostSecret blog has created a video of selected postcards that were mailed to him by anonymous people across the globe carrying their secret confessions. The video also has some behind the scenes footage.

PostSecret is perhaps the most popular blog hosted on blogspot - it has received over 90 million page views in a span of two years and carries absolutely no advertising.

The site is updated every Sunday with around 20 new postcards like the one below. PostSecret is available as a Facebook app and also as a book.

postsecret secret postcard

Saturday, 11 August 2007

Use Skype As a Fax Machine: Send a Fax from Computer

How can you send a fax online via Skype - this has been one of the very frequently discussed topics on the Skype forums for a long time.

Well, the developers of Pamela Calls Recorder (an add-in for recording Skype calls) have released a Skype plugin called PamFax that lets you send and receive fax documents from your computer to any number (fax machine) in the world though Skype.

You type in the facsimile number of the recipient (who uses a real fax machine, not Skype), select the document file, a fax cover sheet and hit send. You can chose to receive fax delivery confirmation via Skype chat or in your email inbox.

Also see: Use Google Docs for Sending Online Fax

In Windows Explorer, you can fax any supported document from the context menu of the file. A PamFax toolbar button is added to Microsoft Office to directly fax the current document from Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.

Unlike the free Fax via Email services, PamFax would require to pay via Skype Credits which can be linked to your PayPal account. Fax rates per page vary between € 0.17 and € 1.59 depending on the country of the recipient. There are however no subscriptions or monthly fees.

Changing the Font Type and Size of Adsense Text Ads

While you are not allowed to alter the Adsense font face, color or size of regular ad units, the Adsense policy book has relaxed the rules in the case of Adsense Text Links which include software like Firefox, Google Pack and the new referral products.]

By default, the Adsense Text hyperlinks will inherit the layout style of your webpage but you are allowed to overwrite the default settings to make your ad links appear more prominent (which may result in better click-through rate and overall conversions).

Adsense allows publishers to alter the font face and size (not color) of the text link by enclosing the Adsense code inside the <font> HTML tag as shown below:

<font size="n" face="font1, font2..' ...">ADSENSE JAVASCRIPT CODE</font>
[-7 <= n =< +7, fonts could be Arial, Verdana, sans-serif, Courier, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Impact, etc.]

Agree, the FONT element is deprecated but that's the only option recommended by Adsense - it's not clear if the CSS Font Styles enclosed in a DIV tag can be used legally around the Google Text Links.

Word of caution: Google also says that the font size changes must be reasonably necessary to match the theme of the site. Unreasonable or abusive changes will constitute a violation of our program policies Don't misuse the freedom.

Copy YouTube Clips to Facebook Videos Directly

You can now upload (or mirror) video clips from YouTube to your Facebook Profile directly using Hey!Spread - just type the URL of the web video that you wish to add to your Facebook account.

This is different than posting a YouTube video link on Facebook because HeySpread will copy the actual video file from YouTube to Facebook servers, not just like to YouTube as is the case with other YouTube applications for Facebook.

The videos will therefore be streamed via Facebook servers, not YouTube. Each video can be as long as 10 minutes and as large as 200 MB.

What I don't like about Facebook videos is that you cannot embed them in places outside the Facebook ecosystem.

Related: Upload Videos to YouTube When Site is Banned

Thursday, 9 August 2007

Did Alexa Change Their Ranking Formula for Blog Websites

There seems to be some serious problems with Alexa - most of the high traffic blogs including TechCrunch, Mashable, Problogger, BoingBoing and ReadWrite Web have registered a significant dip in their Alexa ranks.

TechCrunch, which enjoys an Alexa rank of ~600 during normal days, was down to ~7000 at the time of writing this post. Other top blogs have followed exactly the same pattern (see graph B.)

alexa blog freefall

Graph A: Alexa data for last 6 months (the free-fall started in August)

alexa blog graphs

Graph B: Close-up version of the top graph but for the last seven days

What's interesting here is that while blogs have taken a hit, the ranking of other top Alexa websites like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, etc have remained fairly constant over the same period.

Is this a bug or can it be attributed to Alexa Sparky - the Firefox tool bar for Alexa that was released last month. What do you think?

Create Stop Motion Animations - Video Tutorial

Want to learn stop motion animation ? This video tutorial is probably the best resource on the web for learning the tricks about making interesting and even complex stop motion videos - you can even fly.

For the editing process, you can refer to our previous Stop Motion Tutorial that's done with a digital still camera and Windows Movie Maker.

del.icio.us Opens Flood Gates But Only for Google, Yahoo! & Ask.com

After denying search engines from indexing the millions of bookmarks stored on its servers for so long, del.icio.us has finally lifted the entry barrier but selectively.

 According to the robots.txt of del.icio.us, only spiders from Yahoo!, Google and Ask search engines are allowed to crawl and index the content of del.icio.us - all other bots are banned including msnbot of the Microsoft Live search engine.

come we are open
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Slurp [Yahoo]
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: Teoma [Ask.com]
Allow: /

del.icio.us has also removed the meta robots (noarchive,nofollow,noindex) restriction from all their webpages that earlier prevented search engines from indexing or caching delicious web pages.


As a result, Google has 6 million pages from del.icio.us in their index now while this number was around a million sometime back when the ban was in place.


What does this mean for sites / URLs that are popular on del.icio.us - you could see a surge in search engine traffic but getting listed on del.icio.us won't add any link authority or google juice since all links on delicious are marked with nofollow, very similar to Wikipedia.

Use GMail Plus Trick to Find and Block the Source of Email Spam

GMail Plus Addressing is a very useful trick to save your mailbox from spam. And if you get spammed, you know exactly which website / online service leaked your email address to spammers.

What is GMail Plus addressing? Say you have an email address like billgates@gmail.com. If you append a "plus" sign to your email username, gmail will ignore anything written between the + and @ sign.

So any email address sent to billgates+microsoft@gmail.com or billgates+blog@gmail.com or billgates+website@gmail.com will still reach your billgates@gmail.com inbox though technically, they are three different email aliases.

When you share your email with some non familiar service, like a newsletter, you can supply your existing email with a plus sign. If you ever receive spam addressed to that email alias, you know the exact source that's sending the spam and can easily block all emails using a GMail filter.

[type the alias in the To: fiedd and redirect all incoming message to Trash or apply a new label]

More GMail Easter Eggs [including the dot trick].

Online File Viewer for PDF and Office Documents

view office files online

Zoho Viewer is a web based file viewer for PDF documents and Microsoft Office files like DOC, XLS and PPT. The one advantage here is that it works inside the web browser and requires no installation as in the case of Microsoft File viewers or Universal Viewer.

GMail has something similar but with Zoho Viewer, you can upload documents and view instantly without signing-up. Alternatively, you can paste the URL of any document that's already on the web. Bulk upload supported.

You can email the link to this document using the 'Share' option or you can embed it in your web pages just like Scribd. The service will become popular especially for converting documents to other formats but there are issues. I tried uploading three different PDF documents but had the same error message - "Problem while converting file. Please try again."

While Scribd converts the PDF or Office file into a SWF Flash movie, Zoho Viewer creates a static PNG image of your document when embedding in web pages. The text and images are therefore non-selectable in either of the cases.

Visit Zoho Viewer at viewer.zoho.com.

Wednesday, 8 August 2007

An Effective Home Remedy For Fixing Scratched CDs or DVD disks

Before you discard scratched CDs, watch this quick video that demonstrates how to repair scratches from the shiny surface of CD and DVD disks using just a banana.

It's a three step process - apply a layer of banana, then spread it using the banana peel and finally wipe the surface using a soft cloth. This method may bring some of your old but priceless CDs back to life.

redbalcony.com. Some more tips on cleaning DVD & CD discs.

Google News Offers a Solution to Deal With Bad Press

If some online newspaper or prominent blog site that's indexed by Google News has published a bad review of your company or product, Google now offers you a chance to respond and share your side of the story with the world.

Your comments will be linked alongside the normal media coverage of the story on Google News Website as you can see in the case of Pfizer's new HIV drug story below:

google-news-screenshot

Unlike blog comments where anyone can leave comments, Google News will open comments only for people or organizations who are mentioned or directly involved in the story.

Your comment will be available in Google News for the usual 30 days, and it’ll be associated with the story it was in response to. It may later be made available through the Google News Archive.

If you have been covered in some news article indexed by Google News, you can send in your comments here to get them posted on Google News. Your identify will be verified by Google by contacting your organization, contacting local officials, or collaborating with journalists.

Some Google News comment examples are here and here. Comments FAQ.  Thanks Philipp and Google News Blog.

Related: How to Deal with Negative Press

A Virtual Flower Garden That Will Touch Your Heart

plant-flower-of-hope

The "Hope Garden" project is beautiful and very inspirational.

It's a place for medical patients and their loved ones to place virtual flowers with personal text messages that ultimately become part of the big garden. 

As a visitor, you can read the messages left by those who visited the garden before you, plant a new flower or water the existing flowers in the garden.

You can also search flowers by the name of person who planted it or view the garden for any particular day. And do remember to turn those speakers ON.

www.flowersforhope.com | Thanks Larissa Meek

Email Offers 'Genuine Advice' for Blogs Hosted on Blogger

blog service marketing via email

Say you write a blog hosted on Blogger and the following email arrives in your inbox - How would you respond ?

>>Nice blog.  My friend reads your writing on a regular basis, and talks about it quite a bit.  I just checked it out.   Being a blog designer, I have to say the site looks great, but I noticed something I thought I should bring to your attention.  You probably know this already, but you are doing your blog a great disservice by not having your own domain name.  

I'm sure you get tons of links to your writing, but instead of those building up your domain and it's value, all those links are going to Google's blogspot domain.  I know it's a hassle to move domain and save all your old posts, but I really think it's worth it for you.

Keep up the good work.
ps.  If by chance you are considering transferring to your domain, I do have some skill in that area.

Ian [website address]
"Save Your Blog.  Transfer to your own domain today!"

Spoiler: The email sender actually runs a web design company and that's just another marketing email but very smart - he understands the weak points of Blogger blogs and uses them to sell his service.

I would have probably confused this as some very "genuine advice" from a concerned blog reader had I not received three different emails with the same text. Related: Move from Blogger to WordPress.

Watch Web Videos in Skype Chat Window

The new release of Skype 3.5 allows you to watch web videos and share them with other Skype contacts without leaving the Skype Chat window - you can search videos online and embed them in the same area of the Skype chat window where you type the text messages.


Related: How to Record Skype Calls


Here's how the new Video Embedding feature of Skype works [limited to DailyMotion and MetaCafe, no YouTube or Google Video support yet]

  1. First you have click the "new" Video button in the Skype Text Chat window (just next to the Emoticons link) 
  2. This opens a video search Skype window where you can either browse video by tags/ratings or search using keywords. Then click the "Insert in Chat" button to embed that video in your Skype chat session.

That's it. Your Skype friend can click the green Play icon to begin playing - he or she can chat with you simultaneously in the same window. 

When the Domain Name and IP Address is banned, Use Calculator to Access the Website

You can bypass the internet content filtering software of your school or office using just the calculator application (Start->Run. type calc.exe).

This unique Mathematics based trick will probably work when websites are blocked based on the host name or their IP address.

The trick is to convert the human readable website address that's blocked (like facebook.com) into an IP address (208.75.184.160) and again translate this value to a decimal address which is probably not blocked by the website filters.

Related: How to Access Restricted Websites

Here's a step by step guide to render www.myspace.com to a decimal address:

Step 1: Get the IP address of a website by pinging the name (go the command prompt and type ping www.labnol.org to know the IP address of labnol.org)

Step 2: Open your PC's calculator, and change it to scientific mode (using the "View" menu)

Step 3: Enter each of the four IP octets, one by one, converting them to binary (enter number and click on the "Bin" radio button)

Thus 216.178.39.74 becomes

216 = 11011000
178 = 10110010
39 = 00100111
74 = 01001010

Notice how any binary numbers less than 8 digits long have had leading zeroes added to pad them out. Reassembled into IP address order, you get 11011000.10110010.00100111.01001010

Step 4: Remove the dots, so you get one huge line of binary, thus: 11011000101100100010011101001010


Step 5: Copy this binary string to clipboard, go to your scientific calculator, and hit the "Bin" button FIRST (as you are about to enter binary), THEN paste in the binary string.

Step 6: Click on the "Dec" button on your calculator, and you will get the converted value of 3635554122

Step 7: Add the http:// prefix and paste into your browser's address bar like http://3635554122

Wuntoo says - "I used to be in a place that had websense, where both website names and their corresponding IP addresses were blocked. However was able to get limited access by converting the IP address to decimal, which websense (at the time) did not know about. This might have changed since, or if your school runs an old version it might still work. Note that if you surf away from the page you might hit websense blocks again unless you manually reconstruct the next address you want to get to."