The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders

The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders: "

Do you ever want to email something to yourself so that you can remember it later?

It happens to me all the time especially when I am on a mobile phone. For instance, if I come across a cool site that I would want to check out later from the desktop, I just send the URL to my own email account. If I have an idea for a blog or need to remember something, I jot it down in a message and email it to myself.

Now there are quite a few apps that can help you schedule email based reminders, including Google Calendar, but if you prefer to have something really simple that you can use from your email program itself and one that requires no setup, check out FollowUpThen.

With FollowUpThen, you can quickly setup custom email reminders using email itself. Just send a message to time-interval@followupthen.com and the service will send you a copy of the same email message after the specified time interval.

Here are some sample date formats that you may use while setting up email reminders:

• 6pm@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM exact)


• 6pmTomorrow@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM tomorrow)


• 10minutes@followupthen.com (get a reminder after 10 minutes)


• 3days@followupthen.com (remind me after 3 days)


• tuesday@followupthen.com (remind me the next Tuesday)


• nov29@followupthen.com (setup email reminders for a specific date)

The service recognizes time zones from the email headers so if you setup a reminder for 11 AM, you’ll be reminded as per your time zone. You may also setup recurring email reminders with FollowUpThen though an online calendar would be a more suitable option for such tasks.

Related: Send Emails in the Future

This article, titled The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Email, Gmail, Internet.

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IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube

IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube: "

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and IITs, the premier engineering colleges of India, have earlier joined hands to produce the world’s largest repository of technical video lectures and web-based courses geared towards science and engineering students.

The IIT and IISc faculty have recorded around 4,750 videos for this project till date and anyone, anywhere can watch the lectures online through YouTube at youtube.com/iit.

The project – NPTEL - is funded by the Indian Government and content of the courses is based on the curriculum that’s suggested by AICTE. It should therefore benefit all science and engineering students of India especially those studying in institutes where the local teaching faculty is not at par.

Unlike similar initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare or Stanford Engineering Everywhere, the course material offered by NPTEL on YouTube is currently not available under a Creative Commons license but that may change in the near future. Also, if you are on a slow Internet connection, you can order DVDs of these videos courses for offline viewing.

Thanks @Krishnan for the tip.

This article, titled IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Education, India.

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Soothing Sounds of Nature for a more Relaxing Workplace

Soothing Sounds of Nature for a more Relaxing Workplace: "

MoodTurn offers an excellent collection of calm and soothing nature sounds that can help you both relax as well as concentrate at work.

At Mood Turn, you can listen to highly-realistic recordings of birds chirping, falling rain drops, ocean waves hitting the beach and quite a few other extremely relaxing natural sounds. Just open this site in a background browser tab and run your favorite sound theme in a loop for as long as you like.

I feel I am more productive on days when it’s raining outside and this site just helps me recreate that atmosphere anytime with a click. Thanks @Orli.

This article, titled Soothing Sounds of Nature for a more Relaxing Workplace, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Music, Offbeat.

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The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text

The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text: "

OCR software let you easily convert images, such as digital photographs, scanned documents, printed books, etc. into text. Once you perform OCR on an image, you’ll be able to copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping and it also becomes more searchable.

The Best Web-based OCR Services

Most scanners ship with some sort of OCR software but if you don’t have a scanner, you can simply capture a photograph of the printed text with your digital camera or even your mobile phone and then use an online OCR utility to extract text out of that image.

Meet the best online OCR services that can help you convert images into text.

1. Google Docs – When you upload an image file or a scanned PDF to Google Docs, check the option that says “Convert text to Google Docs format” and Google Docs will automatically perform OCR on the file before saving it to your account.

If the OCR operation is successful, all the extracted text is stored as a new document else Google Docs will store your original image without any modification.

With Google Docs, you can perform OCR on images and PDFs as large as 2 MB, the text recognition accuracy is quite impressive and there are no limits on the number of files that you can process in a day. However, Google Docs won’t retain the original formatting of the document and the OCR engine almost fails with low-resolution images.

2. Abbyy FineReader – FineReader Online is a web-based OCR service that can instantly convert your PDF files and images into corresponding office file formats. This is an Abbyy service and therefore the character recognition accuracy is quite good.

Unlike the OCR engine in Google Docs that can only recognize printed text written Latin characters, FineReader can understand a much wider variety of languages. It even works with multilingual documents that have text written multiple languages.

A free account at FineReader Online will only let you convert a handful of images to text and you’ll have to shell out around $3 per 10 pages for additional conversions.

3. OnlineOCR.net – Online OCR, as the name suggests, is a cloud based OCR service that can handle all common images formats including scanned PDFs. If you have multiple images that you would like to convert to text in one go, you can put them all in a single zip file and upload it to Online OCR.

Of all the OCR services that I have tried so far, Online OCR has impressed me the most. The character recognition accuracy is quite good and the converted documents look like a replica of the original images. In my limited test with three different types of images, Online OCR was able to preserve the structure and formatting after the conversion in all the three case.

Like FineReader, Online OCR offers credits for converting around 5-6 images to text for free and after the limit is over, you’ll have to pay around $4 per 50 pages.

4. FreeOCR.com – If you ever need to extract plain text from an image or a scanned PDF file, Free OCR may be worth a try. The service requires no registration and you can handle up to 10 image uploads per hour.

Free OCR is like a graphical front-end for Google’s Tesseract OCR engine that is often considered as one of the most accurate text recognition engines around. However, Tesseract supports only a limited number of languages and it ignores most of the formatting of the scanned image.

5. OCR Terminal – OCR Terminal is one of the most mature online OCR services out there that not only supports images and scanned PDFs but even software screenshots.

For instance, if you ever get an error message on your computer, capture a screenshot, upload the image to OCR terminal and it will return you the entire error in plain text that you can copy-paste in emails or online forums.

OCR Terminal is internally powered by Abbyy’s OCR engine. A free account with OCR Terminal gets you 20 free conversions every month and you can pay around 7-9 ¢ per additional conversion.

6. OCR Online – Like FreeOCR, OCR Online doesn’t require any registration and you can translate up to 100 images to text in a single day. It also supports a large number of languages.

OCR Online offers good recognition accuracy and preserves most of the original formatting but what you’ll like most about this service is batch processing. You can upload a large number of files in one batch and it will output the results as one document.

Online OCR Software – A Comparison

[*] One obvious downside will all the above mentioned OCR software is that they work only with printed text, they cannot recognize characters from hand-written text.

The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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Give your Eyes a Break with the 20-20-20 Rule

Give your Eyes a Break with the 20-20-20 Rule: "

If you spend a good part of your day using the computer, the 20-20-20 rule, that I recently learned recently from my doctor, might also help you relax your tired eyes.

The rule goes something like this.

The screen is bright and therefore, if you don’t blink your eyes as often as you should while working at the computer for long hours, you can have dry eyes sometimes even followed by redness.

To help you deal with this problem, the 20-20-20 rule suggest that after every 20 minutes, you (the computer user) should take a break for at least 20 seconds and look at objects that are 20 feet away from you.

Since it is nearly impossible for any computer users to remember that they have to take a break every 20 minutes, there are free software programs that can help you in your mission.

For instance, there’s a Windows utility called Eye Defender that sits in the system tray and, after a fixed interval, it will auto-run a visual training (see video below in full screen) for the eyes on your screen.

You are supposed to follow the pointer on the screen and this in turn should help relax your eyes.

WorkRave is another handy app that reminds you to take breaks at regular intervals to prevent computer related stress (including eyestrain).

It offers two kinds of breaks – micro-breaks, these are short and are mean to relax your eyes, and then there are rest-breaks where you are supposed to walk or stretch a little. Workrave also has a built-in wizard that demonstrates the various types of stretching exercises that you can do during these breaks.

If you are an active computer user, these tools need to be on your desktop.

Related: Software reminds you to Exercise

Give your Eyes a Break with the 20-20-20 Rule

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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Easily Share Large Files over the Internet

Easily Share Large Files over the Internet: "

If you are to share a large file with someone over the Internet, there are generally two options – you can either attach the files to an email message or, if the files are too big to fit in an email program, you can upload them to an online storage service and then share the download links with the recipient.

Let’s now explore some of the popular services that’ll make it easy for you to transfer large files over the Internet without any hassles or costs.

A: Share Large Files over Email

The Gmail service cannot handle email attachments that are larger than 25 MB but the recently-revamped Hotmail service is a much better alternative as it lets you send email messages as large as 10 GB.

The maximum size of an individual file that you can attach to an Hotmail message is only 50 MB but you can use a file-splitting utility like HJ-Split to break a big file into smaller chunks and then attach them all to a single message. The recipient can then join these chunks to restore the original file and he can do without requiring external programs.

B: Share Large Files without Email

The downside with email attachments is obvious – most ISPs and web-based email programs (including Gmail) will reject incoming messages that have big attachments and therefore, if you are sending a bulky file via email, the recipients also have to be on Hotmail as well in order to receive that file.

One of the best options for sharing large files without email is Dropbox. Once you install the the Dropbox utility on your (Windows, Mac or Linux) desktop, you can upload files of virtually any size to the Internet – it’s only limited by the size of your Dropbox storage which is 2GB in the case of free accounts. Alternatively, if you don’t want to install Dropbox, you can upload files straight to the Dropbox website from your browser but the limit in this case is 300 MB per file.

You can even consider using Google Docs to share those big files over the Internet. Google Docs lets you upload files up to 250 MB in size and they can be in any format. You have 1 GB of free storage space for storing all the non-Office files on Google Docs but you can also buy more space for a reasonable fee.

Unlike FTP servers, services like Google Docs and Dropbox don’t support resumable downloads. That means if the connection breaks while the recipient is still trying to download your “huge” file, he or she will have to resume the download from scratch. That can be a deal-breaker for lot of people.

SkyDrive, part of the Windows Live family, can solve this problem in a way.

The service offers 25 GB of free online storage, with individual files limited to 50 MB. To upload a large file, split it into chunks of 50 MB each and then upload them all to a single folder on SkyDrive. The recipient can download the entire folder as a ZIP or, if he’s on a flaky connection, he can download files one by one and then join them all at his end.

C. Share Files without Registration

Finally, if you are looking for something quick and simple that doesn’t even require registration, talk to YouSendIt or WeTransfer (if the file size is really big). Just upload the files via the browser, enter the email address of the recipient and hit send. WeTransfer lets you send files up to 2 GB in size while the maximum allowed limit is 100 MB in the case of YouSendIt (free version).

Chart: Comparison of file sharing services

Also see: Access your Files over the Internet

Easily Share Large Files over the Internet

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator: "

Here’s another undocumented feature of Google that most of us are probably unaware of.

You can use Google web search to quickly find the time of sunrise and sunset for nearly every city in the world using the syntax “sunrise <city name>” and “sunset <city name>” respectively.

For instance, a query like sunrise Delhi will show you an approximate time when the sun will appear next in the Indian capital while sunset London will display the time when the sun is likely to disappear from London – all times are mentioned in the local time zone.

Other than Google, you can also find detailed information about the sunrise and sunset times of various cities using Wolfram Alpha.

Thanks Angus Kidman.

Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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One Good Reason to Allow Pop-up Windows in your Browser

One Good Reason to Allow Pop-up Windows in your Browser: "

Pop-up windows are considered evil as they open on your screen without asking and can sometimes lead you to annoying websites.

That explains why most browsers now block pop-ups by default but here’s one good reason why you may want to temporarily disable that blocker and allow pop-ups.

Stewart Smith has created an highly addictive and fun version of the Pong game using nothing but pop-up windows while your entire desktop becomes the playing table.

You can either play the game with the computer or invite a friend and both of you can use the same keyboard to control your racquets. You play with Up & Down arrows while he uses the A & Z keys on the other side to move the racquet up or down.

Browser Pong is done in HTML5 and you may therefore want to use Firefox or Chrome while playing pong. Thanks @Maguay and @Smashing for the tip.

Related: Play Classic DOS Games on your PC

One Good Reason to Allow Pop-up Windows in your Browser

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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[Poster] We Don’t Need No Google!

[Poster] We Don’t Need No Google!: "

Turkish Bloggers mock the ban on Google!

YouTube has been blocked in Turkey for long and now, according to some news reports, the government has also blocked Google Docs, Google Books, Google Analytics, Google Translate and most other Google services in the country.

Unhappy at the ban, a group of Turkish bloggers has created an interesting poster mocking the censors!

[Poster] We Don’t Need No Google!

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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Write Your Name in Different Styles & Languages

Write Your Name in Different Styles & Languages: "

Looking to write your name in different styles? Here’re some online tools to help you do just that:

1. Google Transliterate – India is a land of many languages and this online tool from Google will help you write your name in almost all prominent languages of the country including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Bengali.

2. Google Translate – If you want to write your name in a language like Chinese, Japanese or even Greek, you really need to get hold of a person who can speak that language. If you can’t find one, Google Translate is the next best option.

3. Elvish Language – This is something for Lord of the Rings fans. The page describes how you can easily represent your English name using the Tengwar script. The writing looks mysterious and it’s not very hard.

4. Braille Generator – The tool will convert your name into Braille, a popular writing system that enables blind people to read and write through touch. They just run their fingers across these tiny dots to read them.

5. Hobbit Runes – The runes were in use during the 1st century AD and were later replaced by the Latin alphabet. The tool will help you write you name using the ancient runic alphabets.

6. Babylon Tablets – Use this tool to write your name in the cuneiform script, the earliest known writing system in the world of the Babylonian era. The script was written on clay tablets and was then baked hard in a kiln.

7. Morse Code – Write your name in Morse Code, a system that was invented in the 19th century to transmit information using telegraph lines. The most popular Morse code phrase is SOS which is represented by “…—…” or 3 dots followed by 3 dashes followed by 3 dots.

8. Ancient Egyptian – The writing system of ancient Egyptians, known as Hieroglyphs, used symbols instead of characters. The tool take the first 16 characters of your name and converts them into the same hieroglyphs symbols that were used by Ancient Egyptians.

9. FДКЗ CУЯILLIC – Remember how they wrote "BORДT" on the movie posters of “Borat” – that’s was fake Russian and this tool can help you convert just about any English text into the same style.

[*] The above postcard was printed on Google’s Internet Bus.

Write Your Name in Different Styles & Languages

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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