Wednesday, July 21, 2010

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.


Relax 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.


Stretching Exercies


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

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

Friday, July 16, 2010

Easily Share Large Files over the Internet

Easily Share Large Files over the Internet: "

Send Big FilesIf 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


File Sharing - Size Limit


Also see: Access your Files over the Internet


Easily Share Large Files over the Internet

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator: "

sunrise


sunset


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

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

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

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

Pong GamePop-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

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

[Poster] We Don’t Need No Google!

[Poster] We Don’t Need No Google!: "

Google Turkey


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!

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

Write Your Name in Different Styles & Languages

Write Your Name in Different Styles & Languages: "

Name in Indian 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.


Elvish Language3. 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.


Braille Logo

runes 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.


ancient_egypt 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

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

Find the Person Behind an Email Address

Find the Person Behind an Email Address: "

You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?


Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.


No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.


#1. Find the sender’s location


Location of Email Sender


Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.


Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.


#2. Reverse email search with Facebook


Facebook email search


Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.


Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.


If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to TinEye – it’s a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.


#3. Check all the other Social Networks


Search Social Networks


You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.


If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.


#4. People Search


Reverse Email Search


Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.


Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.


Also see: Find Postal Addresses with Google Maps


Find the Person Behind an Email Address

Facebook Twitter Digital Inspiration @labnol

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"