KentAhrens Weblog

Convert Images Into Editable Documents in Google Docs

2009-09-29T09:02:00.002-04:00

Google Docs can now perform OCR on digital images. You can upload an image containing typewritten or printed text (like a fax document or a scanned newspaper clipping) to your Google Docs account and it will turn that image into editable text.

Most Popular Email Clients

2009-08-06T19:43:00.002-04:00

Digital Inspiration blogs asks, "Where do people read their emails?".

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

2009-07-28T13:09:00.001-04:00

From TED, "Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work." ~ Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

How to Insert OpenOffice.org Footnotes and Endnotes

2009-07-20T16:00:00.003-04:00

Solveig Haugland blogs about The exciting topic of footnotes and endnotes. In her OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas blog, she writes,

I realized a few weeks ago that I have rarely if ever written or blogged about footnotes. In this season of pulpy beach reads, then, let's make a 180 and talk geeky, intense, length footnotes ...

The basics of inserting a footnote are very simple. As always, Solveig's explanation is worth the read.

Read more about How to Insert OpenOffice.org footnotes and endnotes here.

OpenOffice.org 3.1 New Features

2009-07-20T09:00:00.001-04:00

Gates and upcoming Google Chrome Linux "distro"

2009-07-16T09:15:00.004-04:00

From CNET News.com,

"There's many, many forms of Linux operating systems out there and packaged in different ways and booted in different ways," Gates said in an interview with CNET News this week. "In some ways I am surprised people are acting like there's something new. I mean, you've got Android running on Netbooks. It's got a browser in it."

I'm wondering,

How many people are out there (like me) who are playing with Ubuntu's Linux OS and wondering whether or not they'll switch to the upcoming Google-Linux OS, and,
how many people haven't yet switched to linux, but would switch if Google introduced their version, and,
how many people are refraining from buying a netbook because of the unfamiliarity of a Linux OS?

There are a few discussions about the impact that Windows 7 will have on Ubuntu 9.10 (like this one, here or here). Every release of Ubuntu seems to get easier to use (even for me, a perpetual Ubuntu newbie). The changes are more-than-just-pretty. It's hard to believe that more people won't take a look at it: After all, what are you going to do with the old desktop you have sitting in the basement/were ready to throw away/give away?

Imogen Heap - 1st Train Home

2009-07-15T19:06:00.002-04:00

Niall Ferguson and James Fallows debate Chimerica

2009-07-15T11:39:00.004-04:00

Via Paul Kedrosky, who writes, "The full video of the contentious and sharply argued "Chimerica" debate between Niall Ferguson and James Fallows at the Aspen Ideas 2009 event. The opening is a little long, so be patient and get through it."

Update: if above video fails, here's another source for the Q & A.

"Talks Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

2009-07-14T19:03:00.001-04:00

Twitter

2009-07-12T09:49:00.000-04:00

Going to give twitter a try. Not sure how long that will last

A better local optimum

2009-06-30T20:59:00.004-04:00

As follows is a paraphrased clip from Michael Nielsen's "Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?":

The problem is that your company has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists' phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture ... don't make your situation better; they make it worse. So you're stuck gazing over at [a guy] ... who is at an even better local optimum, a local optimum that could not have existed twenty years ago ... unfortunately for you, there's no way you can get to that new optimum without attempting passage through a deep and unfriendly valley

Regina Spektor - Eet

2009-06-30T16:17:00.005-04:00

Writes NPR Music,

If you ever have trouble remembering lyrics, Regina Spektor has a song for you.

"It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song," Spektor sings in "Eet," a track from her new album, [Far] . . . "It's more about the sound than the food intake," she says in reference to the phonetic spelling of her song "Eet." The spelling hearkens back to Spektor's childhood: She was born in Moscow and came to the U.S. at the age of 9. She had to learn English, and she initially knew words only by their sound.

Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. The family emigrated, when permitted, during the period of Perestroika, Regina had to leave her piano behind [1].

Real-Time measure of Firefox 3.5 downloads

2009-06-30T15:51:00.003-04:00

Mozilla's worldwide Real-Time download site graphs Firefox 3.5 downloads per second.

How to find which version of Windows Vista is on your PC

2009-06-27T08:53:00.002-04:00

This article pertains to Windows Vista. Users of Windows XP can find help here.

To find the version of the Windows Vista operating that's installed on your Windows PC, click:

Start / Control Panel / System and Maintenance / System

(I found this information on Apple's website, the number 1 Google search result on the day I checked.)

Next Ubuntu edition will be without '100 paper cuts'

2009-06-15T21:09:00.003-04:00

For those of us (newbies) who experienced great pains upgrading from 7.** to 8.** (and are still afraid to even think about upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04), this seems like good idea:

A project led by Canonical's Design and User Experience team to improve user experience in Ubuntu by identifying 100 small points of pain for users, or "paper cuts", and healing them!

Via ars technica, Canonical to boost Ubuntu usability by tackling "papercuts"

How to remove the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox

2009-06-10T09:30:00.000-04:00

This Microsoft article describes how to remove the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox from your computer. The article also describes how to update the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 for the .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 so that the component can be disabled.

Convert a Chain-Food Favorite into Exercise Equivalent.

2009-06-02T23:23:00.001-04:00

Here is what some of our chain-food favorites will cost us in time spent doing common exercises.

Saying "O!"

2009-06-02T11:33:00.003-04:00

If I could only say 'O!' like Mr. Whitefield

-- Mark Liberman

A statue of Richard Whitefield lives outside of Mark Liberman's dining-hall at the University of Pennsylvania.

Liberman was thinking about how certain emotions were uniquely conveyed by a particular speaker. To LanguageLog, Whitefield's written words and printed texts "don't convey ... what (a phrase that was perhaps mistakenly ascribed to) Benjamin Franklin called 'the extraordinary influence of his oratory' ... Whitefield could make audience-members faint merely by saying the word 'Mesopotamia'."

In Baltimore. When attending a baseball game. There's a very meaningful point in the national anthem where -- just like Whitefield -- the "O!" Is pronounced in a particularly unique and meaningful way. The printed text, without the addition of some-type-of-semantic markers, may diminish the essential meaningfulness of the word.

How does one scribe this semantic markup?

First, let's consider this: Say that you are familiar with musical notations (I'm not). The "Baltimore O!" or "Whitefield O!" might then be marked-up with a Sforzando - literally forced, denotes an abrupt, fierce accent on a single sound or chord; followed by a Glissando, Portamento, and terminated with a diminuendo (or some other nicely ended "O!" word).

The unique meaning of the O! may achieve a special value because -- as a couple of stodgy and crazed old deutschmen termed -- within various polarities created by this text (this O!); cudgels forth an 'implied' reader to make expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of characters and settings through a wandering viewpoint.

MOMA recently attempted to capture the possible wandering viewpoints of potentially skeptically and easily-bored viewers through this viral video. The viewer = the reader = the observer becomes more interested when she wanders into a part of history that appears very similiar to her own. The video tugs on the observer:

The sculpture you are looking at drew ridicule and shame when the artist first exhibited it in 1913. Nearly a century later 'Symphony Number One' is considered a pivotal example of abstract sculpture. Your immediate reaction might be to dismiss this work, just as your boss dismissed you after making what anyone would agree was an honest mistake. But if you allow yourself to really look at this piece, you'll see that it awakens all senses simultaneously."

I've often wondered what makes one web site more interesting than another? While, some people can write like Norse bangee gods, others (like me), not so much. We all have the ability to say O! and, in Baltimore, everyone in the crowd who sings O! is generally greeted with open arms. However, the O!s are very tricky to convey properly on a web page.

Using the 'display:block' css tag to create a nicer css menu

2009-05-20T10:49:00.002-04:00

We can create a "sidebar menu" for your website using a few CSS elements to achieve a specific look for the menu. An important component is the display:block css tag.

For example, let's say that we want to create a simple menu for our website so that the background color changes when we 'mouseover' an item. This could be done with the following CSS code;

a:hover {
background-color: Yellow;
color: #000000;
}

To some, this is a sloppy method, because the length of the background color box for each menu item will change depending on the length of the word.

So, instead, we'll use the css element display:block tag. This causes the element to generate a block box of equal length for each menu item. Much neater. Here's how.

Modify OpenOffice Calc So that the Delete Key Deletes Immediately

2009-05-04T13:17:00.004-04:00

You may have asked, "How can I change the delete key to work like Excel's delete key?"

In OpenOffice.org Calc, by default, you have to press Backspace to delete cell contents instead of pressing Delete key (like in Excel). However, here's how you can change the key functions so that when you press the delete key, the contents of the cell are deleted.

Choose Tools / Customize... / Keyboard tab / Select Calc radio button

Next,

Under the "Shortcut Keys" area of the box, highlight "Delete",
Under "Category", highlight "Edit",
Under "Function", highlight the first "Delete Contents" (note there are two).

Your dialog box should appear as follows:

Finally, click "Modify" button, "OK" and that's all there is to it!

For more info, see: How can I delete cell contents immediately with the Delete key like in Excel?

What colors are used on a web site?

2009-05-01T13:33:00.008-04:00

I was wondering what colors Google uses on their web sites and ran across the answer on a site by deauxmain titled, "View color information on any WordPress page".

On December 3, 2008, deauxmain found the following:

#000000
#0000cc
#3366cc
#551a8b
#808080
#a2bae7
#c9d7fq
#ece9d8
#ffffff

The colors on any site can be determined using this Web Developer Firefox Add-On. After installing the addon, the color information can be found by:

Tools > Web Developer > Information > View Color Information

How to do a "Mail Merge" from a Calc spreadsheet.

2009-04-29T10:43:00.002-04:00

Instructions for OpenOffice.org 2.0 on "How to do a 'Mail Merge' from a Calc spreadsheet".

See also: Solveig Haugland's articles tagged with "Mail Merge".

Remove 'Text Boundaries' by default in OpenOffice.org Writer

2009-04-21T23:03:00.005-04:00

To remove the gray boxed 'text boundaries' that are on by default in OpenOffice.org Writer:

Tools / Options... / OpenOffice.org / Appearance / Uncheck Text boundaries checkbox / OK

(procedure in Go-oo 2.4, but I think that it's the same in OpenOffice 3.01)

Custom Keyword Search in Google Chrome

2009-04-19T06:36:00.008-04:00

You can customize Google Chrome with keyword search features (just like Firefox).

Right click anywhere in the address bar and select 'Edit search engines...'.

See here and here for more info. And, all Google Chrome shortcuts.

Where are Google Chrome Files located on Windows Vista?

2009-04-06T22:17:00.003-04:00

According to "Unlock For Us" blog, Google Chrome temporary files are stored on Windows Vista here:

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\