Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

Letter home – living history – Fort Stockton 150th anniversary

150th anniversary – living history – Fort Stockton

Photo I took today at historic Fort Stockton during the living history celebration. Celebrating 150th anniversary

You can upload documents in a variety of formats like PDF, TIFF, JPG, and other image files as well as a ZIP of your document. Without creating an account you can convert documents up to 1MB in size and 5 pages long. Creating a free account allows you to upload documents that are 20MB in size and longer than 5 pages.

The biggest bonus that comes with account creation isn't the expansion in file size however but the format preservation. You can convert a PDF with columns into a Word document with columns and so on. The free version simply rips the text from the document into plain text—as seen in the screenshot above. If all you need is the text to slap into another application, the free account is more than sufficient. Note: For the advanced conversion that comes with an account, you get 5 credits good towards 5 pages of conversion, after that you’ll need to purchase additional credits to use the service. Basic conversion is always free. Thanks sharp-eyed readers!

Have your own favorite OCR tool? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Powered by Twitter Tools

Learn Wave’s Keyboard Shortcuts

Every good webapp has a full set of keyboard shortcuts for getting around and performing the most common actions, and happily Google Wave is no exception. While Wave is still missing common shortcuts (j/k, please?), there are a few you must know now. Here are the ones to learn first:

• Arrow keys: Move up/down within a list of waves, and left/right from inbox to open wave panel with your arrow keys.
• Spacebar: Go to the next unread wave in a list
• Ctrl+E: Edit a selected wave
• Shift+Enter (in edit mode): Finish editing your wave; equivalent to clicking the “Done” button
• Enter: Add a reply to a selected wave directly under it
• Shift+Enter (in view mode): Add a reply to the bottom of a list of waves

Here’s the full list of keyboard shortcuts. Alternately, you can click on the image below to see them all.

Filter Waves with Advanced Operators and Saved Searches

Wave is a very Googly product, so searching is simply a matter of typing a keyword into the search box. But like Gmail, Google Wave also offers several advanced search operators that let you find waves based on who they're with, what they're tagged, and other attributes. For example, to see all the public waves—that is, waves in which anyone using Wave can see—use the with: operator. In fact, if you’re feeling lonely in Wave, the first Wave search you should try is with:public.

To save a search for reuse, click on the “Save Search” button on the bottom right of your Wave inbox. When you save a search you can also specify filter actions for all the waves that match it. Right now the only choices are “Archive” and “Mark as read.” Once you run that with:public search, every public wave you read will end up in your inbox, which becomes overwhelming almost immediately. So save your with:public search and check off “Archive” so they don’t clutter up your inbox. (You can also “Mute” chatty public waves that did make it into your inbox if you’re not interested in every new update.)

The opposite of with:public, the with:me search is very useful for just seeing waves that are explicitly with you (not with the public group). To limit your results to only waves you’ve updated, use by:me.

Other search operators include tag: for tags, and has: for attachments like images, files, and gadgets. For example, has:gadget returns waves with gadgets; has:image returns waves with images in them, and has:attachment returns waves with gadgets, images, or files. You can combine search operators, like with:public has:gadget, and use the minus sign to exclude waves as well, like -has:image. Here’s the full list of Wave’s advanced search operators.

Make a Wave Public

Now that you know how to find public waves, you probably want to make one of your own waves public. Problem is, there’s no one-click button to make a wave public. The trick is to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list. To do so, click the + button on the bottom right of your Contacts module. Type public@a.gwave.com into the Address field, and even when Wave says “User does not have a Google Wave account”, press Enter. The public group will appear in your contacts list, as shown. Add public to any wave you want to make public, but be prepared: Public waves often get destroyed by newbs and bots who haven’t been in Wave long enough to grok the etiquette (see below). Also note that if you switch computers, you may have to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list again.

Know Wave’s Bot Etiquette (and Bounce Unwanted Bots)

One of the biggest problems with public waves is that anyone can edit them or add recipients to them: including content-changing, and sometimes busted, bots. When you do your with:public search, you’ll find dozens of waves that have been destroyed by newbs adding bots to them that delete or mangle the existing content so bad that even playback is broken. Good Wave etiquette dictates that you don’t add bots to public waves. If you want to mess with a public wave, from its menu choose “Copy to New Wave” and go to town with your private copy.

If you’ve created a public wave and someone added a bot to it that you want out, add the Bouncy bot to your contacts (bouncy-wave@appspot.com). Then, add Bouncy to the wave, and reply to it adding the command bounce:botaddress, replacing botaddress with the email address of the bot to bounce. Bouncy will oust the unwanted bot from your wave. This only works on bots. After Bouncy’s done his job, you can delete the wave with the command and Bouncy’s response. Update: The Google Wave team has enabled the “Remove” button for bots only, obviating the need for Bouncy. To remove an unwanted bot from a wave, click on its icon at the top o the wave and lean on the “Remove” button. This only works on bots, not humans.

Garden Your Waves

Like a wiki, useful and popular waves require oversight and gardening, or else they fall in to disrepair or go out of date or get vandalized (especially if they’re public). You can oversee, clean up, edit, and update any wave you’re a participant in, and everyone will appreciate it if you do.

First, empty “blips” or replies are a common occurrence around Wave, which is still kind of twitchy in different browsers and new to a lot of folks who might accidentally hit Enter when they didn’t mean to reply. Delete empty blips when you come across them by clicking on the wave action drop-down on the top right of it, and choosing “Delete.”

To automate this process on waves you create, add the Sweepy bot (sweepy-wave@appspot.com) to your contacts and to the wave itself. Sweepy will not delete existing empty blips, but it will delete any newly-added empty replies automatically. (Sweepy is one of the very few bots that may supersede the “never add bots to public waves” rule, as Sweepy’s functionality cleans up the wave. For more on bots and gadgets, see this Google Wave Extensions list.)

If a wave becomes totally destroyed and you want to restore it to a former useful state, use its playback feature. Pause at the revision you want, and use the “Copy to a new wave” menu item to fork it into a new copy.

Bookmark a Custom Wave Layout

Netbook owners or those who keep Wave open in a small window appreciate the ability to minimize unneeded Wave modules and maximize the reading or writing area on the wave you’re working on at the moment. To load Wave with certain modules minimized by default, you can use a custom Wave URL with the #minimized parameter. For example, https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact launches Wave with the Navigation and Contacts modules minimized. The https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search URL minimizes Navigation, Contacts, and Search panes as shown here.

URL-observers will also notice that every individual wave has an ID that appears in the URL when you click on it. This means you could bookmark or IM a link to a public wave to anyone on Wave.

What Doesn’t Work in Wave

The Wave Preview is a pre-beta webapp, and lots of things aren’t working or just simply aren’t implemented yet. From the “it’s not just you” department, here are some notes on what’s not working:

• Some bots and gadgets: A couple of bots I mentioned in my first look at Google Wave worked in the Developer preview, but don’t work in the regular preview, namely Bloggy, Polly, and several others. The best way to see if a bot works is to just try it, or search for its name and the with:public operator to find discussions about it.
• Requests, or waves from other servers: The Requests link in the Navigation pane is presumably for you to approve waves that come from other servers. However, while Wave server federation is part of the protocol, it’s not yet working for real. That’s why users on the Developer preview can’t wave at users on googlewave.com. Yet.
• Removing Wave recipients: Right now you cannot remove non-bots from a Wave once they’ve been added to it. Copy your wave to a new one and reinvite folks instead.
• Uploading files (that are not images): While you can drag and drop images into a wave (and be sure to try that, it’s fantastic fun), you can’t upload other filetypes using the Files button yet. Update: While the files menu on the lower righthand corner of a wave is disabled, you CAN add files to a wave by dragging and dropping them onto the wave, or clicking the paperclip icon on a wave’s toolbar in compose mode.
• The “I’m online” green dot: When the Wave preview first launched, a pretty green dot would show you which of your contacts was online at the moment. This feature had a serious bug involving Suggested Contacts so the Wave team had to pull it. Expect those dots to come back in the next few weeks.
• Playback (sometimes): If a wave is huge and has lots of revisions or a bot has made extreme changes, playback on waves can be wonky or just not work at all.
• Blog publishing: The Bloggy bot does not work right now, and while the Madoqua bot will give you Javascript embed code to add to your blog, ONLY people who are signed into Wave will be able to see your wave (and it has to be public, which makes it editable by anyone). So, while publishing waves on any web page with proper permissions and access by anyone on the web will happen, it’s not working right now.

Overall, Wave is a rich platform with a huge community of people discovering more of its ins and outs and quirks and workarounds every day. Wave users, what are your favorite tricks and tips for getting more out of Wave? Post up your comments below or in this public wave.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, really hopes to meet Dr. Wave someday to tell him just how shiny everything is. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

In this case, non-intrusive means the advertisements aren’t watermarked or otherwise touching your actual photos. They’re inserted between the pages, and can be pulled out, kind of like magazine subscription cards. You’d also have to be comfortable with HotPrints using “contextual” data from Facebook to target some ads at you. That means the album style you choose, the content of your profile, and region information from your Facebook account are used to target the ads, but the company claims that no identifying information is given out to its sponsoring partners. You can read more about HotPrints’ do’s and don’ts at their privacy policy.

If you’re cool with that at the cost of free, even free shipping, HotPrints’ Facebook app makes it fairly easy to pull in tagged photos of yourself or any Facebook contacts for a quickie album, with a limit of one per month. It’s a free service, requires a Facebook account (and app authorization) to use.

Joen Asmussen coded the one-click bookmarklet converter because he himself was tired of waiting to see whether Adobe or another PDF plug-in would bring up a document, or force him to use his browser’s session restore feature.

It’s just as simple to use as any bookmarklet: drag it into your browser’s bookmarks or bookmark toolbar, click it on a page with any PDF links, and they’ll be converted to show you the document in Google’s own online document viewer, which then offers download and printing links. As Philipp at Blogoscoped notes, this would be a great candidate for a simple Greasemonkey script. Any takers?

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

STDU has a nice browser-style tabbed interface for viewing multiple documents in one window, supports most electronic document formats you would want (including TXT, TIFF, PDF, DjVu, Comic Book Archive, and XPS), displays thumbnails of pages in the sidebar, and allows for bookmarking in documents. As FreewareGenius points out, it also has a really nice text search tool that displays all the results in a list rather than requiring you to jump all over the document.

It may not have been one of the favorites on our readers’ list of the five best PDF readers, but it supports a lot more than just PDFs, and it’s a formidable viewer if you’re just looking for a change in your default reader.

STDU Viewer is freeware for non-commercial use, Windows only.

It’s not a new trick by any means, but conditional call forwarding isn’t a trick that cell phone carriers go out of their way to explain to new customers. Put simply, there are codes you can punch into nearly any cell phone to make it forward calls that you don’t pick up because you’re busy, out of range or powered off, or simply not answering, to another number. Make that second number your Google Voice number and set Google Voice to “Do Not Disturb,” and it’ll pick up the call forward instantly, just like your primary voicemail.

T-Mobile and AT&T (known as "GSM carriers") follow a fairly standard forwading scheme outlined at Wikipedia's helpful call forwarding page, linked below. The Howard Forums site is a great resource for discovering other forwarding codes, including those for Verizon and Sprint. Take heed, however, as not all call forwarding is free. T-Mobile users get 500 minutes of forwarding free with most plans, for example, while Sprint users report forwarding fees of $0.10-$0.20 per minute, so it may not be worth the voicemail switch-over.

Got another helpful call forwarding trick you’ve used? Tell us about it in the comments. Thanks Alexander!

Powered by Twitter Tools

The secret sauce in this DIY project? Paint sample chips—lots and lots of paint sample chips. You'll need to run a raid on your local big-box hardware store and round up some sample chips.

You'll need a source image, an image editor—we recommend checking out the Hive Five about image editors if you need one—and of course a razor to cut the paint chips up. From there all you need to do is toy with the resolution of the image in your image editor to pixelize it and then transfer it, paint chip-by-paint chip, onto your wall.

How many colors and how many pixels you want to use is limited by your patience and whether or not you get kicked out of Home Depot before filling your entire shopping cart with paint chips.

Photo by Eastern Blot.

Blogger Melissa at home weblog The Inspired Room says that a quick daily cleaning frenzy can help prevent a dirty house:

A cleaning frenzy might last ten minutes or even up to an hour. But everyone participates, including the kids. We run around picking things up, putting things back, and generally tidying things up.

While the idea itself is not revolutionary, sticking to a daily cleaning frenzy is a good way to avoid looking like a tornado hit your home. Browse the post for other suggestions on how to keep your home “clean enough,” then chime in with your own quick cleaning tips in the comments. And if you’re looking for more suggestions on how to clean your place, browse our previous post on attack plans against a cluttered home.

Photo by woodleywonderworks.

10. Cc:Betty

This email-organizing service is openly pitching itself to those left out of the first round of Wave preview accounts, and not entirely without reason. It doesn’t do half the things that Wave claims to do, but it does free your coworkers from having to read through freakishly long “RE: FWD: FWD:” letters just to understand what the original question or discussion was. Add CC:Betty to your cc: list on a topic you want to get started, and the webapp does the work of organizing each person’s contributions, different attachment types, chronology, and who’s been left out of the chain. Even if everybody doesn’t bother to check in at the Betty page for the discussion, the person trying to make sense of it all will be glad they can do so. (Original post)

9. MediaWiki

It is, of course, the software that powers Wikipedia, and might seem a bit dated in the light-speed-paced world of webapps. Still, MediaWiki’s power lies in how easy it is for multiple people to make and commit changes to a document, link inside and out of other pages, create page structures and hierarchies on the fly, and work from pretty much any browser on Earth. Nobody needs to sign into any account unless mandated by the administrator, and everybody gets the information they need without having to fiddle any knobs. (Original post)

8. TimeBridge

This meeting facilitator aims to eliminate the mess of emails and mass confusion over whether it was meeting room 130 at 2pm, or room 230 at 1pm. Create an account, plug in your coworkers’ emails or SMS numbers, plug in a few times that work for you, and TimeBridge takes on the work of contacting them all and asking which of those times work, then presenting the results for your consideration. The webapp also reminds participants of the details by email or SMS, and a just-released iPhone app helps you keep things moving along with an agenda and details view. (Original post)

7. Google Groups

“Isn’t that the thing that Google turned Usenet into?” Yes, but Groups lets a, um, group of like-minded folks hash out arguments, answer questions, and point to helpful resources without software or constraints. Users of a group can rate posts for helpfulness, search out answers across their own groups or other similar-themed topics, and get their answers and responses delivered from an easily filtered email source. It’s an oft-overlooked tool in an age of fancy-pants social tools, but it gets everyone hooked up and talking pretty quickly. (Original post)

6. TextFlow

It’s easy to ask everyone’s take on a piece of text, but much harder to actually incorporate their ideas, revisions, and word choices without spending twice as much time as on the original. TextFlow, a free Adobe Air app that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, takes in all the documents spawned from an original, analyzes the changes, and presents them to you to show what’s different, accept what you want to change, and make it easy to see how far you’ve moved off the original draft. For a certain kind of work, it’s a real time saver, and it makes it easy to respond when your collaborators ask why their masterful lead-in sentence didn’t make the cut. (Original post)

5. DimDim

Makers of “webinar” software are feverishly pitching the idea of at-your-desk conferences as a money-saving alternative to travel these days. DimDim, an open-source meeting platform, offers web users a truly money-saving experience, with up to 20 users able to view a presentation, three of them with microphone access, with no software installations required. It’s a nice step up if you need something a little more professional than a social video chat room, and is surprisingly responsive on freehand drawing, text, audio, and even screencasting across a variety of connection speeds. (Original post)

4. MindMeister

How many 10-minute verbal explanations would have worked much better as a one-minute cocktail napkin sketch? Plenty of them, we’d suspect. For ideas and projects where drawing a line through your thoughts helps keep them together, MindMeister is a great helper. Not only does their web-based design tool allow for easy branching, notating, and organization, but if you just want to jam in a few ideas to be molded into shape later, it allows for email additions. You can, of course, share, publish, and collaborate on your mental diagrams, and doing so might just save you a really unnecessary phone call or stop-and-chat. (Original post)

3. present.io

File-sharing service Drop.io is really convenient because it lets you store up to 100 MB of files without a sign-up, password, or software. Present.io, a group-focused tangent, lets you gather a team of chatters around a set of images, text, audio, or even video files and let them tell you what rocks and what stinks about them. Those away from a computer can call in mid-stream and leave MP3 voicemails for all to hear or join in a phone conference call. Meanwhile, the "drop" administrator keeps the show moving by queuing up new files on viewers' screens, and nobody has to log in or be accepted to join in—they just need the right URL. (Original post)

2. Campfire

Not that we aren’t at least thinking of holding our Lifehacker chat and brainstorming sessions in Wave, but for the time being, Campfire does a remarkably good job of letting multiple people yak it out and learn from each other. It’s searchable, it makes uploading files to everyone easy, it can be a walled garden or open to those you link in, and it sits nicely in a browser tab, changing its page title when new chats arrive. There’s a fair number of third-party clients and input tools available for 37Signals’ collaborative chat platform, but it works just fine as a quiet spot to talk. (Original post)

1. Zoho

It’s hard to jump in and describe the best features about Zoho’s vast suite of online editing and group organization tools, because so much changes on a week-to-week basis. That said, if you find Google Docs to be impressive for a single user, but not a great back-and-forth facilitator, Zoho is where you should look next. It’s able to handle both the lower-level tasks of group editing, document sharing, and other work, as well as the milestone tracking, group chat, invoice creation, and other tasks needed by teams that aren’t sitting right next to each other. It’s good stuff, and it’s free. (Original post)

Photo by a4gpa.

According to Zen, part of successfully ingraining a desired behavior involves clearly identifying the habits that trigger said behavior.

What situations trigger your current habit? For the smoking habit, for example, triggers might include waking in the morning, having coffee, drinking alcohol, stressful meetings, going out with friends, driving, etc. Most habits have multiple triggers.

The key to changing, according to the post, is to write down any and all potential triggers, then sub out the bad habit with a more positive replacement. The process may be a tedious one, which is why the post also suggests charting strategies to defeat the inevitable urges.

Browse the full post for a big list of 29 ways to change a habit, and if you’ve successfully managed to pull a 180 on a hard-to-kick habit, tell us how you reached the finish line in the comments.

The projects on the Monsterlist vary in skill and commitment levels. Typical descriptions range from “You’re going to need two buckets and a hose…” to “Have 32 red LEDs and a solenoid valve from a washing machine? Perfect! Let’s get started.” Chances are, you’ll be able to find a project among the 854 (listed at the moment) that covers your range of ability and ambition.

Although the web site’s design is a bit old school, it is functional. The Monsterlist has a basic key which indicates things about the projects listed, such as how new it is, whether or not it’s considered an advanced project, if the prop you’ll be creating is animated or static, and if the project listing has an extremely detailed guide and/or movies included.

We found a variety of interesting projects ranging from simple, such as using mirrors and a barrel to create the illusion of a pit, to workbench-worthy endeavors like building an outdoor room with a moving ceiling. If you find a particularly novel guide while browsing the list, share a link to it in the comments.

Powered by Twitter Tools