My Tech Findings

Google Translate now supports Real Time Translation and Text to Speech

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:48:00 +0000

Do you use Google Translation ? If yes then chances are that you have already seen the new feature google has introduced recently.

If you have not come across this amazing new feature then just open Google Translation and start typing in the text box.

Did you just notice that the translation happens as you start typing?You no longer need to hit the Translate button to get your translated string.This will help the users, see the translated string as they type and correct the sentence accordingly.

Another interesting feature is the addition of Text to Speech feature if you are translating something to English.To listen the translated text in English just click on the speaker icon you see before the translated text.Check the video below to know more about these features.

GO SPeeDY with Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:58:00 +0000

We all know Google's obsession about speed.It was this obsession which prompted Google to launch its own browser Chrome.Chrome is now considered as the fastest available browser by many.

Then came the announcement of Google Chrome OS this July.This is what Google said in a blog post while announcing the project.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight,to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

If you thought google will stop with Chrome browser and OS then you are completely wrong.This week it announced the launch of two more exciting projects namely GO and SPDY.
GO is an experimental open source programming language that combines the development speed of Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C++.The video below claims that a Go package consisting of about 120,000 lines of code is compiled in just under 10 seconds.That's really great considering the time taken by C++ compilers.

You can find a review about the programming language here.The first project using GO programming language is a twitter client which you can find here.

SPDY ,pronounced as "SPeeDY" is an early stage research project which complements HTTP and is designed for minimizing the latency through various features such as HTTP header compression, request prioritization and multiplexed streams.This is what google has said in a blog post about SPDY.

So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance - pages loaded up to 55% faster.

You can find more info about SPDY here.With Chrome OS rumoured to be launched with in a week ,this is going to be interesting.Now combine Chrome browser with OS ,SpeeDY and GO and see where you are headed.

Guard your kids by locking Google SafeSearch

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:40:00 +0000

Google offers a SafeSearch filtering to block Sites from the search results that contain explicit sexual content.Under the SafeSearch settings you can opt either for Moderate filtering or Strict filtering.Moderate filtering applies only to Google Image search results where as strict filtering applies to both image search and ordinary web search.

If you and your kids/family members use the same computer how do you make sure the safe search is on? Well google has added a new feature to lock your SafeSearch .Once locked the filtering mode is always set to Strict filtering and the search results page becomes visibly different so that you can tell whether SafeSearch is locked or not from a distance.

Now head towards Search Settings and click on Lock SafeSearch under SafeSearch Filtering if you want to lock SafeSearch.Check this video to learn more about the feature.

Google Dashboard: Know All your Google Products

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:28:00 +0000

If you are asked to name each and every google product you use ,can you do that correctly?Chances are that you will miss some of them.

Well,You no longer have to remember those products. You can now see information about all the google products you use from the new google dashboard.This is another novel attempt from google to give more control to your data after Data Liberation.Once you sign into the dashboard you see the summarized data for each product you use.the Dashboard also provides direct links against each product to control some of your settings.
I'm sure other Internet companies will soon follow google.You can find the list of google products in this wiki page.Watch this video to know more about this new initiative from google.

Use Twitter Lists to organize information

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:41:00 +0000

I logged into my Twitter Account today and was pleasantly surprised to see the Twitter Lists in my account.Lists allows you to organize information in a better way.

Using this you can create Lists of Twitter accounts and mark them as public or private.They are linked from your profile.If you create a List as friend then you can directly access it as http://twitter.com/(user)/friend.Other users can even subscribe to the Lists created by you.You can even use @(user)/friends to reply to the List.Lists menu is available on the right hand side below the Search box.

Lists can also be used for mass following people on twitter.Now onwards you will also see another menu option to add users directly to the Lists.That means You can even add users to the list without following them.It is still not clear when the Lists API will be available for developers .But once it's available we will see a lot of third party apps developing innovative solution around this.This is going to be an instant hit among the twitter community.

Search for Similar Images in GazoPa

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Some days back I wrote about SAPIR ,Which IBM is currently testing in collaboration with the European Union consortium.Today I came across another interesting program GazoPa which also provides Similar Image Search and looks much more powerful than SAPIR.

GazoPa provides various methods to search for Similar messages.You can upload an image,Draw a picture,paste image URL into search field or enter a keyword to the search field to search for images.It has also built an iPhone App,a Facebook App,a Firefox plugin and a bookmarklet to complement the service.
I did a couple of searches and was satisfied with the search results.Another important feature it provides is the combined search where you can provide an image and a Keyword to search for similar images.

SAAPIR currently indexes flickr for image search and BBC for video search.GazoPa claims to index more than 60 million pictures that also includes flickr.It even allows you to filter out the Flickr images without a Creative Commons license.
In the result page it allows you to filter the images based on size ,time and various other options.Hover your mouse over a particular image in the result page and you will see a lot of information about the image such as size,similarity in percentage with the base image,originating URL and a search option to search for similar option.

Have a look at the GazoPa in this video to know more about it.

You can find other GazoPa related videos here.

This has added a new dimension to the search.Going forward we will see some big players joining the race.

Google Docs Liberated:You can now Download All your Google Docs in a Single Click using Export option

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:26:00 +0000

When Google Launched DataLiberation ,Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager said in a blog post:

We've already liberated over half of all Google products, from our popular blogging platform Blogger, to our email service Gmail, and Google developer tools including App Engine. In the upcoming months, we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export).

Google has done exactly as per the above statement.You can now download or back up All your documents inside Google Docs.Select the Documents You want to Export inside your Google Docs.Click Export under More actions.Now you are ready to download the files compressed as a zip file.Choose the Export format from the drop down and click continue.

If you have more docs, the system might take some time to zip all the files.You can Click on "Email when ready" and It will send you a mail as soon as the zip file is ready for downloading.Note:The zip file will be available for three days only and will be removed after that.
If you are using Bookmark sync in Chrome then it will even download the Bookmarks as a single HTML file.I think the Export option is a great feature coming from google.This will kill a lot of third party applications around batch download.

How to Download embeded SWF or Flash files using your browser

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:13:00 +0000

If you are looking for ways to download flash or SWF files from a website that do not give you save as option then you have come to the right place.

You can download those embedded Flash files through browsers and the process of downloading flash files vary from browser to browser.Let us look at them.

Download Flash Files using Google Chrome
You can download them in multiple ways using Chrome.

Easiest Way
1.Open the website from where you want to download the flash or swf file.
2.Open a new tab and type about:cache and hit enter.
3.Do Ctrl+f in the new tab and search for .swf to locate the swf file you want to download.
4.Right click on the link and select "save link as".
5.Save the file to a folder and you are done.

Using View Source
1.Open the website from where you want to download the flash or swf file.
2.Use Ctrl+U to open a new view-source tab.
Note:If you do not see a new tab that means the URL points to a SWF file and it is not enabled for this.This process will not work if Ctrl+u is disabled.
3.Do Ctrl+f in the new tab and search for .swf to locate the link containing swf file you want to download.
4.Right click on the link and select "save link as".
5.Save the file to a folder and you are done.

Using Developer Tools (This is likely to work always)
1.Open the website from where you want to download the flash or swf file.
2.use Ctrl+Shift+J to open Developer Tools window.
3.Select Elements Tab (selected by default).
4.Do Ctrl+f and search for embed on the right top search box.
5.Locate the correct swf file. Available under src tag.
6.Right click on the link and select "save link as".
7.Save the file to a folder and you are done.

Download Flash Files using Firefox

Easiest Way
1.Open the website from where you want to download the flash or swf file.
2.Go to Tools->Page Info.(this opens a new window called Page Info)
3.Select Medial tab.
4.Scroll down the list under the Media tab to select the right SWF.
5.Click "Save as" button.
6.Save the file to a folder and you are done.

Another way
1.Open the website from where you want to download the flash or swf file.
2.Open a new tab ,write about:cache?device=disk to the address bar and hit Enter.
You can also type about:cache and select List Cache Entries under Disk cache device to arrive at the same page.
3.Do Ctrl+f in the new tab and search for .swf to locate the link containing swf file you want to download.
4.Click on the link .This opens the cache entry.
5.Rightclick on the link and select "save link as".
6.Save the file to a folder and you are done.

Download Flash Files using Internet Explorer (IE)
1.Open the website from where you want to download the flash or swf file.
2.Go to Tools->Internet Options
3.Click Settings under General Tab.(Inside Temporary Internet files section )
4.Click View Files.
This should open the Temporary Internet Files folder.It might contain hundreds of files.
5.Sort it based on Internet Address or Type.You can also do so by View->Arrange Icons by->Internet Address or Type
Note:If you are sorting it by type then the file you are looking for should be of type Shockwave Flash Object.
6.Locate the swf file ,Right Click->Copy to copy the required SWF file.
7.Save it to another folder and you are done.

AirTel Launches Awesome Commercials to promote Twitter on SMS

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:55:00 +0000

Some days back Airtel brought Twitter to India on SMS platform.Now it has gone a step further and launched some awesome commercials to promote the same.Have a look at those AirTel-Twitter Commercials below.

Hitch Hiker

Guitar

Sky Diver

Customize Blogger Title and URL

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:25:00 +0000

If you have a blogger account ,you know that it automatically generates the URL from the Title when you publish a post for the first time.Some days back I did a spelling mistake in my title and came to know about it after I published the article.Then I just corrected the Title and re published it.

After this I realized that this can be used to user's advantage.Sometimes You want to have a Long Title .If you put that title at the beginning then Blogger will automatically shrink it because of URL length restriction and the meaning will get distorted.To avoid this you can think about a different short URL and publish your atricle first with that as the Title.Once published you edit the article and re publish it by changing the title to the original title you thought in the beginning.

For example the post Who says RSS is Dead has the title as Google Reader adds magic:Gives you another reason to believe that RSS is not dead yet and URL as http://tekunik.blogspot.com/2009/10/who-says-rss-is-dead.html .To do this I first published the article with the title as "Who says RSS is Dead" and then republished it by editing the title to have the long title.This can also be used as an SEO technique to improve your ranking on search result pages.

Facebook now has a new HomePage:Are you satisfied?

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:51:00 +0000

I am sure you must have seen the new Homepage that facebook released sometime back.Let us look at the changes first.
Highlights section that you used to see in the right hand side has been merged to News Feed.
You will now see two feeds in your home page Namely News Feed and Live Feed.

News Feed will focus on popular content, determined by an algorithm based on interest in that story, including the number of times an item is liked or commented on.
Live Feed will display all recent stories from a large number of a user's friends.
News Feed is similar to Google Reader's "Sort by magic" feature introduced recently.

While this is a great change and has been appreciated by many ,I do have certain problems with this change.When I first logged into my Facebook I was surprised to see that my HomePage is filled with Highlighted Material.The problem with this is that facebook does not give me an option to hide these items.I can change my privacy settings not to show my highlights to other friends but I do not have control to hide others highlights.

If you are also worried like me then you can use facebook lite till facebook provides you an option to hide others highlights.

The second problem I feel is the introduction of two feeds News feed and Live Feed.I have a feeling that some of the users may not be able to understand them because both of them will now have some overlapping items.

I also observed that this has been announced in facebook developer blog.From a technical point of view ,facebook has cleaned some of the APIs and has provided guidelines about the API usage.This is going to help facebook and other third party applications.

Google Reader adds magic:Gives you another reason to believe that RSS is not dead yet

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:46:00 +0000

Which side of the RSS debate are you?If you believe in RSS story then you have got one more reason to feel proud about it.

Recently Google added two new things to the Google Reader to help users find interesting items faster.

Sort by magic:Until recently Reader had two sort options for feeds , "Sort by newest' and "Sort by oldest".This has been enhanced by adding another sort option called "Sort by magic".If selected ,it re-orders the items in your feed and presents the topic in an order that is important for you.This is personalized for every user and the re-ordering happens based on "like' and "share" activity.That means the magic sort gets refined properly if you use "like" and "share" more frequently.

Popular items:You now have more ways to find interesting stuff .Google reader introduced Popular items under a new Explore section.Popular items contain top-rising images,videos and pages from the Internet and is ordered automatically to your liking.

I had a look at the popular items and it just seems that Reader displays this based on "like" count.

These two features will certainly help users in discovering great content much faster.I'm already sorting the feed items by magic rather than the chronological order.You can find more about this in google reader blog post.

Find Old Applications easily

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:36:00 +0000

How many times you have googled for a old version of a popular software application or program?Sometimes new version of a program may not work as intended or may require additional softwares to be installed on your system.

You want to get things done pretty quickly and know that it was possible in a older version.What will you do?You will google for an older version and might even end up with a spyware.Welcome to OldVersion which now has 2862 versions of 190 popular programs.
The site stores the older applications categorized into various sections such as Communication ,Graphics ,Multimedia.Some of the popular applications include Norton AntiVirus ,Mozilla Firefox ,Yahoo Messenger ,PuTTY ,Picasa ,VLC Media Player.You can safely download your required version from this place.

oldapps and downloadversion also provide similar service.

How to get more space by deleting memory.dmp file on windows

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:32:00 +0000

I always make it a point not to install any software on C drive in windows to save space.But C drive gets filled up because of a variety of reasons.Each time the C drive is filled ,I go and delete the temp directory to free up space.

This time I was looking for ways to clean up the C drive and came across the file MEMORY.DMP inside C:\WINDOWS.The file size was a little more than 7.5gb.From the name it seemed it can be a log file and can be safely deleted.After a bit of googling I came to know that it is absolutely safe to delete memoty.dmp file.I deleted the file and immediately claimed 7.5gb of free space inside C drive.Then I looked for ways to disable the logging and found a way where you can completely disable the logging or reduce the size of MEMORY.DMp file.
Right Click on MyComputer->Properties->Advanced->Select Settings Under Startup and Recovery.Now you should see the Startup and Recovery Window as shown below.

Under "Write debugging information" you will notice that Complete memory dump is selected under the drop down and the dump file name is given as %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP.To remove the log file completely select none from the drop down.If you want to keep a small log file,then select small memory dump from the drop down.You will notice that the log directory has changed to %SystemRoot%\Minidump.Now you will be able to save some valuable space in your C drive.

Note:This is available in Windowx XP and Windows Server 2003.Not sure about the other versions.

Twitter pushing itself aggressively to new territories

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:49:00 +0000

We all know how famous Twitter is as a micro blogging platform.Facebook recently admitted that Twitter was in its real-view mirror.But the September U.S. comScore data tells a different story.

The comScore data suggests that in August,Twitter received 20.8 million unique visits compared to 20.9 million in September.Which means that Twitter's growth might have been slowing down in U.S. .So to gain traction in other geographies it has recently taken some initiatives which makes me think that the top management has also become aggressive to expand it to other territories.

If twitter has to grow beyond U.S.,then what are the countries it will target ?You guessed it right,it has to be countries like India,China,Japan,Brazil ,Russia and some European countries such as France, Italy, Germany and Spain.As part of its effort to bring in more users ,it recently announced an Exclusive Deal with Airtel in India ,to make Twitter available via SMS.
Very few people know about Twitter in India.Though the Tech Community in India knows about it,Very few people find it useful or necessary to use .While it is a welcome step to make twitter available via SMS,it might take a while before people start using it on mobile platform.

On 16Th october it also launched a Japan-based mobile version.Twitter has a very small presence in Japan having less than one million users.

On 8Th October twitter announced in a blog post that it will soon be rolling out support for FIGS: French, Italian, German, and Spanish.It hopes to offer support in several languages going forward.

All these initiatives makes me think that it has become aggressive to look for new users beyond U.S..Only time will tell whether it will succeed or not.

How to Create your own facebook apps in 4 easy steps

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:29:00 +0000

If you are a facebook user then chances are that you know a thing or two about facebook apps.Do you embrace facebook apps and ever thought of building one for others to use your facebook application?Well,developing a facebook application using the facebook platform is not an easy task.

If you look for information on how to build a facebook application then you might land up here which says:
Before we begin, there are a few things you need to know. In order to create a Facebook application, you should know or need the following:

You should be well versed in PHP or some other coding language — such as Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, or Python — especially one that has a client library for our API.
You need to have a basic understanding of the Internet, SSH, MySQL, and Unix.
You need to be familiar with Web hosting fundamentals and have a place to host your application. You can read some fundamentals about hosting here

Most of the users will never come back after reading this ,because it makes the process so difficult to even develop the simplest application.
Hold on,I came across Appbank which is integrated with facebook platform and allows you to build a facebook App very quickly and easily without any development knowledge.It took me 15 minutes to build my first facebook applicaiton which is a facebook quiz that you can access from here.

Interested in building one now?Go to App Bank to get started.Once you allow App Designer to access your facebook account you can start building the application by clicking on "Create A New App".This allows you to quickly build the quiz applications.So let us look at the prerequisites before you start.

1.Set of Questions you want to display to your targeted users.
2.Set Of Answers for the questions you are going to ask.
3.A Logo Image for your app.
4.Set of at least 3 images to display them to the user as the results at the end of taking your quiz.
Step1 is to provide some basic info about your application.Giving a right Logo Image is important to connect with your users instantly.

Step2 and step3 are for setting up Questions and Results:
Results step is for displaying your results to the user at the end.You have to provide a minimum of 3 results at this stage.Assuming that your quiz has 10 questions,think of 0-4 correct answers as failure,5-7 correct answers as success and 8-10 correct answers as Excellent.So decide your Result Title,Description and Image accordingly to convey the result to the user appropriately.

Questions step is for setting up your Questions and all possible answers.So getting all the options of the question is important here.

The last step is to publish your application to the facebook.Follow the instructions to publish your app and you are done now.

Once finished you can do lot many things using the App Designer platform to promote your application.It even shows various usage statistics for the apps.You can even earn if your application is accepted by them.Check the details here.Go and surprise your facebook friends now by creating your own facebook app and inviting them to use.Check your facebook knowledge by taking this quiz created by me.

How to Share a Folder in Google Docs

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:45:00 +0000

You can now share a folder inside Google Docs.This will be helpful in cases where you want to share multiple files with some one.Instead of sharing files one by one ,you can put all the files in one folder and share the whole folder.

To Share a Folder follow the steps as given below.
1.Create a new folder through Create new->Folder.
2.Select the folder on the left navigation panel under my folders.
3.Click the Share this folder Drop down and select Invite people.
4.Enter the mail id of people you want to invite and click send to send them an email with a link to your folder.
According to Google:
when you share a folder, the new permissions are pushed to all sub-folders and docs within the folder. Normally this happens quickly, but occasionally, it could take a couple of minutes.

You can find more details about folder sharing here.

How to Use AppSearch RegLocator and LaunchCondition in MSI

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Sometimes you might be required to edit MSI directly for the purpose of launch condition.This post will help you in finding the existing versions of products using Appsearch and RegLocator and then applying this in LaunchCondition.

Let us take an Example and find out how to use them.
Use case:You want to display an error to user if the value of the following Registry Entry is less than 7.0.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version

Prerequisites:
You need to have ORCA Editor.Get one here if you do not already have it.

Description
Appsearch is used to search for files, registry keys,folders or Windows Installer components.We will use RegLocator in this particular Exercise.AppSearch locates the specified item and returns the search resuls as a property.We will evaluate this property in launch condition.

Steps to Follow
1.Make an Entry in RegLocator Table
Add a new row to the RegLocator table with the following Data.
Signature_ FIND_IE_VERSION
Root 2
Key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\
Name Version
Type 2

Note:The value of root is 2 for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.You can find the list of all other valid values and more about RegLocator here.
Decide the correct values for Root,Key and Type based on your requirement.

2.Make an Entry in AppSearch.
Add a new row to the AppSearch table with the following Data.
Property IE_VERSION
Signature_ FIND_IE_VERSION (Signature value of Reglocator table you entered above)

3.Make an Entry in LaunchCondition.
Let us use the value of FIND_IE_VERSION to evaluate launch Condition.This should be our logic for launch condition.
if (IE_VERSION >="7.0" then )
Make the following entry in LaunchCondition in anew row.
Condition IE_VERSION >="7.0"
Description IE version should be at least 7.0 to proceed with installation.

Save the MSI and test your changes now.You can enable logging and check the value of your new variables inside the log file created in %TEMP% folder.

Note:The AppSearch action searches for file signatures using the CompLocator table first, the RegLocator table next, then the IniLocator table, and finally the DrLocator table.

You can even consider using other tables instead of RegLocator based on your requirement.

EXIF and the Tools to remove them from Images

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:23:00 +0000

EXIF or Exchangeable Image File Format is an image file format specification which is mainly used by the digital cameras.
According to wikipedia:
The specification uses the existing JPEG, TIFF Rev. 6.0, and RIFF WAV file formats, with the addition of specific meta data tags. It is not supported in JPEG 2000, PNG, or GIF.

A lot of information can be found from the Exif meta data tags such as
1.Model and make Of Digital Camera.
2.Date and Time when the photo was shot.
3.Thumbnail.
4.Description and copy right information.
5.Camera settings such as orientation,focal length and shutter speed.

If you are planning to share the images on the web then the Exif meta data can expose some of the privacy information about you.Sometimes you might require to remove the Exif meta data tags before sharing on the web to protect your privacy.While there are numerous tools (both free and commercial) available in the market to remove Exif meta data tags ,I will talk about a few of them.

Online Exif Remover
This will help you in removing the Exif without installing any additional software.I found two online services exifremover and exif-remove for the same purpose.exifremover has a size limit of 10 MB and exif-remove has a size limit of 8MB.I tried a JPG image of size 1MB and exifremover crashed giving the following error.exif-remove worked perfectly with the same file.
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16 bytes) in /home/qtcharts/public_html/jpg_cleaner_function.php on line 35

While online Exif removers are helpful ,they do not allow you to remove the Exif in bulk at once.That is when I looked at the popular image editing tool IrfanView.

How to remove Exif in Bulk using Irfanview?

Install Irfanview from here.
Exif functionality comes to IrfanView through a plugin.So install the IrfanView plugins here.
Check if you are able to see the Exif Info .Open a JPEG file using IrfanView and click on Image->Information (shortcut I).Click on "Exif Info" to see the Exif meta data values.

Now that the setup is ready let us see how can you remove the Exif in batch.
1.Open IrfanView and click on File->Thumbnails (Shortcut T).This should open a new IrfanView Thumnails window.
2.Browse to the folder containing the images.Select All images by Ctrl-A.
3.Select File->JPG Lossless Operations->Lossless rotation with selected files.4.Select "None" under transformation.
5.Select Custom and make sure to uncheck "Keep EXIF" and "KEEP IPTC" under JPG App maker options.

6.Make sure to take a backup of all the files as this will override the existing files.
7.Click on start and wait till the process is over.

You can also read about How to resize multiple images at once using IrfanView.

How to get more screen space with Chrome Browser

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

We all love Google Chrome for its minimalistic design.It helps users in saving a lot of screen space.If you are still looking for some more screen space while using Chrome browser then this post will help you achieve that.

1.How to hide the Chrome bookmark bar ?
Chrome always shows the bookmark bar just below the address bar or the Omnibox.Do you know that you can hide this bookmark bar? Just use the shortcut Ctrl-B to hide the bar.You can again use the same shortcut to show it.You can also right-click on the bookmark bar to hide it.

How to convert the Bookmark bar to a menu ?
Now that you have saved space by hiding the bookmark bar ,Do you have a feeling that you can no longer access the bookmark bar by default ? Well, you can convert the bookmark bar to a menu just to the right of Address bar.You have to use a new command line switch to convert the bookmark bar to a menu bar.you have to activate the feature by giving "--bookmark-menu" in command-line flag.Right click the chrome shortcut and select properties.In the target box add --bookmark-menu after chrome.exe .

The target path on my chrome shortcut looks as given below.Note that there is a space after chrome.exe and you can use multiple switches in your chrome shortcut command line.
"C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --bookmark-menu

Credit for Bookmarkmenu:downloadsquad

2.How to hide the Extensions bar ?
If you have enabled Extensions in Chrome then you will see an extension bar at the bottom just like your bookmark bar.Hide that using the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-B .To display it, again use the same shortcut.It will be nice if we can also convert this to a menu just like we did it for bookmark bar.

3.How to Shrink the tabs to Favicons only ?
Did you know that you can pin the tabs to shrink them down to just the web site's favicons? Well,just right click on any tab and select "Pin Tab" from the menu.The tab has been converted to just a favicon and it is now at the first place.Next time when you want to pin another tab ,just drag the tab to the left of the already pinned tab and it will be automatically converted to a pinned tab.You can still use the right click to pin tabs.This will help you in saving some tab space if you are working with multiple tabs.

How do you revert back the pinned tabs ?
You can do this in two ways.Either right click on the pinned tab and unselect "Pin Tab" or drag the pinned tab to the extreme right till you see the full tab and drop it there.

Hopefully the above tips will help you in giving some more space.

Google Squared :One step closer to come out of Labs

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Google announced a number of improvements to its ambitious project Google Squared which automatically extracts unstructured data from web pages and presents the search results as squares.Google says it will be particularly useful for research oriented questions where the answer is scattered through out the web and must be combined to bring out meaningful information.

Let us look at those improvements.
1.Now the first search result could include up to 120 facts -up to 20 rows and 6 columns.
2.It has improved the quality of information.
In fact I checked a couple of queries and observed that it really has improved.Though it still has a long way to go before it can come out of labs.
A search for indian states gave me the results I expected.I was also curious to search for nobel peace prize winners.The result didn't include Barack Obama.3.It now has the ability to sort columns.
4.You can now export the Data from Squared to Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file.This certainly will be very useful.people can now export the data to Google Spreadsheet and share it with others very easily.

You can find the official announcement here.

What Change I want to see in Twitter Trending Topics

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:25:00 +0000

It was great to know that this year's Nobel peace prize went to Barack Obama.I wanted to see the immediate reaction in Twitter the moment I got the news.

As expected I saw the news as part of Twitter Trending Topics.But I was worried about one aspect of Twitter.When I first checked ,there were two trending topics specific to this as "Nobel Peace Prize" and "President Obama".I again checked after some time and as expected the trending topics now had three terms as "president Obama","#Nobel" and "Barack Obama Wins".
What is the problem with this? Well,all these terms point to one news.Why can't twitter intelligently consolidate them and show as one topic.If it can show them under one trending topic then may be one more important news can be displayed as part of Trending Topics.

I went to What The Trend to confirm what they mean and this is what the site explains about the Trending Topics.What do you think ? Will this be useful or not?

Bring Bollywood Movies to Chrome Theme

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Recently google introduced artistic themes for Chrome browser.Themes are now supported in the latest version of chrome.Google worked with various artists from around the globe to create those themes.

This is what google says in a blog post.
We're honored to have had the opportunity to work with artists including Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Karim Rashid, Jonathan Adler, Oscar de la Renta, Anita Kunz, Tom Sachs, Kate Spade, Donna Karan, Kid Robot, Casey Reas, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Graves, Todd Oldham, Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Mariah Carey (and that's just to name a few!). We would like to extend our thanks to all the artists for lending their vision, imagination and hard work to this collaboration.

I found that the themes gallery now has a hindi page and hosts some cool Bollywood movie themes.You can get the hindi version of the themes gallery here.I now have the "New York" theme on my Chrome and it really looks cool.

Check the preview of these themes in a video flipbook compiled by google.

Find and Replace in multiple files without opening

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:25:00 +0000

Today I needed to replace some texts across multiple files.Since I am a regular user of EditPlus ,I was able to do it using EditPlus.Do a "Find in Files" to find a particular word across multiple files.Once you get the list of files in results pane ,right click and select "Open All".Now perform Replace (Ctrl+H) and select "All Open Files" under "Replace All range" to perform Find and Replace in multiple files at once.

But the problem with this is that I had to open all the files to do a Search and Replace .This will be cumbersome if you have to do it in hundreds of files.So I looked for a tool which can do only Search and Replace in Multiple files without opening them.My search ended with a tool called TextCrawler.The size of the installer is just 1.7Mb and it is very easy to use.You can download the TextCrawler here.

Open TextCrawler after installing and select appropriate Filename/Filter .You can select *.* if you want to find and replace across multiple file extensions.browse to the starting folder ,Select the Find and Replace terms and hit Replace.
The tool finds the word across multiple files and then asks before replacing.Select yes and it will replace all the occurrences.It even supports regular expressions.

There are multiple tools available in the market to do this.But what I liked about this tool is that it does the job without opening the files and this program is absolutely freeware.

Create and Share a Web Page Instantly from EMail

noreply@blogger.com (tekunik) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:33:00 +0000

Let's say you want to share the contents of an EMail with few of your friends instantly.What are your options? Well,you might look for social networking sites like facebook to share the content.If you own a website you might consider that also.

What if you do not own a website and you want to create a web page instantly so that you can share it with others.A new service called moomeo will help you in doing that.All you need to do is send an EMail to post@moomeo.com .Sounds unfamiliar?What it does then?

It creates a web page instantly with your content and sends you a reply with the details of the link.It also sends a bit.ly powered shortened URL to help you in sharing.

How does the web page look like?It contains your EMail content that can be shared with others.It even supports attachments.People can also collaborate by posting comments and subscribe to the comments by RSS or EMail.Done with the sharing and want to delete the content from the moomeo server? It gives a link to delete your page from the server in case you no longer require the content to be shared.Make sure not to delete the Mail you receive in response to your EMail,because that is the only way to manage your posting.

You can even use bookmarklets to send the contents from your browser to moomeo using GMail or default Mail client.Check the following two bookmarklets.

GMail moomeo!

Send to moomeo through Default Mail Client

Though there are other ways of instantly sharing the web page contents ,you might find the above two bookmarklets useful if you are using moomeo.

Share your comments if you know any other services which allows to create web pages instantly without needing a registration.

Credit:makeuseof.com