A Simple Trick to Highlight the External Links on a Web Page

Some popular websites – including Mashable, The Huffington Post and TechCrunch – include too many internal links in their stories (hyperlinks pointing back to their own website) and it often becomes difficult to determine the links that are pointing to external websites.

You have to hover your mouse over a link and look at the status bar of your browser to know where that link is pointing to. That’s lot of work.

Highlight External Links using Favicon Images

Before: This is the original page on TechCrunch

After: The same page but the external hyperlinks are now highlighted

If you wish to quickly highlight all the external hyperlinks on a page, just drag the following bookmarklet link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar.

Highlight Links

Now when you are on a web page that looks cluttered with links, just click this bookmarklet button and it will add favicons next to all external hyperlinks on that page while the styling of internal links is left untouched.

The bookmarklet will also add underlines to external links  making it easier for you to distinguish between external and internal links. And in case you wish to revert to the original style of hyerlinks, just hit the refresh button (Ctrl + R) in your browser.

I have uploaded the bookmarklet source code (de-obfuscated) on ctrlq.org in case you wish to modify the link styling. The favicons for corresponding websites are automatically generated using this simple Google hack.

Find the Exact Date When a Google Maps Image was Taken

Curious to know the exact date when Google cameras captured those aerial and street view photographs of your home (or any other address)? Well you can find that data easily in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Finding the capture date of Satellite Images

If you wish to know the date when satellites captured those aerial images that you now see in Google Maps, you will have to use Google Earth for that (for some reason, these dates aren’t displayed on the Google Maps website).

Launch the Google Earth program, search for any location and zoom in as much as possible. You should see the capture date of that image in the status bar as highlighted in the above screenshot.

Finding the capture date of Street View Images

If you happen to live in a country where Google Street View is available, you can use the Google Maps website itself to determine the date when Google Street Views cars were in your area shooting pictures of the neighborhood.

Search for an address in Google Maps and switch to the street view by dragging that street view icon to the map. The image date will be displayed in the status bar again though in this case, Google only reveals the month and year of the picture but not the exact date.

To summarize, you need to use Google Earth to determine the capture date of Aerial Images and Google Maps for finding the date of Street View images.

A World Map of the Most Visited Websites

This world map represents the most popular websites by country. No big surprises here as Google reigns supreme in most parts of the world followed by Facebook. Yahoo is still the most visited website in Japan and Congo while Baidu is the Google of China in every sense.

The data was arrived from the Alexa rankings of websites per country but there are other ways to estimate traffic ranks and they should paint a similar picture. A larger version of the map is available at The Atlantic.

The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text

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

The Best Web-based OCR Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Online OCR Software – A Comparison

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

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for the DOS Command Prompt

We look at some useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that will help you personalize the MS-DOS Command Prompt Window without using the mouse.

You will also learn about hotkeys for executing DOS commands more quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are known to work in Windows Vista and XP command prompt.

1. Change the color scheme of the DOS Window

color bf - where b is the background color while f is for the foreground color (they are hex codes).

For instance, if you want to have a white background with black text, type color F0 and press enter. To revert to the original color scheme, type color without any arguments.

For a list of all available colors, type color /? on the command line.

2. Chant the Title of the Window to reflect the current time

Do you know that you can put your name or your blog address in the title of the command prompt window. That’s like a neat watermark when you are using that screenshot for your website.

title your_name  %time%

That %time% will append the current timestamp to the Window’s title.

3. Navigate the Command History using Keyboard

If you have a long list of commands in the history, press the function key F7 to navigate through the history list using the arrow keys.

And if you already know the command number, press F9 and directly type that number. Very useful if you have to run some command repeatedly.

4. Typing Long Commands at the DOS Prompt

You know the frustration when you type some long command only to realize that you made a typo or omitted typing some character. Either type the whole command again or a better option is the F1 key.

F1 prints characters of the previous command one by one. 

Alternatively, you can press F2 to copy a certain number of characters from the previous command to the current one. Let me illustrate that with an example:

Say I want to run the command “nslookup www.google.com” but wrote “nslookup www.googlx.com” in a hurry.

Instead of retyping the whole thing, I can say F2 and then say x. This will print all the characters upto “x”. Then you can press F3 to complete the command or type it manually.

Which Web Services are Worth Paying for? [Giveaway]

Most online services work on a freemium model – they offer free accounts for basic users but some of the premium features of the service are only available to people who willing to pay a yearly (or monthly) subscription fee.

Here are some examples that come to mind.

• MailChimp, the email newsletter service, lets you send up to 12,000 emails per month for free but for sending emails to a bigger list, you need to subscribe to a monthly plan.
• LastPass, the online password manager, is completely free but you can get rid of the ads and also get to use LastPass on your mobile phone for a low monthly subscription.
• Evernote is also free but the premium version displays no ads and also lets you download notebooks on a mobile phone for offline access.
• Online storage services like Google Docs, SkyDrive or Dropbox are free but should you run out of storage space, you can add more Gigabytes for a monthly fee.
• You mostly have to pay for web hosting and for domain registrations and renewals.
• Some other popular online apps / services that follow the freemium model include Skype, Flickr, Remember the Milk, CrashPlan, Xbox Live, Vimeo, Hulu, Amazon Prime, SoundCloud, LinkedIn, Box, SlideShare, Google Apps, InstaPaper, Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, Github, Amazon S3, Internet Fax, and more.

What Premium Web Services Would You Pay For?

I have a quick question for you – what are your five most favorite premium web apps that you are currently subscribed to or wouldn’t mind paying for in the future.

Put your responses in this Google Form and you would win an Evernote gift card that will upgrade your basic Evernote account to the premium version (a $45 value).

Evernote Giveaway – The Rules

There are no rules or requirements, you don’t have to send tweets or like any Facebook page to participate and you can be based anywhere in the world.

Just make sure that you only mention services that offer paid options – for example, Twitter and a majority of these useful websites won’t qualify as they are absolutely free. Good luck!

Thank you Pranav Shah for the idea and Troy Malone for providing the Evernote gift cards.

Watch Vimeo Videos in India with this Simple Workaround

Popular video sharing sites like Vimeo and DailyMotion were blocked in India last month following court orders.

Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders

It happened because some movies were illegally uploaded to these sites, the content owners filed a copyright infringement complaint and the Indian court ordered the ISPs to block the sites. Major Indian ISPs, including Airtel and Reliance, complied.

At the time of writing this, Airtel has restored access to the DailyMotion.com website but the videos hosted on Vimeo.com are still inaccessible to most users in India.

The Vimeo website itself is available but the sub-domain serving Vimeo’s video player (player.vimeo.ccom) has been blocked and thus the videos won’t play on your computer or mobile phone.

Watch Vimeo Videos in India

There’s however an easy workaround that can help you watch Vimeo videos if the site is blocked.

Open ctrlq.org/vimeo, paste a Vimeo URL (e.g. http://vimeo.com/43379235) into the text and hit Enter. If you are lucky, the video should auto-play.

The ISPs in India have blocked the default Vimeo Video Player that is served over http but the same player can also be accessed over https and that secure site may have been left open.

The player at ctrlq.org/vimeo simply renders the video using the https version of the Vimeo player.

Bookmarklet for Embedded Vimeo Videos

If a Vimeo video is embedded on a web page, you can use the follow bookmarklet to unblock them with a click. Simple drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar and, while you are on page that contains Vimeo video, just click the bookmarklet.

Show Vimeo

Alternatively, look at the HTML source of that page (press Ctrl + U in Google Chrome) and search for Vimeo’s IFRAME (see highlighted text). Either paste that URL into the ctrlq.org/vimeo or replace ‘http’ with ‘https’ and open that modified URL in your browser.

Permanently Switch to HTTPS

There’s another way to bypass the ban. You can create an account at Vimeo.com, log in and Vimeo will then automatically serve all its videos using the HTTPS version of the video player. This will obviously not happen for external sites that have embedded the Vimeo video player.

Send Postal Letters Anywhere in the World Through Internet – Email to Snail Mail

There are three reasons why you may want to send emails as paper letters using snail mail:

1. Some of your relatives live in remote villages where they don’t have computers let alone access to Internet.

2. Your grandparents know computers but they’ll probably feel more happy if you could send them emails and photographs in paper form that they can read in the lawn outside.

3. You are trying to reach someone who already gets a few hundred email messages per day. Your email may get lost in the clutter but if you take the snail mail approach, chances are high that he or she will at least read your message if not respond to it.

How to Send Email as Snail Mail?

Print your email message, insert it into an envelope, rush to the nearest post office, buy some postage stamps and drop the letter in a post box.

Well that’s one of the option but it involves too much work so we’ll shift attention to some automated email to snail mail services that enable us to send paper mail right from the computer at our home.

These web based letter printing and dispatching services work more or less the same way. You send then an email or upload the document as Word or PDF on to their servers, make the payment online and they’ll send the letter via regular postal mail to the specified physical address.

Email to Postal Mail Services – A Comparison

	Pricing	Colored Printing	Payment Options	What’s Unique?
Postal Methods	$1 for US addresses and $1.5 for international addresses	No	Credit Cards	More useful for bulk mails as price decreases with volume
Mail a Letter	$1 for US addresses and $2 for international addresses	Yes	Credit Cards, PayPal, Google Checkout	You can add a self addressed envelope with the letter
Postful	$1 for US addresses and $1.5 for international addresses	Yes	Credit Cards, PayPal, Google Checkout	You can send colored photos as postcards
EZGram	$1 for US addresses and $1.6 for non-US addresses	Yes	Credit Cards and PayPal	Supports USPS Priority Mail for quick delivery
L-Mail	Around $1 – depends on country	No	Credit Cards and Debit Cards	Supports Brailleand audio letters
Click 2 Mail	Recommended for bulk mail	Yes	Credit Cards	Supports Product Flyers, Booklets and Postcards
Email 2 Postal	$1 for US addresses	No	Credit Cards	Supports handwritten envelopes and greeting cards
PC 2 Paper	$0.8 for UK and $1.5 for non-UK addresses	Yes	Credit Cards, Paypal and Nochex	Offers a real UK based postal address for incoming post

All the web based post mail services discussed above let you send letters from anywhere in the world to any other destination. There are some country specific services like Via Post(for UK), Pixel Letter (for European Union), Snail Mail Me (for Canada) and India Post (for residents of India) that may turn out to be cheaper if are sending letters to any of these countries.

Also, of the services listed above, only L-Mail has offices (or rather printing stations) in quite a few international locations (including Mumbai in India) and thus it can deliver mails more quickly (and cheaply) depending upon the destination address. And if you insist on sending colored letters or documents, Postful may be a good choice as they don’t charge extra for colored prints.

How to Check the Health of your Hard Drive

Hard disk failure is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your computer and it often occurs without giving any warning signs.

Test Your Hard Drive for Impending Problems

You may however run certain tests on your computer beforehand to get an idea about the current condition of your hard disk. This should in turn help you decide whether a replacement drive is necessary or not.

Step 1: Check your hard disk for errors

All recent versions of Windows include a utility called Chkdsk.exe that can check your hard disk for any bad sectors.

You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

Step 2: Understand the sounds of your disk

Do you sometimes hear strange sounds coming out of the CPU box? Well, if the hard drive is making those sounds, it could be an alarming situation and your best bet would be that you turn off the computer before any further damage is done to the disk.

But how do you distinguish between sounds coming from a hard disk with noise that’s made by the fans or the power supply? Here’s a useful page where you can listen to recorded sounds of various hard drives that have lead to a crash. If your disk is making a similar sound, get a replacement quickly.

Step 3: Catch errors before they happen

Disk Checkup is a free hard disk monitoring utility that displays tons of diagnostic data about your disk. While the level of detail it provides may easily confuse even tech-savvy users, just ignore the numbers and keep the utility running in the background.

It monitors your disk’s temperature, read and write error rate, etc. and will alert you when the values of any of these parameters approach dangerous levels. These may be signs of an impending disk failure. Disk Checkup is free for personal use.

Step 4: Thoroughly test your Hard Disk

SeaTools is free diagnostic tool that can completely test your hard drive regardless of the OS installed on it. The tool is provided by Seagate but it works with non-Seagate  disk drives as well.

To get started, you need to download the ISO image of SeaTools for DOS and create a bootable CD. Now boot the computer with the CD in the drive, accept the license agreement and run a long test (the full scan). If any defects are found, a list will be offered at the end or after aborting the disk scan.

Other computer vendors /disk manufactures including Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba (Fujitsu),Western Digital, Lenovo, Dell, etc.  too offer diagnostic tools that work only with their own brand of hard drives. If you are having frequent computer problems (like system hangs or fails to boot up), you may run these tools to confirm if the problems are hard drive related.

Important: While these tools can help you diagnose your hard drive’s health, they are still no good substitute for regular backups.

How to Add Speech Recognition to your Website

Your website pages probably contain a few text fields that require user input. For instance, your site may have a search box where people type in search queries, a comment form (commonly found in blogs) while some sites have a contact form that visitors can use to quickly send a message to the author /webmaster.

The visitors to your website currently need to use the keyboard to enter text in the various input fields but wouldn’t it be nice if you could also offer them an alternate form of input where they can just speak instead of typing?

Well all you need to do is add an extra word – highlighted in red – to your existing search code and your site will able to accept voice based input.

Add Speech Input to your Search Box

<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
 <input type="text" name="q" size="30" x-webkit-speech />
 <input type="submit" value="Google Search" />
</form>

Try a live demo - click the microphone icon, speak and hit enter:  

You may also find a live speech-enabled search box on the site’s homepage. When you are done speaking, the audio is sent to Google servers where it gets transcribed and delivered as plain text.

Currently, only Google Chrome supports the HTML speech input API and thus, the microphone icon will only be visible to users who are accessing your site through Chrome. If they are using a different browser, they’ll see the standard search box.

The speech input attribute that does all the magic – x-webkit-speech – works with <input> fields only but there’s an easy workaround that will help you enable voice support for any other text field the <textarea> tag.

Add Speech Input to any Textarea like Comment Forms

Speech input for textarea - click the microphone icon and talk:  




The code looks something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  function transcribe(words) {
    document.getElementById("speech").value = words;
    document.getElementById("mic").value = "";
    document.getElementById("speech").focus();
  }
</script>

<textarea cols="50" id="speech" ></textarea>
<input id="mic" onwebkitspeechchange="transcribe(this.value)" x-webkit-speech>

Internally, when you click the microphone icon and speak, the transcribed text still goes into the <input> field but with the help of a JavaScript function, a copy of that text is instantly sent to the textarea as well.

The above trick will come handy in case you wish to voice-enable the comment form or the email form of your website that accept long-form text.