SheepTech » Web App

OhLife: Diary That Comes to You

Vincent — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:47:09 +0000

Wants to keep a diary but finds it difficult to write consistently? What about a diary that comes to you to be written on, every night, so that you won’t miss a single day?

OhLife does exactly this. After signing up, OhLife will send you an email every night at 8PM asking “How did your day go?“. Your reply to that email will be your diary entry of the day, automatically stored on OhLife’s website for your reading pleasure in future.

Too busy or just didn’t bother to login to read your entries? Fine. Your diary entry will come and look for you instead. In the same nightly email itself, OhLife will show a random diary entry you wrote in the past.

If for any reason you wanted to stop OhLife from sending you the nightly emails, you can do so from the settings panel. The email delivery time will be fixed at 8PM every night, but you can manipulate this by changing your time zone setting.

You are free to delete or edit any entry you rather not keep. Export is available in .txt format.

Save / Cache Webpage

Vincent — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:42:28 +0000

Now you see, now you don’t. It happens very frequently on webpages with “offensive“, “sensitive“, “non-government friendly” or plain stupid content. To preserve a webpage as it is, at the time you are viewing it, nothing gets more convenient than just hitting the print screen button. But if you prefer a more functional or real webpage, instead of just a plain screen capture, try these:

FreezePage

FreezePage saves all element (but scripts) of webpages you wanted to preserve to its server, provides you a link, and readily show you the saved webpage whenever you visit the link. The saved page looks almost exactly as the original webpage, including all the images and CSS.

It won’t support scripts though, which are mostly advertisements anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

Actual page:

Frozen page: link to preview

Unregistered user can freeze up to 5MB worth of webpages, while registered (free) user up to 10MB.

Kwout

Kwout is basically “screenshot with clickable links”. It won’t save the entire webpage unlike FreezePage, not even the entire “above the fold”. The maximum size of the screenshot is limited to 600×600.

You can however embed the clickable screenshot on anywhere with html enabled. You can embed it as it is, or decorate it with border, rounded corner and shawdow.

Save Google Maps for Offline Use

Vincent — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 05:37:30 +0000

Google Maps is no doubt one of the most used tool to find almost just any location or place on planet Earth. There is one problem though. You can only enjoy such convenience if you are connected to the internet. There is an option to print on Google Maps, but the limited map size and zoom level doesn’t make it any helpful.

Here’s a simple tool that can partly solve the problem, Google Map Saver. With it, you can save any part of Google Maps as an image to your local disk, at a zoom level and resolution of your choice. Being able to select the zoom level lets you dictate how detailed you want your map to be.

If you are wondering how big the map can be — it can go, this big.

Video demo:

Usage idea – print a large map pointing to your house, frame it and hang it in your room. Geekiness +10 overnight.

No installation required. Just download and start the app. After starting it, click on the “About” on the right top corner and click “Agree”. Otherwise there would be an ugly watermark on your saved maps.

Download: Google Map Saver

Gmail Sneak Peak: Preview Mail Content Without Opening It

Vincent — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:31:18 +0000

Gmail Sneak Peak is a newcomer to Gmail Labs. When it is enabled, you can view any mail’s content in your inbox by right-clicking, without actually opening the mail itself.

A window overlay sort of a thing will appear, and an excerpt of your mail content will be displayed, like this:

The window is not scrollable. If the full mail content is too long to be fitted, you will have to open the mail to read it in full. That’s the reason they call it sneak peak after all.

On the top left corner of the window, there are 3 buttons—Archive, Delete & Mark as read, for convenience’s sake.

It’s useful to preview recurring emails, say, notifications email when you got a new follower on Twitter, or a blog comment moderation email. You basically know what’s the content by reading the subject alone, previewing it makes it convenient to click a link in the email without opening it.

Turn Partial RSS Feed to Full RSS Feed

Vincent — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:53:53 +0000

There has been a long debate among bloggers whether to offer full RSS feed or just the excerpt. Some decides to provide full RSS in order to provide more value to their subscribers, while some others provides only partial RSS as it would convert into more pageviews. If your favorite blog decides to offer just partial RSS, fret not, there’s a solution to that.

WizardRSS can turn any partial RSS feed into full RSS feed, so that you will not have to visit the subscribed blog every time you wish to read new blog posts in full. In fact, WizardRSS is capable of turning just any partial RSS to full RSS, not only for blogs.

Here’s an example.

Lifehacker’s partial RSS feed, note the “More” link:

Lifehacker’s full RSS feed, using WizardRSS:

There are two method to turn partial RSS feed to full RSS feed using WizardRSS.

On WizardRSS website: Go to WizardRSS, enter the blog’s URL or feed URL and hit the “Create Feed” button.

Without visiting WizardRSS: Simply add the feed URL of your target blog behind this URL: http://www.wizardrss.com/feed/blogrssfeedurl.com/feed.

For example, if you want to subscribe to SheepTech using WizardRSS, just enter this feed URL in your feed reader:

http://www.wizardrss.com/feed/www.sheeptech.com/feed

But then of course it’s definitely unnecessary, SheepTech offers full RSS

WizardRSS is totally free of charge. In return, they will insert two text linkback to their website at the end of every RSS item. No big deal.

Egg Watchers Watch Your Egg for You

Vincent — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:00:01 +0000

Boiling eggs is definitely not the funnest thing to do. Either end up with an overcooked egg if you walk away, or be bored to death if you watch your egg.

Egg Watchers decides to end the egg watching game. Let it know how you like your perfect egg done and it will estimate the time needed to boil it—and show you a YouTube video (randomly) of almost equal length as the boiling time.

The time the video ends is the time where you can enjoy your egg.

1. How big is your egg? Medium, large, extra large?

2. Is it straight from the fridge?

3. How do you want it? Runny, squidgy, firm?

4. Ready to boil! Pop your egg in boiling water and start the timer.

5. Watch a random YouTube video while your egg boils
Timer will keep going even if the video buffers

6. Ping! Hurray, your egg is ready.

Optionally, you can tweet your egg. Your tweet will say:

I watched a video instead of watching my egg. Thanks www.eggwatchers.com

Cute and awesome.

Get to Know Strangers Who Email You

Vincent — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:00:47 +0000

(Gmail+Firefox/Chrome) Do you receive emails from strangers very often? If yes, it would probably be a lovely to have this Firefox add-on/Chrome extension installed— Rapportive.

This is what Rapportive do — kick out the sidebar advertisement from Gmail and replace it with information about the sender of the email you are reading. Here’s what it will display:

Photo pulled from Gravatar
Job, position or employment information pulled from LinkedIn
Social media accounts that match the email address, courtesy of Rapleaf
If a Twitter account is present, it will display the 3 latest tweets

It’s even possible to add personal notes under the contact profile.

If you are curious on how your profile is displayed to other Rapportive users, you can view it by going to “Sent Mail”, click on any of your sent mail, and lastly, simply hover on your name:

The Dark Side

Remember that embarrassing MySpace profile you created years ago? Or that Bebo and Friendster profile? No? They don’t belong to you?

Problem 1: You have created several accounts on different social networking sites in the pass, with all the embarrassing photos, information about you written years ago that no longer hold any truth today, and those bling blings you have pasted all over your profile.

And you have totally forgot about it! Guess what? If your email recipient have Rapportive installed, he will be able to discover all these history of yours!

Not cool, definitely not.

Problem 2: Inaccurate information. In my case, Rapportive is grabbing my outdated LinkedIn employment information. It is not reflecting the modification I have made some time back. Besides, it’s also linking to my very old Flickr account that I no longer use.

Heck, my email address is not even linked to that old account anymore. But somehow they are still able to dig it out and completely ignore my new account (which is linked to my email address).

Rapportive is well aware of this problem:

If you see data which is inaccurate, abusive or otherwise objectionable, we want you to be able to correct it. Soon you will be able to edit information directly from within Rapportive, but while we are working on this, please send us corrections by email and we will deal with them promptly.

I have sent them an email, and Martin (co-founder) rectified my information on a Sunday!

Problem 3: Google is not gonna like this. They invested so much time perfecting Gmail, giving out so much space, and you are removing their only source of income to over all these cost?

But this is more of a Google problem than ours. They are not any less evil after all

Twitpic vs. Twitgoo vs. yfrog vs. img.ly

Vincent — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:23:08 +0000

With so many third party image sharing service for Twitter, it is hard to decide which one to go for. Since there isn’t any comparison articles yet for Twitgoo vs. Img.ly, two of my remaining choices among the four, I decided to take a real look at them and compare all four Twitpic, Twitgoo, yfrog and img.ly.

Login method

Who would want to hand out their Twitter credentials to a third party website when they can simply link their Twitter account with the image sharing website in just two clicks.

At the time of writing, all (Twitgoo, yfrog, img.ly) are using OAuth to link Twitter accounts to their image sharing service, except for Twitpic, which require you to enter your Twitter username and password.

Image upload

Uploading methods and limitations by the service providers themselves.

	Twitpic	Twitgoo	yfrog	img.ly
Local file browsing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Transload	No	Yes	Yes	No
Email upload	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
File format	GIF, JPG, PNG	GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP	GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP	GIF, JPG, PNG

*Twitgoo accepts pcx/psd/tiff too, but will convert them to JPG.
*yfrog supports video upload too, but since we are only discussing about image upload, I leave it out of the table

Image viewer

Features on the image viewing page and other relevant information.

	Twitpic	Twitgoo	yfrog	img.ly
Follow button	No	Yes	No	No
RT button	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Rotate image	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Social media buttons	No	Yes, including email	Yes, including email	Yes
“Other photos” thumbnail	3	2	2	3, scrollable
Image rating	No	No	Yes	No
Import Twitter style	No	Yes	Yes	No
Special effects	No	Lightbox	No	Tunnel, wall, belt
Mobile version	No	No	No	Yes
Embed code	HTML – 150×150 thumbnail	No	HTML, BBCode – full original size/thumbnail (optional)	Javascript – medium size
Tagging Tweeples (FB style)	No	No	No	Yes
Watermark on embedded image	No	No	No	Yes
Direct link	No	Yes	Yes	No
RSS feed	Photostream	No	Comments	Photostream
Distracting banner ad	Yes	No	Yes	No

Banner advertisement on Twitpic:

Banner advertisement on yfrog:

Misc.

	Twitpic	Twitgoo	yfrog	img.ly
Image URL character	24	24	24	17
Profile URL	/photos/YOURNAME	/u/YOURNAME	/froggy.php?username =YOURNAME	/images/YOURNAME
Big Daddy	n/a	Photobucket, Tinypic	ImageShack	n/a

Which service am I using?

When I first start Tweeting, I use Twitpic because it’s one of the most widely used photo sharing service on Twitter. Then the other day when I was not using my AdBlock Plus equipped Firefox, I discovered that Twitpic has this very ugly banner ad next to all uploaded images. What a deal breaker.

The last few photos I uploaded was on Twitgoo, and now I’m still considering whether to switch to Img.ly, for it has a mobile version of its website. It’s pretty important as many are using mobile to access Twitter, with all the beautiful mobile Twitter clients out there. I for one doesn’t like my mobile browser to load up the entire large website just to view an image, when it’s possible to see the same image on a lighter weight version.

What say you? Did I left out any crucial comparison factor?

*I cannot guarantee that all the information posted above are correct. Human do make mistakes, plus those services are improving themselves all the time. If you notice any mistake, please let me know.

Get Your Pronunciation Right

Vincent — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:06:17 +0000

With the wide range of information on the internet, it is no surprise to discover new words or terms every now and then, in your own language or otherwise. However, some words are not meant to be pronounced as it looks like, particularly brand names, and no one will like the embarrassing moment when you pronounce a word wrong in public (unless you don’t realize).

Forvo is a brilliant website intending to bring people from all over the world to pronounce as many words as they can, in any language. This way, you can learn how people from the rest of the world pronounce a word with different accent.

You can easily listen to pronunciations from different user by clicking on the “Play” buttons on the embedded Google Map.

Each pronunciation can be rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Low rated pronunciation will be hidden to avoid confusion, but you can have them shown in a button click. You can also add your own pronunciation by signing up for a Forvo account.

Besides, you can also add a word that is not already in Forvo’s database, so that someone else will pronounce it for you, or you can pronounce it yourself.

Forvo is good for its policy of accepting just any words in any language into its database, including foul languages—and just anyone can contribute by recording their own pronunciation.

In a case that you do not fully trust user-generated pronunciation for an English word that is in dictionary, you can try these online dictionaries for cross-checking:

For IT terms pronunciation, try this one.

Vertor: Verify Content of Torrent File Before Downloading

Vincent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:31:50 +0000

How frustrating can it be to wait for hours/days eagerly for your torrent download to complete, only to find out that the file you have downloaded is exactly NOT the one you are expecting? It just difficult to judge the content of a file by its name and size, since they can be faked easily.

Enter Vertor, a young torrent search engine that promise to check for downloadability, viruses, DRM and passwords for every torrent file listed. Besides, Vertor will also provide screenshots for movies and previews for songs to ensure that you are downloading the right media file.

20 seconds sample for audio file:

Screenshots for video file:

Other basic information of the torrent file are listed as well, such as file name, category, number of seeders & leeches, file size, and the content of the torrent file.

Vertor might not have a beautiful design, but it definitely is one of the cleanest torrent search engine out there. There is no advertisements in any form (yet), as mentioned on their About us page.

The project is devoted to make bittorrent protocol even more popular, easy-to-use and reliable! We have other reputed on-line projects that make enough profit to invest a small part of it in this experiment. Our plan is to develop Vertor more and not to place any advertisement at least for the nearest one or two years. We want to make it as convenient for you as possible!

I really like the fact that I am able to have sneak peek at the torrent file before downloading, making sure I am downloading the correct file, not password and/or DRM protected. Is there any similar websites that provides similar information about a torrent file just like how Vertor do?

[Vertor] (via John Chow)

Warning: Downloading copyrighted materials without permission is unlawful.