SheepTech » Web App

SmsScr: List Words by Mobile Phone Keypresses

Vincent — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:49:25 +0000

This post brought to you by SmsScr. All opinions are 100% mine.

Just in case you are too young for this (if all you have seen is an iPhone with on-screen keyboard or an Android device with Swype installed), keypresses in this context refers to the number of times you need to hit a phone keypad in order to type a word, assuming without assistance like T9 involved.

Say to type the letter “C”, we would have to hit the number “2″ for 3 times on the keypad.

What is SmsSrc?

SmsScr is a web app that ranks lists of words according to the number of required keypresses. Guam is the easiest country name to type on a phone keypad, with just 5 keypresses, while South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands require 99 keypresses to complete according to this list.

If for any reason you need to rank words with this criteria, you can create a new list by typing manually or upload an existing text file. After previewing the list, you can choose to publish it on SmsSrc for public viewing.

You can browse existing lists to get an idea what you can do with the web app.

You are not alone if you think this web app is just plain weird, serving very little purpose. I’m was clueless too when I first tested it. Apparently it was created for the purpose of code testing, and the developer would like more people to utilize it for more intensive testing.

Facto: Share Your Little-Known Facts

Vincent — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:00:29 +0000

Have you ever been arrested? Do you have any secret nicknames? What are the things that other people don’t know about you? Facto wants to know it.

Facto is a platform for you to share little known facts about yourself. Why would you need a separate service to share your facts when you can do the same on Facebook and Twitter?

That’s because amazing things happen when everyone come together and tell little things about themselves, be it achievements, pet peeves or experience. It’s cool reading random facts about random strangers living half a globe away.

You can reply to a fact using some of the preset responses; including Knew that!, Didn’t know that, Me too!, Awesome, Whoa, Weird, Boring and No way. It’s not possible to post any comments other than the preset ones, so spam is not an issue here.

You don’t need an account to just browse random facts, so go ahead and see what people are sharing there.

WeTransfer: Beautiful Way to Email Large Files

Vincent — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:50:45 +0000

How do you normally send large files over email? Most webmail providers limits file attachment to 25 MB or 50 MB. For larger files, you would have to upload the file to an external host like RapidShare and Megaupload. Some of these file hosting sites is just a pain to use, with annoying ads and waiting time.

WeTransfer is a minimalistic file transfer service with no waiting time, and no annoying ads. There is only one small applet on the website, with an artistic background advertisement.

You can send files up to 2GB to 20 email address. Once your recipient has downloaded the file, you will be notified via email.

No registration is required. You can upload right away, enter your recipient’s email address, your own email address and hit the “Transfer” button.

After uploading, you will receive an email containing a forward link and a download link. Hit the forward link to forward the file to more recipients. Alternatively, you can also share the file using the short URL download link.

All these sounds perfect to bring down those giant file hosting sites with countless of limitations, except the uploaded files will only be hosted for 2 weeks.

Workflowy – Straightforward List Maker

Vincent — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 09:00:50 +0000

Workflowy is a simple yet powerful tool to create lists. How simple?

The first time you use Workflowy, you will see blank page.
Typing on a new line will create a bullet point.
Clicking on that bullet point will zoom into a new sub-list.
Navigate between parent list and sub-list via breadcrumb navigation.
Drag and drop line to rearrange items.
Shift+Enter to add a note to any point.
Strikeout completed tasks.

To describe Workflowy, it’s a list making web app that can create a list in a list in a list in a list, all without complicating anything. How? When you’re zoomed into a sub-list, only items in it will be listed. The parent and sibling lists are all hidden, allowing you to focus on that particular sub-list. You can switch between your parent and children list via the breadcrumb navigation.

Workflowy is not available on the iPhone yet, but a similar app, TaskPaper, is going for $9.99 a pop in the App Store.

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.

You know a word, but can’t remember it?

Vincent — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:55:59 +0000

I’m pretty sure you have encountered a situation whereby, you know a word, but just couldn’t remember it at that very time. You briefly know how it sounds, little idea on how to spell it out and the meaning of the word. How annoying is that?

Photo by J.Salmoral

With Tip of My Tongue, it will be a lot easier to get the word into your head again. Just simply enter all you know about the word into the filters on the left, and it will start searching and display the results on the right in real time.

The four available filters are Partial Word (starts with, contains, ends with), Letters (unscramble, must have, can’t have), Word Meaning (1, 2, 3) and Refine search (min. length, max. length, sounds like).

Say I have forgotten the word for portable computers, I can enter the word “portable” and “computer” in the third filter and voila, results will be displayed almost instantly, with “laptop” being the first result.

The tool isn’t perfect, and sometimes might fail you if nothing matches the information that you enter in the filters. But it’s worth trying it out the next time “what was that word again?” situation strikes, rather than banging your head to the wall.

Deadline is coming? No worries.

Vincent — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:31:28 +0000

Time is running out and you have not even started a bit on your project work? Then File Destructor might be able to help.

File Destructor allows you to fake a file of any size in almost any formats, ranging from .doc to .zip, .txt to .pdf and .swf to .htm. All you have to do is to specify the file name, file size and the file format of the file you want to fake, and you will be able to download it.

The downloaded would look exactly like any other files, with the exact file size you had specified, but when you open it, an error will occur. With it, you can fool your not-so-tech-savvy teacher/lecturer/boss by handing in a fake broken file as your project work. When he/she realized that the file cannot be viewed, the computer will probably be the first one to be blamed instead of your lazy ass.

This is how it looks like when a broken .doc file generated using File Detector is opened:

Make sure you are making an innocent and confused face when you’re being confronted. This might work for once, or twice, but if you hand in broken files all the time, even the dumbest teacher/lecturer/boss would know your little dirty trick here.

Good luck being a lazy bum.

Fixmymovie: Enhance Your Crappy Video

Vincent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:46:36 +0000

Handphone cameras, though produces low quality videos most of the time, is one of the most frequently used device to record an unexpected event. Almost everyone carries their phone around, but not an expensive camcorder that will capture DVD quality videos.

With Fixmymovie, there is no need to settle with those handphone-camera-quality anymore. It will not turn your crappy video into DVD quality, but it will make your unwatchable video to a more watchable one—by brightening your dark video, sharpen your blurry video and make your video less jerky.

Example
The video on the left below is the original video uploaded on YouTube, while the video on the right is after the fix. The original is too dark to see a single thing, but after the fix, you would be able to see someone playing a guitar.

Click on image to watch and compare

After fixing the video, you can either push it to YouTube or download it. For a fee of $2, you can download the fixed video in four formats, which are Windows media, iPod video, flash video and original movie with the “fixmymovie” logo watermark removed.

Not all videos will look better after being fixed though, some would even look unnatural instead.