Store your videos on SkyDrive and Google Drive & also play them directly

Did you know, you can not only upload video files to SkyDrive and Google Drive but also play them online.

Although it is possible to upload video files of any format, SkyDrive can play H.264 (.mp4) and Windows Media Video (.wmv files) videos through a Silverlight player.

Google Drive lets you upload and play the following video formats:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (many cameras use this format - typically the video codec is
• MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

It provides a YouTube-like interface & also lets you add caption tracks to your video files.

Also see:
Popular Audio File Formats

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HOW TO make Google skip redirection step on clicking search result

There have been times when I wanted to just copy the URL of a site mentioned in a Google search result without having to go to the website & then copying it from the address bar.

However when I right click & copy the URL, this is how the address typically looks -
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=menu_elements_selector
&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&ved=0CEIQFjAE
&url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.jquery.com%2Fattribute-ends-with-selector%2F
&ei=LdQ8UKOkJYPTrQfn0IHIDA
&usg=AFQjCNFmICOvDtxuImTTeXY3pCDQNW6yVQ

(URL broken with new lines for readability & to preserve formatting)

Digging into the source code reveals that there is a mousedown event that fires up when the link is accessed & re-creates the HREF of that anchor tag so that you have to pass through a quick additional Google step before you can reach the search result site

I wished there was a bookmarklet that could stop Google from mangling the URL and skip the redirection step. Guess what, there is bookmarklet Zap Events that can remove all JavaScript events assigned to elements in a web page.

It only zaps the following 4 events - "mouseover","mouseout","unload","resize". I tweaked the code a bit to include the "mousedown" event as well -

javascript:(function(){var%20H=^
["mouseover","mouseout","unload","resize","mousedown"],^
o=window.opera;%20if(document.addEventListener/*MOZ*/&&!o)^
%20for(j%20in%20H)^
{document.addEventListener(H[j],function(e)^
{e.stopPropagation();},true);}^
%20else%20^
if(window.captureEvents/*NS4*/&&!o)%20{%20^
document.captureEvents(-1/*ALL*/);^
for(j%20in%20H)^
{window["on"+H[j]]=null;}}%20else/*IE*/%20{function%20R(N)^
{var%20i,x;for(j%20in%20H)^
if(N["on"+H[j]]/*NOT%20TEXTNODE*/)N["on"+H[j]]=null;^
for(i=0;x=N.childNodes[i];++i)R(x);}R(document);}})()

(remove  ^ & newline character when you're using this code)

With this modified bookmarklet, I can now copy the actual URL in a Google Search result.

Update 5/Sept/12: Found that this redirection feature bugs a lot of people. This thread on the StackExchange WebApps forum has simpler bookmarklet code to address this issue:

javascript:function rwt(a,f,g,l,m,h,c,n,i){return a};

Related:

• JavaScript Bookmarklet Builder
• Google Mobilizer Bookmarklet - view just text of web pages
• Is there a no-javascript version of search?

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What is Inbound Marketing?

It is how you can promote your site for free. This image from SEO expert Rand Fishkin's article sums it up well -

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IE10 - first browser to auto-correct text while you type

Although Internet Explorer 10 is the last among popular browsers to implement spell-checking, it is the first to support auto-correction. Did you know, IE was the first to implement CSS (in IE 3) and the idea of AJAX besides a lot of contributions to HTML5

Some interesting facts on this feature from the IE blog -

• Preexisting text will not be spellchecked, however pasted text will be checked when it is inserted.
• Spellchecking is active by default on <textarea> and contenteditable elements, and off by default for text boxes
• Web developers can override the defaults using the spellcheck attribute - spellcheck=true (enabled)
•  In the rare case that auto-correct changes something that you didn’t want changed, you can undo the change via CTRL+Z (Undo) using the keyboard, or bring up the auto-correction context menu using the mouse. In addition to using the mouse, the auto-correction menu can be activated via the keyboard by moving the insertion point inside of the word and pressing SHIFT+F10 (that key combo works to trigger any context menu). From the auto-correction menu you can also prevent the word from being auto-corrected in the future.
• By default, as you enter text into any HTML textarea element (a multi-line input box) or any region of editable HTML content, the spellchecking engine will be used to check the last entered word. The word is checked against a dictionary associated with the current keyboard input language. If that word is misspelled or repeated it will be identified as a potential error using the familiar red squiggly underline. The identification of potential misspelled or repeated words is done in the background so that it does not slow your text entry.
• You can add frequently used words to this dictionary or ask it ignore certain words.
• In Windows 8 this custom dictionary will be roamed to any other Windows 8 machine that you use via the cloud. 
• Internet Explorer 10 currently supports spellchecking in 15+ languages. It does not include any Indian languages.

The same blog entry also reveals that there will be a IE10 version for Windows 7

In Windows 8, spellchecking support is available to applications across the entire operating system, including IE10. Of course, spellchecking will also be available as an IE10 browser feature on all supported versions of Windows (including Windows 7).

This MSDN article indicates an IE10 version  for Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 will come in the future -

Internet Explorer 10 is available for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, and is expected to be released for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

 Also see: The History of IE

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"Hidden" features in Google products

I recently had to explain to a senior citizen, an Internet newbie, on the phone how to upload files onto Google Docs/Drive.

It then stuck me as odd that the Upload button next to the Create button doesn't have a label on it but rather a stupid icon. I was suprised about how a company that supposedly spends a lot of time on usability testing and picking the right shades of color could not have kept things simple and intuitive by giving a button a label like it's normally done.

Let's say you accidentally closed the Tasks window in Gmail. How do you get it back?

Its under the dropdown-kind-of-thing that you get when you click on the little arrow next to the Gmail "label"

to be continued...

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HOW TO quickly save all URLs in tabs within a IE or Firefox window

This tip applies to Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Picture this - While searching for something on the Web, you have opened a dozen tabs and for some reason you have to turn off your PC/laptop quickly. How do you save  all the addresses in tabs within a window for reviewing later?

Madhivanan has a simple solution -

Go to Tools > Internet options

In the General tab, click the Use current button in the Home page section. It will display all URLs in the textarea above it.

Copy & paste it in some document for later use.

The actual purpose of the Use current button is to set URLs so that the related pages open automatically when IE is opened.

This tip can be extended to Firefox as well -

Go to Tools > Options

In the General tab look for the Use Current Pages button in the Startup section. When you click on the Use Current Pages button, all the URLs of the pages open in different tabs are copied to the Home Page text box with a pipe delimiter. Copy the text to get all the URLs.

The keyboard shortcut to simulate clicking on the Use Current Pages button is Alt+T+O+C (tested in Firefox 14)

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"The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got"

InformIt has got authors (Erik M. Buck, Obie Fernandez, Danny Kalev, Eric Lippert, Rob Pike, Mark Summerfield, Bill Wagner) of some popular programming books to share the best programming advice they have ever received. Here it is paraphrased in brief -

• Write less code. 
• Take a moment to understand the error message at the top of an exception/stack trace before making additional changes to your code.
• ..language changes and skill improvements — require constant reading. 
• ..be part of a team that values progress over politics, ideas over territory, and initiative over decorum. 
• ..thinking before debugging is extremely important. If you dive into the bug, you tend to fix the local issue in the code, but if you think about the bug first, how the bug came to be, you often find and correct a higher-level problem in the code that will improve the design and prevent further bugs. 
• TDD & refactoring  
• Make code usable before you make it reusable.
• Participate in forums

Related:
Interviews with Programming legends

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Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts

Win + X   - context menu to access common features like Control Panel, Task Manager, File Explorer, Programs & Features, Run, Search etc
Win + E - Explorer
Win + F - search for only documents on your computer
Win + Q  - search for only apps on your computer
Win + W - search filter to show only settings
Win + ,    - view the Desktop
Win + C  - Charms (also shows Time & Date)
Win + P   - Projector settings

(Win - the Windows key)

work in progress...

(Update 21/Aug/12) Here's a much longer list from the Windows Team blog that makes the list I started redundant.

References -
Channel 9: Windows 8 Tips

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Which Windows 8 edition is right for me?

Compared to Windows 7's seven different versions, Windows 8 has four major editions: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise, and Windows RT.

As per the Windows Team blog,  Windows 8 is for regular consumers while Windows 8 Pro is designed to help tech enthusiasts and business/technical professionals.

Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows RT will not be available at retail outlets. Windows RT will come pre-installed on ARM-based tablets or PCs.

The RTM version of Windows 8 came out yesterday (on August 15th, same as India's Independence Day) and is available for MSDN & Technet subscribers. Microsoft plans to release Windows 8 for general availability on October 26, 2012

If you would like to take Windows 8 for a spin before making it your default OS, you can download the 90-day evaluation edition of Windows 8 Enterprise and try it out with Virtual Machine software like the free VMWare Player.

Related:
What do CTP, RC, RTM, RTW mean?

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QR Codes and MS Tags can connect books to online material

The demand for printed books is falling because of the Internet and digital alternatives. Encyclopaedia Britanica which was first published in 1768 will stop publishing their print edition from this year.

In case of rapidly changing subjects like technology, printed books can't keep pace with online content as it can be updated easily and frequently. Moreover, having rich media in online content makes it more appealing than books.

It is now possible to have the best of both worlds. Authors & publishers can choose to place mobile barcodes like QR Codes or MS Tags in the printed material on topics that can change, to connect readers to updated material on the book's website. This can improve the longetivity of a book. QR Codes and MS Tags need a smartphone app to enable the redirection from the print medium to a web page. The URLs thus exposed through printed tags can be tracked.

Lee Lefever's upcoming book 'The Art of Explanation' will have 16 QR codes that will redirect readers to online material like videos.

Related:
Visual tags: Microsoft Tag vs QR Code

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How YouTube, Wikipedia use machine moderation for crowdsourced content

Search engines rely on bots to index web pages but did you know Wikipedia uses more than 700 active bots to keep its content clean! Wikipedia which is 50 times larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica currently has 4,005,000 articles in the English edition and 22.8m articles in 285 language editions. The bots delete vandalism and foul language, organise and catalogue entries, and handle the reams of behind-the-scenes work that keep the encyclopaedia running smoothly and efficiently. 

BBC News Magazine has a neat writeup on what these bots do -

• "Interwiki" bots link articles on the same subject in different languages
• Flag potential copyright violations and other irregularities for human review
• Add dates to "cleanup" tags so human editors know what needs attention
• Add articles to category lists, and lists of categories to articles
• Format and repair citations and references
• Compare ISBN numbers
• Flag images that need more licensing details
• Behind the scenes:
• Maintain Wikipedia archives
• Handle evidence in arbitration and administrative matters

Bots have been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself.
The site was founded in 2001, and the next year, one called rambot created about 30,000 articles - at a rate of thousands per day - on individual towns in the US.
The bot pulled data directly out of US Census tables. The articles read as if they had been written by a robot. They were short and formulaic and contained little more than strings of demographic statistics.
But once they had been created, human editors took over and filled out the entries with historical details, local governance information, and tourist attractions.
In 2008, another bot created thousands of tiny articles about asteroids, pulling a few items of data for each one from an online Nasa database.
ClueBot NG, as the bot is known, resides on a computer from which it sallies forth into the vast encyclopaedia to detect and clean up vandalism almost as soon as it occurs.

YouTube relies on its automated copyright detection system to verify if an uploaded video is in fact posted by the owner. It compares each upload against all the reference files in their database.

The scale and speed of this system is truly breathtaking -- we're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. And when we compare those 100 years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. It'd be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day without as much as a coffee break.

The official documentation explains how the system works -

If Content ID identifies a match between a user upload and material in the reference library, it applies the usage policy designated by the content owner. The usage policy tells the system what to do with the video. Matches can be to only the audio portion of an upload, the video portion only, or both.
There are three usage policies -- Block, Track or Monetize. If a rights owner specifies a Block policy, the video will not be viewable on YouTube. If the rights owner specifies a Track policy, the video will continue to be made available on YouTube and the rights owner will receive information about the video, such as how many views it receives. For a Monetize policy, the video will continue to be available on YouTube and ads will appear in conjunction with the video. The policies can be region-specific, so a content owner can allow a particular piece of material in one country and block the material in another. 

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Browse Feeds hands-free with Google Reader Play

If your daily Internet diet consists of reading a lot of feeds, try out Google Reader Play to browse through them without using your mouse or keyboard to navigate.

To get started, click on the little arrow next to a Site's Feed, right click and then in the context menu that opens up select View in Reader Play

With the Slide Show mode on, you can run through Feeds that you've subscribed to, hands-free!

This interface is well-suited for posts that are not too lengthy - like news, Twitter feed updates etc

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HOW TO prevent Skype from auto-starting after Windows boots up

Once you install Skype, it will load on startup everytime. If you're low on memory, this will mean an extra app hogging resources even though you may not need it every time.

I found it annoying that the option to disable auto-startup doesn't appear until you sign in.

It's only after you log in that you see the checkbox option Start Skype when I start Windows checked by default (look under Tools | Options | General Settings). Uncheck this option to prevent Skype from auto-starting after Windows boots up.

Also see:

HOW TO speed up your PC

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HOW TO download multiple documents in a SharePoint 2010 Library at once

To download a document from a Library in SharePoint 2010, you can right click on it, select Send To & choose Download a Copy -

But what if there were several documents and you wanted them all at once without going through the hassle of downloading each one of them individually?

Jump to the Library tab & click on the Open with Explorer option -

This will open up your Windows Explorer with the folder containing the documents you require within them.

Thanks Lakshmikanth for the tip.

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Free 42 episode video series on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for Absolute Beginners

Microsoft's Channel9 website has published a two-part video series with 42 episodes on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript by a great tutor.

The course is delivered by Bob Tabor who runs LearnVisualStudio.net, a video tutorial site. In the first episode  in the HTML5 & CSS3 series, Bob clearly outlines what it will NOT cover and sets the right expectations.

The videos can be downloaded (recommended) or viewed online on a Silverlight-supported browser. I was pleasantly suprised to see that some of the online videos on Channel9 now let you jump to a specific point in the video without having to start from the beginning in case you've already watched a portion of a long video earlier.

Unlike earlier, the duration of the video & the file sizes of the video in the multiple formats that it is available for download, are also shown.


If you're on a lean-bandwidth connection, you can try downloading the video in the format that has the smallest size (however on download link to see tooltip showing file-size). I noticed that their mid-quality WMV files and in some cases the MP4 format videos have relatively smaller sizes.





Also see:
HOW TO compare HTML5 features supported by versions 8, 9 & 10 of IE
Who is using HTML5?

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Twitter Search Tricks

Did you know, you can search for tweets on a topic that convey a positive or negative attitude/reaction or pick only tweets that contain questions related to that topic?

Links within a tweet indicate there is some kind of a "story". If you are interested in looking specifically at tweets in you timeline that contain links, use this link in the address bar - https://twitter.com/search/timeline/http

You can also try this - https://twitter.com/#!/search/timeline/filter%3Alinks

On the other hand, if you're interested in tweets/conversations in your timeline without links, use this URL - https://twitter.com/#!/search/timeline/-filter%3Alinks

If you feel the count of followers is a measure of popularity of a Twitter user, you can search by tag on the WeFollow website to find folks who are are most influential.

The following search queries (annotated & highlighted for emphasis) from the Twitter documentation show how you can use other operators (from:, to:, place:, filter:, source:) and keywords while searching on the Twitter website -

• twitter search - containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator
• love OR hate - containing either "love" or "hate" (or both)
• from:twitterapi - sent from the user @twitterapi
• to:twitterapi - sent to the user @twitterapi
• place:opentable:2 - about the place with OpenTable ID 2
• place:247f43d441defc03 - about the place with Twitter ID 247f43d441defc03
• superhero since:2011-05-09 - containing "superhero" and sent since date "2011-05-09" (year-month-day).
• twitterapi until:2011-05-09 - containing "twitterapi" and sent before the date "2011-05-09".
• movie -scary :) - containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
• flight :( - containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.
• traffic ? - containing "traffic" and asking a question.
• hilarious filter:links - containing "hilarious" and with a URL.
• news source:tweet_button - containing "news" and entered via the Tweet Button
• India source:metrotwit - containing "India" and entered via the MetroTwit app

There are also other operators that you can use both through the site's search interface or programmatially using the Twitter API.

Also see:
HOW TO add hashtags while auto-publishing posts to Twitter
Archive tweets & favorites with Google Reader

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