13 June 2013

5 Ways to Blog On The Go with Android



android_blog_intro

While the blogging craze has passed us, there are still plenty of good reasons to start a blog, whether it be to keep a personal record of your life, update your family, or keep your fans informed. There are a large number of different ways for you to get started with blogging, all of which are completely free and easy to use. Best of all, you can access many of these services right from your Android device via their respective apps. Here are five of the top blogging apps you can get on Android.

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How Google's Image Recognition Works



Just like Google Drive, Google+ Photos uses some amazing image recognition technology to make photos searchable, even if they don't have captions or useful filenames. "This is powered by computer vision and machine learning technology, which uses the visual content of an image to generate searchable tags for photos combined with other sources like text tags and EXIF metadata to enable search across thousands of concepts like a flower, food, car, jet ski, or turtle," explains Google.



Google acquired DNNresearch, a start-up created by Professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto. They built "a system which used deep learning and convolutional neural networks and easily beat out more traditional approaches in the ImageNet computer vision competition designed to test image understanding." Google built and trained similar large-scale models and found that this approach doubles the average precision, compared to other object recognition methods. "We took cutting edge research straight out of an academic research lab and launched it, in just a little over six months," says Chuck Rosenberg, from the Google Image Search Team.



The paper, titled "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks" [PDF], explains how this works. It uses supervised learning, 7 hidden weight layers and feature extractors learned from the data. "Our neural net has 60 million real-valued parameters and 650,000 neurons. It overfits a lot. Therefore we train on 224x224 patches extracted randomly from 256x256 images, and also their horizontal reflections."






Google says that the publicly available photo search feature recognizes 1100 tags. "We came up with a set of about 2000 visual classes based on the most popular labels on Google+ Photos and which also seemed to have a visual component, that a human could recognize visually. In contrast, the ImageNet competition has 1000 classes. As in ImageNet, the classes were not text strings, but are entities, in our case we use Freebase entities which form the basis of the Knowledge Graph used in Google search. An entity is a way to uniquely identify something in a language-independent way. (...) Since we wanted to provide only high precision labels, we also refined the classes from our initial set of 2000 to the most precise 1100 classes for our launch."



Some other examples of classes that are recognized: car, dance, kiss, meal, hibiscus, dhalia, sunsets, polar bear, grizzly bear. The system recognizes both generic visual concepts and specific objects. "Unlike other systems we experimented with, the errors which we observed often seemed quite reasonable to people. The mistakes were the type that a person might make - confusing things that look similar."


Google's Mobile Quick View Missing



Back in April, Google launched a cool feature for mobile search that loaded Wikipedia articles faster. Quick View loaded pages in less than 100 milliseconds from Google's servers thanks to a few tricks.



For some reason, the experimental feature is no longer available. The blue button is missing and Wikipedia articles are loaded just like any other search results. Maybe it's a temporary issue.






The Quick View sign-up form is still available. "Mobile quick view is an experimental new project that makes websites appear almost instantly (around 100 milliseconds) after you click on a search result. More and more people are searching on the mobile web, and we will continue to work together with webmasters on making it faster and better. Sign up below to get updates about participating in the mobile quick view field trial," suggests Google.


Facebook Follows Twitter’s Lead And Adds Hashtags To Posts [Updates]



Android App Facebook Alternatives Intro

Facebook has just announced that it is becoming a little more like Twitter, as the social networking giant is now adding hashtags to posts. For the uninitiated, users click hashtags and are taken to a page containing all the posts from others across the social network pertaining to that hashtag.

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Read full post: Facebook Follows Twitter’s Lead And Adds Hashtags To Posts [Updates]



Google Cloud Print App for Android



Google has finally released an Android app for Cloud Print. The application lets you print from any Android device to a Cloud Print-enabled printer, send files to other Android devices or save them to Google Drive as PDF files. You can also track the status of your print jobs. Until now, you had to use third-party apps.






One way to print a file is using the "print" button from the application and selecting the file you want to print. Make sure you've installed a file manager like ES File Explorer to be able to print other files than images. Another option is to use the "share" button or menu item from almost any Android app and select "Cloud Print". For example, you can open a web page in Chrome for Android, pick "share" from the menu and you can print the entire page. You can also select some text from the page and print that text.



There are a lot of Cloud Print-enabled printers from Canon, Brother, HP, Samsung, Epson, Dell. If you don't have one of these modern printers, you can still use the app if you've installed Chrome on your computer and enabled the Cloud Print connector (you computer needs to be on when you're printing).



{ Thanks, Daniel. }


Google Shows Your Recent Sign-ins



There's a new section in the Google Account settings page: recent activity. Google shows a list of recent sign-ins and other security-related actions, with information about the browser, device, IP address and approximate location.






The feature seems similar to Gmail's account activity feature, but it's not. Gmail's feature shows information about about recent activity, whether it's from a browser or an email client, and it's only limited to Gmail. Google's new recent activity feature shows "security-related actions you've taken, like signing in to your Google Account, changing your password, or adding a recovery email address or phone number. This information is for your entire Google Account, so sign-ins from any Google product (such as Blogger, Gmail, or YouTube) will be listed in this section."



There's a subtle difference: "A sign-in is only listed when you've actually typed your username and password to sign in. For example, if you've been signed in to your account for several weeks on your phone, checking your email from time to time, we'll only list the time and location of your initial sign-in." That's not the case for Gmail's account activity feature, which is not limited to the initial sign-ins.



In other related news, Google has a new security dashboard that shows information about your password, recovery options, notifications for unusual activity, 2-step verification and connected applications/sites.



{ Thanks, Florian K. and Herin. }


Navigation Arrows in Google Image Search



Google Image Search shows two arrows when you click a search results. The two buttons let you go to the previous or the next result. Until now, you could only use keyboard shortcuts (left/right arrow keys) to navigate between results.






I'm sure that website owners won't like this feature because it's much easier to go to the next image result, but users will like it. Maybe Google will also add a slideshow mode in full-screen, so that you don't have to click the "next" button over and over again.


Cool Websites and Tools [June 12th 2013]



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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool websites round-ups delivered to your email daily email subscribe here....

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Getting Results In The Jobs Market: The Modern Resume



office

Your resume? Well, it's just a simple piece of paper, now. This certainly isn't to say that your resume no longer has a purpose. It most definitely does, my friend. Instead of serving as the all-around bio that gets you the job, it should serve as an attention-getter to make your future workplace want to know more.

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7 Extensions Every Music Lover Needs Installed [Chrome]



Google Chrome has made extensions a really big deal. Of course, add-ons existed long before Google Chrome was even an existing browser, but it seems like Google's browser has really pushed applications and extensions to the forefront. No matter what you are into, there are extensions that will make your web browsing experience a joyous time.


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TeamSpeak 3: The Original Cross-Platform Voice Chat For Gaming Teams and Clans



TeamSpeak Review Intro

I’m a big fan of voice communication when it comes to gaming. Wearing a headset while gaming adds a social element that makes the gaming experience that much better. While TeamSpeak may have started off as a solution for competitive gaming teams to discuss strategy and tactics in real-time, it has evolved into something beyond the bare essentials. It is used by casual gamers and fierce e-sports enthusiasts alike. TeamSpeak is a great program for talking with your gamer friends.

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Read full post: TeamSpeak 3: The Original Cross-Platform Voice Chat For Gaming Teams and Clans



TeamSpeak 3: The Original Cross-Platform Voice Chat For Gaming Teams and Clans



TeamSpeak Review Intro

I’m a big fan of voice communication when it comes to gaming. Wearing a headset while gaming adds a social element that makes the gaming experience that much better. While TeamSpeak may have started off as a solution for competitive gaming teams to discuss strategy and tactics in real-time, it has evolved into something beyond the bare essentials. It is used by casual gamers and fierce e-sports enthusiasts alike. TeamSpeak is a great program for talking with your gamer friends.

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Read full post: TeamSpeak 3: The Original Cross-Platform Voice Chat For Gaming Teams and Clans



5 Ways to Add Touch to a Windows 8 Computer



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Windows 8's Start screen and "Modern" apps can feel awkward to use on a non-touch PC, but they really start to make sense when paired with a touch PC. If you're not ready to go out and buy a new Windows 8 laptop with touch, tablet, convertible, or all-in-one PC, here are some ways you can add touch support to your existing system. There is a reason Microsoft is pushing hard to integrate touch support into all future PCs. None of these methods is as ideal as having a PC that comes with native touch support.

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Read full post: 5 Ways to Add Touch to a Windows 8 Computer



10 Controversial Topics On Wikipedia Guaranteed To Spark A Debate




One way to measure the level of controversy attached to different subjects on Wikipedia is to track the number of reverts that take place. The authors of a study at Cornell University in New York have used these statistics to compile a list of the most controversial Wikipedia pages across different language versions of the site.

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Read full post: 10 Controversial Topics On Wikipedia Guaranteed To Spark A Debate