24 September 2013

How You Can Learn A New Language While Browsing The Web With Lingua.ly



lingua

If I look back at my day, I spend nearly all of it browsing the Web. I pick up a lot of information on the way. A new language isn’t usually one of them. The Internet has helped to do away with the language tutor – websites like Duolingo and Busuu can easily tell you if you have an ear for new languages; and how you can develop one. But once you get the basics right, you need to keep practicing. That’s what inspired me to write the article on how to learn a new language with the help of...


Read the full article: How You Can Learn A New Language While Browsing The Web With Lingua.ly



How You Can Learn A New Language While Browsing The Web With Lingua.ly



lingua

If I look back at my day, I spend nearly all of it browsing the Web. I pick up a lot of information on the way. A new language isn’t usually one of them. The Internet has helped to do away with the language tutor – websites like Duolingo and Busuu can easily tell you if you have an ear for new languages; and how you can develop one. But once you get the basics right, you need to keep practicing. That’s what inspired me to write the article on how to learn a new language with the help of...


Read the full article: How You Can Learn A New Language While Browsing The Web With Lingua.ly



Kopete vs. Pidgin: Which Linux Instant Messaging Client Has More Features?



instant_messaging_intro

While the idea of chat rooms aren’t quite as popular anymore as they used to be, instant messaging is still used by everyone. Whether it’s Yahoo, MSN/Skype, Facebook, and more, you need an application for your desktop that can handle all of these services while providing great integration. Under Linux, sticking with the applications meant for your given desktop environment is usually the best experience – but there are still pros and cons to the two major messengers. I compared Kopete, a popular KDE instant messaging application, with Pidgin, arguably the most popular open source instant messaging client, to see...


Read the full article: Kopete vs. Pidgin: Which Linux Instant Messaging Client Has More Features?



How To Add Speech Recognition Capabilities To Your Website Search Engine [Chrome]



voice-search

These days, the buzz-phrase on the streets of cyberspace is “voice recognition”. Everyone is going totally bananas about it. Google is racing to integrate speech recognition into as many of their products as possible, and there is nothing cooler than using a software app like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to control the Internet and your computer with your voice. It takes laziness to new heights as you can then sit back and dictate emails, website addresses, documents, and web searches, simply by opening your mouth. A keyboard? Pah! That is so 2000s! But this isn’t something solely confined to the realms of...


Read the full article: How To Add Speech Recognition Capabilities To Your Website Search Engine [Chrome]



How To Add Speech Recognition Capabilities To Your Website Search Engine [Chrome]



voice-search

These days, the buzz-phrase on the streets of cyberspace is “voice recognition”. Everyone is going totally bananas about it. Google is racing to integrate speech recognition into as many of their products as possible, and there is nothing cooler than using a software app like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to control the Internet and your computer with your voice. It takes laziness to new heights as you can then sit back and dictate emails, website addresses, documents, and web searches, simply by opening your mouth. A keyboard? Pah! That is so 2000s! But this isn’t something solely confined to the realms of...


Read the full article: How To Add Speech Recognition Capabilities To Your Website Search Engine [Chrome]



Love Making Lists? Culturalist Is Going To Be Your New Best Friend [Beta Invites Inside]



culturalist

Social networks are great, but most of what we find on them is irrelevant or not very interesting. Lists are another thing almost everyone loves. You can list movies, you can list books, and about anything else you can think up. But other than reading them and moving on, there’s nothing much to do with them. First world problem? I think so. Culturalist is a new website that’s going to solve this problem for you. It’s about lists, and it’s also social. Wouldn’t it be great fun to make your own top 10 lists about anything, share them, and explore...


Read the full article: Love Making Lists? Culturalist Is Going To Be Your New Best Friend [Beta Invites Inside]



How to Track Gmail Messages with Google Analytics



The video tutorial explains how you can use Google Analytics to track your outgoing Gmail messages and get notified when people open and read your email messages.





This story, How to Track Gmail Messages with Google Analytics, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 24/09/2013 under GMail, Google Analytics, Email

Remove Native Apps From Windows 8 Installation Using Windows 8 Apps Remover



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About six months ago, we discussed how to remove all native Modern UI apps from a Windows 8 installation without the help of third-party tools. The method involves executing a command from the Command Prompt and is fairly simple. The only downside of the method is that you need to execute separate commands one-by-one in […]

Relive The Golden Age Of Animation With Free Vintage Cartoons [Stuff to Watch]




They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. Literally. The age-old technique of using hundreds of hand-drawn cels of animation to produce cartoons has long been replaced with more robust digital techniques. But like photographs shot on film and vinyl recordings, traditional animation retains that warm and rustic feel where even the imperfections are celebrated for their almost organic nature. Thanks to the Internet Archive and Film Chest, there’s a small collection of vintage cartoons to trawl through featuring the likes of Popeye, Woody Woodpecker, and Betty Boop. Betty Boop Somewhere around half of the cartoons included in the...


Read the full article: Relive The Golden Age Of Animation With Free Vintage Cartoons [Stuff to Watch]



YouTube Fans



If you have a popular YouTube channels with more than 5,000 subscribers, you'll be able to find more about the people who love your videos. "The Fans page shows a list of some of your most engaged and most influential fans, based on their public interaction with your YouTube channel. By default, the list is sorted by a combination of subscriber count and engagement level, but you can also sort by either factor on its own," informs YouTube.






"For each person on the list, you can see how many subscribers they have, how engaged they are with your channel, an example comment they've left on one of your videos, and how long they've been a subscriber. Engagement is based on that person's public interactions with your channel, such as commenting, liking, subscribing, etc."



You can also create a Google+ circle for your top fans in the insights page. "See what other videos and channels they're into, and reach out via Google+ to ask a question, start a conversation, share behind-the-scenes photos, or upload a private video just for them."



{ Thanks, Stefan. }

The New My Yahoo Gets A New Design To Emerge As An iGoogle Alternative



yahoo-new-design

Yahoo isn’t putting on the stops in its efforts to personalize the user experience for you. In the latest move, it has dusted off My Yahoo and given the personal start page a fresh look. The new design is a refreshing change from its static avatar of recent times. The start page is meant to be the portal that ties together all of Yahoo’s offerings — email accounts, calendars, stock portfolio, sports scoreboard, weather, Flickr, and web content delivered by Yahoo or a web search. The latest redesign also puts My Yahoo in the contention ring of iGoogle alternatives. Google...


Read the full article: The New My Yahoo Gets A New Design To Emerge As An iGoogle Alternative



Chrome to Gradually Drop Support for NPAPI Plug-ins



10 years ago, browsers were a lot less powerful and you had to install plug-ins to watch videos, play games, open PDF files. Applications like QuickTime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Adobe Reader, Java installed plug-ins that added missing features. Now browsers can play audio files and video files without plug-ins, some of them include PDF viewers, many of them render interactive 3D graphics natively. NPAPI plug-ins are no longer that necessary, they have plenty of security issues and the NPAPI plug-in architecture from the Netscape era is now outdated.






Google addressed some of the NPAPI issues in Pepper and bundled a Pepper version of the Flash plug-in with Chrome. Pepper is also used by Native Client and the PDF viewer.



Chromium's blog announced that the NPAPI support will be gradually dropped next year. "NPAPI isn't supported on mobile devices, and Mozilla plans to block NPAPI plug-ins in December 2013. Based on anonymous Chrome usage data, we estimate that only six NPAPI plug-ins were used by more than 5% of users in the last month. (...) Starting in January 2014, Chrome will block webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins by default on the Stable channel. To avoid disruption to users, we will temporarily whitelist the most popular NPAPI plug-ins that are not already blocked for security reasons:" Silverlight, Unity, Google Earth, Google Talk and Facebook Video. Java is already blocked by default for security reasons. "In the short term, end users and enterprise administrators will be able to whitelist specific plug-ins. Eventually, however, NPAPI support will be completely removed from Chrome. We expect this to happen before the end of 2014, but the exact timing will depend on usage and user feedback."



A simplified version of Google Earth is now available in the new Google Maps, while the Google Talk plug-in will no longer be necessary in Chrome when Google Hangouts switches to WebRTC.



Some Chrome extensions include NPAPI plug-ins. Google will no longer accept new Chrome extensions with NPAPI plug-ins starting today and will unpublish these extensions from the Chrome Web Store in September 2014 if developers don't remove the NPAPI plug-ins.



"There are several alternatives to NPAPI. In cases where standard web technologies are not yet sufficient, developers and administrators can use NaCl, Apps, Native Messaging API, and Legacy Browser Support to transition from NPAPI. Moving forward, our goal is to evolve the standards-based web platform to cover the use cases once served by NPAPI."



It will be interesting to see if Google will actually drop NPAPI support next year. There are still many sites that rely on plug-ins and some of them are no longer updated.