01 February 2016

Access your Passwords from Anywhere with Google Password Manager


Google Chrome has a built-in password manager that offers to save your username and password whenever you sign-in to a website using Chrome. The stored passwords are synced with your Google Account and thus are available across all devices where you have signed in using the same Google Account.

Google Chrome is available for all platforms, including iOS and Android phones, and thus you always have access to your saved passwords. However, if you prefer using a different browser, like Safari on iPhone or Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, you can still access all your account passwords saved inside Chrome via passwords.google.com.

Google Password manager

Open the Google Passwords website, sign-in in with your existing Google Account that you are using on Chrome and you’ll find a list of every single account (and the associated password) that you’ve used to sign-in in Chrome.

The passwords are hidden with asterisks but they can be easily revealed by clicking the corresponding eye icon. You can also remove any saved password from the list but there’s no option to edit passwords.

How to Hide Your Passwords

This is another strong reason why you should to enable 2-factor authorization for your Google Account. If someone gains access to your main Google account password, they likely have access to your entire library of passwords through the Google Passwords website.

If you are not comfortable seeing your passwords inside the Google Passwords website, you have two options. Either don’t save your passwords in Chrome at all or just make them inaccessible from the Google website as explained here.

Open Google Chrome on desktop and go to Settings – Advanced Sync Settings. Alternatively, type chrome://settings/syncSetup in the browser address bar and hit Enter. Under the Encryption Options, choose “Encrypt all synced data with your own sync passphrase”, enter a passphrase and save the settings.

Disable Google Passwords

After a minute or two, your passwords will no longer be available through the Google Passwords website. If you have later change your mood, simply reset to default settings.

Also see: 10 Important Google URLs


The story, Access your Passwords from Anywhere with Google Password Manager, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 01/02/2016 under Google Chrome, Password, Internet.

How to Make ASCII Art with Photos on Facebook and Instagram


ASCII art was a phenomenon in the Unix days much before Emojis and GIFs took over the Internet. These are pictures drawn using the characters on a keyboard and, because everything is in plain text, you can view the ASCII image in your browser or even inside a text editor.

You don’t have to have to be an artist to create ASCII pictures. There are readymade tools to help you convert regular images into ASCII art or, if you are on Mac, just launch the terminal window and say “banner {{text}}” to convert the text into ASCII.

There’s an even better way. Upload your photograph to either Facebook or Instagram, set the privacy to public, and you’ll have an ASCII version of the picture ready instantly. Thank you @Mathias for the discovery.

Convert Photos to Text with Facebook

Step 1: Go to Facebook.com on your desktop and open any photo that has the privacy set to public. I am using a picture of the Taj Mahal by @AshuMittal for this example.

Open Facebook Image

Step 2: Right-click anywhere inside the photo and choose “Open Image in new tab” – this will open the standalone image in a new browser tab outside the Facebook website.

Step 3: Go to the browser address bar and add .html to the photo URL. Press Enter and voila! Facebook will render a HTML version of the image (see example). You can press Ctrl+S in your browser to save the HTML image to your desktop.

ASCII to HTML Image

Make ASCII Art with Instagram Photos

Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, too supports image to text conversion. It however requires more work to get the photo URL since Instagram blocks right-click contextual menu. You can either use Chrome Developer Tools to get the URL or there’s a simple trick.

Step 1. Open any Instagram photo page. You should open the standalone photo page (like this one) and not an Instagram profile.

Step 2: Append “media” to the Instagram photo URL (example) to get the direct link to the JPG image. For instance, if the photo URL is http://ift.tt/1PPdhZ5, append /media and the URL http://ift.tt/1nyVlFc will point to the direct image.

Step 3. Once you have the direct link, append .html and the Instagram photo will be converted into colored ASCII HTML. Or append .text for plain ASCII text version of the image.

This trick will only work on “public” photos. If the URL of a photo doesn’t end with a .jpg, it is likely that the picture is not public and thus the ASCII conversion will not work. Also, the generated ASCII images are big in size (few MBs) so if you open a couple of them in your browser, it may begin crawling.


The story, How to Make ASCII Art with Photos on Facebook and Instagram, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 01/02/2016 under Ascii, Facebook, Instagram, Internet.